Free Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen Page A

Combined with the general paucity of political content on the Russian art scene, that meant that Nadya and Kat had only Kovylina’s (problematically commercial) work to show. If they wanted to show something radical, feminist, independent, street-based, and Russian, they would have to make it up.
    “It is worth noting,” Nadya said importantly, “that punk feminist art is being produced in Russia today. Here is an example. The Pisya Riot collective works in a great variety of genres, including both visual and musical compositions.”
    Pisya
is a kid’s word for genitals of either sex; it is most like wee-wee or pee-pee.
    Nadya brought up a slide of Titian’s
Madonna with Child and Saints
, where the male saints had been replaced with a woman, a clothesline from which a variety of boxer shorts were hanging had been placed in the background, and piles of anachronistic dirty dishes occupied the foreground. The reproduction and the alteration were flawless. The audience observed respectfully.
    Then Nadya pushed a button on a boom box. A sound like the scraping of a thousand rusty nails started up. Nadya and Kat rose and quickly but calmly left the audience alone with Pisya Riot’s first and only musical composition, “Kill the Sexist.”
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    B EING A FICTIONAL GROUP, Pisya Riot could not write its own music. Neither of the real-life members of the phantom group could; Nadya had taken music lessons as a child and had not done well, and Kat had no musical background. So they borrowed a track from the British punk group Cockney Rejects and used a handheld Dictaphone to record their lyrics over the sampling:
    You are sick and tired of stinky socks,
    Your daddy’s stinky socks.
    Your entire life will be stinky socks.
    Your mother is all in dirty dishes,
    Stinky food remains in dirty dishes.
    Using refried chicken to wash the floor,
    Your mother lives in a prison.
    In prison she’s washing pots like a sucker.
    No freedom to be had in prison.
    Life from hell where man is the master.
    Come out in the street and free the women!
    Suck on your own stinky socks,
    Don’t forget to scratch your ass while you’re at it,
    Burp, spit, drink, shit,
    While we happily become lesbians!
    Envy your own stupid penis
    Or your drinking buddy’s huge dick,
    Or the guy on TV’s huge dick,
    While shit piles up and rises to the ceiling.
    Become a feminist, become a feminist
    Peace to the world and death to the men.
    Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
    Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
    Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
    Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
    They found they liked being Pisya Riot. Maybe they even really wanted to be Pisya Riot. To become a punk rock group, though, they would need musicians. They thought of N, a woman Nadya’s age who had come to Voina with her boyfriend; they were both anarchists. Nadya sought her out. N was with another boyfriend now, a cool older guy who collected and fixed antique bicycles, and she was no longer an anarchist—she was making a living as a computer programmer and apparently maintaining a perfectly respectable middle-class existence, though she was still serious about her music. N found Nadya changed too: “In Voina, she had been this chubby-cheeked child, and now her cheeks had thinned and her voice took on a certainty. She had chosen her issues, and she may even have chosen them at random, but now she was serious and her topics were LGBT and feminism. And the choice had changed her: she no longer saw herself as an appendage to Petya and Vorotnikov, even if she had once been a willing appendage. It had still limited her. When you are with someone, you are not flying through the cosmos, because your soul always has its home in another person—you may need it sometimes, but it is limiting and it keeps you from taking flight. Nadya got this at some point and took flight.” Pisya Riot, on the other hand, seemed to N almost pure silliness, but she envied whatever it was Nadya felt.