www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_chua/20020903.html
February 6, 2003
by June Chua

Image from www.yoko-ono.com

My God, Yoko Ono turns 70 February 18. The Most Famous Widow in the World is still going strong. It's time to give this woman her props, her due.

Yoko of the long, wild hair, the "bed-in," and the peace marches. Yoko, the artist who turned the world on end because she dared to love John Lennon. Ono has been immortalized in song, both by her late husband and other musicians. Who can forget that 1991 Barenaked Ladies song "Be My Yoko Ono:"

I don't like all these people
slagging her for breaking up the Beatles
(Don't blame it on Yokey)...
(CHORUS) You can be my Yoko Ono
You can follow me wherever I go
Be my, be my, be my Yoko Ono

I was someone's Yoko once. In my last year of university my friend Cindy became enchanted with John Lennon. We made a grand entrance as the charismatic couple at our friends' Halloween bash by dancing into the room to the tune of Imagine - she, resplendent in white suit, tinfoil halo and round shades and I with flowing tresses, hippie skirt and enormous sunglasses. John and Yoko, Halloween ghouls. I knew Yoko then as most people did - band breaker, screamer, all-round bad lady. Yoko is much maligned for her relationship to John Lennon. People generally think she was lucky to be with him. What they don't realize is that he was lucky to be with her. Yoko Ono is an accomplished conceptual artist. She started conceptual art when there were no words for it. That's how John met her when she held her first one-woman art show in London in 1966. He didn't actually meet her, he met her art. One of her installations required people to climb a ladder to the ceiling and to look through a magnifying glass. John did so and what he found was the word "Yes!" He was smitten.

Image from www.yoko-ono.com

Look at the lyrics of the songs he wrote after meeting Ono. In "Oh My Love" Lennon sings:

Oh my love for the first time in my life
My eyes are wide open
Oh my lover for the first time in my life
My eyes can see
I see the wind, oh I see the trees
Everything is clear in my heart

Many people like to talk about her "singing" (yes, she screams) or give their opinion about how she alienated John from his mates and first wife. It's like reducing a master artist to a simple brush stroke - "Oh yes, Picasso, he had terrible teeth." I didn't know much about Yoko until I went to a play called The Yoko Ono Project in 2000. Toronto actress Jean Yoon wanted to reclaim Yoko's name.

Yoko was born into a strict, wealthy Japanese family

Through her play, I discovered Yoko was born into a strict, wealthy Japanese family. Women at the time weren't expected to have their own careers, let alone one as a multi-disciplinary artist. After getting a degree in philosophy at a Tokyo university, Yoko took a divergent path from her family. She went on to study music in New York. She married and divorced twice before meeting John. Soon after Yoko and John hooked up officially, there were comparisons to Linda, Paul McCartney's wife, who died in 1998 of breast cancer. Linda came on the scene the same time as Yoko. Linda is described as more "affable," and therefore, the "anti-Yoko." Even the esteemed liberal magazine, the Village Voice, compared her to a Dragon Lady.

In a Watch magazine article about her 1996 CD, Rising, the reviewer suggested John's killer "could have saved us all a lot of grief by just aiming one foot to the right." The violence in this statement is reprehensible. Yoko watched the person she loved slaughtered in front of her. She had to hold his dying body as life drifted from him. For the reviewer to utter this wish is a hate crime. Yoko didn't fit the stereotype of rock star girlfriend/wife. She had to stay unassuming - as submissive as a geisha.

She had guts to stick it out. She kept quiet and didn't answer her critics. Instead, Yoko plowed through in her own fashion - still screaming, still making art and still talking about love and peace. She has withstood her detractors with a dignity that transcends all the small-minded hate heaped on her. I finally met Yoko in 2002 when the Art Gallery of Ontario put on a retrospective of her work titled Yes Yoko Ono. Cindy and I bought tickets to her talk.

"I thought art was a verb, not a noun."

Her presence imbued the room with peace and tranquility.

At the end of her lecture, she gave us blue puzzle pieces and said they were fragments of the sky broken up on Sept. 11 when the Twin Towers fell. Yoko urged us to get together in New York four years later to put the sky back together. One of Yoko's famous sayings is "I thought art was a verb, not a noun." She lives it. Yoko, you rock. John knew that. It's in the words he left behind:

After all is really said and done
The two of us are really one

The goddess really smiled upon our love, dear Yoko.