by Alice Walker
Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We must ask ourselves why this is so and do the work of discovering our historical behavior toward the other countries and peoples of the planet. As disturbing as this will be, it is a first step toward a peaceful existence. Not because we can make peace for our country, but because we can make peace with ourselves by changing any harmful behavior or attitude that contributed to our present predicament. Choose any country on the map that appears to hate America. Listen to what people are shouting at their rallies and read what their banners proclaim in the street. Sit with their anger until you can see America through their eyes. Try to meet someone from Afghanistan, Palestine or Iran, Iraq or North Korea, Cuba or Nicaragua. The Philippines. Talk with Native Hawaiians about the American takeover and subsequent colonization of their country. Visit North American reservations. Remember that you, yourself, are America. The U.S. Behave as if you are the entire country and carry yourself with humility and dignity.
Love is not concerned
With whom you pray
Or where you slept
The night you ran away
From home
Love is concerned
That the beating of your heart
The beating of your heart
Should harm
No one
12.
Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit
Talk given to the Midwives Alliance of North America, September 22, 2001
The great danger in the world today is that the very feeling and conception of what is a human being might well be lost.
—Richard Wright to Jean-Paul Sartre (circa 1940), in Richard Wright by Constance Webb
This quote seemed the perfect segue into my novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), which explores the challenge of remaining human under the horrific conditions of American apartheid in the Southern United States during my parents’ and grandparents’ time. They and their children faced massively destructive psychological and physical violence from landowners—their successful dispossession and/or extermination of the indigenous people completed—who used every conceivable weapon to keep the sharecropping/slave-labor system intact. A system in which a relatively small ruling class of white people had as much food, land, space and cheap energy (black people’s labor) to run their enterprises as they wanted while most people of color—including blacks, yellows, reds and browns—and many poor white people had barely enough of anything to keep themselves alive.
“We own our own souls, don’t we?” is that novel’s ringing, central cry.
It is the ringing central cry of our time.
I have been advised that there are several different groups of people in the audience; not just members of the Midwives Alliance of North America. I have been warned that some of these people are afraid I am going to talk only about birthin’ and babies. However, I came to Albuquerque especially because I wish to be with midwives, whose business of birthin’ and babies is, I believe, the most honorable on Earth.
A few days ago I was in the presence of Sobonfu Somé, a contemporary carrier of traditional, precolonial and perhaps pre-patriarchal, ancient African lifeways. She taught us that in her culture, among the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, the most important thing that happens in a person’s life is that they be welcomed when they are born. If they are not welcomed, all their lives they experience a feeling of not quite having arrived. There is anxiety. There is unease. There is fear. This made me think of the title I had originally chosen for this talk, which changed after the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “Seeing the Light: The Importance of Being Properly Born.” Some of you who attended my talk last year may recall my story of my own birth: the midwife and my grandmother were present in the room, but alas, they were busy chatting by the fireplace as my mother, overwhelmed with pain, fainted as I was being born. Several minutes passed before they knew what had happened. Was the fire going out? Were they busy, perhaps, restoring it? I realize that even at this late date I wish they’d been beside or, better, on the bed, waiting to receive me, instead of halfway across the room. And that my mother had been conscious.
I wished that even more after I witnessed a birth and saw a newborn being welcomed into its mother’s arms, into the light of its father’s smile, into the world and into its own community.
Sobonfu Somé then asked us to stand as I am now asking you to do, and to turn to the person on either side, take their hands, look them in the eye, and tell them: I welcome you here. Take your time doing this, there is no hurry. If this is a person you’ve never seen before, so much the better.
I’d like to read an address that I gave at a Peace for Cuba rally on February 1st, 1992. The title is “The Story of Why I Am Here, or, A Woman Connects Oppressions; Putting My Arms Around Sadie Hussein, Age Three.”
Last January (ten years ago) when the war against Iraq began, I was in Mexico writing a novel about a woman who is genitally mutilated in a ritual of female circumcision that her society imposes on all females. Genital mutilation (aka genital cutting) is a mental and physical health hazard that directly affects some one hundred million women and girls worldwide, alive today, to whom it has been done. Because of increased risk of trauma during delivery, it affects the children to whom they give birth. Indirectly, because of its linkage to the spread of AIDS, especially among women and children, it affects the health and well-being of everyone on the planet.
With no television or radio, and a lack of eagerness to see or hear arrogant Western males discussing their military prowess, their delight in their own “clean-handed” destructiveness, I relied on a friend’s phone calls to his son in San Francisco to keep me informed. His son told us about the huge resistance in San Francisco to the war, which made me love the city even more than I did already, and informed us too that he had been one of those so outraged they’d closed down the Bay Bridge.
What to do? Go home and join the demonstrations, or continue to write about the fact that little girls’ bodies are daily “bombed” by dull knives, rusty tin can tops and scissors, shards of unwashed glass—and that this is done to them not by a foreign power but by their own parents? I decided to stay put. To continue this story—which became Possessing the Secret of Joy—about female genital mutilation, which I believe is vital for the world to hear. But of course I could not forget the war being waged against the Earth and the people of Iraq.
Because I was thinking so hard about the suffering of little girls, while grieving over the frightened people trying to flee our government’s bombs, my unconscious, in trying to help me balance my thoughts, did a quite wonderful thing. It gave me a substitute for Saddam Hussein, the solitary “demon” among tens of millions on whom the United States’ military bombs were falling. Her name was Sadie Hussein, and she was three years old. So, as the bombs fell, I thought about Sadie Hussein, with her bright dark eyes and chubby cheeks, her shiny black curls and her dainty pink dress, and I put my arms around her. I could not, however, save her.
As it turned out, this was the truth. Saddam Hussein still reigns, at least as secure in his power over the Iraqis, according to some media sources, as George Bush is over North Americans. It is Sadie Hussein who is being destroyed, and who, along with nine hundred thousand more Iraqi children under the age of five, is dying of cholera, malnutrition, infection and diarrhea. Since the war, fifty thousand such children have died. It is Sadie Hussein who starves daily on less than half her body’s nutritional needs, while Saddam Hussein actually appears to have gained weight.
This is the story of why I am here today. I am here because I pay taxes. More money in taxes in one year than my sharecropping parents, descendents of enslaved Africans and Indians, earned in a lifetime. My taxes helped pay for Sadie Hussein’s suffering and death. The grief I feel about this will accompany me to my gr
ave. I believe war is a weapon of persons without personal power, that is to say, the power to reason, the power to persuade, from a position of morality and integrity; and that to go to war with any enemy who is weaker than you is to admit you possess no resources within yourself to bring to bear on your own fate. I will think of George Bush (senior) vomiting once into the lap of the Japanese prime minister—and every media considered this major news—and will immediately see hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, cold, hungry, dying of fever, dysentery, typhoid, and every other sickness, vomiting endlessly into the laps of their mothers—who are also emaciated, starving, terrorized, and so illiterate they are unable to read Saddam Hussein’s name, no matter how large he writes it.
Probably not a person in this room would bomb a baby, child or pregnant woman. Or cause elderly grandparents to starve or not have drinking water. Probably not. And yet, that is the position in which we find ourselves. The war against Iraq continues. In the ten years since I wrote my lament, millions more have died, the majority of them small children. Unlike most North Americans, I did not watch the initial bombing on television; I did later see, however, footage showing the bombing of a long line of what looked like old men trying to flee. They were running this way and that, their eyes filled with terror. I recognized more than I ever had that it is the very soul of the people of North America that is being lost, and that if this happens, for the rest of our time on the planet we are doomed to run with the dogs of war. The dogs of war. This is the vision that I have of this period. Ravenous, rapacious dogs, mad with greed and lust, red tongues out and salivating, running loose across the planet. They are the dogs that show up in some of the art of our time, in cartoons, or in the movie Natural Born Killers. It is an ancient image, however, and what astonishes me is how accurately and irresistibly it has arisen in the psyche. And the psyche recognizes this image, not because it is only external. But because some part of it is internal as well. Which means we must all look inside and get to know our own dogs of war. Some of our war dogs, we have to own, are paying taxes that will be used to destroy people almost identical to us. Many of our war dogs are connected to heating our homes and fueling our cars.
A Native Person Looks Up from the Plate Or, owning how we must look to a person who has become our food.
They are eating
Us.
To step out of our doors
Is to feel
Their teeth
At our throats.
They are gobbling up our lands
Our waters
Our weaving
&
Our artifacts.
They are nibbling
At the noses
Of
Our canoes
& moccasins.
They drink our oil
Like cocktails
& lick down
Our jewelry
Like icicles.
They are
Siphoning
Our songs.
They are devouring
Us.
We brown, black
Red and yellow,
Unruly white
Morsels
Creating Life
Until we die.
Spread out in the chilling sun
That is
Their plate.
They are eating
Us raw
Without sauce.
Everywhere we
Have been
We are no more.
Everywhere we are
Going
They do not want.
They are eating
Us whole.
The glint of their
Teeth
The light
That beckons
Us to table
Where only they
Will dine.
They are devouring
Us.
Our histories.
Our heroes.
Our ancestors.
And all appetizing
Youngsters
To come.
Where they graze
Among
The people
Who create
Who labor
Who live
In beauty
And walk
So lightly
On the earth
There is nothing
Left.
Not even our roots
Reminding us
To bloom.
Now they have wedged
The whole
Of the earth
Between their
Cheeks.
Their
Wide bellies
Crazily clad
In stolen goods
Are near
To bursting
With
The fine meal
Gone foul
That is us.
Where do we start? How do we reclaim a proper relationship to the world?
Here’s an old story the world has recently found and loves:
In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered.
All work ceases, and every man, woman and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, about all the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length.
The tribal ceremony often lasts several days. At the end, the tribal circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.
This will not be the fate of Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the attack on North America. In a war on Afghanistan, he will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people, most of them women and children and the elderly, are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems, in his spirit—from what I have gleaned from news sources—quite prepared. In his mind, he is fighting a holy war against the United States. To die in battle against it would be an honor. He has been quoted as saying he would like to make the United States into a “shadow of itself” as he helped make the Soviet Union, which lost the war in Afghanistan, become a shadow of itself. In fact, he appears to take credit for helping the Soviet Union disintegrate. I personally would like him to understand that the shadow he wishes upon us, of poverty, fear, an almost constant state of terror, is merely the America too many of us already know. It is certainly the shadow my ancestors lived with for several hundred years.
But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love. Or, as the Buddha said: Hatred will never cease by hatred. By love alone is it healed.
Recommendation
Promise me
Promise me this day,
Promise me now,
While the sun is overhead
Exactly at the zenith,
Promise me.
Even as they
Strike you down
With the mountain of hatred and violence;
Even as they step on you and crush you
Like a worm,
Even as they dismember and disembowel you,
Remember, brother,
Remember:
Man is not your enemy.
The only thing worthy of you is compassion—
Invincible, limitless, unconditional.
Hatred will never let you face
The beast in man.
One day, when you face this beast alone,
With your courage intact, your eyes kind,
&nbs
p; Untroubled
(even as no one sees them)
Out of your smile
Will bloom a flower.
And those who love you
Will behold you
Across ten thousand worlds of birth and dying.
—from Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh, beloved Buddhist monk and peace practitioner, wrote this poem in 1965 for the young people he worked with who risked their lives every day during the war in Vietnam. Remember that war? The napalmed naked children fleeing down a flaming road? He wrote it to recommend that they prepare to die without hatred. Some of them had already been killed violently, and he cautioned the others against hating. He told them:
Our enemy is our anger, hatred, greed, fanaticism, and discrimination against (each other). If you die because of violence, you must meditate on compassion in order to forgive those who kill you. When you die realizing this state of compassion, you are truly a child of The Awakened One. Even if you are dying in oppression, shame, and violence, if you can smile with forgiveness, you have great power.
Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that “Where there is a mature relationship between people, there is always compassion and forgiveness.” This observation is crucial to how we must now, more than ever, understand our world. Every thought, every act, every gesture must be in the direction of developing and maintaining a mature relationship with the peoples of the planet; all thought of domination, control, force and violence must be abandoned.
S M
I tell you, Chickadee