by Alice Walker
What does it mean to self-eradicate?
I engage this question every time I play with my hair, which is turning gray. I like the gray, and yet, there are times when I feel bored by it. As I experiment with various colorations, wanting to honor my gray and yet wanting also to honor my passion for variety and change, I feel concern for my own integrity. Some of my friends laugh at me: it doesn’t matter at all what you do with your hair, they say. Wear it blond, wear it red. Who cares? But we are a people who have had to suffer for the right to wear our hair as it grows, a prerequisite to loving it, and ourselves, as we are; the struggle for hair liberation does not, I feel, stop at nappiness. What about salt and pepper? What about gray? What about white? And yet, my friends are right to honor the freedom of spirit implicit in choosing red or blond hair. If indeed it is freedom of spirit and not the sad response of the briefly free to the siren call of modern colonial advertising. If it is a freedom of choice uncontaminated by fear.
A Chinese American friend streaks his dark hair with red every year in honor of Chinese New Year. He laughed when I asked whether it had anything to do with being dark-haired in Anglo-imaged America. And perhaps this is the freedom to which we might aspire. The freedom that comes with self-acceptance, and goes beyond, to the point Mozart reached when, on being offered three outrageous bouffant wigs from which to choose (in the wonderful movie Amadeus) he chose all three; because they were all, he said, so lovely. One of them was flamingo pink.
So what does this have to do with being black? Everything. It is black to struggle with issues like this. It is black to care.
And the reason it is black to care has to do with memory and with revelation. Which is the time we are living in now. Everything you have ever wondered about or wanted to know is being remembered or revealed, during this period. Partly this is because of telecommunications and our ability to be aware of remote places and activities around the globe, but it is more the result of the presence in the world of so many awakened women.
Sometimes, when I am asked to give a talk, I simply set aside the three or four issues that rise to the top of my pile as I’m working at my desk. For this talk there are three issues that somehow want to be worked into this meditation about yoga.
As some of you know, for about a decade I was deeply involved in the effort to illuminate the danger to the health of women and their societies posed by female genital mutilation. I met and was inspired, early on, by a woman who had dedicated her life to this work, Hanny Lightfoot Klein. She and her immediate family escaped Nazi Germany to settle in the United States. The rest of her kin, as she says, “went up the chimney.” It is partly her Jewishness, and certainly her feeling of indebtedness to Jewish culture, as well as what she calls her “survivor guilt,” that has made her a staunch ally to the mutilated women she encountered in, primarily, African countries. In a letter that she wrote to me a few weeks ago she writes:
There does seem to be a noticeable remission going on where FGM is concerned—in patches here and there so far, but one where it is possible to trust its veracity. Women have begun to assert themselves, to take their lives into their own hands and to reject the role of “victim,” such as they had always accepted as immutable before now. It is a beautiful thing to see happening at last. What a joy!
I was reminded of a very tense moment I experienced on the Michael Jackson show (no relation to Michael Jackson the singer) in Los Angeles as I toured the country speaking about female genital mutilation and male circumcision, which I considered also very harmful. I thought it possible, and said so on this show, that the circumcision of boy babies enhanced their later acceptance of violence and of war. An irate Jewish man called the station and for several minutes screamed at me. He was outraged that I dared speak on behalf of the Jewish child who must undergo circumcision as a matter of identity as a Jew.
In an interview Lightfoot Klein also sent me, “Circumcised Babies Are More Nervous,” there is a succinct explanation of some of my other concerns.
The interviewer asks: How do you explain these worldwide predilections for barbarities against the genitals?
To which Lightfoot Klein answers:
I was told about one African ethnic group whose initiation rites involved the removal of one testicle. Holocaust survivors from one of the concentration camps relate something quite similar. This particular Nazi doctor cut off one of the Jews’ testicles, and warned: “Just wait. Next time I get the second one.” Foreskin circumcision of infants is in essence a low-grade castration. The nervous system perceives it as such. Total obedience is achieved with the threat of complete castration, and most especially when this threat occurs at an age when the child is not yet able to understand and only feels. This makes the fear even greater. It pervades the individual’s entire life.
Until I traveled to Africa and later researched female genital mutilation, which is done to children forbidden even to scream, I had not understood how black people had been and still are enslaved by a tradition in Africa, just as perhaps Jews, especially the men, were enslaved before they arrived there, in Egypt.
In any event, it is black to care about the suffering of children, whatever color or tribe. The Feminine, considered black or “dark,” whether in men or women, hears the cries of others, and it is the Feminine that, until recently, we have honored in ourselves. Now many of us wish to be the men that white men are. But that will in no way deliver us and the world from suffering.
Memory and Revelation: Revelation and Memory
A few months ago I visited Japan on a book tour. My publisher there, Shueisha, had published six of my books and was poised to publish a seventh before I felt any interest in visiting Japan. I had a vague idea why my books were popular there—the Japanese woman is struggling against an entrenched, cruel and insidious patriarchal system that has robbed her from time immemorial of her freedom and identity. This makes her awakening in our time similar to that happening to women across the globe. I knew about the viciousness of Japanese soldiers during World War II, and the abuse of mostly Korean “comfort women” during that war, and the refusal of the Japanese courts to pay reparations to the elderly survivors. I knew, from reading history books, of the Japanese domination of China, before the Chinese drove them out. And I knew a bit about Japanese poetry and cars, of which I’ve read much and owned several. Nothing, however, had prepared me for the sweetness, graciousness and kindness of the Japanese people, including the men, that I encountered. After nine days of working with the people who translate, publish and promote my books, I felt part of a team, cared for as if I were family. On the second or third day after I arrived, word went out that I had caught a cold. Every single person we worked with and even met in interviews brought me his or her favorite medicine. And prepared it for me, if I didn’t know how; which I didn’t since I don’t speak or read Japanese. As I joked with them at the Tokyo Book Fair: I was brought so much medicine, the medicine almost made me sick! This experience of being cared for by a company I was working with has never happened to me in almost forty years of publishing in the USA. This caring about me as well as about the number of books my presence in Japan might sell seemed very black to me.
And yet, there was a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “A Bad Week for Women in Japan,” that exposed a side of the Japanese leadership that, like information about their behavior during war, or their abuse and disdain of the “comfort women” male soldiers had abused and discarded, made me very sad.
The dispute [over whether working women should receive pensions as working men do] erupted after a panel discussion last week in which former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and other senior political leaders debated how Japan should address its declining birth rate.
Mori, [present Prime Minister] Koizumi’s mentor and predecessor, said women who do not have children should not be allowed to claim pensions.
“Welfare is supposed to take care of and reward those women who have lots of children,” Mori said. “It is
truly strange to say we have to use tax money to take care of women who don’t even give birth once, who grow old living their lives selfishly and singing the praises of freedom.”
During the debate, ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker and former cabinet minister Seiichi Ota said a growing number of Japanese men seem to lack the courage to propose marriage.
The debate’s moderator then referred to a recent high-profile case of gang rape allegedly involving students at several prestigious universities.
“At least gang rapists are still vigorous,” Ota replied. “Isn’t that at least a little closer to normal?”
At a later point, after several Japanese women complained, another high-ranking official claimed gang rapes were the fault of women. “The problem is that there are lots of women dressed provocatively,” he said.
I believe men, no less than women, wish to be perceived as beautiful. Men can be beautiful and many men are. I met beautiful men in Japan. But it is important that men realize they can not be beautiful sounding like this. It is as if vipers and scorpions and toads are dropping from their lips.
Where is the blackness of caring that I had so appreciated in the Japanese? Not evident in these leaders of the people, who obviously don’t consider the female half of their population autonomous humans. It is painful to think that every one of these men, so lacking in empathy for their sisters, was raised by a Japanese woman, and that it is the labor of the Japanese woman, beginning with the labor to bring the Japanese man into the world, on which the entire society rests. These men sat around worried about the decline of the Japanese birthrate while exhibiting to everyone but themselves why a Japanese woman would have to be insane to want any more men like them born.
In the Sixties, that glorious decade of black awakening, everyone had an idea about what blackness was. Dr. King said it was beautiful, a radical notion. For many people black was anger. Anger. It was such a liberation to let that part of our blackness show. It had been suppressed for hundreds of years. We were so happy to have it back, we became enamored of it; gazed at it with love. Until, like all things that are loved, it grew. Soon our anger crowded out every other aspect of blackness. Our gentleness went into hiding, our respectful behavior, our veneration of our teachers and our elders, our deep solidarity with the less-fortunate. Our loyalty to community. We began to accept leaders who tampered with the truth. When in fact, any of our elders could have told us, and unquestionably tried to: You cannot be led to a good place by anyone who lies, because obviously they have lost the way. I can only imagine the shock our elders have felt, watching the behavior of some of us; truth, in their world, was black.
In an article in Amnesty NOW, published by Amnesty International in the summer of 2003, titled “Soul Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools,” there is a harrowing account of how Native American children were treated in the white-run boarding schools especially set up in the 1800s to rid them of their Indian-ness.
At this point, while writing this talk and after reading this article for the second time, I had to get up from my desk, walk out into the countryside, sit on a bench—where my part-Cherokee mother had liked to sit before she died—and cry. Following this, I took out my yoga mat.
“Native Americans know all too well the reality of the boarding schools,” writes Native American Bar Association President Richard Monette, who attended a North Dakota boarding school, “where recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering Native words.
“Sammy Toineeta (Lakota) helped found the national Boarding School Healing Project to document such abuses. ‘Human rights activists must talk about the issue of boarding schools,’ says Toineeta. ‘It is one of the grossest human rights violations because it targeted children and was the tool for perpetrating cultural genocide. To ignore this issue would be to ignore the human rights of indigenous peoples, not only in the U.S., but around the world.’ ”
The schools were part of Euro-America’s drive to solve the “Indian problem” and end Native control of their lands. While some colonizers advocated outright physical extermination, Captain Richard H. Pratt thought it wiser to “kill the Indian and save the man.” In 1897 Pratt, an army veteran of the Indian wars, opened the first federally sanctioned boarding school: the Carlisle Industrial Training School in Carlisle, Penn.
“Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit,” said Pratt. He modeled Carlisle on a prison school he had developed for a group of 72 Indian prisoners of war at Florida’s Fort Marion prison. His philosophy was to “elevate” American Indians to white standards through a process of forced acculturation that stripped them of their language, culture, and customs.
In an article packed with information about the destructiveness of this effort, there is the following:
Native scholars describe the destruction of their culture as a “soul wound” from which Native Americans have not healed. Embedded deep within that wound is a pattern of sexual and physical abuse that began in the early years of the boarding school system. Joseph Gone describes a history of “unmonitored and unchecked physical and sexual aggression perpetrated by school officials against a vulnerable and institutionalized population.”
Rampant sexual abuse at reservation schools continued until the end of the 1980s. … In 1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run Hopi day school in Arizona had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from 1979 until his arrest in 1987.
The abuse has dealt repeated blows to the traditional social structure of Indian communities. Before colonization, Native women generally enjoyed high status, according to scholars, and violence against women, children and elders was virtually nonexistent. Today, sexual abuse and violence have reached epidemic proportions in Native communities, along with alcoholism and suicide. By the end of the 1990s the sexual assault rate among Native Americans was three and a half times higher than for any other ethnic group in the U.S., according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice statistics. Alcoholism in Native communities is currently six times higher than the national average. Researchers are just beginning to establish quantitative links between these epidemic rates and the legacy of boarding schools.
A more complete history of the abuses endured by Native American children exists in the accounts of survivors of Canadian “residential schools.” Canada imported the U.S. boarding school model in the 1880s and maintained it well into the 1970s—four decades after the United States ended its stated policy of forced enrollment. Abuses in Canadian schools are better documented because survivors of Canadian schools are more numerous, younger, and generally more willing to talk about their experiences.
A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.
The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure. In 1928 Alberta passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy, police, and business and government offi
cials “rented out” children from the residential schools to pedophile rings.
The consequences of sexual abuse can be devastating. “Of the first 29 men who publicly disclosed sexual abuse in Canadian residential schools, 22 committed suicide,” says Gerry Oleman, a counselor to residential school survivors in British Columbia.
Randy Fred (Tsehaht First Nation), a 47-year-old survivor, told the British Columbia Aboriginal Network on Disability Society, ‘We were kids when we were raped and victimized. All the plaintiffs I’ve talked with have attempted suicide. I attempted suicide twice, when I was 19 and again when I was 20. We all suffered from alcohol abuse, drug abuse. Looking at the lists of students [abused in the school], at least half of the guys are dead.”
The Truth Commission report says that the grounds of several schools contain unmarked graveyards of murdered schoolchildren, including babies born to Native girls raped by priests and other church officials in the school. Thousands of survivors and relatives have filed lawsuits against Canadian churches and governments since the 1990s, with the costs of settlements estimated at more than $1 billion. Many cases are still working their way through the court system.