Twenty-One
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ALICE WALKER
Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.
Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, and lives in Northern California. An internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist, she created the term “womanist” to define Black feminism.
Her bestselling books include numerous novels, collections of essays and short stories, children’s books, and volumes of poetry. In 1983, for her novel The Color Purple, Walker made history as the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That same year she won the National Book Award. The Color Purple also became an Academy Award–nominated film in 1985 and was adapted for the Broadway stage and won a Tony Award in 2006. The author continues to write prolifically, including a blog on her official website, AliceWalkersGarden.com.
In this excerpt from her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker shares a personal and dark time of her last year of college, in which writing poetry brought her back to life and light.
I have always been a solitary person, and since I was eight years old (and victim of a traumatic accident that blinded and scarred one eye), I have daydreamed—not of fairy tales—but of falling on swords, of putting guns to my heart or head, and of slashing my wrists with a razor. For a long time I thought I was very ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended. I discovered the cruelty (legendary) of children, and of relatives, and could not recognize it as the curiosity it was.
I believe, though, that it was from this period—from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast—that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out. I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems.
But it was not until my last year in college that I realized, nearly, the consequences of my daydreams. That year I made myself acquainted with every philosopher’s position on suicide, because by that time it did not seem frightening or even odd—but only inevitable. Nietzsche and Camus made the most sense, and were neither maudlin nor pious. God’s displeasure didn’t seem to matter much to them, and I had reached the same conclusion. But in addition to finding such dispassionate commentary from them—although both hinted at the cowardice involved, and that bothered me—I had been to Africa during the summer, and returned to school healthy and brown, and loaded down with sculptures and orange fabric—and pregnant.
I felt at the mercy of everything, including my own body, which I had learned to accept as a kind of casing over what I considered my real self. As long as it functioned properly I dressed it, pampered it, led it into acceptable arms, and forgot about it. But now it refused to function properly. I was so sick I could not even bear the smell of fresh air. And I had no money, and I was, essentially—as I had been since grade school—alone. I felt there was no way out, and I was not romantic enough to believe in maternal instincts alone as a means of survival; in any case, I did not seem to possess those instincts. But I knew no one who knew about the secret, scary thing abortion was. And so, when all my efforts at finding an abortionist failed, I planned to kill myself, or—as I thought of it then—to “give myself a little rest.” I stopped going down the hill to meals because I vomited incessantly, even when nothing came up but yellow, bitter bile. I lay on my bed in a cold sweat, my head spinning.
While I was lying there, I thought of my mother, to whom abortion is a sin; her face appeared framed in the window across from me, her head wreathed in sunflowers and giant elephant-ears (my mother’s flowers love her; they grow as tall as she wants); I thought of my father, that suspecting, once-fat, slowly shrinking man, who had not helped me at all since I was twelve years old, when he bought me a pair of ugly saddle oxfords I refused to wear. I thought of my sisters, who had their own problems (when approached with the problem I had, one sister never replied, the other told me—in forty-five minutes of long-distance carefully enunciated language—that I was a slut). I thought of the people at my high-school graduation who had managed to collect seventy-five dollars, to send me to college. I thought of my sister’s check for a hundred dollars that she gave me for finishing high school at the head of my class: a check I never cashed, because I knew it would bounce.
I think it was at this point that I allowed myself exactly two self-pitying tears; I had wasted so much, how dared I? But I hated myself for crying, so I stopped, comforted by knowing I would not have to cry—or see anyone else cry—again.
I did not eat or sleep for three days. My mind refused, at times, to think about my problem at all—it jumped ahead to the solution. I prayed to—but I don’t know Who or What I prayed to, or even if I did. Perhaps I prayed to God a while, and then to the Great Void a while. When I thought of my family, and when—on the third day—I began to see their faces around the walls, I realized they would be shocked and hurt to learn of my death, but I felt they would not care deeply at all, when they discovered I was pregnant. Essentially, they would believe I was evil. They would be ashamed of me.
For three days I lay on the bed with a razor blade under my pillow. My secret was known to three friends only—all inexperienced (except verbally), and helpless. They came often to cheer me up, to bring me up to date on things as frivolous as classes. I was touched by their kindness, and loved them. But each time they left, I took out my razor blade and pressed it deep into my arm. I practiced a slicing motion. So that when there was no longer any hope, I would be able to cut my wrists quickly, and (I hoped) painlessly.
In those three days, I said good-bye to the world (this seemed like a high-flown sentiment, even then, but everything was beginning to be unreal); I realized how much I loved it, and how hard it would be not to see the sunrise every morning, the snow, the sky, the trees, the rocks, the faces of people, all so different (and it was during this period that all things began to flow together; the face of one of my friends revealed itself to be the friendly, gentle face of a lion, and I asked her one day if I could touch her face and stroke her mane. I felt her face and hair, and she really was a lion; I began to feel the possibility of someone as worthless as myself attaining wisdom). But I found, as I had found on the porch of a building in Liberty County, Georgia—when rocks and bottles bounced off me as I sat looking up at the stars—that I was not afraid of death. In a way, I began looking forward to it. I felt tired. Most of the poems on suicide in Once come from my feelings during this period of waiting.
On the last day for miracles, one of my friends telephoned to say someone had given her a telephone number. I called from school, hoping for nothing, and made an appointment. I went to see the doctor and he put me to sleep. When I woke up, my friend was standing over me holding a red rose. She was a blonde, gray-eyed girl, who loved horses and tennis, and she said nothing as she handed me back my life. That moment is engraved on my mind—her smile, sad and pained and frightfully young—as she tried so hard to stand by me and be my friend. She drove me back to school and tucked me in. My other friend, brown, a wisp of blue and scarlet, with hair like thunder, brought me food.
That week I wrote without stopping (except to eat and go to the toilet) almost all of the poems in Once—with the exception of one or two, perhaps, and these I do not remember.
I wrote them all in a tiny blue notebook that I can no longer find—the African ones first, because the vitality and color and friendships in Africa rushed over me in dreams the first night I slept. I had not thought about Africa (except to talk about it) since I returned. All the sculptures and weavings I had given away, because they seemed to emit an odor that made me more nauseated than the smell of fresh air. Then I wrote the suicide poems, because I felt I understood the part played in suicide by circu
mstances and fatigue. I also began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body. Then I wrote the love poems (love real and love imagined), and tried to reconcile myself to all things human. “Johann” is the most extreme example of this need to love even the most unfamiliar, the most fearful. For, actually, when I traveled in Germany I was in a constant state of terror, and no amount of flattery from handsome young German men could shake it. Then I wrote the poems of struggle in the South. The picketing, the marching, all the things that had been buried, because when I thought about them the pain caused a paralysis of intellectual and moral confusion. The anger and humiliation I had suffered were always in conflict with the elation, the exaltation, the joy I felt when I could leave each vicious encounter or confrontation whole, and not—like the people before me—spewing obscenities or throwing bricks. For, during those encounters, I had begun to comprehend what it meant to be lost.
Each morning, the poems finished during the night were stuffed under Muriel Rukeyser’s door—her classroom was an old gardener’s cottage in the middle of the campus. Then I would hurry back to my room to write some more. I didn’t care what she did with the poems. I only knew I wanted someone to read them as if they were new leaves sprouting from an old tree. The same energy that impelled me to write them carried them to her door.
This was the winter of 1965, and my last three months in college. I was twenty-one years old, although Once was not published till three years later, when I was twenty-four. (Muriel Rukeyser gave the poems to her agent, who gave them to Hiram Haydn at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich—who said right away that he wanted them; so I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing, yet.) By the time Once was published, it no longer seemed important—I was surprised when it went, almost immediately, into a second printing—that is, the book itself did not seem to me important; only the writing of the poems, which clarified for me how very much I loved being alive. It was this feeling of gladness that carried over into my first published short story, “To Hell with Dying,” about an old man saved from death countless times by the love of his neighbor’s children. I was the children, and the old man.
I have gone into this memory because I think it might be important for other women to share. I don’t enjoy contemplating it; I wish it had never happened. But if it had not, I firmly believe I would never have survived to be a writer. I know I would not have survived at all.
Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems—and I write groups of poems rather than singles—are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.
Langston Hughes wrote in his autobiography that when he was sad, he wrote his best poems. When he was happy, he didn’t write anything. This is true of me, where poems are concerned. When I am happy (or neither happy nor sad), I write essays, short stories, and novels. Poems—even happy ones—emerge from an accumulation of sadness… .
——
The writing of my poetry is never consciously planned; although I become aware that there are certain emotions I would like to explore. Perhaps my unconscious begins working on poems from these emotions long before I am aware of it. I have learned to wait patiently (sometimes refusing good lines, images, when they come to me, for fear they are not lasting), until a poem is ready to present itself—all of itself, if possible. I sometimes feel the urge to write poems way in advance of ever sitting down to write. There is a definite restlessness, a kind of feverish excitement that is tinged with dread. The dread is because after writing each batch of poems I am always convinced that I will never write poems again. I become aware that I am controlled by them, not the other way around. I put off writing as long as I can. Then I lock myself in my study, write lines and lines and lines, then put them away, underneath other papers, without looking at them for a long time. I am afraid that if I read them too soon they will turn into trash, or, worse, something so topical and transient as to have no meaning—not even to me—after a few weeks. (This is how my later poetry-writing differs from the way I wrote Once.) I also attempt, in this way, to guard against the human tendency to try to make poetry carry the weight of half-truths, of cleverness. I realize that while I am writing poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write anything.
A Temporary Library in a Small Place
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JAMAICA KINCAID
Why, years after The Earthquake damaged the old library building, has a new library not been built? Why is the library above a dry-goods store in an old run-down cement-brick building?
Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 in Antigua. Named Elaine Potter Richardson, she changed her name once she settled in New York City and began to write short fiction. A novelist and essayist, Kincaid has been published in the Village Voice and the Paris Review, among others. The New Yorker published excerpts of her novels Annie John, about a mother-daughter relationship set in Antigua, and Lucy, which created a publishing sensation as the plot seemed to follow her own experience of being brought to the United States as an au pair and having an antagonistic relationship with her White, wealthy employers. Kincaid spent twenty years at the New Yorker as a staff writer before becoming a professor of literature, first at Harvard University, and currently at Claremont McKenna College.
A Small Place, published in 1988, is Kincaid’s nonfictional depiction of colonial life in Antigua before the country’s independence in 1981. Here, in a passage from that book, Kincaid laments the loss in an earthquake of the public library that meant so much to her childhood.
You can imagine how I felt when, one day, in Antigua, standing on Market Street, looking up one way and down the other, I asked myself: Is the Antigua I see before me, self-ruled, a worse place than what it was when it was dominated by the bad-minded English and all the bad-minded things they brought with them? How did Antigua get to such a state that I would have to ask myself this? For the answer on every Antiguan’s lips to the question “What is going on here now?” is “The government is corrupt. Them are thief, them are big thief.” Imagine, then, the bitterness and the shame in me as I tell you this. I was standing on Market Street in front of the library. The library! But why is the library on Market Street? I had asked myself. Why is the old building that was damaged in the famous earthquake years ago, the building that has the legend on it THIS BUILDING WAS DAMAGED IN THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1974. REPAIRS ARE PENDING, not repaired and the library put back in the place where it used to be? Or, why, years after The Earthquake damaged the old library building, has a new library not been built? Why is the library above a dry-goods store in an old run-down cement-brick building? Oh, you might be saying to yourself, Why is she so undone at what has become of the library, why does she think that is a good example of corruption, of things gone bad? But if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building painted a shade of yellow that is beautiful to people like me, with its wide veranda, its big, always open windows, its rows and rows of shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for sitting and reading, if you could hear the sound of its quietness (for the quiet in this library was a sound in itself), the smell of the sea (which was a stone’s throw away), the heat of the sun (no building could protect us from that), the beauty of us sitting there like communicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of how we met you, your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and always will be; if you could see all of that in just one glimpse, you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua. The place where the library is now, above the dry-goods store, in the old run-down concrete building, is too small to hold all the books from the old building, and so most of the books, instead of being on their nice shelves, resting comfortably, waiting to acquaint me with you in all your greatness, are in cardboard boxes in a room, gathering milde
w, or dust, or ruin. In this place, the young librarians cannot find the things they want and I don’t know whether it is because of the chaos of storing for a long period of time the contents of a public library in cardboard boxes, or because of the bad post-colonial education the young librarians have received. (In Antigua today, most young people seem almost illiterate. On the airwaves, where they work as news personalities, they speak English as if it were their sixth language. Once, I attended an event at carnival time called a “Teenage Pageant.” In this event, teenagers, male and female, paraded around on a stadium stage, singing pop songs—a hideous song called “The Greatest Love” was a particular favourite among them to perform—reciting poems they had written about slavery—there is an appropriate obsession with slavery—and generally making asses of themselves. What surprised me most about them was not how familiar they were with the rubbish of North America—compared to the young people of my generation, who were familiar with the rubbish of England—but, unlike my generation, how stupid they seemed, how unable they were to answer in a straightforward way, and in their native tongue of English, simple questions about themselves. In my generation they would not have been allowed on the school stage, much less before an audience in a stadium.) The head librarian, the same one from colonial days, seemed to spend her time wondering if there was anybody with money or influence to help the library, apologizing to people—Antiguans returning to Antigua after a long absence—who are shocked and offended by the sight of the library sitting on top of a dry-goods store, wondering if in the end the people at the Mill Reef Club will relent and contribute their money to the building of a new library, instead of holding to their repair-of-the-old-library-or-nothing position. (The people at the Mill Reef Club love the old Antigua. I love the old Antigua. Without question, we don’t have the same old Antigua in mind.) When I was growing up and was a member of the library, this woman was the head librarian. In those days, she seemed imperious and stuck-up, suspicious of us (in my case, she was justified; I stole many books from this library. I didn’t mean to steal the books, really; it’s just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it), always sure that we meant to do some bad. She must have been very proud of her work then and her association with such an institution, for, to see her now, she looks the opposite of her old self. I would go to that library every Saturday afternoon—the last stop on my Saturday-afternoon round of things to do (I would save this for last, for it was the thing I liked to do best)—and sit and look at books and think about the misery in being me (I was a child and what is a child if not someone full of herself or himself), whom I loved, whom I did not love, whom I only just liked, and so on. I think that by around nine years of age I had read all the books in the children’s section (it was a very small collection), and so I had to use my mother’s library card to borrow books from the adult section. It is this same librarian who now stands over the shame of what is now the library who used to watch me closely, trying to make sure that I didn’t leave the library with more books than I was allowed, and leave with them in such a way that meant they would never be seen in any library but my own again. This woman kept a close watch on me, making sure that I didn’t walk out with books held tightly between my legs (what a trick, I thought) or in the basket that I carried to hold my Saturday-afternoon purchases. And so again, can you see why it is that the library might mean something to me, why it might make me feel sad to see it reduced to its present condition? For at the moment that I was standing on Market Street and looking up at the thing called the library, the old building where the library used to be was occupied by, and served as headquarters for, a carnival troupe. The theme of this carnival troupe was “Angels from the Realm,” and it seemed to me that there was something in that, though not a deliberate something, just a something, like an “Angels from the Realm of Innocence” something. (And I supposed it made sense for something from the realm of culture to occupy a building that used to house something from the realm of education, for in Antigua, the Minister of Education is also the Minister of Culture.) Where the shelves of books used to be, where the wooden tables and chairs used to be, where the sound of quietness used to be, where the smell of the sea used to be, where everything used to be, was now occupied by costumes: costumes for angels from the realm. Some of the costumes were for angels before the Fall, some of the costumes were for angels after the Fall; the ones representing After the Fall were the best. And so what sort of place has Antigua become that the people from the Mill Reef Club are allowed a say in anything? That they are allowed to live there the way they continue to live there is bad enough. I then went to see a woman whose family had helped to establish the Mill Reef Club. She had been mentioned to me as someone who was very active in getting the old library restored. I knew of this woman, for she is notorious for liking Antiguans only if they are servants. After I mentioned the library to her, the first thing she told me was that she always encouraged her girls and her girls’ children to use the library, and by her girls she meant grownup Antiguan women (not unlike me) who work in her gift shop as seamstresses and saleswomen. She said to me then what everybody in Antigua says sooner or later: The government is for sale; anybody from anywhere can come to Antigua and for a sum of money can get what he wants. And I had to ask myself, What exactly should I feel toward the people who robbed me of the right to make a reply to this woman? For I could see the pleasure she took in pointing out to me the gutter into which a self-governing—black—Antigua had placed itself. In any case, this woman and her friends at the Mill Reef Club wanted to restore the old library, but she said she didn’t know if they would be able to do so, because that part of St. John’s was going to be developed, turned into little shops—boutiques—so that when tourists turned up they could buy all those awful things that tourists always buy, all those awful things they then take home, put in their attics, and their children have to throw out when the tourists, finally, die. I had heard from many people that the person who wanted to develop that part of St. John’s was a foreigner, who was once wanted in the Far East for swindling a government out of oil profits, a man so notorious that he cannot travel with a passport from the country of which he is a citizen but travels on a diplomatic passport issued by the government of Antigua. I thought, then, that I should ask the Minister of Education about the library. I am sure he would have had a good explanation for why it is that for so many years this island, which has as its motto of Independence “A People to Mold, A Nation to Build” has not had a proper library, but at the moment that I wanted to ask him this question he was in Trinidad attending a cricket match, something he must have been bound to do, since he is not only the Minister of Education and the Minister of Culture but also the Minister of Sport. In Antigua, cricket is sport and cricket is culture. (But let me just tell you something about Ministers of Culture: in places where there is a Minister of Culture it means there is no culture. For have you ever heard of any culture springing up under the umbrella of a Minister of Culture? Countries with Minsters of Culture must be like countries with Liberty Weekend. Do you remember Liberty Weekend? In the week before Liberty Weekend, the United States Supreme Court ruled that ordinary grownup people could not do as they pleased behind the locked doors of their own bedroom. I would have thought, then, that the people whose idea it was to have the Liberty Weekend business would have been so ashamed at such a repudiation of liberty that they would have cancelled the whole thing. But not at all; and so in a country that had less liberty than it used to have, Liberty Weekend was celebrated. In countries that have no culture or are afraid they may have no culture, there is a Minister of Culture. And what is culture, anyway? In some places, it’s the way they play drums; in other places, it’s the way you behave out in public; and in still other places, it’s just the way a person cooks food. And so what is there to preserve about these things? For is it not so that people make them up as they go along, make them up as they need them?) Oh, I suppose that it was just as well that the Minis
ter of Culture was not in Antigua then, for I did not know how this man would take to me or anything that I might say.
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