Just As I Thought

by Grace Paley

  As for me, I didn’t say, “Well, I’m going to pick up this rock and see if there are any women under it.” I didn’t think about it that way. But what I thought to myself was: Am I tired of some of these books that I’m reading! Some of them are nice, and some of them are exciting, but really, I’ve read about this stuff already. And who’s this guy Henry Miller? You know, big deal. He’s not talking to me. My life’s not going to get a lot sexier on account of him. His is, no question about it. Maybe.

  So, luckily, I began to understand it. It was just luck or pride or something like that. Or just not being able to accept slurs at myself or my people, women, Jews, or whatever. Even in Shakespeare, it always hurt my feelings. So I didn’t really know that that’s what I was going to do, but that’s what I set out to do, and I did it, and I said, Yes, those lives are what I want to add to the balance of human experience.

  We were accused of having been doomstruck the other day. And in a way we should be, why shouldn’t we be? Things are rotten. I’m sixty-one and three-quarters years old, and I’ve seen terrible times during the Depression, and I do think the life of the people was worse during the McCarthy period. I just want to throw that in extra. That is to say, the everyday life, the fearful life, of Americans was harder in that time than this. But the objective facts of world events right now are worse than at any other time. And we all know that, we can’t deny it, and it’s also true that it’s very hard to look in the faces of our children, and terrifying to look in the faces of our grandchildren. And I cannot look at my granddaughter’s face, really, without sort of shading my eyes a little bit and saying, “Well, listen, Grandma’s not going to let that happen.” But we have to face it, and they have to face it, just as we had to face what was much less frightening.

  If I talk about going to the life of women and being interested in that, and pursuing it, and writing about it all the time and not thinking about whether it was interesting or not, and finding by luck—I like to say by luck, you know, it’s polite somehow—finding by luck that it was interesting and useful to people, I also need to talk a little bit about what the imagination is. The word “imagination,” as we’re given it from childhood on, is really about imagining fantasy. We say, “Oh, that kid has some imagination, you know. Some smart kid; that kid imagined all these devils and goblins, and so forth.” But the truth is that—“the truth,” you know what I mean: when I say the truth, I mean some of the truth—the fact is, the possibility is that what we need right now is to imagine the real. That is where our leaders are falling down and where we ourselves have to be able to imagine the lives of other people. So men—who get very pissed at me sometimes, even though I really like some of them a lot—men have got to imagine the lives of women, of all kinds of women. Of their daughters, of their own daughters, and of the lives that their daughters lead. White people have to imagine the reality, not the invention but the reality, of the lives of people of color. Imagine it, imagine that reality, and understand it. We have to imagine what is happening in Central America today, in Lebanon and South Africa. We have to really think about it and imagine it and call it to mind, not simply refer to it all the time. What happens is that when you keep just referring to things, you lose them entirely. But if you think in terms of the life of the people, you really have to keep imagining. You have to think of the reality of what is happening down there, and you have to imagine it. When somebody said to Robert Stone, “Isn’t there a difference between the life of Pinochet and of you, sir?” you have to imagine that life, and if you begin to imagine it, you know that there’s a damn lot of difference between those two lives. There’s a lot of difference between my life, there’s a lot of difference between my ideas, between my feelings, between what thrills, what excites me, what nauseates me, what disgusts me, what repels me, and what many, many male children and men grown-ups have been taught to be excited and thrilled and adrenalined by. And it begins in the very beginning. It begins in the sandbox, if you want to put it that way. It begins right down there, at the very beginning of childhood. And I’m happy, for my part, to see among my children and their children changes beginning to happen, and also among a lot of young men—that’s one of the things that’s most encouraging to me: to think that some of these young guys have been listening, and imagining the lives of their daughters in a new way, and thinking about it, and wanting something different for them. That is what some of imagining is about.

  So those are the things I’ve been thinking about a lot as a writer, both solitary in the world and at my desk. I just want to read you one little piece, and that’s how I’ll conclude. I probably left something out, but you can’t say everything. We’re really talking about society and artists, and this was in relation to the question of what was the responsibility of the writer, if there was any. And I thought, Every human being has lots of responsibility, and therefore the poet and the artist also has responsibility, why not? But this is the responsibility of society.

  It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet

  It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman

  It is the responsibility of the poets to stand on street corners giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at because of the screaming rhetoric

  It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy, to hang out and prophesy

  It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes

  It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C and buckwheat fields and Army camps

  It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman

  It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman

  It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power, as the Quakers say

  It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless

  It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: There is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice

  It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems

  It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life

  There is no freedom without fear and bravery. There is no freedom unless earth and air and water continue and children also continue

  It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman, to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time.

  —1986

  El Salvador

  I wondered what possible contribution I could make to this rich book of facts, this book of women whose lives have been a longing and a struggle for a revolution that would transform their entire country and include women’s lives in that transformation. (This has not always happened in revolutions.)

  We were actually on our way to Nicaragua, but stopped in El Salvador. We owed this—the next three days—to our own U.S. government, which did not permit Nica Air to fly from the United States to Nicaragua. Still, the planes of my rich country seem to almost line the skies of the planet—unless some other earth-and-heaven–owning nation says, “Not over us! Not just yet!”

  In the course of those packed, well-organized days we saw the streets of San Salvador guarded against its own citizens by soldiers dressed in heavy weaponry. We traveled to barbed-wire camps, dusty, full of displaced villagers. We learned from the idealistic and endangered Catholic and Lutheran caretakers that the barbed wire was not so much to keep the peasants in as to prevent the death squads from easily snatching a hounded mountain villager or a guerrilla’s cousin for questioning and torture.

  We saw orphanages where an energetic priest tiptoed around visiting U.S. congressmen. He hoped they would have contacts with philanthropists who might help pay for the cottage camps so that little children could have books to learn from and prostheses to walk with. (Just a few miles from this camp, this
orphanage, on the very same road, four nuns had been killed, removed from the dangerous occupations of active compassion and prayer by busy killers.) Walking among these children whose parents were murdered or imprisoned or in exile, I couldn’t help but think of Vietnam, where first our government created orphans, then decided to adopt, nurture, and finally educate them, away from the life and history of their people.

  We were able to visit Ilopango prison—the women’s prison—a little while after the fasting, the strikes, the struggles described in A Dream Compels Us. And found, ironically, a somewhat freer environment than we had observed in San Salvador. Young women greeted us, black-tammed commandantes who had been captured in the mountains. A chorus sang the “Internationale” to us. A theater group made a play. We met several young women who, having been fruitlessly interrogated, were shot in the leg to ensure immobility, then raped and arrested. In Ilopango prison there were many small children—some the babies of love, some of rape. For the legless young women, sixteen, seventeen years old, there was only one pair of crutches, which meant that only one woman could get around at a time, making for a kind of sad listlessness in the others. We called the MADRE1 office in New York (we were members of a tour organized by MADRE), and they announced this need on the WBAI radio station. Within a couple of days the office was jammed with crutches, and within two weeks a group from NACLA2 had brought the crutches down to Ilopango. A small shiny pebble in a dirty field of torment, hypocrisy, murder.

  Back in San Salvador we visited the Mothers of the Disappeared. Their office had been raided and nearly destroyed a couple of days earlier. The women greeted us generously, as though they didn’t know that it was our U.S. tax money that was being used to increase and deepen their sorrow. (They knew a great deal.) They had placed two huge photograph albums on the table, which we looked at. We could hardly turn the pages, as it would be an act of abandonment of the murdered son or daughter photographed on that page—usually a teacher or health worker, the same dangerous professions attacked by the Contras in Nicaragua.

  In San Salvador I

  Come look they said

  here are the photograph albums

  these are our children.

  We are called the Mothers of the Disappeared

  we are also the mothers of those who were seen once more

  and then photographed sometimes parts of them

  could not be found

  a breast an eye an arm is missing

  sometimes a whole stomach

  that is why we are called the Mothers

  of the Disappeared although we have these large

  heavy photograph albums full of beautiful

  torn faces

  In San Salvador II

  Then one woman spoke About my son

  she said I want to tell you This

  is what happened

  I heard a cry Mother

  Mother keep the door closed a scream

  the high voice of my son his scream

  jumped into my belly his voice

  boiled there and boiled until hot water

  ran down my thigh

  The following week I waited

  by the fire making tortilla I heard What?

  the voice of my second son Mother quickly

  turn your back to the door turn your back

  to the window

  And one day of the third week

  my third son called me Oh Mother please

  hurry up hold out your apron they are

  stealing my eyes

  And then in the fourth week my

  fourth son No

  No It was morning he stood

  in the doorway he was taken right

  there before my eyes the parts of

  the body of my son were tormented are

  you listening? do you understand

  this story? there was only one

  child one boy like Mary I had

  only one son

  I have written these few remembrances of a country my country won’t leave alone because the faces of the people I saw in those short days do not leave me. I see it clearly right now. The teachers of ANDES—the teachers’ union—demonstrating on the steps of the great cathedral, where hundreds, mourning Oscar Romero’s murder, had been shot only a couple of years earlier. They held banners and called for decent wages, and an end to disappearances. On those historic steps they seemed naked to the rage of the death squads. I could see how brave they were because their faces were pale and their eyes, searching the quiet crowd, were afraid. Still, they stood there, shouted the demands, and would not be moved.

  —1989

  IV / A Few Reflections on Teaching and Writing

  “The Value of Not Understanding Everything” is probably one of the first talks I ever made—mid-sixties or earlier. I must have thought that a march of blunt sentences would set the right authoritative sound. But I see in rereading it that though I was a woman addressing women, I used the pronoun “he” all but once. Well … that’s the way it was. It’s that persistent “he” that now seems strange and artificial.

  “Some Notes on Teaching” was originally written for a collection by Jonathan Baumbach on that subject and reprinted in Points, a periodical published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. I have just looked at it after many years. I was glad to see Paul Goodman’s poem (why are his poems and short stories not known?)—as good as, well, anyone’s. I would, of course, make some changes in the books and writers I suggested. I do stand by the ones I mentioned in this article.

  In the last fifteen years I’ve been asked to write a number of prefaces (sometimes called forewords or introductions). I agreed to do so if I loved the writer, the subject, or wished I’d written the book myself, in which case I’d feel sad or ashamed not to accept the request.

  I studied Christa Wolf’s essays in The Author’s Dimension, read and reread them before I began to write that introduction. I’d been to visit her a couple of times and admired the novels Christa T., Models of Childhood, Cassandra, and later Accident. I believed that the attacks on her from the West German critics had more to do with her interest in writing about women; the East German bureaucrats didn’t like that interest too much, either. She didn’t think that was the problem. I did.

  Norman Fruchter’s excellent novel Coat upon a Stick was republished by the Jewish Publications Society. I had read it in its first publication years earlier and loved thinking and writing about it. It’s wonderful when a fine piece of work is given another chance. The fact is, I admired Fruchter in 1969. We were in North Vietnam. We traveled with others for about three weeks. He was one of the filmmakers. He now works with children, education, the poor.

  In the case of Clarice Lispector, I accepted the word of translators and Portuguese speakers that she did truly bring a new sound to Brazilian literature. I was interested in the fact that her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants in Brazil, and the sounds of those two early languages, Russian and Jewish, in her ear on the way to Portuguese were the same that sang to me in childhood on my way to English.

  I had been aware for years that Antonina Nicolaevna Pirozhkova’s seven years with Isaac Babel were important and had been translated. Anne Frydman, the translator and my friend, was full of this project and loved the journals. Then she was able to bring them to the attention of Steerforth Press.

  At the end of this section I’ve put some shorter pieces in praise of writers—and people—I admire.

  Writing an introductory paragraph or two means I can keep talking about Don Barthelme, for instance, my neighbor, a great writer, friend. We shared a street, West Eleventh—looking in my case north, in his, south. He saw directly into the elementary school, the teachers, the children. It domesticated him, which he needed. He used that improvement to talk about the whole city.

  Not too long ago I was teaching an afternoon workshop at Manhattan Community College. There were GED students, English as a Second Language students, and some hoping-to-get-into-college-ne
xt-semester students. I’m expected in some of these classes to read a story of my own which they have already read, which I do, and there are always lots of good questions. This time I thought I’d try something else. So I read them Don’s story about Hokie Mokie the jazz saxophonist. They loved it, they wanted to know who the guy was who wrote it—was he a musician, could he come and read them another of his stories?—or would I? No, he can’t come, I said, he’s dead. A beautiful writer and understander, inventor in the English language, a funny guy, a moralist, younger than I—and gone—he would be glad to know you loved his story. But this is the great thing: there are his books and they’re still talking. You can’t shut them up.

  Barbara Deming was my teacher before I knew her, and she’s my teacher now. I learned about nonviolence from three people: Bayard Rustin in one brilliant two-hour talk in 1961 in our brand-new Greenwich Village Peace Center—my politics and the politics of my friend Mary Gandall were turned around for life. I never heard him speak again, though for a year or two I saw him often. Then A. J. Muste at the War Resisters League, not so much by his speech as by his way of listening to the young men who were about to decide whether to go to prison or to war. And then Barbara Deming.