Just As I Thought (20 page)

Well, of course they were. There were some women’s affinity groups. In Vermont and New Hampshire, we were part of a general coalition (Upper Valley Energy Coalition) that became so big we had to decentralize, geographically and ideologically, into affinity groups. Bob and I worked with an affinity group that is still in pretty strong business, and also I was associated with the women’s affinity group—WAND—which produced an important little book,
Handbook for Women on the Nuclear Mentality
(I was not involved in its production).

What is your definition of feminism?

Any definition has got to use the word “patriarchy.” If you’re a feminist it means that you’ve noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn’t natural. That it’s an unnatural way of organizing life on this earth. Feminism’s not about ranking priorities and oppressions, but it’s about demanding changes on an even vaster scale—placing the lives of women as close to the center as class and race have been for most radicals and of course exposing the connections.

New York Women’s Pentagon Action is having a public meeting with El Salvadoran women about “What does a revolution have to be for women to be liberated?” We’ve been talking informally with them for several weeks. They are feminists—that is, they’re not simply a support group for male organizations. And talking to them you begin to see how hard it is. It means—for them—that you are responsible for your country’s freedom, women, men, children. It means—for them—the hard act of
not
accepting the authority of men every step of the way. It means keeping the quarrel going, not relinquishing it at all, and still working and fighting alongside the men, because the woman-consciousness must be woven into the means if it is to be the fabric of the revolutionary end. They know the experience of Algerian women who were returned to the veil. They have no intention of repeating it.

Can you talk about some of the divisions in the feminist movement—racism, for example. Why is the women’s movement practically all white?

The feminist movement is not all white. There are large groups within the movement that are. But the big wide movement? No. There are very many women of color who are feminists. They’re organizing without white wisdom or presence. They don’t need white women to organize for them. We live in different situations. It seems there must be ways for us all to work together finally. And I think we’re coming to that. But before working together, you clarify, you empower yourselves, you establish trust and love, then you’re strong enough. It’s a process. The process is a powerful feminist statement.

They do suffer some divisions similar to white feminists, but even more painful. Some groups say, “Well, we can’t be liberated until our brothers are also liberated.” And they say, “Our brothers are really very oppressed and treated with contempt.” But then there’s another group that says, “Yes, that’s true, but they’re oppressors themselves and we don’t want to live like that. It’s they, our brothers, who should be making common cause with us.” I’ve talked to Latinas and black women who feel that way. So it’s a matter of time and white attention to problems of racism, before we all come closer together. Of course it’s something I long for, and since I’m an optimist I see it coming.

Other divisions are between women who think the issues of violence and war are not feminist issues. They are exactly that. Isn’t the violence against women and the violence of our insane interventions and nuclear buildups part of the same upbringing of boys—warriors in the playground, at home, on the job, at war? Another division: between heterosexual women and lesbians, an awful, painful division. Some of it is due to plain well-known homophobia, a historical sickness. I work in a group, the Women’s Pentagon Action, that includes a high percentage of lesbians. Great numbers of lesbians are putting their time, their energy into antimilitarist work—they’re important in almost any antiwar or antimilitarist or antiracist action that’s happened in the last couple of years. Not to see that power and its usefulness to the world is a willful blindness.

But we were just talking about civil disobedience. Some people think it’s an elite act because some of us have privileges of white skin or maybe jobs we won’t lose the minute we are arrested. Well, it’s true that people of color are treated worse in prison than white women. They are. (Of course, the great civil-disobedience movements—King, Gandhi—were not exactly white.) When white women (or men) use the argument—therefore
nobody
should do it—I don’t understand them. It seems to me that privilege is obligation, that if it’s easier to go to jail, so to speak, or more possible, then direct actions that may lead to arrest are exactly what we ought to undertake when that is what’s called for.

It’s sort of like having democratic rights and not using them. It’s a totally different subject but people will always come to you when you’re giving out leaflets and say, “You wouldn’t be able to do that in Russia.” So therefore you shouldn’t do it here? Well, of course you have an obligation to push the privileges of democracy, to push and extend them everywhere. And people who can should do so. We also have to be willing to divide up the work without feeling that some folks are being snotty about it or braver. They’re not braver. For instance, when my children were babies, I was a lot more cautious. We must investigate, imagine, press the limits of nonviolent action.

Some of this will probably seem naïve to some people. It’s a naïveté it’s taken me a lot of time and thinking to get to.

—1984

Of Poetry and Women and the World

Our panel has a kind of odd definition, and I think the three of us have taken it to mean whatever we want to talk about. And since what I want to talk about partly follows the last panel, it may be a very good way of working our way into other subjects.

I have to begin by saying that as far as I know, and even listening to all the people talking earlier, I have to say that war is man-made. It’s made by men. It’s their thing, it’s their world, and they’re terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it’s made by men. How do they come to live this way? It took me years to understand this. Because when I was a little girl, I was a boy—like a lot of little girls who like to get into things and want to be where the action is, which is up the corner someplace, where the boys are. And I understand this very well, because that was what really interested me. I could hardly wait to continue being a boy so that I could go to war and do all the other exciting boys’ things. And it took my own life, really, for me to begin to change my mind somehow—after a number of years of actually living during the Second World War. I lived a lot in Army camps. And I liked living in those Army camps; I liked them because it was very exciting, and it seemed to be where it was all at, and there were a lot of boys there, one of which, one of the boys, was my husband. The other boys were just gravy, so to speak.

But as time went on in my own life, and as I began to read and think and live inside my own life, and began to work as a writer, I stopped being a boy. At some certain point, I stopped being one, I stopped liking being one, I stopped wanting to be one. I began to think there would be nothing worse in this world than being one. I thought it was a terrible life, a hard life, and a life which would ask of me behavior, feelings, passions, and excitements that I didn’t want and that I didn’t care about at all. Meanwhile, at the same time, what had happened was that I had begun to live among women. Well, of course I had always lived among women. All people, all girls, live among women, all girls of my time and culture live among mothers, sisters, and aunts—and lots of them too. So I had always lived among them, but I hadn’t really thought about it that much. Instead, I had said, “Well, there they are and their boring lives, sitting around the table while the men are playing cards in the other room and yelling at one another. That’s pretty exciting, right?” And it wasn’t really until I began to live among women, which wasn’t until I had children, that I began to look at that life and began to be curious about it.

Now, that brings us to writing: how we come to writing and how we come to think about it. When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women. Now, the great thing is that I didn’t know them, I didn’t know who they were. Which I should have known, since I had all these aunts, right? But I didn’t know them, and that, I think, is really where lots of literature comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you’re curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know. (A lot of war literature comes from that, too, you know—the feeling that Robert Stone had, that “this is it.” The reason that he felt like this is that it
hadn’t been it
at all. So he wondered—but more of that later.) So I wondered about these lives, and these are the lives that interested me.

And when I began to write about them, I saw immediately, since my reading and thinking in my early thirties followed a period of very masculine literature, that I was writing stuff that was trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, and not interesting. However, it began to appear that that was all I could do, and I said, “Okay, this is my limitation, this is my profound interest, this life of women, and this is what I really have to do. I can’t help myself. Everybody’s going to say that it’s trivial, it isn’t worth anything, it’s boring, you know. Nobody’s hitting anybody very much [but later on, I had a few people hitting each other]. And what else can I do?”

I tell that story only for other writers who are young or maybe just young in writing. To tell them that no matter what you feel about what you’re doing, if that is really what you’re looking for, if that is really what you’re trying to understand, if that is really what you’re stupid about, if that’s what you’re dumb about and you’re trying to understand it, stay with it, no matter what, and you’ll at least live your own truth or be hung for it.

We’ve talked about whether art is about morality or— I don’t even understand some of those words, anyway. But I do understand words like “justice,” which are simpler. And one of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn’t a matter of opinion, really. That isn’t to say, “I’m going to show these people right or wrong” or whatever. But what art is about—and this is what justice is about, although you’ll have your own interpretations—is the illumination of what isn’t known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write. I was just speaking to somebody who’s a native American, who was saying that what he’s doing is picking up this rock at the mouth of a cave, out there in the desert, picking it up and saying, “I’ve got to light this up, and add what I find to the weight and life of human experience.” That’s what justice is about, and that’s what art is about, that kind of justice and that kind of experience.

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.