Just As I Thought (21 page)

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 MADRE
¹
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 NACLA
²
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.