by Alice Walker
7.
I Call That Man Religious
Healing the Universal Heart: Becoming Intimate with That Which Is Foreign
The College of Integral Studies
San Francisco, California
April 11, 2002
I call that man religious who understands the suffering of others.
—Gandhi
This talk was written for a convocation at the College of Integral Studies in San Francisco, on April 11, 2002. I had been thinking of the split between the dark and the light mother, and how the son of the dark mother rarely has had a voice that is listened to in the governing of the world. It is because he speaks for the majority of mothers and children on the planet, who are dark.
I begin my talk tonight with the words of someone whose voice is almost completely silenced and ignored by the government and media in my country: Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba. They are excerpted from a speech he gave at the International Conference on Financing and Development in Monterrey, Mexico, on March 21, 2002.
Excellencies:
Not everyone here will share my thoughts. Still, I will respectfully say what I think.
The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.
The prestige of the international financial institutions rates less than zero.
The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy. As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing, the gap is widening. The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was thirty-seven times larger than that of the poorest is now seventy-four times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the forty-eight poorest countries combined.
The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low-cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No lower than 11 million children under the age of five perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A.
The life span of the population in the developed world is thirty years longer than that of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. A true genocide!
The poor countries should not be blamed for this tragedy. They neither conquered nor plundered entire continents for centuries; they did not establish colonialism, or reestablish slavery, and modern imperialism is not of their making. Actually they have been its victims. Therefore, the main responsibility for financing their development lies with those states that, for obvious historical reasons, enjoy today the benefits of those atrocities.
The rich world should forgive these countries’ foreign debt and grant them new soft credits to finance their development. The traditional offers of assistance, always scant and often ridiculous, are either inadequate or unfulfilled.
He then goes on to say:
Everything created since Bretton Woods (when the masters of the Western world gathered to decide the fate of the rest of us) should be reconsidered. A farsighted vision was then missing, thus, the privileges and interests of the most powerful prevailed. In the face of the deep present crisis, a still worse future is offered where the economic, social and ecologic tragedy of an increasingly ungovernable world would never be resolved and where the number of the poor and the starving would grow higher, as if a large part of humanity were doomed.
It is high time for statesmen and politicians to calmly reflect on this. The belief that a social and economic order that has proven to be unsustainable can be forcibly imposed is really senseless.
As I have said before, the ever-more-sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.
It should definitely be said: “Farewell to arms.”
Something must be done to save Humanity!
A better world is possible!
Thank you.
Why do millions of people the world over respect and revere this man who is consistently reviled by the United States? Why has our government, notably the CIA, tried to assassinate him almost more times than one can count? It is because for over forty years he has consistently articulated, affirmed and actively defended the aspirations of the poor. I have myself read many of his speeches during this period, really a lifetime, and never has he failed to meticulously set forth the conditions and needs of those least able to speak for themselves. This is a man who is considered such bad news that our presidents, both elected and selected, refuse to shake hands with him, or make eye contact with him, and actually declare before major summits, at which the world’s fate is being decided, that if Fidel Castro is present they will not attend. This childish behavior is shameful, really, and cowardly. And to its credit, much of the world, though poor and illiterate, sees it for what it is: the inability of those who profit from the world’s misery to deal with a truly religious man.*
And so I begin here, where any serious religious exploration must: the actual situation of the peoples of the earth. We are starving, we are illiterate, our environment is polluted almost beyond bearing, we are dying of all kinds of diseases, not just cancer and AIDS; we are running out of water, air, land. The three wealthiest people of the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries! And it is getting worse. However, when voices are raised to make this reality plain, and when people actually risk their lives to change the bad plan the masters of the world have laid out for us, they are in danger of being labeled “terrorists” or in other ways made to feel vulnerable, threatened, and alone.
Well, we are being disappeared anyway. We might as well make noise. How many of us gathered here have already lost lovers, children, friends, to illness that are a direct result of the way human beings, and the plants and animals they consume, are being forced to live? In my opinion what is being planned for the vast majority of humanity, assuming our so-called leaders do not blow us all up in a nuclear war, is enslavement on a global scale. Corporations, like vampires, seem to live forever, and what they crave is more and more of the earth’s and the people’s lifeblood. As an African-Amerindian, whose ancestors were enslaved physically for hundreds of years and many of whose people remain psychically enslaved to this day, I speak as someone returning from that condition who does not intend to experience it ever again.
In times such as these we rely more than ever on the indestructibility of the human spirit, however we define it and whatever physical or denominational robe it wears. And I will speak here of the physical body as a robe; understanding that over eons of time each of us will wear the bodies we might only have gazed upon in other lifetimes. Each of us will at some point have been white or of color, female or male, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian or a Jew. It is in this spirit that I salute the major recent (from five thousand years or so) religions of the world; though to be honest, I feel most of them, alpha-male-dominant to the core, have done more harm than good. I would certainly never consent to guide my own life by any religion that teaches the inferiority of women and the degradation of people of color. Or the acceptance that poverty is inevitable and husbands should control wives. That people should be stoned for any reason whatsoever. That people labeled witches should be burned. Religions that forbid women to speak in those places dedicated to the Spirit. Or even to sit or stand near anything the males consider holy. Or that violence against others, especially against anyone perceived to be “the enemy” is sanctioned by an easily irrit
ated and wrathful God who is not moved in the least by the slaughter of pregnant women and babies. A God so jealous that all female Gods before him had to be destroyed.
But that choice is for each person to make. I do believe that when Fidel Castro Ruz doggedly speaks out for the rights of the poor, the suffering of the children, the atrocious lack of health care for the billions, that this is not simply an expression of the compassion of a devout revolutionary, but that it betrays as well the early imprinting of a radical Christianity learned by Castro in the Jesuit Catholic Church.
It has long been apparent to me that if Fidel Castro had not become a revolutionary, he would have become a priest. And perhaps, as a priest, he might have demonstrated care for the young people who looked up to him, unlike the thousands of priests who, while pretending to care for our children, have in fact voraciously and savagely taken advantage of them, sexually and otherwise; leaving broken rather than healed spirits in their wake. We will recall, sharing this moment together tonight, that for generations, not a word has been raised against these men; that it is only recently, and I believe it is thanks to the Feminist Movement, which made it safe to speak out about sexual abuse, that voices are being raised in hopes of preventing abuse of children yet to come.
My own early imprinting was likewise Christian. And though I have experienced immense sorrow over the way enforced Christianity, the white-supremacist version, wrecked and ruined my people’s innate spiritual integrity, I remain a lover of Jesus, who, like Fidel Castro, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially Che Guevara, never abdicated his responsibility to the suffering, the dispossessed and the poor. I see the Christ spirit in all those who cannot be bought away from their love of humanity; all those who cannot be bribed away from their love of what is compassionate and just. Even as a child, however, I found myself distracted from the demand that Jesus command the sum of my attention and devotion by the obvious goodness of my humble mother. And beyond her, the obvious goodness and magnificence of the humble, unparalleled Earth.
Now we are given to understand that human life truly did begin in Africa. Many of us knew this before, we knew it in our bones, we knew it by the way Africans, in general, and especially African mothers, have spontaneously accepted all peoples, and especially all children; a lovely quality! But what is different about today is that Science has weighed in; geneticists have spoken. The white man has lifted his voice. Each and every one of us is descended from a single woman of color, an African. A black woman who loved us enough to bother to give us birth. And look at what we have done to her. To enumerate the crimes committed against the Mother of Humanity would drive the sanest person mad. Crimes including the destruction of her worship, enslavement of her children, eradication of her image; sacking of her homeland; the raping and the murder of her daughters, over centuries, the raping and the murder of her sons. Much of the raping, pillage and murder under the blessing of the priests, and other so-called religious guides, who we now know were not merely witnesses but participants in much of the destruction and desecration.
In a recent story out of Canada, for instance, one I am sure Africans know only too well, a middle-aged Native American man committed suicide rather than endure exposure that as a child he had been sexually abused by a priest who ran the boarding school in which he had been placed in an attempt to turn him into an ersatz European. His tribe was suing the Episcopal Church for damages to the health and dignity of his people, which it had abused when they were children; but this particular Native man, while innocent of the crime committed against him by someone sworn to be concerned about his soul at least, was too ashamed to have people look at his adult body and acknowledge what had been done to him. He was ashamed. When in fact every elder of the church should have been on his knees asking forgiveness of him.
And after taking our mother’s children away from her, after selling them into slavery, into circuses and sideshows, by the millions and by the thousands, there is the story of Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman, otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus, who was married—more accurately, enslaved—by a European man who put her in a freak show in order to exploit the visual wonder of her generous vulva, breasts and hips; and who then, after her death, prostituted her dead body and that of her dead infant; he also had her vulva cut out, preserved, and placed in the Louvre, in Paris, from which it has only recently been retrieved. To meditate on this atrocity for one hour is to change one’s entire relationship to the order of the world. It is also to understand the tragedy of mistaking one’s own mother’s body for something completely foreign to one’s self. Tragically, it is emblematic of the white world’s treatment of Africa.*
In her passionately explored book dark mother; african origins and godmothers, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, of your own illustrious faculty, shares this observation about our African ancestors, so many of them artists who left thousands of vibrant paintings on cave and cliff walls:
Figures dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, engaging in initiation rituals, with body decoration and masks, characterize the art of the entire heterogenous african continent, according to archeologist Umberto Sansoni. Ancient art of africans south of the Sahara suggest that they venerated their ancestors, considered animals and all life sacred, and that they lived without violence. Ancient african art abounding with fantastic creatures evokes contemporary surrealist art …
When I study this art, when I engage the power and energy of its “fantastic creatures,” I know I am still connected to my ancestors. Not only through my physical body, my cells and my cellular memory, my love of play and creativity, but especially through my dreams, which are also filled, at times, with visitations from “fantastic creatures” that seem to inhabit an eternal world. In this time of global upheaval and global suffering, it is to our dreams that we must turn for guidance; it is to the art inside us that hungers to be born. It is to the literature of writers who love humanity. It is to the wisdom teachings that have come down to us from those who would ease our suffering. We are an ancient, ancient people who, the majority of us, have been frightened, coerced, tricked and bribed away from the source of our greatest strength: an accurate knowledge of who we are. This nature that is nonviolent, this nature that is creative and kind, this nature that is celebratory and people-and animal-loving, this Buddha nature, if you will, is indeed our birthright, literally. It is who we, without benefit of any imposed religion, already are.
As the Hopi say: When the grandmothers speak (and are listened to) the world will begin to heal. I say: When humankind reestablishes a feeling connection to, and a passionate love for, its dark mother—she who has been considered the least of all—the world will change overnight. For this connection, which I was fortunate enough to sense through my relationship with my actual mother, ensures a bond with the natural world that nothing can erode.
At First, It Is True, I Thought There Were Only Peaches & Wild Grapes
To my delight
I have found myself
Born
Into a garden
Of many fruits.
At first, it is true,
I thought
There were only
Peaches & wild grapes.
That watermelon
Lush, refreshing
Completed my range.
But now, Child,
I can tell you
There is such
A creature
As the wavy green
Cherimoya
The black loudsmelling
& delicious
Durian
The fleshy orange mango
& the spiky, whitehearted
Soursop.
In my garden
Imagine!
At first I thought
I could live
On blue plums
That fresh yellow pears
Might become
My sole delight.
I was naïve, Child.
Infinite is
The garden
/>
Of many fruits.
Tasting them
I myself
Spread out
To cover
The earth.
Savoring each &
Every
One—date, fig, persimmon, passion fruit—
I am everywhere
At home.
This poem speaks to my delight at finding my way across the divides of race and gender to affirm a kinship that had been denied. In the Sixties I found it possible to love a man of European descent. Against the laws and attitudes of my country, I married him. Thirty years later I found myself deeply loving a black, black woman of African descent. Both these relationships were, in a very real sense, taboo. However, loving is nothing if it is not an education, and through the relationship with the Euro-American man I learned that all white men are not racist, are not shut down, closed off, from the life of others who appear different from themselves. The man I chose was, at that time, someone living comfortably in his fullness as a human being, without barriers between himself and a non-Eurocentric world. As a free Euro-American man, one of only a handful I have ever encountered, he was a revelation. His ability to be present and conscious among people considered “unlike” himself made it possible for me to have hope for these particular children of the ancient African common mother, the Europeans. That they have not all gone so far away from their original nature that they are irretrievable, that is to say, lost, to the concept of belonging, on equal terms, to a global, human family.
In the relationship with the black, black woman I experienced the bliss of loving my own source. I encountered the flavor of origin, a flavor expunged from much of the Western world. I understood that it is because this flavor has been largely disappeared from our lives that there is an immense suffering, especially in the Western, Eurocentric world, that shows itself as hunger. We are overweight partly because the flavor of our origins—in every respect—is off-limits to us. Hidden behind mountains of lies, misinformation, poverty, ridicule, hatred and envy and fear. Not to mention denial and guilt. We snack on an endless river of food trying to approximate something we almost remember but are at the same time afraid to recall. Absence of the original flavor, that of the black, black woman, our common mother, is the very reason people willingly endure such things as canned laughter, Muzak in elevators and pastel colors in which it is rare for anyone to look really good. (This is a joke based on the fact that black people in the South, if they were black-skinned, were told not to wear red. They were told this by their En glish and Irish and Scottish and French and German slave-owners. It was considered “too loud” against our vibrant darkness. We were steered instead toward more innocuous pastels. Obviously we looked great in red, just as no one on earth looks more gorgeous eating red, white and green watermelon. That was the problem.)
