by Alice Walker
All the taboos set in place over the last six thousand years must be carefully brought to light, inspected in council, and probably broken, if we are to move further along our evolutionary path. They were set in place for a reason: they keep us ignorant of our true nature. I learned this once again when I was writing a novel about the practice of female genital mutilation. That the vulva was considered such an offense that it was cut off. It was taboo even to discuss it. Taboo even for the young girls who were being mutilated to cry aloud. The mirror opposite of this was the taboo in Haiti for many years against a religious ritual clearly ancient African in its origins, in which participants kiss the vulva of a dancing woman. An act described by Euro-American missionaries and others as “the obscene kiss.” As if to kiss the place of our entry into this world is more obscene than to destroy it.
And why is it considered evil and obscene in a patriarchal world? Because it is a remnant of the worship of the Mother, a gesture of gratitude and blessing, that European civilization has denied and tried to wipe out.
We Have a Beautiful Mother
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her hills
Are buffaloes’
Her buffaloes
Hills.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her oceans
Are wombs
Her wombs
Oceans.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her teeth
The white stones
At the edge
Of the water
The summer
Grasses
Her plentiful
Hair.
We have a beautiful
Mother
Her green
Lap immense
Her brown embrace
Eternal
Her blue body
Everything
We know.
The earth mother, who stands behind the Human Mother, can be known by lying on her breast. She can be known by swimming in her oceans, or even by looking at them. She can be known by eating her collard greens and carrots. Savoring her fruits, walking through her wheat fields. She is everywhere, our Earth Mother; it is truly astonishing how often she is not seen. She may be deeply known by the ingestion of plant medicines many ancient peoples have been directed in their dreams to create, medicines that exhibit Her character of patience, loving-kindness, and healing wisdom. We are never alone; have never been alone, because Earth has always been with us. And it is to the Earth that the world will inevitably turn because really there is, ultimately, no alternative. Heaven, an idea of Earth, is not an option. When the Buddha was asked by Mara, the king of delusion, what gave him the right to teach human beings how to end suffering and to be happy, Buddha simply touched the Earth. He might also, had he known about her, have called upon his African Mother. She who lived in a time of happiness, when everything around her was considered kin. And She who was responsible, certainly, for the Buddha’s curly hair, which is always a charming surprise when one studies the oldest paintings and carvings of him.
As we sit here tonight, many of us are in deep grief over the destruction of life and hope in the Middle East. Palestinians have been driven to blow themselves up in the company of their oppressors rather than live with the pain and humiliation of losing their homeland, their families, their homes and vineyards, their joy of life and their dignity. They have also, for half a century, felt misrepresented, misunderstood and abandoned by the world. Israelis, afraid and angry, have invaded their cities and massacred them without mercy. Using billions of American tax dollars to do this. At this very moment hundreds of lives, many of them children’s lives, are being taken by force. There are many questions to be asked about this genocide. The Earth, we know, is impartial; she supports all alike. But the Gods involved are another story. They have sites that are so special to themselves that the killing of trespassers is not only acceptable, but ordained.
Let us affirm that Human beings do not have to remain slaves to such Gods.
In The Color Purple, two characters, Celie and Shug, discuss God: Shug says: I believe God is Everything That Ever Was, Is, Or Ever Will Be. And that when you can feel that, and be happy that’s what you feel, then you’ve got it. Meaning you recognize yourself as part of Everything God is. You are tied to no particular temple, wall, or rock. This was also the wisdom of Isis, Goddess of ancient Africa, who learned it, obviously, from Our Mother.
Believing this, as I do, there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of a love that is in fact the same Love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us while we starve.
After many years of listening to my government’s ravings against Fidel Castro and Cuba, I decided to go and visit. How foreign can these people be, I wondered, that my government thinks so little of them? I discovered a people so familiar, that without knowing the language, I felt seen, affirmed and understood. These were people of great heart, deep soul, honest intentions. They were “poor” in material goods but rich in character and resolve. They were blessed to have among them, flung around freely and at all times, more love and caring for themselves, for one another, as well as for the stranger, than I had ever seen. The God of Love, that so many in North America had been looking for, was in Cuba. Because of hardship, suffering, human failings, some of this early beauty has been distorted or lost; still what is left of the Revolution is inspiring. What did I learn from my experience there? That I did not need to join my government in its attempt to, in Cuba, cut out our Mother’s heart. After four visits, two of which afforded me the opportunity to shake hands with and even hug “the enemy,” Fidel Castro, and definitely to look him in the eye, I concluded what I had already suspected: that he is my brother. Our brother. How was it possible, I wondered, that nine American presidents had failed to comprehend what I could plainly see? That they saw only the return of their previous “ownership” of Cuba as a desirable goal, and not the health and happiness of an honorable people? That they placed no value on the possibility of friendship between our two peoples simply astounds anyone who has visited Cuba and deeply grasped the importance of Cuban thinking for the coming and present crises of the planet.
A new religion of the Earth, based on the best wisdom of the past and all the information that science and genetics is bringing us, is being born. We are beginning to write our own gospels; compose our own songs of praise. (In that regard, another member of your faculty, Jennifer Berezan, is composing music that is charting our spiritual growth perfectly). We are beginning to articulate our own philosophies. To worship the Great Mystery, which is never static or dogmatic, but always evolving, ever unfolding. It is a religion in which it is a given that we share a common Earth Mother and a common Human Mother. That we are family not only because we inhabit the same Earth house but also because we share the same DNA, and through our African foremother alone, the same mitochondria.
In my novel The Temple of My Familiar, a “romance”* of the last five hundred thousand years, I follow the faint trail left by ancestral mothers to a time before they were human beings, when they were “fantastic creatures” such as lions. It was important to me that I create a record that felt something like the knowledge I carried in my cells, history books having failed to confirm much of what I guessed and little of what I “knew.” I needed to understand and to offer a new gospel, The Gospel According to Shug. Shug Avery, unrepentant wild woman and undomesticated blues singer, appeared in my earlier novel The Color Purple. She epitomizes the person of our time who, through immense suffering and struggle, accepts and affirms her own self as an expression of the Great Mystery; in her Being she is a healing medicine to
those around her, because in her there is achieved, at long last, balance, and the ability, as Virginia Woolf might have said, to consider things “in themselves;” not as other people might wish her to, but as they actually are. In other words, she is free.
The Gospel According to Shug
To bless means to help.
HELPED are those who are enemies of their own racism: they shall live in harmony with the citizens of this world, and not with those of the world of their ancestors, which has passed away, and which they shall never see again.
HELPED are those born from love; conceived in their father’s tenderness and their mother’s orgasm, for they shall be those—numbers of whom will be called “illegitimate”—whose spirits shall know no boundaries, even between Heaven and Earth, and whose eyes shall reveal the spark of the love that was their own creation. They shall know joy equal to their suffering and they will lead multitudes into dancing and Peace.
HELPED are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.
HELPED are those who find something in Creation to admire each and every hour. Their days will overflow with beauty and the darkest dungeon will offer gifts.
HELPED are those who receive only to give; always in their house will be the circular energy of generosity; and in their hearts a beginning of a new age on Earth: when no keys will be needed to unlock the heart and no locks will be needed on the doors.
HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm; to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with trees.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are those who risk themselves for others’ sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the world in which no one’s gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator’s magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another—plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness.
HELPED are those who know.
Understanding that the world is engaged in ever increasing spirals of violence and suffering, I asked Spirit to give us a peace chant and mudra. I will teach it to you, if you will please stand.
When humankind writes new laws of behavior for the world, in some Time quite different from now, one of the first must be that no one will harm anyone less powerful without first visiting her or him; eating and drinking with her or him, and meeting his or her family. I am deeply disturbed by the long-distance murder of poor and defenseless people that passes for legitimate “war” in our time. It is incredibly cowardly, and I marvel that more people don’t jump up and down in the streets, pointing this out. How much courage does it take to point and shoot a missile at a town you’ve never seen, filled with children whose voices you’ve never heard?
What is religion for if it is not to protect each other? To see and understand each other’s nightmares and fears, worries and heartaches? Our dreams and hopes for ourselves and our offspring? If a religion’s primary meaning becomes the destruction of its enemies, it has ceased to be of use in the healing of the world. It has ceased to be religious.
I am glad that I traveled to our “enemy” the Soviet Union when I was young. Deeply grateful that I have made my own connection to the Cuban people, a connection of solidarity and love I will honor always. I am happy to have met and loved actual Africans, women and men, boys and girls, so that as the world watches Africans die in the millions of IMF–and World Bank–engineered poverty and instability, I know from experience the loss we bear. I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.
Think of revolutionaries and revolutions you have admired. Not just Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi. Christ and the Buddha were also revolutionaries. Contemplate what it has meant to many of them to face relentless repression. Consider the loss of new thought, new ways of being for humanity, because of this repression.
Is there a “bogeyman” person (like Fidel Castro) or “Axis-of-Evil” country (like Iran or North Korea) you would like to know more about? Consider a visit. What will be the greatest surprise? That the people remind you very much of folks you know. That they are trying to live their lives the best way they can, just as you are. That there are only fathers and mothers and children and grandparents, like everywhere else. Ask yourself how you will feel if your government harms them.
I believe Americans are predominantly good. That they are generous and warmhearted. Kind and often passionate about freedom and justice. Any struggle for peace, freedom, love or justice I have found myself in has been thick with Americans. This is one reason foreigners have considered Americans “lucky.” It has never been only our materialism they have admired, but also our spirit.
Meditate on your own view of Americans and what it means to be an American—a North American: a person from the US of A. This is a time to feel compassion for our country, at the same time that we may feel despair, sadness, anger or disgust. It is a country built on so many lies, it is almost impossible for it to find its way; its very foundation is murder and theft. And yet, I remember a story told at an Un-Thanksgiving celebration some years ago, on th
e island of Alcatraz, in the San Francisco Bay. A Native American woman from one of the East Coast tribes told of the early contact between her people and the Pilgrims. To the surprise of many in the huge circle of people gathered, she said that her people and the Pilgrims had gotten along splendidly. That the Pilgrims and her people had shared many philosophical and spiritual concepts. That the Pilgrims had loved and learned their language and had written it down, thereby preserving it. That today, because of this, she and her tribe (and I am sorry I do not recall its name) are learning their language (from the Pilgrims’ transcript) for the first time in modern history.
That there might have been real peace, symbolized by the feast of Thanksgiving, between Pilgrims and Indians, had never seemed probable to me, so great was the slaughter of Native people that followed it.
How do you wish to meet new people? By sharing recipes, and cooking and eating dinners together; by learning their medicines and dances and gardening techniques, their wisdom and philosophy; by listening to the sound of their language and trying to learn it? While sharing what you have? Or do you wish to meet them via television, as they mourn the children you have killed? The farms you have destroyed? The temples and tombs you have shattered? The sacred Mother or Fatherland you have trashed?
