by Alice Walker
Although there is disagreement in Native communities about how to approach the past, most agree that the first step is documentation. “It is crucial that this history be exposed,” says Willetta Dolphus, a Cheyenne River Lakota. “When the elders who were abused in these schools have the chance to heal, then the younger generation will begin to heal.”
Members of the Boarding School Healing Project say that current levels of violence and dysfunction in Native communities result from human rights abuses perpetrated by state policy. In addition to setting up hotlines and healing services for survivors this broad coalition is using a human rights framework to demand accountability from Washington and churches.
While this project is Herculean in its scope, its success could be critical to the healing of indigenous nations from both contemporary and historical human rights abuses. Native communities, the project’s founders hope, will begin to view the abuse as the consequence of human rights violations perpetrated by church and state rather than as individual failings. And for individuals, overcoming the silence and the stigma of abuse in Native communities can lead to breakthroughs: “There was an experience that caused me to be damaged,” said boarding school survivor Sammy Toineeta. “I finally realized that there wasn’t something wrong with me.”
Many of us have Native American great-grandmothers. Though some of us were forced to deny her during our own black cultural revolution, that occurred, along with our enlightenment, during the Sixties and Seventies. Envious of, or offended by, straightness of hair or lighter color of skin or shape of nose, and wanting to pledge allegiance only to the African in us, we forbade mention of this ancestor, to whom we are so irrevocably linked, not through hair or skin or nose, but through suffering.
We know that everything I have listed here, everything that was done to Native American children, and to their parents (and to the Maori and the Hawaiians and the Tahitians and the Nunga of Australia, etc.), was done to our people. Mixed African and Indian and European, as we became. And more specific cruelties, numberless and unspeakable, that resulted from having sadists unleashed upon them. Sadists wearing cassocks and rosaries, sadists pretending to be interested in God. Sadists who claimed to be bringing civilization. Sadists who inspired the more documented and endlessly spotlighted atrocities of Adolf Hitler. Sadists who clear-cut the spirits and souls of our ancestors as effectively as their slave-driving, white-supremacist greed clear-cut and devastated the land.
Lying on my yoga mat, having done a few back stretches taught me by Konda Mason, who survives and thrives in our own time, I let go of all of this. I concentrate on my breath, and silently thank the Creator for allowing it to flow into and out of me. It is such a joy to know to do this.
I learned my first yoga postures while living in a tense and sadist-filled Mississippi, from a book for children called Be a Fish, a Bird, a Tree! It was years before I received instruction from an actual person. When I lived in San Francisco I took lessons once a week from the founder of Bikram yoga. And for many years after that practiced using a tape given to me by Quincy Jones, who, during our first meeting, demonstrated all the most difficult Hatha postures, effortlessly, including the fixed firm, which I was never able to do. Years later I encountered Konda Mason, a wonderful teacher of inspiring soul, and then Tajma Noor, a young master of yoga and a fabulous singer too, and then Deni Hodges, whose dedication and affection, while teaching me yoga, is blackness itself.
From the final sevasana of the yoga mat it is easy to see how like orchids we have been, and still are. Beautiful, rare, common, fragile, strong, exotic, plain. Gorgeous. And how true it is to say, as one can easily observe in many of our neighborhoods, where killing ourselves and each other has become almost a sport, we have no idea how to take care of us.
Until sadist rule of the world ends, or at least until it is revealed, acknowledged and controlled within human beings, we will never know peace. That is why yoga and meditation are essential. In order to free ourselves we must listen to many harrowing tales that our people, for their own health and sanity, must share with us. Knowing what happened to our ancestors’ lives is the only way we can begin deconstruction of the dysfunction in our own. To do this will require the warriorship we associate generally with heroic leaders: Mandela, Che, King, Tubman, Truth, Malcolm X, etc. But it is within reach of us all. Warriorship in this case means holding protective chi, or life force, that enables one’s self and the community to heal.
Which brings me to the question I posed at the beginning of my talk: What is blackness? What is it that makes us black?
To be black means to have body and soul together. That is why, customarily, we used to define a “together” person as “having soul.” It has been shocking, in the past decades, to see so many soulless black people. People who, in our grandparents’ time, would have been considered zombies. And it is this area in which yoga can be so powerful. Yoga means to bind back, unite. To bring the body and the soul together. To strengthen ensoulment. For this reason the practice of yoga is a holy endeavor and the teaching of it to our people a very high calling.
A marvelous thing happens when the body and soul are together, something that is the essence of who we’ve always been, and in our deepest nature still are: we care. To be black means to care. About everything. About orchids, and ancestors, about children and old people, about hair and history. It means accepting the pain and suffering of that condition, without drugs, or overeating, or sex addiction, or workaholism. It means trusting, as well, that the Universe will respond to our fidelity to our true nature by teaching us ways of being that will help us carry our unique burden—our deep, inevitable, irrevocable caring about people and the world—which is, at the same time, our most magnificent flower.
During my orchid “meditation,” one orchid in particular, dewy dark blue, with a golden center, held my eyes. It was days before I realized that it reminded me of someone, my best friend, cousin and soulmate, when I was a child, whom everyone called Sister. We were like sisters growing up and wore identical dresses, snowsuits (though there was little snow in Georgia), white anklets and black patent-leather shoes. Grownups liked to call me cute, but to me Sister was the one. She was beautiful: glowing and dark like a peaceful night sky filled with bright stars. In fact the first time I saw a painting of the Goddess Nut, from inside an Egyptian pyramid, I had thought of her. The blue-black body of Nut, stretched across the sky, her milky way flowing toward all below, hungering, worshiping her, on earth. But the grownups did not consider Sister cute, let alone beautiful. In those days no African American person of any color was considered beautiful, and Sister was black; blackness itself was considered ugly. I thought the grownups were blind and crazy, but because I was a small child my view didn’t count to them, nor did I have words to express it. I held tightly to Sister until she and her family moved north.
Sister eventually married someone who abused her. Later I would wonder about her self-esteem. How had she found a sense of herself as beautiful if no one around her could see it? I wished I had been there to whisper it in her ear every time she felt doubt. When I heard of her miserable life and even more miserable death, something inside almost lost hope that many black people can survive their own internalized self-hatred. How is it possible to hate the color black? What can we do to destroy the horrible prison of non-appreciation so many find themselves in? I began to think about blackness and what, over a lifetime, it still means to me.
Is American society and culture our rotten log? Our ordinary tree? Is America the burning house that James Baldwin thought we were integrating into? Can we learn how to live here? Can we thrive? If we cannot, perhaps we should not continue trying to live here. In fact, I have friends who are saying bittersweet good-byes, and leaving. They point to what is for them the final straw—after the stolen election of 2000, the disenfranchisement of black people, the growing suppression of women’s rights and burgeoning religious intolerance—the way that drug addiction is changing even the
character of humans; and drugs are abundant in America. My friends feel life is too short to try to blossom in soil soaked in poison. I understand their position. However, if we can learn how to blossom in our rotten log, our ordinary tree, or perhaps save enough of the burning house to live in, in peace, how exactly do we accomplish that?
If you have ever seen happiness, you know what it looks like. The experience of happiness is something one never forgets. What saves me from total pessimism about our Being in America is that I have experienced whole and healthy, mentally and spiritually sound, deeply happy black people. But they had obviously to learn how to live here. What did these people have in common? A love of the earth. A love of the sky above their heads. A love of their fields and animals, if they were fortunate enough to have them. A love of their neighbors and compassion for the old and for children. A reverence for growing things. An enjoyment of life’s daily miracles. A love of the Great Mystery. And a deep and humble gratitude for having been born in their perfectly wonderful bodies. They believed in community so much that they established societies to look after “the sick and the shut-in” and to make sure every person in the community had a decent burial. Homelessness and hunger were unheard of, for instance, in the community into which I was born. There were no orphans.
In meditation after yoga, consider the oneness of the planet, and how each part of it seems to have its own suffering. Wherever I have traveled I have found the same sorrows from different and sometimes the same mistakes; this makes me reluctant to abandon the country of my birth; many of its mistakes and sufferings I at least understand. I believe it is a time of great awakening, and that this awakening is global, hence the race by patriarchal powers worldwide to suppress and subjugate women, who, awake, are notorious for seeing why things are going wrong; and saying so.
Sit on the Earth, our Mother, and thank Her for her loyalty and devotion to you, whatever your condition or the condition of your people has been. Tell Her that wherever you go, you will never desert her. That you will do everything in your power to return to Her the care she has extended to you and yours. That you understand She is your true country and your eternal home. Kiss her pinecones, caress her turtle shells, admire the variety of her clouds, trees, oceans, beans. Remember, She is alive and wanting and needing affection, just as you do. You will be with Her always, though countries and governments crumble into Her dust.
Stretch out on Her breast, face to the grass. Allow your love, your pain, your confusion and sadness, your disappointment and hate, your fear, to fall into the only lap large enough to hold it all.
Look at that grass under your face, think of it as your own hair; what can you do to make it happier? And if you cannot imagine happy hair, or happy grass, how will you ever imagine happiness itself?
14.
To Be Led by Happiness (Re: March 8, 2003)
I wrote this essay as a thank you to Medea Benjamin, an activist hero, who invited me to participate in this event and later asked if I would write an Op-Ed piece about it.
Not buying
War
Grief remains
Unsold.
It started with Einstein. I had written a poem about his hair. It wasn’t just about his hair: I was thinking about his statement that World War III might be fought with nuclear weapons but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. I was walking down a gray, chilly street near my home in Berkeley, thinking about the sadness of his eyes, the sadness of our situation: about to invade and massively bomb Iraq, a country inhabited by old people, orphans, women and children. Boys and men. The children, half the country’s population, under fifteen years of age. I was thinking about my impending journey to Washington, D.C., to join a demonstration against the war; a city whose streets, during slavery, were laid out by Benjamin Bennaker, a free African American (father African, mother Irish-African) tobacco planter from Maryland. I thought of the ancestors who, enslaved, built (eyes lowered, muscles straining), the imposing symbols of freedom in Washington, including the White House.
Though wanting to join the women of CODE PINK who had been holding a vigil in front of the White House for four months, dressed in pink to signify the feminine concern for the safety, especially, of children, I was dreading the long lines at the airport, and the flight. I stopped at a light, thinking of how our experience now at airports, being searched and sometimes seized, bears a resemblance worth scrutinizing to what Palestinians, attempting to enter and leave their Israeli-restricted areas, go through. Reflecting on this, I rested my hand on a telephone pole before rather wearily crossing the street. A piece of paper near my hand fluttered in the wind. There, just above my head, was another quote from Einstein someone had stapled to a pole. The problems we face today cannot be solved by the minds that created them.
It was a pretty grim message, perhaps grimmer than the earlier one; still, I found myself beginning to smile. Here he was: an ancestor who knew, and said out loud, that if we keep going in the direction we’re headed, the jig is up. On the other side of the street I thought: Whose mind has not been heard at all on the direction we must immediately turn? The Mind of the Grandmothers of the World. But that’s another story.
Ten thousand women dressed in hot pink, cool pink, all shades of pink, marched and rallied in Washington, D.C. to celebrate March 8, International Women’s Day, 2003. There were rousing speeches; there was music and dance. Enormous and magical puppets. There was laughter and solemnity. The march was led by several rows of small children chanting “One Two Three Four, We Don’t Want Your Crummy War: Five Six Seven Eight, We Will Not Participate.” They were followed by writers and artists and activists, including Susan Griffin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rachel Bagby, Terry Tempest Williams, Medea Benjamin, Nina Utne, and me. Behind us the sea of pink stretched far as the eye could see.
At Lafayette Park, across from the White House, we paused. Twenty-five of us were chosen to enter the park (a number previously authorized); only to find admittance denied. After a brief huddle, squatting at the knees of a line of police, we moved forward. Several hours later, having sung “Peace Salaam Shalom” and “Give Peace a Chance” the entire time, we were arrested. And it is of that moment, that hour—because it took a long time—that I wish to speak; and of our time in a holding cell before being set free.
I had been arrested before. While protesting apartheid in South Africa; while attempting to block the shipment of weapons, by train, to Central America. Those were serious times, but this time felt different. This time felt like: All the information is in. If our species does not outgrow its tendency to fight wars, we can kiss all we have created, and ourselves, good-bye. To bring children into the world at all, given the state of things, seems not only thoughtless but cruel. And it was of the children I thought, partly because there, right across from us, as we sang in front of the White House, were huge photographs of dismembered fetuses held by an anti-abortion group whose leader began to harangue us through a bullhorn. He called us traitors and murderers and accused us of nagging.
Nagging. What century was he from? we thought.
That he could not make the connection between the gruesomely dismembered bodies in his photographs and those of children bombed in Iraq seemed unbelievable. As he shouted at us we sang: “Protect the women and the children of Iraq.” Eventually, scowling, looking extremely churlish, he left.
Standing between my Irish American sister (Susan Griffin) and my Chinese American one (Maxine Hong Kingston), and with twenty-four other courageous women all around us; with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewing us for our communities across the world, and Kristin Michaels, a videographer, taping us, I felt the sweetest of all feelings: peace. The police began to gather their horses, their paddy wagons, their plastic handcuffs. We sang. Being women, we noticed and made much of the fact that a rainbow appeared suddenly in the sky.
Amy (who within minutes would be arrested herself) asked each of us how we felt about being arrested. Maxine said she felt it wa
s the least she could do. I said I felt happier than I’d felt in years. Susan said her happiness went beyond happiness to joy. None of us could live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while a country filled with children, a lot of them disabled, homeless, and hungry, was blown to bits using money we need in the United States to build hospitals, housing and schools.
The arrest went smoothly. I thought the police were considerate, human. Some of us tried to help them do their job by sticking our arms out in front of us but the handcuffs go behind, not in front. We sang in the paddy wagons, we sang later in the holding cells. We recited poetry to each other and told stories from our lives. And all the while, there was this sweetness. Even though the floor of the cell, where some of us had to sit, was cold, and even though the toilet wouldn’t flush. I found Fannie Lou Hamer’s voice coming out of my throat and led our cell in singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
I realized that, at the root of the peace cradling me, was not only Einstein, and other ancestors who told us the truth, but especially Martin Luther King, Jr. I had followed him faithfully since I was in my teens; his fearless, persistent struggle against injustice mesmerized me. Perfect love casts out fear. That is what he had. And that, ultimately, is what the sea of pink symbolized. We were women and children who loved ourselves in our Iraqi form of women and children; loving ourselves as humans meant loving ourselves as all humans. We understood that whatever we did to stop war, we did it not for the “other” but for a collective us. The heart enjoys experiencing the liberating feeling of compassion; it expands and glows, as if beaming its own sun upon the world. That is the warmth our cooling emotional world so desperately needs to preserve its humanity. It is this savoring of the ecstatic nature of impersonal love that lets the peacemakers of the world do our job. It is this love whose inevitable companion is not only peace, but happiness, and, as Susan said, joy.
