by Grace Paley
So my meeting in the early sixties, very early, maybe even ’59, with what I later discovered were Friends, was a real breakthrough. The whole idea, the simple sentence “Speak truth to power” really shook me. Meanwhile, I was writing more and more [stories] and thinking about the truth of art and the truth of politics and going further—Act truth to power. Circumvention and manipulation in the movements of my youth had begun to disgust me—that was one of the reasons I got into so much local work—I had really just had it with the grown-up men and the big picture without quite realizing it.
The first action I took that could be described in formal terms as civil disobedience was during the Armed Forces Day Parade in the sixties. Somebody said, “You want to do that with us?” And I said, “Oh sure.” So we sat down in front of the parade, sat down and threw flowers at the tanks, etc. And the good thing about that is that I got six days in jail. I’ve never spent more than that at any one time. I learned a lot. I learned that it was interesting. I mean, when you’re in jail, it’s not as if you’re no place. You’re in another place. You’re SOMEPLACE. It is not as if you’re not among people. You’re among women and they’re interesting, not frightening. Whoever they are, the people, the prisoners, those women can educate you. And the whole experience is one that, well, you are suddenly in an American colony. You can think of that vast prison population that way. You have to go into it from time to time. This is how the colonized live. Prison is not a metaphor.
How does your commitment to nonviolence affect the kind of political work that you do?
Well, first of all, I think most people are nonviolent. I think there’s an awful lot of junk written about the naturalness of competition and revenge—survivalism. Which is not to say there aren’t certain cultures where people go out and kill each other and kill each other back. But for me, when I say nonviolence, it only means I will be nonviolent as long as I possibly can. I can’t think that armed struggle is the only way to change the world or the neighborhood. And it’s just words. I know this view will anger people—even some who are dear to me—but most of the people in the United States who use the term so frequently have no idea of what killing and war and death are. They have no feeling for the suffering. “Armed struggle” is two words in a pamphlet, repeated many times in a book. So you can see I hate the cheap use of that term. Still, nonviolence does not mean personal safety. Pacifism is not passive-ism. If it means that, it’s useless. So I will try with others to make change in this world as stubbornly as I possibly can without inflicting pain or death but without dodging conflict confrontation—even initiating it—as at Greenham, Seneca, Livermore, Griffiss, all the wonderful Ploughshares actions at draft boards.
All of this is related of course to what I said about not asking permission to move through my time in this world. It relates also closely to the idea, the Quaker idea again, that there is a light in every human being and that light has to be addressed first before anything else. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry. I’ve elbowed a few cops in my time for getting too close for my comfort or, in certain cases, my children’s. But it does mean that your first approach to another human being is with the assumption that that woman or man is human and you can at least begin to talk—approach without hatred.
Then you say, “How do you feel about the Nicaraguans—El Salvador?” Well, first I don’t judge them. I don’t judge other people, other nations that our government and their own have pressed beyond bearing. In the second place, how can I judge them in the position they’re in when I myself, without such experience of oppression, have lived with all the abstractions of war in my own head. As a little girl growing up—as any little girl growing up in my generation—we really looked to that little-boy image of energy no matter how lively we were ourselves. People assume it’s a natural progression—the only forward. It took me a long time to think in other ways. Our histories are written in chapters of war and violence. Where are the long histories of nonviolent lives and actions? In fact, we here in the United States have infinite possibilities for nonviolent actions. There are people who talk a lot about armed struggle and there are many passiveists who say they can’t possibly withhold taxes, they’d get in trouble with the IRS.
How did you become a feminist?
It’s a long process. It begins in childhood, doesn’t it? I’ve always had a lot of girl friends—women friends and always circles of friends. I’ve never been far from the lives of women. But I liked men a lot, too. I think it was called boy crazy once. During the Second World War, I lived in army camps for a couple of years with my husband. In those days all the boys I knew were in the Pacific or Europe. At war. I still have a lot of feeling for soldiers. At Seneca—the Women’s Peace Encampment—I saw those kids and they meant something to me. We don’t think about those young fellows enough. But your question: After my kids were a couple of years old, I began to write stories that were really mostly about women’s lives. That was because I was pained by the peculiar life of the women my age—in their twenties and thirties, a lot of them with kids and a lot of them alone already, objects of considerable contempt but kind of tough, ironic, becoming angry. I didn’t think of myself as a feminist writing those stories, but I would say I’d begun to educate myself without knowing it. I was learning from myself, among others.
And then when, in response to nuclear testing and the Vietnam War, the Greenwich Village Peace Center was formed, we tried to form a women’s task force. But Women’s Strike for Peace had gathered itself together within that year and they seemed to fill peace-women’s needs for more autonomous action. I was more interested in local work then, and in fact, many of us in the Peace Center came out of PTAs, park work, tenants’ organizations—we had lived in the community’s life. There were very strong women at the center and we didn’t suffer too much the experiences you’ve probably heard about from women who worked in mixed (men and women) antiwar groups. Also, we were on home turf, not at meetings far away. Still, I had enough discontent to join an early consciousness-raising group. And I thought of myself more and more as a feminist. But when several women left Resist in the early seventies, I didn’t do that, I didn’t think we should all leave. At the time I thought we should (we women) have gotten together and decided in some common way who should remain, who should go. It seemed important for feminists to continue to work inside groups like Resist that were offering support and funding to women. The war was still going on, there were also resistance groups that had to be supported—in and out of the Army. (Maybe that was the central committee of my youth still talking.)
It was in early consciousness-raising groups that I began to think of myself as a feminist and also see that I had been one for some years in argument and concern. But it was really later that I decided that was the way I wanted to work. I had to go through some years of the anti-nuke movement first, really, before I decided I wanted to work in autonomous women’s groups.
What was it about your experiences in the anti-nuke movement that led you to make that decision?
The split over the Seabrook actions. Both sides infuriated me. That’s wrong, there were at least three positions, when Clamshell on a moment and a half’s notice decided not to do the planned CD at Seabrook, and then the other side’s bossy male leadership wanted to take over the place (naturally disgusted but with the same macho thoughtless muscle-making). These were, by the way, mostly Boston people (I was working and living in Vermont at the time). So I’d begun to say words like that—rural, urban—and also to see the differences.
When you said you had to go through the whole anti-nuke movement, did you see that as being separate from the feminist movement? Did you see them as being two different things?
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 a
ffinity 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.
