In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly.

  I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her—black, yellow, brown or red, “aboriginal” as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated, and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated, and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium-mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers, and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of many People of Color’s resistance to the present antinuclear movement.

  In any case, this has been my own problem.

  When I have considered the enormity of the white man’s crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me … When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing, and food . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized .. . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think—in perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.

  And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it, and continue their lust to dominate, exploit, and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything else they can reach.

  If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white men away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing, or destroying it. They who say we poor (white included) and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds.

  What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New.

  Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam.

  Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires serious thought from every one of us.

  However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventive medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe.

  So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the Earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save humankind.

  And we are not saved yet.

  Only justice can stop a curse.

  1982

  NUCLEAR MADNESS: WHAT YOU CAN DO

  NUCLEAR MADNESS IS a book you should read immediately. Before brushing your teeth. Before making love. Before lunch. Its author is Helen Caldicott (with the assistance of Nancy Herrington and Nahum Stiskin), a native Australian, pediatrician, and mother of three children. It is a short, serious book about the probability of nuclear catastrophe in our lifetime, eminently thoughtful, readable, and chilling, as a book written for nuclear nonexperts, as almost all Americans are, would have to be.

  Caldicott was six years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and calls herself a child of the atomic age. She grew up, as many of us did, under the threat of nuclear war. She recalls the fifties, when students were taught to dive under their desks at the sound of the air-raid siren and Americans by the thousands built underground fallout shelters.

  During the sixties, political assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War turned many people away from concern about atomic weapons and toward problems they felt they could do something about. However, as Caldicott states, the Pentagon continued resolutely on its former course, making bigger and “better” bombs every year.

  Sometime during the sixties Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, said that between the United States and the Soviet Union there already existed some four hundred nuclear bombs, enough to kill millions of people on both sides, a viable “deterrent,” in his opinion, to nuclear war. The Pentagon and the Kremlin, however, apparently assumed this was not enough, and so today between the two “superpowers” there are some fifty thousand bombs.

  What this means is that the U.S. and the USSR, literally have more bombs than they know what to do with: so they have targeted every city in the Northern Hemisphere with a population of at least twenty-five thousand with the number of bombs formerly set aside to wipe out whole countries. So even as you squeeze out your toothpaste, kiss your lover's face, or bite into a turkey sandwich, you are on the superpowers’ nuclear hit list, a hit list made up by people who have historically been unable to refrain from showing off every new and shameful horror that they make.

  For several years Caldicott has been on leave from her work at the Harvard Medical Center, and spends all her time practicing what she calls “preventative medicine,” traveling across the Earth attempting to make people aware of the dangers we face. Like most medicine, hers is bitter, but less bitter, she believes, than watching helplessly while her child patients suffer and die from cancer and genetic diseases that are directly caused by the chemical pollutants inevitably created in the production of nuclear energy.

  The nuclear industry, powerful, profit-oriented, totally unconcerned about our health, aided and abetted by a government that is its twin, is murdering us and our children every day. And it is up to us, each one of us, to stop it. In the event of a nuclear war all life on the planet will face extinction, certainly human beings. But even if there is no war we will face the same end—unless we put an end to the nuclear-power industry itself—only it will be somewhat slower in coming, as the air, the water, and the soil become too poisoned from nuclear waste (for which there is no known safe disposal) to support life.

  What can we do? Like Caldicott, but even more so, I do not believe we should waste any time looking for help from our legal system. Nor do I have faith in politicians, scientists, or “experts.” I have great faith, however, in individual people: you with the toothbrush, you in the sack, and you there not letting any of this shit get between you and that turkey sandwich. If it comes down to it, I know one of us individuals (just think of Watergate) may have to tackle the killer who’s running to push the catastrophe button, and I even hope said tackle will explain why so many of us are excellent football players. (Just as I hope something will soon illustrate for us what our brother
s learned of protecting life in Vietnam.)

  As individuals we must join others. No time to quibble about survival being “a white issue.” No time to claim you don’t live here, too. Massive demonstrations are vital. Massive civil disobedience. And, in fact, massive anything that’s necessary to save our lives.

  Talk with your family; organize your friends. Educate anybody you can get your mouth on. Raise money. Support those who go to jail. Write letters to those senators and congressmen who are making it easy for the nuclear-power industry to kill us: tell them if they don’t change, “cullud” are going to invade their fallout shelters. In any case, this is the big one. We must save Earth, and relieve those who would destroy it of the power to do so. Join up with folks you don’t even like, if you have to, so that we may all live to fight each other again.

  But first, read Caldicott’s book, and remember: the good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that’s who She thinks we all are.

  1982

  TO THE EDITORS OF MS. MAGAZINE

  [I wrote the following memo a few weeks prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and a few months before the Beirut massacres, in response to an article, “Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement,” by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, which appeared in the June 1982 issue of Ms.]

  THERE IS A CLOSE, often unspoken bond between Jewish and black women that grows out of their awareness of oppression and injustice, an awareness many gentile women simply do not have. For example, last year at the height of publicity about the Atlanta child murders I visited a small college in middle Ohio to read poetry. Two women, a white Jew and a white gentile, met me at the airport and drove me to a restaurant for dinner. I was wearing two green ribbons,* one on my overcoat and another on my sweater. As soon as the four white people at the opposite table noticed this (and perhaps it was merely my color they noticed) they ordered the piano player at the front of the room to strike up “Mammy’s Li’l Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread,” which they sang at the top of their lungs (the two women—a visual obliteration of the possibility of interracial woman bonding—hanging onto the men like appendages) and at the end of each stanza, after “Called for the doctor, the doctor said …” they added, “… and another one dead!” with emphasis, foot-stomping, and hoots of hickish laughter. When they finished this, they clamored for a rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which the piano player claimed (mercifully) not to know.

  The Jewish woman and I froze the moment the singing began. The gentile woman placidly ate her meal. Eventually the singers left and the Jewish woman said: “We have to do something about this.” “Yes,” I said. The gentile woman said: “What’s the matter?”

  The Jewish woman explained it to her.

  And she said: “Oh, I noticed they were singing loud, but when I realized it wasn’t anything against women, I just ignored them.”

  As we made our objections to the restaurant manager (“Well, one of those women works here and that’s just one of the songs we have in the songbook we hand out here”) the gentile woman continued to look perplexed. Whereas the Jewish woman seemed about to start swinging with her pocketbook.

  But this is only part of the story.

  Several months ago, when Israel “annexed” the Golan Heights, a Jewish friend of mine visited that country. Upon his return he explained that Israel needed that land to protect itself from the possibility of enemy shells, apparently lobbed off its cliffs, into Israel.

  “But doesn’t that land belong to people?” I asked.

  “They’re not doing anything with it,” he replied.

  I thought: I have a backyard I’m not ‘doing anything with.’ Does that give you the right to take it?

  He continued telling me the glories of Israel, but I found it hard to listen: Crazy Horse, Lame Deer, and Black Elk stoppered my ears. He sounded like a typical American wasichu (a Sioux word for white men, meaning fat-takers) to me. It seemed only incidental he was a Jew.

  I think I am glad Letty Pogrebin has added her article to the necessary and continuing discussion of anti-Semitism in the women’s movement. As a black gentile, encountering black anti-Semites is always distressing, because what history clearly shows, if nothing else, is that anti-Semites are never happy. But also because black people, to keep faith with their own ancestors, must struggle to resist all forms of oppression—and it is this necessity that so often brings them to the side of people like the Palestinians, as well as to the side of Jewish Israelis. And this middle ground is where most black people who think about the Middle East at all seem to me have been, until a few years ago. Before that—and perhaps I am merely tracing my own personal history—most black people sided emphatically with Israel.

  I remember Egypt’s attack on Israel in 1967 and how frightened my Jewish husband and I were that Israel would be—as Egypt threatened—“driven into the sea.” When Israel won the Six-Day War we were happy and relieved. I had little consciousness of the Palestinian question at the time. All I considered was the Holocaust, the inhuman fact that Jews were turned away by virtually every country they sought to enter, that they had to live somewhere on the globe (there had been talk by the British during the forties of settling them in Uganda, where Britain had already “settled” thousands of its own citizens) and I had seen the movie Exodus, with its haunting sound track: “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” Over the next several years—thanks largely to a Jewish woman friend who visited Palestinian camps and came home with a Palestinian name—I became more aware. When I tried to talk to my husband about the Palestinians, however (all the Palestinians, not just those in camps or those in the PLO), he simply shut down. He considered my friend a traitor to Jews, and any discussion that questioned Israel’s behavior seemed literally to paralyze his thoughts. I understood his fear, and shared it. But when he said, “Israel has to exist,” I could only answer, “Yes, and so do those other folks.”

  One thing that troubles me greatly is how in Pogrebin’s article the word “imperialism” is hardly used. It is like reading nineteenth-century European history and seeing the word “colonialism” once or twice.

  “After the great outcry against Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights,” she writes, “I heard a woman joke, ‘Israel is Hitler’s last laugh on the Jews’—as if Menachem Begin’s ultra-nationalism [my italics: denoting Pogrebin’s equation of an ideology with an act] would destroy the Jewish people better than Hitler could.”

  “Ultra-nationalism” in this case should read “imperialism.” For what can you call Israel’s establishment of colonies on other people’s territories if not imperialism? Regardless of what other folks, like the Americans and Russians, are doing (imperialists both) I think it would help our dialogue if we could say, for instance: Yes, Israel must exist—because Jews, after heinous world maltreatment, deserve affirmative action (as Pogrebin describes it), but when it moves into other people’s lands, when it establishes colonies in other people’s territories, when it forces folks out of their kitchens, vineyards, and beds, then it must be opposed, just as Russia is or as America is. And, as with those countries, I think there has to be some distinction made between Jews per se and the Israeli government. (Many Americans will undoubtedly say that the settlement of Israel was itself an imperialistic act on the part of the British, and that on that basis it should not exist, but those Americans will have to concede the same thing about America, and answer the question Am I ready to leave and give it back to the Indians?)

  I do not believe black people want Israel to “commit suicide,” because so many of them still hope the war will slacken enough for them to visit, but any person who has experienced occupation or colonialization will have a hard time condoning Israel’s establishment of “settlements” it controls in areas where indigenous people already live. Looking at Israel’s “settlements,” I think of all those forts that dot the American plains. Israel’s “settlements” look chillingly familiar and American to me.

  And
rea Dworkin’s comment that “I resent the expectation that, having been oppressed, Jews should exercise a higher morality running their country than anyone else” makes me realize I have expected exactly that: I have an identical problem with African countries (and just as frequently face disappointment). That Israel would not be a little America or a little Russia (Idi Amin not be a black Andrew Jackson). That it would not seek to enlarge its empire through the acquisition of “satellites,” “protectorates,” “colonies,” or “states.” This was obviously foolish on my part, and I reluctantly accept that. But if Jews are going to behave exactly like other folks (and notably like white Christian men), what then is their Jewishness if not simply their belief in their right to occupy a chosen piece of land? Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

  To many people in the Third World, Zionism doesn’t equal racism so much as it equals Israeli imperialism. (Though when Pogrebin quotes someone as saying most Israelis are dark-skinned Jews—and Zionists—one does wonder why none of them seem to be in the Knesset or ever shown as the majority of Israelis when Israelis are presented to us on TV.) And they are against it not because they hate Jews (though some of them may) but because they recognize and condemn imperialistic behavior. When Third World people condemn American or Russian imperialism (and they do) I know perfectly well they are not talking about those millions of Americans or Russians who abhor virtually every political action our respective governments make. If I am appalled by Menachem Begin’s policies (and I am, and many Israelis—including soldiers in the Israeli army—are, and many American Jews are) my response is not that Israel should cease to exist, but that Israelis should stop electing him to power.