Some of Us Did Not Die

1
INTRODUCTION:
SOME OF US DID NOT DIE¹

ONCE THROUGH the fires of September 11, it's not easy to remember or O recognize any power we continue to possess.

Understandably we shrivel and retreat into stricken consequences of that catastrophe.

But we have choices, and capitulation is only one of them.

I am always hoping to do better than to collaborate with whatever or whomever it is that means me no good.

For me, it's a mind game with everything at stake.

For example, what has what kind of savagery blurred or blocked or buried alive?

This is an excerpt from my Poem To Take Back The Night:

What about moonlight
What about watching for the moon above
the tops of trees and standing
still enough to hear the raucous crickets
chittering invisible beneath the soon lit stones

What about moonlight
What about moonlight

What about watching for the moon
through windows low enough to let the screams
and curses of the street the gunshots
and the drunken driver screeching tires
and the boombox big beat and the tinkle
bell ice cream truck
inside

What about moonlight
What about moonlight. . . .

Luckily, there are limitless, new ways to engage our tender, and possible responsibilities, obligations that our actual continuing coexistence here, in these United States and here, in our world, require.

For example, as the great Afghan poet, Rumi, has written:

Thank you so much, Barnard's Women Center, and thank you Barnard College, for your notice and your faith! Thanks for asking me to speak, out loud, about the rough-hewn trajectories of my poet's life.

I am rather late as I try to tell you tonight about my gratitude.

Back in 1975, I wrote:

“To be honest, I expect apocalypse, or I look for and I work for defeat of international evil, indifference, and suffering, only when I am not otherwise stunned by the odds, temporarily paralyzed by the revulsion and grieving despair.

But life itself compels an optimism. It does not seem reasonable that the majority of the peoples of the world should, finally, lose joy, and rational justice, as a global experiment to be pursued and fiercely protected. It seems unreasonable that more than 400 million people, right now, struggle against hunger and starvation, even while there is arable earth aplenty to feed and nourish every one of us. It does not seem reasonable that the color of your skin should curse and condemn all of your days and the days of your children. It seems preposterous that gender, that being a woman, anywhere in the world, should elicit contempt, or fear, or ridicule, and serious deprivation of rights to be, to become, to embrace whatever you choose. . . .

At Barnard, there was one great teacher whom I was privileged to know, Barry Ulanov. And in freshman English I remember two assignments for which I will always feel gratitude. One was a paper that would pull together, I think he said ‘somehow,’ Alfred North Whitehead's Aims of Education and Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Many of my classmates became more or less suicidal as they reflected on this task. But I thought, damn, if you can synthesize Whitehead with Greek mythology, then maybe you can bring the Parthenon to Bedford-Stuyvesant, and make it all real.”²

Back then, I meant to say that Barnard College never gave me the connection between the apparently unrelated worlds of black and white. But that is not quite true: because there was no obvious given connection between Barnard and Bedford Stuyvesant, I had to discover and invent that connection for myself—which is worthy work for anyone, for sure.

And because this/Barnard was the Parthenon, I got to thinking about how some of us choose to remember, and why, and how: why we do not forget.

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

Before Barnard, I didn't even know there was a Parthenon, or a Pantheon— these are ideas at least as much as they are standing, if mostly ruined, remains of human pride and hope and a reaching for impossible, and imperative, accomplishments. So, however belatedly, thank you for that! And thank you for the man who became my husband and the father of my son.

“In between classes and in the middle of campus, I met him on a very cold day. He stood, without shivering, behind a small table on which an anti-McCarthypetition and pages of signatures lay, blowing about. He wore no overcoat, no gloves, no scarf, and I noticed that his cheeks seemed almost bitterly red with the wind. Although that happened some half century ago, I remember that he wore a bright yellow Oxford cloth button-down shirt, open at the neck, and no tie. He explained the petition to me. But I wanted to do something else. I wanted to excuse myself and find him a cup of coffee so he'd keep warm enough to continue standing out there, brave against Senator Joe McCarthy and the witch-hunts that terrorized America. He looked like a hero to me. It really was cold. He really didn't care. He stood there, by himself, on purpose. I went away to bring him back a cup of coffee, and, as I recall, that same afternoon I told a couple of my friends that I had met the man I would marry.

That was 1954. He was a twenty-year-old senior at Columbia College. I was eighteen and a sophomore at Barnard College, across the street. It would be hard to say which one of us was younger or more ignorant of the world beyond our books, our NAACP meetings, school parties, ping-pong, running hikes through Van Cortlandt Park, or our exhaustively romantic letter-writing at the rate of two or three letters a day. But he was taller and stronger, and he was white. We were not the same.”

And beginning then, inside that interracial, state criminalized relationship, I learned all the way to my knees, the sometimes terrible consequences of difference, the sometimes fatal response of religious, and of political, and social systems set against differences among us, differences characterized by those most powerful as deviant, or pathological, or blasphemous, or beneath contempt.

That confrontation with heavyweight intolerance carried me through our Civil Rights Revolution and into our resistance to the War Against Vietnam and then into the realm of gender and sexual and sexuality politics. And those strivings, in aggregate, carried me from Brooklyn to Mississippi, to South Africa, to Nicaragua, to Israel, to Palestine, to Lebanon and to Northern Ireland, and every single one of those embattled baptisms clarified pivotal connections among otherwise apparently disparate victories, or among apparently disparate events of suffering, and loss.

Issues of community control in New York City's public schools plunged me into the complicated facets of self-determination. And, then again, my personal recovery from actual rape catapulted me into difficult questions about resistance as a reluctant attitude for anyone who believes he or she has been violated and debased.

In turn, several intricate problems of resistance have taken me into repeated attempts at overview constructions and analyses of the world-wide absurdity of endangered female existence: I mean, why is that our universal situation? And when will we revolt against our marginalized, pseudo-maverick status and assert our majority, our indispensable-to-the-species’ power—and I do mean power: our verifiable ability to change things inside our own lives and in the lives of other folks, as well.

For example, I attended one of the best prep schools for girls in this country.
And then I came here to Barnard.

And I did not know, I did not understand, the fantastic privilege such an education implied.

I think I more or less mostly tolerated school because, to me, it was just that, “school.” And yet, here, in this new millennium, we are struggling with the consequences of the abysmal fact that education, that basic literacy, in fact, is not god-given, or a sovereign state entitlement. As a matter of fact, education is denied to most female human beings on the planet. And even if you disregard the significance of that for girls and women, you just might, nevertheless, begin to care about the documented correlations between illiterate female populations and the impoverishments, the barbaric hardship of every society maintaining and/or imposing such an unequal, such a literally suffocating status quo.

Before the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan, 90% of girls and women were illiterate. After the Taliban, it is virtually 100%. Now some of us knew about these deplorable conditions quite a while ago. In my 1993 essay, “I Am Seeking an Attitude,” I wrote:

“It took longer than inexcusable indifference for folks inside the United States to even raise an outcry against the documented, systematic, genocidal rape of more than 20,000 mostly Muslim women, and girls, inside the former Yugoslavia.

It is still all quiet on the documented, horrifying fate of women, and girls, inside Afghanistan.”

And yet it was years later, and not because our official government cared about the sisters of the Taliban, before USA policies stopped supporting the Taliban.

Indeed, it was American feminists including Jay Leno's wife, who agitated for censure of horrible Taliban practices. And, nevertheless, as recently as 4 months ago, George W. Bush gave the Taliban 43 million dollars. Why? To cajole Taliban cooperation with our War Against Drugs—Clearly a war way more important than a war against the maiming and annihilation of Afghan women.

I have evolved from an observer to a victim to an activist passionately formulating methods of resistance against tyranny of any kind.

And most important, I think, is this: I have faced my own culpability, my own absolute dirty hands, so to speak, in the continuation of injustice and powerful intolerance.

I am discovering my own shameful functions as part of the problem, at least. I no longer think “They” are this or that, but rather, “We” or “I” am not doing enough, for instance, or “I” have not done my homework, and so on.

Here is one poem from my Kosovo Suite:

And as I have wrestled with my own violence, my own instincts to strike back, to strike out and smash what hurts me, or my people, or my country, or my ideal aspirations for my beloved America I have written in part:

And then, getting strictly personal, and strictly political, at the same time, I wrote Soldier, the story of my childhood:

“Maybe I should have been born a boy. I think I dumbfounded my father. Whatever his plans and his hopes for me, he must have noticed now and again that I, his only child, was in fact a little girl modeling pastel sunbonnets color-coordinated with puffy-sleeved dresses that had to accommodate justin-case cotton handkerchiefs pinned to them.

I’m not sure.

Regardless of any particulars about me, he was convinced that a “Negro” parent had to produce a child who could become a virtual whiteman and therefore possess dignity and power.

Probably it seemed easier to change me than to change the meaning and complexion of power.

At any rate, he determined he'd transform me, his daughter, into something better, something more likely to succeed.

He taught me everything from the perspective of a recruiting warrior. There was a war on against colored people, against poor people. I had to become a soldier who would rise through the ranks and emerge a commander of men rather than an infantry pawn.

I would become that sturdy, brilliant soldier, or he would, well, beat me to death.”

And sometimes, I suspect, whenever any of us feel defeated we may think maybe everybody should have been born a boy. Maybe everybody should have been capable of the awesome and inspiring heroism of our firefighters, and our police, who sought only to retrieve and rescue the living and the wounded from the infamy of September 11.

Maybe we should all of us be that strong that way.

Maybe that would be easier, all around.

But there is also the humble love of Ruth and Naomi I will place right next to the derring-do of David's love for Jonathan.

There is the bravery of the Women In Black who for more than a decade hold public, silent vigils to end the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

There are the ridiculed pink-beribboned people against violence in the bedroom, the kitchen, the streets, and in our domestic and foreign priorities. There is the bravery of women against the valorization of violence and force rather than the valorization of a negotiating wish and commitment to make merciful and just our coexistence with really different people trying, always, to fully and freely live on this one earth.

So, actually, I am ok with being a girl, and becoming a woman.

I am fighting breast cancer, and it's not a readily visible contest but you know, it's mine, and it's also the fight that a stupendous number of other women have no choice about.

In 1999, I published an essay, Are You Hunting For Jews?

“‘You're looking for me.’

With those four, casual swords, Aryan Nation member Buford O. Furrow Jr. presented himself to the FBI in Las Vegas, August 11, 1999.

One day earlier, Furrow was hunting for Jews. He wanted to kill Jews. He wanted America to wake up. He thought that killing Jews would help to interrupt a dangerous national sleep during which ‘the spawn of the devil’— Jews, blacks, homosexuals—have gained something or other powerful and good at the expense of Christian white people. . . .

And then, a few weeks later, I heard an Auschwitz survivor, Elly Gross, in an interview with Laura Flanders on Pacifica Radio.

Elly Gross is part of a class action suit seeking compensation for the slave labor forced upon her, and thousands of other Jews, in 1944.

What struck me to my soul was her spontaneous, on-air declaration. She said: ‘I guess it was my destiny to live.’

She meant that her life hopes to honor the memory of her mother and her five-year-old brother who were waved to the left—to their death—by a white-gloved Nazi officer, June 2, 1944, while she was waved to the right, first to Auschwitz, and then to the slave labor at Fallersleben.

She meant that to live is not just a given: To live means you owe something big to those whose lives are taken away from them.”

And two things happened for me: I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, Some of Us Have Not Died.

Some of us did NOT die, for example, on September 11th. This is what Elly Gross meant by “I guess it was my destiny to live.”

And I come among you, here, humbled by that attack against the World Trade Center, September 11, that atrocity against so many thousands of men and women, from more than 50 countries around the world and as I listen to and as I watch various New York City survivors express their rage and their terrified, seared consciousness, and their inconsolable longing for loved ones lost, and their sense of safety lost—may I just repeat this idea that, as Elly Gross said, I guess it was your destiny to live.

Indeed some of us did not die.

Some of you, some of us remain, despite that hatred that violence that murder that suicide that affront to our notions of civilized days and nights.

And what shall we do, we who did not die?