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Literature and the Arts Why Do They Matter? Imagine a world without fiction, poetry, or drama, without music, art, or other fine arts

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Literature and the Arts Why Do They Matter? Imagine a world without fiction, poetry, or drama, without music, art, or other fine arts. We are so accustomed to taking the arts in their totality for granted that it is hard for us to conceive of contemporary culture without them. Our fondness for stories or paintings or any other creative form might help us understand our culture or might even move us to action. Yet the value of various artistic forms doesn’t derive exclusively from their ability to tell us something about life. The arts can also take us into an imaginative realm offering perhaps more intense experiences than anything we encounter in the “real” world. Think of literature and the arts as an exercise in imaginative freedom. You are free to select the books you read, the music that appeals to you, the exhibitions and concerts you attend, and the entertainment software with which you interact. Some of your decisions might be serious and consequential to your education. Other decisions, perhaps to watch a few soap operas on a rainy afternoon or to buy the latest potboiler, are less important. The way you view the arts—whether as a way to learn something about the temper of civilization or as a temporary escape from conventional reality—is entirely a matter of taste. Regardless of your purpose or intent, you approach literature and the arts initially for the sheer exhilaration and pleasure they provide. Art, as Plato observed, is a dream for awakened minds. The arts awaken you to the power and intensity of the creative spirit. At the same time, you make judgments and evaluations of the nature of your creative encounter. When you assert that you like this painting or dislike that poem, you are assessing the work and the value of the artistic experience. Clearly, you develop taste and become more equipped to discern the more subtle elements of art the more you are exposed to it. Perhaps you prefer to keep your experience of literature and the other arts a pleasurable pastime or an escape from reality. Or you may wish to participate in them as a creative writer, musician, painter, or photographer. Ultimately, you may come to view literature and the arts as a transformational experience, a voyage of discovery in which you encounter diverse peoples and cultures, learn to see the world in creative terms, and begin to perceive your own creative potential in a new light.

 

Superman and Me Sherman Alexie Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) grew up and still lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member, Alexie contended with a life-threatening illness when he was young, but managed to attend Gonzaga University before transferring to Washington State University (BA, 1991). Alexie writes and creates in many modes, and is also a performer. As many of the titles of his works suggest, the Native American experience informs his short stories, novels, poetry, songs, and films. Alexie’s fiction includes Reservation Blues (1995), Ten Little Indians: Stories (2003), and Flight, A Novel (2007); his poetry has been collected in First Indian on the Moon (1993), The Man Who Loves Salmon (1998), and other volumes. In the following essay, Alexie attests to the importance of literature—all kinds of literature—in his life. I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food. My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies, and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch’s Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores, and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms, and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of book-shelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well. I can remember picking up my father’s books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and com-mon experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and our adopted little brother.

 

Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue, and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that “Superman is breaking down the door.” Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, “Superman is breaking down the door.” Words, dialogue, also float out of Super-man’s mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, “I am breaking down the door.” Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, “I am breaking down the door.” In this way, I learned to read. This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches

 

himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads “Grapes of Wrath” in kindergarten when other children are struggling through “Dick and Jane.” If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.

 

A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for

help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians. I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished my classroom assign-ments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawn-shops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life. Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories, and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. “Books,” I say to them. “Books,” I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.

 

 

 

Finding Neverland David Gates David Gates (b. 1947) is an American journalist and fiction writer. Gates attended Bard College and the University of Connecticut in the mid-1960s, subsequently working as a cab driver and in other capacities while refining his literary craft. His first novel, Jernigan (1991), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Both his second novel, Preston Falls (1998), and the collection The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (1999), were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates is a senior editor and writer at Newsweek, covering books, music, and the arts. He also teaches in the graduate writing programs at Bennington College and New School University. In this essay from the July 13, 2009, issue of Newsweek, Gates surveys the life, death, and career of music legend Michael Jackson. True, for a while he was the king of pop—a term apparently originated by his friend Elizabeth Taylor—and he’s the last we’re ever likely to have. Before Michael Jackson came Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles; after him has come absolutely no one, however brilliant or however popular, who couldn’t be ignored by vast segments of an ever-more-fragmented audience. Not Kurt Cobain, not Puffy, not Mariah Carey, not Céline Dion, not Beyoncé, not Radiohead—not even Madonna, his closest competitor. When the news of his death broke, the traffic on Twitter caused the site to crash, even though he hadn’t had a hit song for years. But starting long before and continuing long after he lorded over the world of entertainment in the 1980s—his 1982 Thriller remains the bestselling album of all time—Jackson was the Prince of Artifice. As the prepubescent front boy of the Jackson 5, he sang in a cherubic mezzo-soprano of sexual longing he could not yet have fully felt. As a young man, however accomplished and even impassioned his singing was, he never had the sexual credibility of a James Brown or a Wilson Pickett, in part because of his still-high-pitched voice, in part because he seemed never to fully inhabit himself—whoever that self was. In middle age, he consciously took on the role of Peter Pan, with his Neverland Ranch and its amusement-park rides, with his lost-boy “friends” and with what he seemed to believe was an age-less, androgynous physical appearance—let’s hope he believed it—thanks to straightened hair and plastic surgery. (No one—least of all Jackson himself—would have wanted to see the Dorian Gray portrait in his attic.) He did his best to construct an alternate reality on top of what must have been an initially miserable life: Imagine Gypsy with—as Jackson claimed in interviews—a physically abusive father in place of Mama Rose, set among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Which was the more imaginative creation: his music or his persona? In retrospect, so much of what Jackson achieved seems baldly symbolic. This was the black kid from Gary, Ind., who ended up marrying Elvis’s daughter, set-ting up Neverland in place of Graceland, and buying the Beatles’ song catalog—bold acts of appropriation and mastery, if not outright aggression. (Of course, Elvis and the Beatles had come out of obscurity, too, but that was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.) He made trademarks of the very emblems of his remoteness: his moonwalk dance and his jeweled glove—noli me tangere, and vice versa. He morphed relentlessly from the most adorable of kiddie performers (his 1972 movie-soundtrack hit, “Ben,” was a love song to a pet rat) to the most sinister of superstars: not by adopting a campy persona, like those of his older contemporaries Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne, but in real life, dodging accusations of child molestation, one of which led to a trial and acquittal in 2005. (One shrink concluded at the time that he was not a pedophile, but merely a case of arrested development.) The 2002 episode in which he briefly dangled his son Prince Michael II (a.k.a. Blanket) over a balcony in Berlin, above horrified, fascinated

fans, seemed like a ritualized attempt to dispose of his own younger self. And eventually his several facial surgeries, a skin ailment, serious weight loss, and God knows what else made him look like both a vampire and a mummy—Peter Pan’s undead evil twins. That is, like the skeletal, pale-faced zombies he danced with in Jon Landis’s 14-minute “Thriller” video. When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.

But whatever strictly personal traumas Jackson may have reenacted and 3

transcended—and then re-reenacted—he performed his dance of death as a cen-tral figure in America’s long racial horror show. He was, quintessentially, one of those “pure products of America,” who, as William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923, “go crazy.” To take the uplifting view, enunciated after his death by the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton, he was a transracial icon, a black person whom white Americans took to their hearts and whose blackness came to seem incidental. In this he resembles such figures as Nat (King) Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and, inevitably, Barack Obama. As a singer-dancer, he clearly belongs not just in the tradition of Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and the Temptations—who seem to have been among his immediate inspirations—but also in the tradition of such dancing entertainers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who, in turn, drew from such black performers as Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. In the 1978 film version of The Wiz, Jackson even seemed to appropriate and reinvent Ray Bolger’s role as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. And as a messianic global superstar, he resembles no one so much as his father-in-law, Elvis Presley (who died long before Jackson married his daughter), a transracial figure from the other side of the color line. When Presley’s first records were played on the radio in Memphis, DJs made a point of noting that he graduated from the city’s all-white Humes High School, lest listeners mistake him for black. Given the ubiquity of television, nobody mistook the wispy-voiced young Michael Jackson for white, but it seemed, superficially, not to matter. Yet Jackson, always the artificer, surely knew that part of his own appeal to white audiences—who contributed substantially to the $50 million to $75 million a year he earned in his prime—lay initially in his precocious cuteness, and when he was a grown man, in his apparent lack of adult sexuality. He was energetic, charismatic, and supremely gifted, but sexually unassertive—unlike swaggeringly het-erosexual black male performers from Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) to Jay-Z (“Big Pimpin’”). He neutered himself racially, too: his hair went from kinky to straight, his lips from full to thin, his nose from broad to pinched, his skin from dark to a ghastly pallor. You can’t miss the connection between these forms of neutering if you know the history of white America’s atavistic dread of black male sexuality; the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, for supposedly flirting with a white woman, is just one locus classicus. That happened only three years before Jackson was born; when he was 13, he was singing “Ben.” No wonder Jack-son chose—with whatever degree of calculation—to remake himself as an American Dream of innocence and belovedness.

No wonder, either, that the artifice eventually turned scary, and the face of the icon came to look more and more corpselike. Readers of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, might recall the passage in which an African woman tells about her first sight of white slavers: “There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin is confusing.” That’s the middle-aged Michael Jackson to a T. Jackson arguably looked his “blackest” on the original cover of 1979’s Off the Wall; by Thriller, the transformation had begun. Off the Wall was his declaration of manhood: It came out the year he turned 21, and you could make the case that it was his greatest purely musical moment. Why did he feel so deeply uncomfortable with himself? The hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching yourself into a simulacrum of a white man suggests a profound loathing of blackness. If Michael Jackson couldn’t be denounced as a race traitor, who could? Somehow, though, black America overlooked it, and continued to buy his records, perhaps because some African-Americans, with their hair relaxers and skin-lightening creams, understood why Jackson was remaking himself, even if they couldn’t condone it. As with Ernest Hemingway—another case of deeply confused identity and (who knew?) androgynous sexuality—we need to look past the deliberate creation of an image and a persona to appreciate the artistry. A more masterly enter-tainer never took the stage. In 1988, the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called him “a virtuoso . . . who uses movement for its own sake. Yes, Michael Jackson is an avant-garde dancer, and his dances could be called abstract. Like Merce Cunningham, he shows us that movement has a value of its own.” Better yet, Astaire himself once called Jackson to offer his compliments. As a singer, Jackson was too much of a chameleon—from the tenderness of “I’ll Be There” to the rawness of “The Way You Make Me Feel” to the silken sorrow of “She’s Out of My Life”—to stamp every song with his distinct personality, as Sinatra did, or Ray Charles, or Hank Williams. But these are demigods—Jackson was merely a giant. (And how’d you like their dancing?) As a musical conceptualizer, probably only James Brown has had a comparable influence: Jackson and his visionary producer, Quincy Jones, fused disco, soul, and pop in a manner that can still be heard every hour of every day on every top-40 radio station—only not as well. Tommy Mottola, former head of Sony Music, called Jackson “the corner-stone to the entire music business.” The best recordings by Jackson and Jones—“Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” “Billie Jean”—belong identifiably to their time, as do Sinatra’s 1950s recordings with the arranger Nelson Riddle. Yet like Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” or “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” they’re so perfect of their kind that they’ll never sound dated. The night before he died, Jackson was rehearsing at the Staples Center in Los Angeles for an epic comeback—a series of 50 concerts, beginning in July, at London’s O2 Arena. If that sounds impossibly grandiose, consider that all 50 shows had already sold out. People around him had been wondering if he was re-ally up to it, and the opening had already been put off by a week. He was 50 years old, after all: long in the tooth for a puer aeternus—eight years older than Elvis when he left the building, and a quarter century past his peak. Jackson had had health problems for years. Drug problems, too, apparently: In 2007, according to the Associated Press, an L.A. pharmacy sued him, claiming he owed $100,000 for two years’ worth of prescription meds. And money problems: In 2008, the ranch nearly went into foreclosure—he defaulted on a $24.5 million debt—and even the $50 million he stood to realize from his potentially grueling London concerts might not have helped that much. And of course, just problems: His very existence—as a son, as a black man—was problematic. In his last days, did the prospect of a comeback, of remythologizing himself one more time, excite him as much as it excited his fans? Did his magical moments in performance have an incandescent density that outweighed what must often have been burdensome hours and days? Ask him sometime, if you see him. Whatever his life felt like from inside, from outside it was manifestly a work of genius, whether you want to call it a triumph or a freak show—those are just words. We’d never seen anyone like this before, either in his artistic inventiveness or his equally artistic self-invention, and we won’t forget him—until the big Neverland swallows us all.

 

Regarding the Torture of Others Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (1933–2004), one of the most influential critics of her generation, was born in New York City and grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles. After graduating from high school at the age of 15, she started studies at the University of California at Berkeley; subsequently, she received degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard University. As an art critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Sontag brought intellectual rigor to her subjects. The main body of her work in prose consists of two collections of essays, Against Interpretation (1966) and Where the Stress Falls (2001), as well as Trip to Hanoi (1968), Illness as Metaphor (1978), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988). In addition, Sontag wrote fiction, including Volcano Lover (1992) and In America: A Novel (2001), and several films and plays. In this essay, published in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, Sontag offers a meditation on the photographs of torture taken by American troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. I. 1 For a long time—at least six decades—photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-2

relations disaster—the dissemination of the photographs—rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration’s initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs—as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word “torture.” The prisoners had possibly been the objects of “abuse,” eventually of “humiliation”—that was the most to be admitted. “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. “And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the

word “genocide” while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks’ time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib—and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay—by its true name, torture, is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.” (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3—common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949—and many recent human rights conventions.) The 1984 convention de-clares, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the 4

widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere—trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military fig-ures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims—it is probable that the “torture” word will continue to be banned. To ac-knowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America’s right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage. Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America’s

reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the “sorry” word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America’s claim to moral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside

King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was “sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.” But, he went on, he was “equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.” To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, “unfair.” A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., “not by everybody”)—but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush adminstration’s distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its “liberation.” And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, “unlawful combatants”—a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002—and thus, as Rumsfeld said, “technically” they “do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention,” and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photo-graphs reveal to have happened to “suspects” in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, “Photographing the Holocaust,” by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880’s and 1930’s, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photo-graphs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies—taken by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures—less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers them-selves are all photographers—recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities—and swapping images among them-selves and e-mailing them around the globe. There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time—life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited?—has become a norm for count-less Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am—waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life—even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in “Capturing the Friedmans,” the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges. An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim’s face, although such “stress” fell within the Pentagon’s limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: A young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet—and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions re-corded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them.

Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naïve for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing be-long to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more—contrary to what President Bush is telling the world—part of “the true nature and heart of America.” It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys—can the video game “Interrogating the Terrorists” really be far behind?—and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools—depicted in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, “Dazed and Confused”—to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings—as in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, near-unwatchable film, “Salò” (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era—is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To “stack naked men” is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation—or is it the fantasy?—was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh’s response: “Exactly!” he exclaimed. “Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” “They” are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: “You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?” Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

The notion that apologies or professions of “disgust” by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one’s historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and pre-rogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war—for “the war on terror” is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are “detainees”; “prisoners,” a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by interna-tional law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless “global war on terrorism”—into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by Pentagon decree—inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret. The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent—the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of “suspects”—the principal justification for holding them is “interrogation.” Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable. Remember: We are not talking about that rarest of cases, the “ticking time bomb” situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: In principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for pre-paring prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out—these are the euphemisms for the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, a prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was describing. The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of reports com-piled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on “detainees” and “suspected terrorists” in prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this “real” to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget. So now the pictures will continue to “assault” us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some in-stances more appalling view), would be in “bad taste” or too implicitly political? By “political,” read: critical of the Bush administration’s imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, “the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.” This damage—to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower—is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of “our freedom”—the freedom of 5 percent of humanity—came to require having American soldiers “across the globe” is hardly debated by our elected officials. Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right to defend ourselves: After all, they (the terrorists) started it. They—Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what’s the difference?—attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Com-mittee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee “more outraged by the outrage” over the photographs than by what the photographs show. “These prisoners,” Senator Inhofe explained, “you know they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.” It’s the fault of “the media” which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world. More Americans will die. Because of these photos. There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not be-cause of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command—so Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Sen-ator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon’s full range of images on May 12. “Some of it has an elaborate nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,” Senator Graham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men in a hallway—a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene, some not even paying attention—contradicted the Pentagon’s assertion that only rogue soldiers were involved. “Somewhere along the line,” Senator Nelson said of the torturers, “they were either told or winked at.” An attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version; according to the Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a civilian contractor working with military intelligence. But the distinction between photograph and reality—as between spin and policy—can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration wishes to happen. “There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,” Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. “If these are released to the public, obviously, it’s going to make matters worse.” Worse for the administration and its pro-grams, presumably, not for those who are the actual—and potential?—victims of torture. The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it’s hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don’t write letters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today’s soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, “running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.” The administration’s effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Commit-tee, John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt “very strongly” that the newer photos “should not be made public. I feel that it could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.” But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq—to identify “outrage” over the photographs with a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of America. After all, we’re at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren’t going to go away. Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

 

 

Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life Alice Walker Alice Walker (b. 1941) was born in Eatonton, Georgia, and now lives in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. A celebrated and prolific novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, she has also been active in the civil rights movement. Walker often draws on both her personal experience and historical records to reflect on the African American experience. Her books include The Color Purple (1976), which won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer prize; You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981); Living in the World: Selected Essays, 1973–1987 (1987); The Temple of My Familiar (1989); By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1999); The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2001) and Devil’s My Enemy (2008). The following essay, from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), offers a highly personalized and perceptive analysis of the importance of influence on both art and life. There is a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard that is very meaningful to me. A year before he wrote the letter, van Gogh had had a fight with his domineering friend Gauguin, left his company, and cut off, in desperation and anguish, his own ear. The letter was written in Saint-Remy, in the South of France, from a mental institution to which van Gogh had voluntarily committed himself. I imagine van Gogh sitting at a rough desk too small for him, looking out at the lovely Southern light, and occasionally glancing critically next to him at his own paintings of the landscape he loved so much. The date of the letter is December 1889. Van Gogh wrote: However hateful painting may be, and however cumbersome in the times we are living in, if anyone who has chosen this handicraft pursues it zealously, he is a man of duty, sound and faithful. Society makes our existence wretchedly difficult at times, hence our impotence and the imperfection of our work. . . . I myself am suffering under an absolute lack of models. But on the other hand, there are beautiful spots here. I have just done five size 30 canvasses, olive trees. And the reason I am staying on here is that my health is improving a great deal. What I am doing is hard, dry, but that is because I am trying to gather new strength by doing some rough work, and I’m afraid abstractions would make me soft.

Six months later, van Gogh—whose health was “improving a great deal”—committed suicide. He had sold one painting during his lifetime. Three times was his work noticed in the press. But these are just details. The real Vincent van Gogh is the man who has “just done five size 30 canvasses,

olive trees.” To me, in context, one of the most moving and revealing descriptions of how a real artist thinks. And the knowledge that when he spoke of “suffering under an absolute lack of models” he spoke of that lack in terms of both the intensity of his commitment and the quality and singularity of his work, which was frequently ridiculed in his day.

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellects—even if rejected—enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist’s best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that, as an artist’s critic, one’s judgment is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters. What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins. Recently, I read at a college and was asked by one of the audience what I considered the major difference between the literature written by black and by white Americans. I had not spent a lot of time considering this question, since it is not the difference between them that interests me, but, rather, the way black writers and white writers seem to me to be writing one immense story—the same story, for the most part—with different parts of this immense story coming from a mul-titude of different perspectives. Until this is generally recognized, literature will always be broken into bits, black and white, and there will always be questions, wanting neat answers, such as this. Still, I answered that I thought, for the most part, white American writers tended to end their books and their characters’ lives as if there were no better existence for which to struggle. The gloom of defeat is thick. By comparison, black writers seem always involved in a moral and/or physical struggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom. Perhaps this is because our literary tradition is based on the slave narratives, where escape for the body and freedom for the soul went together, or perhaps this is because black people have never felt themselves guilty of global, cosmic sins. This comparison does not hold up in every case, of course, and perhaps

does not really hold up at all. I am not a gatherer of statistics, only a curious reader, and this has been my impression from reading many books by black and white writers. There are, however, two books by American women that illustrate what I am talking about: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston.

The plight of Mme Pontellier is quite similar to that of Janie Crawford. Each woman is married to a dull, society-conscious husband and living in a dull, propriety-conscious community. Each woman desires a life of her own and a man who loves her and makes her feel alive. Each woman finds such a man. Mme Pontellier, overcome by the strictures of society and the existence of

her children (along with the cowardice of her lover), kills herself rather than defy the one and abandon the other. Janie Crawford, on the other hand, refuses to allow society to dictate behavior to her, enjoys the love of a much younger, freedom-loving man, and lives to tell others of her experience. When I mentioned these two books to my audience, I was not surprised to

learn that only one person, a young black poet in the first row, had ever heard of Their Eyes Were Watching God (The Awakening they had fortunately read in their “Women in Literature” class), primarily because it was written by a black woman, whose experience—in love and life—was apparently assumed to be unimportant to the students (and the teachers) of a predominantly white school. Certainly, as a student, I was not directed toward this book, which would have

urged me more toward freedom and experience than toward comfort and secrity, but was directed instead toward a plethora of books by mainly white male writers who thought most women worthless if they didn’t enjoy bullfighting or hadn’t volunteered for the trenches in World War I.

Loving both these books, knowing each to be indispensable to my own 16

growth, my own life, I choose the model, the example, of Janie Crawford. And yet this book, as necessary to me and to other women as air and water, is again out of print. But I have distilled as much as I could of its wisdom in this poem about its heroine, Janie Crawford:

I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands

the one who wanted to change her into a mule

and the other who tried to interest her in being a queen.

A woman, unless she submits, is neither a mule nor a queen

though like a mule she may suffer and like a queen pace the floor.

It has been said that someone asked Toni Morrison why she writes the kind of books she writes, and that she replied: Because they are the kind of books I want to read. This remains my favorite reply to that kind of question. As if anyone reading the magnificent, mysterious Sula or the grim, poetic The Bluest Eye would re-quire more of a reason for their existence than for the brooding, Wuthering Heights, for example, or the melancholy, triumphant Jane Eyre. (I am not speaking here of the most famous short line of that book, “Reader, I married him,” as the triumph, but, rather, of the triumph of Jane Eyre’s control over her own sense of morality and her own stout will, which are but reflections of her creator’s, Charlotte Brontë, who no doubt wished to write the sort of books she wished to read.) Flannery O’Connor has written that more and more the serious novelist will write, not what other people want, and certainly not what other people expect, but whatever interests her or him. And that the direction taken, therefore, will be away from sociology, away from the “writing of explanation,” of statistics, and further into mystery, into poetry, and into prophecy. I believe this is true, fortunately true; especially for “Third World Writers”; Morrison, Marquez, Ahmadi, Camara Laye make good examples. And not only do I believe it is true for serious writers in general, but I believe, as firmly as did O’Connor, that this is our only hope—in a culture so in love with flash, with trendiness, with superficiality, as ours—of acquiring a sense of essence, of timelessness, and of vision. Therefore, to write the books one wants to read is both to point in the direction of vision and, at the same time, to follow it. When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which “accepted literature” is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself. (It should be remembered that, as a black person, one cannot completely identify with a Jane Eyre, or with her creator, no matter how much one admires them. And certainly, if one allows history to impinge on one’s reading pleasure, one must cringe at the thought of how Heathcliff, in the New World far from Wuthering Heights, amassed his Cathy-dazzling fortune.) I have often been asked why, in my own life and work, I have felt such a desperate need to know and assimilate the experiences of earlier black women writers, most of them unheard of by you and by me, until quite recently; why I felt a need to study them and to teach them. I don’t recall the exact moment I set out to explore the works of black women, mainly those in the past, and certainly, in the beginning, I had no desire to teach them. Teaching being for me, at that time, less rewarding than stargazing on a frigid night. My discovery of them—most of them out of print, abandoned, discredited, maligned, nearly lost—came about, as many things of value do, almost by accident. As it turned out—and this should not have surprised me—I found I was in need of something that only one of them could provide. Mindful that throughout my four years at a prestigious black and then a prestigious white college I had heard not one word about early black women writers, one of my first tasks was simply to determine whether they had existed. After this, I could breathe easier, with more assurance about the profession I myself had chosen. But the incident that started my search began several years ago: I sat down at my desk one day, in a room of my own, with key and lock, and began preparations for a story about voodoo, a subject that had always fascinated me. Many of the elements of this story I had gathered from a story my mother several times told me. She had gone, during the Depression, into town to apply for some government surplus food at the local commissary, and had been turned down, in a particularly humiliating way, by the white woman in charge. My mother always told this story with a most curious expression on her face. She automatically raised her head higher than ever—it was always high—and there was a look of righteousness, a kind of holy heat coming from her eyes. She said she had lived to see this same white woman grow old and senile and so badly crippled she had to get about on two sticks. To her, this was clearly the working of God, who, as in the old spiritual, “. . . may not come when you want him, but he’s right on time!” To me, hearing the story for about the fiftieth time, something else was discernible: the possibilities of the story, for fiction.

What, I asked myself, would have happened if, after the crippled old lady died, it was discovered that someone, my mother perhaps (who would have been mortified at the thought, Christian that she is), had voodooed her? Then, my thoughts sweeping me away into the world of hexes and conjurings of centuries past, I wondered how a larger story could be created out of my mother’s story; one that would be true to the magnitude of her humiliation and grief, and to the white woman’s lack of sensitivity and compassion. My third quandary was: How could I find out all I needed to know in order to

write a story that used authentic black witchcraft? Which brings me back, almost, to the day I became really interested in black women writers. I say “almost” because one other thing, from my childhood, made the choice of black magic a logical and irresistible one for my story. Aside from my mother’s several stories about root doctors she had heard of or known, there was the story I had often heard about my “crazy” Walker aunt. Many years ago, when my aunt was a meek and obedient girl growing up in a strict, conventionally religious house in the rural South, she had suddenly thrown off her meekness and had run away from home, escorted by a rogue of a man permanently attached elsewhere. When she was returned home by her father, she was declared quite mad. In the backwoods South at the turn of the century, “madness” of this sort was cured not by psychiatry but by powders and by spells. (One can see Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha to understand the role voodoo played among black people of that period.) My aunt’s madness was treated by the community conjurer, who promised, and delivered, the desired results. His treatment was a bag of white powder, bought for fifty cents, and sprinkled on the ground around her house, with some of it sewed, I believe, into the bodice of her nightgown.

So when I sat down to write my story about voodoo, my crazy Walker aunt was definitely on my mind. But she had experienced her temporary craziness so long ago that her story had all the excitement of a might-have-been. I needed, instead of family memories, some hard facts about the craft of voodoo, as practiced by Southern blacks in the nineteenth century. (It never once, fortunately, occurred to me that voodoo was not worthy of the interest I had in it, or was too ridiculous to study seriously.) I began reading all I could find on the subject of “The Negro and His Folk-ways and Superstitions.” There were Botkin and Puckett and others, all white, most racist. How was I to believe anything they wrote, since at least one of them, Puckett, was capable of wondering, in his book, if “The Negro” had a large enough brain? Well, I thought, where are the black collectors of folklore? Where is the black

anthropologist? Where is the black person who took the time to travel the back roads of the South and collect the information I need: how to cure heat trouble, treat dropsy, hex somebody to death, lock bowels, cause joints to swell, eyes to fall out, and so on. Where was this black person? And that is when I first saw, in a footnote to the white voices of authority, the name Zora Neale Hurston. Folklorist, novelist, anthropologist, serious student of voodoo, also all-around black woman, with guts enough to take a slide rule and measure random black heads in Harlem; not to prove their inferiority, but to prove that whatever their size, shape, or present condition of servitude, those heads contained all the intelligence anyone could use to get through this world. Zora Hurston, who went to Barnard to learn how to study what she really wanted to learn: the ways of her own people, and what ancient rituals, customs, and beliefs had made them unique. Zora, of the sandy-colored hair and the daredevil eyes, a girl who escaped

poverty and parental neglect by hard work and a sharp eye for the main chance.

41 Zora, who left the South only to return to look at it again. Who went to

root doctors from Florida to Louisiana and said, “Here I am. I want to learn your trade. ”Zora, who had collected all the black folklore I could ever use. That Zora. And having found that Zora (like a golden key to a storehouse of varied treasure), I was hooked. What I had discovered, of course, was a model. A model, who, as it happened, provided more than voodoo for my story, more than one of the greatest novels America had produced—though, being America, it did not realize this. She had provided, as if she knew someday I would come along wandering in the wilderness, a nearly complete record of her life. And though her life sprouted an occasional wart, I am eternally grateful for that life, warts and all. It is not irrelevant, nor is it bragging (except perhaps to gloat a little on the happy relatedness of Zora, my mother and me), to mention here that the story But she had experienced her temporary craziness so long ago that her story had all the excitement of a might-have-been. I needed, instead of family memories, some hard facts about the craft of voodoo, as practiced by Southern blacks in the nineteenth century. (It never once, fortunately, occurred to me that voodoo was not worthy of the interest I had in it, or was too ridiculous to study seriously.) I began reading all I could find on the subject of “The Negro and His Folk-ways and Superstitions.” There were Botkin and Puckett and others, all white, most racist. How was I to believe anything they wrote, since at least one of them, Puckett, was capable of wondering, in his book, if “The Negro” had a large enough brain? Well, I thought, where are the black collectors of folklore? Where is the black

anthropologist? Where is the black person who took the time to travel the back roads of the South and collect the information I need: how to cure heat trouble, treat dropsy, hex somebody to death, lock bowels, cause joints to swell, eyes to fall out, and so on. Where was this black person? And that is when I first saw, in a footnote to the white voices of authority, the name Zora Neale Hurston. Folklorist, novelist, anthropologist, serious student of voodoo, also all-around black woman, with guts enough to take a slide rule and measure random black heads in Harlem; not to prove their inferiority, but to prove that whatever their size, shape, or present condition of servitude, those heads contained all the intelligence anyone could use to get through this world. Zora Hurston, who went to Barnard to learn how to study what she really wanted to learn: the ways of her own people, and what ancient rituals, customs, and beliefs had made them unique. Zora, of the sandy-colored hair and the daredevil eyes, a girl who escaped

poverty and parental neglect by hard work and a sharp eye for the main chance.

41 Zora, who left the South only to return to look at it again. Who went to

root doctors from Florida to Louisiana and said, “Here I am. I want to learn your trade.”

Zora, who had collected all the black folklore I could ever use. That Zora.

And having found that Zora (like a golden key to a storehouse of varied

treasure), I was hooked. What I had discovered, of course, was a model. A model, who, as it hap-pened, provided more than voodoo for my story, more than one of the greatest novels America had produced—though, being America, it did not realize this. She had provided, as if she knew someday I would come along wander-ing in the wilderness, a nearly complete record of her life. And though her life sprouted an occasional wart, I am eternally grateful for that life, warts and all.

It is not irrelevant, nor is it bragging (except perhaps to gloat a little on the happy relatedness of Zora, my mother and me), to mention here that the story I wrote, called “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” based on my mother’s experiences during the Depression, and on Zora Hurston’s folklore collection of the 1920s, and on my own response to both out of a contemporary existence, was immediately published and was later selected, by a reputable collector of short stories, as one of the Best Short Stories of 1974. I mention it because this story might never have been written, because

the very bases of its structure, authentic black folklore, viewed from a black perspective, might have been lost. Had it been lost, my mother’s story would have had no historical underpinning, none I could trust, anyway. I would not have written the story, which I enjoyed writing as much as I’ve enjoyed writing anything in my life, had I not known that Zora had already done a thorough job of preparing the ground over which I was then moving. In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone. To take Toni Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read. Consulting, as belatedly discovered models, those writers—most of whom, not surprisingly, are women—who understood that their experience as ordinary human beings was also valuable, and in danger of being misrepresented, distorted, or lost:

Zora Hurston—novelist, essayist, anthropologist, autobiographer;

Jean Toomer—novelist, poet, philosopher, visionary, a man who cared what women felt;

Colette—whose crinkly hair enhances her French, part-black face; novelist, play-wright, dancer, essayist, newspaperwoman, lover of women, men, small dogs; fortunate not to have been born in America;

Anaïs Nin—recorder of everything, no matter how minute; Tillie Olson—a writer of such generosity and honesty, she literally saves lives; Virginia Woolf—who has saved so many of us. It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are

“minority” writers or “majority.” It is simply in our power to do this. We do it because we care. We care that Vincent van Gogh mutilated his ear.

We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin’s music lives! We care because we know this: The life we save is our own.