[DEBATE] : Alice Walker on Gaza

[Salim Vally]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Moshenberg Sent: 15 January 2009 03:51 PM
Subject: The Root: Sister Loss

Hey all,
A war carried in the heart will one day mean a bomb under the table, a
rocket through the roof, phosphorous on the flesh, and mountains and
valleys of corpses. Gaza.
See ya, Dan




Sister Loss


Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker on stepping back into the
world from her sister's death, only to grieve the death of other sisters
in Gaza.


*	By: Alice Walker | Posted: January 14, 2009 at 6:22 AM

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My sister Annie Ruth Walker Hood died the morning of Dec. 27, 2008:
Throughout the four days leading up to her death in Hospice, friends and
I sat in ceremony, thousands of miles away, chanting, praying,
meditating and speaking at times to her spirit and soul. It was a
difficult transition for her; at the end, for us at least, there was a
palpable feeling of release, of peace. We were close as children, but
grew apart as the years turned into decades since we lived near each
other, and our ways in the world proved very different. She didn't
believe in voting, for instance, which I found an affront to those who,
voting even when their lives were endangered, made attempts year after
year to change a system that kept her and others like her relatively
poor, without health care, undereducated and largely ignorant of
anything not seen in a flash on television. 

Just last year she discovered, and believed, the earth was in trouble,
running out of resources, and immediately decided to recycle her paper
napkins and garbage bags. But voting, no. Seeing Earth as divine, rather
than a fundamentalist religion that encourages passivity and "heaven"
for a few thousand souls, no. So we disagreed.

The morning of her death my friends and I moved our circle from outside
the house to the dining-room table. Holding hands we urged her to let
go. I had written a poem for her, and letting go was its theme. During
her cremation, we again sat in circle, just my partner and I this time,
a two-person circle, and waited until my niece called from Atlanta, to
tell us the machine had stopped and the cremation was done. No pun
intended. But my sister would have enjoyed this, even if one were
intended. Anything to do with cooking, eating, ovens and refrigerators
aroused her interest; she loved to eat. This had, unfortunately,
contributed to her ill health.

So this was our Christmas. The day after my sister's death I felt
lighter than I had in months. She had been very sick for years, fighting
it all the way. The day after her cremation, however, sister-loss set
in. It felt exactly as if I had lost a limb or some other part of my own
body. My body felt too heavy and wobbly to carry; I had to lay myself
down, as if I were wood, the remains of a tree from which a huge branch
had been removed. I found a hammock way at the back of my house, hidden
behind cactus plants and swung in limbo. Earlier I had had a dream that
I thought of now: I was being informed by an old friend that he was
leaving. He showed me the symbol of his new life: a green apple encased
in a moist, spongy kind of cake. I seemed resigned to his moving on, but
at the same time I experienced a piercing pain in my heart, so agonizing
it threatened to wake me; but I went up to the table (that suddenly
appeared) in the dream, a table spread with all that remained of
enjoyment in life, and I tried to find a new place. A place not for two,
as had been the case until now, but for the solitary one I had become.
The dream had done the thing that dreams do so well: given all the
symbols my psyche needed to prepare for the devastation I was feeling in
the hammock as I swung.

Going from this state to encounter the news of the outside world was
probably a mistake. I don't know why I did so. Curiosity, love of the
world, concern over our collective well-being. More curiosity. In any
case, the first thing I encountered was Israel's attack on Gaza,
illustrated by a row of little girls, looking sound asleep but obviously
dead, their grandmother wailing over their heads. And then, in the same
frame, or close, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Speaker of the House saying that
Hamas, the elected representatives of the Palestinian people are
"thugs." Had she seen these children's bodies? And then, a fragment of
news that has kept me awake every night: In one house, bombed by Israel
with money their state (more important by the attention it gets than any
of our legitimate states) received from American tax dollars, five
sisters had been killed. Five sisters. Their mother was critically
injured.

We know that Gaza is comprised largely of refugees. That refugee
settlements are generally 80 percent women and children. What are we to
do with this assault on a people who have been forced into a space too
small for them, deprived of water, food, medicine and mobility? Of
fathers, brothers and husbands? Five sisters, on whom a thousand-pound
bomb was dropped. And on their mother. How are we to live with this?
 
This tragedy to the human race is unbearable. How are we to raise
children in this atmosphere of savagery? Every child on the planet
realizes he or she is in danger from grown-ups gone mad. When I think of
children left alone with images of bloodied corpses of children just
like themselves I can hardly sit still, let alone sleep. When I
visualize the five sisters, they are wearing green. Green dresses with
billowing skirts. The mother alone is dressed in black, and at her
throat she wears a white embroidered collar that can be detached. Is she
still alive? And if she is alive, and if they have told her about her
daughters, how does she feel? As if all her branches are gone? Her root?
Were there still more sisters left? One sister? There are now hundreds
of people dead, thousands wounded. Even before this attack, medical
supplies, as well as food and water, were miniscule. I had a glimpse of
the horrendous wall the Israelis have built around Palestinian
settlements and noticed they have a ledge on the Israeli side for
soldiers to stand in order to shoot down into the imprisoned population.
Doesn't this remind the world of images we've all said "Never again" to,
and tried to grow beyond?
 
I am convinced that, unless the world takes the time to unravel the
skein of hatred that binds the people of the Middle East, our end-the
end of the world citizens have made-will come from there. That though
all focus appears to be on which Arab nation is likely to strike the
United States, in my awareness of the unpredictability of evil, I
imagine Israel just as capable of doing us nuclear harm. This is because
the United States and Israel, working together (and with Britain) have
done terrible things to others in their greed to take resources away
from them: And it is the nature of thieves to eventually have a grand
falling out. More, Israel, with our help, has the weapons of mass
destruction for which Bush looked for in vain in Iraq. One senses, in
Israeli rage, unhealed wounds that may well be unhealable. As a world we
continue to feel grief for this, as we feel grief, unspeakable grief,
knowing four and five hundred years of enslavement and unimaginable
brutality inevitably damaged our people. Human people. All people. Not
just the blacks, browns, yellows, reds and whites that were enslaved. 

But what is the remedy? Is it to claim the people who fight the madness
are "thugs?" While the people who drop bombs on women and children are
justified?

Three years ago I called a Peace Camp to which I invited
African-American and Jewish women, feeling completely sure that peace is
not to be entrusted solely to men. About 20 women came, and we had a
couple of days of talking together, no holds barred. I called the circle
because what frightens me more than anything is the silencing of people
who object to Israel's behavior, which I have experienced personally, as
have many other African Americans. My position was, and is, that in
every single movement for change and betterment of lives on the planet
in which I've found myself, I've been flanked by at least one Jew.
Sometimes this has been a male, sometimes, often, it has been a female.
Only in the last three decades have I felt a chill, as we tried to talk
to each other about the Middle East. This precious and unlikely
alliance, two beleaguered peoples, determined to witness and affirm each
other's struggle, seemed too essential to relinquish without a word. Or
many. At our Peace Camp, we talked through the day and into the night.
What was accomplished? For me, the certainty that this circling around
this issue, globally, might just lead to the kind of change that real
conversation, real telling and real listening, can lead to. I was able
to express how being called anti-Semitic hurt, when I dared, in the '70s
and '80s, to express the fear that what is happening in Gaza would one
day occur. To say to a beloved Jewish friend who dreamed, she said one
day, that she was kissing Ariel Sharon, that in the absence of a
non-dream sharing of what this symbol might mean, I had felt the need to
withdraw from her. (Being true friends, we, of course, talked our way
back to our senses on this).

I remember one of the women from Israel who explained to us that she
worked in Israel with Arab women in the cause of peace, but that she
never thought of the Arab women as friends. This was sad to hear. And
the other African-American women, silenced for decades, struggling now
to pull back into focus a cause that-with all the calamities befalling
our own communities-they had mostly lost. What happens when one's words
of concern are thrown back at one as if one has no authority to speak is
that people learn not to pay attention, not to care. But, of course,
this is impossible. This is a very small planet, and by now most of the
humans on it are endangered, one way or another, and very scared. It is
in no one's interest to let any nation, no matter its history or claim
to sympathy, further terrorize us.
 
And that, I feel, is ultimately what I am objecting to: the
terrorization of the planet by the United States and Israel. And yes, I
know African armies and Indian armies and all the other smaller armies
are imitating the big guys as best they can. I happen, however, to be
attached to the U.S. and Israelthrough the strongest possible bonds:
birth and taxes. These overly armed countries are attacking people who
cannot possibly put up an equal fight, which makes attacking them
sadistic. Where is the glory, the freedom and bravery, the wisdom, the
profit in this? All the oil in the world will not wipe away the bomb
scar now seared on the hearts of billions of Earthlings, cowering in
their beds or losing themselves in licentiousness and drugs. 

In the film The Thin Red Line, the main character, a conscientious
objector to the war in which he finds himself, asks, contemplating the
slaughter on both sides: Who is Killing Us? That is the only question to
ask, really. Who is killing us? Who is torturing us? Who is making us
dance around the world going Yes, Yes, Yes, you are so right, when all
the time we're appalled to our very core. 

We have not, as a planet, been seeking to change the world so that this
insanity can continue. And we must not feel limited by our insistence on
non-violence, when all around us is guts and blood. Wars of the sort
that cause guts and blood cannot be won. Let us take courage from that
fact. The anger, hatred, fear, devastation let loose on the planet just
during the reign of George the Second will mean millions of people,
people we might see every day, will carry war in their hearts. A war
carried in the heart will one day mean a bomb under the table.

I place my own trust in human conscience. As exemplified by Israeli
students who are presently demonstrating against their government's
massacre of largely defenseless people. I call on all Earthlings to let
their conscience speak; no matter what you are called, or by whom you
are called it. You have a right to live in joy on this planet. You
cannot do that, we cannot do that, if we are harassed and tormented by
those who do not care about us, or about law and justice; those who
readily insult our integrity whenever we ask simply to be heard; those
who trample our dreams of peace and would deny us tomorrow because we,
having been made to feel guilty and intimated by a history of which we
had no part, have not found the courage to say No to them today. 
 
(c)2009 Alice Walker

Casa Madre
Mexico

Alice Walker <http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com/> 's recent books are We
Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of
Darkness, Meditations, Why War Is Never a Good Idea, a picture book for
children, A Poem Traveled Down My Arm, Poetry and Drawings, and Now is
the Time To Open Your Heart, a novel.

http://www.theroot.com/views/sister-loss



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