Change, But Not Enough: Part III
As new institutions of learning and culture emerged through political movements of the 60s and 70s, their intellectual and theoretical traditions bore the movements’ strengths and their tensions. People weighed the value of experience, urgency, pragmatism, representation, and power, and arrived at differing, contentious, and group-fracturing conclusions. The BCRW archive bears some witness to these struggles and the limitations that emerged in feminist spaces dominated by white middle- and upper-middle-class women. Although the archives are, like any archive, a partial glimpse into the past, what is observable are the attempts and stumbles to articulate a politics in the flood of experience, feeling, history, and hope. During the first decade, in the 1970s, pamphlets, tape recordings from events, and meeting notes indicated that most of the faculty, students, and participants in panels, workshops, and conferences were white women, a few were lesbians, some were working-class in origin. There were few Black women or women of color. Most conversations (about art anyway) attended to questions of focus and material, affect, politics and propaganda (feminist art as a change agent), and problems with patriarchy and marginalization as women. Some talked about material conditions of art creation, money, space, resources, access to publishing. Very few said a word about race, or applied feminist thinking toward forms of oppression that did not constrain their own experience. Their conversations revolved around a few common questions: Feminism was a mode of thinking and creating, an orientation, but with whom, toward what, and away from what? With what aspects of life, expression, history? Feminism was a challenge, but to what forces of domination? With what boundaries, flexibilities, and rigor could feminism be a unifying principle around which women and people organized themselves? (What they did not ask: Why would one want a unifying principle at all? How could one imagine it possible?) Because the consequences of marginalization were severe, material and interpersonal, matters of actual life chances or exposure to injury, violence, or premature death, Black women and women of color formed their own organizations, like the Combahee River Collective (formed in 1974) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (formed in 1968).
If by the 1970s, the worlds of literature, art, and higher education had changed from the experiences that Jordan had in the 50s and Walker in the 60s, they had but not enough. 1975 was the year when the Vietnam War officially came to an end, and it was also the year when a fiscal crisis descended on New York City that proved to be disastrous. As Jordan said, “It seems to me merely reasonable... that the mayor of the City of New York should instigate a tax strike against Washington and call upon private employers to follow suit… since the impending default of New York will mean a colossal loss of livelihood, and a loss of service to keep life feasible in the city (human life I mean)...” She was speaking to the people in the room: the private employer that was Barnard College; the students who could (and some did) get up and join the protests (if they weren’t already involved); the teachers with the political commitment and obligation to bring these problems into their classroom so that this generation’s students may find their education more relevant, more useful than she did in solving the problems in their streets. Jordan’s words were charged with a call when she said,
Nothing that I learned here prepared me for the tragedy of the death of the Black Boy that produced the Harlem Riot of 1964, nor the atrocious, non-reporting by white media, of what actually happened. Nothing, here, prepared me for the travesty of high-paid, "anti-poverty" planning and research on the lower East Side, research that yielded no new, safe housing to the peoples forced to live there, in continuous jeopardy.
The call was a reckoning.
While Jordan’s talk faced the crisis of representation as “an agent for change, an active member of the hoped-for apocalypse,” Walker looked inward. What were the consequences of this crisis as a writer with her craft? Walker recalled an experience that got to the heart of this problem with an origin story of her short work of fiction, “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” The fictional story was based on a memory of her mother’s, which her mother repeated to Walker throughout her life. During the Depression, she went into town to apply for government benefits at the local commissary where was denied and humiliated by the white woman in charge. Although this degradation may have wounded her (Walker does not say) she feels triumphant in the end because, she said, she lived to see the white woman grow old, and mentally and physically decline. Walker recounted that after “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 lady that she is), had voodooed her?” Life was leading to fiction through the what-ifs, what otherwise, and the work of invention.
However, Walker felt troubled by a problem of evidence. She felt she needed to know more about voodoo beyond the few stories and anecdotes she had from members of her family. She needed this knowledge to create a story with the density and truth that allows fiction to exist, full of its own life. Yet when she went to research, the archives were places of unlivable violence, brutally inhospitable to the characters of her story. Authored by white men, dripping with anti-Black misogyny, the texts were gateways into a violent imagination. Walker kept searching for another way. For a long time she searched, discouraged, until she came upon a footnote of a writer by the name of Zora Neale Hurston, a Black anthropologist and novelist (and Barnard alum, class of 1928), who had done years of ethnographic research on voodoo and obeah in New Orleans, Jamaica, and Haiti, creating the archive that Walker had hoped she would find. The meticulous attention that spotted the footnote led Walker to Hurston’s ethnographic work, Of Mules and Men, on Black diasporic religion, including a large section on voodoo. Prior to this, Walker had never heard of Hurston, and Hurston became a model and a guide for Walker (see Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora”). “Had [Hurston’s work] been lost,” Walker said, “my mother’s story would have had no historical underpinning, none I could trust...” Surely a writer as rigorous and dedicated as Walker would have found a way no matter what, but how might it have been had she not come upon her guide?
