Why Write?

by Lucy S.

A good friend emailed me this morning to express her doubts about the value of this or any blog, along with so many other efforts to challenge the multitude of injustices in this world.  She wondered if these things change anyone’s minds or if we are all only talking to those who already agree with us.  Meanwhile, the atrocities continue.

I can certainly understand her feelings. I wrestle with my own despair and defeatism. It comes and goes, and I cannot always tell when it will hit me again.  This is particularly true not only when we are saying and/or doing something that goes against prevailing views and the systems as they function – difficult enough – but when various aspects of who we are makes what we say not be taken seriously or takes away a forum in which to even say it. I know this feeling oh so well. I wonder how many thousands of times over my life thus far I have said or written to someone something close to this: “What difference does it make anyway? I am nobody. No one cares what I have to say anyway.” But that is a feeling that eats away at us. Moreover, the various oppressors benefit when we are chewed up inside by these thoughts, because people who feel that way are more likely to cry in isolation and blame themselves than to fight back.

Yet I do not believe in the individualist ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ approach. It doesn’t work for most people, and the system itself is structured so that it cannot absorb everyone doing this.  Can we ALL go to college and get great jobs?  That justification for making more money than other workers only works if most people do not go to college. These are all just different sorting schemes to make us believe that if we play by the rules of a continually changing game and give it our “best,” we will “win.” Those who don’t will deserve to “lose.” And if even the game fails to conform to its own rules and we dare to complain, those who defend the system will say, “Nobody said life was fair,” as if we are just supposed to accept that it is unfair.  We are then cast as malcontent whiners if we do not accept our lot or find some individual way to claw our way up past everyone else.  So instead, we have to find collective strength, find some kind of way to pull each other up.  Otherwise, the system will continue to play us against one another as “competitors” in so many ways.  We will stay isolated in our despair, not understanding our commonalities or the particular ways in which oppression manifests in different lives.  And we will think that this despairing condition is somehow just “life” rather than the outcome of systems structured in specific and brutal ways.

So I say we write and talk to each other and find any ways that we can to care for each other and band together.  In what ways do we labor?  In what ways has our hard work been appropriated and devalued by the system (paid or unpaid work of many kinds)? I don’t think we can write thinking that it is only valuable as a means to an end. Yes, we need to change so much in this world, but this work will go on and on. We have to value the writing itself, to value our participation in this work, to realize that this is life itself. So many of us have been telling stories to one another for years anyway. This has always been our strength. So we’d might as well find ways to write them down and share them.  We can create our testimony, like many others have done and are doing now, and see what comes of it.

In Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, Richard Wright relates what happens when destitution forces him to go to the relief office during the Depression:

When I reached the relief station, I felt that I was making a public confession of my hunger.  I sat waiting for hours, resentful of the mass of hungry people about me. My turn finally came and I was questioned by a middle-class Negro woman who asked me for a short history of my life. As I waited again, I became aware of something happening in the room. Black men and women were mumbling quietly among themselves; they had not known one another before they had come here, but now their timidity and shame was wearing off and they were exchanging experiences.  Before this they had lived as individuals, each somewhat afraid of the other, each seeking his own pleasure, each staunch in that degree of Americanism that had been allowed him.  But now life had tossed them together and they were learning to know the sentiments of their neighbors for the first time; their talking was enabling them to sense the collectivity of their lives and some of their fear was passing.

Did the relief officials realize what was happening? If they had, they would have stopped it. But they saw their “clients” through the eyes of their profession, saw only what their “science” allowed them to see.  As I listening to the talk, I could see black minds shedding illusions. These people now knew that the past had betrayed them, had cast them out; but they did not know what the future would be like, did not know what they wanted […]  Had [the ruling class] understood what was happening, they would never have allowed millions of perplexed and defeated people to sit together for long hours and talk, for out of their talk was rising a new realization of life (300-301).

We have seen this time and time again, that when enough people talk to each other about their “perplexed and defeated” condition, they become less and less perplexed and defeated. At the same time, our stories themselves have value. Just as we do not have relationships with each other as only a means to make the world better, but for the sheer love of it, we can write this way, too.  Caring hurts, but what is life without it? And at the same time, our relationships DO make the world better. So it is with our writing, which in itself is another manifestation of our caring labor for ourselves and each other.  From all of this can rise, as Wright says, “a new realization of life.”

My lifelong friend Gloria sent me a short passage today which she wrote to express her feelings about what has happened to her in her job.  I will let her tell more of her story when she is ready to, but for now, I will say that she worked at a job which required her to put a tremendous amount of stress on her hands over and over throughout the day. And so one of her hands has been damaged by this overuse. She cannot do the job anymore.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.