"They Say, Let Those Who Call for a New Language First Learn Violence"[25]

If feminist nonviolence movements have sometimes confused the violence of patriarchy with the violence of men, these movements have also often challenged the rigid gendering of violence through their own reliance on violent metaphors and fantasies. At a San Francisco antinuclear rally in March 1982, for example, Alice Walker began her speech by quoting a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston collected in the 1920s. Her comments on this curse are worth quoting at length:

I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would die. Horribly.

I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse . . . . And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman - starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death - over centuries, is coming to pass . . . . And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement.

In any case, this has been my own problem.

When I consider the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.[26]

After September 11, 2001, Jean Baudrillard described the "new terrorists" as people who turn "the violence mobilized by the system" against it, and who "do not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play."[27] Walker here seems to share these traits, the traits of a terrorist imagination. As she repeats the curse of the woman who "would readily . . . commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would die," what distinguishes her from Baudrillard's new terrorists? On one level, it seems important to say something like, "Not much," to acknowledge that feminist activists have repeatedly spoken threats of violent destruction, and have occasionally acted upon them.[28] From this, we can learn that, for feminism, social justice begins with the acknowledgment of, and commitment to wrestle with, the extremes of violence that exist within ourselves. Refusing to inhabit a position of uncontaminated purity, Walker places herself inside a long history of feminist-terrorist imaginings and, as a result, she cannot be assimilated to the "us" of "us and them." Yet nor is she simply one of "them," for Walker's feminist-terrorist thinking is marked by her unwillingness to idealize the banality of death: "Life is better than death," she asserts, "if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it." This statement does not cancel out Walker's recognition of the appeal, even the pleasure, of violent language and action; it simply shows her stepping back from enacting Hurston's curse, at least for now, because the world still has "fresh peaches" in it. These peaches come in varied forms, they are often hard to find, and they grow in strange places - sometimes even in our classrooms. As feminists, we must cultivate their growth wherever we happen to be, and fiercely protect and expand the spaces where they thrive. Then, as our peaches ripen, we must dare to eat and share them, for their sweetness holds both our melancholia and our violence at bay.

Endnotes

1. Shortly after the attacks, Judith Butler commented on this temporal prohibition: "It is that date . . . that propels the narrative. If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options." Butler, "Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear," Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 57-67, at 58. [Return to text]

2. George W. Bush, United We Stand: A Message for All Americans (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), 6. [Return to text]

3. Bush, United We Stand, 16. [Return to text]

4. Shauna Curphey, "Women in Afghanistan Fear New Taliban-Like Rule," Women ENews, May 15, 2003, available at http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/womensenews.htm. [Return to text]

5. McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com, http://www.ifeminists.com. [Return to text]

6. Wendy McElroy, "Iraq War May Kill Feminism as We Know It," Foxnews.com, March 18, 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81318,00.html. [Return to text]

7. Caryl Rivers, "Where Have All the Women Gone?" Women's ENews, April 17, 2003, available at Alternet.org, http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15677. In this article, Rivers notes, "As the war dominates the headlines, journalists, scholars and others interested in public policy have noticed a growing silence: the absence of women's voices in the nation's elite media . . . The situation is dire for women scholars and journalists who wish to influence the public agenda of the nation," she complains. "I haven't seen it so bad since the pre-women's movement days when women were completely invisible in the media." [Return to text]

8. Judith Butler, "The End of Sexual Difference?" in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 414-34, at 418. [Return to text]

9. Ranjana Khanna, "Ethical Ambiguities and Specters of Colonialism: Futures of Transnational Feminism," in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 101-25, at 101. [Return to text]

10. W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," (1939) in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 241-43, at 242. [Return to text]

11. David Cortright, "What We Do Now," Nation, April 21, 2003, at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20030421&s=cortright. [Return to text]

12. Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 129-50, at 139. [Return to text]

13. Wendy Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholia," in Loss, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 458-65, at 464. [Return to text]

14. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 164-79, at 164. [Return to text]

15. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 84. [Return to text]

16. I am, of course, referring to Hélène Cixous's 1976 essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1 (Summer 1976): 875-99. Early in her radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, Laura Bush stated, "children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud."[Return to text]

17. The political utility of the affect of shame has been central to recent discussions in queer theory, and feminism might usefully benefit from this work as it continues to address the problem of internal oppression. For further reading on shame, see Douglas Crimp, "Mario Montez, For Shame," in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57-70; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 1-16; and Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). [Return to text]

18. Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholia," 460. [Return to text]

19. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35. Nancy distinguishes community from a "communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We" (Nancy, 15), a communion that effectively describes the oppressive and potentially fascistic consequences of the Bush administration's mobilization of the language of "us" and "them." For a helpful discussion of this language, see John Michael, "Beyond Us and Them: Identity and Terror from an Arab-American's Perspective," South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 701-28. [Return to text]

20. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 11. [Return to text]

21. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 22. [Return to text]

22. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), xi. [Return to text]

23. Mallika Dutt, "Reclaiming a Human Rights Cultural Feminism of Difference and Alliance," in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1998), 225-46, at 232-33. [Return to text]

24. On feminist coalition politics and complexity, see Janet R. Jakobsen, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

25. Wittig, Les Guérillères, 85. [Return to text]

26. Alice Walker, "Only Justice Can Stop A Curse," in Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, ed. Pam McAllister (Philadelphia: New Society, 1982), 262-265, at 264. [Return to text]

27. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 18-19. [Return to text]