Alice Walker - Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit

Copyright 2001 by Alice Walker

A Seven Stories Press First Edition,
published in association with Open Media.

Series Editor, Greg Ruggiero.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

eISBN: 978-1-60980-301-8

Cover design by Greg Ruggiero.
Cover Photo 2001 by Jean Weisinger

v3.1

love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home
love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
the beating of your heart
should harm
no one

SENT BY EARTH
A MESSAGE FROM THE GRANDMOTHER SPIRIT

Adapted from a speech to the
Midwives Alliance of North America
Albuquerque, New Mexico
September 22, 2001

The Great danger in the world today is that the very feeling and conception of what is a human being might well be lost.

Richard Wright to Jean Paul Sartre (1940s)

T his is one of the epigrams I chose to preface my first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 1970, which was about the challenge of remaining human under the horrific conditions of American Apartheid in the Southern United States during my parents and grandparents time. They and their children faced massively destructive psychological and physical violence from landowners who used every conceivable weapon to keep the sharecropping/slave labor system intact. It was a system in which a relatively few ruling class white people had the possibility of having as much food, land, space and cheap energy to run their enterprises as they wanted, while most people of color and many poor white people had barely enough of anything to keep themselves alive.

We own our own souls, dont we? is that novels ringing central cry.

In my opinion, this is also the ringing central cry of our time.

I have been advised that there are several different groups of people in the audience; not just members of the Midwives Alliance of North America. I have been warned that some of these people are afraid I am just going to talk about birthin and babies. However, I came to Albuquerque especially because I wish to be with Midwives, whose business of birthin and babies is, I believe, the most honorable on earth.

A few days ago I was in the presence of Sobonfu Som, a contemporary carrier of traditional, pre-colonial and perhaps pre-patriarchal, Ancient African life-ways. She even today. Were they busy, perhaps, restoring it? I realize that even at this late date I wish theyd been beside or on the bed, waiting to receive me, instead of halfway across the room. And that my mother had been conscious.

I wished this even more fervently after being permitted by a midwife friend to attend a home birth and to see for myself what is possible in terms of welcoming the newborn into its mothers arms, into the light of its fathers smile, into the world and into its immediate community. (Fortunately, I grew up to understand I was, from the beginning, very welcomed by the universe.)

Sobonfu Som then asked us to stand, as I am now asking you to do, and to turn to the person on either side, take their hands, look them in the eye, and tell them: I welcome you here. Take your timedoing this, there is no hurry. If this is a person youve never seen before in your life, so much the better.

Last January [more than ten years ago], when the war against Iraq was started, I was in Mexico writing a novel about a woman who is genitally mutilated in a ritual of female circumcision that her society imposes on all females. Genital mutilation is a mental and physical health hazard that directly affects some one hundred million women and girls worldwide, alive today, to whom it has been done. Because of increased risk of trauma during delivery, it affects the children to whom they give birth. Indirectly, because of its linkage to the spread of AIDS, especially among women and children, it affects the health and well-being of everyone on the planet.

With no television or radio, and no eagerness to see or hear arrogant Western males discussing their military prowess, their delight in their own cleanhanded destructiveness, I relied on a friends phone calls to his son in San Francisco to keep me informed. His son told us about the huge resistance to the war in San Francisco, which made me love the city even more than I did already, and informed us too that he had been one of those demonstrators so outraged theyd closed down the Bay Bridge.

What to do? Go home and join the demonstrations, or continue to write about the fact that little girls bodies are daily bombed by dull knives, rusty tin can tops and scissors, shards of unwashed glassand that this is done to them not by a foreign power but by their own parents and societies? I decided to say put. Tocontinue this storywhich became Possessing The Secret Of Joyabout female genital mutilation, a.k.a. female circumcision, which I believe is vital for the world to hear. But of course I could not forget the war being waged against the earth and the people of Iraq.

Because I was thinking so hard about the suffering of little girls, while grieving over the frightened people trying to flee our governments bombs, my unconscious, in trying to help me balance my thoughts, did a quite wonderful thing. It gave me a substitute for Saddam Hussein, the solitary demon among tens of millions on whom the United States militarys bombs were falling. Her name was Sadie Hussein, and she was three years old. So, as the bombs fell, I thought about Sadie Hussein, with her bright dark eyes and chubby cheeks, her shiny black curls andher dainty pink dress, and I put my arms around her. I could not, however, save her.

As it turned out, this was the truth. Saddam Hussein still reigns, at least as secure in his power over the Iraqis, according to some media sources, as George Bush is over North Americans. It is Sadie Hussein who is being destroyed, and who, along with nine hundred thousand other Iraqi children under the age of five, is dying of cholera, malnutrition, infection, and diarrhea. Since the war, fifty thousand such children have died. It is Sadie Hussein who starves daily on less than half her bodys nutritional needs, while Saddam Hussein actually appears to have gained weight.

This is the story of why I am here today. I am here because I pay taxes. More money in taxes in one year than my share-cropping parents, descendants of enslaved

There is not a midwife in this room who would bomb a baby or a child or a pregnant woman. Perhaps in this particular room there is not one person who would do so. And yet, that is the position we find ourselves in. The war against Iraq continues. In the ten years since I wrote my lament, millions more have died, the majority of them small children. Unlike most North Americans I did not watch the initial bombing on television; I did see later, however, footage showing the bombing of a long line of what looked like old men trying to flee. They were running this way and that, their eyes filled with terror. I recognized more than I ever had that it is the very soul of the people of North America that is being lost, and that if this happens, for the rest of our time on the planet we are doomed to run with the dogs of war. The dogs of war. This is the vision that I have of this period. Ravenous, rapacious dogs, mad with greed and lust, red tongues out and salivating, running loose across the planet. They are the dogs that show up in some of the art of our time, in cartoons, or in the movie