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Three Days and a Question by Grace Paley and Poems by Stephanie Strickland edited
by Daniela
Gioseffi Featuring Grace Paley and Stephanie Strickland Grace Paley is one of
America’s most beloved storytellers. Known as the Chekov of New York City,
she lives with her husband in Vermont, but returns to New York City often, where
she read from her latest book, Collected
Stories, in April of 1995 to sold-out audiences both at the Poetry Center
of the 92nd Street YMHA and at Symphony Space in the “Selected Shorts”
series. Grace Paley, born Grace Goodside in 1922, is an author of social
conscience who has devoted much of her life to anti-war and social justice
causes. She calls herself a “cooperative anarchist” and a “combative
pacifist,” and has worked closely with the War Resisters League. She has
taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and City College of the
City University of New York and was the first official “New York State
Author,” an award created by the Mario Cuomo administration in Albany. Her
many publications include Later the
Same Day (1985), Enormous Changes
at the Last Minute (1974), and The
Little Disturbances of Man (1959). The story appearing in this issue of
VIA, “Three Days and a Question” (copyrighted by the author [1991]), is
reprinted with her kind permission. It appears in Long Walks and Initmate Talks (The Feminst Press, CCNY, New
York)—a collection of stories and poems by Paley which was illustrated by her
good friend and fellow activist, an award winning artist, Vera B. Williams. Grace Paley has
published two collections of poetry and won a Senior Fellowship from The
National Endowment on the Arts as well as numerous other prizes and awards.
She has been arrested several times as a non-violent war resister, including
as a founding activist of The Women’s Pentagon Action and as a member of “The
Washington Eleven”—a group which held up a banner on the White House lawn
simply stating, “No Nuclear Weaons US or USSR,” while another group did the
same in Red Square. As Grace Paley has said It is the poet’s
responsibility to speak truth to power. . . . It is the poet’s
responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless. It is the
responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no freedom without
justice and this means economic justice and love justice. It is the responsibility
of the poet to sing this in all the original and traditonal tunes of singing
and telling poems. It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip
and pass it on in the way story tellers decant the story of life. There is no
freedom without fear and bravery. . . . These
words, among others, were spoken by Grace Paley at the American Poetry Review “Conference on Poetry and the Writer’s
Responsibility to Society,” Spring, 1984. Jonathan Baumbach
wrote in Partisan Review: “The
voice of Paley’s fiction—quirky, tough, wise-ass, vulnerable, bruised into
wisdom by the knocks of experience—is the triumph and defining characteristic
of her art.” Susan Sontag has said: “Grace Paley makes me weep and laugh—and
admire. She is that rare kind of writer, a natural, with a voice like no one
else’s: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.” There is no American
short story writer who is more satisfying than Grace Paley. No one who can
make us laugh so readily through our tears as her human and humane wit allows
us to. The following story, “Three Days and a Question,” is only a small
taste of the work of the consumate artist whose newly issued Collected Stories should be on our
most immediate reading list. * * * * Our other guest for
this issue is the poet, Stephanie Strickland. Her second book of poems, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil
won the 1993 Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her
first, Give the Body Back, was published
in 1991 by the University of Missouri Press. She has received many awards
for her writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the
Open Voice Award from the West Side Y Center for the Arts. Her poems appear
in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review,
Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner.
She is the editor of What’s Become of
Eden: Poems of Family at Century’s End, from Slapering Hol Press, 1994.
She was a panelist for the Associated Writing Program March Conference,
1995. From Stephanie
Strickland’s The Red Virgin: A Poem of
Simone Weil, copyrighted 1993 by the author (Madison: U of Wisconsin P),
we reprint with her kind permission, “Zealot at the Zoo” and “The Fig Tree.”
Strickland’s book is a “biography” in poetry of Simone Weil (1909–1943) who
has been called the greatest woman philospher in the Western tradition. Fifty
years after her death, Simone Weil’s life still inspires passionate debate.
Weil and her contemporaries, Simone de Beauvoir and Gertrude Stein, were
important to their generation in focusing attention on female intellect, but
only Weil chose to base her thought on the trauma that war, rape, slavery,
and bias inflict. Using her body as a source of knowledge, she attacked the
same issues women battle today: hunger, violence, exclusion, inability to be
heard, and self-hate. Lisel Mueller in her “Brittingham Prize Citation” said: Stickland’s
book-length sequence gives us a vivid and fascinating portrait of a woman
whose short life, as well as writings, represented a tremendous moral force
for the post-World War II generation and remain relevant for us. Weil comes
through as a brilliant, erratic ascetic, utterly uncompromising and always
at odds with the world—a burning, difficult saint. About Give the Body Back from which
Stickland’s poems, “Leaving” and “Amphibian” come, Margaret Gibson has said:
“These are fearless poems. They give glimpses that go to the core of a
woman’s intimate relationships, insights in terse and compelling rhythms, so
vivid they only release us slowly from their gaze.” Grace
Paley On
the first day I joined a demonstration opposing the arrest in Israel of
members of Yesh Gvul, Israeli soldiers who had refused to serve in the
occupied territories. Yesh Gvul means: There
is a Limit. TV cameras and an
anchorwoman arrived and New York Times
stringers with their narrow journalism notebooks. What do you think? the
anchorwoman asked. What do you think, she asked a woman passer-by—a woman
about my age. Anti-Semites, the
woman said quietly. The anchorwoman said,
But they’re Jewish. Anti-Semites, the
woman said, a little louder. What? One of our
demonstrators stepped up to her. Are you crazy? How can you . . .
Listen what we’re saying. Rotten
anti-Semites—all of you. What? What What the
man shouted. How you dare to say that—all of us Jews. Me, he said. He pulled
up his shirtsleeve. Me? You call me? You look. He held out his arm. Look at
this. I’m not looking, she
screamed. You look at my
number, what they did to me. My arm . . . you have no right. Anti-Semite, she said
between her teeth. Israel hater. No, no he said, you
fool. My arm—you’re afraid to look . . . my arm . . . my
arm. On
the second day Vera and I listen at pen
to Eta Krisaeva read her stories that were not permitted publication in
her own country, Czechoslovakia. Then we walk home in the New York walking
night, about twenty blocks—shops and lights, other walkers talking past us.
Late-night homeless men and women asleep in dark storefront doorways on
cardboard pallets under coats and newspapers, scraps of blanket. Near home on
Sixth Avenue a young man, a boy, passes—a boy the age a younger son could
be—head down, bundles in his arms, on his back. Wait,
he says, turning to stop us. Please, please wait. I just got out of Bellevue.
I was sick. They gave me something. I don’t know . . . I need to
sleep somewhere. The Y, maybe. That’s way uptown. Yes, he says. He
looks at us. Carefully he says, aids.
He looks away. Oh. Separately, Vera and I think: A boy—only a boy. Mothers
after all, our common trade for more than thirty years. Then he says, I put
out my hand. We think he means to tell us he tried to beg, I put out my hand.
No one will help me. No one. Because they can see. Look at my arm. He pulls
his coatsleeve back. Lesions, he says. Have you ever seen lesions? That’s
what people see. No. No, we see a
broad fair forehead, a pale countenance, fear. I just have to sleep, he says. We shift in our
pockets. We give him what we find—about eight dollars. We tell him, Son,
they’ll help you on 13th Street at the Center. Yes, I know about that place.
I know about them all. He hoists the bundle of his things to his back to
prepare for walking. Thank you ladies. Goodbye. On
the third day I’m in a taxi. I’m leaving the city for a while and need to get
to the airport. We talk—the driver and I. He’s a black man, dark. He’s not
young. He has a French accent. Where are you from? Haiti, he answers. Ah,
your country is in bad trouble. Very bad. You know that, Miss. Well, yes. Sometimes
it’s in the paper. They thieves there.
You know that? Very rich, very poor. You believe me? Killing—it’s nothing to
them, killing. Hunger. Starving people. Everything bad. And you don’t let us
come. Starving. They send us back. We’re at a red light.
He turns to look at me. Why they do that? He doesn’t wait for me to say, Well
. . . because . . . He says, Why hard. The light changes. We
move slowly up traffic-jammed Third Avenue. Silence. Then. Why? Why they let
the Nicaragua people come? Why they let Vietnamese come? One time American
people want to kill them people. Put bomb in their children. Break their
head. Now they say, Yes Yes, come come come. Not us. Why? Your New York is
beautiful country. I love it. So beautiful, this New York. But why, tell me,
he says, stopping the cab, switching the meter off. Why, he says, turning to
me again, rolling his short shirtsleeve back, raising his arm to the
passenger divider, pinching and pulling the bare skin of his upper arm. You
tell me—this skin, this black skin—why? Why you hate this skin so much? Question:
Those gestures, those arms, the three consecutive days thrown like a formal
net over the barest unchanged accidental facts. How? Why? In order to
become—probably—in this city one story told. (from: The Red Virgin:
A Poem of Simone Weil) zealot in a
zoo The body is not the soul’s
opponent: a soul is injured by the structure
of its city, by mob, by solidarity—by
keep of that Beast: party,
program, coerced mode; the opponent of the soul is the soul’s own words,
made to serve, made-to-measure, to grasp
all thing by its grammar. There are only two
services words offer the afflicted, the first, to speak of
good: good that cannot be abused; then, to speak the numbness of their affliction, the
specific, raw frantic thing in them— A tree is rooted in the
sky suspended there by crystal cannulae, long,
clear cables which contain the falling light. If
these are broken or shrouded, the tree
dies. But if light soar down them, the tree lives, it lives its body and pushing,
sends out roots to bring air onto the earth. fig tree One
is Genius Itself—the other Beauty, a
neighbor said, pointing to
André, then
Simone, praising children
to their mother. Simone
says, a beautiful woman looking at the mirror may well believe the image is herself; an ugly one knows it is not— She
says, she knows it
is not, but she shudders, believing she
is the barren, the parable fig
tree: naturally impotent
and cursed for her impotence. (from: Give the Body
Back) leaving A-cree!
A-cree! The jay is screeching. Rain-beaten
stems lie flat. A
late wasp burns the fallen apple. Scraggles
of catkin blow in yellow boats of
ash leaves—looseness in our lives leaves
bruises, walls that
were a garden. Not to see you again.
The gate rusts open in
my hand. amphibian All
day I think of that frog made
to lie open, to empty convulsively. All
day I limp; I feel like
crying. It’s not just
you, or how you use your strength— It’s
that time they
injected her with hormones to
make her give birth in
class: the instructor squeezing eggs
out of her, over and over, like
stripping milk from
a teat; shaking out the
last drops. I got sick. When
I came back, the body: dropped
in a sink— breathing. This
morning in
the dark, prolonged, split second,
as I wanted to get up but
began to know, you didn’t, a flash— the
stone house in Italy, all
gray tones and
blurred—a photograph from
a physics textbook: Volta,
in his garden. On something like
a doll’s clothesline, just
a string really, are the
frogs hanging, and the legs of frogs. |