High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [64]
Of these I can claim in adequate measure only the last; I’m drawn like a kid to mud into the sticky terrain of cultural difference. How wondrous, it seems to me, that someone else can live on the same round egg of a world that I do but explain it differently—how it got here, and what’s to be done with it. How remarkable that other people’s stories often sound more true to me than my own.
I’ve been advised from all quarters about my obligations as a writer in the multicultural domain. I have been told explicitly, in fact, both that I should write more and less (or even not at all) about nearly every category of persons imaginable, including men, women, people with disabilities, Asians, Armenians, Native Americans. Fortunately I’m not a short-order cook, because whenever I get lobbed rapid-fire with commands my tendency is to go find a quieter place.
What seems right to me from my quieter place is to represent the world I can see and touch as honestly as I know how, and when writing fiction, to use that variegated world as a matrix for the characters and conflicts I need to fathom. I can’t speak in tongues I don’t understand, and so there are a thousand tales I’ll never tell: the waging of war; coming of age as a man; childhood on an Indian reservation. But when the wounded veteran, the masculine disposition, and the reservation child come into the place where I live, they enter my story. I will watch closely and report on the conversation. A magnificent literary tool is the dramatic point of view; one of its great virtuosos was John Steinbeck. Without ever pretending to know “female” or “Mexican laborer” or “mentally retarded” from the inside, he rendered those characters perfectly from the outside. Through reading Steinbeck I first realized this precious truth: bearing witness is not the same as possession.
Godspeed the right of each of us to speak for ourselves and not be spoken for, but I cannot suffer a possessiveness of stories. When I was nine years old, our town librarian wore broad black picture hats and deeply disliked the idea of children rummaging through her books. I drove her to palsy by checking out every book and dusty pamphlet she had on Cherokee lore, even those she felt God had intended for the Boy Scouts. She told me I would ruin my eyes with so much reading, and hinted my character was headed down the tubes as well. Too late; long before I discovered Cherokee lore, I felt in a certain light that animals could talk. I believed in trees, and that heaven had something to do with how dead trees gentle themselves into long, mossy columns of bright-smelling, crumbling earth, lively inside with sprouting seeds and black beetles. I could not make myself believe in a loud-voiced, bearded God on his throne in the clouds, but I was moved to tears by the compost pile.
No wonder I perturbed the librarian. But her fearful assessment of my soul was inexact. I wasn’t studying up to be Cherokee; this would hardly have occurred to me. I loved stories about Wild Boy and the waterbug who discovered the world, not because I wanted to become a different kind of person, but because these stories delighted the heart of the person I already was. And they do still. For my particular brand of pantheism I don’t need to affect beads and feathers. I can go to the woods in my jeans and sweatshirt and find grace, without a sweat lodge. I can also fling myself on the floor and spend whole afternoons with my volumes of Joseph Campbell, by accident, when I only meant to be passing by the bookshelf on my way to something productive. I’m not studying up to be Neolithic, I just need those cave paintings and creation stories. I could live without electricity if I had to, but not without stories.
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