Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [5]
Why write stories? To join the conversation. Literature is a conversation—a lively enthralling exchange that constantly challenges and widens our own imaginations. A skinny guy from the Bronx told things I never imagined about growing up a Puerto Rican who has never seen the islands. A tall woman from the Midwest talked about apple farms and hiding up among the half-ripe fruit so as not to have to think about dead and lost children. God yes, I murmured. Yes. In return, I tried to reimagine the world as my great-grandmother saw it, feeling in my low back the generational impact of giving birth to eleven children in fifteen years. A little later I retold the crime I committed against a woman who loved me with her whole heart, but who, for all that love, never knew who I really was.
Did she really say those things? No, but she might have.
Does it feel like that? Absolutely.
I try for truth, and language. Sometimes if the language works, I let detail slide. But I am a writer, and I know my own weaknesses. In the end, the stories have to have their own truth and craft.
Now for a word on “trash.” I originally claimed the label “trash” in self-defense. The phrase had been applied to me and to my family in crude and hateful ways. I took it on deliberately, as I had “dyke”—though I have to acknowledge that what I heard as a child was more often the phrase “white trash.” As an adult I saw all too clearly the look that would cross the face of any black woman in the room when that particular term was spoken. It was like a splash of cold water, and I saw the other side of the hatefulness in the words. It took me right back to being a girl and hearing the uncles I so admired spew racist bile and callous homophobic insults. Some phrases cannot be reclaimed. I gave that one up and took up the simpler honorific. By my twenties, that was what I heard most often anyway. Even rednecks get sensitized to insults, abandon some and cultivate others. I have not been called white trash in two decades, but only a couple years ago, I heard myself referred to as “that trash” in a motel corridor in the central valley in California.
In 1988, I titled this short story collection Trash to confront the term and to claim it honorific. In 2002, Trash still suits me, even though I live over here in California among people who are almost postconscious. In Sonoma County it makes more sense to call myself a Zen redneck, or just a dyke mama. What it comes down to is that I use “trash” to raise the issue of who the term glorifies as well as who it disdains. There are not simple or direct answers on any of these questions, and it is far harder to be sure your audience understands the textured lay of what you are doing—specially if you are in Northern California rather than Louisiana, and in 2002 rather than 1988. And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us—displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
Dorothy Allison
Guerneville, California, 2002
Deciding to Live
Preface to the First Edition
There was a day in my life when I decided to live.
After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by