The Woman is Hollering

Old journal 1
So do I stop writing and take the job?
I’m not done with the novel. (But will I ever be? I wake up on the verge of vomiting from terror on my writing days. Too tired with Machi to write at night when I used to write before Machi, because at last at the end of the day and deep into the night I arrived at some sense of myself, sustained some identity as a writer, some sense of domain over my mind and my brain.) And I’m afraid for my livelihood.
So I show up at the interview my neighbor Iliana told me I had to go to. “I went to this interview but the job it’s for you. They’re looking for a writer, who is bilingual Spanish and English. Go even if you don’t want to. At least you’ll be able to write about them.”

Their office is tiny, crammed with desks, stacked with papers and folders and books everywhere. Lots of children’s picture books. Something passionate and zealous is going on there. I am interviewed by a woman who is much older than anybody you ever see in an office. She’s going full steam at an age when everybody else is not even working. She must be at least 70. And she’s dressed the way my grandmother used to dress, in a big flowered dress with lots of blue, and laceup old lady shoes, and her nearly fully white hair is coiled into a bun at the back of her head. The younger woman is almost as intense but less self assured. She’s showing she really likes me. The elder’s name is Mrs. Fletcher. The young woman is named Solly, short for Soledad.
We talk for hours. I tell them about Ventura and how my Father, when he was still for the revolution, worked on the literacy campaign, helped design the campaign. (I don’t tell the interviewers that when it came time to send the young people to the mountains to teach the peasants to read using his methods, my Father had already turned against the revolution. It got away from him, went beyond what he could understand. He got scared. Or the way he had always been scared could be pinned on the revolution. He decided the literacy campaign was meant only to indoctrinate the people into communism. And he forbid me to go with my best friend Angelita to the mountains. That was when my life closed in, away from people. In the very moment when I could have joined the forward thrust of history he wrenched me away from the present. He went into exile, took my family to the City so that I wouldn’t be indoctrinated into communism. But communism found me anyway. And just about 20 years later I was being inducted into another literacy campaign.
(Still not able to sustain an identity as an artist, or not able to sustain the effort, or simply not able, I am forever of the class who have jobs only because other people don’t, forever of the class whose only source of not being poor is to manage the poor. Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte hechar.)
So even though I still have a few months left of unemployment, and am still nowhere finished with my book, the job has found me, it’s come pounding on my door.
I tell them all about the Venturan literacy campaign and my Father and I am swept up by the zeal in the place, and even though I haven’t really decided before I step out the door it’s obvious I will be back. There’s a sense of mission here, and Mrs. Fletcher has somehow got me believing I’d be fulfilling something my Father didn’t complete.
It’s as if by taking this job I were reclaiming a legacy, getting a second chance to join the revolution, or that this job appearing now were a demonstration that the revolution is also going on here, in the City, and not only in Ori’s Party. What I don’t tell them is that I’ve been already involved in several rescue my past, revolution reclamation efforts. I don’t tell them of the years of my life I’ve given to the Party (not managing the poor but aiming to liberate them, us) and that I’m on the rebound from that failed love. The Party crashed, or is crashing. Ori’s on the periphery now after a leadership shakeup and a change in direction. (Do they really think they’ll get X elected to the council?). He’s doing other political things that keep him out at night which he won’t exactly tell me about with people I don’t get to meet. When the First Secretary comes to press him to go back to editing the paper, Ori refuses. He’s got a family now, he tells the man. He’s got to have a job that can pay to raise his child. Me? I’m allowed to drift away. Like most Party women who became mothers, I’m flung off by the centrifuge of Party activity. The First Secretary doesn’t come to ask me if I’m going back as managing editor.
So years ago I give up my dreams of going with the young people on the Venturan literacy campaign. And now I give up my dream of being a writer to go join this zealous woman, heir to John Brown, in her literacy campaign. And come to think of it, I gave up my dream of being a poet once before, when I became a political writer for the Party paper.

But why am I giving up my dream?
Because I’m too afraid? Because I can’t sustain my identity as a writer? Because I’m not able? Is it oppression or is it me?

Days later I am in the barrio, sitting in the parlor of a Catholic priest’s house, trying to figure out how to get my lone first student Carla to learn to read. I’ve reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed (I’d read it before in my Party days) and the best sense I’ve made of it is to show up to this class of all women with photographs of women I’ve gotten at the picture collection of the Mid Manhattan Library. I’ve been to the picture collection before to get graphics for the Party paper. These photographs are my codifications. Carla chooses a wood cut of a woman whom she reads to be screaming. She tells me the woman is hollering and I write the word holler. She’s hollering because of her husband and I write the word husband. Holler and husband become her first words. When I get to know her better I find out her husband makes her holler a lot, he gets drunk and then he gets violent. She finally stopped his beatings by pulling a gun on him. (I decide to wait to learn how she came to have a gun. I wouldn’t want her asking me how I came by my 357 magnum.)
I am now a literacy worker. Hired to teach women to read by writing with them, creating our own literature together will get us someplace. I believe this. I am on a journey here. I recognize this job is truly on my path the way the revolution was. This job is part of my destiny to save all the sentient beings, or redistribute the wealth, or do something that matters with my time on this earth. I don’t know where it will take me, this path, away from poet dream and toward my world changer dream. Or is it my task to realize how the dreams are the same, connected? To make them connect. My task to be a poet with the women in my class. Am I running toward my true life or away from it? Am I running away from freedom toward willing wage slavery? Or am I a witness to wage slavery?
(O was this what I meant for my life? Who am I lying to? Why am I lying? I grieve for my dreams. I want to wear ashes and sackcloth and rend my garments in grief for my dreams.)