White Silence is Violence

I have been silent on this blog in part because I've been writing papers for two graduate English literature classes. Below is a reading response to Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga

excerpt from Salt. 

          by Nayyirah Waheed

if we
wanted
to.
people of color
could
burn the world down.
for what
we
have experienced.
are experiencing.
but
we don’t.

— how stunningly beautiful that our sacred respect for the earth is deeper than our rage. 

I “was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is,” Doris Lessing wrote of herself in relationship to the racial injustice she witnessed in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for the 24 years she lived there (Lessing 716). From 1925-1949 Lessing was in the center of social/political conflict resulting from the infiltration of white British settlers onto tribal land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which divided the territory into Native (unaliented) and European (alienated) areas, set the scene for her story, The Old Chief Mshlanga. The story begins with a detached third person black and white point of view. On the land is a “white farm” with a msasa tree “notable for the vivid colorings (pink through copper) of its spring foliage and for the fragrance of its white flowers” a “pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle,” and “a white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape” (718). This Caucasian landscape is contrasted with the “amorphous black mass” of other that “instilled a consciousness of danger, of something unpleasant, that made it easy to laugh out loud, crudely…there is a certain kind of laughter that is fear, afraid of itself” (719).

With this trigger-finger black and white tension in place, Lessing pulls the reader in with a brilliant shift to first-person point-of-view. Bam, we are the white girl walking through corn fields, conscious of the ploughed soil beneath our feet, “the great red clods…like a choppy red sea” (720). The hierarchy of white over black is established and the foreshadowing of bloodshed red on the land is further enforced when we meet Chief Mshlanga “his hair grizzled white, a dark red blanket slung over his shoulders like a cloak” (720).

This story, set in 1925 Rhodesia, was published in 1951 available to an American audience, “a generation radicalized by the civil rights movement of the 1950s” (Behrent). The story still speaks to the “color wars” raging in the United States today in 2016. I read my longing “to let both black and white people meet gently, with tolerance for each other’s differences” (Lessing 721). Until 2012, in my small relatively white landscape of Portland, OR, I thought, like Doris Lessing, that this gentle meeting of races “seemed quite easy” (721). But then there was Trayvon Martin and “Black Lives Matter” and “White Silence is Violence.” Tolerance was never enough and this story is an old, old story. As writer Anne Lamott said in a recent Facebook post, “Life has always been this scary here, and we have always been as vulnerable as kittens. Plagues and Visigoths, snakes and schizophrenia; Cain is still killing Abel and nature means that everyone dies. I hate this. It's too horrible for words.”

I learned as a white dance major in college taking my first African dance class that there was “a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn” (Lessing 721).  I could only imitate and hopefully not appropriate; I could fill my body with respect and awe and wonder for a culture in a land I would never truly know. Yet today, in Portland, OR, I read “it is my country as well as the black man’s country,” yet unlike Lessing I’m wondering if there really is “plenty of room for all of us, without elbowing each other off the pavements and roads” (721). Tolerance is not enough. Inclusion is not enough. Yesterday, I thought the ideal was pluralism: beyond inclusion to an embrace of our differences so that those differences blend and swirl and spin in a cosmic reverse centrifuge creating a “stunningly beautiful” rainbow Earth.

Today, I’m not so sure. I know that “Silence =Death!” But what do I, a white woman who has never even stepped on any African soil, have a right to say or write today? I am not afraid to speak, I feel compelled to write something because "white silence is violence" and I am a pacifist. But what value do my words have in this narrative? I have experienced discrimination, a loss of civil rights, but my experience is not the black experience and I refuse to co-opt the black narrative. So what, if anything, am I allowed to say today? 

Allowables
-Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

Works Cited:

Behrent, Megan. “A Golden Writer.” Socialist Worker 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 July 2016.

Lessing, Doris. The Old Chief Mshlanga. S. Akbari, W. Denecke, V. Dharwadker, B. Fuchs, C. Levine, P. Lewis, M. Puchner, E. Wilson (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature. (Vol. F 3^rd ed. pp. 716-726) New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2012.