Saturday's Child (66 page)

The trick is to pull off this balancing act—conscientiousness but not guilt, respect but not servility—steadily, never forgetting it has everything to do with fairness and nothing to do with charity. After decades of teetering on this tightrope, I admit to some vanity at being one of the few trusted U.S. women in the international Women's Movement; I've worked hard to earn that trust. Then again, you never
can
earn it. It's a gift.

At first, my idealistic naïveté got bruised. After decades of rhetorically idolizing “the Third World,” what a shock to discover how profoundly racist the Chinese can be, how xenophobic Japanese culture is, how deeply tribal enmities are rooted in parts of Africa, how dismissive of indigenous populations most South Americans are, how many national women's movements resist noticing the inherent connections between sexism and bigotries based on caste, class, homophobia, disability, or age. Sometimes I wonder where my head was during the early years of hardly daring to criticize another culture's cruelties with the same frankness I aim at my own. Actually, such criticism is a form of respect, since it implies a belief in the capacity to change. Not daring that critique shows the limits of a radicalism blind for its own sake, when what's needed is harder to achieve and even more difficult to sustain: an idealism that persists while fully noninnocent about the underside of human nature.

Staying silent in the face of any inequity (for fear of coming across like the Roman) does no good. Speaking up risks provoking the cultural relativism reaction—“What do
you
know about it, you outsider?
We
have no such problems. These have always been
our
ways.” This specious argument never ceases to amaze me. First, if an idea is good it doesn't matter where it comes from—which cultural relativists understand well enough when it comes to the light bulb; pasta originated in China, but the whole world thinks pasta is Italian, so what. Second, what's old and traditional is not necessarily affirmable: think slavery, bound feet, monarchy, stale Christmas fruitcake. Third, if you look and listen carefully enough (which
is where those villages come in), you discover people right
there
who've been speaking out against “our ways” all along.

After a week in the Himalayan foothill villages outside of Kathmandu, I begin meetings with the many women's groups in the city. They are energetic, competitive, overworked. The landlocked little country has Least Developed Nation status, and a 5 percent literacy rate for women (33 percent for men); women have almost no property or inheritance rights and very limited reproductive, divorce, and custody rights; hereditary temple prostitution still thrives in this Hindu fundamentalist society. When I am there, in 1994, the country is newly emerging into fragile democracy after centuries of god kings followed by decades of “hereditary prime ministers.” So the feminist NGOs have their work cut out for them. Yet I notice they are all composed of Brahmin or Chetri (priestly or warrior caste) women. Where, I ask, are the lower-caste women? I am told, “Oh,
they're
not interested in feminism”—an answer inevitably more revealing about its speaker than its subject.

When I seek them out, not surprisingly I find they're very
much
interested. Formerly called “untouchables,” renamed by Mahatma Gandhi
harijan
, or “children of God,” they've now chosen for themselves the name
dalit
, or “the oppressed.” Durga Sob, a small Dalit woman with a lovely heart-shaped face, about thirty years old, is a natural leader. She exudes warmth but has a sweet steeliness about her; she's an anomaly in having managed to get herself educated and even learn some English, although we work with backup interpretation. Quick to grasp the opportunity, Durga makes it clear that she and other Dalit women had approached the women's NGOs repeatedly but had been told that feminists could never come from a low caste. She has heard that there are Dalit women's groups in India, but since none of these call themselves “feminist” Durga wonders if the upper-caste Nepali women aren't right after all. She herself recalls being beaten at school when, at age seven, she mistakenly drank from a well reserved for upper-caste students. But she finds the feminist rejection especially frustrating because “Dalit women are doubly persecuted—by
the caste system and by our own men. Where can
we
find support?”

It takes only a few hours and a few stories. About the separate water fountains in Mississippi in the old days. About the sit-ins and marches. About the founding of the National Black Feminist Organization. About a
good
kind of refusing to stop. Before we leave the room, Durga and her colleagues have formed the first feminist untouchables' group in the world: FEDO, Feminist Dalit Organization. She asks me to be godmother patron of the group and makes me an honorary Dalit. I'm so honored I blush, and my red face provokes giggles and hugs all around.

For the remainder of my three weeks in Nepal, we are joined at the heart. Whatever meetings I attend—with high-caste women in Parliament, in NGOs, in the aid community—Durga and/or some of her Dalit sisters accompany me, at my invitation. The Brahmin and Chetri women are eager to meet with this international feminist visitor from New York, to discuss organizing, to ask about international funders, to raise their profiles in interviews so that I will write about them, to hear different strategic approaches that have worked elsewhere in winning legislative and judicial reforms. But if they meet with me, they find they're meeting with Durga and FEDO as well. At first it seems simple enough: the upper-caste women are stiff but courteous. Then I spy them in a corner sprinkling their heads and hands with water to purify themselves after having sat at a lunch table polluted by the presence of Dalits. Still, after an intensive three-day workshop I conduct on tactics—opened by an exercise where each of the forty women present has to speak as if she came from a caste other than her own—I spy a new mix of women in those corners, this time arguing animatedly, crying quietly, sometimes embracing for a moment, awkwardly, across caste. It's just a beginning. None of us are so naive as to believe it won't take a
long
time. But Durga slips a gift of bangles onto my wrist, then gives me the high fives I've taught her.

As I write these words, the one image from the global Women's Movement I keep on my desk is a photo showing the garlanded, festooned front entrance of the FEDO office on the day it opened. The legible plaque reads, in Sanskrit and English, “First Feminist Dalit Organization.”

By the end of 1987, the novel was out, I was finishing
The Demon Lover
, and Blake was at his chosen school, Berklee College of Music in Boston, coming home at least once a month, with the snobbery of the Manhattan born, for his fix of garlic bagels and “
proper
Chinese food, not served with
bread
, forgodsake.” Meanwhile, the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, with Karen Berry as its executive director, had pioneered the first Emergency Action Alerts ever to be focused on the plight of women persecuted specifically for work on female human rights.

The romantic tumult had calmed down. Marilyn's Australian lover, understandably enough, had
had
it, and definitively broke off the relationship. Marilyn continued her lecture trips to North America, which were quite lucrative since the exchange rate was almost two to one. She then proceeded to buy a farm herself, about an hour's drive outside of Auckland, and begin fixing it up. I'd started to trust that we weren't always about to say farewell. In fact, we were easing into our own coupledom, mocking our situation by claiming we were like any other middle-class pair with a city pad and a country home—except that in our case one happened to be in New York and the other in New Zealand.

Once I had completed
The Demon Lover
, I hit the road again. These days, when I was invited to another country for a conference, or to speak, organize, or write about women there, I asked if they also needed a feminist economics person since I just happened to know an excellent one. This was the start of our meeting all over the world—oh, the anticipation, the excitement of those encounters!—doing our political work, then stealing four or five days of vacation alone together before flying off, wet-eyed, in opposite directions.

One such meeting took place in Brazil in 1987, when Bella and I were the U.S. presence at a gathering of CEDAW (the Committee on the UN Convention to Eradicate All Forms of Discrimination against Women), and I arranged for Marilyn to be invited as an expert witness on women's unpaid labor—which in fact she was. By the third day I'd managed to miff Bella by apparently insulting the president of Brazil when, during our audience with him, I politely inquired about a timetable for direct elections.
When abroad, Bella had to act like the former congresswoman she was, but I didn't. I was under instructions from poor women in the favelas and from indigenous women who wanted me to raise this question, so what the hell, glad to be of service. When the meetings were over and Bella had grudgingly forgiven me, she, Marilyn, and I went off for a brief holiday first at the home of then Deputy (Congresswoman) Ruth Escobar, and later at the ranch of my old acquaintance the theater director Gilda Grillo. Gilda put us all on horseback—to Marilyn's alarm, my dismay, and Bella's glee as the one horsewoman among us. Bella also trounced everybody at poker until we plied her with cachaça, which slowed her down and made her head wobble enchantingly.

Much as I adored the vacation part of these trips, I also relished working politically with Marilyn. Though we had markedly different styles—she was even more impatient than I am, but was unafraid of acting abrupt or snappish—we learned much from each other. The poem “Two Women”
⁴
captures that connection, describing a large part of what drew and held us together. But I'd deftly forgotten how I'd once tended to embody all poetry in Kenneth. Now I was confusing Marilyn with feminism. I'd once written the line (in “Monster”) “I want a woman's revolution like a lover.” Had I all along really wanted the reverse?

The year 2000 is Brazil's 500th anniversary (the indigenous peoples surely have something to say about that). When news coverage shows crowds celebrating Brazil's “racial democracy,” I think of Maria Alice Santos. I met her in 1987, but later lost her. Since 1994, mail has been returned from her address, and none of my Brazilian contacts know how to find her. I'm afraid she's dead.

She was, in 1987, a tiny, birdlike woman of indeterminate age, bright black skin, a sardonic smile, and a gaze that punctured your ego. She had agreed to meet me because I “came recommended” by some of the favela women, one of whom, who spoke English, kindly came along to translate.
It turned out that Maria Alice had seen me before, at a full-moon Candomblé ceremony to which I'd been invited a few nights earlier.

That led to talk about female spirituality, and then we turned to talking about her work. She wanted to explain her name first, laughing: “Whenever you meet someone called Santos, you know it's almost always because they're born out of wedlock. In Brazil, you see, having no father automatically makes you a saint.” Maria Alice Santos was a secular saint. She'd been working with prostituted Afro-Brazilian women in Rio's back-streets for more than twenty-five years. She'd been talking about HIV/AIDS since the early 1980s, but no officials would listen to her.

“One day they'll find me murdered,” she shrugged. “It might be pimps, or the sex traffickers, porno guys, drug dealers, cops, johns—any of them. They all know while I'm alive, I'll never quit. Getting the girls off drugs, out of the life. Getting the kids—the ones not even menstruating yet—out of the life, into school. It's hard enough being black, and hard enough being poor, but being black, poor, and a woman—that's a ticket to hell. Sex for sale is mostly where poor black women start out here, and mostly where we end up. If politicians cared, they'd find a way to stop prostitution, all right. But they
want
us where we are. So we try to survive. I get money where I can—some girls give me money to help others, like I helped them. We share. I
don't
take Church donations. The Church is another john—it always wants something for its money. I know safe places in the favelas no guys dare go. The women trust me. That's what matters.”

When I offered to help raise money for her work, Maria Alice shook her head. “Look,” she smiled, “nobody ever
listens
to what somebody like me says. Most men never listen to what most women say, anyway. And black women who are poor and live on the street—we don't exist, except as a statistic or a blowjob. Sometimes I want to run into the road and scream,
‘Look at me! I'm human here inside of me!'
So—if anybody listens to you—
you tell our story
. That's what you can do.”

It's a curious way to travel, with the Women's Movement as your guide. When I was seventeen, my mother had sent me briefly to Europe in hopes of ending my adolescent rebellion. She attached me as an informal au pair
to one of her stockbroker friends, a wealthy widower who had an eight-year-old girl. I was grateful to go abroad at all, but I disliked the man, couldn't win over his spoiled, twitchy daughter, was mortified by the flashy “ugly American” way they traveled, and in general felt like a character trapped in a Henry James novel as rewritten by Tom Wolfe. I did manage to escape for a day to Stonehenge, all by myself. Fortunately, that was years before it deteriorated into the tourist site it's now become. I arrived in late afternoon, and the fields were totally deserted. I walked around the towering stones for over an hour, then lay down, like Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, on the altar stone to watch the sun set. It was bliss. There was one other escape—a solo side trip from Florence to Viareggio, to stand on the rocks and fling a rose into the sea where Shelley had drowned. As for the rest of that trip, my poor mother couldn't figure out why I didn't understand this was “the
best
way
any
body could possibly get to see the
world
.”