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Culture is the cry of the people, the cry of the ground and earth. It must come out of that and not on to it.
On November 7, exactly one week before she died, I received a letter from Meridel LeSueur. The handwriting was difficult to decipher; she had been in the hospital since January. She had not been in good health for years. My students, who each semester read her novel The Girl, knowing that she had been born in 1900, would often ask if she was still alive. I would answer, "Yes" and begin a tale of life and work: quitting school at 16, going to Hollywood and working as a stunt woman, living with Emma Goldman, meeting all the great political radicals and radical writers, being harassed by the government, her children's stories, her poetry, her very human spirit of endurance. "Survival," she said, "is a form of resistance."
Now I must answer, "Yes, she is alive but only in the spirit revealed in her writing and expressed through the influence she had on those who knew her." And she was a great spirit. Though we met only a few times, her writing made an organic connection with me: I considered her one of my dearest friends. We had been out of touch for several years but got re-connected just before she died. More than any writer I know, she struggled with the processes inherent in the act of writing. She spoke of this struggle in cultural/political terms as "the fetish of being outside." She knew that the greatest challenge for a writer is to be both witness and participant, and she lived this challenge as did no other. And, of course, she suffered for this integral belief. The FBI hounded her and her family. Publishers blacklisted her. Literary associates shunned her because she refused to adhere to their particular party line. But when the books were made available, often through heroic efforts on the part of small press publishers, the readers responded. The readers were always out in front of the critics. Someday when more of her writings are published, as well as her notebooks and notes for novels she was working on, people will see what an amazing innovator she was. Her influence on American fiction is yet to be fully felt.
Outside the world of commercial publishing, that place where the art of writing is still alive, there is a lot of talk about the unique quality of the small press. This quality, though, is hard to define except in numerical terms: small circulation, readership, profit & loss. Meridel LeSueur knew what was unique about the small press. Only the small press collective keeps alive the people's culture. In her letter to me she asked if I could collaborate with her on a sequel to her novel The The DreadRoad. She did not really expect this of us, though if I lived nearby and she were in good health we would have considered such work, and I would have been honored to help her as I could. I suspect she asked this of others as well. I had read that novel in manuscript nearly fifteen years ago, and it has haunted me ever since. It is innovative (not experimental since she was so sure of her technique) and political (not "politically correct" since she was so sure of her basic instincts and loyalties) in a way that the American literary establishment seems only capable of appreciating in the fiction of foreigners. She wrote in the letter that "all real writing is collective." She wrote from that belief in the midst of the impossibility of its realization. And for that I admired her more than any other writer I know. And for her living out the most basic of metaphors, its heart and soul, the ability to "carry across" meaning through language, she exposed every genuine writer's essential vulnerability before the mystery of human language. And in this heartless and soulless time, her living through nearly the entirety of the bloodiest century of our history, she persevered. And because of her ability with our language and her faith in our humanity, we loved her.
I think that culture is not something that you figure out from outside. Culture is the cry of the people, the cry of the ground and earth. It must come out of that and not on to it. -- Meridel LeSueur, Quindaro, #8-9, 1981
I think it's important to break open our language like an egg and see what it really is and see how it really affects us. I think that academically the language has been made into a very imperialistic language of naming, of manipulation, of advertising and so on, and even our political use of the language is manipulative and concealing. -- Quindaro, 8-9, Panel with Jack Conroy, Tom McGrath, Fred Whitehead
Perhaps Meridel wrote her own best eulogy in many poems and stories, including this short part from her long poem, actually notes taken on one of her many bus trips through America. The selections below are from Word is Movement, Journal Notes From Atlanta to Tulsa to Wounded Knee, published by Mary McAnally's Cardinal Press, 1984.:
A whole part
I am he that slaved in the sugar cane
I am he that was black and invisible
I am he that fled north with no map from swamp to swamp
as the cell contains everything so he contains in his
single body riding on the bus in the fouled night.
All is lighted sulphuric light of memory
The light is fed by meeting other lights
is carried by those towers
is strengthened
does not lose power but gains it
conveyed across space because of alternate currents
I am he who is here
containing it all
like uranium I can spill and spread in all earth and flesh
and explode in one great light
lighting the world
Now that she is dead, we need to listen all that more carefully to how clearly her message was as to how to live. This from Part III, Tulsa:
We must live. We must live.
We live in our city we have built with our hands.
In our streets we bear freedom's music through dense smoke.
Through the rubble of traffic, through unemployment, hunger,
and corporate power, widening its poisonous sinews
around our limbs.
We stand alive, a hurricane of people.
Hurricane of terrible and beautiful force.
Hurricane of the terrible breath of freedom.
Look and see each other massed around the green earth,
remember, comrades, we are together, steady.
It comes like this -- the song -- the gentle giant hum of earth
and its sons and daughters are not in canisters of bombs.
Seek and find each other in the root dark,
in the dusty faces, in the resurrected hearth,
in the raised fist, in the global shout and hurricane.
-- Meridel LeSeuer
-- Joe & Barbara Napora napora@ramlink.net
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