No Judgement, Just Facts

I don't remember the world and its human inhabitants ever being this divided before. Where most of the population is either shouting, because they KNOW they are right, and everyone else needs to go live on an Island somewhere away from here, or they are tuning out completely because it's all too much noise that they cannot make sense of. This week as I began reading Gwendolyn Brooks and Grace Paley, I felt a surge of relief in what and how they saw the world. Both women wrote about the messy, complicated parts of life without choosing easy sides, and because of this they did not set out to use their art to divide people. They used it to connect them.

Brooks grew up on the South Side of Chicago, surrounded by the rhythm and struggle of Black life in the mid-1900s. Her parents worked hard and valued education. Paley, meanwhile, was born in the Bronx to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents who filled their home with politics and debate. While Brooks grew up hearing jazz and gospel in the streets; Paley heard Yiddish and protest songs. But these open conversations shaped how the saw the world. They knew that words have power and they used that power to connect people to each other, and not to create division.

What impressed me most is how both women wrote about regular people with so much care. Brooks wrote about mothers and neighbors and kids hanging out on corners. Her poem “The Mother” touches me to the core every time I read it. She writes,

“Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All” (Brooks, 1945).

As the reader, those words punch me in the gut and warm my heart at the same time. What is beautiful about this poem is her ability to neither condemn or defend. She puts her situation on the floor at her readers feet for them to see the dilemma and impossible decisions left to women with truly no choice. She makes room for all the feelings and reveals the thoughts that invade her mind about her decision to terminate her pregnancies. That’s what makes her writing so human. She’s not trying to be right; she’s trying to be honest.

Grace Paley does the same thing, but in her own messy, wonderful way. In “A Conversation with My Father,” she’s talking to her dad about how to tell a story. He wants her to write a predictable, yet tragic story, about a woman who ruins her life through her drug addiction. The father is hoping for a tragic (extreme) ending, but she refuses. She tells him, “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (Paley, 1974). That line lifted me. She wants to tell the story that no matter how hard you fall, there is always hope and room for redemption. Nobody is ever stuck. She’s not afraid to leave the story open, just like Brooks isn’t afraid to hold two truths at once.

Both of them write like people who understand that extremes lead to more problems. That blame pushes people into corners to collect bitterness. Brooks writes about racism, motherhood, and poverty with an open heart and an intention of healing. Paley writes about feminism, family, and politics, but keeps it light with the humor that reveals her true nature. Neither of them gets trapped in hate for another side. They believe people are complicated and they give them the room to grow and change through reading their work.

Reading them reminded me of how loud the world has become, and how blaming others for the world's problems is now the excepted behavior. Everyone’s picking a side and shouting that their side is the right side. Brooks and Paley remind me that you can stand for something without closing yourself off. You can tell hard truths with compassion. That’s the kind of writer I aim to be. A writer who doesn’t write to prove a point but rather to make people feel something.

Although their writing style is very different, they meet in the same emotional place. Brooks’s poetry is tight and musical, like jazz, every line deliberate but full of life. Paley’s stories sound like she’s talking right to you, interrupting herself, laughing, pausing, thinking out loud, all while chewing a piece of gum. But both leave you with the same sense about life. It's complicated and messy. It's unfair and beautiful at the same time, and the way to a better world, might just be to talk less and to listen more. We all might learn a thing or two.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “The Mother.” A Street in Bronzeville, Harper & Brothers, 1945.

Paley, Grace. “A Conversation with My Father.” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.