Like Phyllis Chesler, I am deeply grieved to read of Rebecca Walker's public and, thus far, one-sided argument with her mother Alice ("The Color Purple").
Rebecca Walker feels fundamentally wronged by Alice Walker and has decided to return the favor.
As a daughter and a mother myself, I feel hurt to see such a key, intimate relationship go wrong--to see a chain shattered.
But even more, it hurts to see confession happen in what looks an awful lot like the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong way. It hurts to see the improper use of pain.
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I don't know what's driving Rebecca Walker. I do know, having lived with a severely damaged person and his silences, that I don't feel comfortable with people who are eager to tell strangers all about the worst things that happened to them.
(ED. What I mean by that is: My experience, and not just with this one family member, is that people with serious damage tend to want to protect it rather than expose it. Someone who chooses to publicly describe what people did to him/her, and particularly to describe in detail how it made him/her feel, is someone in a very different place from the hurt people I've known. Each of whom, I can tell you right now, would have "rubbed shit in their hair and run naked down Seventh Avenue"--in Anthony Bourdain's memorable words--before they'd do that. It's something that I don't understand.)
But that is neither here nor there.
In going public with her pain through a tell-all memoir, Rebecca Walker did not, in my opinion, just lash out at her mother. In my opinion, she also lashed out at herself. She set herself up to be dragged into what Jonathan Shay ("Achilles in Vietnam") calls a "hierarchy of suffering."
That's when somebody who had it worse than you decides to pull victim rank on you.
(Jonathan Shay rightly decries the hierarchy of suffering, pointing out that everyone's pain is their own and cannot be compared to anyone else's. I agree with that. But right now it's still an ideal. Hierarchies of suffering are still widely accepted in our world, and Rebecca Walker...well, walked...right into them.)
Then there's the karma of it. In her Salon article, Phyllis Chesler calls it "dangerous" to "[expose] your mother's nakedness in public." Even if your mother exposed your nakedness in public, two wounds don't make a healing.
Still, it would be a lonelier world if the wounded didn't speak.
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And this is why God invented fiction. He invented it for the proper use of pain.
Anne Lamott once famously said she believes in writing for revenge--but with a veil. She used the example of a student whose mother used to deliberately burn his hand on the stove. She had him fictionalize her [ED.: And I mean thoroughly--no romans-a-clef], then told him to cry, havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.
Why is that first step important?
It's important because your pain is bigger than you.
Your pain doesn't even belong to you. It belongs to the pain that generated it and to the pain you yourself, against your own will (or with your complicit denial) will generate. It belongs to the whole stinking fucking world; it belongs to that person right now who is trying so hard not to cry.
May we all make our pain into a gift for them.
