CHAPTER 27
Standing Up
Angelina Grimké, the daughter of an aristocratic, slave-holding Southern family, became, as a matter of conscience, an abolitionist. Publicly championing the unpopular abolitionist cause constituted an act of engagement and an example of conscience in action. In 1835, Angelina converted her older sister Sarah to the abolitionist cause and together they became the first women to speak in public for the black slave and, later, for women’s rights. They became founding activists in a pair of vital movements.
As activists, they persuaded their mother to give them the slaves who constituted their share of the family estate, whom they immediately freed. In part as a testament to their Quaker faith, they began speaking and lecturing in New York and New England against slavery, speaking engagements that included Angelina’s three effective appearances before the Massachusetts legislative committee on antislavery petitions in 1838.
In addition, Sarah wrote, among other nonfiction pieces, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836), urging abolition, and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837). Angelina wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836). Standing up for abolition equaled engagement; speaking out made them activists; but quietly sitting and dealing with the challenges that attend to writing an effective nonfiction piece amounted to something else. Creating something that could move a listener constituted an act of engaged creativity. This is a primary way that a writer can stand up for what she believes, by filling public spaces with her creative efforts.
A songwriter, when he attends a rally, is engaged. If he helps organize the rally, he is an activist. But when he composes a song for the cause, that composing is an act of engaged creativity. It is an act that requires that he make use of his talents, skills, mind, heart, hands, and personal presence in ways that are different from—not better than or more courageous than, but different from—the way he uses himself when he signs a petition, writes a check, or builds a barricade. In exactly the same sense, a physician who travels to Africa without pay to provide medical services for the indigent poor is engaged and an activist; but if, upon arriving, she discovers that she must invent new procedures because of conditions on the ground, that need demands that she engage the creative part of her nature, the part that innovates and dreams up new combinations. Both the protest song and the new procedure are acts of engaged creativity, that is, creative effort in ethical service.
Engagement is conscience in action and engaged creativity is creative effort in ethical service. A writer can do his part in the struggle to keep civilization afloat in two different ways: as a person and in his art. As a person, there are organizations to join and movements to support. He can also turn over a portion of his time to making art with an overt social and political bent, as, for instance, Richard Dawkins did when he wrote The God Delusion or Michael Isikoff and David Corn did when they wrote Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of Iraq. That is a real option.
“Engagement” is not a new word or a new idea and “the engaged artist” is a well-known designation in existential literature. Both “engaged creativity” and “the engaged artist” are useful phrases and we should begin to use them—and live them— more. An “engaged artist” is someone whose body of work is political and who perhaps is always political. This is admirable but it may not be the way you want to live your life. “Engaged creativity,” by contrast, only requires that you spend a percentage of your time on sociopolitical writing. Maybe you write one kind of novel most of the time but every so often you try your hand at a Brave New World or an Animal Farm.
We need our writers to bring their best efforts to the struggle against the reactionary forces that, wherever and whenever they can, tyrannize others. We need our writers to create iconic work that speaks the truth and that provides us with a powerful shorthand way of thinking and speaking—a shorthand such as “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian.” We need these things more every day. Most writers do not want to do this work as their only work or as their primary work, but perhaps they can commit to being engaged part-time. Can you?
The domestic and worldwide forces lined up against reason and justice are considerably more powerful, more ruthless, and more single-minded than we are. They have slogans and enforcers: we seem always to have only ourselves. Because we seem only to have ourselves, we feel exhausted and defeated even before we begin. How can I, a lone individual, make a dent? We feel past absurdity, past irony, past despair, and find ourselves disempowered and equal only to watching television. And yet it is exactly where we find ourselves that we must make our significance.
I invite you onto the path of at least occasional “engaged creativity.” There is a public space for you to inhabit as a writer, one where you add your voice to the voices of others and defend with your pen those principles you deem important. We need you there, in that public space, despite the risks to your livelihood, your friendships, and your place in society that you invite by going public.
LESSON 27
Pepper public spaces with some engaged writing in which you stand up for what you believe. You can still be charming; you can still be amusing; you can still be witty. Just be sure to stand up.
To Do
1. Take a risk in your writing, any kind of risk, so as to begin to acquire the habit of risk-taking as a writer. Remember that when you take a risk it is likely to feel risky! Learn to deal with the anxiety and fear that standing up provokes.
2. Pick an issue—illiteracy, intolerance, exploitation, the proliferation of nuclear weapons—and create a piece of fiction or nonfiction that is at once beautiful and polemical. Try your hand at marrying art and conviction.
3. Think about how you are holding the words “private” and “public.” Are you intending to remain private even after your work goes public? Or are you ready to inhabit public spaces such as radio studios and lecture platforms?
4. Stand up. We need you.