"Sitting Around the Volcano"

In October, Meridel LeSueur was invited to speak at a three-day conference on "Technology and Society: Human Values and Policy Making," held at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), Ms. LeSueur focused on the responsibility of writers, poets, and other artists to speak to the human consequences of economic and technological change, and to create a vision of hope in the face of the destruction brought by what she calls "the machine." She has graciously given Multinational Monitor permission to print excerpts from her talk and one of her poems. We publish them here as a special New Year presentation to our readers.

In these wonderful three days of discussing the world, the global world, the private world, and the small world, it seems to me like we've been sitting around a volcano that promises [both] destruction and a new kind of reality.

In the 19th century, Engels said that we have two great forces in our society. One is the morbid, the corpse of the old society which brings destruction of various kinds as we see now. The other is the viable, the new birth of the new society.

As a writer and a participant of our society for all these years, I feel that the image of the new birth of society is what the intellectuals and the so-called conscious people should bring forth. We have had great literature about the corpse; [and] God knows, the corpse is in a state of extreme decay and danger. So I would like to represent here the feeling of the new image. It seems that we have a responsibility of presenting that new image and not the image of despair and decay and even absolute destruction.

I feel that there has been in our society, our culture, and education, a conspiracy to hide the true history of our democratic people and the struggles of our people in the development of imperialism in the world. It is really terrifying the way that people come out of higher education with very little knowledge of the immense and great struggle of our people through the 19th and 20th century against the development of the greatest giant power that has ever existed in the world.

The machine, it seems to me, represents this corpse, and at the same time, the viable new birth of a new form, a new structure of society, which is so exciting.

In 1923, one of the great cultural disasters was the publishing of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. I was 23 years old. We had just ended a very despairing war and we had found out that it had not been the war to save democracy. Not one young man that was in my class in high school came back from Europe; my generation committed suicide. [This created] a tremendous despair, and in the midst of this, came The Wasteland. You probably don't think that culture has that much influence, but this was deathly, terrible. There was no use in anything. You went out in a whimper, not a bang.

I was very delighted to see in the new William Carlos Williams' letters, written in 1930 to T.S. Eliot, in which Williams says to him: this is one of the most terrible poems, coming at this time showing disaster and pessimism and despair. And he said a very strange thing, he said this is preparation for the bomb. Now nobody was thinking in 1930 specifically of the bomb. They were still trying to split the atom in Berkeley. So I think this was a tremendous illumination.

But subtle seepage of this kind of poetry is like a chemical poison that plants Faustian dissension: double thinking on one hand, and on the other hand, maybe not. This paralyzes you.

At the same time, during this period we have had growing simultaneously a new kind of reality, which I call global reality, a global grazing of consciousness... I feel that by necessity the struggles of the people now are becoming global. If you are going to have multinational corporations, you are going to have a multinational people. It's not a mystique any longer. I was a socialist when I was ten years old, and we used to talk about the international working class. We didn't have any basis for that word, except in slight events that happened, so I think that we are coming back now to the great feeling that only the oppressed bear the moral and physical force of humanity. Only the oppressed can now afford to be human.

I think that every person has a responsibility of creating the image of the choice between death and life. Do we have to have inventions that threaten the human being? Aren't we here on this earth, this great green earth to create a human society? Everything should be measured by the measure of the great human body and the great body of earth. Tolstoy said, "The art of the future will not be a continuation of the art of the present, but will develop upon completely new foundations."

I believe in America that we have a great people's democratic art, that most of you aren't even conscious of. It's said in sophisticated circles that we do not have an art. I went to Greenwich Village when I was 15 looking for this miraculous cosmopolitan art. I went from Iowa and when I got to the Village I stayed in a rooming house where everybody was from Iowa. So I came back and I wrote in 1930 a kind of declaration saying that I was coming back to the Middle West. This was my country. It had great drawbacks and Puritanism and despair, but I was going to stay there, and live or die in my country, and I have done that.

Let us all return. It is the people who give birth to us, all culture, who by their labors create all material and spiritual values. No art can develop until it penetrates deeply into the life of the people. The source of the American culture lies in the historic movement of our people, and the artist must become the voice, messenger, and awakener, sparking the inflammable silence, reflecting back the courage and the beauty. He must return to the people, partisan and alive with warmth, abundance, excess, and confidence.

Albert Parsons [a nineteenth century labor organizer involved in the Haymarket Riot] when they put the black cloth over his face before hanging him because he asked for the eight hour day, said through the mask, "Let the voice of the people be heard." And I believe that this is inevitable, that this is what is happening now in our culture.

It isn't mysterious that only the oppressed can be the inheritors of the struggle for humanity in the last three centuries; they literally have nothing to lose. Marx said a century ago that they had nothing to lose but their chains. The people who have to defend their property become the murderers and the assassins. I believe that this is the basis for great hope and courage and to fight the pessimism.

The meeting of the International Women's Union in Copenhagen two years ago came to a great conclusion, saying that 80 percent of the exploited labor in the future will be women. I would like to tell my mother, which seems to be an impossible thought, that within a few years, there would be an international women's union because of the world exploitation of women. All of the garments of Sears, made in Korea, at 50 cents an hour. Along the border of Mexico I went into factories where the electronic companies make all of their transistors with the labor of Indian, Chicano, and Spanish women, at 50 cents an hour, or less, with terrible conditions. And they'll be blind in a couple of years, and there is no security or pensions, nothing.

It seems to me that the academic world has the chance to contribute the great knowledge, skill, technique, thinking, to create this image in all of us, to destroying the T.S. Eliot image that was so vicious. We are having a struggle among the poets, and writers, and artists that have been infected with the paralysis, to write this new image, to create this image of the global world. The possibility of a world without nations, the possibility of food, the possibility of energy. It's not a possibility, it's a reality.

I would like to read a poem that I wrote for the Vietnamese Women's Union during the Vietnamese War. The Women's Union asked a delegation of women from America to come there, who brought penicillin and pencils, things that they didn't have. And so I sent this poem, called "Solidarity, or "Doan Ket" in Vietnamese. It was translated into Vietnamese, and was circulated on the front of the fighting. I think that it bears the images that we have been talking about here, sitting around the volcano, dodging the lava that is coming out...

Doan Ket (An excerpt) Sisters, the predators plan to live within our bodies. They plan to wring out of us unpaid labor. Wrench their wealth from our bodies. Like the earth they intend to bore inside the woman host, open the artery like weasels, use, consume, devour, drill for oil, eat the flesh of the earth mother. Like the earth they will consume all the woman flesh and the commodities of her being. The harbors of the world will be for the sale of her body. The sweat shops will multiply stolen wealth of her living skin. They slaver at the cheap labor of women around the world. They will ground us on the metate, like living corn. We will be gutted an used by the Companies to make wealth. General Motors, Ma Bell, Anaconda, pickers of cotton and coffee, hanging our babies on our backs, producers of hand and brain and womb. The world eaters sharpen their teeth. Out of the unpaid labor of women they will triple their wealth. Women far down under are trashed, pressed into darkness, humiliated, exploited. Half the Indian women of South Dakota sterilized, the salt savor of our seat tiding like an ocean. Brothels called meat markets in all the ports of the conqueror. In solidarity I stood at the gates of Honeywell where the "Mother Bomb" is timed and triggered. I hid my grandsons from the gun. I crouched under the terrible planes of Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger. I felt the boots on your throat as my own. I saw the guns pointed at us all. It was the gun used on my sister. Now in the "white house" another mask of white criminals turn upon us, on our native people at Wounded Knee, cut food for our children and promise us a bigger army. Children are shot down. I hear children crying at the black belt. Women of the earth, bear the weight of the oppressor, bearing us down into deep to glow upward from the dark, from the womb, from the abyss of blood, from the injured scream, from below we glow and rise singing. We bring to you our fire     We pledge to you our guerilla fight against the predators of our country We come with thunder    Lightning on our skin Roaring the womb singing    Our sisters       Singing Choruses of millions    Singing