Maya Angelou was convinced that words are things. “You must be careful about the words you use,” she cautioned, “or the words you allow to be used in your house.”
For me, words – and the written word, in particular – are a safe harbor. Literature might stir my passions or mollify them with equal facility. And writing restores order to the chaos around and within me. These, however, are words in their purest, untarnished state – a counterpoint to language defiled by ignorance, bigotry, prejudice and sanctimony.
Maya believed that, someday, we’ll be able to measure the power of words and their power to permeate everything around us. “I think they get on the walls,” she said; “they get in your wallpaper, they get in your rugs and your upholstery and your clothes, and finally into you.”
Much has been said and written about the rage and rhetoric unleashed on both sides of the proverbial aisle by the presidential election. And, while I shared the vexation, I did not feel compelled to chime in. That is, not until I encountered them in my backyard. People I haven’t known long, but whom I liked and respected, were swept up in the unbridled and unabashed war of words, and I was, at first, too appalled and mystified to respond. In what increasingly felt like a cultural abyss, an erosion of our very humanity, I was rendered speechless – until last month, when a particularly disturbing conversation prompted me to scrawl just four words on a Post-It note:
“What would Maya say?!”
Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of a tragedy, I found my way out of a maelstrom of anger and grief in the calm confidence of Maya Angelou. Since then, her singular voice – like her infectious smile – has played the role of a trusted friend I can summon with a thought and look to for clarity and candor. “We are neither devils nor divines,” Maya wrote in A Brave and Startling Truth, and she prayed for the humility to remember that even the brute, the bigot and the batterer who dwell among us are God’s children. But the feigned piety and hypocrisy of the self-righteous, pretending to have no skeletons in their closets? They, she asserted, are the most dangerous of all.
When we come to it,
We, this people, of this wayward, floating body,
Created on this earth, of this earth,
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety,
Without crippling fear.
To be sure, I share the consternation of many within and beyond these borders. I am fearful of the uncertainty. Fearful of the widespread hostility. Fearful that we’ve relinquished dignity and decorum, empathy and community, to identity politics. And, mostly, I fear the arrogance and ignorance of those who have sacrificed nothing and no one.
“You’re not in it!” Maya might say. There’s a place inside us no one can touch. “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” Dare to rise above the din. Above the hostility and the hatred. They aren’t a part of you.
“You see?”
Maya Angelou bequeathed to us a wellspring of wisdom. She viewed life as a classroom and herself as both student and teacher. “When you get, give,” her grandmother told her, “and when you learn, teach.” So, Maya lived what she preached, always striving to know better and do better. And with her death, she became one of those great souls about whom she wrote in When Great Trees Fall –
…after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
Maya Angelou bequeathed to us a wellspring of hope – the ability to look beyond our darkest moments to the promise of another sunrise and be grateful. Grateful for having emerged from the darkness a little wiser, stronger and kinder.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes,
Into your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
Copyright © 2016 Timna M. Hurwich. All rights reserved.