"First, They Said": Alice Walker's Poem For All Seasons (Alas!)

Ever since I discovered "First, They Said" (Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful, 1984), I cannot recall a single semester of teaching where it has not figured—a poem for essential reading and discussion; a handy illustration for me to wrap up a lecture on postcolonial theories; a sample of elegant understatement and explosive irony. Alice Walker's poem is for all seasons and climes (alas!). Let us hope tomorrow's world will prove this poem's scenario to be too unspeakably bizarre and incredibly silly to warrant any discussion. For now, sadly, its point is embarrassingly true. The several Indian classes and contexts in which I have discussed this poem have helped us see ourselves ineluctably join the chorus that speaks the poem. There could not be a more humbling moment.

"First, They Said" is sung by victims of sectarian prejudice and discrimination ("we") about their perpetrators ("they"). That neither fold claims any distinctive identity in terms of nation, region, physical geography, race, color, gender, caste, class, or religion makes Walker's song truly universal. The irony of this "universality" is easy to grasp even for students who have not yet had a decent opportunity to suffer. Walker's language here is mercilessly plain; it generates the kind of irony for readers that they least expect. For don't we recognize, for starters, that for all the cruelty of continuing oppression and the inhumane repressive regimes in place, "they" and "we" are on talking terms? Does it matter, my students wonder, that the poem is in English—easily identified in our classrooms as the colonial master's language? No, in fact. Oppressive regimes seem to speak the same language; within such regimes we seem to hear it as ours. (Translated into another language, only the words change; the poem will still mean all the mean things rolling out from the Oppressor's tongue.) "We" and "they" generate seemingly endless binaries without which discourses of alterity cannot be sustained—call them the Colonizer and the Colonized, the Resident and the Alien, the Native and the Other, the Globalist and the Localist. The sexists, racists, imperialists, capitalists, bureaucratic bullies, and obstructionists of social reform everywhere speak much the same language, and their victims again respond pretty much like those dignified and demure selves in Walker's poem.

Walker may not immediately re-set the thresholds of inhibition and tolerance in any society but an English class might well be the initial site where the great dialectic between Culture and Society works out to modest lengths. The tropic reversal of irony here is a detail to which, therefore, I draw my class's attention. If my students are apt to believe with the Identity Theorists that "We" occupy multiple subject positions, we do not, surely, in a regime that deploys universalist traps. Walker's parodic universalism makes this point, but more. We learn to speak (and respond unwittingly to) the Oppressors' insidious language. We capitulate, without dignity, without tragedy:

Here's money, they said. Raise an army among your people, and exterminate yourselves.

In our inferior backwardness we took the money. Raised an army among our people.

And now, the people protected, we wait for the next insulting words coming out of that mouth.

If we can recall some recent examples from international politics, we shall easily see how Walker's poem breaks past even the discipline of irony.

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