Story
as Medicine
A Review of
Medicine Stories by Aurora Levins
Morales
Diane R. Schulz
As author Clarissa
Pinkola Estes says in her near classic work,
Women Who Run With the Wolves,
"Stories are medicine...They have such power;
they do not require that we do, be, act
anything -- we need only listen." The small
book of essays, Medicine Stories
(South End Press, 1998), bears out the truth
of Estes statement. Morales tells her story
in simple language, yet with a keen sense of
history. She is very politically aware, and
in the introduction to the book, entitled
"The Political is Personal", she states
clearly that the issues she discusses arise
out of a "twenty-year practice of activism
through which I have tried to integrate
healing myself and healing the
world."
Morales is the
daughter of a Jewish father and a Puerto
Rican mother, both politically active
Communists, who met in New York City where
both were raised. She traces the history of
her dual ethnicity and reveals the close
connections between Puerto Ricans and Jews,
both oppressed peoples, though seemingly for
different reasons. She also reveals the
complex mix of races that comprise Puerto
Rico - African, indigenous Arawak, Spanish,
and conversos -- Spanish Jews who converted
to Christianity to save themselves from the
Inquisition -- and the politics of
interaction between them.
In 1951, Morales'
parents decided to return to her mother's
country to raise their family on a small
farm. But in 1966, her father was denied
tenure at the University of Puerto Rico
because he had taken an active role in the
1965 student protests against the Vietnam
War. "My father was essentially blacklisted
from teaching on the island, my mother wanted
to go back to school and both my parents were
concerned about my approaching adolescence in
a rural community with inadequate education
and a high rate of pregnancy among my
friends. So my father accepted a job in
Chicago and we moved there."
Seen as "white" in
Puerto Rico, Morales became suddenly
"non-white" in Chicago -- a real shock to a
young girl. In the 1970's she became part of
the feminist movement, a natural outcome of
her upbringing. "I also grew up in a family
of activists who were thinking about race and
class and gender and the uses of history and
literature long before there were college
courses to do this in, a mother who was a
feminist in the 1950's, a father who told me
bedtime stories about African and Chinese
history and taught biology as a liberation
science."
In her chapter
entitled "The Historian as Curandera",
Morales gives her readers a step-by-step "set
of understandings" by which she
"de-colonized" her relationship to history.
She presents it as "a kind of curandera's
(healer's) handbook of historical
practice."
Of the 15 points she
outlines, the first four are really the core
of her practice. First, she says, one must
"Tell untold or undertold histories," then
put women in the center of the story rather
than adding them in to men's history. Next
she suggests that one must "Identify
strategic pieces of misinformation and
contradict them," and finally "Make absences
visible."
The role of a
socially committed historian is to use
history, not so much to document the past as
to restore to the dehistoricized a sense of
identity and possibility. Such 'medicinal'
histories seek to re-establish the
connections between people and their
histories, to reveal the mechanisms of power,
the steps by which their current condition of
oppression was achieved through a series of
decisions made by real people to dispossess
them; but also to reveal the multiplicity,
creativity and persistence of resistance
among the oppressed.
Although each chapter
of her book can stand alone as an individual
essay -- with topics ranging from her
personal stories of growing up as a mixed
race child, her recounting of a period of
abuse by "by a small group of adults who
practiced physical, psychological and sexual
tortures" (unbeknownst to her parents) to her
analyses of the history of colonization and
oppression -- Medicine Stories is a
well-integrated presentation. The subtitle of
the book, "History, Culture and the Politics
of Integrity," aptly describes the
integration of her separate essays into a
comprehensive work.
The final chapter,
"Walking the Talk, Dancing to the Music,"
addresses the subject of political activism
and how one can sustain a lifelong commitment
to change without burning out and becoming
cynical. "Long-term activism requires more or
less reliable, ongoing sources of
hopefulness, faith, joy and trust because it
is a matter of believing in and working for
possibilities that are nowhere in sight." She
stresses the need for us to connect with
creative spirit in order to notice the
"miraculous nature of life, how it keeps
coming back, asserting itself in the midst of
destruction." She urges us to integrate the
personal and the political. "The personal
keeps passion alive. A sustained personal
life means attention to what kinds of
relationships we need in order to remember
our goodness, what kind of community keeps us
strong, what nourishment we require in order
to set about undoing the the damages
inflicted on us by our own encounters with
oppression."
Morales has given us
a blueprint for sustained action against
oppression, a way out of victimhood, and a
way to look again at the historical context
of colonialism, racism, sexism, and their
interrelatedness. It's the right kind of
medicine to help us in our search for a
different and better way of life for the
children of Earth.
Medicine Stories is published by South
End Press. Order it from Powell's Independent
Bookstore!
