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The Paula Gordon Show |
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The Paula Gordon Show |
| 3 R's | |||
Tell the truth, do what you can and expand beyond your
own self-imposed boundaries, says Pearl Cleage. How? Put her “3R’s”
to work building community -- Reality, Reason and Revolution. |
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Conversation 1 Pearl Cleage tells Paula Gordon and Bill Russell why she thinks it’s time to add “reality, reason and revolution” to “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.” Telling the truth is revolutionary, Ms. Cleage says, and explains. |
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Conversation 2 The vital role of stories and story-telling is explored, focusing on truth, honor, beauty and community. Ms. Cleage describes her novels as “revolutionary romances.” Challenging us to bridge generational divides, she declares grandmothers more interesting than television, expresses concern that we are not getting what we need to sustain life from TV. Search out what is worth watching on TV, she urges, and offers examples. All-black environments are completely natural to her, Ms. Cleage says, and shows how her fiction reflects that life experience. |
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Conversation 3 Ms. Cleage says she is always conscious of community, tracing her social activism from her earliest days to the present. To address America’s huge problems, she goes back to babies and simple things like the need to protect women and children, Ms. Cleage says, because we can do that. She describes how she puts that philosophy to work in her novels, allowing people to see possibilities, start where they are, see something better by the end. She remembers how her mother taught her this lesson. |
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Conversation 4 We need to understand honest differences between people and cultures, Ms. Cleage says, saddened when government officials denounce other cultures, impose American ways on others. She objects to the arrogance of telling instead of asking. Everything she writes, Ms. Cleage says, comes out of questions she has for herself. Using one of her plays, she describes the importance of empathy, then examines racism, sexism and how the two are inseparable. The more we talk about hard subjects, she insists, the less frightening they are, which is why she addresses violence against women in her novels. “If he hits you, it’s not love,” she declares. |
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Conversation 5 The double oppression of being black and female puts black women in a unique position in America, Ms. Cleage says. Many black women who live feminism resist the word, Ms. Cleage says, choosing it for herself because “feminism” connects her with a worldwide movement. America never had a myth for a black woman, she says, dismissing it as by and for wealthy white men. It’s time to stop thinking about what we want to be and start talking about what we are, she says, or we’ll never fix glaring problems. With a broad look at the media, she says her challenge as a writer always is to find a way to tell the truth to as many people as she can. |
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Conversation 6 We must call things what they are or we can’t understand them, Ms. Cleage believes, describing how her novels demonstrate real love affairs, good parenting, peaceful homes. The way the world is, she says, she is now “anti” all kinds of nationalist, she says, enriching her earlier “black nationalism” to expand beyond boundaries because, she concludes, we are all the same. |
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Acknowledgements Ms. Cleage kindly entrusted us with hard-to-find copies
of her work, for which we particularly thank her. |
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