In 1991, as the novelist Barbara Kingsolver marched outside the Tucson federal building to protest America’s involvement in the Persian Gulf war, a man sped by in a pickup truck and screamed, “Hey Bitch, love it or leave it!” Kingsolver, whose anti-war animus had already driven her to rip yellow ribbons off car antennas, obliged her heckler. She ran off to Spain to ride out what she called the “clamor of war worship” that had taken hold in the States.
Kingsolver herself has become the object of literary cult worship among a multiplying sect of young, white, mostly female readers. They are hooked on her soft, multicultural tales of strong women in strange circumstances. Still, ask one of them about her self-expatriation during the war, and you’re likely to be met with surprise, if not disbelief. Like devotees of daytime soap stars, Kingsolver’s fans identify her with her fictional heroines: She is their girlfriend, their confidant. But what would they think of the unmediated agitprop of the real ingsolver at Ladies Night Out?
Kingsolver is an unreconstruct Jessica Gavora is director of programs at the New Citizenship Project in Washington, D. C. ed leftist. But her first rule of writing fiction, she told the Arizona Republic, is that in the U. S. ” you’re not allowed to mix art and politics.” To do so is to risk the censorship that the American establishment imposes on “cultural workers” who dare to question prevailing national passions. In her nonfiction, Kingsolver labels the U. S. soldiers in Desert Storm war criminals and baby killers; but she is cagier in her novels. There, she conveys her message by stealth, layering it under easy, flowing prose, engaging characters, and a biting wit. Though her politics are radical, her aesthetics are quaintly didactic. “The artist’s maverick responsibility,” she writes in a new collection of essays entitled High Tide in Tucson (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $ 22), “is sometimes to sugarcoat the bitter pill and slip it down our gullet, telling us what we didn’t think we wanted to know.”
Artificially sweetening her bitter political medicine has paid off for Kingsolver. Since 1988, three of her feel-good, eco-feminist novels — The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven — have become bestsellers.
Once in paperback, her books stay in print and continue to sell. Kingsolver’s publisher, Harper-Collins, boasts that she has had combined paperback fiction sales of 1.5 million. That’s a lot of recycled paper. What’s more, Kingsolver has built up her following largely by word-of-mouth, almost entirely outside the “literary-industrial complex.” Independent booksellers, whose customers tend to be particularly receptive to her multicultural, New Age message, love her. She packs their customers in at her frequent signings and readings, spending time to talk with fans and linger over autographs.
It’s not that her novel s aren’t political — they’re full of descriptions of the rapaciousness of Western culture, paeans to Mother Earth, and some not-so-subtle disparagements of men. Two of them deal with a deep dilemma for the politically correct: Can a single white mother adopt an Indian child, taking her off the reservation and into the white world? Or is she denying the child her cultural heritage and continuing the cultural genocide of white against Native American?
Her politics are consciously inclusive; the aim of the novels is to (as they say) bring us together. Kingsolver’s characters are not crusaders but ordinary people made heroes because they battle forces larger than they. Her protagonists are all women — single women, mostly — yet they are not manhaters, and they retain their sense of humor. Her villains are distant, ubiquitous forces — corporations intent on exploiting workers and raping the land, or governments bent on oppressing the working class. There are no unhappy endings.
Success seems to have emboldened Barbara Kingsolver. In High Tide in Tucson, her first major work of nonfiction, she dispenses with the soft focus she uses in her fiction to blur the sharp edges of her politics. In interviews publicizing the book, as well as in the essays themselves, she has become more direct and less artful in packaging her message. Above all, she seems relieved. The weight of her art has been lifted: She can finally speak her mind.
And if Kingsolver the novelist is a gentle allegorist, Kingsolver the essayist is a screechy polemicist. She has a long list of grievances — everything from the Contras to private property — but she reserves special ire for the “information industry.” The media, she charges, are feeding Americans a steady diet of empty news calories. She’d like us to sink our teeth into something more nutritious, albeit less tasty. The U. S. role in Latin America, for instance. “Few U. S. citizens are aware that our government has routinely engineered assassinations of democratically elected heads of state in places like Chile and Guatemala, and replaced them with such monstrous confederates as Augusto Pinochet and Castillo Armas,” she writes. ” Why do those dictators” names fail even to ring a bell in most redblooded American heads? Possibly because our heads are too crowded with names like O. J. and Tonya.”
Unlike the New York publishing houses she berates for turning away Ramsey Clark’s accounting of alleged U. S. Gulf war crimes even as they eagerly embrace O.J.’s musings tom jail, Kingsolver takes her role in the information industry very seriously. And she sees limit- less possibilities for enlightening her fellow citizens. For men, she is the wise post-feminist teacher. “Through art, a woman can give a male reader the unparalleled athletic accomplishment of childbirth, or the annihilation of being raped,” she writes in High Tide in Tucson. “If every man knew both those things, I would expect the world to change tomorrow.” For taxpayers, she is the voice of conscience: “Public debate dickers and rages over our obligation to fund the welfare system — a contribution of about $ 25 a year from each taxpayer on average, for keeping the poorest among us alive. How can we haggle over the size of this meager life preserver, while shiploats of money for death sail by unchallenged? What religion of humankind could bless the travesty of the U. S. federal budget?”
Kingsolver looks at America and sees a nation in need of a new set of national stories — and she’d like to be the one to write them. Our old ones, grounded as they are in the glorification of the individual, have accomplished their objective. They gave us the courage we needed to populate the West, conquer the great rivers, and bring the indigenous peoples to heel. But somewhere along the line, in celebrating the individual, we lost our sense of community.
Reconstructing our sense of community for Kingsolver means deconstructing and discarding those old myths. Foremost among these is the American dream. The gre at hoax of the American experiment is that it has legitimized wealth and stigma tized poverty. In other words, the flip side of our celebration of Horatio Alge r is our demonization of the welfare mother. The notion that anybody can make i t in America with a little brains and a lot of hard work “allows us to perpetua te this huge gulf between the well-off and the desperately poor. If you fall th rough the cracks you must be stupid or lazy or both.” Particularly vulnerable t o this trap are single women, especially single mothers. Although Kingsolver wr ites eloquently of the self-discovery of parenthood, she, like the First Lady, believes that parenting is a communal responsibility. This is a truism that vir tually every country has managed to grasp except for the U. S., which she compa res unfavorably to Cuba and Slovenia in its treatment of children. “If it takes a village to raise a child,” she writes, “our kids are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home.”
It doesn’t really matter if Heather has one mommy or two, or whether she has a mommy at all. The only parent that matters is government, and the current government has produced what she calls an “anti-child political culture.” And you, dear reader, must remember to do your part by always voting to increase taxes and school spending. “If you’re earning promise, the school needs those few bucks more than you do,” she writes.
And apparently, Kingsolver feels that, for now at least, America needs her$ N more than Spain does. She decided to return home after the Gulf war, she says, because “I couldn’t imagine criticizing only from the distance.” The man in the pickup truck outside the federal building in Tucson taught her a valuable lesson. “‘Love it or leave its is a coward’s slogan,” she told The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer recently. “I think a more honorable slogan is ‘Love it and stay’ ‘Love it and get it right.'”
Or, perhaps, her third choice: “‘Love it and never shut up.'” Although she promises to return to fiction, High Tide in Tucson is selling faster than Kingsolver’s novels. Is this a sign that America is ready for Barbara Kingsolver, uncensored? Maybe, but until her message takes hold, Kingsolver’s fidelity to her native land appears to be tenuous. High Tide’s success, she told the Arizona Republic, “gives me faith that this so-called mandate, this right-wing revival that’s doing such horrible things in this country, maybe isn’t so all-inclusive. If I had to believe that the people in this state and in this country really supported that, I would have to leave.” ,
Jessica Gavora is director of programs at the New Citizenship Project in Washington, D. C.
