The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

of another incursion against the oppressor - to show that he

75

Heartbreak

had not won, nor had he created a paralyzing fear, nor had he

stopped one from risking one’s life for freedom.

I haven’t read Kazantzakis since I lived on Crete in 1965. I

have never read Zorba the Greek, his most famous novel

because of the movie made from the book, a movie I saw

maybe a decade or two later on television. Freedom or death

was how I felt about segregation back home, the Vietnam

War, stopping the bomb, writing, making love, going where

I wanted when I wanted. Freedom or death was how I felt

about the Nazis, the fascists, the tyrants, the sadists, the cold

kil ers. Freedom or death was how I felt about the world

created by the compromisers, the mediocrities, the apathetic.

Freedom or death encapsulated my philosophy. So I wrote a

series of poems cal ed (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose

poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a

novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on

Burning Boyfriend; and poems and dialogues I later handprinted

using movable type in a book cal ed Morning Hair. The burning boyfriend was Norman Morrison, the pacifist who had set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War.

76

Discipline

I learned how to write on Crete. I learned to write every day

I learned to work on a typewriter that I had rented in

Heraklion. I had thin, light blue paper. I’d carve out hours for

myself, the same every day, and no mat er what was going on

in the rest of my writer’s life I used those hours for writing.

I learned to throw away what was no good. One asks, How

does a writer write? And one asks, How does a writer live?

At first one imitates. I imitated in those years Lorca, Genet,

Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller. I read both Miller

and Lawrence Durrel on being a writer in Greece. It seemed

from them as if words could stream down with the light. I did

not find that to be the case, and so I thought that perhaps I

was not a writer. Then one wants to know about the one great

book: can someone young write only one book and have it be

great - or was there only one Rimbaud for al eternity and the

gift is al used up? Then one needs to know if what one wrote

yesterday and the day before has the aura of greatness so that

the whole thing, eventually, would be the one great book even

though that might have to be fol owed by a second great

book. Then one wants to know if the greatness shows in one’s

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