Just As I Thought by Grace Paley

Author:Grace Paley [Paley, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466883970
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-10-13T20:00:00+00:00

—1984

Of Poetry and Women and the World

Our panel has a kind of odd definition, and I think the three of us have taken it to mean whatever we want to talk about. And since what I want to talk about partly follows the last panel, it may be a very good way of working our way into other subjects.

I have to begin by saying that as far as I know, and even listening to all the people talking earlier, I have to say that war is man-made. It’s made by men. It’s their thing, it’s their world, and they’re terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it’s made by men. How do they come to live this way? It took me years to understand this. Because when I was a little girl, I was a boy—like a lot of little girls who like to get into things and want to be where the action is, which is up the corner someplace, where the boys are. And I understand this very well, because that was what really interested me. I could hardly wait to continue being a boy so that I could go to war and do all the other exciting boys’ things. And it took my own life, really, for me to begin to change my mind somehow—after a number of years of actually living during the Second World War. I lived a lot in Army camps. And I liked living in those Army camps; I liked them because it was very exciting, and it seemed to be where it was all at, and there were a lot of boys there, one of which, one of the boys, was my husband. The other boys were just gravy, so to speak.

But as time went on in my own life, and as I began to read and think and live inside my own life, and began to work as a writer, I stopped being a boy. At some certain point, I stopped being one, I stopped liking being one, I stopped wanting to be one. I began to think there would be nothing worse in this world than being one. I thought it was a terrible life, a hard life, and a life which would ask of me behavior, feelings, passions, and excitements that I didn’t want and that I didn’t care about at all. Meanwhile, at the same time, what had happened was that I had begun to live among women. Well, of course I had always lived among women. All people, all girls, live among women, all girls of my time and culture live among mothers, sisters, and aunts—and lots of them too. So I had always lived among them, but I hadn’t really thought about it that much. Instead, I had said, “Well, there they are and their boring lives, sitting around the table while the men are playing cards in the other room and yelling at one another. That’s pretty exciting, right?” And it wasn’t

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