Make music, not War
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Inga Muscio, author of Cunt, discusses gender, race, and her new book

Interview by Tamiko Murray

Inga Muscio, author of Cunt, read from her works at the Southern Girls Convention on March 15 at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. In a candid interview with AGR, she spoke about gender issues, race relations and her new book, Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society.

AGR: One thing that you talked about during your reading was all those revolutionary groups during the Vietnam Era that were fighting the same cause but somehow remained separate, and you talked about racism within the activist community. We’ve grown up in this capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, and we’re trying to come together to form this resistance. It’s an issue that is really uncomfortable.

Muscio: One thing that struck me was the February 15th march in LA. I was marching next to this group of Black and Chicano kids. They started doing this really cool chant. I was chanting along with them, but soon the White voices… ‘This is what democracy looks like…’ It enveloped the voices of the kids of color and it was drowning them out. There was all this rhythm to it. It was a different way of chanting than the White way; this beautiful, coming from the heart chant. Why can’t everybody just be like… ‘okay, I don’t know how to chant like this’ or something like that. And it wasn’t like anybody ever acknowledged it. It’s all underneath. That’s what I’m talking about, the racism in the peace movement. It’s like it comes into play in that kind of thing. It was just sort of an analogy for me, to just watch all these voices getting drowned out. I don’t think anybody was consciously saying, ‘Oh, all those Black and Chicano kids are chanting, and we need to shut them up.’ I don’t think it was conscious like that. And I’m like, ‘is this what democracy looks like?’ It’s not what democracy looks like to me. I’ve been working on this book for three years, Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil.

AGR: How did you come up with that title?

Muscio: I was reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. It’s always been a big deal to me in my life, racism and stuff like that, partly from the town I grew up in. Even when I was writing Cunt, it was always something that set heavy in my heart. And so, what actually happened is I was writing, and “the victors of history’s present telling” [excerpt from Cunt]…it came to me. That term threatened to take me into this book [Authobiography of a Blue-Eyed evil], but I was still working on Cunt.

AGR: The current version of Cunt? The blue one or the yellow one?

Muscio: The yellow one…way back then. So that term actually is where that first was born. I was reading something about Malcolm X and it was kind of like a homage to him. Maybe kind of a dubious homage, I’m not sure. But it’s a homage to not just Malcolm X, but just all Black nationalists and all Black revolutionaries that have been thrown in jail or killed or were just oppressed.

AGR: Tell me the subtitle again?

Muscio: My Life and Times in a Racist, Imperialist Society. Working on this book I’ve dealt with a lot of frustration towards White people and also my own indoctrination. It’s a really uncomfortable place to be. It is frightening, but it’s not more frightening than living in ignorance. They don’t know that it’s not as scary. Looking inside your own heart and your own family and your own upbringing and your own history…that’s what’s frightening I guess to a lot of people. We’re not taught to do that in our culture…no matter what race you are. We need to be strong about ourselves, like our own emotions and learning them and stuff like that, you know. So I’m trying to write in a loving way, but I have a lot of anger and frustration, so I have to kind of work through that so that it doesn’t come out in the book, because if I have anger and frustration in the book, I think it’s going to turn people off. I’m walking a fine line here.

AGR: You’re walking a fine line anyway.

Muscio: Yeah. One thing I’m talking about in my book, and it really surprised me when I realized it, that White supremacist groups, the Aryan Nation or whatever, for better or worse, they know they’re White. They think about race, the White supremacists. They critically examine it. They’re coming from a place of fear and ignorance and often hatred, but from my perspective, they’re more involved than your average well-meaning White person in terms of thinking about race, and where does that leave the White majority of people in this country? When the White supremacists are more evolved than just your average well-intentioned White person walking down the street, you have a problem with that. I can talk to a White supremacist about stuff. They disagree with me, and they think I’m full of shit. But I can talk to them about stuff that I can’t talk to with Joe White or whatever.

AGR: Can you tell me a little bit about your own history? When you started writing Cunt, how old were you?

Muscio: Twenty-eight. In ‘95 I started writing it.

AGR: Have you gotten feedback?

Muscio: The feedback I get is really interesting. It’s a good feeling, like deep in people’s hearts and lives I think in a really good kind of way. I’m talking about really intimate things, so it tends to affect people in really intimate ways. Mostly what I hear from is individuals who tell me really intense stories about being abused and how my book has helped them have a perspective. The one thing that pisses me off though, a critique that I get, is the assumption that I’m middle class and college educated. My mother raised four kids and she was a nurse. We weren’t poor in that we had a roof over our heads and we had clothes and food and stuff like that. I knew what my mother was doing to keep us fed, and it killed me. I had a Washington State residency and ended up going to college and getting a college education. I’m really thankful for that, but that really kind of pisses me off because it feels like a dis towards my mom, of how hard my mom worked to raise us.

AGR: I wonder where that assumption comes from.

Muscio: I don’t know. Because of the “feminist,” White, middle class thing.

AGR: You mean the stigma that sometimes comes with the label “feminist”? Is that what you’re talking about?

Muscio: People just started calling me a feminist. And I didn’t know what the fuck a feminist was. And then people started calling me a feminist. [It’s] because of the way I was raised. You know, my grandmother[didn’t] put up with any shit. That was my feminist learning and watching my mother raise all us kids.

AGR: There’s one part [in Cunt] where you’re talking about your experience with herbal abortion and visualization. I was talking to a friend who interpreted your message as, ‘if you can’t do this, then you don’t have your shit together’ or something like that.

Muscio: It’s not what I was saying. I have a couple of friends who tried that, and it didn’t work for them. It felt really bad. It feels bad no matter what. My mom was a nurse. As a child, I heard lots of stories about western medicine and hospitals and doctors and how they function. I had a really rich history of not believing in western medicine. By the time I was 20, this was a foregone reality in my mind. So, when it came time for me to do this, there were no mental blocks in my head. So, I kind of wonder if that puts me in a more fortunate position in terms of doing some kind of healing that’s considered alternative in our culture. Also, I was in a situation when I did the herbal and the vision thing, I was going to college, and I was literally able to spend an entire week of my life just to focus on this. A lot of women have to fucking go to work or they have to do stuff, and I just so happened to be in a situation where I could spend a week of my life doing nothing but this. I had a lot of resources available to me, and a lot of women don’t. I thought about that when I was writing it down, but I still wanted to put it out there.

AGR: Well, it’s part of your experience.

Muscio: Even if they actually aren’t able to do it for any number of reasons, just the thought that it is a possibility. It can happen, and it works. It’s so much less horrifying than the vacuum cleaner.

AGR: How do you feel about the whole medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry and how they cash in on women’s fears of their bodies and pain? How does that play into the oppression of women in general?

Muscio: It’s a systematic oppression.

AGR: Kind of like a conspiracy?

Muscio: Well, not like a conscious conspiracy. It’s an unconscious fear of women’s power. Anything that negates the power of women is cool in this society. And it’s not like people sit around and go ‘oh, how can I negate the power of women. At this point, the fear of women’s bodies is so ingrained in our culture, that it is unquestioned that these men know how to deal with our bodies. It’s just not questioned.

AGR: Male obstetricians and male gynecologists. It’s absurd.

Muscio: It’s fucking absurd. It doesn’t make any sense. But now gynecologists and obstetricians, the male ones, are really being pushed out. And I don’t mean to dis doctors. It’s the same thing as police. I know a lot of police who actually want to provide service to their community. They’re incapacitated because the system is all structured toward oppressing people.

AGR: They get sucked up into it.

Muscio: If their hearts are in the right places, no matter how hard they’re trying or how much love they have in their hearts, sooner or later, they get absorbed in that system. They have to operate under mainstream designation. It’s structured to make them assholes. It’s the same thing in every aspect of all these different careers.

AGR: Do you feel that in your career as a writer? Is it frustrating having to deal with people and publishers on a regular basis?

Muscio: You’d be surprised. I don’t have to deal with people that much that I don’t want to deal with. I really don’t. As a writer, you get what you put out there. If you put out something from your heart, you get back….

AGR: Heart.

Muscio: Yeah, you get back heart.

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Make music, not War

By Carolyn Court

Adelaide, Australia, Mar. 22 (IPS)— Make music, not war — that is the message coming loud and clear from the international music festival called World of Music, Arts, and Dance or WOMAD, just held this month in Australia and New Zealand, and now traveling throughout the year to Spain, Britain, Italy, and Singapore.

More than 65,000 people attended the Australian WOMAD festival, called WOMADelaide Sounds of the Planet 2003, in the south Australian capital of Adelaide on Mar. 7-9. The festival featured 350 artists from 31 countries including India, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Mexico, Senegal, Pakistan, Colombia, Algeria, Russia, South Africa, Britain, Canada, Japan, and Australia. While WOMAD is a joyful celebration of the world’s music, arts, and dance, it is also a political festival allied to a range of political and human rights causes.

“I guess what’s important about events like this at times like these is that it’s a more positive potential picture of the world,” says Rob Brookman, the artistic advisor to WOMADelaide, who believes that while international music festivals might not be able to change the world overnight, they have a role to play in promoting cultural understanding. The festival becomes “a place where people are actually interested in finding out about each other’s cultures and understanding each other, rather than the dominant media paradigm that the United States is trying to manipulate, which is to dehumanize and depersonalize and dumb down any debate or discussion about the issues in relation to Iraq,” he adds. During many of the WOMADelaide festival performances, musicians dwelled on the planned US-led war on Iraq. The Pacific band Drum Drum, whose members come from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia, introduced one of their songs with this statement: “If ever there was a hypocrisy regarding a war on terror it is now. This music is dedicated with love to all the people and especially the children of Iraq.”

The Mexican 10-piece Latin/Punk band, Los de Abajo, said of WOMADelaide: “This concert is for peace, no war in Iraq.” Benin-born musician Julien Jacob conveyed a heartfelt message through an interpreter, “You love life, you are life, at this moment we must think of the people on the other side of the planet.” During the finale of the Australian festival, tens of thousands of people observed a minute’s silence, in respect for peace and the victims of war. Oxfam campaigner Sally McHenry, who was working on the ‘Big Noise’ Fair Trade campaign at WOMADelaide, says that the atmosphere of WOMAD inspires all who attend.

“It sounds like a cliche but it really is an atmosphere and environment here of how the world could really be, the music and artists and the people who come with an open mind and an open heart to what all different peoples and cultures of the world can bring and how we can share it all together. It really is the most wonderfully extraordinary atmosphere here,” says McHenry.

Asked about the significance of WOMAD music festivals being held in these times of conflict, US guitar virtuoso Bob Brozman says he sees WOMAD as a political statement as well as a great musical event.

“I have some very strong opinions about it actually. One of the hidden values of any music festival is simply the public’s right to assemble,” he explains.

“That’s something in my country that’s really being eroded. They would rather that people stay at home and watch canned media on television and not form opinions themselves or have any kind of sense of community, and with the latest street protests basically being ignored by (US President George W.) Bush, it’s very frustrating,” he adds.

“I really feel like music can almost be described as the language of the future, when people are able to better communicate with each other. At a festival like this, there’s a lot of collaborations and the communication happens on a much more flowing sort of higher level that’s much more efficient than language,” he continues.

Music and art, therefore, is serving as a bridge of communication among different cultures and musical worlds — and reflecting the concerns of many people, including musicians and artists, about today’s uncertainties and US plans for an attack against Iraq. In the end, WOMAD organizers such Brookman see the festival as a great way to promote education and awareness — and at the same time, having fun.

This attitude also shaped the selection of visual arts and dance performers such as this year’s performance on racism and refugee issues, ‘People from Away,’ which was performed by the huge puppet characters of KneeHigh Puppeteers, as well as rarely seen ceremonial corroborees, or ‘inma,’ such as those performed in Adelaide by the Central Australian indigenous people, the Anangu Pitjantjatjara.

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