FORWARD
Like all of her visual and verbal art, Mary Susannah Robbins is full of surprises. I have never met Susannah in person, though we have spent many hours together on the telephone. During these conversations, which span more than a decade, I knew her as an extraordinarily engaged antiwar activist, writer, and editor who was making powerful and unique contributions to the contemporary movement to rescue us from the black hole of endless wars. One cannot talk for long with Susannah without sensing the profound compassion that drives her passion for peace. As a contributor to a couple of her splendid books--Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists and Peace Not Terror: Leaders of the Antiwar Movement Speak Out Against Foreign Policy Post 9/11--I was at first skeptical about the prospects of her actually getting publishers and an audience for these two volumes amid the deafening drumbeats of war that continually thunder across our mass media. But her profound humanistic faith and dedication enabled her to make these books into material forces that have allowed many readers to hear a very different kind of music and to see possible ways out of war‘s cesspools and quicksands.
In our conversations about these books, only bit by bit did I get hints that Susannah—
always modest and unassuming—was also a poet and visual artist with many highly recognized creative achievements. This present volume gives all of us an opportunity to range through some of the dimensions of her creative imagination.
The prose sketches and stories are a swirling kaleidoscope of memory and fantasy, in which the most concrete and telling details of everyday experience swirl around a quest for the meaning of individual and social life. As she put it in the closing words of the sketch titled ―Flavor‖:
―I have to go back to reality now,‖ Emil had said after lunch. I had felt surprised and disappointed, knowing that all he was going back to was a cluttered apartment.
He had smiled at me. ―You have to distinguish between significance and reality,‖ he said kindly.
Could I?
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Although most of these stories are very personal, they are also essentially political, for, as Susannah says, ―Everything I have ever done has been political.‖ What she means by political always comes back to the personal, because what she calls ―home‖ is central to her quest. In these stories one can sense the profound loss and devastation inflicted on individuals, our nation, and the world by those unending wars we have been forced to wage by those who have stolen our country. This is summed up in a beautiful one-line paragraph that isn‘t even a sentence: ―This country that used to be our home.‖
―Home‖ takes on a deeper poignancy and richness in Lance, A Vietnam Vet: A Love Story, her collection of poems about her love for a homeless vet who finds his home with her until he leaves her with a loveless home. But though her loss is profound, the poems preserve her love and her experience with this man who embodies so much of what she is trying to tell us.
Perhaps Susannah sums up this book—and all her other achievements—most succinctly in these words: ―If I have done anything in my life it has been to preserve the world and its experiences.‖
H. Bruce Franklin
Newark, NJ
May 2010