When Terry Tempest Williams brought her son home from Rwanda for the first time, he asked all about the hype regarding America. She brought him to PetSmart. All the clothes, beds and toothbrushes made for dogs took Louis by surprise. In his country, they shot dogs.

Williams spoke at Hendricks Chapel on Thursday evening on the topic of ‘The Writer as Witness’ for the final installment of the University Lectures series this year.

When she first met her son in Rwanda soon after the genocide, blood was still on the walls and bones were still in the soil.

‘All I could do was write,’ she said.

Williams, an environmentalist and political activist, said America is lost due to a split in identity and a lack of place.

‘There are times when I don’t know what this place called America is,’ she said. ‘Whether it’s Trayvon Martin and the open wound of racism, or whether it’s the grave young woman who speaks up on terms of reproductive health.’

Topics like these anger Williams. She encouraged the audience to turn feelings like those into something productive that starts a conversation and moves for change. Usually, Williams said, she uses her writing to express her rage. But there is more to writing than just ranting, she said.

‘A responsibility of the writer is paying attention,’ she said. ‘It’s about trying to find the emotional landscape with which to tell a story that is trustworthy.’

Williams said she always trusted The New York Times, but when it reported that 80 percent of the oil from the infamous BP spill had been removed from the Gulf of Mexico, she had to see it with her own eyes. As she flew over it, there was oil as far as the eye could see, she said.

‘I think what’s scary about writing is being accountable for ideas. It doesn’t afford you the capacity for change, to say, ‘I was wrong,” Williams said.

She encouraged students to ask themselves what they feel strongly about and find their voice. Resistance is easy, she told the audience. Civil disobedience doesn’t have to mean being arrested by certain beliefs. People can be the ones who bail each other out of jail.

‘How do we integrate what we love, with what our gift is, into the greater good?’ Williams said.

Claire Bach, a senior geography and German major, said she was moved by Williams’ talk.

‘Some parts seemed so clich, but at the same time, true. It was really straight-forward the way she talked, beautiful in simplicity,’ she said.

Williams quoted a number of favorite writers whose philosophies have inspired her. One was the son of John D. Rockefeller, who returned a piece of land owned by his father to the American people. He wrote that a feather could turn a scale in the direction of right or wrong.

Said Williams: ‘Each of us is a feather that can tip the balance, whether it’s through a gesture, whether it’s a sentence or a question.’

sfanelli@syr.edu 

Published on April 1, 2012 at 12:00 pm