Patricia Smith and Alice Walker on Addiction

When seeking to understand addiction, it has often been said that individuals have a predisposition for it, and this creates the common argument that it is a disease and cannot be mitigated in any form or fashion. Addiction then is more or less unavoidable in the face of unquestionable biological processes. But is that argument valid? Can we really generalize that everyone who has an addiction is prone to it and therefore, locked into the context of being predisposed of a disease? Is it our duty morally to understand if addiction is indeed a disease or if we have expressed that it is based on emotional attitudes? Two literary pieces that seek to answer these questions are Alice Walker's "The Welcome Table" and Patricia Smith's "What it’s Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t)." Each piece unequivocally poses these questions with thought-provoking language about addiction and its cascading presence in the lives of Black Americans. Walker finds that it is our emotional attitudes that we base our conclusion from, and Smith provides an outlook through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl in what could be concluded as a harrowing experience of the intense connotation of addiction and genetic movement in one's life.

Much of Smith's argument lies in the virtue ethics argument that it is our duty or moral obligation to know and understand addiction before seeking to mitigate its effects (Darwall, 2002; Smith, n.d.). The 9-year-old girl expresses observations of an addicted individual in the lines "like your edges are wild, like there's something, everything wrong....primping in front of the mirrors that deny your reflection" (Smith, n.d.). Here, Smith is projecting the animal of addiction and one's moral obligation to face this addiction head on without hesitation before it can be confronted and dealt with. Addiction is a continual presence in the 9-year-old girl's life noted by the lines "it's finding a space between your legs, a disturbance at your chest and not knowing what do with the whistles" (Smith, n.d.). The 9-year-old is concerned with the operation of addiction that is pervasive when examined through her eyes. She understands it and is challenging the reader morally to understand it as well and then acknowledge with honesty, a virtue, that society is wrought with the predisposition of drug addiction as a disease.

In contrast, Alice Walker's "The Welcome Table" concludes that it is our emotional attitudes about addiction that form the basis of why it is often believed to be a disease. The old woman in "The Welcome Table" is seeking comfort in the church to “lay her burdens down” (Myers, 2007). The woman has made up in her mind that addiction "will never take [her] back to the place [she] was before" (Jakes, 2006). Walker writes, “some of those who saw her there on the church steps spoke words about her that were hardly fit to be heard," (Walker, 2003) Walker writes about the presence of the old woman. The woman has known suffering of what many in the story can concluded to be addiction as she has the appearance of what is often illustrated as such. "There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue-brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for reasons in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read" (Walker, 2003). She is shunned by those in the church, as she invokes the emotional attitudes and dispositions that people often have toward what is perceived to be an individual who is addicted. "Everybody could see. They stared at her as they came in and sat down near the front" (Walker, 2003). There is not necessarily a place in Walker's story that foretells that the woman was actually an addict, but she was presumed to be by the individuals at the church who cringed at her presence.

So, is addiction a disease or not? Both Smith and Walker offer the answer to that question. Smith utilizes a 9-year-old girl to illustrate that addiction is persistent and that we as a society must deal with the challenges that it poses. Smith stresses that it is our moral obligation on the premise of virtue ethics to answer this question, while Walker draws from the emotional vestiges that we all harbor about addiction and its puzzling properties. Perhaps Walker's piece is more or less the answer to the question on why addiction should be considered a disease because she depicts a woman who is thirsty for serenity and peace in faith that is often discovered by addicts following acceptance that they have an issue needing to be addressed.

References

Darwall, S. (2002). Virtue Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jakes, T. D. (2006). Woman, Thou Art Loosed. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image Publishers.

Myers, J. B. (2007). Faith and Addiction: A faith alternative to the Twelve Steps theory and disease model of addiction treatment . Charleston, SC: BookSurge Publishing.

Smith, P. (n.d.). What it’s Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t) [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://nunningincircles.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/warning-this-might-be-uncomfortable/

Walker, A. (2003). The Welcome Table. In M. C. Curtis (Ed.), Faith: Stories Troy, MO: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 254-258.