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Alice Walker
Author, The Color Purple and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
In conversation with Ayelet Waldman, Author, Daughter's Keeper
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: What internal process takes you from the individual to the global, from personal anguish to general despair, or from personal, political anger to a novel that is a political novel, like Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart?
A: Take Possessing the Secret of Joy. When I heard about female genital mutilation, I was 20. I was in Kenya, helping to build a school. The thing about Kenya then that I didn't quite understand was how completely destroyed most of the people had been by colonialism, so much so that we were trying to build this school in a little corner of a vast pineapple plantation, and the people who lived there weren't even allowed to eat any of the pineapple. They ate this horrible corn that was sent by our country, that was piled up into a little shack next to the school. They were talking about this initiation. I was so upset, because I couldn't figure out what there was on any woman that needed to be removed. I couldn't get it. I just thought, "Where is the excess?"
I was so young and it had been such a fright to think that people would assault children in this way. I came back and started reading African women novelists. Because it was a taboo, they couldn't talk about this - they could be killed for talking about it - they always talked about the "bath." It was called the bath because the whole point was this was how you cleanse a woman's body. So, all this time, this feeling of just suffering, to realize that 100 million women and children were suffering this in the world, but what to do? I'm a poet. I'm not a terrorist, and not to mention how you cannot really change something like this through terrorism, as you cannot actually change anything. I just really did everything I could to prepare myself as a warrior would, but as a warrior poet, to create a work that would have enough power to begin to change this situation.
I feel like in much of my work I have had to be a priest in terms of dedication. I've had to really pray to be able to create work that would do in the world what is needed to be done, so that you can actually change the world using words and not guns.
Q: People will say that there is no place in fiction for politics. What do you say?
A: Lucky for me, one of the first writers that I fell in love with and read and still adore is Tolstoy. Tolstoy, Victor Hugo - all of the great writers always are political. There's no way you can avoid it. How could you write a novel today, for instance, without including a vision of what is actually happening in the world? All of it's political, just as all of it is spiritual. But to answer your question more fully, I don't engage people at that level about what I'm doing. There is no better I can do. Sometimes I just say, "Go and criticize that pine tree. Go criticize that rutabaga. Go criticize that rose." I feel for them, really. Imagine being on that side of it, where you get to just criticize. In the '70s, I used to write criticism for The New York Times. The last one I did was a review of a book by Alice Childress. I thought I was doing fine; I had my critic's voice and went through her book. She was so hurt. I realized that I don't need to do that. There are people who have that critical thing operating, and then there are people, like me, who have mostly the praise thing. I'm very content to be this way, and I let them do what they need to do, but I don't necessarily ever really pay that much attention.
Q: You are a black woman in a world which both subjugates and, with violence, speaks out against all that you are. How do you face this real adverse world and how do you stay calm - or do you?
A: I write all my books, and that is my gift. But part of my work is to show that it's possible to be free. And, for instance, I actually feel very loved by the universe. I feel very loved by the earth. I feel that the earth is delighted that I'm here - just tickled. There are racists and there are horrible people and there's oppression and there's suffering and there's this, there's that. But there are also oranges. If I wanted to transmit anything to people who feel in any way unwanted and unwelcome, it would be this sense that clearly the universe is delighted with everything it has made and definitely delighted with us.
Q: How do you feel when people look for a more vulnerable Alice Walker, when they ask for more personal details? How do you create a boundary?
A: I say, "It's none of your business." But first of all, I learned a long time ago that personal is not as personal as you think, because we're humans. We may have slight differences, but actually, if you go very deeply in your own personal stuff, that's where you connect with everyone. The Color Purple, for instance: I went to China shortly after it was published. They had already translated it and it was a bestseller in China. I was there talking with Chinese women writers and they were all very nervous about me finding out they had done this, because they were not paying me. I didn't care. When they told me I said, "Well I'm happy." They said, "Oh, you're not upset about the royalties?" I said, "Are you kidding? But why is it a bestseller here?" And this woman said, "Oh, but Alice, it's a very Chinese story."
That's my experience of life. I know that people who are racist and who have been brought up in a bubble, when they look out at other people they see a difference that is so huge that they can't even imagine being the same or being similar or being close. We have to outgrow that, because if you feel like that you've missed so much. How do you dance with the people of the world? And you really want to dance with the people of the world.
The movie The Color Purple, one of the gifts it gave me was that by the time I went to Africa to work on female genital mutilation to make a film about that, the women, because of the film (not because of reading, because most of them don't read), they came willing to be loving and to help. They would often be dressed from head to toe in purple. It was a magical thing, because without that connection, without them feeling that I could be trusted, they wouldn't have talked to me. Also, it gave me such a tender feeling for Steven Spielberg. Sometimes I tell him that what I like about him is that he appeared out of the blue. That person who appeared out of the blue gets to be the connection between me and this whole continent of women and girls in a way that was very, very helpful.
Q: You made this documentary in Africa. What was that like?
A: I worked with Pratibha Paramar. She was born in Africa and she's Indian. We went around and we talked to all kinds of people, including the people who do the mutilations, these old women. In the novel I had the woman who had become mutilated hold so much anger that when she went back to Africa to confront the woman who had mutilated her, she killed her. There's anger for you.
I confronted these same women, one woman in particular, and I thought I was going to be just as angry. I had the headache of my life trying to hold what she meant; I found I wasn't angry at all. I found that I looked at her and I saw this old, old woman who had been doing this horrible work because there was no other work for her to do in her village. We're talking about societies where women do not have work at all. This was originally done by the men. And they forced the women to do it. But over thousands of years, the women no longer remember how it came about. At the root of it, as Che Guevara says about revolution, the root of any kind of change in society is love. It's loving people enough to just risk everything. If people are going to hate you, complain, kvetch, you just say, "Fine. This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm here to do and I'm going to do it."
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