|
Alice Walker
Author, The Color Purple and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
In conversation with Ayelet Waldman, Author, Daughter's Keeper
Ayelet Waldman: I'd like to begin by tracing a common thread informing three of your most recent works: Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; the collection of poetry Absolute Trust and the Goodness of the Earth; and the novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. Each of these is engaged with: How do we continue to maintain faith in humanity in this national and global political climate of terror, war and destruction? Talk to us about how you grapple with this in your work, in your life.
Alice Walker: It helps that I'm a gardener. It helps that I grew up in the South. I grew up very close to and in nature. I had a mother who was very connected to the natural world and who brought me along with her, respecting it. I lived in Mississippi for seven years during a time when there was so much murder and terrorization of people, and I managed to survive - although I had lots of depression - by turning back to the earth and planting things. Even though we had this tiny little suburban house, it was surrounded by bushes and trees and plants of all description. So my connection to life itself and my sense that I dare not give up as long as the earth does not give up, that is my belief, my mantra. I look outside and spring has come. And so, because spring has come, I am willing to continue and to produce what it is that I feel I am here to produce.
The more difficult life becomes, the harder I work. The more I dream about children - I dream about them more than I ever have - the more I think about the plight of women, the more I try to show up for people. A young sister from Afghanistan two weeks ago came to this area at great risk to herself, and all I wanted to do was just to be there to let her know that I was there. They wanted me to speak and they wanted to do this and that. But basically I just wanted to hold her in my arms.
Those are things that can center us. Why do we have at this point a human life to live? What does it mean to have this human life? What does it mean to have these eyes that can look into another human face with compassion? What does it mean to have these arms that we can actually hold people with? I can hold this young woman from Afghanistan - traveling by herself, delivering this horrendous message about what has happened to her people. It's only for two seconds, but I know what an embrace can do. I have been the recipient in times of great sadness and despair. And just that meeting of human beings is what we use to balance the world.
Waldman: This connection to the physical earth is something that Kate in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart speaks so profoundly about. She talks about when she was a child climbing up in trees looking for the mouth of a tree, hugging the tree and embracing the tree and looking for the tree's mouth so that she can kiss the tree. Is that something that you felt as a child, or is that something that you imagined for Kate?
Walker: I feel that now. We live in such a land of wonder. The planet is so amazing. If television can bring all these people into our living rooms through a little wire, why can't trees speak to us and why wouldn't a child assume that a tree would have a mouth to talk? We are spoken to from the plant world all the time; it's just that we grow out of being able to hear or wanting to hear. We think that if we're going to cut it down we don't want to hear what the tree has to say. That's the reason I was so interested in plant medicines and studied with plant teachers for a year, because I wanted to see whether in fact trees do talk to us, and if they talk to us, what language would they use? To my astonishment, they have a language that they speak to us in, and it's a visual one. We can be taught by plants in just the ways that I assumed we could be taught by plants when I was little.
If you are studying with a plant like ayahuasca - this is a drink that Kate experiences in the novel - you have visions. In our culture, you think about hallucinogenic visions and you discredit them. We have nowhere to put the experience that we're having. I have been in circles with people taking sacred medicine, and they don't know what to do with it except to try to make love on it or have sex on it, which it's not about at all. It's like they connect with us through the chemical properties of the plants, of the mixture that you drink.
Waldman: Kate goes on a spiritual journey through this medicine. It's like any spiritual journey - like Yom Kippur, where you fast in order to bring yourself to a spiritual place. There are all these ways that people try to bring themselves to a spiritual state, and ayahuasca is one. Would you talk a little bit more about the specific nature of that spiritual understanding that the ayahuasca brought you?
Walker: I don't know how many people in this room have had a similar journey with ayahuasca or peyote. There are many different things that people have been using for a long time. But you don't necessarily remember it like a memory. I was very concerned about that until I realized that I didn't have to remember it in the old way of remembering - that in fact what had happened was there was something that had transformed within me so that I feel that I have it. It's a knowledge that I have from a different way of being taught. What I can say I have more deeply, which is what I had as a child, is this very complete almost - not merger exactly - with nature and with the plant world. I find myself so attuned to trees again and to plants in just a wonderful way, so much so that I feel like there's no such thing as being alone, because they are here.
Waldman: Did you have that feeling of the grandmother that Kate had, the sensation of that overarching spirit of the plant universe that she feels?
Walker: I had to do a lot of making up. However, I think that the making up that I did necessarily comes out of the experience that I had. We are held as human beings by this great grandmother spirit, who is not necessarily angry with us because we have made such a mess. It's more a kind of sadness that we have been given so much joy and comfort, and we seem intent on burning it for ourselves.
Waldman: That seems to be one of the joys of being a fiction writer. You can have this experience and not remember it and yet be able to recreate it in a way that is almost a sister-self in understanding it. Does fiction serve any kind of a purpose like that for you?
Walker: It's a way to share the way that I perceive the world, which apparently is quite different from the way many people perceive it. I want to share this because when people share their view with me and it's very different from mine, I learn from it and I think, Well yeah, that's a whole other way of being that I hadn't considered. Fiction writing also always is wonderful for me, even when I'm writing about extremely sad things. I could be writing about female genital mutilation, for instance, which was one of the hardest subjects that I had to take on. But there was such an amazing joy to know that I had managed to get an education, I had managed to research this area and I was able then to write about it in a way that could possibly move people enough so that they could change this.
Waldman: You write in so many different genres. Is there one sort of medium that you think is better or easier at a given time for effecting that kind of movement?
Walker: What I love most is poetry, and that's what I began as, as a poet. I took on all the other areas because they were there and they came to me to do. Many of you have this experience that there are certain things in the world that are yours to do. You can try to run from them, you can try to evade them and you can ignore them for a time, but if they are actually yours to do, they stay there. I could possibly have just written poetry this whole time, because poetry is the most magical, the most autonomous, and it comes when it wills. You really understand that you yourself are being written when poetry arrives.
There's also a great creative joy in writing novels and short stories, to see, as you go, an entire world that wasn't in existence, and to understand that this is your connection to the Creator, because you really get it that everything comes out of silence, that if you are just quiet long enough, something begins to form. When I'm ready to write a long piece, like a novel, I have to find a year or so in which I can be relatively quiet and away from a lot of activity.
Waldman: Does it start for you with the genre, or does it start with the idea?
Walker: With the poetry, it often begins by a sense of something building, almost like a pressure. I had made this announcement to my friends that I was done with writing and that I was done with poetry and from now on I would just take my little musical instruments and show up where people were gathered and play, and that would be enough. But within three years or so, I started to feel this pressure, and one day it became really intense. I was walking through my house and I was just feeling so weird. I sat on a bench in the sunroom looking out at the trees, and it's as if I really received a message, which was, You don't get to choose when you stop, because you are connected to the source. So later, when I went away from my house in Berkeley to Mexico, all of these poems which were living underneath, they just showed up.
Waldman: You didn't write for three years?
Walker: I didn't write with an idea to do anything with it. I always write, because I'm a writer.
Waldman: Did people in your greater audience find out about it? I imagine they would have been devastated.
Walker: They may have been concerned there was some sort of blockage. People think of writer's block, which I've never had. I've been trying to explain the difference between a writer's block and an attempt to let go of something that has been an identity for 40 years. There's something very wonderful about letting it go.
Waldman: I once heard a writer talking about this feeling they had of channeling. I was wondering if you had that feeling that the words are almost coming from outside you.
Walker: I think that means you are in a complete state of readiness and that you have lived to that point so that it comes that way. That has happened to me many times, and it's always such a delight. I dance when that happens. People always do assume that it's channeling, which seems to mean that you just do nothing. You just appear and you sit there and someone above you pours in everything and it comes out. But no, it usually means, in my case, that I have lived completely all the questions. I have made all the journeys I have to make in order to begin, and I'm ready. I found a year that I can afford to be self-supporting and private and all my household stuff is taken care of. I'm free. Having prepared myself, I'm ready. We make ourselves ready and then what is ready to be developed through us is there.
Waldman: You and a group of other prominent women writers and journalists - Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Goodman, Terry Tempest Williams - were involved with Code Pink in demonstrations during the beginning of the war in Iraq. You even got arrested, which is probably the first time you've been arrested in a little while.
Walker: I hadn't been arrested for many years. It was really wonderful. I want to say this, because I had done an interview with someone and I had said, "The experience of being arrested with these women was really awesome." And she assumed that I said, "It was really awful." But no, awesome. We were 10,000 women in hot pink and we were marching in D.C. This was a few days before the bombing began. There were all these women and a lot of their children. Right at the head of the protest were all these really little kids and they were saying, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your crummy war!"
Code Pink is an organization dedicated to making the voices of women heard around issues of war and what this country does to other people in the world. Twenty-four of us were arrested, including Amy Goodman. She was there interviewing us, and she was arrested first. They took away her recorder. While we were there, there was a counter-demonstration against abortion. As we were standing against the fence around the White House, there was a man with these huge, giant, blown-up pictures of fetuses that were just really mutilated. He was calling us murderers and various things. We were saying to him, "Think about the people in Iraq, because this is exactly what will happen to their children." At one point he actually said, "Quit nagging." It was so amazing. What century was he in?
In any case, they did not want to arrest us. The police were really very gentle. After we were arrested - and they take your shoes and your shoelaces - when I got out of the cell and I was trying to put my shoes on, this policeman went down on his knees and said, "Let me help you put your shoes on." We started talking about his children and we talked about children's books and what you need to be doing with your children in terms of reading. I ended up sending him a lot of books for the children. It was wonderful, because I feel that in every situation, if we can hold a feeling of this person as a human being rather than that other thing that often comes up - "Get out of my face. Who asked you? Why are you here? I don't need this" - it's possible that we can very slowly change at least the area that we're in. And that's what happened. We sang in that place and transformed it and we felt so good to be doing it together. I ended up standing between Susan Griffin and Maxine Hong Kingston; there was just a feeling of such rightness. You know that feeling: This is absolutely where I'm supposed to be. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. I couldn't imagine that there was anything more in need of my presence than stand ing there in front of the White House trying to sing across the fence to George, who was home that weekend, they said. Usually he's down in Crawford.
Looking back on it, I think that all these wonderful women in their pink, we knew what was coming. We knew it was a disaster. If they had listened, think of all the people who would still be alive. Think of all the children who would still be playing. Think of all the teenagers who would still be strutting around.
Waldman: One of the things that allows you to be a poet is having empathy, being able to see and to imagine another person's thoughts, feelings. Can you imagine what allows someone like Colin Powell to have participated in the massacre of so many children, so many women, so many boys, so many girls?
Walker: Well, you could ask that about all of them. I think it's because they love their jobs and having the power that they have to make the rest of us afraid. I feel for them. I know that I would not want to be in any of their shoes. I would not want to be this president. I would not want to be Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, any of them. How sad.
When we have a world that is run by people that we really respect and who really have our interests at heart, it's going to be very, very different. But we won't have it as long as we have the kind of leadership and political structure that we have today. It's just impossible.
Waldman: In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, there are a couple of different discussions on the notion of "hot" and "cool" revolution. In one of the first pages there's a meditation teacher called Mr. Clean. He's criticizing this idea of hot revolution - revolution with guns and violence. And he says that the Lord Buddha's way is cool revolution. Later, almost towards the very end of the novel, the grandmother says, "Buddha wouldn't mock those who take up arms against their own enslavement. Sometimes there's no way except through violence to freedom." I was wondering if you would help us understand what the grandmother means in this context.
Walker: She's like Kali: sometimes Kali is smiling and loving and sometimes Kali is cutting off heads. What she's saying is, for instance, if you're enslaved in the South and they won't let you go, then you have a civil war, and we understand that. In other words, you do not have to really bow down and accept enslavement and degradation. It's a human instinct to free yourself. But the point is that Buddha, understanding that, would still say that because you have a human life, which is a precious life, that is not the best way to have to use it - through violence. Violence happens. Look at the world. Often the reason people are fighting is because they are desperate to have a life at all. That is why in the beginning there is the question about the people who teach us in meditation that you must never think of violence. It will all be resolved through the cool revolution of meditation and patience and religion. But, in fact, that doesn't always work for everybody.
I feel very fortunate that I am a poet and not a terrorist. I understand how one could be a terrorist. And if you really look into your heart and don't just pretend that you are so good and other people are so evil, you will see that all of this is in us. We can go left, we can go right. It's by denying that that we get into so much trouble. Look at Bush saying Osama is the terrorist. Why can't he say, "Look. He looks so much like me. My goodness. Maybe we're both terrorists." Why can't he say that?
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein