The World Has Changed (12 page)

To most people Meridian’s illness seems sort of exotic, and they can’t quite figure out why she gets ill. But the fact is that when you are under enormous stress, as most of the civil rights people were, the things that the body will do are just incredible. I fully expect that the people who were
very brave and who had endured racial brutality and intimidation . . . I fully expect that throughout their lives they will have some sort of physical disorder. Because suffering is not all psychological. The body and the mind really are united and if the central nervous system is crucially unbalanced by something, then there are also physical repercussions.

Guilt is also stress, and if it is compounded by intense political activity in a dangerous situation and compounded further by the giving away of your child, the losing of someone you love, then that stress becomes so intense that physical problems result.

I think Marge Piercy was right in one way in her review of
Meridian
, although in another way she was very humorous. She said that what the book needed to end it was a marriage or a funeral. Marriage is absurd. Meridian is not interested in marriage, but I can see that the expected end of that kind of struggle is death. It’s just that in addition to all of her other struggles, her struggle is to not die. That’s what she means when she’s talking about martyrs not permitting themselves to be martyrs, but at some point just before martyrdom they should just go away and do something else.

She talks about Malcolm and King going off to farm or raise Dalmatians or doing something else other than permitting martyrdom. This impulse to flee represents her struggle to break with Christianity, because Christianity really insists on martyrdom. She can see that the life of Christ is exemplary. It truly is. It’s a fine life. But just before the crucifixion, according to Meridian, Jesus should have just left town.

 

C.T.: Does Truman assume Meridian’s struggle at the end of the novel?

 

A.W.: Oh yes, Meridian’s struggle is in this sense symbolic. Her struggle is the struggle each of us will have to assume in our own way. And Truman will certainly have to assume his because his life has been so full of ambivalence, hypocrisy, and obliviousness of his actions and their consequences.

 

C.T.: Are black women writers more concerned with dramatizing intimate male-female encounters than social confrontations with white society?

 

A.W.: I can’t think of any twentieth-century black woman writer who is first and foremost interested in what white folks think. I exempt Phillis
Wheatley and all the nineteenth-century black women writers who
did
have that problem. Twentieth-century black women writers all seem to be much more interested in the black community in intimate relationships, with the white world as a
backdrop
, which is certainly the appropriate perspective, in my view. We black women writers know very clearly that our survival depends on trust. We will not have or cannot have anything until we examine what we do to and with each other. There just has not been enough examination or enough application of findings to real problems in our day-to-day living. Black women continue to talk about intimate relationships so that we can recognize what is happening when we see it, then maybe there will be some change in behavior on the part of men
and
women.

When you see
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
, for example, and you see what the behavior looks like onstage and you recognize it, you are recognizing it as behavior you’ve seen in the real world and you can judge the consequences of it. This recognition has to become very ordinary for all black people. We must be able to see what is happening, recognize such behavior and
make a judgment
. Judgment is crucial because judgment is lacking in black people these days.

Let’s see if I can explain what I mean by that. There was a time when behavior was judged much more strictly than it is now. If you were walking down the street and some black man felt he was perfectly right to accost you and say sneaky, nasty little things to you, there was a time when the community rose up and said, “That’s wrong! You can’t do that. This is Miss so-and-so’s child.” There was a time when the community looked at this kind of behavior with the eyes of judgment. But today black people see without judgment. They think that to be nonjudgmental is progress. But in fact, it isn’t when your non-judgment means that people suffer. And they do because there is no one saying with the whole authority of the community that what you are doing is hurting us as a community.

 

C.T.: Do you think that black women are capitalizing on an antagonistic press, as Ishmael Reed said not too long ago?

 

A.W.: I read somewhere that Reed said he had sold only eight thousand copies of his last book, and he was upset. He felt that if he had been a black lesbian poet he would have sold many more. But I have bought
nearly all of Reed’s books, and I did not buy them because he is a black lesbian poet. I bought them because he is writing about the black community, presumably from inside it. Since I
am
the black community, I represent his audience. And it is this audience that is ultimately important.

In any case, I think anybody can
only write
. Writing or not writing is not dependent on what the market is—whether your work is going to sell or not. If it were, there is not a black woman who would write. And that includes Phillis Wheatley. Think of
her
antagonistic market! I mean if you really thought about the market, you would probably just take a job canning fish. Even the most successful black women writers don’t make a lot of money, compared to what white male and female writers earn just routinely. We live in a society that is racist and white. That is one problem. Another is, we don’t have a large black readership; I mean, black people, generally speaking, don’t read. That is our
main
problem. Instead of attacking each other, we could try to address that problem by doing whatever we can to see that more black works get out into the world—which, for example, Reed does with his publishing company—and by stimulating an interest in literature among black people. Black women writers seem to be trying to do just that, and that’s really commendable.

This brings to mind Ntozake Shange’s book
Nappy Edges
, which I just read and liked a lot. It has a wonderful introduction where she refers to a speech she made at Howard. She talked about how black people should try to relate to their writers and permit them the same kind of individuality they permit their jazz musicians. It’s beautifully written, and funny, and I’m sure the audience loved what she was saying. Black women instinctively feel a need to connect with their reading audience, to be direct, to build a readership for us all, but more than that, to build
independence
. None of us will survive except in very distorted ways if we have to depend on white publishers and white readers forever. And white critics. If Reed only sold a few thousand copies of his book, he might look at who
controls
publishing first, and then he might look at who is buying his stuff or not buying it, in order to determine whether there is some serious breakdown in communication between him and his potential readers. Although I have all of his early books, it gets harder to lay out money for books that speak of black women as barracudas. As black women become more aware of sexism—when, in fact, they are as sensitive to sexism as they are now to racism,
and they will become so
—then a lot of black male writers are going to be in serious trouble. You notice we do not buy books by William Styron in droves, either.

In any case, to blame black women for one’s low sales is just depressing to think about, considering the sad state of our general affairs. Skylab is falling; the nukes are leaking; we’re running out of oil and gas; there’s a recession. People don’t have jobs. Most writers I know, white and black, live with an enormous amount of anxiety over just getting by. That black male writers, no less than black men generally, think that when they don’t get something they want, it is because of black women, and not because of the capitalist system that is destroying us all, is almost too much irony to bear. Capitalist society. Racist capitalist society. Racist, sexist, and colorist capitalist society which doesn’t give a damn about art except art that can be hoarded or sold for big bucks. It doesn’t care about art that is crucial to our community because it doesn’t care about our community—which is perhaps its only consistency.

If the black community fails to support its own writers, it will never have the knowledge of itself that will make it great. And for foolish, frivolous, and totally misinformed reasons—going directly back to its profound laziness about the written message as opposed to one that’s sung—it will continue to blunder along, throwing away this one and that one, and never hearing or using what is being said. That is basically what happened with Zora Neale Hurston. The time has to come when the majority of black people, not just two or three, will want their own novels and poems, will want their own folktales, will want their own folk songs, will want their own whatever. There is so much that is ours that we’ve lost, and we don’t even know we’re missing it: ancient Egypt; ancient Ethiopia; Eatonville, Florida! And yet there’s no general sense that the spirit can be amputated, that a part of the soul can be cut off because of ignorance of its past development. But I know one thing: when we really respect ourselves, our own minds, our own thoughts, our own words, when we really love ourselves, we won’t have any problem whatsoever selling and buying books or anything else.

Look what happens with Jews and books. Jews make Jewish books bestsellers. Whatever is written by and about them they cherish and keep it going. When we feel
we
are worth money, when we feel that
we
are worth time, when we feel that
we
are worth love, we’ll do it. But until we do, we won’t. And that’s that! This whole number about depending on white people for publicity and for this and that and so forth . . . All I can say is I hope it will soon be over. I am tired of it.

By and large black women writers support themselves, they support each other and support a sense of community much more so than any
other group I’ve ever come in contact with, except for the civil rights era when people tended to be collective. That was true of them, and it is true of us. And I like that.

 

C.T.: What is your responsibility to your audience?

 

A.W.: I’m always happy to have an audience. It’s very nice because otherwise it would be very lonely and futile if I wrote and had no audience. But on the other hand, although
I’m willing
to think about the audience before I write, usually I don’t. I try, first of all, to know what I feel and what I think and then to write that. And if there’s an audience, well, fine, but if not, I don’t worry about it.

Have I ever written a story with all white characters? Well, of course I have. Years ago I wrote a wonderful story which I must find, if it’s not packed in a trunk somewhere back in Brooklyn. It’s a good story, and I know I’ll publish it one day. But at the time I wrote it, nobody would buy it because it was a very chilling view of white people, of these particular white people. I had written what I saw. I had written what I thought. I had written what I felt, but this was a view that was totally unacceptable to everyone. Nobody wanted this particular view.

So what I do generally is write, and if there’s an audience, there is one, but if there isn’t one, I just pack it up and wait.

 

C.T.: Have people asked you whether
Meridian
is autobiographical?

 

A.W.: Oh yes. I don’t think people really understand that a book like
Meridian
is autobiographical only in the sense of projection. Meridian is entirely better than I am, for one thing. She is an exemplary person; she is an exemplary,
flawed
revolutionary because it seems to me that the revolutionary worth following is one who is flawed. When I was talking about the flaw before I didn’t mean that it made these people less worthy of following. It made them more worthy of following.

My life has been, since I became an adult, much more middle class than Meridian’s. Although what happens often when I write is that I try to make models for myself. I project other ways of seeing. Writing to me is not about audience actually. It’s about living. It’s about expanding myself as much as I can and seeing myself in as many roles and situations as possible. Let me put it this way. If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would.
Writing permits me to be more than I am. Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

 

C.T.: Are you drawn toward the folk hero/heroine as the focal point of your work?

 

A.W.: I am drawn to working-class characters as I am to working class people in general. I have a basic antagonism toward the system of capitalism. Since I’m only interested in changing it, I’m not interested in writing about people who already fit into it. And the working class can never fit comfortably into a capitalist society.

I think my whole program as a writer is to deal with history just so I know where I am. It was necessary for me to write a story like
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
, which starts in the twenties and has passages that go back even further, so I could, later on, get to
Meridian
, to
In Love and Trouble
, and then on to
The Color Purple
. I can’t move through time in any other way, since I have strong feelings about history and the need to bring it along. One of the scary things is how much of the past, especially our past, gets forgotten.

 

C.T.: You’ve often written that some of your stories were also your mother’s stories: