The World Has Changed (13 page)

A.W.: Yes, some of the stories in
In Love and Trouble
came out of my mother’s stories, for instance, “Strong Horse Tea.” She often talked about how poor people, “in the olden days,” had to make up home
remedies for sick people. She used to crack me up with the story about my brother who stuttered and how he was stuttering and stuttering and they couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So finally someone told her to hit him in the mouth with a cow’s melt. As far as I can figure out, it’s something like the spleen. Anyway, it’s something raw and wet and bloody, and you get a grip on it and just hit the stutterer in the mouth with it. That would make anyone stop stuttering or stop talking altogether. But anyway, she did that; she hit him in the mouth with the cow’s melt and he stopped stuttering.

Anyway, my mother would ramble on and tell about how she would make tea out of the cow’s hoof when one of us felt ill. Years later when I was living in Mississippi, when I wrote most of those stories, her world was all around me.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only
some
people progress. The rest of the people don’t. There’s always somebody using “strong horse tea” in the world; this day, this minute, there’s some poor woman making strong horse tea for a child because she’s too poor to get a doctor. Now that may not be the case in California; it may not even be in Georgia or Mississippi; it might be in India. But somewhere it is current. This is what I started to understand while I was in Mississippi. So I made up the story about the woman who tried to save her baby because the doctor wouldn’t come. You know that the baby died and most of the people around the mother, the white people especially, could not even comprehend that she suffered, that she suffered as any mother would suffer.

“The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” in
In Love and Trouble
is also based on one of my mother’s stories about a time during the Depression when she went to a local commissary to get food and was refused. I carried the germ for that story of hers with me for years and years, just waiting for an opportunity to use it where it would do the most good.

I wrote “The Child Who Favored Daughter” [from
In Love and Trouble
] in 1966, after my first summer in Mississippi. I wrote it out of trying to understand how a black father would feel about a daughter who fell in love with a white man. Now, this was very apropos because I had just come out of a long engagement with a young man who was white, and my father never accepted him. I did not take his nonacceptance lightly. I knew I needed to understand the depth of his antagonism.
After all, I was twenty or so, and couldn’t quite understand his feelings since history is taught in the slapdash fashion that it is taught. I needed to comprehend what was going on with him and what would go on with any black man of his generation brought up in the South, having children in the South, whose child fell in love with someone who is “the enemy.”

I had been writing the story for, oh, I guess, almost six months and I took it with me to Mississippi. Ironically, it was over that story, in a sense, that I met the man I did, in fact, marry. We met in the movement in Mississippi, and I was dragging around this notebook, saying, “I’m a writer.” Most people think when you say you’re a writer, and especially when you’re twenty, that you can’t be serious. Well, I read the story to him and he was convinced.

“To Hell with Dying” [from
In Love and Trouble
] was the first story I wrote and it was also my first published story. I wrote that story when I was still at Sarah Lawrence. It is my most autobiographical story. But again, the way autobiography works for a writer is different from what you’d think of as being autobiographical. It’s autobiographical though, in fact, none of it happened. The
love
happened.

The story is created out of a longing. There was this man I really loved, not in the romantic sense, but I loved, cared about him, and he died while I was away at school. I didn’t have any money to go home for the funeral. So the story was my tribute. It was what I could give. Referring to your question about audience, this story really wasn’t about having an audience at all. All the audience I gave a damn about was dead.
He
was the audience. I would have been happy if he had known this was what I was thinking about when I couldn’t go to his funeral.

ELLEN BRING: In your book
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, you wrote about connections, about seeing a larger perspective in a diverse world. What, for you, is the common thread, the unifying theme that connects movements for animal liberation, women’s liberation, civil rights, and others?

 

ALICE WALKER: I think we all suffer oppression. We all suffer from a lack of having others perceive us as being basically the same, in having the same feelings, and the same dreams and desires. I remember when I gave a benefit for Winnie Mandela, I was thinking at the time that there were two things really important to me. One was to raise money for Winnie Mandela and South Africa. The other was to raise money for animal rights because I was just beginning to deal with my own feeling of responsibility towards animals. There were people who were very critical of that because they immediately thought that I was equating human beings with animals in a negative way. I mean I definitely do equate them, but positively. It seemed to me so
right
because the oppression that black people suffer in South Africa—and people of color, women, and children face all over the world—is the same oppression that animals endure every day to a greater degree.

 

E.B.: In terms of public activism, the animal rights movement is predominantly white and middle-class. Why is that?

 

A.W.: I think white, middle-class people are the only people who have the time to do the things that have to be done.

At the same time, I feel that, inasmuch as I am a citizen of the planet, my responsibility to other beings is clear. I don’t see the responsibility
for promulgating an animal rights agenda falling just on white middle-class people. I think that everyone has to nurture an awareness of the ways that we are connected to animals—the essence of what being animal is—and to cherish and literally try to save animals.

I think many people of color feel that they’re facing extinction. It’s a little difficult, then, to put the energy that you have to fight for your own life into trying to fight for the lives of creatures that you are also exploiting. It’s a very heavy bind.

 

E.B.: Although every day provides us with an opportunity to feel better about ourselves by personally resisting and boycotting violence towards nonhuman animals, many people are hostile and defensive about changing their lifestyles. Why do you think that is?

 

A.W.: I think that people are defensive about change because people are basically lazy. If they already feel that they are suffering under a horrible government, the world is going crazy, and war is everywhere, then it’s a little hard to now have to think about everything they eat and wear.

It would be nice to think that universal enlightenment occurs at once, but it doesn’t. I think you can only hope to inspire people—to move them by what you see yourself, by what you feel yourself, and by what you do. It may take them weeks, months, years, but once you reach them, they start to work on the problem, whatever it is. If I didn’t have faith that that is what happens, I wouldn’t bother to work at all.

When I write a novel about child abuse and sexist violence, I expect that a lot of the wife beaters and a lot of the child abusers are going to be really hostile and resentful. Of course, they don’t want to stop this behavior. This is the behavior they learned from their mama and daddy. Since it didn’t kill them, it’s obviously the right thing to do.

But if the argument and the scenario is presented in such a way that it truly engages the feelings of the abusers, then I think we have a change coming in those people. I don’t care how much they claim they’re not going to change or how much they claim this doesn’t happen. Once they are moved, the change is inevitable because you cannot live so divided within yourself, between what you know to be right and what you are in fact doing that isn’t right.

 

E.B.: Why do you think people are so invested in being violent towards nonhuman animals?

 

A.W.: In thinking about
The Color Purple
, I should have included the mistreatment of dogs in poor communities, especially in southern black communities like the one in the book. Even today, in some of these communities, there is a real battering of dogs, in addition to a lot of child abuse and wife battering.

I think that people really pass on what’s done to them. Therefore, we can only really change people by treating them differently. In that sense, you can understand how violence is not only obsolete, it’s totally useless as a way of changing the world. The more violence you create, the more you have. Even what it accomplishes is illusory because you acquire something today by violence only to lose it over and over again. That’s because people will always protest and the planet will protest too.

The planet is not helpless and its patience is wearing thin. I’m all for its patience to wear thin because I can’t stand the abuse of the planet and the rampant lack of compassion for the Earth.

 

E.B.: What do you think is the artist’s responsibility towards social change?

 

A.W.: To work for it, but also
to be
it. If you want a world where people are concerned about life on the planet, then you have to be concerned and work for change. But everyone is responsible for the whole creation and the artist has her or his part to do.

 

E.B.: At this point, what do you feel is your role in the animal liberation struggle?

 

A.W.: I wish you could see the place where I live when all the creatures are running around. Someone even saw an eagle here yesterday. I don’t know what’s happening, but I think that everything that ever used to be here is here! So I think coexistence is the direction of my effort and I’m still struggling with my vegetarianism.

 

E.B.: What is that struggle about and can people help?

 

A.W.: I get so much help from vegetarians, it’s amazing! It’s like being prayed through some kind of phase. Ever since people have heard that I was trying, they’ve been really rooting for me.

I’m not sure that I will ever be totally vegetarian. I guess about 10 percent of my diet is chicken and fish. I’m not sure that this won’t always be so. Part of it is that I can’t force myself anymore. I’ve nudged myself to the stage where I eat mostly vegetables, rice, and tofu. In fact, I was vegetarian for three months before I went to Nicaragua this past summer.

I’m still trying to formulate how I really feel about this. I feel in a sense that we are all eaten. That the earth is eventually going to eat all of us. What really bothers me about eating animals, in addition to being able to empathize with them, is that they can’t get away. I think my reason for feeling that eating a fish is not as awful as eating an animal who is grown in a factory farm is that the fish can get away, at least in theory. Not being able to escape is the most awful thing. I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like what I say in the essay about Blue, that you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.

I have a friend up on the hill who has some chickens who run around and she gives me some of their eggs. So, sometimes I eat eggs. My struggle continues. But, I’m also just as concerned about the migrant workers who harvest the strawberries I eat. I read an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
recently about two of them who are suing the growers they worked for because they were paid $20 a week for a six-day, twelve-hour-a-day week. They were housed in a shack with no toilet or bathing facilities, with eighty-nine other people. This is slavery.

 

E.B.: How has your reawakening to nonhuman animal consciousness affected your personal and professional life?

 

A.W.: I think the animals know that I have awakened to them and I feel an amazing connection. For instance, in my house in the city, animals come to the door and into the house. The other day, I was sitting under the tree over there and a bird politely came down and sat on my head.

Now, I am always aware that I’m truly coexisting in the midst of other beings.

 

E.B.: Are your friends already animal rights advocates or are you bringing this awareness to them?

 

A.W.: I think I’m bringing it to them. Generally, they are receptive. One or two of them have looked at me askance. People are so afraid to feel for themselves if the feeling is different from what they perceive the mainstream feeling to be. So I do have friends who just couldn’t imagine what I was talking about—“You talk to these animals? Isn’t that weird?” But now, of course, they talk to them too. So I don’t give up on them, and I don’t give up on myself either.

 

E.B.: The animal liberation movement is about compassion. Yet, compassion for the self is often the hardest to show.

 

A.W.: Yes, because we love to be perfect or even just vastly better now. But, as long as I feel I’m moving, I won’t despair. I think this need of ours to be better than we are sometimes prevents change. It prevents us from acting.

For instance, I agonized a long time over whether I should write the article about Blue because I felt that I could only really take this position and express and share the way I feel about him as a fellow being if I was already a vegetarian. I kept asking myself how can I dare to presume to say this if I am not already at the point where I want to take people. I finally answered by saying to myself that I have the responsibility to share the vision even if I am not already in the vision. There’s value in sharing the process. You want to encourage people by appearing as if you have it all together, but I frankly feel it’s better to share that you don’t because that’s the truth and that’s the reality. Nobody has it all together.