The World Has Changed (14 page)

 

E.B.: Being vulnerable in that way often makes it easier for other people to begin their own process.

 

A.W.: Absolutely! It also makes it easier for them to share their process. I have gotten tons of cookbooks, letters, testimonials—I think I’ve heard from half the vegetarians in the world!

At times, I question my 10 percent of chicken and fish, but then I think it’s okay because it is the truth. It’s where I am and I’m glad to be
there. Given my background of meat three times a day, this represents such a leap in consciousness.

 

E.B.: Was it hard to move away from that?

 

A.W.: Not really, although every month I would get a real chicken attack. I wrote about an incident when I was in Bali that is helping me a lot to deal with my chicken problem. One day, I was walking across the road with my daughter and my companion. It was raining and we were trying to get home. I looked down and there was this chicken with her little babies. They were trying to get home too. It was one of those times feminists refer to as a “click.” Well, this was one of those human animal–to–nonhuman animal clicks, where it just seemed so clear to me how one we are. I was a mother. She was a mother. And she was trying to get those little brats across the street. They were not cooperating and she was just fussing and carrying on.

I feel I’ve been having a lot of help.

 

E.B.: What do you think about the argument that vegetarianism violates cultural traditions and rituals and, therefore, is racist or imperialist?

 

A.W.: You mean if people have been killing pigs forever, you should let them keep doing that and not mention that the pig has something to say? No, I don’t think that’s a good argument.

Slavery was an intrinsic part of southern heritage. Propertied white people loved having slaves. That was something they were all used to and they even fought a war to keep them. But that view did not take into account the desires of the slaves, who didn’t want to be slaves. In the same way, animals don’t want to be eaten.

 

E.B.: There seems to be an emphasis in the current animal liberation movement on male-defined philosophy and science, and on male academicians—even though women are the backbone of the movement. Emotions are for “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” but not for a sophisticated movement that’s to be taken seriously. However, in her article “Dominance and Control,” author Gene Corea discusses the necessity of dismantling patriarchy and sounds a warning to women that we
“betray ourselves in our work for the animals” when we adopt “artificial male language.” Please comment.

 

A.W.: I read her article and I agree absolutely. I think the feeling that the animal rights movement and a lot of other movements are dominated by white men who have a very dispassionate, rational, linear way of approaching reality keeps away a lot of passionate Third World people who are really sick of that. That’s gotten us where we are today, which is on the edge of extinction.

Who needs this? Who wants this? Who cares about trying to sit under that kind of tutelage—condescending, cold, cut off from feelings? Wherever I go, I take my passion. It’s part of me. The whole thing is what you get. In any case, it’s what I keep.

Think of it this way. During the enslavement of black people in this country, white women were required to look on the most savage beatings and also to administer some of them. White women were not supposed to care, only to take care of business—to see that “Suki” was beaten and “John” had his foot chopped off. This made the white woman’s enslavement that much more profound. She couldn’t even be herself in that situation.

A brave white woman looking at slavery would have had to try to see herself as one of the people enslaved. She would have had to know from her own suffering that there was a connection between herself and the slaves. She would have had to bond with the slaves and not with her husband.

That is what it seems to me we have to ask ourselves in bonding with animals rather than with the killer. What permits us to be who we are? I think the animals give us much more freedom to be who we are than people who are oppressing all of us.

 

E.B.: Why do you think that people who care about nonhuman animals are often called sentimental, and why does it seem that the word “sentimental” has a negative connotation rather than a positive one?

 

A.W.: The people who call us sentimental have destroyed great tracts of feeling in themselves, and what else can they do but say that we’re sentimental? We are talking about people who have big holes in themselves that were probably punched out when they were children. Now when
they meet other people who don’t have the holes, they feel they have to say something. They have to project onto us.

I think some people think of sentimentality as negative because they associate it with women. To say that someone is sentimental, in the sense of being like women, is, of course, a positive thing. It means you still have your sentiments, your capacity to care.

 

E.B.: In your essay “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” you wrote, “But if by some miracle in all our struggle the earth is spared from a nuclear holocaust, only justice to every living thing will save humankind.” What’s your vision of that justice?

 

A.W.: Obvious things like an end to hunger, an end to illiteracy. To put it another way, the beginning of health for everyone, food for everyone, education for everyone, respect for everything.

Part of what justice means for nonhuman animals is that there will just have to be fewer people, because I think the insistence of people to cover the Earth is itself a grievous insult to the nonhuman animals whose space is squeezed into nonexistence. Just because people can have three, four, and five children does not mean that that’s the best thing for all creation. It definitely is not. Helping people to see that is an early project which has to go along with animal rights.

CLAUDIA DREIFUS: Your new novel,
The Temple of My Familiar
, has been published to mixed reviews. You spent eight years writing it. Surely, this must hurt.

 

ALICE WALKER: Well, you can only be hurt by the criticism of the people you respect. And failing that: the people you know. And failing that: the people who understand your life. Or care about your worldview. When people don’t fit any of those categories, it’s hard to be really
that
concerned. Yes, you would like to be understood by people. But I
do
understand that my worldview is different from that of most of the critics. I think most of the reviews have been by white men, you know,
real
establishment white men. And they are defending a way of life, a patriarchal system, which I do not worship. They are not working-class white males. They are not progressive white males. They are not the white males I have worked with in all the progressive movements and causes I have been active in over the years. I can’t imagine any of these critics being at the pro-choice march. I can’t imagine any of them blockading arms shipments to Central America. I can’t imagine any of them being arrested at antiapartheid demonstrations. I can’t imagine any of them knowing about or caring about the lives of black women, or of black children, or of black men. So there is no reason I should really care that they are angry.

 

C.D.: But they can hurt your work, your ability to reach readers.

 

A.W.: They can try. But what can I do about it? I can only persist in being myself.

 

C.D.: It’s not just white male critics who get very angry at your work. When
The Color Purple
was first published, black male critics fell all
over each other to denounce what they said was your negative portrayal of black male characters.

 

A.W.: My feeling was that the way some of the black males revealed themselves to be was far more negative than anything I would ever have even thought about black men. I would not have expected such pettiness. You know, they had no identification with the struggle of women! That’s shocking in a people who, I had always assumed, identified with every struggle for human rights in the world. If you have in your cultural background Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Du Bois, all these people, how then can you really totally ignore a progressive movement like the women’s liberation movement? So that when you read my work, you read it without any acknowledgment that my work, especially
The Color Purple
, is in the context of a struggle for liberation that women all over the world are engaged in.

What I did was to go on writing
The Temple of My Familiar
. But I just wish in general that people would truly read what you write, rather than launch attacks against you based on hearsay, based on what they think you mean. And I wish that men could have more of an appreciation of gentleness in men and not find it so threatening. That’s part of the problem of men who can read
The Color Purple
and only find negative things about men in it. Because once the men in my book change from being macho men, [the critics] just lose interest in them, they can’t recognize them as men.

 

C.D.: The striking thing about the men in
The Color Purple
is how much you permitted them to change, to grow. Mr. ___ starts out as a brute, but he ends up rather loving toward Celie.

 

A.W.: Right. They would have been bad if they had just remained macho brutes. But they don’t.

 

C.D.: Do you think some of the attacks on you are really jealousy of your worldly attainments? You’ve got the prizes, the money, the fame—many of these gentlemen critics would like that stuff too.

 

A.W.: I suppose. There is nothing I can say about it except I’ve worked very hard all my life. I have not had an easy life. I did not start out writing to attain worldly goods. I started out writing to save my life. I had a
childhood where I was very much alone and I wrote to comfort myself. I’ve been very suicidal at times in my life, for various reasons that I don’t want to go into here. But I’ve had some really hard times. And whenever that has happened. I have written myself out of it. And it may look to other people like “silver-platter time,” but to me, it’s just been a very long struggle; so it was always just astonishing to me that anyone would be envious.

 

C.D.: When you say you’ve written yourself out of depressions, is that because you created characters to keep you company?

 

A.W.: No. It’s because of the act of creation itself. It’s like in Native American cultures, when you feel sick at heart, sick in soul, you do sand paintings. Or you make a basket. The thing is that you are focused on creating something. And while you’re doing that, there’s a kind of spiritual alchemy that happens and you turn that bad feeling into something that becomes a golden light. It’s all because you are intensely creating something that is beautiful. And in Native American cultures, by the time you’ve finished the sand painting, you’re well. The point is to heal yourself.

 

C.D.: More than many writers, you are known as a political activist. What do you get from activism?

 

A.W.: Well, it pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet. There are things that you really owe, I feel. I think if I weren’t active politically, I would feel as if I were sitting back eating at the banquet without washing the dishes or preparing the food. It wouldn’t feel right to me.

 

C.D.: Did you go to the recent pro-choice march in Washington, D.C.?

 

A.W.: Yes. As someone who had an abortion before it was legal, it was very moving to be there with my daughter. Because I really knew what I was marching for. I knew that I don’t want her to suffer the same kind of sadness, depression, and fear that I had, that many of us do.

 

C.D.: Tell us about the illegal abortion.

 

A.W.: It was really frightening. And also, I was brought up to feel that it was a heinous thing. I was nineteen or twenty, something like that. I was in an incredible moral struggle to decide. I wanted a life to live and there was no way I could support another person. So it was a problem.

 

C.D.: You weren’t injured?

 

A.W.: Oh, no. No. It was quite nice. That part of it. A very nice Italian doctor whose daughter was at Vassar. He understood perfectly well why I, a college student, shouldn’t have a baby.

 

C.D.: For many of the women who went to that march in April, it was an exhilarating experience. However, everyone noticed how few women of color attended.

 

A.W.: And the fact is that more black women have abortions than anyone else. You can’t say they didn’t come because they don’t believe in abortion.

 

C.D.: Maybe there was a great ambivalence in the black community about the issue.

 

A.W.: Maybe so. You know, I don’t think there’s that much ambivalence about the issue. Maybe about being perceived as someone who is pro-abortion. But the reality is that nine out of the ten women you meet on the street have had an abortion.

 

C.D.: Your nineteen-year-old daughter has your name—not that of her father, your ex-husband. Why?

 

A.W.: I think she decided that she’s a Walker. You know, I chose Walker. It was my name, but I also re-chose it, because I had a great-great-great-grandmother who walked from Virginia to Georgia carrying two children. She was a slave of white people. I always think of that walk in her as a Walker, as being totally heroic and wonderful. And so when I was deciding on what to name myself, after I had decided I didn’t want to be called by my husband’s name. I had to figure out what I really wanted to do with all these patriarchal names. This was back in the third year of
my marriage when I decided I could not stand being called by my husband’s name. So I went to court and had my name given back to me. So I decided I really wanted that name because of her walk, not because it was my father’s name. So then [my daughter], really loving that history, decided that she wanted it as well. But also, we’re very close.