The World Has Changed (15 page)

 

C.D.: Your books are taught at hundreds of universities around the country. Yet there are many professors who complain their students should be reading Plato and not Alice Walker. There’s a “back-to-basics” anger that writings like yours have become texts.

 

A.W.: Whenever you try to get inclusive, you get it.

 

C.D.: In your work, you’ve tried to go to other myths and histories than the ones that are standard. Do you think that’s one of the reasons why you draw this kind of criticism?

 

A.W.: Of course. It’s amazing to me that the white male establishment in literature and other areas really seems to believe that because they buy the myth that they have always been wonderful, that they’ve always done everything, and that the only thing worth knowing is what they produced—it’s amazing to me that they think we should think it. We don’t. If ever the emperor had no clothes, this is it. Whatever their worldview is, it is certainly not shared by me.

But this is entirely reasonable. I am not they. My life has not been theirs. My life has been one of everyone in the culture acknowledging that I, as a black woman, am the least respected person in the society. I’m the one expected to do most of the work and not complain, and a long list of other things, over hundreds of years. They, on the other hand, have been brought up to think that they are to rule, that their word is law. But just because they have the power to do that does not mean it is right or that I think they are great. I don’t. I think any twelve black women anywhere in the world could do a much better job of running the world than they are doing. And I say twelve because if I had to create a structure for governing, it would never have one person at the head of it. To me that is really totally obsolete.

You have to have many more people in charge of things—and they have to be people who care about the future. This culture is one in which
everyone is trying to get through the next four years—at best. And look where that gets us. It gets us plutonium in the drinking water and in the air. It gets us a trillion-dollar budget. At a time when people are starving and when they don’t have medicines.

 

C.D.: What do you read when you have time to read?

 

A.W.: At the moment, let’s say in the last month or so, I have read—these are wonderful books—I loved
The Great Cosmic Mother
, by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor. I loved Barbara Walker’s
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
. I read a novel by a Zimbabwean woman, it’s wonderful, it’s called
Nervous Conditions
. Her name is Tsitsi Dangarembga. She’s a young woman brought up in Zimbabwe in the home of a missionary uncle. The voice in it is rare. This woman has a sort of detached quality that is very rare in African women’s writing. She’s very perceptive. Then, another book I read some months ago is called
My Place
, by Sally Morgan, an Australian aboriginal woman, who is fabulous. I’m also reading, at the moment,
Lives of Courage
, about the South African women who are in the anti-apartheid movement. It’s wonderful, because they are all kinds, all colors, and even all classes, which I didn’t know.

 

C.D.: From
The Temple of My Familiar
and
The Color Purple
, one senses that color is a very important part of your life. In
The Color Purple
, you have a long section on the meaning of purple. In this new book, one of your characters, Olivia, owns a miraculous blue suit that works miracles only in a certain shade of blue.

 

A.W.: I think colors
are
miraculous. We live in a universe that is extremely creative and magical. We become happier as we appreciate these things in nature.

 

C.D.: And have we been cut off from appreciating them?

 

A.W.: Oh, yes. When we live in cities, which are basically artificial arrangements, we do forget, for instance, how miraculous spring is. I’ve been walking in Central Park today, and I’ve been so attracted by the fresh little green leaves that are such a beautiful spot in the center of this
concrete city. But most of the people—and especially the children—in New York are so far removed from the magic that is inherent in nature, from spring coming to flower, to bloom. Even my daughter, who’s been brought up around gardens all of her life, said to me last summer, when I was showing her corn I had planted and how tall it was, “Mama, tell me, does the corn come out of the ground—or where does it come from, on a stalk?” She was eighteen then. I was shocked. But I think if you’re surrounded by buildings and paper and you learn about life through books rather than perceiving life itself, you don’t know what inherent magic there is in creation.

 

C.D.: You used to live in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. Did you move to the West Coast because you felt too cut off from nature?

 

A.W.: Yeah. I bought a little house in Park Slope that gave me the largest possible amount of sky, and I had a tree planted in the front and one in the back. And I sort of thought these could represent sky and forest.

 

C.D.: A symbolic tree?

 

A.W.: Yes. Because I couldn’t really live without at least a symbolic tree. I knew that much. But what I realized three months after I bought this house and moved into it is that it just wasn’t enough. I don’t want the symbolic. I want the real. So I moved. I moved to California, where there still are, thankfully, lots of trees, lots of sky, and lots of earth.

 

C.D.: Tell us about Olivia’s blue suit. Her daughter, Fanny, takes it to the cleaners and it never comes back, so she makes another one for herself, but it is the wrong shade of blue and it makes her extremely tired every time she wears it. Where did that idea come from?

 

A.W.: I just made it up. Because it just seemed perfectly logical. All of us have had at least one magical garment that someone gave us or that we bought. And when we put it on, we just felt very vivid. And then, if you lost that and you tried to replace it with something else, it just wouldn’t work. There was just no way. Because, actually, you were trying to make a material thing function as a spiritual thing. The first one actually en-spirited you because of the connection. It was made by someone who
loved you. But then you get something off the rack, and it is not the same thing.

 

C.D.: One senses you have very strong feelings about handmade objects. Once, on
The Today Show
, you described a book almost as if it were a piece of sculpture or pottery.

 

A.W.: Well, I do. In my house, I don’t have much furniture. But what I have looks like anybody could have made it. Anybody with a real aesthetic eye. Not fancy things. Useful objects. I love pottery, I wish I could make pots. I’m not very good at it. I value what has been made by people.

 

C.D.: Do you think the objects, after a while, encompass the spirit of the person who made them?

 

A.W.: Oh, I think they do from the beginning. When you respond to something because it’s so beautiful, you’re really looking at the soul of the person who made it. The spirit of the person who made it has gone into it; that’s why it is so beautiful. It has all of her or his concentrated intensity and passion and thoughtfulness, and that’s what you see.

 

C.D.: There’s a New Age quality to your writing, to your ideas.

 

A.W.: What I’m doing is literarily trying to reconnect us to our ancestors. All of us. I’m really trying to do that because I see the ancient past as the future, that the connection that was original is a connection; if we can affirm it in the present, it will make a different future.

Because it’s really fatal to see yourself as separate. You have to feel, I think, more or less equal and valid in order for the whole organism to feel healthy.

PAULA GIDDINGS: What made you focus on the issue of clitoridectomy in
Possessing the Secret of Joy
?

 

ALICE WALKER: I dragged my feet for a long time, because I knew my whole life would change once I published it. But I could not continue going on blithely, as if this weren’t happening. As if this were not a part of what’s wrong with Africa. Of what’s wrong with us. I firmly believe that the reason AIDS spreads faster in Africa is because of these genital mutilations. And I think that if it continues, it will depopulate the continent—maybe not in my lifetime, or even my child’s lifetime, but it will happen.

 

P.G.: There are those who will say that clitoridectomies are now only performed in isolated areas....

 

A.W.: I love the people who say, “You’re only talking about ten women, so what are you worrying about?” Of course, the point is that if it only happened to one little girl, that would be too many—but the estimation is that [almost] one hundred million women have been mutilated. One hundred million! Imagine that you’re in Chicago and you could walk and meet everyone between there and the Atlantic Ocean. Then imagine that all of those people you met had had this done to them. That’s what one hundred million would look like. Now tell me, how do you expect to have a healthy continent with this going on, when this is wrecking the very foundation of it? How do you expect healthy anything?

 

P.G.: The first thing I’ve heard a lot of men say is that this is done in secrecy by women and that men don’t know very much about it.

 

A.W.: It’s been happening for thousands of years, and they don’t know? Some of the men have to take their wives to the hospital because they are so hard to break into, and they don’t know? If we’re going to lie about it, why don’t we just say that we are a people who lie? Let’s just be out front about it.

 

P.G.: Now, you know what the main thrust of the criticism against you will be: How dare this American judge us? What gives this Westerner a right to intervene in our affairs?

 

A.W.: Slavery intervened. As far as I’m concerned, I am speaking for my great-great-great-great-grandmother who came here with all this pain in her body. Think about it. In addition to having been captured, put in the hull of a ship, packed like sardines, put on the auction block, in addition to her children being sold, she being raped, in addition to all of this, she might have been genitally mutilated. I can’t stand it! I would go nuts if this part of her story weren’t factored in. Imagine if men came from Africa with their penises removed. Believe me, we would have many a tale about it.

The other answer is when Africans get in trouble, whom do they call? Everybody. They call on people they shouldn’t even talk to—trying to raise money, appealing to people to fight their battles, buying guns from Russia and the United States. They [Africans] invite all of these experts from Europe and the United States to go there to say their bit about AIDS, to sell them condoms. So they can accept what I—someone who loves my former home—am saying. They don’t have a leg to stand on, so they better not start hopping around me!

 

P.G.: What about those who say that this casts aspersions on the homeland?

 

A.W.: I don’t really care where the child is who’s suffering. I really don’t. I just know that the child is suffering. That she’s been held down and cut open. That she will never forget it. You know, you don’t forget anything. You may not remember, but you don’t forget. It’s inexcusable, it’s indefensible.

 

P.G.: It’s hard to imagine living a life after being mutilated like that.

 

A.W.: It’s such a shock to the system. You know everything you’ve been taught about African women, that they are “hot” and “lascivious”? It makes you wonder.... In Hanny Lightfoot-Klein’s book [
Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa
(Harrington Park Press, 1989)], she talks about visiting, in the Sudan, a place where at night all the women go in, like chickens. There are no windows, they lock the door—practically nail it shut—and then in all this heat they wrap themselves up in a way that is practically impossible to unravel. Then they huddle close together. There is no air. That’s how they sleep. Because as bad as rape is anywhere, for them it is a matter of life and death. There, if you’re torn open, you’re subject to tetanus, to all kinds of infection and disease. Then there’s the tearing—I mean you could bleed to death if there is no one there to repair you. So these women are completely controlled by the fears of being torn open without possibility of repair.

 

P.G.: What do you know about any movement against mutilation in Africa?

 

A.W.: As far as I know, there is not much of a movement, just woman after woman—either alone or with two or three other people—getting up and speaking out or writing about it. I think there have been periods when there was more of a concerted effort to stop it. After the British left, for example, there were attempts to raise consciousness about it, but it’s the kind of thing that is so deeply engraved into the tradition that people slide back into it.

What I’m hoping is that this book will invite whatever movement there is to converge with all of the people who may now be aware of it, and together we may be able to do something.

 

P.G.: In
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, Tashi sees a psychoanalyst who tells her that “Negro women” can never be analyzed effectively because they can’t bring themselves to blame their mothers.

 

A.W.: [Sighs] I knew that phrase would leap out of the novel. It explains the pattern of our repression, our self-repression. It has been extremely difficult to blame our mothers for anything, because we can see so clearly what they’ve been up against. It almost killed me to see women
in Kenya and other places who actually have grooves in their foreheads from carrying heavy loads. How do you say, “Look what you’re doing to me?” How do you criticize someone who has “made a way out of no way” for you? But we have to. For our own health, we have to examine the ways in which we’ve been harmed by our mothers’ collaboration.