The World Has Changed (39 page)

 

A.W.: [laughter] Good.

 

M.J.: We just have to go on with it—and then still more when you wrote a book about genital mutilation. How did it look to you? You lived through it. How did it feel;
now
, with some distance, what does it look like?

 

A.W.: You know what an African man—I actually had many a time with African men, because they would say to me, “We do not have female genital mutilation. This is just something that you are making up out of your own distorted imagination.”

 

M.J.: Are you serious?

 

A.W.: Oh, yeah.

 

M.J.: This was after it was also published?

 

A.W.: Yes, yes. And also, another one said to me, “We have a saying in our tribe,” or “our group,” “that to tell the truth hurts the people.”

 

M.J.: This was a saying he had just made up. [laughter]

 

A.W.: No, no, no. Well, well . . .

 

M.J.: No, not necessarily.

 

A.W.: I’m just getting to this whole thing about people being afraid of what other people are going to do with the information that you give them, as if they haven’t noticed.

 

M.J.: As if it hasn’t already been said.

 

A.W.: Exactly, and as if it’s not happening in every corner of the globe that I have been to. I just cannot understand this feeling that, if you attempt to heal yourself, there’s something about that that’s going to make you sick. No, it’s true, you may get grief-stricken and sad and angry and sick in
that
way while you’re dealing with it, but you’re going to be a lot healthier after you deal with it honestly and look at it. You know, so when I’m writing about these so-called men who have suffered through the generations and done this, that, and the other thing, what was really different, I think, is just that I was showing what that behavior looked like from the perspective of the women to whom it was happening, who
matter
to me.

 

M.J.: And you were also showing what it was taking out of the men who were doing it.

 

A.W.: Oh, absolutely, and out of
us
collectively. You cannot batter and abuse and stand on half of your population and expect to thrive. How can you do that? I traveled all over Africa talking about FGM. And sometimes I would just very bluntly say, “Look at this village. Look at this community. There’s so much sickness, there’s so much pain. People are barely shuffling along.”

 

M.J.: That walk that you describe. In
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, Alice keeps describing the walk that the Olinka girls and women have after the cliterodectomy is performed, and it is this painful little shuffling walk; it’s what we associate with the abject shuffle of the dispossessed black person.

 

A.W.: And not only that, it’s very painful. When women have intercourse, it’s excruciating. There’s no such thing as pleasure. When they give birth, they often have to be cut open again in order to give birth. I mean, this is as horrible as anything you can imagine. How are you going to sit and justify that? How are you going to sit and justify beating
women and girls and forcing them to be subservient because they are female? You cannot do it. And furthermore you cannot expect to be a healthy people if you abuse each other in this way. It is impossible. So I accept all the criticism. I am so thankful that my ancestors made me really strong. You know, I’m really strong, and I understand that strength, having suffered a lot, but I am strong enough to take it, because we are worth it. We are
worth
it. And we are worth it; not only the men are worth it, but the women are worth it.

 

M.J.: You speak of healing oneself and what it costs, and it strikes me that a great deal of what stands in the way of healing is one’s own shame and embarrassment of not only how you will be perceived by others, but of facing it yourself.

 

A.W.: Yes.

 

M.J.: What does one do with that?

 

A.W.: Well, I was shot when I was a child, and I was blinded in my right eye, and this was something that was so excruciatingly painful, and caused so much shame, that it took me so long to deal with it at all, but when I was able to deal with it, Margo, it just transformed the way that I could see the world, and I began to understand that it is when we can accept our own woundedness, when we can see the way that we have suffered, and just accept it, acknowledge it, and say, “Okay.” And I’ve talked to people who have been raped, who have been cut in various ways, who have been shot, whose parents did this and that and the other thing or to child soldiers who have killed their parents. When you can at least say that this is what life has brought to me, you know, openly, honestly, then there is a possibility for some kind of shift and transformation, but if you can’t do that, if you are sitting there holding on to all of the grief and all the sadness and all the shame, you will never move.

 

M.J.: What made it possible for you to deal with the scar, the wound from the eye?

 

A.W.: I think love. Love is what usually helps us deal with anything. I had this
amazing
brother who had basically tried to have my eye
operated on when I was still in Georgia, but the doctor basically took the money and didn’t do anything, so years later, like six years later, he asked me to come to Boston, and he took me again to the hospital and he had surgery performed. And the surgery was wonderful, and I loved feeling a lot more
sightly
, but what really did it was his love of me. This is the thing. If we can truly love our siblings and truly love each other, there is a possibility of transforming the most heinous, horrible things that happen to us.

 

M.J.: And that is, it seems to me, what you are going at more and more in each piece of writing. You are moving from the black American world of the early works in Africa, Latin America; you now speak of your American Indian and black ancestry. Did it start with those characters coming to you in
The Color Purple
?

 

A.W.: The inclusiveness or the healingness? No; here is one of the places it started. My ancestry is actually English, Irish, Scottish, from the Euro side; Cherokee, from the indigenous side; and African, from I think Ghana, because I get along really well with Anansi. Now, this is something, really, I want to share this because everybody in here probably is a mixture of something.

 

M.J.: Yes, we’re a mongrel country.

 

A.W.: Yes, and so many people do not want to deal with that. There’s one you don’t like. This one did that. Well, I actually had that problem, I had the problem with the European ancestor, because they did some awful things. Part of my family comes from something that’s still today called Grant’s—Grant like Hugh Grant—Grant’s Plantation. You know, and then there’s the Walker section, that’s the Scotch-Irish people. What do you do with these people, you know, what do you do with them? One of them was a rapist. He raped my great-grandmother when she was fourteen. This is where “Mister” comes from, you know, and it’s been so sad to see that we are so ahistorical that we can’t even recognize the behavior of the slave owner in ourselves. So I had to
really
deal with this ancestor, this white ancestor, because he’s here, he’s nowhere else but here. So I really decided that he had to have other attributes than rapist. And I know that he—and I now know this after many long nights and
many struggles and traveling all the way to Edinburgh, where they just
adore
me. They sit there and say things like, “Well, Alice, the English are trying to bury their nuclear waste in Scotland. What shall we do?” I say, “Brother, I don’t know.” [laughter] Oh, my brother. But, anyway, so I decided, knowing the Scotch people, and I really grew to like them because of their poetry, I realized that, oh, this is an ancestor who must have loved poetry, even if he was run out of Scotland, and he probably liked music, because they do love to dance, and this is true also of the Irish, and to some degree of the English as well. You know, I had to enlarge my sense of who this intrusive person was. And then I had to think about how he came to Georgia. How did he get there? You know, was he like one of those little starving boys in
Oliver Twist
? I mean, was he Oliver Twist? You know, I mean, these are the connections we make.

And then there’s my Native American great-grandmother, and what was her story? I learned very late in life because of my friend Wilma Mankiller—she used to be the chief of the Cherokee—but the Cherokee held slaves, you know, and so this was an ancestor who was part African, she was Cherokee, but she was part African, and then she came into our family through the Calloways. The Calloways are these people in Georgia who have big flower gardens. Now, gardens. And on and on like that. And then the African. The African got off the boat and walked from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia, carrying two children. Now
there’s
an ancestor.

See? And that’s who’s sitting in front of you, that’s who’s sitting here, and you look into who you are, that’s who’s sitting there, maybe not the same configuration, maybe a different configuration, but we have to really claim all these strands in order to be whole. I remember in the Black Power phase of the movement there was this insistence that you had to be just black, and they were saying things like that about someone who looked like Kathleen Cleaver, just really very, very light-skinned people had to be as if they had just come completely from Benin. [laughter] And this is
absurd
. We are people of color. I love Du Bois for giving us that phrase. Isn’t it beautiful?

 

M.J.: Yes, I love it, too. Yes.

 

A.W.: People of color, you know?

 

M.J.: Intense and muted and every kind of, yes.

 

A.W.: And all my English and Scottish and Irish people, they are now people of color. And I’m sure they’re very happy. [laughter]

 

M.J.: I hope mine are, too.

 

A.W.: Yes, they are, Margo, they are, listen, I’m telling you. When you free them, you’re happy. Set them free.

 

M.J.: Oh, Alice, you’ve just reminded me of a painful story. In the height of the Black Power movement, I had a friend who had dead-straight hair, as we used to say, and was very light. So there she was in New Orleans, which was very hot, in a huge Afro wig in a restaurant one evening. She got up to go to the bathroom, basically to take a wig break. [laughter] She walked into the bathroom, and there, facing her, was a woman, a browner-skinned woman, who was also taking a wig break, but she had taken off her straightened wig and, yes, and underneath was a small version of the Afro that my friend craved. According to my friend, first they saw each other in the mirror and then they exchanged a look that meant, “Something will be learned from this,” but they then each had to put the wig back on and return to their place, [laughter] but I think my friend ceased to wear her wig shortly after that. But it happened and that’s comic, though not entirely, but terrible things were done in the name of all of that.

 

A.W.: Exactly. And I hope we learned; I think we did. I think now it’s more a matter of choice.

 

M.J.: And I think the whole view of mixed-race children and all that, there’s more flexibility, there’s more room, absolutely. Which characters did come—because I’m still thinking of your moving from the U.S. to Africa and in
The Color Purple
Nettie making her way to Africa—who did come to you first? Because you describe yourself as writer and
medium
in thanking people in
The Color Purple
. Who came to you first and how?

 

A.W.: Okay, well, I had a stepgrandmother whose name was Rachel, and she loved me very much. My own grandmother had been murdered
by a man who wanted to date her, and she said no, and he just shot her dead in front of the church, and she died in my father’s arms, but in any case I had this stepgrandmother Rachel, and all I knew about her is that she had two children, nobody ever knew what happened to them; she had married my grandfather, who was not the sweetest husband you could imagine; and she was this loving though servile kind of person, and I wanted so much to honor the love that she managed to give to us that I decided to try to write in her voice, but I could never remember much more of her voice, her actual voice, than an expression that she used to use, which was “sho do.” “Sho do.” And I was then able to construct an entire book [laughter] out of her “sho do,” and so that was a kind of start, and it was a way of honoring, also, the people, my grandfather, her, my grandfather’s lover, you know, all of these people, it was a way to spend
time
with them, because I was so little that, you know, most of my siblings, all of my siblings left pretty much before I got, you know, big, and then the grandparents were getting really old, and so all you could hear was like these little fragments of “Well, then they did so and so,” and “She was wearing this,” and “Oh, that hat.”

But I think there was something in me that so loved them, that so loved the remnants that were left of them, that I resolved to spend a year trying to be with them, and so when you read
The Color Purple
, you actually are reading someone who is actually feeling like she is with these people, and the only way that—since they’re all dead, the only way that I could possibly do that, and it was a wonderful time, it was truly wonderful. They were so funny. And that was the other thing that was so annoying, people that were complaining about
The Color Purple
, they’re all like, it’s so, you know, depressing and tragic and this and that, but that’s life, life has all that in it, but what you need to counter that is your own sense of honor, and these people I thought were just hilarious.