The World Has Changed (48 page)

So I offered this book as a companion for this specific time, which I consider probably, along with millions of other people, the most dangerous, frightening, unstable time that the earth has known and that human beings have ever known.

 

D.S.: But your regular publisher didn’t see it that way?

 

A.W.: No. I think they may not have understood how much nourishment we get from teachers who encourage this kind of awareness. Even when
we feel we can’t change things, it’s important to have awareness of what has happened. If you are unaware of what has happened, it means you’re not alive in many respects. And to be unalive in many places within yourself means you are missing a lot of the experience of being on this planet. And this planet is not to be missed.

RUDOLPH P. BYRD: For
The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker
, you have written a poem that marks the publication of your first collection of conversations and interviews. Tell us about the genesis of the poem and the questions you believe are central to it.

 

ALICE WALKER: With the election of a black man to the presidency of the United States, the world
has
changed. Such an event was unthinkable for many people until it actually occurred. For some, there is an unwillingness to believe this historic turn in North America’s affairs is real. They need a poem that reminds them that disbelieving in a new reality can mean missing it altogether; this would be a waste and a tragedy for those who could benefit from shifting their understanding of what America is or can become. I was asked by a newspaper, I don’t recall which or whether it was printed, to write a poem for the inauguration; my mind was very much on those who, from disbelief, could not rejoice. I was able to read the poem on
Democracy Now!
on the day of the inauguration. I co-hosted the program that day with its anchor, the most honorable Amy Goodman.

I also wanted to celebrate those of us who have withstood years of little hope and scant beauty coming to us from Washington. That we continued to believe in and then to work for change, in the person of Obama, was remarkable. We deserve a better world, and it will come, as we strengthen belief in our own power to create what we desire. Human beings must regain faith in ourselves and try to see more good in each other than bad.

R.B.: You have devoted the last year or so to travel, to seeing the earth, and to meditation. Why have you restructured your life in this way? What have you learned about yourself and the world during this period? And what effect has this period of wandering and meditation had upon your writing?

 

A.W.: I wasn’t planning to travel beyond my writing and meditation retreat in Mexico. I settled in for the duration, thinking I would meditate on my cushion, which faces a fountain created by a local artist as an abstract sculpture of a mother holding her child/her heart, symbolized by a large reddish stone. I thought I would wander no farther than a local beach filled with Mexican families who strike me always as still knowing how to enjoy life. There are lots of moms and dads and children and the occasional dog, lots of thatched palapas for sitting out of the sun, lots of food. The day Obama won the election, I started a Web site and a blog. This would take care of the very occasional writing I thought I might do. However, true to a pattern I’ve noticed over the years, I am like a spring that goes dry from overuse but then, with rest, fills up again. I began writing almost daily on my blog, often about my attempts to get collard greens to flourish in my garden or a neighbor’s field (where unfortunately ants ate them overnight), and to my surprise I soon found myself—within weeks of leaving Mexico—on my way to far-off destinations: Burma (Myanmar) and Gaza (Palestine).

But the old way of living and writing—tied to schedules, book tours, and publicity concerns—has no attraction for me. This period I’m in now, with its surprise writing and travel, also feels transitional. There is a sense of sinking back, with gratitude, into the vegetation. A call from the soul that wants a quiet so deep, a mental space so clear and empty, that I can inhabit it almost solely as spirit. And surely this is part of what aging is for: to prepare us for the slow absorption into the All, which I perceive to be a radiant and positive destination.

R.B.: You will be traveling soon to Dharamshala and returning to Gaza. What draws you to these very different places? Is there a history that the people in both places share?

 

A.W.: It isn’t clear whether I will be able to have an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala; I was forced to cancel an audience with him scheduled too close to the date I am to join a Freedom March in Gaza, December 31, 2009. We met many years ago, I think the first time he came to San Francisco. He came to speak to our youth, and I was also invited to speak. I admire him tremendously for his humble bearing of the huge responsibility life has given him as leader of the Tibetan people and, in a sense, leader of the rest of us who need a living example of how to maintain soul under nearly unbearable circumstances. When I travel to countries like Rwanda and the Congo and Palestine, I draw on his example of soul care and his dogged continuation of teaching that which he knows, having used it himself, to be effective: meditation and clear seeing. Also peace enhancement and anger management.

While in Kerala, India, I hope to spend time with the writer Arundhati Roy—and her mother! Roy’s work is marked by an intense, even fierce compassion for common people; I want to visit the Kerala that produced this sense of commitment and belief in possibility. I’ve heard little about the senior Mrs. Roy, but I’m sure she will be revealed as formidable.

While in New Delhi, I will want to pay my respects to Mahatma Gandhi. I believe I’m to give a talk at the Gandhi Institute there. What always struck me about Martin Luther King when I was a student in high school and he was just beginning his charge against the Dictatorship of White Supremacy in our country was that he seemed to know us, people of color, so well. What we really, in our heart of hearts, were like. And he accepted us for what we were. I want to visit India to see what it was that Gandhi loved, understood, and accepted about Indians—so much so that he endangered his life to live among them and to teach and lead. That King thought us worthy of any sacrifice was clear to me as a student, and moved me to tears. How does he know? I wondered. How does he continue to believe in us? Who are we, after all? After four hundred years of slavery and post-enslavement degradation, we were, far too many of us, quite a wreck. But with those extraordinarily wise eyes of his, he saw us beyond our wreckage and with compassion held us dear. Knowing the divine within himself, he saw it in us. Namaste!

There are similarities between what has happened to the Tibetan and Palestinian people. Both peoples have been invaded, their lands confiscated, and their culture suppressed and largely destroyed. The Chinese and Israeli governments have behaved with similar cruelty toward the
indigenous people. Both Palestinians and Tibetans have a strong history of resistance, and their cultures are deeply rooted in nature, in music, in religion/spirituality, and in art. They are also, very often, farming people, with a deep love of the land. This is one of the reasons I resonate with both of them. Whenever I encounter people who love their olive and fruit trees, their tomatoes, vegetables, and land, the farmer in me joins hands with them. I need no other, more political connection. But this is because of my paganism, no doubt. My belief that nature and we and “God/Goddess” are one and the same. My devotion to this intuitively arrived-at understanding.

R.B.: At an earlier period in your career as a writer, you spoke of the importance of Jean Toomer’s
Cane
, Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, Flannery O’Connor’s
Everything That Rises Must Converge
, Ernest J. Gaines’s
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities,
Bessie Head’s
When Rain Clouds Gather
, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
. This is only a very slim sampling of the writers and their books you regard as important in your artistic development. What are those books in either fiction or nonfiction with which you are now in dialogue as writer and as earthling?

 

A.W.: Reading comes in layers: there’s the reading one does to understand the current crisis, whatever it is; the reading for pleasure; the reading for soul.

Because I’m engaged in bringing more U.S. awareness to the situation in Gaza, where the Israeli government uses American taxpayer money (including, to my shame, some of mine) to destroy Palestinians—a lot of them children, women, and old people—I have been reading books by Palestinian and Israeli writers: Ali Abunimah, Saree Makdisi, David Grossman, and Marcia Freedman, among others. I like what some Indian writers are writing. I loved
The Mistress of Spices
and will read anything by Arundhati Roy. I recently read a wonderful book called
Leaving India–
not a novel but one woman’s travel all over the earth to trace relatives and ancestors who’d left India to settle in odd places: Fiji, for instance. I wish I had a better memory and could recall all the novels I’ve loved and all the names of the writers. One novel, about Gertrude Stein
and Alice B. Toklas and their Vietnamese cook, that I never forget is
The Book of Salt
, by Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong. I am also a big fan of the Hawaiian writer Kiana Davenport, who wrote
Shark Dialogues
. No one should go to Hawaii without reading her novels about it.

On a day-to-day basis, I am happiest reading the
Dhammapada
, the Upanishads,
365 Tao
by Deng Ming-Dao, and other books that teach spiritual lessons. I love the work of Jack Kornfield, especially his books on CD:
The Roots of Buddhist Psychology
and
Buddhism for Beginners
. Also
A Path with Heart
. I also love the work of Michael Meade, war resister, mythologist, and storyteller, also on CD. For decades I have been supported by the old stories collected and told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I think her two-volume set
Theatre of the Imagination
should be in the audio library of everyone. I have also benefited from reading Carl Jung and Laurens van der Post—van der Post because he lived in a time when Bushmen (Bushpeople) were still living their traditional lives close to the earth in Africa. We can learn a lot from their gentleness, compassion, and disinterest in gobbling up the world around them. I’ve studied Jane Goodall’s work admiringly, as well as Malidoma Somé’s.
The Healing Wisdom of Africa
and
Of Water and the Spirit
are strengthening gifts to human imagination and growth. The work of Pema Chödrön has meant a lot to me. I love books (books and houses—a decent house!—were what I most longed for as a child), but I’ve become very selective about what I read. I find I simply cannot read anything that lacks integrity or spiritual energy. Beside my bed are these: the
I Ching
(which I sometimes feel is my favorite book simply because I’ve used it for so long); the
Motherpeace Tarot: Deck and Book
, which I also use periodically;
The New Astrology
(Chinese and Western) by Suzanne White (a wonderful book and not only because she gets monkeys right); and
The Essential Rumi
, translated by Coleman Barks. Rumi and I belong, with millions of other enchanted readers it is heartening to realize, to the same star.

What many people don’t realize is that the soul can benefit from instruction just as the mind can, and that this instruction is readily available. We just have to look, sometimes vigorously. It is a good thing to have a nourishing church experience every Sunday, for instance, but that is like going to a dinner where only a certain kind of food is likely to appear on the table. The soul may take a nibble, but it’s quite likely that what it really wants isn’t there. Unfettering the soul and letting it roam after its own peculiar nourishment is part of what assures spiritual
development. We live in a time rich in all kinds of soul food, not just chops and overcooked greens, but organic produce and pure water, one might say.

I am fundamentally animist (everything has spirit) and pagan (I worship nature and the spirit of nature), but I am enchanted with wisdom wherever it is found. Buddha and Jesus, the poet Rumi, Somé, Meade and Kornfield, Chödrön, Amma, and Fidel are all dear to me.

R.B.: You have created beautiful and enduring works in the genres of the essay, poetry, the short story, and the novel. Could you elaborate upon the appeal and challenge of each genre? Given your obvious strengths as a writer of dialogue, will you ever write plays?

 

A.W.: I enjoyed writing the screenplay for
The Color Purple
once I actually started it. (Not used for the movie.) I can imagine writing plays. What gets in the way is the realization that I’d need actors. It is extremely satisfying to write in genres that don’t require more than I myself can give. I can imagine being distracted trying to find the right actors for the roles, or even having to think about this. Also, at this point in my life, I seem to be returning to poetry, my first love. Over the past year, I’ve written a book of poems,
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: A Year of Poems
. These came at a rate of several a week. Sometimes several came on the same day, like surprise guests.

R.B.: Along with the stories themselves and the majesties of language, what is most memorable about your fiction are the characters. What are the several elements that for you lead to the creation of characters? Could you describe your process of creating characters and also for naming them?