The World Has Changed (16 page)

 

P.G.: That makes me think of something I recently heard about the reaction of a mother to her daughter, a college student, when the daughter told that she had just been raped. The mother said, “Oh, don’t make such a big deal about it, all women go through that.”

 

A.W.: That mother just put a nail in her coffin. And if the daughter’s ever to rise again, she’s going to have to get that nail out.

 

P.G.: There is also a comment in the novel to the effect that women have to minimize the pain that men give them so that they won’t hate their sons.

 

A.W.: Yes. Perhaps that is why mothers protect them so, why daughters like the student you talked about are sacrificed—even when there’s no actual son in the house. That’s why we cannot continue this. We want our sons and we want our daughters. We can’t raise sons who will break into a woman’s body and just help themselves.

 

P.G.: How do we begin to heal all of that, Alice? I mean, do we all have to go to psychoanalysts? Can we do it ourselves?

 

A.W.: I doubt it. I don’t think you can do anything without help. In order to see the back of your head, you need a mirror to look into. It doesn’t have to be a psychoanalyst—it might be a novel. But it has to be some kind of healer.

 

P.G.: We tend to equate tradition with something that is positive, needed. But not all tradition should be preserved, should it?

 

A.W.: Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths percent of traditions should be done away with because women did not make them. Like marriage, for example. Say you woke up one morning in a beautiful world
and you had everything you wanted: you had your work, your health, you had your friends, you had good food, good lovemaking. Would you really look around and say “What do I really need now? I guess I need to get married.” [laughs] Give me a break! But we think that way because we are in a heterosexist culture that says your life is incomplete without a man. It is the same with men. They are told that without a woman you can’t have pleasure, you can’t have joy. . . . And then there is the church, bless its heart, which has been so damaging....

 

P.G.: You define religion as “an elaborate excuse for what man has done to woman and the earth.”

 

A.W.: That’s what organized religion is. Can you imagine a church telling you what to do with your body? Telling you not to masturbate, for example? It’s your body! Or the church telling you what race or class or color to have sex with? It’s none of the church’s business.

I’m not saying that there are not some wonderful things about the church. But it is a reflection of a male-dominant tradition that has been reinforced by the slave culture. The church has to be taken apart and put back together in a way that is revolutionary.

 

P.G.: We’ve been made less than whole in so many ways, haven’t we?

 

A.W.: Yes, there are so many people walking around who have forgotten to be whole persons. Just like they’ve forgotten what it is to laugh. We have canned laughter. I hate it, because I know what real laughter sounds like. Do you know that many of our children have never heard real laughter? Many people have forgotten how to love. We’ve forgotten to have faith in our own beauty. “Don’t you know you’re beautiful?” I ask people. “Can’t you remember?”

 

P.G.: Is that in effect what Tashi is doing in this novel, trying to remember her beauty before society or tradition cripples her?

 

A.W.: Yes, and that makes Tashi a universal woman. I want people to see that there is not a big gap between Tashi and [a celebrity] who enlarged her breasts. She has been crippled. Why would you marry someone who wanted a woman with big breasts? Why not just send him a couple of
breasts? That’s what I would have done—I hope. I would have just asked somebody to make up two large breasts and put them in a box and send them to whatever-this-guy’s-name-is, you know?

But collusion with this need of his is a sign of her crippling.

 

P.G.: In the novel, Tashi is surrounded by a loving community that includes an African American man, a European man and woman, and a young man who is both biracial and bisexual.

 

A.W.: I was never a separatist, but now more than ever before my own life is so multiracial, multiethnic, multisexual, multieverything. That’s my life. And I’m glad of it, thank the Goddess. I think the reason that it’s so wonderful is because sometimes your own oppression—let’s say the relationship with your family—is so painful that if you couldn’t do very much with it, you’d die.

But what you gain in that situation gives you another insight that you can apply to something else—and live. That’s why we find ourselves connecting so deeply in these different communities, with all these different people. I just love that aspect of life. I love the people in my life.

 

P.G.: The idea of displacing pain makes me ask the question about black women’s relationship to it.

 

A.W.: You can get addicted to pain. That’s another thing that’s
so
awful about the image of the crucifixion, you know? But you can also get addicted to joy! That’s what I would do. [laughs] I mean, I am sure there is pain waiting in my life. The whole world situation is painful. But I am here to tell you that your joy can equal your pain—it can strip your pain.

And if you can have faith in a God that somebody else gave you and that you have never seen, you can also have faith in your own joy—something you’ve at least had a glimmer of.

 

P.G.: Have you always known this?

 

A.W.: I would have never gotten out of Georgia if I didn’t know, ’cause those people were about to kill me. You just have to let joy be your guide. You know, when I was growing up, I used to escape from the house to the woods—there was tremendous joy there. And I said to myself, “One
of these days you can actually have both. You won’t have to run away from a bad place to a good place. You can have two good places.” And that’s what I have.

 

P.G.: What you’re saying is so important: to be conscious of the world, of your own pain, and also of your own joy.

 

A.W.: Paula, I’ve never had a better time—weeping all the way, you know what I mean? You know the expression “unspeakable joy”? I have unspeakable joy even as I deal with my anger, sorrow, and grief. I don’t have a big plan, a big scheme about all this. I have one requirement: that, because of this book, one little girl, somewhere, won’t be mutilated. And that’s plenty. That’ll keep me laughing. I’ll go home, I’ll kick up my heels, and I’ll feel that on this issue I’ve saved one child. That’s enough.

JEAN SHINODA BOLEN: One of the images I had when I was invited to fantasize who I might have a conversation with, with you, I thought of the three of us as being really—you saw us walk in, we’re all about the same size, and we’re ethnically diverse, and we did not plan to dress in a color-coordinated way, but we have.

We have been sitting in the Grace Cathedral version of the green room, which is labeled “nursery,” and we have been warming up by talking with each other, and one of the things that has come up is that we don’t want this conversation just to be okay, we have a feeling/sense that many of you are here because you have creativity that wants to be born and wants form. And maybe something that we share with you will in some way help in your own birthing process.

The other thing that feels so very special to me is that I have a feeling that almost everybody in the room is related to all three of us, probably, certainly at least two, I mean people are related to authors of books in ways that really matter. It’s like, when you write from a soul level, you share something of what deeply matters to you. You put it in form and you put it out there, and then a reader comes along. And often that reader comes along at a particular significant moment, connects with a book that has something in it that makes a difference. And so there’s a feeling in this room of you are community, you are related to us.

We have a conversation about to happen, and we have not planned it. Not only will we have space for you to have questions, but there’s something about being in the vessel that is this room, and being part of it, and picking up, perhaps as the currents of the conversation go, something of why you came and what you came to hear.

We have touched each other, our work has touched each other. We actually don’t know each other well. We have already gotten a sense of
where the conversation might go by raising such questions as the personal level out of which our work comes, and for me personally with my training as a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist, and being ethnically Japanese, there is a long tradition of really not being very personal. And certainly when I sit in my office, I’m focusing on the other people, and when I’m lecturing, I have a subject, and so this is a new form for me, and I am both excited by it and a little nervous, and so is Isabel.

 

ISABEL ALLENDE: I’m terrified, but I’m not terrified for the same reasons she is; I’m always very personal, and I don’t mind being extremely personal, but this is the first time that I’m not reading. I’m, you know, English is not my language, and I’m always overprepared for everything. So I bring these pages, and I read, and I feel safe behind the pages. Well, this time I feel totally naked.

 

J.S.B.: And Alice has great trust.

 

ALICE WALKER: Plenty of it.

 

I.A.: Alice said, “You don’t have to worry, these people come here and they will have to do the happening, not us. So you already know what your responsibility is.”

 

A.W.: Right. So was there a question, Jean, did you finish?

 

J.S.B.: Well the overall question is where do our books come from? What is the model, being like the labyrinth in this cathedral or the birth process, what inseminates, impregnates, what starts the process, and what is it like?

 

A.W.: Well, I think with me it’s different with each book, and that it’s usually just that there is something that never goes away, you know, some feeling or something I want to understand that is always with me no matter what I’m doing. And I literally cannot lose it. And at the point I’m really knowing that I can never lose this, I then try to schedule a year in which to really look at it and really see what comes. Because it’s so important to unclutter the brain, the mind. This society is so full of junk, and, you know, just stuff, that for me creativity is greatly impeded
just by the chatter, you know, of all those things and the visual clutter of life. So I need to be able to see great distances, you know, just clear to the horizon for one thing, and a lot of time that is quiet and pure, that is not about which bills to pay or, you know, noise. It’s just very important to have a space that is really really clear for whatever is emerging to come.

 

J.S.B.: Your last book [
Possessing the Secret of Joy
] was very uncomfortable.

 

A.W.: Yes.

 

J.S.B.: I would imagine you were not very comfortable living with this book and what brought it up and how you felt. Do you feel your way into the characters, does the experience feel, like, embodied and then it comes out? How was it for you to be with your last book?

 

A.W.: It was very difficult. There were days where I actually started the writing. First of all it took a lot, twenty years or more, for me to decide to write it, because I wanted to be sure that it would be in a form that people could feel and not really get away from, and also in a form that—

 

J.S.B.: [interrupting] It succeeded.

 

A.W.: But also that it would be in a form that wouldn’t intimidate anyone either. I mean you could put it down, you could go for weeks without opening the book. But I learned about genital mutilation twenty years ago in Kenya, and it just was so completely beyond my experience at the time, because I was a student, that I didn’t, I literally didn’t understand what they meant. And then over the years I started to understand what that meant, and then what that meant to the women and the children when this was done.

But by the time I actually started, I was in such a state of grief that the only thing that sustained me was that I could go outside and just lie facedown on the earth. And somehow I got the energy that I always get from the earth directly. And I really understood, in a quite deep way, that the body of woman is the body of the earth, and it was the same kind of scarring, mutilation, control. You know, “If you’re gonna have a crop, it’s gonna be my crop. This is what you’re gonna have. It’s gonna
be cotton, it’s gonna be corn, it’s gonna be soybeans.” And the same where they cut the woman, and they sew her up, and they say, “If you’re gonna have children, it’s gonna be my child, it’s gonna be a boy.” But I have found in my work that I couldn’t live without the earth; I mean, the people who think they could live in space, they’re crazy. I cannot live without the earth. It gives me everything, including peace of mind. I mean, just by being under my feet, and under my body when I lie on it.

 

I.A.: I imagine that in the case of this book there was also a lot of anger that you have to transform to something else. I mean put boundaries to that anger and use it.

 

A.W.: Yes, but I still have it. I was able to use the anger that I had, but also to come finish the book and realize that I’m still angry, and that I’m justified at being angry. If you cannot be angry about something like this, I think you’re dead. You know? And that is good, I mean it is good because it propels you on to do something more, and also to keep yourself really alive.