The World Has Changed (22 page)

I would only add that, for me, the alliance is between women and children: it is us. I think that children should be permitted to vote; I think that they have to have much more of a say in running the world and that a twelve-year-old child, boy or girl, is often much more compassionate, astute, and openhearted than the politicians who are regularly elected and who waste our money on extremely foolish things and who do damage every day.

Children have been disenfranchised, they have been ignored, but they are natural allies of women and of men who understand that the whole thing has to change for any kind of high-quality life to continue.

 

J.H.: Was it difficult raising your own child and doing your writing?

 

A.W.: Actually, [my daughter] was born three days after I finished my first novel, so she came at a natural break in the process of writing. I devoted myself to her for one full year, night and day, and then I enrolled her for half a day in the day care down the street. I could see the house from our yard, and I liked the woman who ran it. When we went to the Radcliffe Institute, she went to the Radcliffe day care, and I wrote and I took care of her. It was difficult—there were times when she was sick and it was very hard to get a doctor, and all those things—but I would have to say that I grew to understand the African woman who does her work with her child on her back, that this is all just part of life, this is part of what is. As long as you are not competing with some man who thinks that his balls are what can make you a writer, there’s no problem. You just write as well as you can and you raise your child as well as you can.

Another way of thinking about it, which I really feel now, is that time is all there is, so there’s no hurry either, there’s no rush to do it. It’s a very full life because a child connects you to the coming generations. Just from giving birth I felt a new understanding and respect for women. And then, because it is so miraculous, the whole process of conception, and pregnancy, and giving birth, and watching a child grow brought the miracle of life right up close where I could watch it every day.

When I look at my daughter, I sometimes see the little child crawling, or the little girl in the yellow jumper who’s rushing out to play with her friends, or the eleven-year-old who has a crush on somebody. To watch a tiny being grow up until today she is much taller than I am, she’s so smart, and caring, and such a good person—it’s just amazing.

 

J.H.: You said some time ago, “I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival
whole
of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and the triumphs of black women.” Would you add anything to that today?

 

A.W.: From
Living by the Word
to
The Temple of My Familiar
, I think in those books especially, I delved into my fascination with and interest in nature, and my interest in tracing my own spiritual ancestry all the way back to five hundred thousand years of wherever. It became really crucial to me to reconnect with the prehistoric, because the historic—for
women especially, and for people of color—is so negative and so one-sided. And it truly is
his
tory—it just leaves us out, or we are shown in such mutilated ways that the depictions of us are not helpful.

So I started dreaming my way back and through all of these lifetimes on this planet. Just in the natural course of existence my focus has moved to include more than people.

 

J.H.: Do you have a familiar? And if so, what is it?

 

A.W.: What I was working on with
The Temple of My Familiar
was getting to the understanding for myself that your familiar is your own free spirit, and freedom is its temple. And that is what I have: that is my familiar. Frida [Walker’s cat, named after painter Frida Kahlo] tries to be my familiar, but she just represents that part of myself which is the inner twin, the one who is free and is totally committed to being authentic, to being a free person. Your familiar is your own free spirit.

 

J.H.: In one of the essays in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, you talked about your aunts and your mother who worked on a farm and had strong muscles and would go out after working on the farm. “It is because of them that I know women can do anything, and that one’s sexuality is not affected by one’s work.” If one’s sexuality is not affected by one’s work, what
does
affect one’s sexuality?

 

A.W.: Well, one’s passion, basically. I think it’s not just in philosophy or even “life” that you follow your bliss, but you also follow your bliss sexually. I mean, that is what affects your sexuality—what you’re attracted to and what you’re drawn to and where your passion takes you. This doesn’t always have anything to do with other people’s notion of what
should
move you.

I was writing in
Possessing the Secret of Joy
about a pansexual person, someone who is turned on by waterfalls, and elephant rides, and horseback riding, and all of that. There was one reviewer who found this very funny, but actually there
are
women who are orgasmic riding horses and elephants and waterfalls.

I think of sexuality as something that, like spirit, has been colonized. It’s the Bible again, that book that has done so much damage to women’s self-image and their notion of what they’re about. It says something like,
“Your desire will just be for your husband.” In other words, if you’re a woman, you’re only supposed to be turned on to men. That’s so limiting! It’s hard to believe that people would limit themselves to men, or even to people. It’s a world that is full of great sensuous experiences and it’s like committing yourself to one religion or one way of thinking about things when in fact, the more we learn, the more mysterious the universe is. There is nothing that is solid, there is nothing that is hard, there
is
no hard copy. The universe is full of space, and full of movement, and full of flux, and full of change. That’s the nature of what reality there is.

 

J.H.: I loved the section on Fanny and kissing in
Temple of My Familiar
and the wonderful descriptions of kissing. Kissing is fast becoming a lost art; one has only to look at American film and television actors, who are embarassingly terrible kissers. By resuscitating kissing in this country do you think we might succeed in bringing back intimacy?

 

A.W.: Oh, I think so! I am a great kisser myself; I love to kiss. Kissing is in many ways more a spiritual connection than making love because you exchange breath, and breath is the most ever-present, everlasting thing that you will ever have as a human being who is alive; it’s very special. I just did a yoga retreat with a wonderful woman named Angela Farmer, and she was speaking of the breath as your most enduring lover. When you kiss, that is what you are offering, and that is what you are receiving. So it is a very high art and it’s a very high expression of soul.

 

J.H.: You are one of the most respected writers in America today. Yet you have said, “To be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects rather than raises it.” What
does
it mean today to be a black woman and an artist?

 

A.W.: Well, in many quarters that’s still true. Black women writers are constantly attacked, and for instance, during
The Color Purple
film and book, these attacks were fast and furious, with people organizing to picket the film. Most of my life I have been called various things. I find it very difficult to talk about people’s criticism and vilification; I accept it as something that they apparently need to do and will do, but I find no pleasure in it. With
Warrior Marks
there are many African women and American women, black and white, who take the position that genital
mutilation is something that is not my business and not my place to write about, think about, or campaign against.

When you say “respected,” there are people who do respect what I do, and that’s very good. But there are also people who hate what I do and who are very vociferous about it and have been from the very beginning of my career. I don’t see that this is unexpected. I knew when I started writing that everything I wrote would be very hard, that it would be hard for people to accept, it would be hard for them to accept whatever lifeway I was indulging in, and that there would be criticism and that there would be hostility. At times this has been very painful, at other times it has been less so.

 

J.H.: In an August ’89 interview in
The Progressive
, Claudia Dreifus asked you about the pain of getting mixed reviews, primarily from male critics, and said they can hurt. You replied, “They can try. But what can I do about it? I can only persist in being myself.” Who are you these days? And where do you find the strength and courage to be yourself?

 

A.W.: I don’t see that I have an alternative. I’m very happy to exist in this one lifetime that I have for sure as me. It seems ridiculous to try to live your life at any time as anybody else or as anybody else’s version of how you should be. It’s a waste of time, really, and as I said, time is all you have, so why waste it? I find it amazing that people do, that there are people who care more about what other people think of them than they care about what they think of themselves. It’s almost something that I can’t grasp because the pleasure of being who you are is very great; there’s nothing like it.

One of the things that I’ve been attacked for is my insistence on affirming my mother’s Cherokee grandmother and the Scottish-Irish whoever-he-was rapist who was my father’s grandfather. Their take on this is that somehow it’s a way of trying to get away from being a black person, which I think is incredibly backward. What people fail to understand is that the real pleasure of life is in what is unique. The world has such incredible variety; why not join it, be that different thing, that other expression, since that is what you are anyway, and love it?

It is such an affirming pleasure to rummage through your soul and to find the lost Scottish-Irish whoever-he-was and take him to task, and to rummage through your soul and find this great-great-grandmother,
who apparently was very mean, and who had a story of her own which we may never know. How did she get into the family? And why is it that so many of us in my family either look very much like her or we have characteristics that are very much hers?

And then the African. I go to Africa every once in a while and I feel so tender, I have a tenderness for that strain of who I am, it just overwhelms me. It’s almost like a puzzle, to trace one’s emotional attachment to one’s ancestry. Like why, why do you have these loves and these uneasinesses?

 

J.H.: It’s as if you belong to the whole world.

 

A.W.: Of course I do, and so do you, and so does everyone. So why sit in a corner somewhere and try to be just one thing when you are all of it? I’m listening to a wonderful tape on Ayurvedic medicine and the science of life. Their way of looking at reality is that we are all made up of five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and ether—and that, literally, you have attributes that correspond to these factors. Even without having known their way of thinking about it, that is the way I feel.

I feel like that same microscope that looks at a leaf and eventually finds nothing but emptiness and some tiny little thing in there at the end of the magnifying process, some tiny, tiny, tiny little thing that you can’t even tell is there except by its shadow—that’s exactly what’s happening in me, that’s what’s happening everywhere, and that is matter, that is what is here on this planet. It really helps to put things in perspective.

 

J.H.: Where do your characters come from? From what elements are
they
made?

 

A.W.: Imagination, and tiny bits or large bits of reality, love for certain people, and commitment to telling a story which, unless I told it, wouldn’t make it. In the tape I made together with Isabel Allende and Jean Shinoda Bolen, I talk about my first novel and how, when I was thirteen, I saw this woman who had been murdered. Her husband had shot her, she was really poor, she had this one shoe left on and it was stuffed with newspaper, she had all these children, and her last name was Walker, although she wasn’t related to us, to my knowledge. Domestic violence is something that today we have a handle on, although
it’s even worse than we thought. But back then, there was really no one to analyze this and put it somewhere where it could be useful. What it needed was a story to contain it and to make it possible to share it without bludgeoning the reader or the hearer. Over time I had to go to school and learn how to do it, but I finally did write this story. And so she’s remembered.

 

J.H.: At one point you commented that your characters come through you, that they speak to you. I remember you said that when you were writing
The Color Purple
your characters told you to sell the house in New York and move to Northern California.

 

A.W.: Oh well, they just said they didn’t like New York, and of course, they’re me, you know. I love that Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had this way of always saying, “Well, God told me that I had to pack up and cross the river, and that if I would just take these slaves ten miles he would take them the rest of the way.” Every time I read those women I just love them more. It also is sad, though, because you realize that the spiritual colonization of people is so intense that most people cannot take responsibility for their own desires and their own will. So it was impossible for either Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman to say, “I just decided that I’d had it, and I was going to go and I was going to take all these people.” In the same way you have a dialogue with the imaginary, and that’s what happens. It’s all you and you don’t really forget that, but there’s that wonderful, playful quality of knowing that you have dreamed up people who are walking around and who have opinions.