The World Has Changed (24 page)

I want to do things like that that seem to me to be about creating a
space where people can kick back, eat, laugh, tell stories, be comfortable, and by extension send that vibration across the world. Because really, what’s important is not so much the frenzied activity that we all have been in—if we’re not still in it—but the slowness of the daily and the richness of the very ordinary stuff.

TAMI SIMON: What are the beliefs and principles you live by on a daily basis—that guide your life?

 

ALICE WALKER: I try to be kind, and I try to maintain a peacefulness in my spirit. But I suppose the main thing I feel is a kind of internal drive to be my natural self. Because I feel to be the natural self is the truest form of gratitude for being and also of worship to what is here—the planet and the universe.

 

T.S.: It seems that by the time many people reach adulthood, they have lost touch with their “natural self.”

 

A.W.: I think that what is required is silence. It requires listening to yourself and letting yourself lead, speak, and express. It is an internal flowering that is expressed externally. And also it’s fluid; it’s not as if you never change. It’s more like everything else in life. It’s always becoming and you never quite see it, but it’s still happening.

Often in this culture people are programmed to think hierarchically: the blonder the better, the bluer your eyes, the whiter your skin, or the bigger and the taller your shoulders—the better. There is this whole notion that you have to be some other way in order to be right. Nothing in nature supports that view. So what people have to realize is, they are really just fine the way they are. Beauty and joy follow when you become more of who you are. And so the essential thing is not necessarily who loves you, or what group is accepting of you, or what group do you accept. But do you accept yourself, however you are?

 

T.S.: I know that in addition to being a poet and a writer, you are also a mother. I’m curious—is there anything you learned from that experience that you don’t think you would have received from any other part of your life?

 

A.W.: Oh, yeah. When my daughter was born, three days before I finished my first novel, I was instantly connected to all the women in the world. Because I finally understood what an incredible thing women do in creating and peopling the world. You know, it hadn’t really sunk in to me that women people the world. And that all the people that you see come out of women; they come out of women the way that my daughter came out of me. Through a lot of pain. And I realized that this is part of what is hidden—the heroic nature of giving birth, and the humility of keeping silent about this journey, which is harrowing. So I felt very much connected to my mother, who had done this eight times without any kind of anaesthetic.

 

T.S.: That heroism that comes with childbirth: how has that been hidden from people?

 

A.W.: I think by people not affirming it, and by the way they force women to lie on their backs to give birth so that the doctor can get the credit. In fact, the real normal way to give birth is to squat. And to let gravity help you deliver your child. And this is how it’s still done in many parts of the world. But you know, there are no songs that I know of about “Now she is hugely pregnant. Now she is heavy. Now she has stood on her feet for nine months waiting for you. Now she is in pain. Now she is in labor. Now she is mounting the bed or the chair so that she can give birth to you. Ah, this is a woman of great courage. She would have to be, for now she will have much pain.”

This is not a song that you hear, but this is a song we should be singing as women go into labor. Preferably in their own houses, or in some birthing space in nature where there are a lot of women around them. This is a ritual that I think would help us very much.

 

T.S.: Your most recent novel,
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, addresses the horrors of female genital mutilation, a practice that occurs in over thirty countries around the world. At the end of the novel, it’s
stated that “resistance is the secret of joy.” Please comment on that statement.

 

A.W.: Just simply, that resistance to tyranny is the secret of joy. It means that the joy is in the struggle against whatever is keeping you from being your true self. You have to fight it. You cannot expect to have happiness in an intolerable situation where you are thoroughly oppressed and violated. There is no greater joy than being who you are, and what you are, and truly that. And to have someone come and say to you: “Well, you know, your body would be okay if you didn’t have a vulva. Let me just cut yours off.” It’s not acceptable. You really have to fight it.

 

T.S.: What is your way of resisting or fighting back?

 

A.W.: My way of fighting back is to understand what I am fighting, and then in my writing to create a work that expresses what I understand. What is great about being a creative person is that instead of throwing a rock or a bomb or whatever, you can
create
something. And the creation of it is very healing.

 

T.S.: Do you believe in prayer? Do you pray?

 

A.W.: All the time. I think that for me the sincerest form of prayer is to express my being and my gratitude for being.

Also, work for me is always prayer. I think of all of my work as prayer. In the work itself there is the speaking to the reader, but I’m also expressing all of the feelings that I have as to who I am. And that is the prayer.

 

T.S.: I know you are a student of Buddhism, and I’m curious what your thoughts are about the Buddhist concept of enlightenment or spiritual liberation. Do you think that this is a possibility for human beings?

 

A.W.: I do. I definitely do. I think it’s all about being here and being happy we’re here. Accepting what’s here, including yourself. And knowing that there is no better place that you could be, if only you would get your stuff together.

I think “be here now” says it. And it’s the hardest thing to do, of course, because there is that old imagination.

But imagine, if you could—I love sunflowers, so I’ll say a sunflower—if you could just be like a sunflower, not complaining, just open, with your little seeds and your little yellow petals. And you’re turning your face to the sun and following it around. At night you just stay there, quiet and content. Because where is true happiness? Your true happiness, or my true happiness, is in a peaceful spirit. It’s hard for me to think that there’s anything else that matters.

ALICE WALKER: I would like to read a poem that I wrote over the last three days; it’s called “My Teacher,” and it’s dedicated to Howard Zinn.

And now, I would like my teacher to come and join me.

 

HOWARD ZINN: Well. Now. Alice told me, as we were talking about what we would do, just how well organized this thing is. Five minutes before we came, we were talking about what we should do, and she said, “Well, I’m going to read something, and then I have a surprise.” That was the poem. Do you really mean that?

 

A.W.: Yes, I really mean it, I mean every word. I do.

 

H.Z.: I really was her teacher. You may have gotten that impression. I also remember the first time that I met her. I don’t remember the first day that I met every student, but this was Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, 1961, and I had been at Spelman for several years, but this is Alice’s first year, she had just arrived from Eatonton, from out of, you know, the country.

 

A.W.: Deep country.

 

H.Z.: And we just found ourselves sitting next to one another at this freshmen’s dinner or honors dinner—you were honored even then, God. Anyway, she was very quiet, but very dignified. Not like now. We talked a little, and then, as a sophomore, she took my course. In a little college you teach everything, things you know, things you don’t know, and I was teaching a course in Russian history, and I thought I would jazz it up a little. It was art, literature, it had students read Russian literature, and Alice didn’t say anything in class. And then the first papers came in, and she wrote this paper on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and I read the paper—well, I showed it to a colleague of mine. This is sort of an inside thing about the academic world, I have a lot of inside things of the academic world, and this colleague of mine—as you can see, I’m not letting Alice say anything—I showed it to a colleague of mine, and with that professorial arrogance, he said, “She couldn’t have written it.” I never told you this, did I?

 

A.W.: No, who was it?

 

H.Z.: I never told you this? We’re going to hear a lot of things we haven’t told one another; even though we’ve seen each other over the years, there are things we haven’t told one another. He said, “Somebody else must have written this.” I said, “No, you’re wrong. There’s nobody around that can write like this.” That was our introduction.

 

A.W.: And I took your class because I had been to Russia the summer before, and I was really right out of the country and really very young, and it didn’t make a lot of sense, and I felt that if I came back and I studied Russian literature and history and a little of the language, which you taught too—you know,
mir y druzba.

 

H.Z.: Nice, you remembered. You remembered all of the Russian language that I taught.

 

A.W.: Right. Please, thank you, peace and friendship.

 

H.Z.: It was amazing to me that you were doing all this traveling. You just came from Eatonton; traveling to Atlanta was something.

 

A.W.: I was trying to put some distance between me and Eatonton.

 

H.Z.: You did. You went to Russia, and at some point you went to France, and another point you went to Africa, and all this while you were a student.

 

A.W.: I really was very curious about the world, and I love travel, and I’m not so keen on it now because there’s hardly anyplace that I would really like to go—except now I would like to go on the river in the Grand Canyon, that’s the only place I can think of that I’d really like to go now.

 

H.Z.: Really? It’s a big drop, isn’t it?

 

A.W.: Big drop?

 

H.Z.: I mean, it’s way down there. The Colorado River.

 

A.W.: Yeah, that river. But, at the time, I had never been anywhere, hardly, out of the state of Georgia, and most of my relatives had never been outside this little three-county area in Georgia, and it was wonderful to be able to travel and just bring back little things to show them what other people were like in other parts of the world. Those dolls, you know, that fit into each other, things like that. Shawls that had a lot of embroidery. It was good; I was always trying to bring the world back to my family and to my little town.

 

H.Z.: It must have been really astonishing to them, and you were only one of your many siblings who did that, right?

 

A.W.: Well, I had a sister [Mamie Lee Walker] who did it, but she eventually stopped coming back, so I guess I took over, that part of it, the one who goes far and says yes, there’s land over there. You know, you bring back what you find. I love doing it, especially doing it with my mother, just try to make the world bigger for her.