The World Has Changed (30 page)

 

M.T.: There was also a redemptive quality you incorporated in the character Albert.

 

A.W.: Yes, because I love him as much as I love anybody else in the book. If anything saddened me, it was that people who denigrated the depiction of black men couldn’t see how much I loved this man. In fact, that if I didn’t love him so much I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to put him through all of the changes that he goes through to become the kind of person who can be talked to and who can listen.

 

M.T.: I just was reminded of something you wrote about how when you were writing
The Color Purple
, working on it, that you didn’t like Brooklyn.

 

A.W.: I didn’t like New York. I hated New York. But you know, it’s because I’m so completely melded with all of the parts of myself, and these characters are parts of myself. That’s why they come to me and not to somebody else. They are mine. They come out of me. When we got to San Francisco, they liked the beauty, but they didn’t like earthquakes, and they were loud and insistent and that’s how I got here in Anderson Valley. I knew that I needed to be in a place where they felt comfortable. I know there must be writers who can write about the “kind of characters” in
The Color Purple
, [in] a little apartment somewhere in an urban setting, but that’s not me. And for
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, I started it in Mexico. Because, again, this setting, which I love, was just really a little too posh. I needed a third-world country; Africa was far, but Mexico turned out to be a kind of Africa of this part of the world. I needed to think about what it would be like to have this kind of procedure, this mutilation, in a setting where you didn’t have medical care, you didn’t have antiseptics, you didn’t have anesthesia, you didn’t have people who actually knew what they were doing, even.

 

J.T.: Tell our listeners what you’re speaking of.

 

A.W.: I’m talking about female genital mutilation and writing a novel in which I discuss this procedure and its impact on a woman in the book, and the need to leave my quite wonderful house for writing in Mendocino and go to Mexico, where I was right in the middle of a poor—well, I didn’t live right in the middle of it, but I was close to a village that reminded me of Africa. Because the thing about living in this culture, it is so easy to assume that everybody in the world has ample space and ample food and ample clothing. That’s just not true.

 

M.T.: We were talking earlier, before we started the interview, about radio being the medium of storytelling. I think, since you’ve brought up about where you live, it might be interesting for you to describe where you live, for the listeners.

 

A.W.: What attracted me to this part of the world—Northern California—is really the resemblance to Georgia that it has. Georgia isn’t this dramatic; it’s more simple and plain. But there is the same kind of spaciousness in the out-of-doors, the same forested areas and
the same valleys and sort of rolling hills. I lived in Boonville for a while, but it became too congested. I don’t know if you’ve seen it lately, but there are many more cars and things. I just needed to be back up in the hills. This has been a very good place for me. A very good place for dreaming.

 

M.T.: Your ancestors like it here, too?

 

A.W.: Oh, yes, they’re quite happy.

 

J.T.: This reminds me, in your new book,
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, you’re talking about genital mutilation, and at some point in the book, you talk about circumcision for both men and women: in circumcising men it’s taking off a piece of foreskin that’s like a feminine quality in men; for women it’s taking the masculine quality and it’s taking this away from our, making us one gender, rather than, maybe, something else. Can you speak to that?

 

A.W.: Well, I was just thinking, as you were talking, that the one thing I loved about the Maori was that they were very much at ease about being people of male and female spirit. They have no qualms; they would just talk about being balanced and having a spirit that encompasses male and female. This description of the circumcision of men and the circumcision of women is actually taken from a very old culture, the Dogon, in Mali. That is exactly what it is about, that the foreskin, to these people, symbolized that quality, that female quality in the man, that they were asking him, forcing him, to denounce. So you take off this circle that is representing your woman spirit and, as a man, you cannot have that. Then, for the women, the clitoris, to them, signified the penis in the woman (and also signified her masculine spirit), but as a woman she was not permitted to have a masculine spirit. So, by excising the clitoris, the message to her was that she had to be in every respect a person with a feminine spirit. That a masculine spirit, or a masculine and feminine spirit, could not coexist in the same body.

 

J.T.: There is much mischief in the world today due to sexual identity and stereotyping sexuality. You may have hit on one of the major mischief makings.

 

A.W.: I hope so, because I think it would help people to understand that people are naturally bisexual, as they are naturally bispiritual. You have a male and a female spirit. You have a male and a female sexuality. It’s because you have a male and a female parent. I think it’s useful to consider this discussion in the book, because we need to know what ancient people have done to start this duality that we have, that we are really burdened by this need to be sure that every woman is locked into femininity. And every man is locked into masculinity. Now, you could have that, you could have a really totally masculine man and a totally feminine woman, if you could somehow have parents who were both. For instance, if you and I had a child, we could expect, maybe, to have a totally female feminine person. But even then it wouldn’t work because both of us had fathers. You know, the other sex never disappears. Why would it?

 

J.T.: Yes, that’s the way it’s set up.

 

A.W.: Right.

 

M.T.: Also the figure of a hundred million used to be mentioned.

 

J.T.: Even right now, today, in 1992, how many women and girls actually go through this circumcision?

 

A.W.: The estimates differ. The World Health Organization says 75 million to 100 million. Some people say 95 million; some say 85 million. But it’s very high; the 100 million is the upper figure.

 

J.T.: You write about it in the book and I’d like you to share it with our listeners: some of the personality changes, the painfulness, of this mutilation and what happens.

 

A.W.: Well, first of all, I want to qualify this comment about the numbers, because there are three kinds of mutilation. One is clitoral; one is the clitoris and the inner labia; and the pharaonic, which is what Tashi has in this book, in which everything is scraped away and the woman is sewed up and has to be reopened with every . . . Intercourse often is preceded by being opened, often with instruments—knives and things. There’s also the infibulation, which happens to this woman in this book.

It is just an incredible violation of the body and the spirit. There is no way of actually rectifying it. Intercourse is extremely painful and would not, I don’t think, be recognized as intercourse, because it is such a battle and sometimes the men are actually wounded in this attempt to sleep with their wives. To have a child means that you have to be cut open again in order to have the child come out; I’m not talking about just the episiotomy; you have to actually cut through the sutures that have been made in the flesh of the woman. Often all of this is without any anesthesia and any antiseptic.

 

J.T.: Does this go on in the United States?

 

A.W.: It does. The people who come from cultures where it’s done and settle here consider it part of their culture. It’s like bringing favorite food or marriage customs. In fact this is a marriage custom. Apparently it is done in hospitals in Washington, D.C., and New York and Philadelphia. In London as well. And in France. Because the people who do it do it wherever they are. They don’t say, “Well, we’re going to America now, we don’t have to do this.” I think it’s in this context in the West that you see how much it is about control of female sexuality. A lot of the people, especially from some of the Arab countries, feel that when the children get here they become too wild and too much like Americans. I don’t know if you read about the people from an Arab country somewhere, where the child, a young woman, they thought she was too wild and they killed her. The mother and the father actually killed her. They expressed no regret because they felt she was beginning to be out of their control. So it is about deciding that your child will not have her own sexuality. If she is desexed she is much more malleable.

 

J.T.: This is legal, in hospitals? Doctors will go along with this?

 

A.W.: Apparently so.

 

J.T.: And if it’s not, it’s done illegally and it’s done without the benefit of sterilization.

 

A.W.: But I think in this country it is mostly done by doctors. Now, this is something we will be looking into, as this goes on. As I can
learn more. I’ve had a really wonderful letter from a group whose specialty in this country is female mutilation. It’s a recent organization, but people are aware that it’s being done. In London, it’s the Somali community that has it done to the daughters. In France, it’s the Mali community.

 

J.T.: In Africa, it’s not done overtly; it’s more underground. The tribal people are not for it, but it’s more tradition.

 

A.W.: No, they are for it. Have you been aware of the story of Aminata Diop? She’s a woman from Mali who ran away from Mali because her parents decided that she should have this done to herself. She ran to France. Her fiancé in Mali denounced her; her father denounced her, beat up her mother, threw her mother out of the house—banished her mother because the child had run away. She has been seeking political asylum in France . . . she’s been there going on two years now. It’s a custom and the sad thing, as with Tashi, what happens is that people think that the culture demands it, and if you don’t have it, you’re not really part of the culture.

 

J.T.: So for her, it was a group pressure to belong.

 

A.W.: More than that, though. If you’re part of a tribe, and you have been completely overwhelmed by the settlers, whoever they are, you perceive yourself to be holding on to whatever you have that you are actually permitted to keep. You have to think about the cultures in which everything is taken: their masks, their everything. Everything. Then you have to imagine what things you could keep that nobody could take away from you, that would prove that you really are who you were. Then you get down to things like scars. Nobody wants scars. But you could get scars and you keep those. It’s a very difficult choice she makes, and she lives to regret it. But it’s one that you can understand if you’ve ever really thought about what happens to people from whom everything has been taken.

 

M.T.: Alice, one of the things you wrote about was Mother Africa dying, and as Mother Africa dies, the rest of the planet is dying. Could you elaborate on that?

 

A.W.: I think of Africa as the navel of the world, the birthplace of the world, the peoples of the world. Everything has been, she’s just been used as a resource for all the other peoples of the world. They’ve just gone in and taken, for centuries, without feeling the need to repay and replenish, support, nurture. Now there are colonizers who will claim that they did that. But they did that only—what they did was to set up schools just to teach the people enough so they could work for them. You know, things like that, that’s not the same as actually caring for the place. But Africa is so central to the life of the planet, as far as I’m concerned, that you cannot ignore it and let it die. You have to be very attentive because it is also a crossroads. It is also part of your body; I think that’s the truest concept: that if Africa is your heart, and I think of how, from space, the photograph of the earth, Africa is the heart of the earth. It looks like a heart and it’s right in the middle there. If your heart is dying . . . and you can even see from that shot how much of Africa has been used up. The desert, which used to be the breadbasket of Europe; the Romans, that whole area was planted. They grew food for Europe and for Rome. Now it’s a desert. That is the way in which Africa has been used by the rest of the world. If it is your heart—even if it is just your arm—if it is dying, then you’re dying. Because it’s a part of your body. You can’t turn away from any part of the earth. That’s why every part of it is sacred.

 

M.T.: I just want to continue the Africa thing. You’ve written about your solidarity and compassion for Winnie Mandela and what she’s had to go through, particularly during the time of Nelson’s incarceration and the kind of persecution she suffered through and so forth. I wanted to give you the opportunity to speak to what’s happening, the fact that Nelson and Winnie Mandela have separated. I want to give you an opportunity to speak to that.

 

A.W.: I feel happy that they’re separating, because I think that they never had much of a chance to have a marriage. I prefer people to just honestly separate and go about being two whole people who still have some respect for each other. I prefer that than having people insist on putting up this united front that doesn’t really exist. So that’s really nice. What I worry about is that this charge against her (which has resurfaced with this announcement) that she helped to kill this young boy and that she’s
an alcoholic and that she has a younger lover, all these things. I think all of these things have been used to deflect attention from the fact that the new South Africa is really the old South Africa. It hasn’t changed yet. People are pretending that there is some big major change—and there is some change. But we’re still looking at a society that is extremely economically unjust, extremely repressive for black people. And a society in which the white people still maintain all of the best land, all of the best jobs, all of the best housing, all of the best food, all of the best fresh air. But somehow people have made this one woman . . . if she has broken and committed a crime, I think she really deserves all the compassion that we can muster. Because, frankly, personally I don’t think I could have stood up to the things that she did, for so long.