The World Has Changed (40 page)

 

M.J.: How did Nettie find her way to Africa? I keep asking that because Nettie’s—the children who lived with her, Celie’s children who live with Nettie in Africa, show up in two more books,
The Temple of My Familiar
and
Possessing the Secret
.

 

A.W.: Okay, well, Nettie is named after my mother’s mother, Nettie, who died when I was two. Now, this woman was battered terribly by my grandfather, the other grandfather; he was also a batterer.

 

M.J.: Did you ever see them battering each other?

 

A.W.: Never, never, I never saw any of that. This was all legendary; well, some of them had unfortunately the scars to prove it. No, I never saw that. This woman, my grandmother Nettie, who died when I was two, never went anywhere. Here’s where the slave thing just goes right into what followed slavery. During slavery, you could not leave the plantation. The women
never
left. The men might get a pass to do something, but the women were
there
. So this Nettie, after slavery, not very long after slavery, also never went anywhere. This is what my mother used to say. “My mother never went anywhere.” So I said, you know what, this woman is going to be named Nettie, and she’s going to go everywhere. [laughter] And not only that, then two children that nobody ever knew. My stepgrandmother was the least quote “sexy” person you can imagine, so how she even got those children, you know, was just such a mystery, and you know it was a terrible way, I’m sure, but because she had had them, and because they had disappeared, I said, “Well, I’m going to give her some children, they’re going to travel with Nettie, and they’re going to one day come back to her because she deserves to have her children.” So
there
.

 

M.J.: But did they—the way you describe in later books you really do have visions, and this is a little different, so it began to change in later books.

 

A.W.: Yes, because I did. I did. In fact, the reason I love
The Temple of My Familiar
is because when I was writing
The Color Purple
I was just in service; I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of just knowingly putting yourself at the service of whatever it is. So I was like a priest, not the kind of priest you hear about in the news these days, but, you know, a priest priest, where you really know what you’re supposed to be doing, and you’re there, you’re on the job, you give up everything else to do that, so I was serving these ancestors, basically, and I did it as well as I could possibly do it, I was just—it was like prayer, the whole year, and then I finished it and I just cried, you know, because I missed them so much when they left. But then, after I finished that novel,
they
turned around and gave me, it seemed to me,
The Temple of My Familiar
, which started with a dream.

I had bought a little house in Park Slope and I had gotten a divorce and I—long story—but I bought a little house, and it was only twelve feet wide, so we used to call it a sliver of a house. And one night in that little house I had a dream that I went down the stairs and I went to the basement and in the middle of the floor there was a trapdoor, a round trapdoor with a metal thing, and I lifted that up and there were more stairs and I went down there, too, and in this subbasement there were all these people from South America, and they were all making incredibly beautiful things. Beautiful things, I mean, weavings and things with feathers and, you know, just incredible—and they were all speaking Spanish and some of them were even speaking I think Quechua, or Mayan. Who were these people? I had no idea. Years went by. I wrote whatever, this and that, and then one day I realized that I had to start this new novel, and I started dreaming in Spanish, and I hired a tutor, because I didn’t speak Spanish, so I hired my daughter’s teacher to tutor me in Spanish, and I started writing
The Temple of My Familiar
, and that’s who they were, they were the people in this new book, and I felt it was just the most generous gift.

 

M.J.: And then what about
Possessing the Secret of Joy
; what drove you to that, which is the female genital mutilation or, as you refer to it, FGM?

 

A.W.: Well, the son of Celie marries a woman who is genitally mutilated because in her culture they think that unless you’re that way, you can’t marry and you’re no good. So when we were making the film in Burbank, or wherever that is down there, one day she arrived. She came from Kenya, this wife came from Kenya, the wife-to-be, the fictional wife, and I was looking for her to see how she was walking, whether she had been mutilated, and I don’t think she had been, but in any case, it made me realize that I had to—for me, if I create a character who has a whole hidden story, especially of suffering, I cannot just leave her or him there, I have to pay attention to this person because I understand
fully
that this is not just about fiction, that every character, quote “character,” is living somewhere in the hills of Kenya, somewhere in Benin, somewhere in Ghana, somewhere in Alabama, so I decided to take the time, which was I think a little over a year, maybe two years, to write a story about this woman and how she decided to be genitally mutilated, and that’s how that happened.

 

M.J.: It’s not just about fiction.

 

A.W.: No.

 

M.J.: No, I mean, I feel that in your books. Have you always known that?

 

A.W.: Yes.

 

M.J.: But it seems to me to become more and more intense.

 

A.W.: Yes. It’s not; how could it be? You know, look at Charles Dickens. There was someone who fully understood that it’s not about fiction, it’s not just about fiction. We are capable, as writers, of changing some horrendous situations. I have been back to Africa many times and talked with people who five years or ten years before would have sworn that this didn’t even happen, but now they know a hundred million women, horrible transmission of AIDS, great devastation of the communities, not to mention self-esteem and self-respect, you know, so we’re actually, it’s within our power to do some really good things just for the health of people. Even if you don’t want to go into the spiritual whatever, just on this basic level of health, we can do some incredible things as writers.

 

M.J.: Two things are actually warring in my head. One thing—well, I’ll say this first. I am always struck at your—and very appreciative—at how willing you are, amidst quite a panoply of spiritual practices and healings, to put black people in therapy and in psychoanalysis, because it seems to me that this is another taboo. [laughter] For many centuries—no, generations, let’s say, psychoanalysis seems centuries old, but it’s not—you know, the myth was that we were too strong for that. Whatever we had endured, and also, then the myth, based on some truth, arose that it couldn’t encompass our experience and therefore couldn’t be encountered and expanded but simply had to be denied, but you’re one of the only black writers I know who consistently has black characters encountering psychoanalysts and therapists, and I thank you.

 

[laughter]

 

A.W.: You’re welcome.

 

M.J.: No, it matters, and now I realize I had to say it because it’s one of those life and fiction connections. It removes—it’s like writing about depression, it takes away a stigma, it really does.

 

A.W.: Yeah, I just really want us to be healthy. I want us to be healthy and wealthy and wise, you know. It’s wonderful to be able to—for instance, in
Possessing the Secret of Joy
. Usually what happens with me is I will study something for a long time to understand it as fully as possible, so I spent like years studying Jung, and I love Jung, and I was actually able then to understand his theories and his way and I went to visit Bollin-gen, where he had his little tower by the lake, and I was able then to actually put Jung himself in the novel, and that was such a delight because I feel that the people like Jung give us new ways of understanding our behavior when they help us to see the shadow that we just don’t want to face, that they are actually helping us to see the light, to see the light of health, of who we really are. People like that should be honored, and so I was delighted to have him show up in the novel as Imsi, the old man who goes to Africa. And he actually did go to Africa, you know. I don’t think he—here’s an interesting little place where I think Jung and I, because I’m, you know,
me
, and he was
him
, where we saw things very differently. He had one of these old-fashioned video things. What do you call these things?

 

M.J.: They used to take those home-movie-type things.

 

A.W.: Well, he had one of those. You know what I mean, this thing. So he went to this village, and he saw all of these young girls who were lying in a row and they were obviously suffering, but they weren’t permitted to show it, so they were just like, you know, immobilized. So he took this picture of them, and he came back and first of all he said they were boys, because they had had their hair shaved off, but that’s what happens, you know, and then he went on about, you know, some kind of initiation, blah blah blah blah, but what he had actually seen, I think, was what I saw when I went, was that these were girls, little girls, who had been mutilated and they were lying in the row.

So I believe that psychoanalysis is really helpful, and I have spent
some really wonderful—and it’s fun, really, once you, you know. You shouldn’t have somebody who’s just going to sit there and not say anything much and just tell you to pay the money and come back Thursday. [laughter] You don’t need that. You need somebody who’s alive, who’s alive to life, and who loves life and lives life.

In fact, by now, we must never, never put ourselves under the dominion of anybody who’s half-dead [laughter]. I mean, check people
out
! [laughter] They will try to fool you by looking all, like, well-dressed and calm and collected and everything, but if they don’t have the spark of life they are no good to you, and don’t waste your time. See, the finger thing comes when you get to be sixty. [laughter]

 

M.J.: Put down the rose and lift the finger.

 

A.W.: Exactly.

 

M.J.: I think that you all should be able to talk to Alice Walker.... It’s kind of shadowy back there, but if people, ah, they can approach microphones? Yes. Okay!

 

Q.: Good evening. I just wanted to say it is an absolute pleasure to be here tonight. I have two questions, fifty-two seconds, I’ll promise. First, I just moved here from Nashville to New York City. I’d like to know what was your biggest cultural shock when you moved from the South to the North. Which you can answer hopefully quickly. The second one a little bit more provocative. My mother, who was a fair-skinned, dead-straight-hair kind of person, she is not a fan of
The Color Purple
, because she feels like it totally misportrayed black men and it aired our dirty laundry, so I wanted to know how do you deal with black people who are critics of that particular book.

 

A.W.: Let’s see, the cultural shock. Not enough flowers. Not nearly enough flowers, and also that black people seem very ashy. [laughter] And you can also tell that they thought that not being ashy was really wonderful. Or not being shiny. They thought shininess was like—like country bumpkins were shiny. You know, I wrote a book called
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult,
and it answers every question you can imagine about how I responded to all the people criticizing,
you know, this and that. You know, maybe your mother just doesn’t like the book, maybe she has her own issues, I would imagine, because it’s a book that is just full of love, it really is, there’s nothing in that book but love, even the people who are hating each other are coming out of love. It takes love to create people, clearly, who are doing self-hating things. It takes a lot of love to do that. I like to—I sort of think about Che Guevara, who said the revolution comes out of love. It’s the same with creativity. It’s the same with writing novels, singing. You know, like when Stevie Wonder sings to us, you know that man is singing out of love. He’s often telling us some very sad things, but we know that he just loves us. So if your mother with the lightness, the hair, there’s a lot of pain there, so just be patient with her, and tell her to come see the musical.

 

[laughter/applause]

 

Q.: Hi. I have a question about you being able to embrace your creative-writing niche at a time when that may not have been easy. Like, basically nowadays, they say, forget creativity, get a job, make money. And when you have that creative niche and you want to kind of get into it, how do you—how did you do it, basically?

 

A.W.: You know, life will give you some sort of spur. I think—I had had an abortion, actually. This is where my first book came out of, and I was very, very happy that I was not going to be trying to raise a child that I knew I couldn’t raise, and I had also been facing suicide around this issue, and so when I realized that I could have my life, the response was just this outpouring of poems. And I gave these poems to my teacher—I was at Sarah Lawrence by then—and she gave them to a publisher, and you know, then I just kept writing, but luckily for me, my feeling of self-worth and self-respect meant that money just didn’t matter as much to me as feeling good about myself did, and I knew that writing was a way that I could really utilize my whole being. It’s such a wonderful discipline, writing, in that way. So I would say to you that, just forget about the siren song of the big bucks. Try to make enough, or get a grant or something, grants are good, something that will give you six months to a year to work on something that you really feel you must do, and do that.