The World Has Changed (44 page)

 

G.G.: In the early years of the Cuban Revolution Fidel made contact with many prominent black Americans, such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and later with people such as Jesse Jackson and Muhammad Ali. How is Fidel viewed by black Americans today?

 

A.W.: I only know a couple of hundred black Americans well enough to guess what they might think about anything. In the world, however, one senses there is a deep respect for Fidel. It is based on the fact that he has stood his ground. That my country’s attempts to shut him up and to assassinate him have failed. I have written elsewhere that he is like a lone redwood tree in a forest that’s been clear-cut. It is painful to imagine what might have been our current situation if Patrice Lumumba had survived, and Che, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the long list of names most of us will never be able to connect to each other, but which are connected by their resistance to the terrorism and tyranny of the United States.

 

G.G.: In an interview you once remarked that you had heard that Fidel could not sing and he could not dance, so it was just as well he had all those other good qualities. What do you consider his finest qualities?

 

A.W.: I have had the pleasure of meeting (with a group of people) with Fidel twice. It’s true he talks a lot, and it is incredibly interesting because he enjoys explaining his information. He is a natural teacher. And he has a robust sense of humor. I realize many people, encountering such a force, would immediately think of him as a dictator. But it’s different
when someone talks a lot and it’s about sending doctors around the globe to serve the poor, or it’s about why so many young men are suffering from a mysterious eye disease (this was the topic at one of the meetings) or about the exploitation of the South American countries by the United States and Europe over centuries. His grasp of world realities is so profound that he has not one iota of the nervousness that most so-called white leaders display in the presence of alert people of color. This is delightful.

But let’s linger a moment on the singing and dancing. These are profoundly important to the human spirit, and because Fidel’s is a singing and dancing intellect, I wanted him to embody dance and song in himself. For his own enjoyment. Che was likewise without this embodied solace. Because I love these men, honor what they have accomplished, realize they have dedicated their lives to the alleviation of misery, I want them to have this medicine which I so frequently use. And there is also a part of me that says: you’re Cuban, damn it! And before that, Spanish. What about that soulful music you had in Spain, and flamenco! And then of course I remember Catholicism and its heavy suppressions of the life force.

In Fidel this passion is expressed in his priestly dedication to revolution.

Fidel is eighty. It is perhaps selfish of me, but I wish he would retire to the countryside or seashore and enjoy a lengthy period of silence. It would be wonderful for him. And that there might be small children brought by to play with him for a couple of hours each week. I would want him to have a cat that falls asleep on his chest. And if there’s a wife, as there must be since there are children, that they hold hands day in, day out. And fall asleep together in the hammock. Enough of leaders being used up, becoming, as Fidel was quoted as saying, “the slave of the revolution.” The world is indescribably beautiful. One day of truly witnessing it is enough to revitalize the heart, stilling many worries about the outcomes of the future. I would wish many such days for Fidel.

MARIANNE SCHNALL: Congratulations on this amazing book
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
—it contains so many important insights and observations the world needs to hear. In this “me” society we seem to have turned such a deaf ear to what is really important. It’s said that the truth hurts. Do you feel it is your calling to scream the truth out loud?

 

ALICE WALKER: Not at all—I never scream, and I think that silence is the best way to get real attention. Especially from the deep self. So I think the people who are in solitude in the mountains, or who live in temples or are contemplatives, the people you never hear from, you never know are there, somewhere in some deep, dark cave, meditating—I think those people are basically responsible for a lot of the sanity that we do have. And in my own case, I know that what I can bring to the world comes from a world of deep silence and quiet. And that is where my compass—my moral compass and my internal guide—that’s where they live, in that deep quiet. So by the time whatever I’m offering gets out into the world, it may sound quite loud, maybe, but that’s only, I think, to people who are not used to being in quiet and silence. Sometimes it might seem loud because it is a voice they have been silencing.

 

M.S.: That reminds me of something you wrote in your book, about the need for a “pause”—a pause to reflect. And I think I probably chose my words wrong, because I definitely did not mean to imply that you “scream”—I guess I meant more that part of your calling seems to be to bring light to the truth; that is probably the better way to say what I was trying to say.

 

A.W.: Well, I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic—I use this metaphor a lot, but I’ll use it again—it’s like a pine tree producing pinecones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries: it’s just what happens with this being, now. Going through the world and seeing what I see, and feeling what I feel. And wanting very much to touch other people with that.

 

M.S.: The subtitle of your book is
Inner Light in a Time of Darkness
. Is this where the real change that is needed in the outer world begins, in our own individual inner worlds, first?

 

A.W.: It has to be there. And not only that, we do carry an inner light, an inner compass, and the reason we don’t know we carry it is because we’ve been distracted. And we think that the light is actually being carried by a leader or somebody that we have elected or somebody that we very much admire, and that that’s the only light. And so we forget that we have our own light—it may be small, it may be flickering, but it’s actually there. And so what we need to do, I think, is to be still enough to let that light shine, and illuminate our inner landscape and our dreams—especially our dreams. And then our dreams will lead us to the right way.

 

M.S.: We work with Omega Institute—and I just finished watching your beautiful, inspiring talk that you gave at one of the Women and Power conferences a few years ago. There was so much in there. And you had talked about your concern about the fascism and imperialism that’s in the world today. Has America as a country spiritually lost its soul? And do you see a hopeful, antifascism peace movement that’s growing?

 

A.W.: Oh yes, I do. I mean, look at us—look at the millions of people who turn out, and who turned out against the war. The people who are refusing to fight in the war and the soldiers who are throwing down their weapons and going to jail. And the mothers and the fathers who are speaking up—there’s a couple who’s taking their son’s coffin from town to town because their son died in the war. But there’s a massive, worldwide movement, I think, that is completely antiwar. And I think
of that as a kind of enlightenment that we could not have had in earlier ages because we couldn’t see war and its causes quite so clearly. And people were so misled by the church and other institutions that they couldn’t see that basically the powerful and the rich, and the people who wanted to stay that way, actually made these wars, most of them for their own benefit. And so they could rip off the resources of people living far away. Now we can see that. Now there are enough women in the world who are educated and smart, and can really run it on down to their parents, and to friends, and to the media. It’s a wonderful time. It seems so bleak, but I maintain that it’s one of the best times to be alive, and I’m very happy to be here now.

 

M.S.: I’ve been thinking that maybe things needed to get so blatantly off course so that we can actually see the state of humanity in order to realize the urgent change that’s needed.

 

A.W.: Unfortunately, that seems to be the way it is with humans. They need to be really scared on some level, and they need to worry about self-preservation and survival. And then it’s an instinct—they have an instinct for thriving and continuing. And so that’s part of who we are. It’s a shame, though, because if we could develop in ourselves a lot of compassion for other beings, we wouldn’t have to watch their destruction and humiliation and terrorizing of them in order for us to be moved, to be fearful of what could happen to us.

 

M.S.: In the world today, there is a growing awareness and more and more people wanting to contribute to change in the world, but not even knowing where to start. As such a longtime activist, what words of encouragement would you offer to other activists in the world?

 

A.W.: There’s always something to do—always. And the reason that’s true is that you always can work with yourself. You don’t have to go out and worry about what other people are doing or how to start this or that out there; you can start ever so much in yourself. And that will evolve outwardly. So if you just hold that thought—that it really is up to each of us, and we’re all trying to get to a place where collectively we can effect change. But we can’t really do it from being a collective before we are actually self-collected.

 

M.S.: Do you think the rising of women, and feminine principles in the world, is a natural, evolutionary shift we are experiencing now?

 

A.W.: I think it is because the feminine has to rise in order for there to be any hope of continuation of the species. And I think that most people actually feel that on some level. What is a little frightening though is how many women—you know, people who in this lifetime have female bodies—are really fleeing the feminine. And you see it most clearly in language. As I mention in
We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
, that women and girls are taught and programmed actually to think of themselves as “guys.” And it’s a way to basically evade being deeply feminine on a daily basis. And you’ll notice too that there’s a kind of repetitiveness—like it’s being constantly reinforced that you are not feminine, you are something else.

And I think it bears scrutiny and it bears sitting with and really deciding one way or the other. You might decide, well, damn it, you’d like to be guy, you want to use that word and other things that are similar, but you really need to make it a conscious decision. I think women have to be so conscious about what they want to be called, what they actually are—it should be our choice, and it should not just be society’s programming, or the media’s programming, or masculine or patriarchal programming—which is actually what it is.

 

M.S.: Speaking of language and linguistics, with a site called feminist. com, I am always amazed at the misconceptions there are about feminism, and the many women who clearly are feminists but who would never call themselves that. You came up with the term “womanist.” For people who may not be familiar with that term, can you describe how that term came to be and its relevance today?

 

A.W.: Well, first of all it’s feminist, but it’s feminist from a culture of color. So there’s no attempt to evade the name “feminism,” which is honorable. It actually means “womanism”—I mean, it’s French in its essence,
la femme
, so “feminism” would be “womanism,” actually. Womanism comes, though, from Southern African American culture because when you did something really bold and outrageous and audacious as a little girl, our parents would say, “You’re acting womanish.” It wasn’t like in white culture where that was weak—it was just the opposite. And so, womanism affirms that whole spectrum of being which
includes being outrageous and angry and standing up for yourself, and speaking your word and all of that.

 

M.S.: When I interviewed Jane Fonda, she talked about how later in her life she experienced an “aha” moment where her “feminist consciousness slipped out of [her] head and took up residence in [her] body, where it has lived ever since.” Do you think women need to experience a type of aha moment, their own personal epiphany, when they finally get in touch with their own feminine power?

 

A.W.: Definitely. I don’t know if that’s the only way they can do it, but anything that encourages women to accept themselves as who they are and what they are and to honor the feminine in them would be very, very helpful for the world’s healing. Because the world is becoming so patriarchal, even more patriarchal in some ways, but also, just more dismissive and discarding of the feminine. And you see that in the way that very young girls are sold—often because their parents are really poor, but generally speaking it’s the father who does the selling. And then these children basically are sold into slavery. And they live and die in brothels in many parts of the world. And it’s as if the feminine there—when the feminine is so degraded anywhere, it’s a blow to the feminine everywhere. Now, that’s when we should be screaming—jumping up and down everywhere—and saying that this is such an insult to the Mother and to the feminine that we cannot stand it, and we will not. And we should liberate all these children from these horrible prisons that they’re in as these slaves to just whoever can come in and pay a few rupees or whatever the money is.