The World Has Changed (7 page)

As an activist and revolutionary, Walker also visited Nicaragua in 1983, on the occasion of the Managua Book Fair, where Daniel Ortega charmed her by “strolling through the stalls and emerging with a copy of
The Color Purple
held aloft, over his head, proclaiming it ‘the best book of the festival.’ ”
⁷⁰
Walker and her companion at the time, Robert Allen, were guests at the home of Ortega and his wife, Rosario. What struck her during the visit was “how little food there was.” “I was vegan,” she says, “but there wasn’t any rice or beans. We ate very stringy meat which taught me a good lesson: it is a privilege, sometimes a luxury, to be able to decide what you will eat.”
⁷¹
Away from the residence of the president, Walker remembers there were “constant Contra attacks [as she and Allen] traveled roads lined with soldiers, for miles and miles.” “It was amazing,” she says. “I felt no fear. Only the joy of being able to show my support.”
⁷²

Walker’s unwavering commitment to justice, peace, and an end to all forms of suffering has encompassed other revolutionary struggles, including the abolition of apartheid in South Africa; the Native American movement; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered movement; the human rights movement; and the animal rights movement. For many years she has been an opponent of nuclear war and capital punishment. Coming of age during the movement against the Vietnam War of the 1960s, she has been arrested three times, most recently for her opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Walker’s deep concern about the impact of AIDS upon communities in the U.S. and abroad has manifested itself in a variety of ways, including her support of Marlon Riggs’s
documentary
Black Is . . . Black Ain’t: A Personal Journey Through Black Identity
(1995). In the aftermath of Katrina, she traveled to Houston to deliver aid to the families displaced by a disaster that had its origins in both nature and the failures of the state. As a member of CODEPINK, a U.S. women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walker traveled to the Middle East in March 2009 to deliver humanitarian aid to the women of Gaza. She also has raised her voice and pen in support of political prisoners, including Assata Shakur, now living in exile in Cuba, and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, and also those fellow writers and freedom fighters who have been threatened with death or killed for their courage in confronting the backwardness, venality, and brutality of the state. In this regard, Walker has stood in solidarity with Salman Rushdie of India and Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria.

In
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism
, Walker reflects upon, in deep and specific ways, the origins, the value, and the foundation of her own activism. “My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted,” she writes, “in my love of nature and my delight in human beings.... Everything I would like other people to be for me, I want to be for them.”
⁷³
As we are confronted with so much bad news, in Walker’s view activism generates “a different kind of ‘news.’ A ‘news’ that empowers rather than defeats.”
⁷⁴
According to the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of May Poole, when people stand in solidarity together much is revealed: “Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough
to be that
—which is the foundation of activism.”
⁷⁵
Of course, there is the alternative—passivity, indifference, complacency, pessimism—but this is a choice that Walker spurns: “The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward fullness, has never appealed to me.”

 

 

In the preceding pages, I have attempted to reconstruct, using the broadest of strokes, the various ways in which the world has changed for Walker in her long, productive, unique, and meaningful life. The topics I have examined, her origins in rural Putnam County, Georgia, her education, the events that have shaped her emergence as one of the
most gifted and influential writers of our time as well as an activist, are addressed by Walker in the various interviews and conversations that compose this volume. In the following pages, she is in conversation with scholars, activists, religious leaders, psychologists, feminists, and writers concerning the vital issues of our time. Walker’s interlocutors include such women and men as John O’Brien, Claudia Tate, Paula Giddings, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Isabel Allende, Jody Hoy, Evelyn White, Pema Chödrön, William R. Ferris, Margo Jefferson, Amy Goodman, Marianne Schnall, and Howard Zinn.

As already noted, this volume is the first collection of conversations and interviews with Alice Walker.
The World Has Changed
spans almost four decades and addresses a worldwide readership that now bridges several generations. In many ways the great value of her interviews and conversations has been overlooked until now; this volume seeks to elevate this genre to a new place of importance within her growing corpus.

In
The World Has Changed
, Walker addresses a number of important subjects that she has treated with varying degrees of specificity in her own nonfiction writings and that scholars have examined in their scholarship. These include commentary on the formal and thematic elements in her work and writing process; the shifting set of interests that has led to changes in the direction of her art; the manner in which she defines herself in relation to other major writers; her stance as a writer, especially her solitary, sometimes suicidal nature, the experience of her illegal abortion, and her position as outcast, rebel, and elder; her belief in human potentiality and the great value she places upon the importance of growth and development, of transformation and the power of the spirit, and the ways in which the act of witnessing and activism are catalysts to these states; and finally the factors that shape our lives as earthlings. In many places in the volume Walker speaks of the great power of sexuality; the role of pain and suffering as teachers; the value and challenge of being oneself; the vital difference between trying and doing; the necessity of forgiveness, of love, and also of her love of the earth and her embrace of the earth as her god; as well as her fears that we may have irreparably damaged the earth—our only home.

In Walker’s commentary on these and other subjects, which further enlarges our understanding of the origins and scope of her artistic and activist concerns, we are struck by the power of her voice with its
strong sense of immediacy and spontaneity. We also are struck by her engagement with her interlocutors and, by extension, with us. These are elements that are distinctive to the genre of the interview at its best, of course, an important research tool in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Whether written or oral, the interview is both accessible and immediate. As readers we occupy a peculiar position in relation to the interviewer and her subject, for we are engaged in the act of reading and listening, and of hearing and interpreting. In instances where rapport intersects with preparation, the outcome is a genuine conversation where both the interviewer and the subject learn something new. These elements account, in part, for the special value of this volume for scholars, biographers, activists, and writers.

In
The World Has Changed
we are keenly aware of the importance of possessing an awareness of what has happened—of change. Through Walker’s example and words we are also keenly aware of the dangers, risks, and consequences of remaining ignorant of change. While the world has changed there are some things, happily for us, that have not changed. The first is Walker’s unwavering commitment to the highest standards of art, a commitment everywhere in evidence in her luminous corpus. Another constant is Walker’s approach to the creation of art. “The way I understand my work,” she observes, “is that it is a prayer to and about the world.”
⁷⁶
In the act of prayer or of writing Walker has held us,
held us
, in her cupped hands, and from this position we have been seen, beheld, and loved. Even when we have rejected what she has given to us out of love, her stance toward us, toward the world, has not changed.

We know, now, because of Walker’s loving excavation of the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, that we cannot throw our geniuses away. We do so at great peril to ourselves. And so let us keep faith with Walker, as she has kept faith with us, in this changing world.

As a writer and activist, Walker “continues to change the world, heart by heart.”
⁷⁷

 

Rudolph P. Byrd
Emory University

JOHN O’BRIEN: Could you describe your early life and what led you to begin writing?

 

ALICE WALKER: I have always been a solitary person, and since I was eight years old (and the recipient of a disfiguring scar, since corrected, somewhat), I have daydreamed not of fairy tales but of falling on swords, of putting guns to my heart or head, and of slashing my wrists with a razor. For a long time I thought I was very ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults and slights that were not intended. I discovered the cruelty (legendary) of children, and of relatives, and could not recognize it as the curiosity it was.

I believe, though, that it was from this period—from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast—that I began to really see people and things, to really notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out. I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems.

But it was not until my last year in college that I realized, nearly, the consequences of my daydreams. That year I made myself acquainted with every philosopher’s position on suicide, because by that time it did not seem frightening or even odd—but only inevitable. Nietzsche and Camus made the most sense, and were neither maudlin nor pious. God’s displeasure didn’t seem to matter much to them, and I had reached the same conclusion. But in addition to finding such dispassionate commentary from them—although both hinted at the cowardice involved, and that bothered me—I had been to Africa during the summer, and returned to school healthy and brown, and loaded down with sculptures and orange fabric—and pregnant.

I felt at the mercy of everything, including my own body, which I had learned to accept as a kind of casing, over what I considered my real self. As long as it functioned properly, I dressed it, pampered it, led it into acceptable arms, and forgot about it. But now it refused to function properly. I was so sick I could not even bear the smell of fresh air. And I had no money, and I was, essentially—as I had been since grade school—alone. I felt there was no way out, and I was not romantic enough to believe in maternal instincts alone as a means of survival; in any case, I did not seem to possess those instincts. But I knew no one who knew about the secret, scary thing abortion was. And so, when all my efforts at finding an abortionist failed, I planned to kill myself, or—as I thought of it then—to “give myself a little rest.” I stopped going down the hill to meals because I vomited incessantly, even when nothing came up but yellow, bitter bile. I lay on my bed in a cold sweat, my head spinning.

While I was lying there, I thought of my mother, to whom abortion is a sin; her face appeared framed in the window across from me, her head wreathed in sunflowers and giant elephant ears (my mother’s flowers love her; they grow as tall as she wants); I thought of my father, that suspecting, once-fat, slowly shrinking man, who had not helped me at all since I was twelve years old, when he bought me a pair of ugly saddle-oxfords I refused to wear. I thought of my sisters, who had their own problems (when approached with the problem I had, one sister never replied, the other told me—in forty-five minutes of long-distance carefully enunciated language—that I was a slut). I thought of the people at my high-school graduation who had managed to collect seventy-five dollars to send me to college. I thought of my sister’s check for a hundred dollars that she gave me for finishing high school at the head of my class: a check I never cashed, because I knew it would bounce.

I think it was at this point that I allowed myself exactly two self-pitying tears; I had wasted so much, how dared I? But I hated myself for crying, so I stopped, comforted by knowing I would not have to cry—or see anyone else cry—again.

I did not eat or sleep for three days. My mind refused, at times, to think about my problem at all—it jumped ahead to the solution. I prayed to—but I don’t know Who or What I prayed to, or even if I did. Perhaps I prayed to God awhile, and then to the Great Void awhile. When I thought of my family, and when—on the third day—I began to see
their faces around the walls, I realized they would be shocked and hurt to learn of my death, but I felt they would not care deeply at all, when they discovered I was pregnant. Essentially, they would believe I was evil. They would be ashamed of me.

For three days I lay on the bed with a razor blade under my pillow. My secret was known to three friends only—all inexperienced (except verbally), and helpless. They came often to cheer me up, to bring me up-to-date on things as frivolous as classes. I was touched by their kindness, and loved them. But each time they left, I took out my razor blade and pressed it deep into my arm. I practiced a slicing motion. So that when there was no longer any hope, I would be able to cut my wrists quickly, and (I hoped) painlessly.

In those three days, I said good-bye to the world (this seemed a high-flown sentiment, even then, but everything was beginning to be unreal); I realized how much I loved it, and how hard it would be not to see the sunrise every morning, the snow, the sky, the trees, the rocks, the faces of people, all so different (and it was during this period that all things began to flow together; the face of one of my friends revealed itself to be the friendly, gentle face of a lion, and I asked her one day if I could touch her face and stroke her mane. I felt her face and hair, and she really was a lion; I began to feel the possibility of someone as worthless as myself attaining wisdom). But I found, as I had found on the porch of that building in Liberty County, Georgia—when rocks and bottles bounced off me as I sat looking up at the stars—that I was not afraid of death. In a way, I began looking forward to it. I felt tired. Most of the poems on suicide in
Once
come from my feelings during this period of waiting.