The World Has Changed (21 page)

 

J.S.B.: Now, I think that writing . . . you have to have the idea that you can do something before you can do it. And that we give it to each other. I think that one of the major reasons why I write has to do with I kept running into everybody who wrote. And the sort of sense is, well, you know, when you first read books, you think that somebody who writes a book is really in some kind of special category. Then when you start hanging out with people who write books, you figure, well, they could do this, it’s not such a big deal.

 

A.W.: Well, when I was—my mother tells this story—she says that when I was crawling, she would be looking for me and I would have crawled behind the house with the Sears, Roebuck catalog and a twig, and I would be busily writing in this, now. So I don’t know what the model was for that, Jean. And then later I had this habit of talking to spirits, I called them, but just standing up on the porch and talking, and feeling or seeming to feel that I had a response. And I’ve since come to realize that in a way it was as if all the people who are now real in my life and in those chairs were these spirits who somehow I was trying to reach even as a three-, four-, or five-year-old. So it has always felt very natural, very organic, this way of reaching out.

 

I.A.: Excuse me, but this poor lady has been standing there for forty-five minutes; can she ask her question?

 

Q: Thank you very much. My question actually comes from the Buddhist tradition. Although I have written many things and been lucky enough to publish a few, I always, when I sit down at the computer, I always feel like I have never written before. I always feel like a beginner. And I always thought this was a tremendous liability. And then I read
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, and I thought, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a liability. Maybe it’s great to start anew every time. Maybe it’s okay that even though you can stack up the stories in front of you and say, ‘Hey, I did that,’ it doesn’t help. That that’s okay.” And I’m just wondering if this echoes with you at all.

 

A.W.: Oh, it does very much with me. I always feel like this, and it’s true too that you are a beginner always. And that’s really lovely. And whatever you create after all is different. I mean, this is not true for every writer that we know in the culture, but we are easily bored by repetition, our own repetition and anybody else’s. So it has to be you.

 

I.A.: I have been for eleven years, and I have a feeling that I haven’t learned anything. It’s true that every time I face a new book and I turn on the computer on January 8, I don’t know anything. I don’t remember the mistakes I made before, and I usually make them again. And it’s always a new story, and each story has a way of being told, has a tone, a rhythm, a language of its own. And you have to be very respectful. So I can never use the formula that worked with another book.

 

J.S.B.: I feel the same way, because each time it is a new paragraph, a new chapter, and it is new if I am in the place of feeling and imagery. And out of that comes a dialogue where examples or metaphors come up as if from some other place other than my mind. If I write from a place that has been trained, I use big words, it’s boring, I quit and go do something else. So that only in that beginner’s mind of being totally engrossed and rather delighted when a right phrase comes up, it’s an adventure. And that’s when the writing is juicy versus when it’s not.

 

I.A.: But anyhow I think that before we finish we should say that there is nothing to it really. Writing is not such a big deal. It’s just sitting there and doing it, and it’s very joyful and very simple.

 

A.W.: And also you do it in bed often.

JODY HOY: What was it like growing up the eighth of eight children? How did being part of a large family affect you? You write of the black southern writer’s inheritance of a sense of community; did the size of your family also play a part in developing the passion for community and connectedness in your work?

 

ALICE WALKER: Negatively, in a way. I was the last child and in some ways a neglected child, although this was not something that was deliberate: my parents both worked, and my mother and my father were very much partners in what they did. I have five brothers and two sisters, and we lived in very small, substandard houses from which we were often driven after a year by the landlord, who exploited the labor of the entire family. I was conscious of crowdedness and of not having enough of various things, although we always had lots of food, and my mother was a genius, she could create clothing out of all kinds of odds and ends that people gave her.

I think the reason I love community and I believe in it is because the African saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child is true—and part of the village certainly helped my mother raise me. For instance, the first clothing I received was not from my parents but from the woman who became my first-grade teacher. So I have a sense of the ways in which people in the community can actually shape lives. What is very sad in this culture, and more and more all over the world, is that people are often afraid to be a community to children because there is so little respect for elders. And, generally, respect has declined.

 

J.H.: Were you writing before you received formal training? Did your own method and style begin to evolve at that point, or did it come later? Where did it come from?

 

A.W.: My mother claims that I was writing with a twig into the margins of a Sears, Roebuck catalog when I was crawling, so sometimes I think it’s a past-life activity. At other times I just think it was cheaper to write than to play the piano or paint, and that I was able to write about things that seemed far removed from my own misery but, in fact, reflected that misery. You develop what is called style by being as true as you can possibly be to the story you’re telling and to give it all the time and space that it needs to be born whole. That’s what style is, in a way; for me, that’s what it has been.

 

J.H.: How did you transform yourself from “someone nearly devastated by childhood suffering” into “someone who loves life and knows pleasure and joy in spite of it”?

 

A.W.: How did I do that? I think I did that by working very hard. But the foundation for that was my mother’s connection to the earth, and to wildness, and to landscape, and to natural beauty. Without that foundation in the natural world I would have found it exceedingly difficult to survive.

 

J.H.: You began
Warrior Marks
by talking about how important it is that we “adhere to our own particular way,” “in being true to our most individual soul.” Was there a specific moment in your life when you became aware of the choice to be true to your own soul, that you started living out that choice consciously? If so, what has been the cost, and what have been the benefits?

 

A.W.: I don’t know if I can actually pinpoint a moment; in any life there would have to be many moments. For instance, when I was a student at Spelman, in Atlanta, I was there on scholarship and had struggled very hard to get there, yet I found it to be a fairly oppressive place. That made me terribly unhappy and I had to make a decision to leave, even though I didn’t know where I was going. Fortunately, one of my professors recommended Sarah Lawrence (which I had never heard of) as an alternative
to Spelman. I made that choice without any assistance or guidance from my family because they also didn’t know Sarah Lawrence—actually, they didn’t know Spelman either.

I think that life is a series of choices like that, and they just come one after the other. It’s about all kinds of things—where you will live, how you will live. When I went to Mississippi to live with my husband in an illegal marriage, it was necessary to decide consciously that this was where I would be, and that if I couldn’t be there, there was no point in trying to be anywhere else because, after all, this is one country. If there are places in it where you feel like you can’t be—because of segregation, racism, bad laws—then it seems necessary to question one’s citizenship. Mississippi’s “antimiscegenation” law said I was not a citizen; at the time this seemed to me really unacceptable.

 

J.H.: Do you have any desire to return to the South, or are you settled in Northern California?

 

A.W.: I have some commitments there, but I have no desire to settle and live in the South. When I lived in Georgia during my formative years, and then when I lived in Mississippi, it was extremely violent, and for a long time that distracted me from the fact that the other part of it is often boring. It’s enough to have lived there for all the years that I did. I don’t really want to go back.

 

J.H.: In
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
, you said that, like Rilke, you came to understand that “even loneliness has a use and that sadness is positively the wellspring of creativity.” Could you expand on that? And how is that reflected in your own life?

 

A.W.: I think suffering has a use, although at the time you can’t quite figure it out. I remember having a very difficult time about ten or fifteen years ago, and I was very aware that I was suffering. I was reading
The Gnostic Gospels
, Elaine Pagels’s book, and there was a quote from Jesus in the Gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible (it seems to me that his best stuff was censored). He said if you learn to suffer, if you learn
how
to suffer, you will not suffer. It was such a mysterious thing to say, and yet I felt I understood it in the sense that suffering is inescapable, it’s totally inescapable. So your task is to accept it as
suffering, and to get to know it, and to learn it, and to learn how to do it.

One of the ways you can learn how to do it is not to inflict it on other people, unless you just can’t help it. You can try to know it so well that it doesn’t really surprise you and leave you flabbergasted or enraged. To know it, to learn how to suffer, to learn what suffering is, what it feels like, not to deny it, not to deny that it’s happening, not to deny that it’s happening to you and to make of it a companion—it’s right there.

And true enough, when I learned how to suffer, which was mainly a matter of
accepting
that I was and that it was not to be escaped, I suffered much less! It was amazing—I felt an instant lightening of spirit.

There’s another story in
The Gnostic Gospels
about how the crucifixion is symbolic, that it’s not the most important thing actually happening there. What actually happens is that the spirit of Jesus at this point rises above his own tortured body, laughing. It’s not that he’s not being killed, it’s not that he’s not being vilified and turned against. But he has managed to see crucifixion as part of what seriously out-of-balance people can do to you, and to see the humor of it, and to understand that life is very long, time is very long, and you’re pretty much very small, and even your suffering, whatever it is, can be seen in the context of what the whole world is going through.

 

J.H.: Is it possible to separate Christianity from patriarchy? Must one give up Christianity in order to free oneself from patriarchy?

 

A.W.: I think we should just kidnap Christ and go off with him; he’s the best of the whole bunch. I say that having struggled for many years trying to deny him, get rid of him, or ignore him, because he is a captive of the church and they use him for absolutely everything. I feel myself to be a born-again pagan and quite happy in nature. And I feel a great love for Jesus as a teacher and as a very feminine soul, especially during that time. His tenderness, his caring quality always makes me think of someone who was raised by his mother. I mean, he’s the son of a feminist. You can always tell the son of a feminist because generally speaking there is that ease that they have with women, and they seem to grip (“grip” is one of my daughter’s words) things without having to have every little thing explained. You don’t have to tell them that women don’t like to be called “bitch” or “witch” or whatever in a negative way: they know
this. It’s a whole different sensibility from the sensibility of boys who are brought up with fathers in a patriarchal household. I love the sons of my feminist friends; they are very easy to be with, they’re funny.

 

J.H.: In [an] interview, Marilyn French said that the true goal of feminism was to transform the world. In
Warrior Marks
, your colleague Pratibha Parmar said, “We need to be willing to transcend all our differences without ignoring them, to build new communities that bring us nearer to our utopian ideals, to continue to redefine our ideas about womanhood and feminist politics, and to embrace concepts of justice and equality while at the same time recognizing the complexities of our diverse identities.” Is that possible? Are you optimistic about women’s joining together to become a force for change? Do you agree with Marilyn French that we are living through the end of Western civilization as we know it?

 

A.W.: We’re the only hope. Whether we can succeed is a question, but for sure we have to attempt it if we want to have any kind of world at all. The patriarchy has ruined the world; if it’s not clear by now, I don’t know what people need. And of course, yes, Western civilization, the world itself as we knew it, is no more.

When I was a child, I assumed that the world was pretty much stable, that it was endless, that it was ever generative. I thought that it was clean, that the waters were pure, that the air was pure—and a lot of that was true. But even then they were felling the forests at an incredible rate, so that now there are no big trees in Georgia except the ones that have been carefully preserved, like the giant oaks and the plantation tree boulevards.