The World Has Changed (23 page)

That’s what happens too when you have long bouts of silence: it becomes such an echo chamber: You’re dreaming people, you’re creating people, they do surprising things, but it’s only because you have given them that freedom in creating them. So it
feels
that way. I explain it as well as I can because many people think I’m talking about channeling, and I’m not talking about that at all. This is all hard work: it takes solitude, it takes money so you can do it for a year or so, it takes time and sweat—and sometimes wonderful swims in the river—but it’s work. You open yourself to creativity really just by being receptive to it.

 

J.H.: When you write, how do you start? Does a book start with a character? Does it start with an idea, does it start with a story?

 

A.W.: It can start with any of that; there’s no special way.

 

J.H.: And where do your images come from? There is one in
Meridian
which I still remember—“He cried as he broke into her body, as she was to cry later when their children broke out of it.”

 

A.W.: By then I had had a baby and I had some sense of that breakage. I think that for many women the first sexual act, and sometimes later acts, are really break-ins; they’re not something that the woman is particularly ready for or caring about. And I think some men, and maybe this is what’s happening with this man in
Meridian
, some men are sensitive enough to realize that penetration is a kind of violation, it’s an entering into a sacred space, and you are really blessed to have been invited.

 

J.H.: Celie, Shug, and Olivia from
The Color Purple
show up in later books. Was it your intention to create a kind of saga, a larger family, a community? Why did you do that?

 

A.W.: Let’s see. I wanted to show what Shug and Celie were like later on in life. I felt like they founded a kind of womanist household, and they were a foundation for these children, Benny and Fanny, so this is a whole new beginning with this matriarchy. I also wanted to discuss ways in which they did have strife with each other. But with Tashi, I never forgot that she was a character who had endured something very strange, painful, destructive, and that I kind of left her there, mainly because the book was going somewhere else.

I struggle with characters only because they are still with me, not because I’m trying to impose something on the work. I mean, if they don’t come back to haunt me, I don’t bother. There are people in those books—who knows, but I don’t think they will ever show up again.

 

J.H.: What is the role of forgiveness in your work?

 

A.W.: Forgiveness is absolutely crucial to any kind of going forward, even though, as you know, it’s extremely difficult because by now you think there are so many things that are totally unforgivable. But, in fact, they are so horrible that it becomes clearer than ever that you can only
move beyond them by forgiving them. It’s the stuff of which the soul is made; it is such hard work that to get there changes you completely. It’s very difficult.

 

J.H.: In
The Temple of my Familiar
, the story of Zede and Zede the Elder has a happy ending, if I may call it that; the story of Suwelo and Carlotta has a happy ending; the story of Ayurveda and Fanny has a happy ending; the story of Lissie and Hal has a happy ending. There is all this tragedy in the book, yet there are also all of these happy endings. Your works are generally upbeat despite the dreadful things that happen to your characters over the course of their lives. One is almost always left with a sense of triumph at the end, including in
Possessing the Secret of Joy
. Do you do this because unmitigated suffering is too depressing or because you are by nature an optimist?

 

A.W.: I do it because they’re not happy endings, they’re plateaus. I think everybody has a plateau and then they start all over again. That seems to be the nature of the thing to me. You know, suffering is totally with us. It is completely a part of what is life, and yet, right alongside it, there is so much beauty and joy and happiness and understanding and peace and goodwill and good cooking and beauty, that it is again a waste of time just to focus entirely on how, when you are suffering, you may not ever get anywhere but there.

Also, in my own life, I feel that I so often get to the other side, and I get to the other side with the gift of whatever the suffering was, so I can’t even regret it. Given that it has happened and there’s no changing it, I have to say, “What is the gift of this? Whatever it is, what did I learn from this?”

If I had the power to design life on earth, maybe I would just make everybody happy all the time; but maybe I wouldn’t, because sometimes people who are happy all the time and who don’t go through these crucibles are really shallow, and you don’t want to be with them for very long.

I am optimistic because that’s my spirit, and again, I trace it to my mother, who was a warrior and very at home on Earth. You know, many people are really not at home on Earth. I wish they would just leave right now and stop using up our tax money to do it—get on a ship or spacecraft and move on out to wherever it is they want to go. Because
there are earthlings who
feel
like earthlings and have no desire to go anywhere but to just be here and to really love and worship what is here.

 

J.H.: How do you sustain yourself within a specific work and for so long a period of time? What happens to your personal life over the time that you are involved in writing a book?

 

A.W.: I live in a world that I am creating, and I am usually very happy there, no matter what the story is. It could be a very sad tale, but I am very happy because I have survived to tell it. My partner has to understand that I need long periods of silence, so that he or she, depending on whom I am relating to, will have to be fairly quiet on long drives, for instance, or be very conscious that I am creating something. And while I am doing that, then they are free to be creating something too. I give myself over entirely to this process; I try to find a year or two to really look at whatever it is I’m interested in and to really tell the story the way it should be told. I love this; it is not at all a hardship. It used to be, but now it’s a relief to say no to practically everything that anyone proposes—not to see people, and to just be very quiet and intent on what I’m doing.

 

J.H.: Have you always kept a journal? If so, what is the relationship between your journal and your published writing?

 

A.W.: I have kept a journal for maybe twenty-five years or more. It’s a companion and a place to watch yourself grow and hopefully develop. It’s very much like meditation: when your teacher is teaching you how to meditate, there’s always a moment when they say, “There will be days when nothing much will happen and you will find yourself making your grocery list or thinking about laundry.” And sure enough, there are those days when you sit there, and you try to meditate, and you can’t stop thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner . . . just trivia.

A journal is kind of like that: there are times when you just have that shopping-list feeling, and you’re kind of jotting down everything. But then there are times when you make a breakthrough, and the breakthrough of course is what you’ve got to wait for, although you’re not supposed to wait for anything, you’re supposed to just be.

That moment sometimes comes when you back up in your journal,
and then you have the breakthrough. There you sit (I usually write my journal in bed) and you flip back to, say, the first of the year (you’re now in September or October), and lo and behold, you start to see the pattern of whatever it is that is a subconscious snarl. Then you see what you need to do to change it. I think that people who keep journals are a lot more lucid and a lot more clear about who they are and what is the essential me. That’s what I think is really revealed in a diary or a journal.

 

J.H.: I read recently Toni Morrison’s
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
. In her preface, she said: “For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination.” What do
you
believe that assumption has meant to the literary imagination in general, and yours in particular?

 

A.W.: It’s meant a lot more hard work for those of us who are not white because you have to feel the story, whatever the story is, identify with characters who are usually very much on the surface not like you—you have to go for the heart and the soul. But again, it’s one of those funny things: it really enlarges your ability to be empathic.

It’s so curious about things that are obstacles—how they are so often things that cause you to grow in ways that you would not otherwise. Because, of course, Toni Morrison and all of us writers and readers, black people, Native American people, Chinese people—we have been reading all of these books. I loved
Jane Eyre
—that was my favorite book. Now on the surface, especially in the South, if Jane Eyre had come out of the nineteenth century and stopped at our house it would have been extremely shocking. The white people would have had a fit, they would have come and snatched her away, because it just wasn’t done. This was classic segregation, so I was supposed to think that there was no connection. But there was every connection in the world because it was about the soul, it was about the heart, it was about courage, it was about being a real person.

I think all of us had that experience of being able to identify with what was really important. That means that if you turn it around, white
people (you can see this with white women) in the last ten or twenty years have started to be able to do that with work which is not about white people, where they say, “Ah, this is the heart: my heart sees that heart, my soul sees that soul.” That is why your friends and you read my work and you don’t feel like it is written by someone who is so out-there that you can’t relate, or that I would think or feel that you were somewhere out there that was impossible to reach. So that assumption which was meant to limit has in many ways enlarged capacity to feel for people at a soul level.

 

J.H.: The enlarged capacity to feel brings to mind one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus.

 

A.W.: Mine too.

 

J.H.: I felt that kinship very strongly in your work. Someone once asked him what his ten favorite (in the sense of most meaningful) words were. So many of those words are central to your work as well—“compassion,” “justice,” “love.” Were I to ask you that same question, what would your ten most important words be?

 

A.W.: I think “love,” “freedom” . . . I love this tape on Ayurvedic science that I am listening to because they are the first people I have ever heard who said that love and freedom are the same. There’s usually that question, “If you could choose love or freedom, which would you choose?” And I would always choose freedom! But they say that they are the same, and I think that’s brilliant.

Anyway: “love,” “freedom,” “justice,” “compassion,” “hope,” “joy,” “struggle.” That’s what comes to mind now.

 

J.H.: How does it feel to have achieved recognition as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist?

 

A.W.: I’m pleased. I was in Aotearoa, New Zealand, a couple of years ago with the Maori. They took me to one of their meetinghouses, and immediately, just across from me, was one of their seers, and she started to weep the minute I set foot inside the door. Of course I wanted to
know why—had I stepped on something or whatever? It turned out that there was a message she wanted me to take to the Cherokee, my ancestral people (I can’t tell you about that until I actually get around to taking it). But the other thing she said was, “So many people came through the door with you, you’re just surrounded.” That’s why I’m pleased: when I walk through the door I’m surrounded by so many people that I bring in with me, and that feels very good.

 

J.H.: Are you fearless? What frightens you?

 

A.W.: I think the thing that frightens me most is that I won’t follow through on something that I believe in.

 

J.H.: What have you not yet accomplished that you would like to do?

 

A.W.: I am dyslexic with manuals; I can’t operate things. When I look at your recording machine, I know I want one just like it because I see how you operate it and I figure I can do that by watching and if you point out a few things to me. I have a Jacuzzi and I’m trying to clean it out for the first time myself. I’ve been on the phone with my friend Deborah down in the city; she had to tell me how to do it because I had looked at the manual and it gave me such a headache. I want to clean out this Jacuzzi, and I want to do it right. I want to get it really clean, and I want to put that polish on it that she says I should put on it, and I want to put the right amount of bromide in it so that I don’t kill my guests who get in it, and then I want to get it running again. I have no idea if I’ll actually be able to pull it off, but that’s the kind of challenge that is intriguing to me now.

I have Oprah Winfrey’s cook’s cookbook and they have a recipe in there for crab cakes. I’ve been dragging this cookbook back and forth between the city and the country, picking up ingredients as I go because I don’t have everything—I didn’t have any baking soda, I didn’t have any baking powder—but I’m going to get those crab cakes. I want to make that dish. I want to learn how to make really good pasta. I want to be able to give dinner parties for my friends without feeling so nervous that the food won’t taste like anything, or that I will not have enough or something.