The World Has Changed (35 page)

A.W.: No.

 

P.C.: So maybe that’s . . .

 

A.W.: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s probably just, you know, about seeing—as Bob Marley said so beautifully—that the biggest bully you ever did see was once a tiny baby. And that’s true. I mean, I have tried that, you know. On Ronald Reagan. [laughter] I even tried that on Nixon, but it didn’t really work that well. But, really. You know, there you are. You’re standing face-to-face with someone who just told you to go to the back of the bus, or someone who said that women are not allowed here, or black people, or whatever.

And what do you do? You know, that’s the question. And what do you do with your spirit? I mean, it’s your spirit that’s being attacked. I mean, they could basically blow you away physically. But also, if they don’t do that, it is your spirit. So you have to really look at them and see. I don’t know what you do, Pema. But I always, at that moment, see that they are really miserable people and they really need help. And I think now, of course, that I would love to send them
Awakening Compassion
. [laughter]

 

P.C.: Yeah. Big deal. A chance they’d listen to it. But that’s right. I mean, that’s kind of a leap for some people, to actually see that the cause of someone’s aggression is their own suffering.

 

A.W.: Oh, yeah.

 

P.C.: But on the other hand, you could also just realize that your aggression is not going to help anything in that situation.

So then, there’s the situation. You’re standing there. Actually, you
are
being provoked; you
are
feeling aggression. And what do you do? So that’s when tonglen actually becomes very helpful. Because you breathe in, and you connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. And
you have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like that. And if you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth, you know.

 

A.W.: Exactly. And, you know, war will not be what comes out. And that’s, you know, I think that’s really the hope.

 

J.L.: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had that quality. He wasn’t a tonglen practitioner, but he
was
a tonglen practitioner.

 

A.W.: Yeah, he was, in a way.

 

J.L.: But it didn’t stop him from making stands.

 

A.W.: Yeah. No. He was. He was a Southern preacher from a long line of Southern preachers. And, you know, a great pray-er, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer, and also through love. I think that the person who has a great capacity to love—and it often flowers when you can actually see and feel the suffering of other people—can also strategize. I mean, I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got, of course, very angry and upset, but, at the same time, knew what he was up against. So I think he knew what he was carrying, how much of the load he was carrying, how much depended on him.

I think, some kind of practice. And actually, what I’m thinking is just that it wasn’t tonglen. It wasn’t TM. It wasn’t metta. But in a way, it was all of that. You know? And any practice that we do regularly, even if we fall off . . . I think of my falling out of meditation as kind of falling off the wagon. Falling off the meditation wagon. But it is really important to have some kind of practice so that when we do go out into the world to confront these more and more horrible situations, we can do that with a feeling of knowing that we are in the right place in ourselves, and also knowing that we’re not bringing more fuel for the fire, more anger, more despair.

The difficulty of this is not really a deterrent. I think what I find is that the more difficult something seems, the more there is a possibility of—I think you say it really well—giving up hope. I mean, you sort of approach it with a feeling of already having given up hope, but that
doesn’t stop you. You know? I mean, that slogan, “Abandon hope,” that you say we should put on our refrigerators . . .

 

P.C.: Give up all hope of fruition. Right.

 

A.W.: Yes. Right. And just do it, because you’re doing it and this feels like the right thing to do, but not feeling that it’s necessarily going to change anything.

 

P.C.: Right. One thing that I once heard Rinpoche teach, and it’s been a big help to me: he said to live your life as an experiment, so that you’re just always experimenting. So, you could experiment yelling back and see what happens. You can experiment doing tonglen, and speaking out of that, and see how that works. You know, in terms of your activism, or anything. In terms of the stakes getting higher and higher, like, what actually allows some kind of communication to happen? And you learn pretty fast what closes down communication. And that’s the strong sense of enemy, I think.

 

A.W.: Of what?

 

P.C.: The other person feels your hatred.

 

A.W.: Hatred, mm-hmm.

 

P.C.: Then everyone closes down.

 

A.W.: But I also feel like fear . . . that what closes people up and down more than anything is just being afraid. And I can say that about myself, that the times when I have really been afraid to go forward in a relationship, or a problem, or whatever, that there is this fear. There’s anger, and there’s fear. And so, the practice of tonglen, or, basically, sitting—I mean, I think any kind of sitting and just being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away or disown them—I think that’s just incredibly helpful.

 

P.C.: Yeah. Yeah.

If you think of the early stories, it’s true that the women end badly, but it’s because they belong to the generation of my mother and grandmother, when they were suspended because they had nowhere to go. All of them couldn’t be Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, so they ended up doing all kinds of destructive things. Most of that generation didn’t have any fame or glory. But notice that all of those women are much older than I am. They exist in an historical place that is removed from my generation of women. It’s not until
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
that I got my generation of people. It starts so far back because I wanted to have a really good understanding of the historical progression. I wrote about those women in
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
. The women who have not had anything have been, almost of necessity, self-destructive. They’ve just been driven insane. And the ones who have managed have been the ones who could focus their enormous energies on art forms that were not necessarily recognized as art forms—on quilting, on flowers, on making things. It’s a very human need, to make things, to create. To think that women didn’t need that—that by having a baby you fulfill your whole function—is absurd and demeaning.

When I was in Mississippi, there was a woman named Frankie Walton White who had read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, and we were talking about it, and she loved it. And I got it, and I read it, and I loved it. That was when I connected really with Zora. The oddest thing is that in that same anthology that Langston Hughes did—where he put “To
Hell with Dying”—there’s a story by Zora. But at that time I was so convinced that only men wrote literature that I had to read, that I read that anthology without really noticing. It’s terrible, but I think it’s true. Then I read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, and it was so much my culture. I had never read a book that was so true to my specific southern black culture, full of music, full of humor, full of just—not righteousness—craziness. People living their lives, people having good times, people fussing and fighting. At the same time, as with my mother and father, they are absolutely rooted in the earth, in earth life. People in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
are really pagan. They are not bamboozled by religion as it is taught in the South. They are always poking fun at the hypocrisy. And the passages that are so incredible are, of course, when they drop a bean in the soil, and up comes this food. The Indians, too, the way they knew a storm was coming. They started leaving. The animals knew, they started moving. Only people were hesitating. Most of the people were not as connected. They had already gotten two or three steps removed from what is the natural rhythm of the earth, so they didn’t know and so they had to sit there, be scared, and pray to the sky god, watching the sky god.

Now this is an aspect that I rarely see reflected in any review. Basically, it carries forward my sense of the transformation that many people have to go through to shed what is a deadening sky-god religion, whatever it is, in order to come back to their rootedness in nature as the source of divinity. That is why
The Color Purple
really is a book about learning to believe in your own god or goddess or divinity or whatever is sacred to you. It’s not about what other people are telling you. You get rid of the Charlton Heston–type God, you get rid of Yahweh, you get rid of all these people that, while you are worshipping, try to convince you that you are nothing, and you begin instead to be a child of what you actually are, a child of—you are a child of the earth. That is why, at the end, Celie understands that if God is anything, God is everything. And so the birds, the trees she sees—she makes a long list of all these things. That is what this book is primarily about. It’s about understanding that people may well need to have religions in order to further their social programs and their political agendas or even their spiritual desires, but essentially what is divine is in front of you all the time. You cannot separate yourself ever from the earth. I was thinking that if you understand that, you lose all fear of dying. You may be grass, you may be a cow,
but you’ll always be here, in fact even if they shoot you. I was thinking, “What would they do to me to really punish me for being an earth lover?” I mean they could shoot me to another planet, but because I’m made of earth, I could never leave. That is my home, that is what I am. I love this feeling of always being at home and always being with what is sacred to me, what is divine to me. It was a gift from my mother without her knowing because, before she died, she became a Jehovah’s Witness, and part of those people’s belief is that if your own child is not also a Witness, you don’t speak to the child. Isn’t it amazing? Imagine having that as your guiding light.

Because my work is grounded in spirituality rather than in politics, I am able to follow my intuition and my sense of being one with other people much more easily than I ever thought possible. When I write as I have done about these African children who are mutilated, I can do so without getting bogged down in all the cultural baggage and the political resistance of various African governments and African people. I really understand what they are saying. Some people have to do studies to know these things, but they have proved that things hurt if you hurt them. If you put a monkey in a cage and put electric shocks on one side and not on the other, they will try to stay on the side away from the shocks. So, if you can believe those children feel pain, and if you think that is not right, then you try to change that. My point is that there is a lot of opposition to people wanting to alleviate suffering by people who have a vested interest in continuing it, because it’s their means of ruling, literally controlling.

I have this theory, and I wrote a poem about it, that Martin Luther King, had he lived, would have become a violent revolutionary rather than a nonviolent one simply because he would have perceived that he had met an object, specifically, this country, that is not going to be changed nonviolently. I think his dedication was so intense that he would have tried other strategies. In the poem, I talk about his love in front and his necessary fist behind. I also mention that people who are crucified should decide not to be crucified—that they should do as much as they can, but then they should know when to stop, that they’re much more valuable farming, or raising tulips somewhere, than they are dead—if they would only understand that.

A good example is Bob Moses, who was in Mississippi in the early sixties and who was rapidly becoming a legend. He was with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and he was just wonderful because he knew how to go into a community and let people lead him rather than trying to tell the people what they needed. He would listen to what they wanted done and then he would try to help them do it, which is the true revolutionary way. But then the people started saying that this man was their Moses because they make these quick religious connections, and he decided he didn’t want to be their Moses; he wanted to disappear. So he changed his name, took his mother’s name, and he just walked away. The last time I heard anything about him, he was teaching school in Tanzania. I think that’s brilliant. That’s exactly what people should do.

After King’s speech against the war in Vietnam, it would have been so lovely if he had known somehow. He had all these premonitions, but he was so into the propelling force of history, where you have to go right to the end and be shot. He never considered not listening to all the things telling him that the end was coming. He knew the end was coming. But wouldn’t it have been terrific if after the speech “On the Mountaintop,” [“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”] he had gone back to Atlanta, said, “Coretta, get the children, we’re gonna go to California. Let somebody else lead. I’ve had it.” He was tired. Or think about Malcolm. Malcolm could have started a little farm in Detroit and been ready to come back another time.

If people think that’s taking the easy way out, well, to hell with people. I think the symbols are wrong. I think the symbols have always been wrong. I think that the worship of death is really stupid; to hound people until they feel they have to be shot is just sick. We got to a point when people were saying, “Well, now it’s time for King to be assassinated for him to be any good.” Now, that’s sick. Here’s a man who had given every ounce of his energy, absolutely everything he had. And there we were just saying, “Well, he’s screwed up in Chicago; he can’t reach people in Harlem. The only thing left for him to do is to stand there and be shot.” I’ve thought about it constantly. I would like for people to think they can have more than one life and that there are more ways to be committed than to give your absolute life’s blood. Going to teach in Tanzania or Harlem or Mississippi, that’s a commitment. I would love to have had Malcolm or Martin Luther King teach my child.