The World Has Changed (41 page)

 

Q.: First of all, I just wanted to say thank you for everything, and especially on the eve of
The Color Purple
opening on Broadway—congratulations. I wanted to hear you speak a little bit about the transition from the written word to the spoken and acted word, and what you find particularly fulfilling or thrilling and what you find challenging about that transition.

 

A.W.: The written to the spoken?

 

Q.: Yeah, from the text of
The Color Purple
to it becoming a movie and it becoming a play and it being embodied not just in your mind and in the reader’s imagination, but in actual bodies.

 

A.W.: Oh, right, yeah. Oh, it’s been magical, really, you know, it’s like when we were making the film, it was just—there were all these synchronicities. And synchronicity is a sign of life, so whenever your life is full of synchronicity, you know you’re right on it, you cannot do a wrong thing, it’s all just good, you know. So there we all were down in Burbank making this film and we had these incredible synchronicities. I mean, one of the big ones, of course, you may know, is that Oprah is Harpo spelled backward. The other one was that when Celie was giving birth in the film, Steven Spielberg’s wife was also giving birth. It was like an endless kind of thing, and it’s been so long that I don’t remember all of them. I have learned to really trust that generally speaking good people turn up in my life and when they are not good people, I try to help them move along, [laughter] but for the film I felt that Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg were really good and I felt the same way with the producer who came to ask me if he could make a musical of the novel. And then what happens, this is part of the real magic. You know how I was saying how I missed my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, because they all went away, or they were all very old, and I felt like as a little child I just had all this
love
for them, and I couldn’t really be with them because they were gone. So now what happens? Well, I walked onto the set for the movie. There they all were! And then I walked to look at the people doing the musical. There they are again! I have this feeling that they’re not going away until I am really fulfilled in this desire to be with them. When I have had enough of them, you won’t see any more movies or musicals. But I’m not done yet. I still miss them.

 

Q.: Hi. I just wanted to ask just an overarching larger question. You mentioned briefly that we are ahistorical, in the context of the social structures that currently exist in the U.S., like the disparities in education and the minority and black students, the incarceration rates and politics, and I just wanted to ask, how do you think our lives would be different if we as a people were exposed to the true histories of, like, race and class and gender and how they have played a part in forming our country, or do you think our lives would be different at all?

 

A.W.: Oh, I think our lives would be so much different if we knew our own history and we knew how things got to be this way, and also that we could see how they make a circle. We are going back in some ways to places we have already been and we really don’t, we really shouldn’t be able to, we shouldn’t
have
to do that, and if we had a firmer grasp on the history, and on who we actually are, and what people have already created these wheels, we wouldn’t be doing them over, and sometimes I feel a sadness about that, because I can see how young people especially, from the cradle really and before, even in utero, they are so attuned to television and other media, and I really appreciate these media, I mean, they are magical in themselves, but you know you cannot actually understand who you are if you are constantly being bombarded by things to buy, you know, how to look, you know, how thin you can be, how this, how that, so we’ve become extremely distracted in a way that actually did not exist when I was a child; we were not distracted in that way, and so I would say that we really, all of us, not just African Americans, but people in the world, have to learn how to turn off the distraction in order to connect again to what is vital. We will never get our people out of prison if we are all watching—I don’t know what you’re all watching, but you know, you have to really have a certain amount of a sacred solitude in which you develop what is a priority for you in this lifetime. You cannot do that if you are distracted and just pulled this way and that way all the time, so I don’t know if that answers you, but those are some thoughts.

 

Q.: I identify something with you during the question-and-answer. I was an immigrant from Hong Kong and you mentioned the children being alone and the parents working, and people are saying this was changing. Can you name some things that the immigrants can help their children feeling that way—how to deal with that feeling?

 

A.W.: Well, I don’t know, but what comes to mind is to say to this group what I say almost everywhere I go, which is that the time that we live in is so dangerous, is so precarious, for all of us, for our children, I cannot imagine what it looks like to our children, but it is very important that we form circles, that we form circles in which then the children who come into our circles feel that support, they feel that they have a community. Many of us have left communities. And some of us will never actually have the community of origin that we were born into—that’s gone. But if we creatively make circles . . . You know, I have, I belong to two circles: one is a women’s council, we meet four times a year, and then I belong to a sangha, which meets every month, and these are both circles that if there were children, little children around, they would be coming in, you know, grabbing a cookie off the table, where there are these
grand
women, sitting and talking about the fate of the earth and the fate of the community and the fate of
them
. This is what our children need. They need to know that there are adults
somewhere
sitting together and discussing, at least, what it’s going to take for us to survive this brave new world.

 

Q.: I have a question, pretty simple—you basically answered my question already about young adults realizing how much we need to connect with our history and how much we need to learn from that and move on with our future—but my question now is going back to the movie
The Color Purple
and the night of the Oscars. Now, I understand that the movie wasn’t recognized at all, and I just wanted to know what was your reaction to that night. I understand that God has a purpose for everybody and everything happens for a reason, and if anything God will bless you with that opportunity in the future, but at that moment in time, what was your reaction?

 

A.W.: Well, one thing you understand really early on in this kind of thing is that you don’t need awards. You don’t. [applause] You know, you don’t. So, or another way of putting it, is that the award is
life
, and we won, we got it. What more do we need? So I was thinking, you know, they told me, well, Steven really wanted an Oscar, well, I thought, “I’m going to call up my friend in the country and have him just make him one.” [laughter] It is true that if you have Oscars, you get more money, and you do this and that, but in fact one of the things I hope I’ve
conveyed is that the creativity is the joy, when you’re actually doing it, that’s the award, not the other thing. So, personally, I felt very glad that we didn’t get an award, and the reason I felt that was I didn’t know any of the people who were giving the award. Now if my first-grade teacher had been one of those people, if even my high school teachers had been some of those people, if some of my uncles and aunts had been some of those people . . . but what are we talking about? We are talking about a few, you know, very well-to-do, basically white men in Hollywood. Do they know what they’re doing? [laughter]

So it was not really that difficult. Actually it was not difficult for me at all. But I did feel. I felt for Oprah. I felt for Whoopi. I felt for Danny. I mean, all the people who were nominated. You know, there were eleven nominations. So there we all were in this huge hall, which I don’t know if you know this, but you know, it looks very sophisticated on the TV, but outside, it’s not, because you come in and there are these people on bleachers, like in high school, and they’re yelling and they’re screaming, and it was really not that wonderful. So I wanted
them
to have that affirmation, but we must deeply understand, especially in this culture,
especially
in this culture, that you do not need an award from people you don’t know. You do not. It is meaningless on a deep level. It is absolutely of no use whatsoever if they don’t really know you. Do you understand what I’m saying?

 

Q.: Hi. Thank you, Miss Walker and Miss Jefferson, for tonight. My question is just, as having loved your novels, but as an adult having come to understand and really identify with your essays, my question is how do you deal with—well, what I identify with is that you kind of, I felt like, were the first person to kind of call out and tell things like they were that I had noticed about the world. And I just wonder how you deal with the frustrations of ignorance. Like for me, it sometimes often turns to rage just dealing with racism and sexism. And I’m always the person who’s the naysayer and oh here she goes again, bringing some realism into it and stats and everything else, so how do you deal with that within yourself, and also I feel like I want to
help
people, and often it comes out where I’m pushing then away because I get so wired up about it.

 

A.W.: I don’t know. Actually, what comes to mind is how in my last novel—I have spent, again, two years studying Buddhism and
shamanism, and those are the twin pillars of that novel, and I was showing how, even though we think that they are very far apart, Buddhism and shamanism, because one is like it’s not really a religion, but it’s a philosophy, and it’s all written and everything, and then shamanism tends to be somebody with a drum and herbs and dances and ritual, you know, and so we think that they are just like yay apart, but in fact they are so similar, because the aim of each one is to open the heart, because they understand that with a closed heart, you really can’t do anything; you have to open your heart. So then imagine my surprise when I—I don’t read reviews but people always tell you. [laughter] You know, they’ll say, “Did you know?” and I’ll say, “No, I didn’t know that.” But imagine my surprise when this whole aspect is just completely—it’s as if it didn’t exist.

And not only that, I was also very interested in indigenous medicine. You know, this is medicine that is older than anything you’re taking, and more people have been taking it, and more people have been getting well with it. So I wanted to know about it, so I studied it, I took it myself. I can’t tell you how many times I threw up trying to
learn
about medicine that people have used for so long. And then to understand that when it reaches the desk of someone who lives in New York, or wherever, and they have no notion that there is this whole history, this lineage, this world of medicine and shamans, and so they write really disrespectful—just madness, really, because it’s so provincial and insular, you know? So what do I do? There’s nothing I can do. All I can do is write my books. What I do when I love a writer, say, for instance, Charles Dickens or that man that I love so much whose name is just completely gone, but anyway, but what I do when I really love someone’s work is I trust them not to give me, then, five books down the line, absolute garbage. Usually it’s just not in the artist to do that, unless they’ve just completely sort of sold out and gone over, you know. Generally speaking, if someone you know cares deeply—and you can tell, you can really tell. Read
Oliver Twist
. Charles Dickens really, really cared. So then you just really trust that they are going to continue to probe deeply, to try to see clearly, and to share this with
everyone
, because our existence is in the balance right now. It’s not even, you know, like, tomorrow; it’s now, it’s yesterday. So there is just on my part the feeling that eventually I can wait. And I don’t even have to be here for the people to discover my work that has been misrepresented. Eventually somebody will find
it. I mean, look at Zora Neale Hurston; we found her. This is what we can do.

 

M.J.: I think that that is a fine place to end but really to begin again. Thank you.

 

A.W.: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I was just saying to Alice that I think one of the last times that I saw her was right before the invasion. It was International Women’s Day, March 8, 2003.

She was standing in front of the White House with Maxine Hong Kingston, Terry Tempest Williams, and a number of other women. It wasn’t a large group, about fifteen or so women, and they stood there, arms locked, and the police told them to move, and they said no. And they all got arrested.

We were trying to get their message out on community radio. I was interviewing them on cell phone. The police didn’t appreciate that. So, really, the last time that I saw her was in the prison cell with her. But, Alice, you said that day, as we were in the paddy wagon or in the police wagon, that it was the happiest day of your life. Why?

 

ALICE WALKER: Well, you were there. I have so much admiration for this woman, so much love for Amy. . . . So I was very happy that she had appeared to talk to us about why we were there. Nobody else was asking.

And so, there we were, arrested in this patrol thing, and actually I did feel incredibly happy, because what happens when you want to express your outrage, your sorrow, your grief—grief is basically where we are now, just bone-chilling grief—when you’re able to gather your own forces and deal with your own fears the night before, and you arrive, you show up, and you put yourself there, and you know that you’re just a little person—you know, you’re just a little person—and there’s this huge machine that’s going relentlessly pretty much all over the world, and then you gather with all of the other people who are just as small as you are, but you’re together, and you actually do what you have set out
to do, which is to express total disgust, disagreement, disappointment about the war in Iraq.