The World Has Changed (43 page)

 

A.W.: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? I know I’m very soft-spoken, but I have endeavored to live my life by my terms, and that means that I am a renegade, an outlaw, a pagan. What was the other thing?

 

A.G.: A rebel.

 

A.W.: A rebel, oh yes. Oh yes, and there is no reason not to rebel. I learned that really early. There is no reason whatsoever. You know, I don’t look at television hardly at all, although I’m saving it for my old age. But when I do see it, and I see how relentlessly we are being programmed, and I see how defenseless our young are, I realize all over again that rebellion, any way you can manage it, is very healthy, because unless you want to be a clone of somebody that you don’t even like, you have to really wake up. I mean, we all do. We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

 

A.G.: [Will you speak about] making
The Color Purple
into a movie?

 

A.W.: It was a great risk, but I grew up in Eatonton, Georgia, actually not even in the town, way out in the luckily beautiful countryside. But our entertainment was on Saturday night to, you know, bathe and get dressed and go to see a film. Now, these were all, in retrospect, really
pretty awful films. They were all shooting and killing each other, you know. But that was all that we had really in the way of entertainment that wasn’t the church and our own entertainments. So that’s what I grew up with. And my mother who worked so hard and never left the house or left the fields, she would sometimes be able to go, but after eight children, it was sometimes difficult to even move, but she enjoyed these movies.

And so, the risk that I took was in a way to offer to my mother and people like my mother something that they could identify with, something that they could, you know, have some real connection to. I mean, my mother never met Tom Mix and Lash La Rue. These were all these characters that were shooting and killing.

So I thought about, you know, the segregated theater. When I was growing up, we had to be up there in the balcony, and the white people were down here [on the floor], and, of course, the seats were better down here. So I wanted to change that to the degree that I could do so. And so that’s part of the reason I wanted to make a film.

And I think—you know, I had never heard of Steven Spielberg when he appeared. I think that, for many people, that’s amazing, given how famous he was, but I had no idea who he was. And that’s the other thing, when you are working on your work—and I think it’s really important that I talk to you about this a little bit as an elder—when you are working on your work, you really don’t have to be concerned about what other people are doing.

You know, there’s an expression: “Everything that rises must converge.” At some point, if your work is as true as you can make it, it has its own luminosity, and it inevitably brings to you and your work all the people that you need. So enter Steven Spielberg to make the film, which turned out to be a very good thing. People thought it was a terrible choice, but what I looked for in him and in other people is the willingness to listen and the willingness to grow, to learn, and he had all of that.

 

A.G.: The questions that were raised—here you had written it, deeply out of your own experience, then having a white producer produce it and going on to Broadway, well, that’s just repeated over and over. What were your thoughts of having your experience, your writing, your art, channeled through them?

 

A.W.: Well, I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, do anything. So your job is to find trustworthy companions and cocreators. That’s really it. And if you find them—and I don’t know how you do, I can only go by how I feel about people.

And so with the play, this young man, Scott Sanders, who is the primary producer, went to great lengths to woo me, because I was not interested in doing a musical, partly because of the suffering that had occurred after making the film. There was so much incredible controversy after the film, and a lot of it excruciatingly hurtful. And even though I had ways to buffer myself, and even though by nature I can continue to function and do things that I need to do, it was still very painful. So I didn’t really want to go back to that....

That anybody reading
The Color Purple
or seeing the film, actually, that they could read it and see the film and still think that I hated . . . my father, my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, just because they were black men—and, you know, this would mean that I hated Langston Hughes or Jean Toomer or Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison or—it felt so incredibly mean. It felt very mean, it felt very small, and it was very painful.

 

A.G.: And so how did you get through it?

 

A.W.: Well, I came down with Lyme disease in the middle of all of this, and I experienced it actually as a spiritual transformation, even though I didn’t know that was going to be the result. It was very frightening. But I came out the other end of the bashing that I had received, the physical debilitation from Lyme disease, the breakup of my relationship with a partner at the time. I came out of all of that with a renewed sense that life itself, no matter what people are slinging at you, no matter what is happening, life itself is incredibly precious and wonderful, and that we are so lucky that we wake up in the morning, that we hear a bird, that we . . .

You know, just if you think about little things, they seem little, but they are so magical, you know, like eating a peach. I came through that period understanding that I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way. And being this way,
The Color Purple
is the kind of work that comes to me. I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to.

So there was this marvelous feeling, you know, that I had already been through a kind of crucifixion by critics.... And not to compare myself with Jesus, but I really got it, that there is a point at which a certain kind of crucifixion leads to a certain kind of freedom, because you cannot be contained by other people’s opinions of you. You will always, I think, after you go through this kind of thing, feel somewhat removed, as I do. You know, I basically stopped reading reviews. And it’s fine. I have realized I don’t need them. I really feel that if more people could pay less attention to other people’s opinions of them, they would be so much happier.

 

A.G.: Alice, I wanted to ask you about the Sisterhood. Who was this group of women writers in the 1970s that you gathered with?

 

A.W.: Well, the Sisterhood was the brainchild of myself and June Jordan, because we looked around one day—we were friends—and we felt that it was very important that black women writers know each other, that we understood that we were never in competition for anything, that we did not believe in ranking. We would not let the establishment put one of us ahead of the other. And so, some of us were Vertamae Grosvenor, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, myself, and I think Audrey Edwards, who was at
Essence
, and several other women that I don’t tonight remember.

The very first meeting was at June’s apartment because it was the larger of—I had moved out of my marriage house into basically two small rooms. And so June had this beautiful apartment with lots of space, and the women gathered there, and I remember at the very first gathering—I had bought this huge red pot that became the gumbo pot—I made my first gumbo and took it to this gathering of women, all so different and all so spicy and flavorful like gumbo. And we have this photo. There is a wonderful photograph that someone took of us gathered around a large photograph of Bessie Smith, because Bessie Smith best expressed our feeling of being women who were free and women who intended to stay that way.

 

A.G.: You talked about criticism earlier and how you decided never to read reviews. Can you talk about it in terms of Toni Morrison’s early work and the response of the critics?

 

A.W.: Well, I thought that her writing was beautiful. I had read
The Bluest Eye
and, in fact, was passing it out to people. And I was very upset that it didn’t get much of a long life. I think—I don’t know if it went out of print, but it certainly was sort of below the surface. And then I read
Sula
, which I just fell in love with. And I remember that there was a review of it in the
New York Times
by . . . someone who basically said that in order for Toni Morrison ever to be anything in the literary world, she had to get out of writing about black women, and she had to broaden her horizons and that way, she would maybe connect. And I was just completely annoyed. And I wrote a letter to the
Times
, reminding [the writer] that we will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful.

 

A.G.: Here is the letter. Alice, here is the letter.

 

A.W.: Oh, okay; it says: “Dear sir: I am amazed on many levels by Sarah Blackburn’s review of
Sula.
Is Miss Morrison to ‘transcend herself’? And why should she, and for what? The time has gone forever when black people felt limited by themselves. We realize that we are, as ourselves, unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Fifty years ago Cuba was an apartheid state. Even President Batista, a mulatto, was barred from the exclusive whites-only clubs. You went to Cuba for the first time in 1978. What were your impressions of the relations between Cubans of different ethnic ancestries?

 

ALICE WALKER: I went to Cuba in 1978 and there was of course lingering racist behavior and attitudes, which my group of cultural workers—artists, musicians, dancers—pointed out. The Cubans had a good understanding of how hard it is to change ingrained notions of superiority but assured us they were dedicated to doing so. They pointed out that racism itself had been made illegal in Cuba. This was a profound and novel idea that I wished to import to my home state of Georgia, USA. And the rest of North America as well. I had by then toiled long years in Mississippi beside my civil rights lawyer husband and watched the slow, sometimes life-threatening process of dismantling racist institutions case by case. There was no comparison between the racism of Mississippi and that of Cuba. Or the response to it. Mississippi was by far the more dangerous place to be.

 

G.G.: Fidel has always reached out to the “wretched of the earth,” whether poor whites or blacks, the peoples of Southeast Asia at the time of the Vietnam War, the peoples of Africa, the indigenous peoples of the Americas. What is your impression of Fidel and what he has done for Cuban society?

 

A.W.: It is always apparent to me that Fidel is a deeply religious man. In the Gandhian sense: “I call that man religious who understands the suffering of others.” More than any other leader of our time, or of the last
century, Fidel has made it his business to understand exactly why people are poor, in whatever country they are in; why they are at war or at peace; why they are suffering. He has a fine, large intellect, which he uses to comprehend and defend the wretched of the earth. And what is most admirable about him, in my opinion, is that he has never once abandoned his scrutiny of the material conditions of the world in an effort to find solutions to the horrible inequities that exist. He thinks about the same things I do: infant mortality rates; how many calories it takes for a child to do well in school; what is the best way to develop a society in which people feel connected and not alienated. When I am in Cuba I feel safe. Once I was vacationing in Jamaica with my daughter and she was in a motorcycle accident that broke her foot. On the whole side of the island we could not find one doctor, only a couple of nurse practitioners who had only kindness and a bandage to offer us. In Cuba, even during the periods of almost no food or medical supplies I know my daughter’s foot would have been looked after by a doctor, and moreover, a doctor who lived nearby. The Cuban people take such things for granted. They take a lot of things for granted. Free education, health care, low housing costs, their leader’s obvious love of them. His pride in their endurance, stamina, compassion for the beleaguered of the world, their innumerable accomplishments. I have never felt affection, as an American, from a national leader in the United States. When there has been a semblance of genuine, as opposed to photo-op, caring, it has been partisan. And therefore painful. There has been no substantive and sustained attempt to deal with the underlying foundation of genocide and enslavement that created North America’s wealth, still in the hands mostly of white families. Yes, I know Oprah has a billion dollars, which she uses very well, but this does not mean capitalism, rooted in Indian killing and African enslavement and torture and murder, works.

Cubans, generally, I have found, are intelligent, compassionate people who are curious about life. Partly because their leaders are. They hold a vision of what is possible different from that most North Americans possess. That is because they are taught more of what is happening on the planet and why. Global warming, for instance, which is only now becoming a hot (so to speak) topic in the U.S., has been in the consciousness of Cubans for years. That is why when a hurricane struck Havana some years ago the entire city was evacuated before it arrived. Think of the confusion of the U.S. government during Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans. It is enough to make us weep. And we will weep, because more of that—confusion, denial, incompetence—is surely in our future.

I was not surprised when Fidel and the Cuban government offered to send supplies and doctors to New Orleans—this is behavior I expect of Cubans after all these years watching them respond to the disasters of the world. And I was ashamed when their generosity was refused, by my childish government, as so many of my people suffered miserably in alligator- and snake-infested water, and many of them died. This disregard for the black poor, like the disenfranchisement of black people during the last two elections, we can never forget. It is a permanent bruise to the heart.