The World Has Changed (45 page)

 

M.S.: I also recently interviewed Gloria Steinem, who I know is a friend of yours. When I asked Gloria how we can help women better stay in touch with ourselves and make empowered choices for our lives, she said, “I think that the most effective means we have is to talk to each other in groups. Human beings are communal creatures.” How important is this notion of telling our truths to each other and being supported by friendship and the power of sisterhood?

 

A.W.: It’s totally crucial. In fact, I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can’t do that, once every two months or every four months. But you have to have
a circle, a group of people, women—smart, wise, can-do women—who are in the world doing their work, and you need to meet with them as often as you can, so that they can see what you’re doing, and who you are, and you can see the same. And you can talk to each other about the world and about your lives. In a circle of trust and safety. It’s crucial. It is crucial for our psychological health and our spiritual growth—it’s essential.

 

M.S.: In talking to Gloria about women’s media, she remarked that only Oprah has the power to put some non-product articles in her magazine. I know Oprah has been a longtime supporter, colleague, and dear friend of yours. How do you view and understand Oprah’s importance and popularity as one of the most powerful women in the media, and certainly as one of the most powerful African American women, possibly in the world?

 

A.W.: We’re not really close friends—we’re mutually respectful people. I met her when she worked on—you know she was Sofia in the movie of
The Color Purple
and later, recently, she became a producer of the musical, very late in the process, and did a lot of the publicity for it. And I have admiration like so many people. I think we love Oprah because she speaks her mind, and she is honest about her life and about the processes. And I think the world really is hungering for women of power. We love her partly because she’s powerful. And because to see someone with so much power, and she uses it, I think, so often for such good. To see that is just a tonic for the spirit. And we need so many more people like that.

Now, there have been women with a lot of power—for instance, Margaret Thatcher. But she didn’t inspire people with the love and devotion that Oprah does, because her power was so patriarchal and because we rarely thought she was always saying what she thought. It was very clear that she was still surrounded by men and becoming more male every day. And you can’t really say that about Oprah. I’m not a big TV watcher, so I don’t watch her closely as, for instance, my sister does, who watches it every day. But my sense is that she is living a very large life, of her own design. You may not particularly care for the design, but it is what she wants to be doing with her life. And if more women could see that, and enjoy it, I think there would be much more loose and
inclusive and free feeling, sense of possibility, and enchantment among women in the world.

 

M.S.: In your Omega talk you spoke about the concept of the Dark Mother. How do you see the significance of Africa for humanity and the world—Africa as our communal birthplace?

 

A.W.: Well, as I’m talking about in
We Are the Ones
, we have an African mother. That is the common mother. And we have been taught to be so different and separate. And that’s an illusion. And it’s an illusion that has made us really murder each other and just do horrible things, especially to people of color, because white people have more often been in the power to do that on a mass scale. You know, like the rape of Africa, the absolute subjugation of the people, the stealing of resources, the enslavement of people—all of those things. And when humanity understands, really with the heart, that they have been doing all of this to their mother, I believe there will be a great shift in the world. Because you can only do those terrible things that people do when you have that illusion of separation.

And when you lose it—it’s like when you really think that you are so, so very different from, say, your cat. Because I have a cat and I adore her. And you hang out with the cat and you live with the cat, and finally it really dawns on you that basically you and the cat like the same things! You know, you like to be warm, you like cuddling, you like food, you like to lie in the sun—and then you kind of get it: “Well, you know, I don’t want to harm this cat, I don’t want to eat this cat, I don’t want to steal this cat’s anything.” So I’m hopeful that now that geneticists have actually done the work of linking us by DNA to our African mother that at some point that is going to sink into human consciousness and lead to an understanding of who the Mother is. Hopefully, the human mother and then of course the Earth Mother.

And you see how that has changed. I don’t know if you remember this, but not so long ago only Native Americans, and indigenous people elsewhere and aboriginal people elsewhere—only those people talked about the Earth Mother. The earth as mother. And then this man—Lovelock, I think it was—found the Greek word “Gaia” for the Earth Mother/Goddess Mother, and was just astonished that, you know, hey—it’s alive. Now everybody knew it was alive. All of the people who
have lived on this planet for thousands of years, praying to the earth and thanking the earth, they completely knew—of course it’s alive! So that’s a good example of how consciousness changes, and if people can get it that they come from the Earth Mother, then they one day will understand that they also come from a human mother, the same mother, and she is due immense respect and love and appreciation.

 

M.S.: I know that the environment is a cause you care deeply about. The other site I run is an environmental site,
ecomall.com
, and I do think there has been increasing environmental awareness. Do you think that with all the recent attention to the dangers facing our planet due to global warming, we are finally starting to wake up to the current environmental crisis?

 

A.W.: I do, I think so. I think Katrina did it. You know, the tsunami in Southeast Asia was amazing, but it was far away, and I think that when Katrina hit . . . You know, interestingly, before Katrina, there had been an enormous amount of devastation and a lot of terror and fear in the islands, like Cuba and Jamaica and all of those islands, because they are all in that area. And it had been so sad to see how little attention was paid by this country to that devastation. And then when Katrina ripped across the Gulf, I think that woke up a lot of people. And then politically, I think a lot of people were awakened because then, for instance, Cuba immediately offered to send aid to help the people who were stranded and to send medicine and doctors, and in our country we refused the offer. And it wasn’t the first time they had refused an offer from Cuba. And so many African Americans especially, and Americans generally, now see not only that we are in a lot of danger from “natural disasters,” and that’s what they are, disasters, but we are also in danger because we are led by people who watch us struggle, and suffer, and die while other people outside the country are offering help to save us—and they won’t let that happen. So there’s a general enlightenment happening about global warming and the inefficiency and
meanness
of our government.

 

M.S.: I don’t know if you know of this Native American medicine woman named Dhyani, but she said something to the effect of, “You can tell how evolved a society is by how much of its garbage
is recycled.” How is how we treat the earth—our environmental awareness, or lack thereof—indicative of the state of humanity’s consciousness?

 

A.W.: Well, I’ll tell you, some of it has to be—I have a
Rolling Stone
article that I’m trying to get up my nerve to read and it’s about how many hogs are slaughtered each year. By one company—Smithfield Foods, I think, or something like that. It was 27 million last year. And that’s basically the population of like—I don’t know—thirty-two of the largest cities in the land; that’s the number of hogs they kill each year. I mean, it’s just almost unbelievable. And I’m going to go and check it as soon as I get off the phone, because I read it [laughs to keep from raging] and then I just had to sit down. Because they were talking about the amount of waste that this one company generates, and where it goes, and you multiply that by all of the other pollution staying in the animal kingdom—or what would have been the animal kingdom, but now it’s like the animal dungeon. But, you know, you have your chicken farms and your hog farms and your geese farms, and your cattle places. And that alone, just the cycle of the kind of brutality that goes into killing all of those creatures, and then sort of mindlessly eating them, and almost nobody even thinks about where all of their waste is going. And it gets recycled through us one way or the other.

So I think consciousness is very poor, actually. And that person that we were talking about earlier, like “What do I do? Where do I start?” Well, you can just start right there with your consciousness about what you’re recycling through yourself.

What is so striking about the photographs that accompany the article in
Rolling Stone
about the factory-farming of pigs—and this is a must-read for humanity—in which we see the human look of fear and suffering on the faces of the pigs about to be slaughtered, juxtaposed with the face of the man who is responsible (along with the blissfully ignorant public) for their mistreatment, and, physically, they resemble each other so much! Only the man is sitting behind a desk and wearing glasses and clothing, and the pigs are covered in filth from the degrading circumstances of their captivity; and his look is less honest, by far. We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

 

M.S.: I know you have written a lot about female genital mutilation and other forms of violence against women in Africa—are conditions worsening or improving, and how can we address the problem?

 

A.W.: Well, someone just sent me an e-mail about the fact that some scholars very high in the hierarchy of the Muslim world met recently in Cairo, and they made a resolution that female genital mutilation is not to happen henceforth among Muslims. And my friend Pratibha Parmar is visiting, and she and I made a film called
Warrior Marks
that talks about female genital mutilation, and we just almost cried, because it’s such a major acknowledgment from people who have traditionally ignored the problem. Basically people like these scholars have ignored the problem for six thousand years. So there is change, and a lot of it has to be about making sure that men, and maybe starting really young, really understand that they are endangering themselves. Because they really are very self-interested people, most men—and I say that because when I started talking about female genital mutilation and writing about it, many men in Africa and elsewhere just completely denied it and just didn’t want to hear about it. Until I said, “Well, you know, you notice how AIDS is spreading, and one of the ways that it spreads is through these fissures and tears that happen when you have intercourse with someone who has been mutilated,” and that really sat them up very straight.

And so, you know, we have to do a lot more educating of men, and I know that many feminists feel like they’re tired of that and they can’t do that, and da-da-da-da-da. . . . And nobody’s more tired than some of us, but it seems to be really important. Especially if we’re thinking of our sisters’ and daughters’ health. And not only that, so many of us by now have these wonderful feminist sons and grandsons, who really are allies, and we should give them the respect as allies, in changing a lot of the things that are wrong and done against women in the world.

 

M.S.: You write about how much you enjoy living in the country on a farm. Do you find it easier to be more creative in nature? And do you think part of humanity’s problem is a growing disconnect with nature—that we need to be more in tune with nature for a healthy body, soul, and mind?

 

A.W.: I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature. That people no longer notice the seasons, really. Or they talk about all the beautiful colors in the fall; that’s about all they know. They don’t know how to plant—you know, they would starve if they had to try to grow their own food. They have no idea; some people think that apples grow underground and potatoes grow on trees—I mean, really! And they go to the market and they buy their food there and they often have no connection to who picked the food, the workers, and that’s also really heartbreaking. As a daughter of a farmworker, to feel just how much they take for granted, the people who are buying their food without thinking about the people who produce it. And that leads to not caring that those people are being treated very much like slaves. Not permitted to go to the bathroom, for instance, for long periods. And then of course that endangers the people who eat the food, because like, you know, with that E. coli bacteria that was in the spinach? Part of that could very easily be if you don’t let people go to the bathroom, you know, they have to go somewhere. So it’s just one of those cases of insisting on human decency everywhere, with everyone. And therefore making it possible for your own health and well-being to prosper.

 

M.S.: There are so many unbelievably alarming statistics about world poverty these days. What do you see as the cause of world poverty and what can be done to help to alleviate the problem? Sometimes it just seems so overwhelming that it feels insurmountable; is it?

 

A.W.: No, of course it isn’t. It’s that some people have all the goods and money they can imagine having, and they’ve taken it from the poor people. In my book, I’m talking about a speech that Fidel Castro gave in which he talks about how the three richest people on the planet own more than forty-eight poor countries combined. Now, this is ridiculous—they don’t need all that, and why don’t people just insist that there is a limit to what people can have? This is where the world will have to go anyway; it’s just inevitable. Because everything is just shrinking. Unless we want to go back to a time when, you know, feudalism or something, where the king had everything and the peasants had nothing. And I don’t think we want to go back there. So it would make a lot more sense to say that,
actually, you know what—you cannot have $50 billion. You just can’t have it. Forget about having that, and just have enough for you and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, but you’re not going to have that much while other people have nothing. Period.