An Interview With Alice Walker
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Alice Walker Writing to save my life' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Alice Walker, age forty-five, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, author of four novels and...
...So that when you read my work, you read it without any acknowledgement that my work, especially The Color Purple, is in the context of a struggle for liberation that women all over the world are engaged in...
...I wanted a life to live and there was no way I could support another person...
...Did you move to the West Coast because you felt too cut off from nature...
...You have to have many more people in charge of things— and they have to be people who care about the future...
...But they don't...
...That part of it...
...That's especially true if you are a man and happen to be black...
...Yet there are many professors who complain their students should be reading Plato and not Alice Walker...
...And while you're doing that, there's a kind of spiritual alchemy that happens and you turn that bad feeling into something that becomes a golden light...
...It was quite nice...
...But I think if you're surrounded by buildings and paper and you learn about life through books rather than perceiving life itself, you don't know what inherent magic there is in creation...
...The spirit of the person who made it has gone into it...
...Not fancy things...
...It was my name, but I also re-chose it, because I had a great, great, great grandmother who walked from Virginia to Georgia carrying two children...
...There's a "back-to-basics" anger that writings like yours have become texts...
...Q: When you say you've written yourself out of depressions, is that because you created characters to keep you company...
...that's why it is so beautiful...
...Q: You used to live in Brooklyn, in Park Slope...
...I think any twelve black women anywhere in the world could do a much better job of running the world than they are doing...
...I don't...
...I love pottery...
...Mr__starts out as a brute, but he ends up rather loving toward Celie...
...Walker: Well, it pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet...
...And when we put it on, we just felt very vivid...
...Q: You weren't injured...
...Even my daughter, who's been brought up around gardens all of her life, said to me last summer, when I was showing her corn I had planted and how tall it was, "Mama, tell me, does the corn come out of the ground—or where does it come from, on a stalk...
...Whatever their world view is, it is certainly not shared by me...
...This woman has a sort of detached quality that is very rare in African women's writing...
...I knew that much...
...She's a young woman brought up in Zimbabwe in the home of a missionary uncle...
...This culture is one in which everyone is trying to get through the next four years—at best...
...Walker: Whenever you try to get inclusive, you get it...
...Q: More than many writers, you are known as a political activist...
...Walker: Oh, no...
...In my house, I don't have much furniture...
...Or care about your world view...
...Yes, you would like to be understood by people...
...However, everyone noticed how few women of color attended...
...You know, I don't think there's that much ambivalence about the issue...
...They are not progressive white males...
...Q: Maybe there was a great ambivalence in the black community about the issue...
...In this new book, one of your characters, Olivia, owns a miraculous blue suit that works miracles only in a certain shade of blue...
...Q: Did you go to the recent pro-choice march in Washington, D.C...
...So I moved...
...I have not had an easy life...
...It's wonderful, because they are all kinds, all colors, and even all classes, which I didn't know...
...But what can I do about it...
...But most of the people—and especially the children—in New York are so far removed from the magic that is inherent in nature, from Spring coming to flower, to bloom...
...Q: In your work, you've tried to go to other myths and histories than the ones that are standard...
...It's amazing to me that the white male establishment in literature and other areas really seems to believe that because they buy the myth that they have always been wonderful, that they've always done everything, and that the only thing worth knowing is what they produced—it's amazing to me that they think we should think it...
...Q: Your nineteen-year-old daughter, Rebecca Walker, has your name—not that of her father, your ex-husband...
...And failing that: the people who understand your life...
...They would have been bad if they had just remained macho brutes...
...You know, they had no identification with the struggle of women...
...Q: Your new novel, The Temple of My Familiar, has been published to mixed reviews...
...Do you think that's one of the reasons why you draw this kind of criticism...
...I can only persist in being myself...
...Q: One senses you have very strong feelings about hand-made objects...
...Walker: It was really frightening...
...I can't imagine any of these critics being at the pro-choice march...
...Surely, this must hurt...
...I'm not very good at it...
...So there is no reason I should really care that they are angry...
...The thing is that you are focused on creating something...
...Q: There's a New Age quality to your writing, to your ideas...
...But what I have looks like anybody could have made it...
...Because I really knew what I was marching for...
...I knew that I don't want her to suffer the same kind of sadness, depression, and fear that I had, that many of us do...
...I loved Barbara Walker's The Encyclopedia of Women's Myths and Secrets...
...But I do understand that my world view is different from that of most of the critics...
...I had a childhood where I was very much alone and I wrote to comfort myself...
...Alice Walker: Well, you can only be hurt by the criticism of the people you respect...
...To promote this new book, Walker journeyed to New York City from San Francisco, where she lives, to meet with the media...
...Walker: No...
...There are things that you really owe, I feel...
...Q: The striking thing about the men in The Color Purple is how much you permitted them to change, to grow...
...Walker: They can try...
...There is nothing I can say about it except I've worked very hard all my life...
...She was eighteen then...
...I am not they...
...It's all because you are intensely creating something that is beautiful...
...Her name is Detze Darembga...
...When we live in cities, which are basically artificial arrangements, we do forget, for instance, how miraculous Spring is...
...I was nineteen or twenty, something like that...
...And then, if you lost that and you tried to replace it with something else, it just wouldn't work...
...Walker: Well, I do...
...You spent eight years writing it...
...I value what has been made by people...
...They, on the other hand, have been brought up to think that they are to rule, that their word is law...
...I bought a little house in Park Slope that gave me the largest possible amount of sky and I had a tree planted in the front and one in the back...
...Q: Do you think the objects, after a while, encompass the spirit of the person who made them...
...When her novel The Color Purple was published in 1982, black male critics spilled endless ink denouncing her portrayal of black men...
...They are not working-class white males...
...That's shocking in a people who, I had always assumed, identified with every struggle for human rights in the world...
...But what I realized three months after I bought this house and moved into it is that it just wasn't enough...
...So I decided I really wanted that name because of her walk, not because it was my father's name...
...All of us have had at least one magical garment that someone gave us or that we bought...
...We live in a universe that is extremely creative and magical...
...Q: It's not just white male critics who get very angry at your work...
...Q: Tell us about the illegal abortion...
...It gets us a trillion-dollar budget...
...Walker: Maybe so...
...I was shocked...
...You have to feel, I think, more or less equal and valid in order for the whole organism to feel healthy...
...They are not the white males I have worked with in all the progressive movements and causes I have been active in Claudia Dreifus is a free-lance writer in New York City...
...Q: Tell us about Olivia's blue suit...
...In The Color Purple, you have a long section on the meaning of purple...
...That's part of the problem of men who can read The Color Purple and only find negative things about men in it...
...I want the real...
...Because it's really fatal to see yourself as separate...
...It's like in Native American cultures, when you feel sick at heart, sick in soul, you do sand paintings...
...And so when I was deciding on what to name myself, after I had decided I didn't want to be called by my husband's name, I had to figure out what I really wanted to do with all these patriarchal names...
...I can't imagine any of them being arrested at anti-apartheid demonstrations...
...Walker: I think colors are miraculous...
...I don't want the symbolic...
...There was just no way...
...Walker: Of course...
...Q: But they can hurt your work, your ability to reach readers...
...As she thrashed around her two-room suite at the Hotel Pierre, Walker seemed shy, soft-spoken, and clearly awkward at the fame game...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Alice Walker Writing to save my life' BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Alice Walker, age forty-five, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, author of four novels and several volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays, is at the forefront these days—among women writers, among African-American writers, among American writers in general...
...So it was a problem...
...Q: For many of the women who went to that march in April, it was an exhilarating experience...
...To me that is really totally obsolete...
...Walker: What I'm doing is literarily trying to reconnect us to our ancestors...
...As someone who had an abortion before it was legal, it was very moving to be there with my daughter...
...And failing that: the people you know...
...So then Rebecca, really loving that history, decided that she wanted it as well...
...Walker: I think she decided that she's a Walker...
...Walker: At the moment, let's say in the last month or so, I have read—these are wonderful books—I loved The Great Cosmic Mother, by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor...
...She was a slave of white people...
...I can't imagine any of them blockading arms shipments to Central America...
...But I've had some really hard times...
...And I sort of thought these could represent sky and forest...
...My life has been one of everyone in the culture acknowledging that I, as a black woman, am the least respected person in the society...
...You know, I chose Walker...
...And I say twelve because if I had to create a structure for governing, it would never have one person at the head of it...
...At a time when people are starving and when they don't have medicines...
...This was back in the third year of my marriage when I decided I could not stand being called by my husband's name...
...Because I couldn't really live without at least a symbolic tree...
...And that fact has made her voice less than beloved in some sectors of the black male literary community...
...I read a novel by a Zimbabwean woman, it's wonderful, it's called Nervous Conditions...
...Q: What do you read when you have time to read...
...And I wish that men could have more of an appreciation of gentleness in men and not find it so threatening...
...It gets us plutonium in the drinking water and in the air...
...But just because they have the power to do that does not mean it is right or that I think they are great...
...But then you get something off the rack, and it is not the same thing...
...DuBois, all these people, how then can you really totally ignore a progressive movement like the women's liberation movement...
...Q: Your books are taught at hundreds of universities around the country...
...But also: We're very close...
...Then, another book I read some months ago is called My Place, by Sally Morgan, an Australian aboriginal woman, who is fabulous...
...Q: From The Temple of My Familiar and The Color Purple, one senses that color is a very important part of your life...
...Walker: I just made it up...
...When The Color Purple was first published, black male critics fell all over each other to denounce what they said was your negative portrayal of black male characters...
...Maybe about being perceived as someone who is pro-abortion...
...We don't...
...I started out writing to save my life...
...And also, I was brought up to feel that it was a heinous thing...
...I was in an incredible moral struggle to decide...
...I've been walking in Central Park today and I've been so attracted by the fresh little green leaves that are such a beautiful spot in the center of this concrete city...
...If ever the emperor had no clothes, this is it...
...Walker: Right...
...Because, actually, you were trying to make a material thing function as a spiritual thing...
...What do you get from activism...
...Walker: I suppose...
...But I just wish in general that people would truly read what you write, rather than launch attacks against you based on hearsay, based on what they think you mean...
...Where did that idea come from...
...What I did was to go on writing The Temple of My Familiar...
...Walker: Oh, I think they do from the beginning...
...Q: And have we been cut off from appreciating them...
...I think most of the reviews have been by white men, you know, real establishment white men...
...And look where that gets us...
...So I went to court and had my name given back to me...
...We become happier as we appreciate these things in nature...
...Q: Do you think some of the attacks on you are really jealousy of your worldly attainments...
...The point is to heal yourself...
...I think if I weren't active politically, I would feel as if I were sitting back eating at the banquet without washing the dishes or preparing the food...
...My life has not been theirs...
...The Color Purple can make you see red," wrote an enraged Earl Caldwell, columnist for the New York Daily News...
...Her books tell of black women's woes, of the cruelties of their double oppression—by race and sex...
...He understood perfectly well why I, a college student, shouldn't have a baby...
...It wouldn't feel right to me...
...Because once the men in my book change from being macho men, [the critics] just lose interest in them, they can't recognize them as men...
...I've been very suicidal at times in my life, for various reasons that I don't want to go into here...
...Useful objects...
...I'm the one expected to do most of the work and not complain, and a long list of other things, over hundreds of years...
...It's because of the act of creation itself...
...Q: A symbolic tree...
...Walker: Oh, yes...
...You can't say they didn't come because they don't believe in abortion...
...Now, in 1989, Alice Walker has published The Temple of My Familiar, which includes some of her characters from The Color Purple...
...Walker: Yes...
...But this is entirely reasonable...
...if we can affirm it in the present, it will make a different future...
...And they are defending a way of life, a patriarchal system, which I do not worship...
...When people don't fit any of those categories, it's hard to be really that concerned...
...And it may look to other people like "silver-platter time," but to me, it's just been a very long struggle...
...Her last interview for The Progressive was with Israeli General Yehoshafat Harkabi in the June issue...
...When you respond to something because it's so beautiful, you're really looking at the soul of the person who made it...
...And in Native American cultures, by the time you've finished the sand painting, you're well...
...It's a global book that seeks to tell nothing less than all of humankind's history, in a mix of folktale style borrowed from Zora Neale Hurston and the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
...It was made by someone who loved you...
...Her daughter, Fanny, takes it to the cleaners and it never comes back, so she makes another one for herself but it is the wrong shade of blue and it makes her extremely tired every time she wears it...
...I'm really trying to do that because I see that ancient past as the future, that the connection that was original is a connection...
...I moved to California, where there still are, thankfully, lots of trees, lots of sky, and lots of earth...
...Anybody with a real aesthetic eye...
...I did not start out writing to attain worldly goods...
...The voice in it is rare...
...But the reality is that nine out of the ten women you meet on the street have had an abortion...
...Because it just seemed perfectly logical...
...A very nice Italian doctor whose daughter was at Vassar...
...Once, on The Today Show, you described a book almost as if it were a piece of sculpture or pottery...
...I would not have expected such pettiness...
...When the film version was released by Steven Spielberg, the movie was picketed by civil-rights organizations who claimed that Walker's brutish character Mr__defamed African-American men...
...Walker: My feeling was that the way some of the black males revealed themselves to be was far more negative than anything I would ever have even thought about black men...
...She's very perceptive...
...All of us...
...It has all of her or his concentrated intensity and passion and thoughtfulness, and that's what you see...
...Walker: Yes...
...Or you make a basket...
...Walker: Yeah...
...over the years...
...I always think of that walk in her as a Walker, as being totally heroic and wonderful...
...I can't imagine any of them knowing about or caring about the lives of black women, or of black children, or of black men...
...so it was always just astonishing to me that anyone would be envious...
...If you have in your cultural background Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, W.E.B...
...The work attempts to span the history of the world for the past 500,000 years...
...I'm also reading, at the moment, Lives of Courage, about the South African women who are in the anti-apartheid movement...
...I wish I could make pots...
...And whenever that has happened, I have written myself out of it...
...The first one actually enspirited you because of the connection...
...You've got the prizes, the money, the fame—many of these gentlemen critics would like that stuff too...
...Walker: And the fact is that more black women have abortions than anyone else...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
