Alice Walker is a feminist icon and also a defiant individualist. Libby Brooks meets a woman at ease with herself, if not the world
Alice Walker pads around her hotel suite like a fabulous cat. Just in from California and weary, she is not particularly friendly, but I would still like to touch her. The author of The Color Purple is aware that I should feel I am in the presence of somebody special.
Pulitzer prize-winner and spiritualist, Guggenheim Fellow and tree- planter, Walker is a woman at ease with her own contradictions. “I don’t try to square it,” she bristles, apropos of her bisexuality. “I never square myself with anything. I’m me. People have an opinion, good – I don’t care.” She is, to borrow the title of one of her poems, nobody’s darling.
Walker is promoting her most recent collection of essays, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (The Woman’s Press). This eclectic patchwork of intimate musings, letters and speeches knits her memories of the civil rights movement and the politics of dreadlocks with Fidel Castro and her mother’s crockery to produce a volume that is at once as simplistic as it is rich, and as intractable as it is giving.
“There is an activism inherent in writing, but then there’s the activism inherent in being active literally,” she explains. “I do feel guilt about not being more active politically, not putting my body on every barricade. The point of the book is that activism that feels right to you is probably your activism, and that you should stick with it.” Walker’s particular activism reflects a lyrical world-view which relies on individual voices rather than intellectual rigour. Her belief in telling your own tale is firmly rooted in her own story.
Born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944, the youngest of eight children, she lived with her sharecropper parents, Willie Lee and Minnie, in a farm shack. The descendants of freed slaves, the family were forced to share profits on the corn or cotton they grew with the local landowner, who also owned the only local store.
When she was eight, her brother shot her in the eye. “My parents tried to tell me that it was an accident, but I was on top of a garage, and I was the only thing up there,” she notes wryly. The scar tissue, later removed, made her feel ugly and different. At 13, her sister, who worked in a funeral parlour, showed her the body of a woman who had had half her face shot off by her husband. Walker noticed that one of the victim’s shoes had been patched with newspaper. Such is the detail that grounds her politics.
Everything about her flesh is whole: her apple cheeks and huge fudgy eyes (her blind eye looks perfect), the gleaming, uncreased skin; the lively worms of hair and the softly rounded belly filling out her combat trousers. At 54, she is whole of vision too. Spoken in low, honeyed tones, her words are generous but inflexible.
Humour comes in the gaps between her seriousness. “What difference does it make?” she responds, when asked about discrimination she has faced as a black writer. “I do what I do and they do what they do. My work is to create and theirs is to attack. I prefer mine.” On female circumcision, the subject of her raw and impassioned novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, she speaks as someone who has thought long about her willingness to be utterly unequivocal. What about cultural relativism, which suggests that it is wrong to interfere in another culture’s traditional values? “I find that extremely lazy, and I think that if karma works at all there will come a point when those people are in pain and nobody hears them cry.”
Her anger, it appears, is as contained as her approach to her critics. “Anger is great but it shouldn’t be destructive. I feel lucky that, as a creative person, I can always build something rather than blow it up.” Walker currently divides her time between the college town of Berkeley and a woodsy cabin in the hills of Mendocino County in north California. An intensely spiritual individual, with an unnervingly dreamy edge, she believes that women possess an innate knowing and connection to the natural world: “I dislike the biblical mentality that the Earth is evil and that there is somewhere better in the sky.”
Writing is a necessarily solitary activity, she says. “I can live in a world that I’ve created, that’s mine right down to the last doorknob,” she notes calmly. It is also a delicious pleasure for the single mother who filed and waitressed in leaner times. “Like the idea of the sculptor liberating the form from stone, you get to release yourself out of the darkness, out of the stone, constantly, and it’s a wonderful thing.”
After winning a scholarship to the prestigious black college, Spelman, Walker moved north to study at Sarah Lawrence women’s college, before returning to the Deep South in 1967 to work on the voter registration drive in Mississippi. She met and married – in New York – a white Jewish civil rights lawyer, at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in Mississippi. The only mixed marriage in the state, it lasted seven years and produced a daughter, Rebecca.
Currently involved with a woman, Walker ponders the cyclical nature of human liaisons: “The seven-year cycle is a real thing. I bet if you went back to the I Ching, you’d find that the Chinese noticed it first.” With Walker, in person as much as in print, if you want to be a fellow traveller you must jump in with both feet.
Describing herself as a “womanist” rather than a feminist, she once wrote that “womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender”. She now corrects me that there is no opposition – “Womanism is just feminism that does away with black.” Her lifestyle and, one suspects, inclination are not suited to following the detail of contemporary feminist debate, though the young women she meets are not, she says, easily fooled, which pleases her mightily.
“The work that I do has never been about what women can wear,” she says firmly. “I worry about whether they are cutting off parts of your body, do they have enough food? I understand so well that sexual harassment on the job is terrible but I can’t really feel.” – she thuds her chest – “as engaged to action as I do about people holding down a child and hurting her.”
But such loftiness sits oddly with her often intensely personal analyses. The Same River Twice, just reprinted in paperback by The Women’s Press, examines the page-to-screen progress of The Color Purple, and its treatment by Steven Spielberg, the white maker of blockbusters. She writes of a spiritual connection between herself and the director, yet includes a letter written three years later which states that his attempt to include her in a scene holding his baby son reeked of racial stereotyping.
She also touches on the reaction of black men to their portrayal in the novel: “It was really about the portrayal of lesbianism, but they were too cowardly to say that. People are homophobic, and men and women are having a hard time. To think that women can find an alternative is shocking. The black men in the book were wonderful, and the one who wasn’t dies, which is what happens to people who aren’t wonderful.” She politely declines to discuss her daughter, who founded the Third Wave young feminist organisation in the Eighties. “She’s 28 and she’s capable and living her own life, speaking her mind, and that’s what I hoped to accomplish in raising a daughter.”
I mention the passage in her book where she describes reconciling with the past through her relationship with Rebecca: “Because of her I … know the daughter and the mother I was. I’ve also discovered the world is full of mothers who’ve done their best and still hurt their daughters.”
Walker is a brave and beautiful writer – certain in herself, if occasionally confounding. She is also a black women who has found her own voice and given voice to those who had none, which is why she is an icon.
Her simple, rhythmic poems work best out loud. “Be nobody’s darling,” she reads. “Be an outcast./Take the contradictions/Of your life/And wrap around/You like a shawl,/To parry stones/To keep you warm.”
The audience erupts.
Suddenly animated, she gurgles and whoops with delight. “I feel like I have tons of daughters, I do, I feel like I have so many, and they’re in good hands.”
The following day, I attended the first, sell-out date of Walker’s British tour. Some 1 900 people, many black, many female, are gathered in Hall Four of London’s Barbican Centre. The audience breathes when she breathes. Their attention is offered like a sacrifice. The small comfortable figure, marooned in the middle of the wide wood stage, beams warmth now. On the back screen is a huge photograph of her hugging Fidel Castro.
In one missive she urges the International Indian Treaty Council to include menstruating women in religious rituals because “it is well known that menstruating women express their true feelings more honestly during their `moons’ than at any other time”. Walker does not pander to those who like their politics dry.