Interview: Alice Walker on violence, peace and compassion

Last week, I had the honor of speaking to author Alice Walker about her new book, Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel, which will be released later this year. Walker is the author of The Color Purple, for which she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A prolific writer, she has also written a dozen more works of fiction an impressive catalogue of poetry and nonfiction. Walker is also teacher, editor, activist and a central figure in modern African American writing and thought. It would be difficult to overstate the role she has played the American feminist and womanist movements: As the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and author of one of the the most powerful stories in modern American history, Walker is a living legend.
In the last several years Walker has traveled to some of the most war-torn parts of the world, places where unthinkable atrocities are a daily reality. In the book, parts of which are wrenching in their description of truly awful suffering (trigger warning), she writes:

Over four million Congolese have been murdered in an endless war whose foundation rests on the mineral wealth of the Congo. One of those minerals, coltan, makes cell phone use possible. Millions of families are homeless and in ruin, living in the rain and heat. War continues, like a sickness that has no cure. Infectious diseases are rampant. Weapons flow into the hands of the young, even into the hands of children. How can she smile? I wonder, about my just met Congolese sister. But she does so because she is alive, which means the Feminine is alive.
There is the work of The Mother to do.
There is the work of The Daughter to do.
This is a source of joy. We embrace, parting. She will learn how to start a business and longs to take lessons in computer use.

When Walker returned from Eastern Congo, she writes, she “fell ill” with the burden of the knowledge she had gained and the stories she had heard. “I felt as if my own heart had been taken out of me, and this assault on the planetary human body that I represent, brought me low.” Over time she recovered, and found the ability to speak about the people she had met on her trips to the Congo, and to Rwanda and Gaza. Overcoming Speechlessness is about how each of us can find the words, and the voice, to process the unimaginable truths of mass rape, genocide, and large scale human cruelty.
Walker will be speaking at the 92nd St Y later this month. She’ll be discussing her trips abroad, and the process of writing Overcoming Speechlessness, in a one-on-one discussion with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. She will also be signing copies of Overcoming Speechlessness. Tickets are available here.
In our interview, I had the chance to ask Walker about her new book, about feminism at home and abroad, and about her vision for a new generation of girls and women.

Chloe Angyal: You wrote about falling ill from the burden of the stories you heard in the Congo and in Rwanda. Is it difficult to put those stories down on paper when you know that they might have the same effect on your readers?
Alice Walker: My responsibility is to witness and to share what I witness. It’s up to the reader to do whatever they like. If they fall ill, that’s where we are in the world. Things are so horrible that if you don’t fall ill, it’s a wonder, isn’t it? So I don’t feel responsible for whatever happens to them. I think that I’m responsible for what I’m supposed to be doing about the problem.
CA: When you’re writing about these problems, do you ever feel overwhelmed, or like they’re too big to solve?

AW: Well, I don’t know if it’s about solving them. Certainly not in my lifetime. None of this is going to be solved any time soon. But that shouldn’t stop anybody from trying to understand what is happening. And to actually be there to support people who are suffering.
CA: What do you think is the best way for people to do that if they don’t have the kind of platform and voice that you have?
AW: Everybody has something. I don’t buy the idea that unless you have a platform, you don’t have anything to say. Because all these horrors, in some way or another, are connected to us. They’re connected to our thoughts and to our feelings and ultimately to our politicians. So we have many things that we can do. We can sit at home and write books, we can make phone calls, we can use our computers. There’s no end to what people can do. It’s outdated to think that you can’t do something because the problem is so huge. That’s just not true.
CA: What was the most inspiring part of your trips abroad?

AW: In Gaza, the most inspiring part was that there were women who were so battered and so haunted by the invasion and the occupation and bombing of their homes, these women who were still alive but who had lost sisters and mothers and children and grandparents, but they were still able to take me by the hand and lead me into a room where we all danced, even as we cried.
CA: What do you want people when they read the final page of Overcoming Speechlessness and close the book?
AW: I really want them to be able to look at all people with love, and to follow that, and not to feel that they’re separated from anyone, because they’re not. People are being pretty much indoctrinated to think that if a person is a terrorist, you’ve got nothing to say to them, but that’s ridiculous. I want them to go from there and follow people’s experience of life, and have compassion for them. And some day someone will have compassion for you. Because who’s perfect? Nobody. Who’s not hurting here? Nobody. So just accept that, and see the pain that people are carrying, and ask yourself, “What can I do to help them with this awful journey that they’re on? What small thing, medium thing, big thing?” But the tendency to turn away, and to try and hide in drugs and loud music and fast cars and loose women, I mean, forget it. That’s so out the window; that’s gone.
CA: One of the things that American feminists often struggle with is how to balance addressing the enormous needs of women in the developing world with addressing the still quite significant needs of women here at home. How do you reach that balance?
AW: Well for one thing, I don’t really separate myself as though I’m disconnected from the women who have fewer resources than me. I come from a background of great stress and impoverishment, so any time I’m in any part of the world where people are going through that, I see their struggle as one that they have, and I support them in any way I can, but I understand that it’s theirs. Because it’s a unique situation, wherever it is, their struggle won’t be exactly like mine, and I just say, “OK, yours looks different, it is different, but what can I do, even so?” And usually what I can do is be there, in any way I can, and I can witness. There’s always something.
CA: How do you feel about forms of aid that specifically target women, like microfinance?
AW: I love it. I think that people who can do that are to be commended. It’s true that, in our experience, if you give the money to the man, who knows what’s going to happen to it? You get bicycles and wristwatches and whatever. But if you give it to the woman – and that’s not all men, there are some very responsible men – if you give it the women, generally speaking, because not all of them are thrifty either, they will think about things like food and shelter and education and drinking water and all of those things. I’m very much supportive of that.
CA: The last 18 months have been a historic moment for women and for people of color in America. What would you like to see happen in the next 18 months?
AW: I would like always to see planetary awareness and aliveness and responsibility. But I don’t generally live in expectation; I live in what is happening now. I think Americans have a lot of work to do in understanding their own country and in trying to maintain the separation of Church and State. That’s our big challenge, because unless we’re very careful, we may find ourselves living in a “Christian country,” in which women have very few rights. I know that most Americans find that unbelievable, but only because they don’t understand the country that they’re in and the history of the country, how you can get rights and then have them taken. I believe in freedom to have an abortion, for instance, and the right wing Christian movement in this country is very much against that. They think that women don’t have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. And that’s a fundamental right, the right to your body.
CA: What about the next 18 years? If a girl is born today, how would you like the world to look on the day she starts college?
AW: I want a world of peace and happiness and joy and plenty of food and water for everyone. That’s what I want for everyone, men and women, animals and trees.