Fragments

I have decided to publish thoughts, fragments, letters and other communications as they turn up on my computer, from years of offering what I have.  The only answer I have been able to offer for this activity is:  It is time. ~aw

SUFFERING IS LIKE ANY OTHER SCHOOL, ONLY MORE PAINFUL AND RECESS RARELY COMES

What is the meaning of suffering?  Is suffering of any use? What can be made of it?  Why should the oppressed be concerned?

©2011 by Alice Walker

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine 2011, Cape Town, South Africa

I was born in the mid- 1940s, under American style apartheid, called “segregation,” in the southern United States of America.  For over three hundred years prior to my birth people of color in the United States – Africans, African Americans, and Native or Indigenous Americans- faced periodic devastation and sustained abuse.  In fact, beginning in the early 1600s African peoples – who had been ripped from their communities in Africa and forced to work for European settlers in America- were so brutally oppressed it is almost beyond comprehension today.  They were forced to work at such a pitch and with so little attention to their bodily requirements of food, shelter and rest, that they “wore out” within seven years.  Their very bones were stunted, disfigured and deformed from the far too heavy loads they were made to carry.  And, like an old car or piece of furniture no longer of use, they were thrown away, often having been struck a heavy blow in the back of the head that broke their skulls.  Graves of these ancestors have been found in New York City underneath what is now Wall Street, a place of commerce, of trading and, even today, of breathtaking corruption.

Native Americans who lived harmoniously with Nature before the Europeans arrived were slaughtered in order for the “pioneers” to take their land. Those not killed outright or placed in prison were herded onto reservations where the land was so poor it could not support a healthy population.  To this moment there is widespread malnutrition and sickness on the reservations in the United States.  Native people, once upon a time some of the healthiest people on earth are dying. And have been dying since encountering the strangers who came to erase them from their land, a mission almost accomplished after only a few hundred years.  From people who once populated the whole of America they comprise today less than one percent of the population.

The poor Europeans (as well as wealthy ones who also emigrated to America) survived, their descendents that is, to become the white Americans we see today.  Because America was declared a white country by its European “discoverers” they were able to thrive: they needed nothing more to recommend them for the privilege of being “acceptable” Americans than their white skins.

After slavery was abolished in the 1860s a system called sharecropping was introduced.  This meant the people who had worked on the plantations and for white people as slaves were now forced, because they were landless and poor, with no legal rights, to work for these same white families under a different name than “slave.” The work was much the same.  The housing was often worse than under slavery: there was no health care or provision for food.  Moreover, because whites frequently prevented black children from being educated, by burning down their schools, or lynching their teachers, or frightening or horsewhipping their parents, it was almost impossible for a viable middle class to develop.

Black workers, like my own parents, and my grandparents before them, faced unrelenting hostility from whites who had lost the Civil War that finally made it possible for black people to be freed, and whose ancestors had earlier taken the land from the indigenous people in every part of America and stolen millions of Africans from Africa to work it for them.  For the most part the settlers of America were too lazy to do their own work themselves.  They were also remarkably greedy.  Often owning thousands of acres of stolen land, which could only be worked if one owned hundreds of slaves.

The suffering of my ancestors, all branches of them: the African, the Native American – Cherokee- in my case, and European (probably English, Irish, and Scottish) is beyond imagining.  And yet I force myself to imagine it, because I have lived long enough now to see that through their suffering my ancestors were capable of passing on a profound gift to me: that suffering has a meaning, has a use, and we must seek to understand what that meaning and use might be, so that we may not despair when the present day sacrifices appear to have no value.

PART TWO

My mother says I began to write with a twig in the dirt behind our shack of a house while I was an infant and still crawling.  My twig at some point became a pencil, then a pen, then a typewriter, then a computer. I feel I was born to make sense of our collective suffering, and I have done my best to live up to this responsibility.

When people read my best known novel The Color Purple they often do so without my own understanding that I was writing about an oppressed people who have been warped, sometimes hideously, by the oppression they suffered over hundreds of years; and that in the novel I am exploring ways our abused spirits might rise above the frightful inheritances of our woeful condition.

I love creating characters!  Because, like our children, they really create themselves.  We get to sit back and watch something astonishing come into being that we had something to do with, but not everything. It’s magical, actually.  Naming characters is also.  For some books I try to keep alive names I heard as a child; the names of friends, relatives, family.  People I loved or whose names struck me as poetic in some way.  I did this in The Color Purple as a way to honor family who would have no way of being remembered or honored otherwise.  It amused me too to mix up the names so that sometimes a character (based on a real person) is mistreating his wife who has the name of the real person’s mother or daughter.  I suppose this is a way I, posthumously for these people, attempt to teach them about each other.  And to urge kindness.  Similarly Grange Copeland is not only named for the land itself – the grange – but also for the landowner –“Copeland” –  who owned land my family lived on when I was a child.  The connection between land, farmer, landowner, is very strong, but to my knowledge it is rarely deliberately intertwined in Literature.  Mem Copeland’s name comes from the French word “la meme” which means “the same.”  This was a signal to readers about the prevalence of domestic violence before it had a name.  As a student in college I adored French and lived in the French House on campus.

Writing The Temple of My Familiar was an absorbing joy, creating all the names in it made it more so.  Dickens loved naming his characters.  A companion and I enjoy watching Dickens on DVD and just finished watching Bleak House. Fantastic names!  Lady Dedlock, Mr. Guppy, Mr. Smallweed. Each of them funny and perfect.  I think naming characters is a way we writers play with our work.

Your Preoccupations as an Artist

In an earlier period in your career you stated that your preoccupations as a writer centered upon two overlapping areas: “I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women.”  What are your preoccupations at this stage in your life as a writer?

What could it be but to be of assistance to the world in its dire hour of need?  We’ve turned a scary corner, as humans.  We may have ruined our nest.  If I write about Palestinians being deprived of water and land, of Aung San Suu Kyi and the precious instruction she is capable of giving us – not only about democracy but about morality; if I write about violence and war, and chickens, I can connect with others who care about these things.  Hopefully, together we can move the discussion of survival with grace and justice and dignity forward.

On Black Women Writers: The Sisterhood

In 1976 you and your friend and fellow writer the late June Jordan established The Sisterhood. Could you recall the origins of this group? How often did you meet? Were the meetings structured in a particular way? Did you imagine at the time that the writers of The Sisterhood—June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange—would have such a deep and wide impact upon American and world literature?

June and I were rebels of the first order against ranking of any kind imposed from beyond ourselves.  We thought we must create a space for black women writers to honor each other, to know each other, so that nothing from outside could make us fight over anything.  Or even feel competitive. This was The Sisterhood’s purpose.  We met only a few times while I was still in New York.  I moved to California and later so did June.  My connection with women’s circles continued.  I have been a member of a Sangha for ten years and was part of a Women’s Council (now on break) for about seven years.  Circles are crucial for human advancement in the time we are now in.  In a safe place, where people can express their sorrows and fears without worry, we can shift the world’s thinking, as these circles, millions of them, join together to usher in solid thought that has emerged in the patience and safety of our homes.