To the Cuban Reader

To the Cuban Reader

©2014 by Alice Walker

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is my seventh novel, and, unless

I am mistaken, it is my last. I wrote it toward the close of my Fifth decade;

it presents the concerns that, at that time, seemed important to share.

First of all, I realized I was older than either of my grandmothers, Kate

Nelson Walker or Nettie Lee Grant, had lived to be. One was murdered by

a man who desired to be her lover, her five children and husband

notwithstanding, the other lived a life of drudgery with my abusive

grandfather and their twelve children. According to my mother, her

mother, Nettie Lee Grant, was loving and kind, though never with

sufficient energy or time to leave the house and environs, which, not so

oddly enough, was located on the same plantation where her parents, and

my grandfather’s parents (though my grandfather, William Grant, was

actually the biological son of the English enslaver) had been slaves.

Approaching my mid Fifties, I allowed myself to feel deeply the tragedy of

all their lives, but especially the lives of my grandmothers who might have

been adventurous, creative, fascinating women, if they had been allowed

freedom to thrive.

And so, in Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart, the main

character’s name is Kate Nelson; she changes her last name to Talkingtree,

in the tradition of the other strain of DNA my own family claims, Native

American (Cherokee). But also because, in the novel, as a child, she had

thought it natural – since she felt trees so deeply – that they should be able

to talk. By naming herself in this way, she merges herself with trees, which

is to say, with nature. As it happens, as a child I also named myself after a

tree: the tall, slender, pine tree, mostly trunk, whose head seems to meet

the clouds, that grows profusely in the Georgia clay. My name to myself,

for many years, was Straight Pine.

I realized in my mid-Fifties that I had little faith that humans can be

enlightened by any of the methods I had up to that time experienced. And,

even if they might be enlightened, by the study and practice of Buddhism

or Taoism, for instance, it would take a long time for enough humans to

become conscious enough to collectively save what is left of our world. In

the novel one woman says to another, when asked what are humans to do:

“Let’s go ask the trees!” And so they find a shaman, two shamans, in fact,

and are led through a ceremony that is based on the drinking of

Ayuhausca, an ancient entheogen (God within) made from a tree and a vine

 1that has been medicine for millennia to those in dire need, as humans

today are, in my opinion, of a speedy and radical transformation into an

earth saving consciousness.

Much teaching comes from this experience. The tree does, in fact, talk.

The gist of this teaching is that though Nature has tried Her best with us,

and likes us, our failure as one of her many experiments will not break her

heart; saving ourselves is up to us. How do we do this? It is simple and of

course incredibly difficult. We must love the Planet, indeed all of Creation,

as ourselves. By now most of us understand that real love means work.

Ayuhausca, which tastes horrible, is The Grandmother Medicine of All

Nature. She says to humans: Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart. I

agree with Her. Without the implementation of a radical compassion for

everything that nurtures us, at the very least, how can we humans presume

to survive? The presence of this wise plant Grandmother makes us feel the

loss of human grandmother wisdom deeply. So deeply that we forget we

are Grand mothers, with our own power of thought, our own insistence on

which way the world must go.

Because my grandparents and especially my grandmothers almost never

left the plantations on which they were born, and the same fate, even more

intensely, befell their own ancestors, who were enslaved, I have felt a

calling to explore the earth. To see the other races and places of the planet,

and to bring back news of what is transpiring wherever I travel. I am

deeply offended that human beings have been forcibly controlled to work

the land of others for hundreds of years, with no idea, often, of what was

just over the next hill. This is a particularly pathological exploitation

whose cruelty sinks in deeper the longer one ponders it. And though

plantations today may not last hundreds of years, the exploitation of

workers is as deliberately grotesque and harmful, as it ever was.

In this novel there is travel. Kate Talkingtree visits the Amazon and her

partner Yolo visits Hawaii. In both places they connect with other parts of

the planet through the people they meet. This too has seemed important to

me to share: that we must make it a priority to know the other peoples and

places of the world. Unless we know who is in a country that our own

country is bombing, for instance, we can maintain a distance from the

suffering that degrades us as humans.

Without travel, how are we to learn how our addictions: to alcohol,

tobacco, chocolate, coffee etc. assure the enslavement and destruction, over

centuries, of untold millions of other human beings? I knew, growing up on

a plantation until I was thirteen years old, that the cotton we harvested

disappeared from our view, after my father and our family had been paid –

 2when we were paid – less than seventy-five cents a day to plant, grow and

harvest it. That it became blouses and slacks, army uniforms, etc., at a

profit for nameless corporations was never even imagined.

I often tell about my first visit to Africa, when I was nineteen, and how

astonished I was to see acres of pineapples, a fruit I liked, growing all over

the part of East Africa I found myself. The Kenyans, in this case, had been

shoved to tiny corners of their own land and this crop was everywhere,

though they were not permitted to eat any of it. It was destined for Europe

and other Europeanized countries. How could I have known about this if I

had not sat there with the Kenyans who laughed as I ate enough pineapple

for all of us. A childish protest that triggered a stomachache, but there was

only one of me, a non-Kenyan, and it was the best response to the insult of

colonial exploitation I could imagine at the time.

What of the incredible realization of life’s richness at Fifty that opens us to

so many previously unimagined and happily available choices? To be

single, to be coupled, to be bi-sexual, gay or straight. To be curious about

all of it. Or to be celibate. Celibacy is held in high regard by a character in

this novel: a woman whole/holy unto herself. What does it mean, after all,

if women cannot imagine wholeness without using concepts of someone

else’s definition of them? The sense one achieves by Fifty is that, alas, few

truly free women exist. And for the few who do exist? Where is the

partner, if they choose to have one, for them? Where is the free man, or

free woman, with whom to attend the banquet and celebrate the feast?

In this novel I express my concern for the indigenous people of the earth

and their children, and, in the character of Yolo I take the opportunity to

explore what men of the planet might envision as a way to turn things

around. Yolo, having sat with the body of a young Hawaiian man who has

died of a drug overdose, finds himself invited to circle with other men and

the local Mahus (men who live as women to take on some of the burden

they see the Feminine has been forced to carry) and learns there is deep

thinking among the elders about ways to approach the problem. It is

shocking, and radical, of course, but do-able if the men are serious.

This is my fourth novel (after Meridian, The Color Purple, The

Temple of My Familiar) to be translated into Spanish for Cuban

readers. Working with editor and translator Manuel Verdecia over decades

has been a joy. Cuban readers have a special place in my thinking about

the world, because I care deeply about the people of Cuba; though I

sometimes think my novels must seem, in Cuba’s unique environment,

quite strange. However, we must continue to insist that the world talk to

itself, through all of us. Insist that we listen carefully, unafraid of

 3appearing “soft,” or “odd,” or “strange,” as we open our eyes, our minds,

and our hearts. Now is the time for all of this. If we can recognize what is

required of us we also can know: now is a good time, because it means

humanity is at last waking up to the power to change the world that exists

within each of us.

Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart will be published in Cuba in

2014.