Alice Walker, Advocates for Women

[TiCam]

Alice Walker is a novelist, poet and essayist whose work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. Her novel, The Color Purple, won a Pulitzer Prize and has been made into a movie and most recently a Broadway play. Born to sharecroppers in Georgia, Walker is also deeply committed to social justice, and her writing often tells the stories of those whose voices would otherwise go unheard. Vibrant, wrenching and sometimes punishingly sad, these stories are still, in their own ways, stories of hope. World Ark spoke with Walker, who lives in northern California.

WORLD ARK: In both your fiction and your nonfiction, you have written extensively about women; their lives, their roles and their struggles. As you know, these are issues Heifer is concerned with as well. I'm curious about your thoughts about the role of women in a strong and functioning community, and about the role of strong women in relationship to men.

WALKER: This is the crux of the matter. If women can't control their destiny, and they can't control their livelihood, and if they are continually ripped off by the men in their society...they don't actually have autonomy, which would ensure that they and their daughters could live really fully realized lives. So it is essential, it's totally essential, that we study how to support these women.

It's a very tricky thing, because even in this culture, there are so many women who are so beaten down by patriarchal power that they don't understand that they must, as women, get together and strategize, figure out what will work in each community. We can't do it for them. But we can certainly point out to them that it is up to them to do the strategizing based on their own experience, and knowing all the players in their community, they have to figure out a way to keep whatever we put into the communities for the health of everyone, but especially for themselves and their daughters. ...When women are empowered, as we know, this leads to the empowerment of everyone.

WORLD ARK: You have written about women in historical times as well as in the present day. Do you think that the situation of women in general has improved at all, over the years?

WALKER: What comes to mind is the last time I was in Africa, when I was in Bolgatanga, in the northern part of Ghana. My friend Pratibha Parmar, the filmmaker, and I went as a follow-up to the work we have done to help eliminate female genital mutilation. It was a big conference of men and women; and except for one who was still on the fence, they were the most committed abolitionists I have ever encountered. It was so moving.

What I take from that is that people in these far out, outback places, still are gaining connections to the rest of the world, and have a good understanding that things are changing and have to change for the health of the continent. It's not just about the village, it's not even about the country, it's about the health of the continent and then the health of the planet.

WORLD ARK: Your writing has such an element of activism, of awareness of hardship and struggle and the issues people face. Is that what you see as the purpose of your writing? Is such activism intentional?

WALKER: My writing is holistic. Imagine me as a pine tree; then there would be nothing that would come from me that wasn't pine. I have my pine cones, my pine needles, my scent of pine. I see writing as the reason for my being. It's not like it's a precious section of my existence. It's just the shedding and the re-growing...it's all one.

WORLD ARK: So is writing the way you most fully realize who you are?

WALKER: Yes. This is the way you water the pine, this is the way you add the fertilizer. You keep growing, and you keep sharing, and you keep giving, and you keep bringing in, and you keep letting go. In that circle, there is the sustainability factor, which is that you sustain yourself. But you don't sustain yourself by holding on. You sustain yourself by letting go.

WORLD ARK: By giving away?

WALKER: Yes! In a culture like ours, everyone feels like you have to just conserve, take in, keep, and not pass around. But what Heifer understands is that when you do that, what's left for the rest of the planet to do but to starve?

WORLD ARK: What is the best tool that we can give our children, to prepare them for the future?

WALKER: We have to disabuse them of the notion of scarcity. I think that's the most pernicious and ultimately destructive planetary thought, that we are living in a world of scarcity. Actually, we live in a world of plenty. And it's only because some people have grabbed most of everything for themselves and wasted the rest through war-which is a useless, obsolete endeavor-that we find that some people don't have anything. There is no excuse whatsoever for people anywhere Woon this earth not having sufficient food, clothing, education and health care. None!

WORLD ARK: How did you first become concerned with the issues of hunger and poverty?

WALKER: Because I grew up in poverty. We didn't know it was poverty only because my parents had a genius for making do with little. At some point my father asked the white woman landowner for a raise, to $12 a month, to be able to support his eight children, all of whom worked her plantation, and she went berserk. We had no health care and no housing, dental care was unheard of; we had to move every year, and work totally hard all the time. And this is the situation for millions and millions of people around the earth! I fully understand that, and I am fully in solidarity with them.

WORLD ARK: I understand that you have just written a new book.

WALKER: It's called We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. It is a book of essays, but also meditations, because I feel this is a time when things are truly horrible for millions of people. There is so much fear, and so much sadness and anger. ...We need not only to have political analysis and thoughtfulness, but we need actual meditations, so we can sit with these things that are happening to us, and think of ways to be whole in spirit. ...We have to be reminded that we still have our own spirits, and we can still use them, use our inner light, no matter how dark it gets.