Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

# ..Keep my sister away from me Makidada... #

'I started reading it, you know, just to tease myself to say,'

"Oh, I'll read five pages. If I don't like it I'll put it down."

And I read the entire book in an hour, and I'm a slow reader.

And I read it very, very fast. Then I read it again the next day

and I read it again the day after that,

so I read it three times in one week.

It was the first novel to receive the Pulitzer Prize in fiction

written by a black woman.

One of the members of the Pulitzer jury said to me,

"It is a novel that will stand the test of time."

Alice claimed her space because she needed to be a writer.

It saved her life in many regards.

Intrinsic in her writing is that part of her as a citizen -

a citizen of the world, a woman,

a woman of the world and an activist.

The writing came from her life, it's her life's experiences.

She couldn't control it, you know?

She described writing The Color Purple as something that

was what the gods gave her.

I don't know any other black writer who has experienced

the venom that she experienced

from her own community, the community she cared so much about.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission

and they had a problem with my intellect

and they had a problem with my choice of lovers,

and they had a problem with my choice of everything.

"I am the woman, dark, repaired, healed, listening to you.

"I would give to the human race only hope.

"I am the woman offering two flowers, whose roots are twin.

"Justice and hope, hope and justice.

"Let us begin."

"Three dollars cash for a pair of catalogue shoes was what

"the midwife charged my mother for bringing me.

"'We wasn't so country then,' says Mom, 'you being the last one,

"'and we couldn't, like we done when she brought your brother,

"'send her out to the pen and let her pick out a pig.'"

My great, great, great, great grandmother walked as a slave

from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia, which passes for the Walker

ancestral home, with two babies on her hips.

She lived to be 125 years old and my own father knew her as a boy.

It is in memory of this walk that I choose to keep

and to embrace my maiden name, Walker.

We was a family of eight children, a mother and a father,

and we worked on this plantation and all of us

worked for what you might would say the wages of one person,

because all we got out of it was living,

and that went for all the families around here.

The more children a family had, the better their chances was of getting

a house on a plantation to live in, because the plantation owner

know that he's going to work

maybe ten or 12 people for the price of one.

Well, Mama was the best mother I ever seen.

She was real strong, real woman. Her name was Mary Lou

and that is one person the white folks couldn't push around.

She would stand toe to toe with the landowner who was a white man,

who said to her, "You know, those children of yours,

"they should be out there in my field. You know, picking my cotton

"and chopping my whatever and they don't belong in school."

And she said, "Well, you know what?

"These children are my children and they're going to be educated."

I will never forget that.

We lived in a very small community in the South, very poor housing,

and part of what was magical about my mother was that she just

refused to leave them as shacks

and they became houses, they became homes.

This is where I slept and where the girls slept

and that was always the best room in the house.

She managed to buy rolls of this cheap wallpaper, which managed

to look really quite nice.

But then when she got to her own room and my father's room,

there was no money for wallpaper.

But someone gave her lots of paper bags and so she, you know, steamed

them open, ironed them, and she covered her walls with paper bags

and, to me, it was just part of my mother's magic.

Mama used to be in the field picking cotton,

she'd be at the edge sitting on a blanket or something

with a pencil and paper, scribbling on something, you know.

She always wanted to learn.

I remember, you know, different stages writing -

when various things hurt me

or when I couldn't deal with reality around me, I would create something.

"The nature of this flower is to bloom.

"Rebellious living against the elemental crush.

"A song of colour blooming for deserving eyes,

"blooming gloriously for itself."

I think it was important to me

to have a place where I could put my poems.

I felt it was a way to honour certain people who had

helped me, like my Uncle Frank and my father and my mother.

They were rather morbid poems as I recall, you know,

because that seems to have been what was in the air.

Alice was a salad girl,

like the cafeteria girl, at this place not far from Eatonton.

No black people could go, no black kids, except as workers.

I interviewed a high school boyfriend

and he told this story about how they were going to their job.

They were driving there, Alice started complaining about, you know,

"This is unfair. We are being mistreated, we need to fight."

And he said, "This is just the way it is. We have to accept it."

And Alice got out of the car and said, "I will walk to work.

"We need to fight."

And he said that she was always like that,

that others had accepted it and he said, "Alice never accepted it."

My mother was earning at that time 17 a week.

She worked every day.

Out of that 17, she managed to buy me the typewriter

and a suitcase and a sewing machine,

because at that time, it was cheaper to make your own clothing.

In the face of that kind of love, which is so apparent in the

sacrifice of her life...

you know, I knew I had to really do well and...

There is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea

whose time has come.

The idea whose time has come today

is the idea of freedom and human dignity.

I saw him being arrested.

I'd never seen that kind of acceptance of consequences, a really

radical determination to change a situation by sacrificing whatever

you had to, and it went very deeply into my spirit, I recognised it.

I'd never seen it there, just... It was like finally seeing

a part of myself that I hadn't seen expressed.

I got a scholarship.

I went off to Spelman

and it was a very sharp break with my life in Eatonton.

I first met Alice at a freshman dinner.

I was really struck by her dignity and her presence

and her maturity, and she was only 17 or 18 years old at that time.

And she wrote this paper for me on Tolstoy

and Dostoyevsky, which just astonished me.

It wasn't just the content of the paper, the ideas,

the substance of it, but the style.

She wrote so beautifully.

I can't say that I knew she would be a great writer,

of course not,

but I knew that she was an extraordinary writer at that age.

It was the height of the Civil Rights movement

outside the Spelman gates.

We were encouraged not to get involved

and it would detract from our studies, it might get us in jail.

The movement of the time required that all of the students

actually dismantle segregation, which was a huge thing.

So I was caught in this impossible situation of needing to

demonstrate protests, risk arrest and keep my scholarship.

I couldn't afford to lose the scholarship

and so Staughton Lynd, who was my history teacher,

he realised that they'd get rid of me somehow or other,

and with a little help from him and his mother,

I ended up at Sarah Lawrence. I just left in the middle of the year.

That's one of the remarkable things about Alice, she goes her own way.

I remember at one point she'd quoted Emerson who said,

"I feel most bad about myself when I have listened to other people

"and have ignored my own feelings."

No, she didn't ignore her own feelings.

The thing is, you never quite understand why the trials

we have are given to us.

I was 18, 19

and I had an abortion that... The alternative to that

abortion had been suicide and... you know, it was just a fact.

There was no melodrama,

it was just I had nowhere to go back to in Georgia.

My parents would not have understood it.

As soon as I got stronger, I just had all these poems

and I just wrote poems, poems, poems, night and day,

and I wrote the whole book pretty much in a few days.

The poems had done their work for me,

they had been the medicine to heal the wounding of the abortion,

the agony that had preceded the abortion.

It's like all of the debris of the situation becomes

a fuel for an emergence of a new awareness, and that totally happened.

I had gone to the march on Washington in '63

and Martin Luther King had said,

basically, stop running away from your own part of the world,

the South, and in fact, instead of going to the North, go back home.

So I felt very affirmed in wanting to go back and to...

to do work in the black community.

It seemed the least that I could do to go to Mississippi, where the

share croppers were being thrown off their land

for trying to register to vote.

"It is true, I've always loved the daring ones,

"like the black young man who tried to crash all barriers at once,

"wanted to swim at a white beach in Alabama, nude."

We met at Stephen's Kitchen on Farrar Street, which was two steps

from my offices in Jackson, and during the early summer of 1966,

I was there having lunch and she walked in wearing an African dress

and I looked across the room and I was taken by her, yeah.

I was one of those people who thought that white people

should not be in our movement, so I wasn't pleased at all to

walk into this restaurant where people in the movement ate,

and to see these white people who were a part of the movement.

And I was especially not so happy to see this very cute Jewish boy,

I didn't even know he was Jewish,

but he was really definitely cute

and so I tried to be as cold as possible.

But the attraction was mutual.

So the first time we met we just chatted and the second time we met

she actually had in her hands a manuscript box, which had

her then unpublished first collection of poems, Once.

That's one of my earliest recollections of Alice

and saying she's a writer and wanting me

to share what she had written, and I loved every second of that.

Over time, we started to date and...

But not really date actually, because it was

more like we were trying to, you know, desegregate the South

and part of it entailed going to motels and hotels that had

not been desegregated, which was almost lethal.

# Alabama's gotten me so upset

# Tennessee made me lose my rest

# And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam... #

It really did seem at times as if our love made us bullet-proof,

or perhaps invisible.

When we walked down the street together,

the bullets that were the glances of the racist onlookers

seemed turned back and sent hurtling off into outer space.

# Hound dogs on my trail Schoolchildren sitting in jail

# Black cat crossed my path

# I think every day is gonna be my last... #

We were prepared to die, you know, it wasn't as

if other people were not dying.

They were fire-bombing houses, they were actually beating people.

You know, there were lots of people who just disappeared.

When they would drag the rivers,

they'd find all these bodies they didn't know existed.

# ..All I want is equality

# For my sister, my brother My people and me... #

"Torrents of rain cascaded down the streets, the air was blue with it.

"Lightning streaked our bodies with silver.

"Nature supports what is, we felt, as our bodies

"moved passionately together."

# ..Lord have mercy on this land of mine

# We all gonna get it in due time

# I don't belong here I don't belong there

# I've even stopped believing in prayer... #

It's young love being oblivious to everything, you know?

I think we were taken with each other and

we blocked out the world.

He had one more year of law school

and we were living in the NYU dorm, and so we got married

knowing that we would go back to Mississippi where it was illegal.

They had anti-miscegenation law, which meant that you

couldn't be married to someone of what they called the opposite race.

My family was shocked and very frightened for me.

My parents by then were elderly

and black people who really understood white racism.

And I introduced my husband to my mother and father

and they were really polite.

My father must have been really devastated,

but you would never have known it.

He was gracious, he was kind, he was thoughtful.

And on the other hand, Mel's mother, I think

she screamed for about three weeks.

She was really, really, really upset and she sat shiva,

which meant that he was dead.

She was hostile to my marriage and I think it was...

it was a combination of concern and discombobulation by it,

just being disoriented by it.

But we were living at a time when we were determined to be ourselves.

Ironically, Mississippi was great for me as a writer.

It was so much like going back into the past.

Being able to see my parents' time,

my grandparents' time, understand things that

I could not have understood if I hadn't immersed myself there.

To stand with the people, to be there with them, to actually feel

the terrorism that was inflicted on them and on us as we were there.

It helped me to write out of a deeper awareness

and a deeper commitment to the struggle of my own people.

The interesting thing about Alice's work,

her work, my dear sister, is that she brought what

I call also that Southern part,

a Southern landscape that said, it is...it is woman's landscape,

it is...it is the Native American landscape.

So what we're seeing then is this voice recording what happened

to women, recording what happened to men too.

That when you are oppressed, you always strike out at the one

right close to you.

I think the book that really brought me

into her universe was The Third Life Of Grange Copeland, that was

a kind of a game changer for me, that particular book. I'd never

really heard anything like it, or heard a black woman writing in

that kind of way. That really was looking at issues within the family

and wasn't just, you know, the white man, the white man, the white man.

Racism, racism, racism.

Some people were not ready for that dialogue. They would say,

"We can't talk about that, because after all we are oppressed."

And she said, "Yes, we are oppressed,

"but there are other layers of this oppression that we must talk about

"and if we don't talk about it we're not going to survive."

"Journal entry, January 2nd 1969.

"My bad days were spent in depression, anxiety,

"rage against the war

"and the slow rate of racial progress in Mississippi.

"My good days were spent teaching, writing a simple black history book

"for use in black day care centres in Jackson,

"making a quilt - African fabrics, Mississippi pattern -

"and completing my second book.

"Three days after I finished the novel, I had my daughter."

I loved being a mother.

We were so pleasantly surprised, her father and I,

at how much we loved it.

Since we were the first legally married inter-racial couple,

they couldn't believe their eyes.

So on the birth certificate I'm listed as black

and he's listed as white and they had never seen this before,

because the white fathers previous to this had never

admitted that they were the fathers of these children.

Meanwhile, my husband showed up with huge bouquets of roses

and, you know, was beaming from ear to ear, so there was just no doubt

that he was the father of this wonderful little baby.

So they wrote on there, you know,

"Correct," meaning, "Is this an error?"

I spent one full year completely devoted to Rebecca and after

that year, I started sending her to day care for half a day.

Between nine and 12,

I had to do a certain amount of writing on this book and I did it.

So she actually gave me an opportunity to be more

organised and then everything else worked around that.

We were very much in love and we had a wonderful family.

And we were careful. A lot of things we didn't do

because they were just not safe to do.

We used to get cards, little cards from the Ku Klux Klan

which said, "The eyes of the Klan are on you."

We did have a gun and I would have used it, because I know that

I would not have accepted anyone mistreating my child.

You know, it would be instinctual, I just couldn't do it,

even though, you know, I am non-violent by nature.

Alice felt caged in Mississippi, which is not untrue.

She felt that her writing should never blossom,

develop to the extent that she needed to.

We were under more pressure than anyone should be under, really,

from just being in love and being married

and also trying to change an entire society.

I mean, racism was everywhere.

So at some point she said,

"Mel, it's the marriage or Mississippi. You know, you make

"your choice, I gotta get out of here," and I did not want to leave.

I decided that Alice was very important to me

and my marriage was important to me.

So we moved, we moved to New York.

I got to know her when she came

to New York with Mel

and became a more present contributing editor at Ms Magazine.

The 1970s and '80s saw

really a great resurgence in a movement

towards women's liberation.

Coming out of that political movement,

African American women really started participating in the arts.

She contributed immensely to the magazine.

We never would have known enough to publish Bessie Head

and all these wonderful authors in addition to Alice,

but she didn't like to come to editorial meetings.

African American women were beginning to write much more frequently.

They, with their African sisters and other Third World women, were

writing much more consciously as women.

And June Jordan and I decided that we would have a

gathering of women called The Sisterhood.

What I wanted was for all of us to feel that we were sisters

and that we were up against a very well-known machine that has been

in the habit, historically, of just crushing us and killing our voices.

It had always been about the effects of white racism on black men.

No-one had really looked at the... you know,

the domino effect of that white racism. When the black men

were affected, so were the black women and the black children

and that was a story that black men were hesitant about being told.

-WOMEN SING:

-# The revolution has come

# Time to pick up the gun... #

The black nationalist pushback was

so intense that, at moment, these women were being called traitors.

There were moments in conferences that Alice was the topic.

I remember doing a paper and I talked about Alice and Toni.

In the middle of reading that paper, one of the critics,

male critics, shouted me down, because I'd mentioned their names.

I'm very serious. I can still hear it now.

Black male critics,

they did not want to hear about these women writers.

I used to go to all of her readings and I stopped going.

Whites were told that we really weren't welcome.

Mel was told white people can't be in the movement any more.

"You have done your service, you all have got to go now."

Alice, who was then emerging as a great writer, as an important

spokesperson, started to feel the pressure and I just sensed

at some point that it would be easier for her if I were not there.

"They say you are not for me and I try in my resolved

"but barely turning brain, to know they do not matter,

"these relics of past disasters

"in march against the rebellion of our time."

The divorce was very simple. It was done with respect and love

and we just moved...

but I think it was very hard on Rebecca.

I think it was very confusing for her. Our divorce, which

happened around the time she was going on nine, was devastating.

She was extremely wounded because she loved us both and we loved her.

She had said to me, "My parents' love ended.

"What did that mean for me as the emblem,

"as this blend of the black and white together?"

I think that she felt on some level that she had been abandoned.

"Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise,

"Become a stranger to need of pity,

"or if compassion be freely given out,

"take only enough,

"stop short of the urge to plead."

The single motherhood writer activity

was quite stressful.

I was doing lectures and readings to make money

and it meant travelling for very modest sums.

I have been in every state,

sometimes many times with many different books,

so I had to leave Rebecca with the family downstairs.

Alice has had to make sacrifices to do this work.

She has had to make a path for herself

without necessarily

knowing where that's going go, without being sure of where

she was going to find the resources to do it.

I remember when she moved to San Francisco, she was making

a little budget. You know, we were talking about this budget and

how she would be able to survive and if it meant difficulty

in living, OK. She understood that that would be necessary.

That commitment necessarily meant that in time

she had to withdraw from other connections, other relationships.

"You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy."

"Dear God, I am 14 years old.

"I am, I have always been a good girl.

"Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me."

I tried writing it in New York

and the characters hated New York, so did I.

And we decided we would move to San Francisco

because of the beauty and the space and then they didn't

like earthquakes. Neither did I. SHE CHUCKLES

So we came to Boonville,

found a little cottage that was 300 a month

and Robert, my partner at the time, and I rented it

and we wrote, I wrote, he was writing something too.

I was carrying sometimes up to 12 people in my mind

and they're all talking, and they were all thinking

and they were all planning their next adventure.

I had never read an epistolary novel, which is

a novel written as a series of letters

by a black woman.

And I think what Alice Walker was able to do with that form,

to highlight literacy as a form of freedom, was truly magnificent.

"Dear God,

"Harpo asked his daddy why he beat me.

"Mr say, 'Cos she my wife, plus she's stubborn.

"'All women good for...' He don't finish.

"He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do.

"Remind me of Pa."

It came from spending a lot of time with my grandparents

when I was eight.

Both grandfathers had been horrible. They were batterers,

they did terrible things to their children, to their wives,

they always had other women.

Alice Walker was able to take the kind of spiritual core

of African-American women and the gritty, hard reality

for African-American women, and bring them

together in a fictional piece that expressed hopefulness,

and I'd never really seen that before.

The popularity of The Color Purple, which maybe was,

because of the way it was written, more populist

than many other books, did go a long way towards making clear

that this was universal and a great American novel.

A great world novel.

I want to read a section from The Color Purple.

This is... this is known as the God section.

MUTED APPLAUSE

"Dear Nettie,

"I don't write to God no more, I write to you.

"'What happen to God?' asked Shug.

"'Who that?' I say. She look at me serious.

"'Big a devil as you is,' I say, 'you not worry about no God surely?'

"She said, 'Wait a moment, hold on just a minute here.

"'Just cos I don't harass it like some peoples us know,

"'don't mean I ain't got religion.'

"'Well, what God do for me?' I asked.

"She says, 'Celie,' like she shock.

"'He gave you life, good health and a good woman that loved you to death.'

"'Yeah,' I said,

"'And he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama,

"'a low-down dog of a step-pa

"'and a sister I probably won't ever hear or see again.

"'Anyhow,' I say, 'the God I been praying and writing to is a man

"'and act just like all the other mens I know.

"'Trifling, forgetful and low-down.'"

When she won the Pulitzer Prize,

that kind of ensconced her in the literary community in a certain

kind of way that she might not have been before that was unquestionable.

The literary value,

the social value and then, at the same time, the explosive content

was just really kind of rocking... rocking people's worlds.

I remember when Alice Walker appeared on the cover

of the New York Times Magazine and I don't recall a black woman

ever having appeared before, so it was...it was major.

Because when one black woman makes it, it means another can.

# ..Makidada

# Keep my sister away from me Makidada...#

Did you know if it ever became a movie you would want to be

part of that movie?

Oh, yes, I wrote to Alice Walker.

I sent her my resume and all the reviews of my shows, and said,

"You don't know me, but I just read your book. I think it's amazing.

"First, because it forces people to read, because you can't skim

"this book. You have to read it in order to understand the language."

And that, "If ever they were to make a film, I would play anything -

"dirt on the floor, a Venetian blind,"

literally, this is what I wrote.

That relationship between the four totally different women,

that's what appealed to me, you know.

I mean, the violence was unnerving and so forth,

it really was, but it was part of the package, you know.

Alice is something else.

She's got the chops, we call them in the music, you know.

She's got the ability to really make it very clear

what she's thinking and feeling.

She knows how to get your attention.

It was the separation of family which I could relate to

because I'm a child of a divorce, and it wasn't even the global

separation between the sisters, it was just the fact that they

had no access to each other, except through letters.

I remember when I first asked Steven about...

We were talking about directing the film and he says,

"Don't you think a black director should do this?"

I said, "Did you have to go to Mars to do ET?" And he said, "OK."

The project just seemed to be something that I wanted to,

to seek the permission from Alice,

cos I had to actually make a little trip up to her house in

Northern California, and she had to have a chance to vet me so to speak.

I didn't want to lose this and Alice is so honest.

And, by the way, if she didn't want me

to direct the movie, she would have said it in a lovely, endearing way.

She never would have hurt my feelings,

but I would not have been the director of the picture

if she said, "I'd like to go for somebody tougher than Steven.

"Get me Scorsese," you know? I would have understood that.

For the baby? Yes, indeed. Here it is.

'It was so fabulous because they made the movie as if they were making

'the set and, you know, the gowns and everything out of my imagination.'

The Color Purple was picketed by black men and women

when it opened in Los Angeles.

It has become the focus of a growing controversy.

We're concerned with how the black family is depicted in this film.

The novel itself is a novel of incest, of rape, homosexuality,

physical and psychological abuse of black women by black men.

What don't you like about The Color Purple?

Well, I don't like the same thing about The Color Purple that

I didn't like about The Birth Of A Nation.

Black people, black family is depicted inaccurately,

the history is not accurate.

The toxic response to The Color Purple,

mainly on the part of African-Americans,

particularly African-American men, was extraordinary and unpredictable.

The response was connected to the fact that deep down inside,

black people knew that Alice had actually told the truth.

She had written a novel that talks about the pain that black people

exact upon each other, that you couldn't blame the white man,

and that was a criticism, that there was no

white person to blame for black behaviour,

and so this riled people enormously.

Why?!

The movie has sparked heated debate in black communities across

the nation. This was a meeting of New York area black journalists.

The Color Purple is not an attack upon black men.

It is a challenge to the entire black nation.

It's one woman's story.

It was not meant to be the history of every black man

or woman in this country and I wish people would just shut up about it.

Here is just one negative vote on your otherwise magnificently

-received film, The Color Purple.

-APPLAUSE

The applause is coming from... Excuse me, just one second. Sir...

'The violence was very long-term,'

the verbal assaults, the verbal violence

and, you know, people making threats and being really...

..very...

you know...sad.

I think that this movie is a political manifesto.

She's said that men are evil

and, in the New York Times Magazine section, especially black men.

She has said that lesbianism is wonderful.

That's right, there's never been any...

any same-sex relationships before in the world.

Give me a break, please, please!

All over the planet, you know, it's like a joke, you know.

So if you see it again, what's, what's...

I don't know what the big deal is, you know?

Until then, there wasn't really a major novel which included

the romantic and sexual love between two women as a nat...

part of the natural order of things.

Phew!

This song I'm about to sing is called Miss Celie The Blues.

When I was thinking about Celie's healing,

I looked around at all the men that she could have had

a relationship with and, honestly, there was not one that would

have been a healing relationship for her, because they couldn't see her.

All of those incredibly beautiful qualities that she had,

not a man that I could see in the story could affirm.

It would have just been absurd, you wouldn't have believed it.

'Shug, on the other hand, could see these qualities and affirm them

'and care about Celie,'

so it was very natural that that is how it would happen.

If you literally look at the film, it's really truly

a film about liberation.

The whole idea that Celie's liberation and, vice versa,

Mr's liberation are intrinsically connected.

You know, that's the beauty of the film.

It was both a blessing and a curse that it was such

an extraordinary novel, but then it also probably produced

the biggest amount of trauma in Alice's adult life.

It was really quite painful,

especially the first five years or so,

because I didn't have any defenders.

It took many women and men a long time to find their voices

and to say, "Well, you know, this happened to me,

or, "I know this happened," or, "Look at the neighbourhood," or whatever.

And I was especially saddened because my partner was deeply

conflicted about just how to speak on this issue.

I suffered, but at the same time I started a publishing company,

Wild Trees Press, and I started publishing other writers

and that was quite wonderful.

I did a lot of other things

and I wrote, you know, The Temple Of My Familiar, which was such an

amazing experience that, actually, it was like

climbing into a whole other universe

and closing the door behind me. It just lifted me above so much

of the problem of the criticism and the anger and the hostility.

While people were tearing me to bits in town hall meetings

and things, I was in this entirely other realm, which was so splendid.

Alice has written about an early incident that has been

critical to her life.

At the age of eight,

her brother playing cowboys and Indians

took aim at her and shot.

She was blinded.

I was the Indian because, as a girl, I didn't get a gun

and he was shooting at me but he hit me in the eye.

"There's a tree growing from underneath the porch that

"climbs past the railing to the roof.

"I watch as its trunk, its branches

"and then its leaves are blotted out by the rising blood.

"It is the last thing my right eye sees."

There was a lot of scar tissue

and that wasn't removed from the time I was eight until I was 14.

And at school, there was a great deal of taunting.

The greatest comfort was from nature.

The foundation for that, fortunately, was laid already by my mother.

Her faith in nature, in its ability to regenerate and to give

and to be for ever interesting and for ever alive,

was something that I must have imbibed with her milk.

And we lived always in nature, we never lived anywhere but

way, way, way in the country, where trees were much more familiar to us

than people.

"In search of our mother's gardens,

"honouring the creativity of the black woman."

"I notice that it is only when my mother was working in the flowers

"that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible,

"except as creator, hand and eye."

"She is involved with something her soul must have.

"She is ordering the universe

"and the image of a personal concept of beauty."

"Because of her creativity with her flowers,

"even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms."

In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,

she's really talking about black women's effort to make

beauty in a world that denied that they had anything to do with beauty,

and she talked about the beauty of her mother's gardens.

It's a place, as I think somebody profoundly said once,

"No tree ever called me nigger."

That book could be re-titled The Lost Lives Of Black Women.

You know, the millions of black women

who never ever got to be and do what they fully wanted to do.

"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist

"in her grandmother's time? In our great-grandmother's day?

"It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood."

When she read that, she opened up the memory slots to

a lot of women to go back and research and remember and re-imagine

and recall and celebrate and say simply, "Hey, look at those women."

I think that is very clear from Faulkner forward that there

is a genre of Southern literature to which I would say

Alice Walker absolutely belongs.

But few of those novels I think took

black women as the main characters of the story.

She certainly has done much to centre black women, especially

in the contemporary period, Southern voices and Southern stories.

It's been very exciting to see Alice's success.

And the fact this farm girl from this little town in Georgia

should now have her work published and her poems published,

her essays published and her novels published,

and have one of her novels win

the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award.

Through this climb to fame you might say, she never lost an ounce

of her social consciousness,

her political integrity, her militancy.

Alice Walker is a literary force to be reckoned with.

Her latest novel, Possessing The Secret Of Joy, dealt with the

difficult subject of female genital mutilation as a rite of passage.

Tell me what it is about this that so grabbed you?

I think it's because of the screaming of children, of little children

and the feeling I have that the pain that we inflict on children

is the pain that we later endure as a society wherever we are.

Possessing The Secret Of Joy and specifically talking about

female genital mutilation or female circumcision as a practice that

shut down women's sexuality -

it just like busted the room open, right?

So even for people who disagree, or who agreed with her,

or who were grateful for her, or who were offended by what she did,

there was a way that something that had been

so small was now like all over the place.

It was Alice Walker's fame after The Color Purple that allowed her

to really bring that issue to many, many people for whom...that they

would have no other access to really thinking about that.

This was one of the first books by an African-American woman

that wasn't looking at Africa

through a lens of nostalgia

and that was deeply criticising the sexism

and really not letting Africans off the hook.

They went after her for that.

What is our responsibility?

Do we have a responsibility to stop the torture

of children we say we love or not? I mean, do we love African children?

Are we like the midwife who said that

when she's cutting the child and the child screams, she doesn't hear it?

You know, I mean, are we expected to be deaf?

They were telling her, "You cannot write about this."

Now, they hadn't written about it in any meaningful way.

They hadn't exposed it in any meaningful way.

But yet she has the heart to get out there and really

write about this and then they're telling her, "Shut up! Shut up!"

You know what I mean? "We're the ones who should talk about this."

And I totally disagree with that.

People ask me, "Why are you putting yourself on the firing line?"

And to me it's just on the line of life.

It is something in me that just says you cannot let certain

things happen, certain people suffer without adding to the conversation.

And if you need to be there standing with the people, then go.

It's just a very natural part of who I am.

I need exactly what I have here.

I need space and quiet and peace and trees and grass and water...

..silence, the occasional visitor.

I love cuddling, so it's very nice to have a sweetheart.

I love being able to send her or him home

when you know they need to go home.

"I have learned not to worry about love

"but to honour its coming with all my heart.

"To examine the dark histories of the blood with headless heed and swirl.

"To know the rush of feeling, swift and flowing as water.

"The new face I turn up to you, no-one else on earth has ever seen."

Well, I love women and I thought that

if I fell in love with someone or if I felt attracted to someone,

that as a curious person, someone whose curiosity is very strong,

I would, of course, relate to them, you know, and I would be with them.

So when that happened, it happened and I went off into adventures

with women and loves with women and good times with women

and growth with women and it was all marvellous, even the heartache.

When I was in a relationship with Tracy Chapman,

I felt no pressure from anybody.

I was very much involved in my relationship with her.

And the same was true with my relationship with Jean Weisinger

and Zelie Duvauchelle, whom I adored, you know, while we were together.

The fact that Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman were able to be open

in the way that they were, to be photographed together,

have a certain kind of national visibility, did a lot to diversify

the picture of what a, quote unquote, "lesbian couple" could be.

I loved seeing her with Tracy Chapman,

but she has her own life

and seeing her with someone else or a man or whatever,

means to me that she has figured out a way to be happy in her life.

She keeps coming out of the door with someone on her arm

and that's fabulous, and not apologising.

How can you be in one place your whole time?

I... For me that doesn't work.

The next visitor is Alice Walker. We all know about her,

but now Alice's strong voice fighting against racism, sexism

and human rights issues ring loud and clear.

Alice, I salute your wisdom,

strength and persistence. We need you.

APPLAUSE

She has a really profound sensitivity to human misery and injustice

that she then feels compelled to speak about

and write about and march about.

You go in the book from Rwanda to Eastern Congo,

-to Palestine, Israel.

-Um-hm.

-It was your first trip?

To Palestine, yes.

It's easy to make the connection between the freedom rights

of 50 years ago to the South that helped to

bring down apartheid USA,

and what is happening there in Palestine

with the wall and with the abuse of the Palestinian people,

it's very similar. I mean, it's more intense in Palestine.

My name is Alice Walker and I am with the US boat to Gaza.

This is a fine tradition of going to people who need us

wherever they exist on the planet.

This is our responsibility.

She has never decided that she's going to take the easy route

and just not get on a flotilla

to Palestine, right? You know, because it would be easier

for there not to be her name recognition there.

She's not trying to make it easier for anyone else.

She also doesn't make it easier for herself.

Well, I think Alice is the quintessential writer, activist,

and all of Alice's writings urge us to think differently and to think

critically often about those things we most take for granted.

I think that is what can change the world.

That's the beauty of Alice,

is that she's not only an absolutely extraordinary writer,

it's a woman that certainly is right there

connected to every single movement that

happened over the last 40 years.

You can take every single great writer there is,

comes out of some movement and pushing forward and pushing

the envelope forward, and their writing is a manifestation to that.

Their work as an artist is a manifestation to that.

Who they would have been had they not been a part of the movement,

we don't know.

Well, I think the black presence that Alice wrote about has brought

African-Americans into the vision of the country.

Brought them in without stereotypes or without romanticising,

brought African-Americans into the sensibility of Americans

as full human beings.

And doing that is an enormous contribution to

understanding between the whites and blacks.

It's through her work that I know her. That's what makes

her more than just a rebel or a revolutionary, she's an artist.

Dickens railed against child labour,

that's not the issue so much anymore,

but the books are still valid, the books are still vital

and I think after many of the issues that Alice Walker's written about

are hopefully addressed by society in coming years.

The work still has a beauty and a lyricism that will resonate

with people for... for I think centuries to come.

I left formal religion when I was 13 in favour of the forest.

I would spend Sunday revelling in the glory of nature, you know,

the trees and the flowers and the sun and the wind and the rain storms.

You know, this is the only heaven I care for.

I mean, if there's another one, you know, go,

but just leave me here.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd