Sunday 11 April 2010
Rudolph P. Byrd interviews Alice Walker ☀
- Rudolph P. Byrd: At an earlier period in your career as a writer, you spoke of the importance of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather, and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. This is only a very slim sampling of the writers and their books you regard as important in your artistic development. What are those books in either fiction or nonfiction with which you are now in dialogue as writer and as earthling?
- Alice Walker: Reading comes in layers — there’s the reading one does to understand the current crisis, whatever it is; the reading for pleasure; the reading for soul.
- Because I’m engaged in bringing more U.S. awareness to the situation in Gaza, where the Israeli government uses American taxpayer money (including, to my shame, some of mine) to destroy Palestinians—a lot of them children, women, and old people—I have been reading books by Palestinian and Israeli writers — Ali Abunimah, Saree Makdisi, David Grossman, and Marcia Freedman, among others. I like what some Indian writers are writing. I loved The Mistress of Spices and will read anything by Arundhati Roy. I recently read a wonderful book called Leaving India—not a novel but one woman’s travels all over the earth to trace relatives and ancestors who’d left India to settle in odd places — Fiji, for instance. I wish I had a better memory and could recall all the novels I’ve loved and all the names of the writers. One novel, about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and their Vietnamese cook, that I never forget is The Book of Salt, by Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong. I am also a big fan of the Hawaiian writer Kiana Davenport, who wrote Shark Dialogues. No one should go to Hawaii without reading her novels about it.
- On a day-to-day basis, I am happiest reading The Dhammapada, The Upanishads, 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao, and other books that teach spiritual lessons. I love the work of Jack Kornfield, especially his books on CD — The Roots of Buddhist Psychology and Buddhism for Beginners. Also A Path with Heart. I also love the work of Michael Meade, war resister, mythologist, and storyteller, also on CD. For decades I have been supported by the old stories collected and told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I think her two-volume set Theatre of the Imagination should be in the audio library of everyone. I have also benefited from reading Carl Jung and Laurens van der Post—van der Post because he lived in a time when Bushmen (Bushpeople) were still living their traditional lives close to the earth in Africa. We can learn a lot from their gentleness, compassion, and disinterest in gobbling up the world around them. I’ve studied Jane Goodall’s work admiringly, as well as Malidoma Somé’s. The Healing Wisdom of Africa and Of Water and the Spirit are strengthening gifts to human imagination and growth. The work of Pema Chödrön has meant a lot to me. I love books (books and houses—a decent house!—were what I most longed for as a child), but I’ve become very selective about what I read. I find I simply cannot read anything that lacks integrity or spiritual energy. Beside my bed are these — the I Ching (which I sometimes feel is my favorite book simply because I’ve used it for so long); the Motherpeace Tarot Deck and Book, which I also use periodically; The New Astrology (Chinese and Western) by Suzanne White (a wonderful book and not only because she gets monkeys right); and The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. Rumi and I belong, with millions of other enchanted readers it is heartening to realize, to the same star.
- What many people don’t realize is that the soul can benefit from instruction just as the mind can, and that this instruction is readily available. We just have to look, sometimes vigorously. It is a good thing to have a nourishing church experience every Sunday, for instance, but that is like going to a dinner where only a certain kind of food is likely to appear on the table. The soul may take a nibble, but it’s quite likely that what it really wants isn’t there. Unfettering the soul and letting it roam after its own peculiar nourishment is part of what assures spiritual development. We live in a time rich in all kinds of soul food, not just chops and overcooked greens, but organic produce and pure water, one might say.
- I am fundamentally animist (everything has spirit) and pagan (I worship nature and the spirit of nature), but I am enchanted with wisdom wherever it is found. Buddha and Jesus, the poet Rumi, Somé, Meade and Kornfield, Chödrön, Amma, and Fidel are all dear to me.
