For it is true, an inner discipline of the spirit develops the character that is then visible to others in our behavior, but it is also true that “acting as if” also works; which is to say, conscious development of our outer, discernable behavior, in a direction that we desire, also has the power to move us along. This truth may well be discovered as one goes along in life, but how much more useful to have someone teaching it when one is young. It is easy to see why Howard Thurman was mentor to Martin Luther King. And it is moving to hear his statement the night after King was assassinated. There is in all of Thurman’s work support for the one who contemplates and also acts. In Martin Luther King there was a stunning balance that Thurman must have applauded. And then to lose him! I can only imagine his pain, a pain shared by so many of us. And can only marvel at what he saw as the value of such a death: that the day after King’s death, the people of America moved one step closer to being human. That humanity is sometimes only moved forward by the sacrifices that make us weep. Alice Walker ☀
Activism is my rent for living on this planet. Alice Walker ☀
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.
Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned seventeen dollars a week working twelve-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: “Why, there’s nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!” It would be hard not to love anyone who stood in one’s corner like this. Alice Walker ☀
There they were, I was trying them on. They were fantastic. However, I live in Northern California where political consciousness is quite high and is likely to bring you down to earth when you least expect it. The saleswoman said apropos of nothing: Yes, they look wonderful on you. (Pause). They were made in Israel. Oops. Who came to mind when she said that? Ariel Sharon? Netanyahu? Tsivy Livny? No. No Israelis at all. Who came to mind was a young Palestinian woman I had recently learned about; she had been arrested eight years ago and held in solitary confinement, in an Israeli jail, ever since. Never charged with anything. What did this woman do with her days, I thought. Could she possibly be the person who, in her cell, made these shoes? Suddenly, I could see her there in her cell. It felt cold. It felt barren. It felt lonely. She was all of these things,and more. Seeing her there, torn away from her world, made so strong an impression I lost all interest in the sandals. I could not even bear to look at them. I noticed her cell had a metal door and that there was a huge lock. I could never have purchased anything that would keep her there. I could only wish with all my heart to become a key. I ended up buying a really boring pair of sandals made in Germany, and the irony of this didn’t escape me either. Alice Walker ☀
…I love this person that we’ve elected. I love this gentle, seemingly considerate, thoughtful person. And that will, in no way, stop me from saying I don’t agree with, you know, X, Y and Z. I will not support this war. I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don’t think it’s intelligent, and it’s not sane. So why would you want to support it? And we’ve had leaders who would never be open to that kind of thought, and I think that he might well be open to the understanding that this is really true, that war is an insanity, basically. Alice Walker ☀
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