by Alice Walker
The promised land that King saw was the country of Freedom and Justice. In his speeches he says this many times. How are we to get there?
Just a few days ago I visited Ground Zero in New York City. The people have done such an amazing, loving job of cleaning up the wreckage that it is difficult to imagine all the lives lost there. And yet the people remember. They come, write messages, leave notes. Flowers. Some of the faces of those lost on that day seem to me especially beautiful. Peace-loving. I cannot imagine they would wish their own fate on anyone else.
War will never make us safe. The only way to end it is by stopping. That is the power we have as a nation; as the most powerful nation, militarily, on Earth. Imagine what that would feel like to the world. If we said, instead of bombing small children, donkeys and chickens that never heard of us: We could blow you to bits, we could pulverize you. But we won’t. In fact, we are so strong that we are not afraid to listen to you. What is it you want to tell us that you thought we could not hear unless you went for our mommies and daddies, small children—five thousand of them left without a parent, in New York City—our donkeys and our chickens? Only if we can stop the terrorism in our own hearts will be we able to stop terrorism in the world.
Remember who we are. We are a people for whom someone has died. We are a people who know what it means to have been seen, claimed, and beloved.
Thousands of feet
Below you
There is a small
Boy running from
Your bombs.
If he were
To show up
At your mother’s
House
On a green
Sea island
Off the coast
Of Georgia
He’d be invited in
For dinner
Now, driven,
You have
Shattered
His bones.
He lies steaming
In the desert
In fifty or sixty
Or maybe one hundred
Oily, slimy
Bits.
If you survive
& return
To your Island
Home
& your mother’s
Gracious
Table
Where the cup
Of loving-kindness
Overflows
The brim
&
From which
No one
In memory
Was ever
Turned
Gather yourself.
Set a place
For him.
We are a people—African Americans, Amer-indians—who have always welcomed the stranger. Perhaps this is the most enduring definition of “indigenous.” Of the truly civilized, or, a word I prefer, cultured. It has cost us. And yet, it is a surer path to the promised land of Freedom and Justice, than is war.
Not Children
War is no
Creative response
No matter
The ignorant
Provocation
No more
Than taking
A hatchet
To your
Stepfather’s
Head
Is
Not to mention
Your husband’s.
It is something
Pathetic
A cowardly servant
To base
Emotions
Too embarrassing
To be spread out
Across the
Destitute
Globe.
The only thing
We need
Absolutely
To leave
Behind
Crying
Lonely
In
The dust.
Remember who we are. Precious. Radiant. Seen. Beloved. And if they say your self-regard and love of Earth and humanity is unpatriotic and a threat to the Fatherland—America has become almost entirely masculine; have you noticed?—offer this poem:
Patriot
If you
Want to show
Your love
For Americans
Love
Americans
Smile
When you see
One
Flowerlike
His
Turban
Rosepink.
Rejoice
At the
Eagle feather
In a grandfather’s
Braid.
If a sister
Bus rider’s hair
Is
Especially
Nappy,
A miracle
In itself,
Praise
It.
How can there be
Homeless
In a land
So crammed
With houses
&
Young children
Sold
As sex snacks
Causing our thoughts
To flinch &
Snag?
Love your country
By loving
Americans.
Love Americans.
Salute the Soul
& the Body
Of who we
Spectacularly
&
Sometimes
Pitifully are.
Love us. We are
The flag.
The sixteenth-century mystic and prophet Nostradamus foresaw a future, four hundred years ago, that had someone like Osama bin Laden—a prince from the East bent on our destruction as a country—in it. And Cheney and Bush. And us, the masses of earthlings, trying with a bit of dignity and luck to get by. He saw the world engaged in war, including nuclear, for twenty-seven years. According to him we are in for a period of incredible destruction. Because of famine and war, he said, people would begin to eat each other. I think of this when I hear reports about the people our military is bombing in Afghanistan: that they are starving and cold, that they are eating cakes made of grass. September 11th has demonstrated that America is not immune to the suffering of the world. Karma means we will not avoid reaping whatever we sow.
It may well be too late. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that these two words are perhaps the saddest in human language: Too late. And yet, like him, I do not entirely despair. I like to think of the last night of his life: he’d been depressed, ill with a cold. He felt he couldn’t speak to a crowd who had assembled to hear him. He sent someone else, his friend and colleague, the Reverend Abernathy, in his place. But Martin was sent for; the crowd wanted to hear him, no matter how sick he was feeling, and he went. It was that night that he told the world what he had seen: a promised land of Freedom and Justice for our people. After that speech, his cold seemed to disappear, his spirits brightened. One of the last acts of nonviolence Martin Luther King, Jr., engaged in was a pillow fight, back at the hotel, with his associates. I love this image of him. Laughing, throwing pillows.
Let us take a moment to imagine him doing this. Let us take a moment to smile.
Most of the photographs of King show someone very solemn, very serious. But he had a merry laugh and a beaming smile. He liked to hear jokes and enjoyed his own. I think he was more like the Buddha than like the Christ image that has been handed down to us.
Nostradamus said that after the destruction of this world, there would again be peace, everywhere, and that it would last a thousand years. I offer his words not necessarily for belief, because who among us knows the future? But for contemplation. If we must fight the poor around the world, let it be with pillows filled with food and blankets, houses, donkeys and chickens, heating fuel and real cakes made of butter and flour and eggs and chocolate. We can easily afford this. If the war in Afghanistan and Iraq cost us thirty-five million dollars a day, we could feed and house everyone on Earth who needs it for far less. We could even throw in violins and bicycles. Generosity toward those less fortunate is t
he way of the future, if a future exists. Who are we, blessed with so much, to be stingy?
Remember who we are. We are the people seen and loved. All of us. As you know, Martin Luther King, Jr., never left anyone outside his heart. Not even those who jailed and tortured him. We are people worthy of generosity, passionate advocacy, abiding loyalty and love. We are rich enough to offer these things to others.
We have only spirit, of which Martin is such a radiant part, to guide us. But that is as it should be. Spirit is Our Country because it is ultimately our only home. Let this awareness take some of the fear out of us.
Here are two more poems to help us on our way into what will no doubt be a particularly dark and scary time.
When We Let Spirit Lead Us
When we let Spirit
Lead us
It is impossible
To know
Where
We are being led.
All we know
All we can believe
All we can hope
Is that
We are going
Home
That wherever
Spirit
Takes us
Is where
We
Live.
Remember:
Nothing is ever lost
It is only
Misplaced
If we look
We can find
It
Again
Human
Kindness.
11.
The Glimpse of Life Beyond the Words
On Censorship and Freedom of Speech
Along with her Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, Alice Walker has the honor of being one of the most censored writers in American Literature. Like Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Madeleine L’Engle, and J. D. Salinger, Walker has been the subject of so much controversy that too often the artistry of her work has been lost in the politics of the moment.
—Alice Walker Banned from the introduction by Patricia Holt, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
The first time I read Patricia Holt’s introduction to Alice Walker Banned, a small book on censorship composed and edited by her in conjunction with the publishers of Aunt Lute Books, I was delighted to see her idea that certain forms of censorship can be seen as honoring the writer. I agree. I was content to be in the company, especially, of J. D. Salinger and Mark Twain, whose banned works I studied in college. Twain, in particular, on religious matters. It is the writer’s duty, it seems to me, to question all establishment Gods, and it is a pleasure to stand with writers, throughout history, who have done so.
My other response to Holt’s words was amazement. How did it happen that I should be one of the censored? One of the banned? And why has controversy about my work been so consistent that whenever I publish a novel I am tempted to attach a note to the reader warning that the book might be too much (or too something) for them? And certainly for their children, who I in no way wish to distress. Puzzled, I have asked my friends: Is it character? Is it genes?
I was born to parents who worked a farm and operated a large dairy for the landowner on what remained of a Southern plantation. They were the most law-abiding, clean-living and -thinking people I have ever known. The word “damn” was never spoken in our house. “Darn” was the only expletive I ever heard from my father, and then only when he’d accidentally hurt himself. My mother would never even say that. “Doodoo” was the common word for feces. There was virtually no mention of sex, especially around young girls. I was in college before I actually heard someone say “fuck.” I was shocked.
Naturally, then, when The Color Purple was published my mother had a hard time with the opening pages, in which a nearly illiterate, traumatized teenager writes anguished letters to God using words that, to anyone unused to hearing them, were likely to cause offense. She was joined in her resistance to the book by many others who would read no further than she did, and who, furthermore, had the power to remove the book from school curricula and public libraries.
After Steven Spielberg filmed The Color Purple, my mother was able to see the story beyond the “bad” words, and to see glimpses of her own unsung mother’s life. She saw the love with which the book is infused—my worldly brothers helping her grasp the possibility that not everyone possessed so lofty a mind, or pure a tongue, as she—and was reconciled to the reality that people express themselves using the words they know. And that my main character’s voice, to do justice to her condition, as a poor, abused young woman in the turn-of-the-century South, had to be fairly crude.
I have come to understand, after years of controversy over my work, censorship of it, and banning, that it is “the glimpse of life beyond the words” that those who censor writers are seeking to blot out. Why else would my essay about a lonely horse “Am I Blue” be considered “anti–meat-eating” and therefore unacceptable reading matter for tenth graders, or a short story “Roselily,” about a Christian woman marrying a Muslim man, be banned from a California school test because it was considered antireligious?
The freedom to speak and to write about life as one knows or imagines it is a right that most Americans take for granted. It is that basic, and that precious. Even after all these years, nearly thirty, of writing that has engendered controversy, I am still undaunted in the face of possible condemnation and censorship. My country’s gift to me. I continue to write the stories I believe to be spiritually authentic, creatively true. Stories that are medicine—sometimes bitter, but also sweet—for myself and for the tribe.
I also see banning and censorship as attempts to avoid the pain of encountering subjects that frighten or hurt. I comprehend this reaction and feel compassion for it. I have felt sadness but not much anger over repeated attempts to suppress my work. However, in order for understanding among peoples to evolve, we must continue to learn to sit with one another’s truths, which to me is the real meaning of the First Amendment.
Having said that, however, let me speak at least briefly, about when, and how, censorship hurts. When I published my third novel, The Color Purple, and later when it became a movie, I was harshly criticized and often brutally attacked—in print and also at town-hall meetings across the country. Because I had written a novel about domestic violence and child abuse I was accused of “airing dirty laundry” that would be used against black people, especially against black men. The behavior I explored, in an attempt to bring it to light and to healing, was often said not to exist. That my vision of what I was seeing was my own fault; that I was incapable of seeing clearly. For years this battle raged within the black community. And I used to wonder, as I went about my life outside the debate, about its impact on children, black children especially, who were suffering exactly the violence and abuse I had written about. I knew that many of the young boys were learning from their elders that a black woman writer had deliberately lied about them, which must have been perplexing since many had experienced in their own lives, or seen in the lives of their friends and families, precisely the behavior I had written about. What was the impact on these young men of experiencing blatant denial of what they knew? How did this denial of reality later play into the widespread and inexplicable misogyny that followed? So that within two decades of having affirmed black women as “Mothers of the Nation” the most common descriptions of a black woman in many communities were “bitch” and “ho.” The culmination of this hatred of women was exposed recently at the 2006 Academy Awards. The song that won as most original new soundtrack was “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp.” No compassion for the “ho” standing on street corners, barely dressed in the freezing cold, often hungry, trying to support fatherless children, and required to “go down” on countless unwashed men who might abuse her further if they are not satisfied. Not surprisingly, with the devaluation of the Feminine in our communities has come an unimaginable increase in violence. Violence that endangers and touches everyone.
I received many condemnatory letters
regarding The Color Purple, as well as for Possessing the Secret of Joy. In one, an African man wrote that there was a saying in his tribe that “to tell the truth hurts the people.” This was by far the most depressing of the messages I received. To me, truth, that is to say reality, is the only infallible guide. I would define Truth as God.
It is possible that a generation of black young men and women suffered because the terrorism and abuse they were enduring at home and were hoping to be liberated from, in literature and imagination, if not in life, was, among their elders, being debated as if it did not exist. How can the young trust us, if we lie about what they already know?
What will be the impact on coming generations if they are denied knowledge of evolution? If they are encouraged to ignore global warming? If no one teaches them where the “goodies” of the West come from? If leaders gloss over the widening enslavement of people in poor countries whose women and especially whose children are locked into foul, airless rooms for hours on end and forced to make cheap rugs and towels and clothing for a European and American market; women, children, and men “earning” as little as seven cents a day? This is modern-day slavery, and we should call it what it is.
Censoring what frightens or hurts us is understandable. In these times of so much bad news it is an attempt to protect the fragile self. But we may find ourselves cut off from friends and possible allies in this way; an undesirable side effect.
I overcame some of the pain of being driven from the community (which is what it often felt like) by sitting with the point of view of the people who attacked me; until I could plainly see their fear, and the reason for it. It was not helpful to attack me, but I could comprehend why they did so. Years of insecurity as creators, and as Americans, fueled their anxieties, not to mention years of doubt about their sexual attractiveness and its alleged superiority. They could not trust that my confidence in their human grace was so complete that I could write any number of novels critical of hurtful behavior without diminishing my faith. There was fear at not being seen in the full spectrum of their humanity and fear that my “truth” about God, sexuality, and nature meant that their inherited teachings about these things was “wrong.” When I fully accepted the reality of their suffering from this fear, I could begin to feel compassion, rather than disgust, irritation, anger or, more likely in my case, mystification.