by Alice Walker
It is with joy, then, that I encourage you to view the films presented in the Library of African Cinema. These are moving, sincere films, fully engaged with their culture, created by filmmakers who have made every attempt to be true to the character and personhood of their people. The Africa in these films is an authentic presence. The Africans are holy, flawed, sane, crazy, confused, loving, daring, worried, competent, a mess—just as they exist. And, true to the African landscape and organization of traditional life depicted in several of the films, there is even a different sense of time from that experienced in Western films, which works mesmerizingly on the viewer, so that at the end of a film such as Yeelen one almost feels one has been in Africa during several centuries. It is rewarding as well to see in these films a substantial degree of consciousness regarding such contemporary concerns as the rights of women, in Finzan; the struggle against apartheid, in Mapantsula; and the inherent danger, to people and the environment, of mindless urbanization and dictatorship, explored in one of my personal favorites, Zan Boko. A sign of any satisfying experience is the wish to repeat it. I have watched several of these films more than once, with pride that African filmmakers work so hard to restore us to ourselves, as adults, and with the feeling that at last I am able to offer my little-girl self an antidote to her pain.
Amandla! The power is ours!, I think you will say when you’ve viewed these films. Because, really, it is.
I Am Salman Rushdie
A statement read at a gathering of writers in San Francisco, protesting the threat to the life of Salman Rushdie.
Standing Where We Can
It has been hard to sleep since I heard about the threat against Salman Rushdie’s life. I toss and turn at night, thinking about what he must be feeling. To know there are millions of people focused on the taking of his life, and for something he did simply as an expression of his being—for good writers write what they believe; they cannot help it—must be an indescribably ugly sensation. He must feel as if his heart has fallen through his shoes.
The world is forced to suffer this with Rushdie, for even those who hate him and would accept the five million pieces of silver for his death are yoked to his life, to these anxious, pain-filled days, by a frenzy they neither devised nor can control.
What does it feel like to have a mob screaming for your life?
On these past sleepless nights, an old memory that I had put away came back again. Of an evening, just at dusk, during my student days, while I was working in the human rights movement in the South. Of a sit-in on the porch of the Georgia Highway Patrol in Liberty County, Georgia; and of a mob of white supremacists who threw rocks and bottles and foul language at me, and at the women and men and small children who had joined our protest. At the time I did not seem to feel the terror. Only now, as my heart plunges to my own shoes at what this new kind of censorship of creative people may let loose in the world, do I remember that, in fact, it was something beyond terror that I felt. I felt grief—intense, piercing—to see people so mad, so hopelessly misinformed, so manipulatively deranged. They actually felt, at the time, that by expressing a need to be black and free, in a society constructed by white supremacists to serve their own racist ends, I was insulting everything they stood for: their ancestors, their religion, their “Southern Way of Life,” the sanctity of their white skin itself.
I am glad I have learned a bit about the Moors, who, in the centuries they inhabited Spain, interpreted Islam as a religion tolerant of diverse ideas; dedicated to free expression and to learning, even for women. And I can’t help but think of Malcolm X, such a devout Muslim, such a brave man. And such a fearless follower of his own mind. Where would he stand today?
Well, I have lived long enough to know we stand where we can. It’s the only way we will ever get any sleep.
This That I Offer You
People Get Tired; Sometimes
They Have Other Things to Do
Over the twenty-five years of my writing and publishing life I’ve been amazed to find myself appearing, usually recognizable only by my name, in the thoughts, fantasies, words, and even marketing strategies of others. Perhaps this is a price one pays for being a figure the public feels it knows. Men I’ve never seen in my life have claimed in print that we’ve lunched together and that I flirted. Men and women I don’t know swear they were my best friends or close relatives when we were growing up; now they want money, a job or school recommendation, and a hug. Not long ago I opened the newspaper to a story in which a well-known black male writer complained that he’d come up to speak to me in an airport somewhere and I’d ignored him. This is a man I’ve seen exactly twice, both times in poor light, ten and fifteen years ago respectively. We have never had a conversation. The headline actually said, in big black letters: “ALICE WALKER STILL HASN’T FORGIVEN HIM.” Forgiven him? I don’t even remember him. Which is to say, like the majority of readers in the country, I recognize his name, not his face.
Recently, sadly, I’ve been alternately irritated and puzzled by Anna Caday’s* various accounts of feeling “shunned” by me and by her incredible need, apparently, for my —–. The blank is there because I cannot imagine what it is she needs. Here is a woman whose books are selling spectacularly. (Perhaps Toni Morrison and I had some small role in this, herstorically speaking.) She is witty, poised, attractive. People like her and appreciate her work. She has lots of money. A child. Friends. Her health. Her cup, in short, runneth over. And yet I find in Essence, as in The New York Times and even in The Times of London, that with all this, she still needs something from me and from Toni Morrison. What can it possibly be?
Just as Patience and Stress† began its triumphant march across the country I sent Caday a note congratulating her on its success. It is true I refused to talk to the rude reporter from The New York Times who later wrote an article about Caday—titled, gauchely, I thought, “Caday’s Carats”—not only because I had yet to read the book but because he was obnoxious. He seemed offended that I would refuse to be interviewed by someone from the Times simply because I had nothing to say. Each of the three or four times he called (driving my assistant to ever higher levels of exasperation) he’d concocted yet another reason for my refusal. One of them, as I recall, was that he “guessed” I didn’t want to help another black woman writer. Since I have a respectable record to stand on in this regard, I dismissed him as the uninformed novice he obviously was.
If Ms. Caday wrote more than one note to me—she says in an article that she’d “done everything” to get a response from me and Toni Morrison—I haven’t seen it. Sending galleys of her books to me for blurbs isn’t different from the “everything” done by hundreds of other writers.
The context for the infamous “shunning” episode was as follows. At a reading of my children’s book Finding the Green Stone (I had met Ms. Caday a few weeks earlier at a signing for the same book), she asked me to talk about the subject of my coming book Possessing the Secret of Joy. Because my audience was mostly children three to twelve years old, I felt it inappropriate to talk about the novel’s subject: the devastating effects on women and children of genital mutilation. I declined to comment. Later, as I was signing books, Ms. Caday came up and said, “I’m Anna Caday,” as if this fact, had I known it, might have changed my decision. “I know,” I said. She said, “I just wanted people to know about your book.” I said, “They will know about it soon enough.” Considering the subject matter of the novel, its implications for all our children and for Africa, this was said more in sadness—I may even have groaned—than in pique.
What can we do about the needs others have of us that we, being human and therefore limited and imperfect, cannot fulfill? I have thought about this for a long time, and now, as an elder—well, approaching that status—I wish to tell a tale of a time when I myself might have come close to feeling, as Ms. Caday seems to, rejected or ignored.
Once upon a time, when I was in my early twenties, I met the great human being and writer Langsto
n Hughes. It was love at first sight, I believe, for both of us. I saw in him a loving father/uncle. He saw in me a worshipful daughter/niece. Having no one else to turn to at the time, I used to write to Langston. He wrote back. Until one day, just when I needed him most, he failed to answer a letter I had written and sent off rather urgently. Many things went through my mind: that he really didn’t like me, after all; that my letters bored him; that somehow I’d angered or disappointed him; that he didn’t think my short story that he’d agreed to anthologize was any good; that maybe, like many black men of the time, he disapproved of the Jewish law student I’d decided to marry. And on and on and on. I saw myself very large, in fact, in Langston’s mind.
A week or so went by. One day I received a letter with his return address but not written in his wonderful bright-green ink. I opened it with a troubled heart. Langston Hughes had died, I was informed, before receiving my letter, but the writer knew he had thought highly of me. This was an invitation to his funeral.
We must learn to accept, as I had to then, that people get tired, cross, overworked, and overextended. They go out of the country just when you write to them, and may be gone for months. If they are well known, they get more stuff in the mail than they can possibly read or respond to. They have love affairs from which they refuse to emerge to talk shop. They get PMS. Or, in Langston’s case, prostate cancer. They get sick and sometimes they die. And none of it has anything, really, to do with us, and what we need or expect from them. Langston’s death taught me this, just as his caring but firmly self-respecting manner is something I have wished to emulate and to bring into all conflicts I have with people, especially those of color. It is this that I offer you.
* Not her real name.
† Not its real title.
PART SEVEN
Hugging Fidel
Becoming What We’re Called
“Boy, Man, Fellow, Chap”
Last night, before I could stop myself, I put my arms around a dear friend who’d just said she’d see us later, “you guys!” and told her I don’t like being called “guy.” In fact, I told her, noting her puzzled expression, I detest it.
I remember once, many years ago, attending a spring festival in the seaside village of this same friend. The air was scented with early flowers, the sun was shining brightly off the ocean. My friend found a table for us not far from the grill on which hot dogs and tofu burgers were being flipped. Within minutes, unbeckoned, three teenage maidens brought us overflowing platters of food, freshly prepared, lovingly arranged, a feast. One was brown-haired, one blond, and one as redheaded as the daughter of my next-hill-over neighbors, who was named after the Irish Goddess Bridget. I suppose it was partly this that caused me to think of the three young women, so solicitous, so gracefully nurturing, as Goddesses. Thanking them, I was just about to comment on the Goddess nature of their behavior when my friend said cheerfully, “Thank you, you guys!” I felt they had not been seen, that their essential nature had been devalued, but I said nothing, not wanting to offend my friend.
Sometimes I think these struggles about identity will never end; this one reminds me of nothing so much as of the battle black people seem to have lost a decade ago against the word “nigger.” Seeking to redeem it, to render it harmless, many people deliberately kept it alive among themselves. Now, because of rap, it is commonplace to hear it bouncing through the air, no matter where you are, and if you are not fond of it, you feel all the assault such a negative description brings. (Nigger: a vulgar, offensive term of hostility and contempt, as used by Negrophobes.) Recently, for instance, two other friends and I were walking through the San Francisco Botanical Garden, the only black people there, the only black women. It is crucial, living in the city, to have access to nature: a place where you can relax, be yourself, and relate to the magnificence of the earth without thinking every moment of life in a racist, violent society. We stood by a pond on which there were hundreds of birds and marveled at the way the fluttering of their wings stirred the air. It was a beautiful day. The sun was warm, the sky blue, the Asian magnolias in full expression. Suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, we heard, very loud, “black nigger black … dah, dah, dah.” We looked about for the racist white man who had dared shatter our peace. He was not there. Instead, the retreating back of a young black man, bopping in tune to music from his Walkman, told the story. He was singing along with someone whose refrain, “black nigger black,” he echoed. We watched as he swung along, oblivious to the beauty all around him, his attention solely on this song. He went the length of the garden, seeing nothing; only thinking of how he was black and a nigger and this was all the identity he had. It was like watching him throw mud, or worse, all over himself.
I have asked people, both men and women, why they like “you guys.” Some admit they picked it up from a television commercial that seemed cute to them. Others add, incredibly, that they felt it was an all-inclusive term for males and females; they considered it gender free. Some recalled the expression “guys and gals” and said, laughing, nobody wanted to be “gals.” I tried to imagine everyone in American calling themselves and each other “you gals.” How many men would accept it? Personally, for gender-free inclusivity, I prefer the Southern expression “you all.”
After the completion of Warrior Marks, a film we made about female genital mutilation, Pratibha Parmar and I premiered it in ten European and American cities, an exhausting but at times exhilarating tour. But after about the third city, we realized that the most exhausting thing was neither the travel nor the stress we experienced as we anticipated each audience’s response to the film; it was having, at every theater, to endure the following questions: How long did it take “you guys” to do this? What was it like for “you guys” to travel and film in Africa? The women asking us these questions seemed blind to us, and in their blindness we felt our uniqueness as female creators disappear. We had recently been in societies where some or all of a woman’s genitalia were forcibly cut from her by other women who collaborated—wholeheartedly, by now—with men. To us, the refusal to acknowledge us as women seemed a verbal expression of this same idea. It made us quite ill. After all, it would have been impossible for “guys” to make the film we had made. No women would have talked to them, for one thing. Each night, over and over, we told the women greeting us: We are not “guys.” We are women. Many failed to get it. Others were amused. One woman amused us, she had so much difficulty not saying “you guys,” every two minutes, even after we’d complained!
It would seem from the dictionary that the verb “guy” is another word for “guide,” or “control”: bearing a very real resemblance to “husband.” It means “to steady, stay, or direct by means of a guy, from the French guying.” The noun means “a boy or man; fellow; chap.” It means “a person whose appearance or dress is odd.” Again, as a verb, “guy” can mean “to tease; to ridicule.” And this last is how I feel it when the word is used by men referring to women, and by women referring to themselves. I see in its use some women’s obsequious need to be accepted at any cost, even at the cost of erasing their own femaleness, and that of other women. Isn’t it at least ironic that after so many years of struggle for women’s liberation, women should end up calling themselves this?
I think my friend is probably exasperated with me because of what I said to her last night. After all, “you guys” is a habitual expression in conversation around the world; I am asking her not to call me something that comes easily, apparently, to her. I think perhaps I am a trying friend to have; one who wonders, as I can’t help but do, why this should be so. The magic of naming is that people often become what they are called. What in me evokes this word from her? I will call her up in a day or two and suggest we go for a walk and discuss this issue in the open arena of nature, where the larkspur is not called delphinium and the hummingbird is not labeled dove. Grass is not called tree and rocks are not called bears. When I look at her I see a black woman daily overcoming incredible odds to live a
decent, honest, even merry life. Someone who actively nurtures community wherever she goes. Someone who has raised a strong daughter and now showers affection and attention on a beautiful grandchild. I see someone who dances like a Nubian and cooks like a Creole. I don’t respect “guys” enough to obliterate the woman that I see by calling her by their name.
The Story of
Why I Am Here
or A Woman Connects
Oppressions
An address given at a Peace for Cuba Rally, February 1, 1992, the birthday of Langston Hughes, who, like Hemingway, loved Cuba.
Putting My Arms Around Sadie Hussein, Age Three
Last January, when the war against Iraq was started, I was in Mexico writing a novel about a woman who is genitally mutilated in a ritual of female circumcision that her society imposes on all females. Genital mutilation is a mental and physical health hazard that directly affects some one hundred million women and girls worldwide, alive today, to whom it has been done. Because of increased risk of trauma during delivery, it affects the children to whom they give birth. Indirectly, because of its linkage to the spread of AIDS, especially among women and children, it affects the health and well-being of everyone on the planet.