Redefined is hosted by me, Zainab Salbi, and brought to you by FindCenter, a search engine for your soul. Part library, part temple, FindCenter presents a world of wisdom, organized. Check it out today at www.findcenter.com and please subscribe to Redefined for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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What’s most important about life? What is the essence of life? Is it what we do, how much we earn, how many social media followers we have? Or is it, do we live our lives in kindness to ourselves and to others? Do we live our lives in love to ourselves and to others? In nearly losing my life, I was confronted with these questions and it led me to the conversations that make up Redefined, about how we draw our inner maps and the pursuit of meaningful personal change.

My guest this time is internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist Alice Walker. For many, she is known for her award-winning novels that include The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar. The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and her induction into the California Hall of Fame are just some of the honors she has received for her novels, poetry, and essay collections. Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. But beyond all of that, Alice has been a true activist all of her adult life and believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all.

She’s a staunch defender, not only of human rights, but the rights of all living beings. I have had the personal pleasure of knowing Alice throughout the years as a friend and a mentor, and had the privilege to learn from her courage and wisdom, kindness and fierce love, and above all, an absolute dedication to speaking and being in her truth as the only way to live. Join me in this conversation that weaves the personal, the political, and the wisdom of a woman that is a testament to the triumph of hope, love, and truth.

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I’ve been thinking about where to start, yeah? Because your life is rich of so many stories, of suffering and joy, of love and heartbreaks, of forgiveness and hurt. It’s all of it. And it’s like where do I start? And I wanted to start with a thank you. And a thank you for your sublime generosity. And there are so many levels of that generosity. There is, of course, a generosity that you share of your life experiences and wisdom and knowledge to the world through your writings and through your activism and through your actions, and the sublime generosity is also very personal for me, as you know, because you have always been the light that lights outside of the cave of my own darkness. And we’ve been saying, “When did we meet each other?” We’re trying to remember, and I met you within few years, couple of years after my mother had passed away. She passed away when I was twenty-nine years old. I met you in my early thirties.

And every time I have met you, you’ve always left me with a piece of wisdom that—this is what I mean by the light, right?—that then stayed in my head and then it’s cooked and simmered and I worked on it and all of that and then I come and see you again, I was like, “Okay, I’m reading this, this is what I did with it.” And then you leave me with another piece of wisdom and leave me with another piece of wisdom and you continue to do that until this very day. So the sublime generosity is your teachings and your guidance. And for being that light that in my darkest hours, I knew there is a light to go to. There is a path to walk towards.

And then also the sublime generosity for your actual generosity. Your home has been healing throughout the years for me. You’re a extremely generous person. I don’t know how many people know that about you, but you are actually very . . . I mean, besides your sharing, you’re a physically generous person. And for that, I’m also grateful because it has been a healing on the physical level, as well as on an emotional, psychological level for me as I walk my path. So for that, thank you for your sublime generosity.

Thank you for telling me this. It’s very helpful.

Well, I want to start with the early parts of your life because you are a woman who’ve always defied boundaries. I’m curious, how did it start? Do you remember a time as a child in which you said like, “This doesn’t make sense and I’m going to do this instead.” And can you share a story around that?

Well, one of those stories is that when I was eleven, I realized that the church was so small that it was too tiny for the God they were talking about, and that if God existed, it had to be outside, which also, of course, would contain that little building. So I went into nature at a very early age and I think I was allowed to do that only because my parents were very tired. They could not force me as they had forced their other children who rebelled, but were forced literally to go and sit there. And I went early into nature and I have never left and I never will leave. That is the joy of nature, of seeing that as the whole, of seeing nature is all there is. So that stayed with me that I could go my own way. I could commune with the stars. I could commune with the clouds, the sky, the rivers, the rocks, and they never leave me and I never leave them. So I’ve been relatively speaking, with all of my disruptions in life, very happy.

Well, I’ll go into that with all the disruption, because you’re ultimately indeed happy and have found the joy in everything. Have you ever been back to church and how, when you go back, what is your feelings about it and about how it resonates or what it does in people’s lives?

Of course, because I love the music. So when I understood that they had failed to capture me, then my free spirit could connect to the free spirits I heard in the singing, because that is where our medicine is. Our medicine as people of color, is in the music, much more than in the words from any scripture. So I love it. I mean, when I go to my idea of church, which is usually a forest or a waterfall, but when I go back to real church, and we reconstructed my original church, the one I went to as a child, the one I was born into. It’s now refurbished and beautiful, and I have feelings about it because that is where I felt community. And I love community. I consider community the church: the people are it. And they all love me. They love me and they let me feel it. They were always kissing me, hugging me, giving me nickles, dimes, sometimes quarters. I had access to everybody’s pocketbook. I was such a loving child toward others that my parents entered me into baby contests when they needed to raise funds and I always won. I always made more money for the church. [laughs]

What’s a baby contest?

Well, who’s the cutest sweetest baby?

Oh! [laughs]

[laughs] Guess who? So I was raising money for the church before I even knew there was a church because I just loved everybody. I just . . . The phrase my mother used was, “You know she’ll just go to anybody.” And that included the old drunkards who dragged themselves to church on Sunday and really was sitting there like, “Oh God, why I’m I here?” But they loved me. I mean, they were affectionate as they staggered about, and I could see the wonder in them. People have made fun of me because of my affection for old men, but I see them as beautiful. I always have from a child.

That’s beautiful. That’s really, really beautiful. Now, later, you rebelled in other ways, right? You became a political activist also at the very young age and a time in the ’60s that was . . . I would say not much has changed probably, not too much has changed maybe, but it was physically dangerous to be an activist. Your family must have worried about you a lot. And while in church, they sort of let it go because you are the youngest and they were too tired, as you said. How did they act and how did you deal with their actions or their views or their worries for you as a young activist?

I didn’t tell them. I had most of my activism in other parts of Georgia, and then later on, when I went to Mississippi to live for seven years in the middle of all kinds of horror, I just didn’t tell them. I mean, I got there and I wrote to them and they always said, “Well, Mississippi is so terrible that we don’t even want you to fly over it.” So that meant that nobody came to visit me from my family, except when I had a child, my mother came to help me. But they were terrified and I understood that. I understood that, and I had to accept it, but on the other hand, I accepted that I was working for the people that they were.

Sharecroppers just like we had been, I couldn’t turn my back. There was no getting away . . . And I could have. I could have gone to . . . I was studying French and I got a scholarship to go to Paris or Senegal, anywhere they spoke French, and I made the decision to not go there, but to go to Mississippi, to go to Georgia. That’s where I have my roots and I love it. I love the countryside. It’s so beautiful. Except Mississippi is a little flat and it got on my last nerve eventually.

But you eventually lost the scholarship in contest of . . . As you contested the university’s decision, can you share about that? Because, again, what I’m fascinated about, Alice, it’s your courage. There is a price for courage, right? And you were always willing to pay that price. Can you share more about that?

Would love to because I think this is important. Well, there I was in this very good school for Black women, Spelman, which I still adore, and I had no real good shoes and I had no real good coat, and I had won this prestigious scholarship that this very rich person in the North had been giving for years. And we went for . . . And I refused it because I wanted to go South rather than to Paris and he couldn’t understand that. So he went for a walk and he was saying to me that no sharecropper’s child would ever be any kind of poet. [laughs] Now, his brother, James Merrill, you may have heard of him, was well known and accomplished and so forth and so on. So I guess he was thinking about that that they was so wealthy and his brother was great poet and blah, blah, blah, and who was I? There I was, eighteen and nineteen and thinking my duty was with my people and not with Parisians.

So I did. I turned it down and that became a story in that school and eventually, also that school fired Howard Zinn, my teacher, and I left. I left and I left with nothing suitable to wear in the North really, which was . . . I looked back and it was amazing, but I didn’t care. I mean, I’d rather just be in turmoil and pain and suffering than to accept a gift that felt ill-fitting and also was disrespectful to my culture, because indeed, we have produced poets. I mean, it’s his fault if he didn’t know who they were. I knew some of them.

In hindsight, your message for the learning, the gist of the learning is when you are not in alignment with your moral values or code, go for it. There may be a price at the beginning. There may be hardship at the beginning, as I’m sure you had some financial hardship at that time, but that it is worth it because staying in that path of truth towards yourself eventually does work out.

Well, when I left my little town of Eatonton and got on the bus and was forced to the back, I made a vow that I wasn’t aware it was a vow, but I just knew they had not seen the last of me. That they could not do this and expect to just never hear from me again. That was just not going to happen. So when I got North, I applied myself. I studied very diligently. I held down two or three jobs at a time to make ends meet. And I have to say I never felt sorry for myself either and I would resent it if other people did. I was on my path and I knew it and it was the right one. And that is what’s important—I mean, that’s what was important to me—that I wasn’t deviating no matter what came up. I was on that path and I was going to stay on that path.

And I thought of my people raising $75—this is what the whole community raised to help me get on the bus. And that’s a lot of money for people who don’t have any. So I think . . . I felt that they recognized in me some of what they were, ground down and beaten up and whatever had happened to them, but they recognized in this little girl who couldn’t say no to hugging whoever showed up in the congregation, they knew and they had faith and I was not about to let them down. So I studied hard, I worked hard, and I went back to be with them, really, in Mississippi. That was why later on, it was so hard to extricate myself, because I felt like I was leaving but I had to do it, because I was just worn thin.

Well, before we go to the activism that you did in Mississippi, and I actually am curious about how it coincided with your own travels, because you mentioned a scholarship that could take you eventually to Paris or to Senegal, or France or Senegal. Eventually you actually, as I understand, the first trip you did was to the Soviet Union in the late ’60s.

[laughs]

Right? I mean, that’s very different than Paris, right? Can you—

I didn’t know that exactly, but yes, it was.

[laughs] Well I mean, Paris, I would assume everywhere every time had its own romance—the story of romance in Paris while the Soviet Union had the story of huh! harshness, but what made this eighteen-years-old young woman decide, “I’m going go to the Soviet Union,” in a time where the Soviet is at the peak of the attack on the Soviet and communism and the whole thing?

Well, that’s exactly why. Because the country then—as now—planned to bomb the people, and I had actually seen a few people and I knew that they weren’t all in government. I don’t mean just Russian people, I’ve seen people in the world, on the planet. Most of the people on the planet are not in their governments. They’re just out there trying to make a living. And lucky for me, I met Coretta Scott King and her group of women who were very internationalist, and I don’t know if you know this, but she was also a concert singer. This is the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. And I went to her house, you know, we had a chat and she and her friends were all for young women going abroad and trying to understand the world. So I wanted to understand who was living in Russia, other than the people that my government wanted to kill.

So, that was my impetus, and I got on the bus and in the plane and whatever and got there. The myths that they make about people are so absurd, but they stick. So when we got to the crossing from Helsinki, from Finland to the Soviet Union, I really literally expected an iron curtain. So being curious, which is prominent in my character, I got up. They stopped the train. I mean, not just for me, but because it was the crossing and I got up, got out to find it. I wanted to see what they were talking about, and of course there was not, and so that was my beginning of seeing all of the myths unravel. All of them, the Russian people—a lot of them were really poor. I mean, some even poorer than my parents. Some of the shacks were just amazing.

And there they were, had been peasants and surfs—surf, slaves for hundreds of years—and we connected. We connected on the basis of our common humanity and our historical suffering, and I never had so much vodka in my life. I mean, I really. [laughs] They brought vodka, they brought flowers, they brought chocolates, and they brought themselves, and although we had a terrible language barrier, we had good interpreters, but the main thing is you could see with your eyes. You don’t have to see with your language. And I saw that they were just people. They may have had incredibly backward or stupid or deranged leaders, and who hasn’t had those leaders? But they were in themselves just like anybody, and so I’ve never bought into any idea of harming people that I don’t know. It is just ridiculous.

Beautiful, and as someone who come from other culture who’s been demonized, all my people are as seen as terrorists and oppressors and horrible and all of these things, there’s nothing that hurts the soul more than to be seen in such a demonized way by a collective others. Right? How much you think your own experience as growing up with marginalized communities who have been demonized, and I would say continue to a great extent in America, impacted how you looked at other cultures and how your travel has impacted your activism?

Well, when I looked at my community, which had its radiance. I mean, when people think of folks in poverty and grinding and sharecroppers and everything, they forget that there’s also a radiance that people have just innately. Some of them become really just dulled down and even psychotic, but there’s a radiance to people who learn how to survive on very little and who learn how to continue their love of what is beautiful. This I saw in my mother. My mother—it’s unbelievable. I mean, eight children, working dawn to dusk, with cows, with cleaning people’s houses, with picking cotton. The whole thing, but my mother still had a radiance that was just awesome, and she wasn’t alone. So you grow up understanding that life is likely to hand you, you know, almost any problem and situation, but luckily it also, if you can let it, give you a spirit to stand up to it and to be as radiant as all the things that are not being killed completely, like the flowers. Like the trees. Like the rivers.

You can align with that. You can align with that power, and this is what my mother could do. She took me with her into the forest and she would find things that we could actually make tea out of, like sassafras. I mean, who knew? I mean, she’d see the plant. She’s, “Oh, there’s sassafras. Let’s get a couple of roots.” And that was tea, and it was delicious. So I grew up really, as Camus said, “Halfway between misery and the sun, and the sun taught me that misery isn’t everything.” And I’m so grateful for that. Isn’t that beautiful?

Gorgeous, gorgeous. And it takes me where the women who have taught me how to dance and it’s okay to put some lipstick and look pretty, because in my twenties I was taking myself too seriously and didn’t want to look pretty and all of these things, because I’m a feminist and I’m serious and I go to war zones and some of these travels you’ve joined me, as in in Congo and Rwanda, and we met. I remember the woman we met who the rebels cut her legs and she was dancing fiercely. Fiercely, right? With the artificial legs and she was not letting the fact that the severing of her leg was such a horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible act and experience, but she’s dancing and resisting with her dance and with their smiles and with the songs, fierce songs, and with the beauty. It was these women who was like, “Who am I to take things so miserably and severely and all of that when they can dance? If they dance, who am I not to dance? If they laugh, who am I not to laugh? If they sing, who am I not to sing?” It seems that the same thing, that don’t look at others as only that. There’s such a variety of experience and the human soul shall triumph and resist no matter what.

Now, if I may go to your activism now, because people do their activism in different ways. You did activism in the personal and the political, in the writing and in your love, and it was a multifaceted level of activism that it wasn’t on an intellectual one, nor was it only demonstrating in the streets. It was living your life in essence based on challenging the system and the stereotypes and the law, and being a living being of that activism. Can you share more about . . . was that strategic? Was that just love and came? How did you go about that? I don’t think it’s strategic of course, but how did you encapsuled all the activism into your life?

It was perfectly natural in the same way that anything you plant comes up as what it is. This is just what I am. I don’t have a plan really but when something seems wrong, unjust, oppressive, crazy, it’s just my nature to rebel against it, and I don’t even think of it as rebelling exactly. I think of it more as just having the right to be, like everything else here. I mean, an oak tree is not going to be asking what I should be doing? The oak tree is just an oak tree, or a plum tree, or anything, flowers. So I really have that very much as part of my character. So I get myself into these situations, which maybe for other people seem extreme, but I—it’s just perfectly natural to be this way.

I don’t take oppression of myself or other people lightly. I just, it’s just not my nature. I can’t do it. Now at this point in my life, I will say I’m tired. It’s a long life, of a lot of movement, pushing back and helping and all of that. And I sometimes feel very sad that I can’t continue at the same pace of resistance and helping, but at the same time, again, I see it as the way that nature works. That we have a period when we just are ourselves in full bloom and that’s wonderful, and then there’s a time in life when the full bloom starts to close up a bit, and that’s wonderful as well, and something to be enjoyed.

In one of your books, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, again, another beautiful book, another beautiful title, you write that, “These are stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less than magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that’s challenged everything I’d ever thought about human relationships, situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom.” [oof!] I mean, this . . . “squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom.” Then you go on and said, but this is when you were born. “The fact that I was being reborn as a woman I was to become.” [whoof!]

[laughs]

[laughs] Can you share, I mean, about what you have found about relationships, what you have discovered about relationships, what works, and the heartbreaks and how you go from the heartbreaks to the joy, and the joy to the heartbreaks, and et cetera, and so on and so on?

Well, I would say that I found that I was unable to remain stifled. That there was nothing in my character that would accept my being stifled in any way, and that’s basically why I could not stay in a marriage that seemed to have no windows. Then I went out into the world with many different kinds of experiences and people in it, and lovers. Male and female, and had a wonderful, wonderful time experimenting, loving, sometimes not quite loving, but with good intentions always, and with respect. The world just continued to be an amazement to me as it is to this moment. And I never dreaded being out of the marriage, by the way. Every once in a while I would think “Mmmm [wistful], I had this and I had that, and maybe . . . ,” but never a moment when I thought, “Gosh, I wish I had stayed.” Never.

Well, the marriage itself was also, I mean, I understand, by the way, having gone through my own divorce from a wonderful man of which I still continue to be a friend with and never regretted the divorce ever, and your marriage though, as in my marriage in different contexts, very different contexts. I married a Palestinian which from my family and culture, they’re like, “Oh my God, how did you marry a Palestinian?” Not to compare it, all different stories, different cultures, but you married a white man in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, at the peak moment in the Civil Rights Movement. How did that go with your family? How did you deal with the society and community, how did that impact your life and your awareness of being in that bridge in between?

Yeah. I found it incredibly magical. I mean, at that period in my life, white people just annoyed me just terribly, and to go down to Mississippi and to walk into a restaurant and to see our restaurant, the only Black one in Jackson, and to see these white people there eating, even though they were part of the movement, was so annoying. So here I come from New York City where I’d been working in the welfare department and I get there and I look across the room, glaring— literally glaring—at these white people like, how dare you come and join our movement? He looked up at the same time and that was just it. I was like, “Oh no.” [laughs]

[laughs]

But isn’t that life? I mean, that’s when you know you’re really alive, and we never had a second thought about anything until six or seven years later when I was exhausted and he by then had become so well known in Mississippi as a lawyer and the work he’d done in civil rights, that he was fairly comfortable, but as a writer who needed actual stimulation other than trying to avoid arrest, I had to really go somewhere else. I was breaking down. So that’s kind of how that was. But love. I mean, you really just have to learn to accept that there is magic in this life. There is serendipity, there is synchronicity, there is whatever created all of us. That energy just has a sense of humor, and it will make you eat your words and really understand how silly you are for trying to cut people out of your range of emotion. It’s just ridiculous. You can’t do it.

So I totally loved him, and he totally loved me. And we had a wonderful time as married people, no matter what we endured in Mississippi, and we endured a lot. But at the end of the day, we were happy and laughing and loving our child and just regular folks. [laughs]

Beautiful story. Beautiful story. I love it. Never say no. You never know where the door’s going to open.

I was trying, but that’s it. The universe plays with us. It does. And it’s always trying teach us something. If we could only let go of all this rigidity that we somehow get. And he was a wonderful man. He was.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Now, Virginia Woolf always talked about a room of her own, and you have another room. Would you be interested in describing what that other room is for a healthy relationship?

Oh, the lovers room.

Yes. [laughs]

Oh yes, yes. I tried living with this other man that I felt just . . . I had always loved him, actually, first time I saw him. But years later, we managed to get together. And I adored him. But I realized after like two weeks and his unfortunate fussiness about whatever, that I really couldn’t live with him. So in that relationship, we actually had separate apartments for eleven years, and it worked great. And then after that, having learned that I really do much better when I have my space, I was in houses that fortunately had enough room so that there could be, constructed beautifully, a lover’s room. I’m telling you, this will solve many of your problems. [laughs]

I love that concept. I love it. [laughs]

It’ll keep the love alive and flowing. So in my case, the lover’s room is just not that far from my room and beautiful. Of course, just absolutely exquisite and comfortable. And that’s how I have been very happy in many wonderful relationships with people. They’ve always had their own space, and so have I.

Beautiful. A lover’s room. I think this is an iconic concept. I love it. I think it should be practiced. I remember you saying one day that in some traditions, when the woman needs some space, she also put his slipper on the door front, basically.

Well, that’s in the Acoma people’s tradition. And actually, putting his shoes outside the door, that signifies that the marriage or whatever is over. So I’ve never had to do that with the lover’s room. But I do advise having a lover’s room because really, when people live with you, they need their own space. We didn’t come up with this thing about how you have to sleep with the same person every night in the same bed. Whose idea was that? [laughs]

[laughs] It can be suffocating, no matter how much you love your partner.

It’s just something that, when you think about it for five minutes, you realize that, oh, no, that really is not a good idea. Suppose you wake up in the night, and the universe has given you this incredible vision that you want to send out to help save ourselves or something. And they’re over there, turning over and snoring and scratching or whatever they’re doing. And you love them madly, but at the moment, all of that is in the way of this gift that is trying to be delivered to you, to give to people and to the planet. So they need their own space, and so do you.

Now, you distinguish between womanism from feminism. Can you talk more about that?

Yes, I’d be happy to. And I hope that people understand that I’m not saying get rid of feminism because I’m not saying that at all. In a way, it’s the same thing, but we come—Black people, African American people, Southern people—we come from a distinctly different culture. We have had trials to overcome that white women in the culture, they . . . I’m not saying they haven’t had their trials and tribulations, even they were, when they first got here centuries ago, they were indentured, but they could be freed after, I think, five years or seven years.

But anyhow, but we as Black women, come from a culture where we were literally enslaved and our children were not even our own. We couldn’t even get married. So, it’s a word that honors this tradition that we have of going on anyway. You are a woman, and you go on anyway, you escape from enslavement, as Harriet Tubman did, you go back and you free as many people as you can. And you threaten to shoot the ones who don’t want to be freed. That’s an attitude that is very womanist. She wasn’t threatening to shoot them because she hated them, but she was threatening to shoot them because they endangered everyone.

So there’s a whole history and a whole understanding of the precariousness of our situation in the white world, what became the white world, after they wiped out most of the people of color. And it is infused in this word, and also in our culture, just for a parent to say to a girl when she’s little, “You’re being womanish.” But it wasn’t negative. It was that you are being audacious, you’re being spontaneous, you’re acting like you actually know what you think and feel, and that was positive. It was very good, even though they were likely to spank you at the time. But it’s a cultural word that we need in order to honor more of who we are as people, as women, of color. We can’t get it all in the feminist word, actually.

How so?

Well, because for instance, when the white women were gathering in, I think Upstate somewhere, they really didn’t want Sojourner Truth to speak at their gathering. So they were feminists, but Sojourner was a womanist. She had a whole other story to tell, and they didn’t really want her to speak.

And so, I often say with feminism that if you take it back to the seventeenth century, then what? Then what? Who was even permitted to even think about being a feminist? But at the same time, I claim that too. Of course, I’m a feminist, and it shouldn’t make people nervous if I say that I also come from a culture that has its own distinct relationship to what a woman is and can be. I think every culture must have a word of its own, and I’m so in favor of people claiming their own stuff. Claim it. It’s your medicine. Don’t make yourself paler and weaker than you are. It’s not necessary, especially now.

Well, talking about climate, you talk about all what Earth needs, more than anything, is mothering. What is mothering for Earth means for you?

Well, taking care of it. And I also came up with it . . . I actually was in . . . It was a visitation. I was in Hawai’i at a sacred site. You know Hawai’i is full of them, although they’ve been trashed a lot. But I had this idea about mothering the planet and understanding that one of the ways we can do it is to forward an idea of the planet being something that we protect in a very real way, in a ritualistic way, actually.

So that first, we start to understand Earth as a being, calling out for help. And as a being who is resisting. The earth is in resistance. So wherever she’s resisting, like when she just overflows all the banks of every dam and river, and when she says, “I don’t want you to build this building here, so I’m just going to have an earthquake and destroy it.”

Every time that happens, what I think conscious humans should start to do is to go there with flowers and say to her, instead of tearing out our hair and carrying on and blaming whatever, that we understand that you are fighting for your liberation, and we stand with you.

So I had a visitation of sorts, and it was to found a party, a political party. And the name of that party would be just about this mother, Mother, Protect Yourself party. And that we are with you. There’s a way in which we have abandoned the planet, I mean spiritually, we have abandoned the planet, and why we would expect it then to continue to lovingly support us is really a mystery. So I think the humility that humans can begin to show will help us learn to heal these awful things that have been done to her. So yes.

It’s beautiful. And it reminds me, honestly, and I recently was in Iceland, and there’s a very strong belief that there are other beings in this earth and that we need to respect them. They’re fairies, or I am not sure what other names they have for that. But that belief is not some marginal belief. I heard when I was there that the Ministry of Infrastructure, which is led by a woman, would actually have a discussion before they build a road or a building or anything like that, does that impact the energy or the path of these other beings or the fairies. And the decisions are made in that holistic way, and not in a ridiculed way, or this is some witchcraft or anything like that. It’s just in a respectful way, that this is important for us to coexist with earth and all as beings. Beautiful.

Exactly. I don’t know if I had that correct, when I was trying to tell you. The party’s name would be Mother, Defend Yourself Party. And I really agree with what you’re saying about the people there in Iceland, because of course, who knows what else is here with us? We don’t even know how we got here. So isn’t it just ridiculous to assume that no other beings are here, and they’re never coming here, and all of that? It’s just mind-boggling that people will let themselves think that humans are the only beings here that are worth anything. And only some of those.

Alice, I want to go into understanding more about the path that helps transform your pain into joy. And in particular because you have really been . . . I don’t know how it felt inside of you, right, but publicly, it feels like every time you’re out there, there’s this punch of criticism in the gut, sort of. This is how it feels to me. I don’t mean that it’s how it lands on you, but from The Color Purple and how some men were like, “How dare you portray black men like this,” to your stand on female genital mutilation. And some woman said, “How dare you do that?” To your stand on Cuba, on Palestine, and many political and social issues. I’m curious about how did you manage such attacks in your heart? And how did you process it and then land . . . From what I would—it would hurt me, let’s say, if it happened to me, when it happens to me. And I’m curious about how that transformation happens from the pain to the joy.

Well, my sign is Aquarius, and we are known to just be rebels, basically. Which is to say, we see our path, and we try to stick on our path. And we understand that other people’s paths may be in contention. They don’t want us to be on our path. But honestly, I just feel like I’m really, literally doing the best I can do with the character that I have. This is what I have. I’m sure there are people who drug their character, they get hooked on something or they’ve made bad marital choices or whatever, but I just am very true to my character. This is it. And I will go down this way, and I’m at peace with that and always have been.

My husband and I used to walk down the street in Mississippi, and we actually expected to be shot. So we were just waiting. There we were, what could we do? So that’s it. The criticism is sometimes harsh. It’s almost always so without heart. So you feel sorry, in a way, for the limited emotional capacity, because compassion should be what people feel for you if you’re really misguided. And if you’re saying something really terrible, and they think it’s going to be wounding, especially to you, then they should show compassion.

There’s a flap now about Whoopi Goldberg and something that she said on a show that I’ve actually never seen, but apparently she said . . . She, I hate this word, misspoke, because George Bush Jr. used to use it a lot. But apparently she said something that she should not have said about the Holocaust. And maybe she should not, but my feeling is I feel compassion for her. I don’t feel like jumping on her and making her feel like she has to retract and embarrass, possibly embarrass herself and her family. No, I feel compassion for her. And I think I would have preferred compassion toward me. And some people were compassionate. But for the ones who were not, there’s nothing to really say. My response is to keep going. I go down, sometimes very far, and then I come up again. And often the universe in its goodness gives me a new direction.

So for instance, after The Color Purple movie and people were just, for months, hard on my case as if somehow none of the stuff happens in the movie anywhere in our communities, I founded a publishing company in the country and I started to publish other people who were not so popular. And it was such a joyful experience. And that is basically my response. Just do something else. Do something else that’s wonderful. Do something that the uplifts other people who are having a hard time. That’s really where I’ve found so much joy.

It’s beautiful. Beautiful, really, and great advice for all those who are getting attacked in one way or the other. And there are plenty of attacks these days in a worrisome, in my opinion, culture of cancel culture. I grew up in an authoritarian regime and to see aspect of that, much of it actually comes in America, it’s very, very scary and heartbreaking to witness.

Yeah. I would also counsel, learn how to leave it outside of your gate. The stones, the words, the opinions that are usually crazy, learn to leave them outside your gate. You get home, you go into your gate, and you have your life. Invite your friends. Continue to have dinner parties. Do a lot of dancing. Realize that you are loved, that you are loved. You’re loved partly because usually you’re trying to show your love. You’re trying to exhibit love. You’re trying to bring more love. You just do that. But don’t stay glued to some machine that’s telling you what other people think. Who cares? If they had a life, they wouldn’t be bothering over yours.

Now your website, which I find a beautiful rich encyclopedia of knowledge and of content and of your opinion, but also featuring other people’s work, it’s truly . . . I can’t recommend it enough because it’s a constant learning experience. It’s like going to the library, but to Alice’s library, of all libraries. And I’ve had the privilege of reading some of your books, in your library, which healed me. And now I have it in your website so it’s truly, truly brilliant and so much reflections and learnings in it. And one of them is your article on Mary Trump. And in that, there are a few things that really stayed with me.

First of all, you say, “The medicine of reckoning is bitter, as it would have to be to help any of us at this point.” “The medicine of reckoning is bitter,” it’s amazing. And then in that piece, you talk about how the process of someone who has hurt you and how you went about forgiving this person and the journey of forgiveness within yourself without interacting with him. And as he was on his deathbed, you go to him and you say, “I want to tell you, I forgive you and it’s all love.” And he didn’t acknowledge what he has done. And I found it so fascinating. Right? Because again, here you are, once again, bringing the political with the personal, integrating the two, whether it is that experience or whether it is the experience of the oppressive class, if you may, of not acknowledging and not understanding the pain that has been caused. Within that, within that realm of thinking, how do you think we can, we may, we shall, one day go, as individuals and as a collective, in a process of truth, healing, reconciliation, forgiveness, justice that is based on truth, basically, founded on the premise of truth and not denial.

I’m not sure it’s going to happen. We would like it to happen, but I’m pretty much a realist. I think it will require people to own up to what they’ve done. I mean, what I’m saying in that article is that . . . Just speaking in my own country of course, and America is not the only country like this. But the dominant group of people, white people who settled this country, quote, “settled the country,” more of them, most of them, have to recognize what they’ve done and they have to own it. I don’t see any possibility of real change and growth until people just say what they’ve done. And the piece is talking about how when you don’t do that, it’s like you give yourself a spiritual lobotomy; you just don’t remember. And that is part of the crippling that we see in the United States.

This country should not, it should not be like it is. We should be a happy country. We could have been really happy. We could have been having the most wonderful party as a country. Really. But you can’t do that if you deny what you’ve actually done. It’s impossible. I would really wish for my country, and for every other country, and the ones who . . . I mean, part of the hobbling is because of the religions, where the psyche has been tied to basically religions that teach you that you don’t have to remember. You just kill off people’s tribes and groups because they were some people you didn’t like, and then you just build your mansions on top of their bones.

I mean, this is America. This is so many countries in the world. And people really resist having to remember what they’ve done. But it hurts them. This is the part that I don’t think is clear enough, how it hurts you to excise any part of yourself. I mean, we walk among people who are missing a lot of who they are and they don’t even . . . They don’t know it because they’ve repressed it and because historically our educational system, for instance, has made sure that they don’t even know what they’ve done. I mean, how they got any of the stuff they got, most of it’s stolen. They’re living on stolen things. And they don’t know. They really do believe that: “Of course. We did this. We built this ourselves, alone, single-handedly. Nobody here when we got here.”

And it’s madness. You can’t be healthy that way. You have to be all of who you are. And you have to learn to love the part that you’ve distanced. You just forgive that part, try to understand that part, and go on. But you can’t go anywhere with a spiritual lobotomy.

And that’s where it take me to the beginning because ultimately your teachings in life, on many subject, but regardless of the subject, is about studying, really.

It is. Mm-hmm [affirmative]. That’s what I feel is our only own hope. It’s not wars. It’s not taking stuff from other people. It’s not demonizing other people. It’s not trying to get the best “this,” the best “that,” or even having the best history. It’s study. Study is our only hope. And it’s only through study that we will ever understand how we got here. We were not meant to be, in my opinion, suffering on this beautiful place, on this beautiful Earth. Look at it. I mean, does Earth wake up every morning thinking, “Well I need a few more wars to mess up my rivers and kill my trees”? No she doesn’t. She’s there trying to show you how magical it is to be here.

Now, Alice, I know you have an upcoming book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire. Can you tell us more about the book itself? And when is it coming? I believe it’s coming in April.

In April. Yes, well that’s my life, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, picking flowers while being shot at. I mean, it’s so true. And I wrote it for my husband and myself in Mississippi, because that was totally accurate, that we were happy. We were happy. Our child was happy. We were doing the best we could for everybody that we could and for ourselves. And we were constantly being harassed in some way or another. But we never lost sight of that flower, and that was what was important; we never did. We always understood that what we had at that time was amazing. It was just as amazing as any other expression of nature, being itself. I mean, we were really just being us. That’s who we were. And all the labels, and sticks and stones, and the Klan showing up at the door leaving their calling card, all of that was just part of the fire while we were picking flowers, basically, of life.

Beautiful. Beautiful. You’ve been called a radical and an optimist, a radical optimist, an optimist radical. It’s all, I feel like . . . Would you use these words? Or what other words would you use to describe who you are today?

Peaceful. Loving. Amazed. I think my favorite word actually is “amazed,” and I use it a lot, and I overuse it, and I don’t care. I live in a state of amazement. I just can’t believe we got here, really. And then I can’t believe that humans, whoever these beings are, are so deranged that they can’t feel this, that they’ve been granted something extraordinary, just to be, just to exist.

Now before we end, I have some rapid questions for you, which starts with your favorite song: song you go to all the time for joy or solace?

“As,” A-S, by Stevie Wonder.

Okay. Wonderful. Books that you always go to, to read?

Well for years I have relied on the I Ching. I think it’s one of the wisest books ever. And I don’t go there as often anymore. I think I . . . I didn’t . . . You never outgrow the I Ching, but you do kind of think, “Well the courtly wording of it is a little bit of a drag.” But yeah, that’s the book that I relied on in times when I had no other trustworthy counsel. I think it’s great for times when you really need to have an impartial view from a really old, old, old culture and discipline.

Actually, I read it for the first time in your home. And it did have a huge impact, of course, on me, but that was my first encounter. And movies that you always go to?

Well as you know, I love that movie about Beethoven, Immortal Beloved. His father is the reason he went deaf because his father beat him. And then he had to negotiate that world in Vienna, wherever they were, as a renowned musician. But how well can you manage music if you can’t hear? So that struggle to bring forth your gift, with wounds that your audience may never know about.

Beautiful. Beautiful. I can’t ask for a better ending to our conversation. And the way I’m taking it is instead of putting the energy out only, like “You said this!” and “I said duh, duh, duh, duh!” That’s what . . . One need is sort of putting it in as well. And reflect on the shadow of ourselves and the history we come to, and we reflect of our envy, and part of our own oppression of others. And if we only liberate ourselves, and forgive ourselves, and deal ourselves with compassion, we would actually learn how to deal with others with compassion. And so going back to study, study, study, love, dance, joy, and gathering the blossoms under the fire always.

Thank you.

And the greatest of all of these, as Jesus would say, is study. Thank you.

[closing piano music]

Thank you. I love you very much.

I love you too.

That was Alice Walker. Her new book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, comes out next month and is available wherever books are sold. For full transcripts of this episode, please visit www.findcenter.com. Do remember to subscribe to this podcast. It is free, and your comments are truly welcomed and would mean a lot to me. Redefined is produced by me, Zainab Salbi, along with Rob Corso, Casey Khan, and Howie Kahn at FreeTime Media. Our music is by John Palmer. Special thanks to Neal Goldman, Caroline Pincus, and Sherra Johnston. See you next week, when I’ll be joined by one of my favorite journalists and host of the new series Take Out on HBO Max, Lisa Ling.