Anything We Love Can Be Saved Read online

  “WALKER CONTINUES TO ENCHANT.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Illuminating … Alice Walker emerges from these pages as a knowing ‘almost elder’—thoughtful, funny, gentle, yet a fighter for those causes in which she believes.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Walker writes full-heartedly about her life as an activist and her faith in the human heart, unabashedly revealing her thoughts on issues both private and public.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Impassioned … Walker tackles more than a dozen hot-button issues.… One can’t help feeling charged up, sharing the range of Walker’s energy and involvement, her refusal to do anything half-heartedly.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Create[s] the feel of a conversation over a cup of tea … Her family stories interwoven with her activism and experiences read seamlessly together; one logically forming and feeding the other.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Heartfelt and compassionate.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “REVEALING …

  Ms. Walker again ushers the reader into her internal world and makes us privy to her objectives, thoughts, and feelings.… [She] reveals herself as a multidimensional, compassionate warrior, fighting with her pen, heart, and sometimes her body in the cause of black and other oppressed peoples, the poor, women, and the planet she loves.… The activism on display throughout the book has a tempered yet incisive quality that characterizes the best of Ms. Walker’s fiction and poetry.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “More than just a collection of engaging thoughts and daring philosophies, Anything We Love Can Be Saved is a portrait of courage, joy, sorrow, heavy letdowns, and much applauded celebrations.”

  —African Sun Times

  “Walker provides an inspiring look at her life in action. This powerful new collection contains essays, poems, letters, and speeches, some public pronouncements, many personal reflections, all illuminating the heart and soul of a writer-activist in this age of widespread ennui and apathy.”

  —The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Frankly emotional … Heartfelt … At the center of each narrative is Walker’s belief that every attempt to change the world for the better, no matter how modest, is transcendent.”

  —Booklist

  “Walker’s commitment to activism shines forth convincingly in this wide-ranging collection.… Constantly testing and stretching her readers’ imaginations and boundaries, Walker expresses her warmth, her anger, her optimism in this provocative, lively collection.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1997 by Alice Walker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Most of the essays in this work have been previously published.

  Owing to limitations of space, this page is a continuation of this copyright page.

  http://www.randomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 97-97210

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81694-8

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  THE PLACE IN THE WAYS

  Having come to this place

  I set out once again

  on the dark and marvelous way

  from where I began:

  belief in the love of the world,

  woman, spirit, and man.

  Having failed in all things

  I enter a new age

  seeing the old ways as toys,

  the houses of a stage

  painted and long forgot;

  and I find love and rage.

  Rage for the world as it is

  but for what it may be

  more love now than last year

  and always less self-pity

  since I know in a clearer light

  the strength of the mystery.

  And at this place in the ways

  I wait for song.

  My poem-hand still, on the paper,

  all night long.

  Poems in throat and hand, asleep,

  and my storm beating strong!

  —MURIEL RUKEYSER

  MY ANTHEM

  Joie de vivre, joie de vivre

  Joie de vivre, over me

  And before I’ll be a slave

  I’ll be dancing on my grave

  And go home

  to my soul

  and be free

  —To the tune of “Oh, Freedom”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction: Belief in the Love of the World

  PART ONE: The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven …

  PART TWO: Anything We Love Can Be Saved

  “You Have All Seen”

  Anything We Love Can Be Saved: The Resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston and Her Work

  The Sound of Our Own Culture

  How Long Shall They Torture Our Mothers?: The Trials of Winnie Mandela

  Songs, Flowers, and Swords

  PART THREE: What Can I Give My Daughters, Who Are Brave?

  Home

  Sunniness and Shade: Twenty-five Years with the Woman Who Made Me a Mother

  Audre’s Voice

  Dreads

  My Face to the Light: Thoughts About Christmas

  What Can I Give My Daughters, Who Are Brave?

  What That Day Was Like for Me: The Million Man March

  PART FOUR: Turquoise and Coral

  Turquoise and Coral: The Writing of The Temple of My Familiar

  Looking for Jung: Writing Possessing the Secret of Joy

  Frida, the Perfect Familiar

  PART FIVE: The Growth of Understanding

  Giving the Party

  Treasure

  Heaven Belongs to You: Warrior Marks as a Liberation Film

  PART SIX: Saving the Self

  Getting as Black as My Daddy: Thoughts on the Unhelpful Aspects of Destructive Criticism

  This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party, by David Hilliard and Lewis Cole

  Disinformation Advertising

  Letter to the International Indian Treaty Council

  Letter to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

  Follow Me Home

  Letter to the Editor of Essence

  African Cinema

  I Am Salman Rushdie

  This That I Offer You

  PART SEVEN: Hugging Fidel

  Becoming What We’re Called

  The Story of Why I Am Here, or A Woman Connects Oppressions

  Hugging Fidel

  A Letter to President Clinton

  My Mother’s Blue Bowl

  Permissions

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction:

  Belief in the Love

  of the World

  This book begins with the essay “The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Off Your Land and Out of Your Lover’s Arms): Clear Seeing Inherited Religion and Reclaiming the Pagan Self.” In it I explore my awareness, beginning in childhood, of the limitations of the patriarchal Christianity into which I was born; as well as my realization, over time, that my most cherished ins
tinctual, natural self, the pagan self, was in danger of dying from its oppression by an ideology that had been forced on my ancestors, under threat of punishment or death, and was, for the most part, alien to me. That essay, which was delivered in a seminary in April of 1995, is followed by one about a meeting with people working toward the abolition of female genital mutilation in Bolgatanga, Northern Ghana, that occurred in April of 1996. The book ends with an essay entitled “My Mother’s Blue Bowl,” which grew out of my grieving for my mother after her death, in 1993, and the eventual solace I have taken in memories of all the ways in which she sacrificed to give me life, and fullness of life.

  Preceding that essay, there is a letter to President Clinton protesting the recent tightening of the thirty-seven-year-old U.S. blockade of Cuba, which threatens everyone in that island country with starvation. There are pieces on the resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston, the trials of Winnie Mandela, the experience of being both praised and banned as a writer, and the joy of discovering the Goddess in places we’ve been ashamed to look. There is also an essay on the sustaining miracle of Sweet Honey in the Rock, another on the beauty of dreadlocks, and another on how the life of an activist can be hard on her cat. I also write about our timid acceptance, as women, of language that “disappears” us, of the strengthening that comes from renewing family connections, and of the bittersweet struggle involved in mothering a child.

  My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings. It is when people are at peace, content, full, that they are most likely to meet my expectation, selfish, no doubt, that they be a generous, joyous, even entertaining experience for me. I believe people exist to be enjoyed, much as a restful or engaging view might be. As the ocean or drifting clouds might be. Or as if they were the human equivalent of melons, mangoes, or any other kind of attractive, seductive fruit. When I am in the presence of other human beings I want to revel in their creative and intellectual fullness, their uninhibited social warmth. I want their precious human radiance to wrap me in light. I do not want fear of war or starvation or bodily mutilation to steal both my pleasure in them and their own birthright. Everything I would like other people to be for me, I want to be for them.

  I have been an activist all my adult life, though I have sometimes felt embarrassed to call myself one. In the Sixties, many of us were plagued by the notion that, given the magnitude of the task before us—the dismantling of American apartheid—our individual acts were puny. There was also the apparent reality that the most committed, most directly confrontational people suffered more. The most “revolutionary” often ended up severely beaten, in prison, or dead. Shot down in front of their children, blown up in cars or in church, run over by racist drunks, raped and thrown in the river.

  In Mississippi, where I lived from 1967 to 1974, people who challenged the system anticipated menace, battery, even murder, every day. In this context, I sometimes felt ashamed that my contributions at the time were not more radical. I taught in two local black colleges, I wrote about the Movement, and I created tiny history booklets which were used to teach the teachers of children enrolled in Head Start. And, of course, I was interracially married, which was illegal. It was perhaps in Mississippi during those years that I understood how the daily news of disaster can become, for the spirit, a numbing assault, and that one’s own activism, however modest, fighting against this tide of death, provides at least the possibility of generating a different kind of “news.” A “news” that empowers rather than defeats.

  There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women’s rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looked longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough to be that—which is the foundation of activism.

  It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame.

  This is the tragedy of our world.

  For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.

  In this regard, I have a story to tell.

  In the mid-Sixties during a voter-registration campaign in south Georgia, my canvassing partner, Beverly, a local black teenager, was arrested on a bogus moving-violation charge. This was meant to intimidate her, “show her her place,” and terrify her family. Those of us who feared for her safety during the night held a vigil outside the jail. I remember the raw vulnerability I felt as the swaggering state troopers—each of them three times Beverly’s size, and mine—stomped in and out of the building, scowling at us. The feeling of solidarity with Beverly and our friends was strong, but also the feeling of being alone, as it occurred to me that not even my parents knew where I was. We were black and very young: we knew no one in White America paid the slightest attention to the deaths of such as us. It was partly because of this that we sometimes resented the presence of the white people who came to stand, and take their chances, with us. I was one of those to whom such resentment came easily.

  I especially resented blond Paul from Minnesota, whose Aryan appearance meant, when he was not with us, freedom and almost worship in the race-obsessed South. I had treated him with coolness since the day we met. We certainly did not invite him to our vigil. And yet, at just the moment I felt most downhearted, I heard someone coming along the street in our direction, whistling. A moment later Paul appeared. Still whistling a Movement spiritual that sounded strange, even comical, on his lips, he calmly took his place beside us. Knowing his Nordic presence meant a measure of safety for us, and without being asked, he offered it. This remains a moment as bright as any I recall from that time.

  As a poet and writer, I used to think being an activist and writing about it “demoted” me to the level of “mere journalist.” Now I know that, as with the best journalists, activism is often my muse. And that it is organic. Grounded in my mother’s love of beauty, the well-tended garden and the carefully swept yard, her satisfaction in knowing everyone in her environment was sheltered and fed; and in my father’s insistence, even as a poor black man, easily “disappeared” for any political activity, that black people deserved the vote, black children deserved decent schools.

  All we own, at least for the short time we have it, is our life. With it we write what we come to know of the world. I believe the Earth is good. That people, untortured by circumstance or fate, are also good. I do not believe the people of the world are naturally my enemies, or that animals, including snakes, are, or that Nature is. Whenever I experience evil, and it is not, unfortunately, uncommon to experience it in these times, my deepest feeling is disappointment. I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternati
ve, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.

  I have learned other things: One is the futility of expecting anyone, including oneself, to be perfect. People who go about seeking to change the world, to diminish suffering, to demonstrate any kind of enlightenment, are often as flawed as anybody else. Sometimes more so. But it is the awareness of having faults, I think, and the knowledge that this links us to everyone on earth, that opens us to courage and compassion. It occurs to me often that many of those I deeply love are flawed. They might actually have said or done some of the mean things I’ve felt, heard, read about, or feared. But it is their struggle with the flaw, surprisingly endearing, and the going on anyhow, that is part of what I cherish in them.

  Sometimes our stones are, to us, misshapen, odd. Their color seems off. Their singing, like Paul’s whistling, comical and strange. Presenting them, we perceive our own imperfect nakedness. But also, paradoxically, the wholeness, the rightness, of it. In the collective vulnerability of presence, we learn not to be afraid.

  In this book I am writing about the bright moments one can experience at the pile. Of how even the smallest stone glistens with tears, yes, but also from the light of being seen, and loved for simply being there.

  PART ONE

  The Only

  Reason You

  Want to Go

  to Heaven …

  The Only Reason

  You Want to Go

  to Heaven Is That You

  Have Been Driven

  Out of Your Mind

  (Off Your Land and Out of

  Your Lover’s Arms)

  CLEAR SEEING INHERITED

  RELIGION AND RECLAIMING THE PAGAN SELF

  Unto the woman God said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.