Read Online The World Has Changed by Alice Walker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alice Walker
Ads: Link
for one thing. She is an exemplary person; she is an exemplary, flawed revolutionary because it seems to me that the revolutionary worth following is one who is flawed. When I was talking about the flaw before I didn’t mean that it made these people less worthy of following. It made them more worthy of following.
My life has been, since I became an adult, much more middle class than Meridian’s. Although what happens often when I write is that I try to make models for myself. I project other ways of seeing. Writing to me is not about audience actually. It’s about living. It’s about expanding myself as much as I can and seeing myself in as many roles and situations as possible. Let me put it this way. If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would.
Writing permits me to be more than I am. Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.
C.T.: Are you drawn toward the folk hero/heroine as the focal point of your work?
A.W.: I am drawn to working-class characters as I am to working class people in general. I have a basic antagonism toward the system of capitalism. Since I’m only interested in changing it, I’m not interested in writing about people who already fit into it. And the working class can never fit comfortably into a capitalist society.
I think my whole program as a writer is to deal with history just so I know where I am. It was necessary for me to write a story like The Third Life of Grange Copeland , which starts in the twenties and has passages that go back even further, so I could, later on, get to Meridian , to In Love and Trouble , and then on to The Color Purple . I can’t move through time in any other way, since I have strong feelings about history and the need to bring it along. One of the scary things is how much of the past, especially our past, gets forgotten.
C.T.: You’ve often written that some of your stories were also your mother’s stories:
Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are our mothers’ stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.... She had handed down respect for possibilities—and the will to grasp them.... Guided by my heritage of love and beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
—“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Ms. , May 1974, p. 70
A.W.: Yes, some of the stories in In Love and Trouble came out of my mother’s stories, for instance, “Strong Horse Tea.” She often talked about how poor people, “in the olden days,” had to make up home
remedies for sick people. She used to crack me up with the story about my brother who stuttered and how he was stuttering and stuttering and they couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So finally someone told her to hit him in the mouth with a cow’s melt. As far as I can figure out, it’s something like the spleen. Anyway, it’s something raw and wet and bloody, and you get a grip on it and just hit the stutterer in the mouth with it. That would make anyone stop stuttering or stop talking altogether. But anyway, she did that; she hit him in the mouth with the cow’s melt and he stopped stuttering.
Anyway, my mother would ramble on and tell about how she would make tea out of the cow’s hoof when one of us felt ill. Years later when I was living in Mississippi, when I wrote most of those stories, her world was all around me.
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t. There’s always somebody using “strong horse tea” in the world; this day,
My life has been, since I became an adult, much more middle class than Meridian’s. Although what happens often when I write is that I try to make models for myself. I project other ways of seeing. Writing to me is not about audience actually. It’s about living. It’s about expanding myself as much as I can and seeing myself in as many roles and situations as possible. Let me put it this way. If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would.
Writing permits me to be more than I am. Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.
C.T.: Are you drawn toward the folk hero/heroine as the focal point of your work?
A.W.: I am drawn to working-class characters as I am to working class people in general. I have a basic antagonism toward the system of capitalism. Since I’m only interested in changing it, I’m not interested in writing about people who already fit into it. And the working class can never fit comfortably into a capitalist society.
I think my whole program as a writer is to deal with history just so I know where I am. It was necessary for me to write a story like The Third Life of Grange Copeland , which starts in the twenties and has passages that go back even further, so I could, later on, get to Meridian , to In Love and Trouble , and then on to The Color Purple . I can’t move through time in any other way, since I have strong feelings about history and the need to bring it along. One of the scary things is how much of the past, especially our past, gets forgotten.
C.T.: You’ve often written that some of your stories were also your mother’s stories:
Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are our mothers’ stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.... She had handed down respect for possibilities—and the will to grasp them.... Guided by my heritage of love and beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
—“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Ms. , May 1974, p. 70
A.W.: Yes, some of the stories in In Love and Trouble came out of my mother’s stories, for instance, “Strong Horse Tea.” She often talked about how poor people, “in the olden days,” had to make up home
remedies for sick people. She used to crack me up with the story about my brother who stuttered and how he was stuttering and stuttering and they couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So finally someone told her to hit him in the mouth with a cow’s melt. As far as I can figure out, it’s something like the spleen. Anyway, it’s something raw and wet and bloody, and you get a grip on it and just hit the stutterer in the mouth with it. That would make anyone stop stuttering or stop talking altogether. But anyway, she did that; she hit him in the mouth with the cow’s melt and he stopped stuttering.
Anyway, my mother would ramble on and tell about how she would make tea out of the cow’s hoof when one of us felt ill. Years later when I was living in Mississippi, when I wrote most of those stories, her world was all around me.
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t. There’s always somebody using “strong horse tea” in the world; this day,
Similar Books
