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Walker
continued from page 2
to feel it as a living work of art, as something useful. My
interest in creating anything is that it be useful. People can
love the beauty of it, but they should also use it to grow, to
deepen.
KW: What was it like dealing with the blowback for the
next several years coming from critics who said The Color
Purple was anti-black men?
AW: It actually lasted for a decade. How could you imag-
ine that people could be mad at you for so long? I felt a
great deal of weariness. But because it wasn’t the first time
that I had been heavily criticized, I learned that you just
keep going and turn to other things. Which I did. I went on
to write “The Temple of My Familiar” which may be my
favorite of my novels, because it was a miraculous gift
that I had no idea how I got it. I had a dream one night
that I went down into a non-existent sub-basement of my
little house in Brooklyn. There was a trap door and I went
down further and found these indigenous South American
people speaking Spanish and making all these incredible
things. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish but I sensed that
I was being guided to a new focus. And to make a long
story short, I ended up going to Mexico, I learned one
word, “leche,” which means milk, and I started writing
this novel. So, the blowback, in a way, faced me in a new
direction which was very interesting.
KW: Attorney Bernadette Beekman asks: What did you
think of the stage version of The Color Purple?
AW: I so loved working with the musicians. It was just
wonderful! It was great and I felt like it was such a tonic for
people to see it.
KW: Dinesh Sharma says: In my new book, "The Global
Obama," Professor Ali Mazrui refers to the President as a
"great man of history." Professor Henry Louis Gates of
Harvard agrees. You have written several essays about
Barack Obama. How do you feel about his presidency thus
far?
AW: I’m very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in
support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I
cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the
banks. I cannot support his caving in to Netanyahu [Israeli
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. There’s a long list of
this administration’s initiatives that I find unsupportable. I
think many black people support him because they’re so
happy to have handsome black man in the White House.
But it doesn’t make me happy if that handsome black man
in the White House is betraying all of our traditional values
of peace, peoplehood, caring about strangers, feeding the
hungry, and not bombing children. I’m very disappointed.
More than disappointed, I think I’ve actually returned to a
kind of realism about how the world works. That’s helpful.
Because in a way, no matter who’s in charge of the corpo-
ration that the United States is, the direction in which it is
.. the best way to get children to
read, is to read. They will
absolutely copy you. That way, you
don’t have to worry about what’s
supposedly age appropriate, a
child will pick something up when
the child is ready. — Alice Walker
taken seems to be inexorable. So, you just get the job of
being the front man for four or eight years. Now, most peo-
ple realize that’s what you are.
KW: Talking about being a good or bad president is like
talking about being a good or bad rapist.
AW: [LOL] That’s a very good thought.
KW: I think the black community sort of got checkmated
in terms of its own agenda. And very vocal folks who try to
hold Obama accountable are having their blackness ques-
tioned or their blackness revoked, like Tavis Smiley.
AW: That’s okay. It’s better to have your blackness taken
away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are.
That’s the trap. In fact, Cynthia McKinney just sent me a
piece by somebody about how, for the first time in history,
black people are supporting the wars, the military strikes on
Syria, and other awful things, as if they woke up and
became entirely different people. It’s totally distressing!
Look at the NDAA [The National Defense Authorization
Act], look at the Patriot Act, look at the NSA, and the ruth-
less droning of civilians. I pretty much lost it when they
droned the grandmother who was teaching her grandchil-
dren how to pick okra. It seems to me the ones who are the
real threat are the ones who are in power.
KW: Film director Rel Dowdell asks: Did Danny Glover
fully personify the character Mister in The Color Purple?
AW: No. I love Danny, and he did a good job, but no.
Mister is a small man. Danny is huge! And that matters,
because what I was showing was how even a small man
can be a terrorist in the home because of all the patriarchal
weight that he brings to any situation. That would’ve been
very powerful. In a way, making Mister so big undercut
that message because we’re kind of afraid of big people
anyway, because they take up so much room. I felt that at
times there wasn’t enough subtlety in his abuse of Celie
and her sister, Nettie, because what I’ve discovered and
observed is that often it’s the subtle oppression that deeply
wounds the soul. The parting for instance, which is so hor-
rendous, where Nettie leaves, and is forced out by Mister.
In the novel, that’s handled with a lot of restraint. Filmed
with that restraint it would’ve been just as powerful, even
with a little Mister, just by virtue of his being a man and
having patriarchy as his backup.
KW: Are you interested in writing your own screenplay?
AW: At this point, no, because I have gone back to writ-
ing poetry, which I absolutely love. And I write on my blog,
which I enjoy. And life being what it is, every once in a
while I’ll have a book which will have developed without
my actually having paid that much attention to that part of
it. I’m really only interested in each day’s gift.
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Page 6 The Seattle Skanner
January 29, 2014
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