02-18-06,10;57am

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AMY GOODMAN: This is an excerpt of my on-stage interview with Alice Walker.

AMY GOODMAN: I was just saying to Alice that I think one of the last times that I saw her was right before the invasion. It was International Women's Day, March 8, 2003. She was standing in front of the White House with Maxine Hong Kingston, Terry Tempest Williams, and a number of other women. It wasn't a large group, about 15 or so women, and they stood there, arms locked, and the police told them to move, and they said no. And they all got arrested. We were trying to get their message out on community radio. I was interviewing them on cell phone. The police didn't appreciate that. So, really, the last time that I saw her was in the prison cell with her. But, Alice, you said that day, as we were in the paddy wagon or in the police wagon, that it was the happiest day of your life. Why?

ALICE WALKER: Well, you were there. I have so much admiration for this woman and so much love for Amy. She is so incredibly wonderful, and she is doing such good work in the world. And I feel so proud of her. So I was very happy that she had appeared to talk to us about why we were there. Nobody else was asking. And so, there we were, arrested in this patrol thing, and actually I did feel incredibly happy, because what happens when you want to express your outrage, your sorrow, your grief -- grief is basically where we are now, just bone-chilling grief -- when you're able to gather your own forces and deal with your own fears the night before, and you arrive, you show up, and you put yourself there, and you know that you're just a little person -- you know, you're just a little person -- and there's this huge machine that's going relentlessly pretty much all over the world, and then you gather with all of the other people who, you know, are just as small as you are, but you're together, and you actually do what you have set out to do, which is to express total disgust, disagreement, disappointment about the war in Iraq, about the possibility of it starting up again, all of these children, many of them under the age of 15, about to be just terrorized, brutalized, and killed -- so many of them -- so, to be able to make any kind of gesture that means that the people who are about to be harmed will know that we are saying we don't agree, just the ability to do that made me so joyful. I was completely happy. And I think that we could learn to live in that place of full self-expression against disaster and self-possession and happiness.

AMY GOODMAN: You have had a continued relationship with the police officer who put handcuffs on you.

ALICE WALKER: Yes, because he really didn't want to do it. And I could see that they really did not want to arrest us. And he, this African American man, truly did not want to arrest me. And I totally understand that. Would you want to arrest me? No. No, no. You would not. So even as they were handcuffing me, they were sort of apologizing like, oh, you know -- because I also thought that you put the handcuffs like that, you know, your hands in front, but they put them behind you. I hadn't really noticed that before. And so, there was some amount of apology.

And then later, after we were released, you know, they take your shoes, so he was – I was there trying to put my shoes back on, and he came over and he got down on his knees, and he said, “Let me help you.” And I said, “Sure.” And I put my foot out, and he helped me with my shoes, and we started talking about his children. Well, first of all, he told me about his wife. He said, “You know, when I told my wife that I had arrested you, she was not thrilled.” And so, then I asked him about his family, and he told me about his children, and I told him I write children's books. And so he said, “Oh, you do? Because, you know, there's nothing to read. The children are all watching television.” I said, “That's true.” So it ended up with me sending books to them and feeling that this is a very good way to be with the police.

And can I just extrapolate a little bit on the police and us? Because I realized fairly recently -- I went to Houston to the Astrodome to take books and other things to the people, and the police, a lot of them also African Americans, but, you know, many other kinds of people, as well, they came over. And it was very clear that they, like the people who had lost their homes, really wanted some books. But they felt like they, as one of them said to me, “I really would like a book, but I'm not the people. I'm the police.” And I said to him, and then some of the people said that, too, they said, “You know, these people are the police, they're not the people.”

However, I said to the people and to the police that the police are the people, and we have to remember that the police are the people as well as the people. And so, you know, there they were, these big guys who probably had not had anybody offer them a book to read in years, if ever. They had gone into the army and into the police force because they did not have an education. That's part of why they're police. And so, I really feel very strongly that as we go into this activity, more of it, which we will undoubtedly have to do, that we remember even when the police are acting really, as we used to say down South, ugly, that we remember that they are also the people and that this is – you know, that we understand how they got to be the way that they are, and to try to hold that place of seeing them as the people, no matter what is happening.

AMY GOODMAN: I was reading Evelyn White's biography of you, called Alice Walker: A Life, and she goes back to 1967, and you had just come to New York, and you were submitting an essay to American Scholar. It was 1967, so you were about, what, 23 years old. And it was entitled “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” And you include it in your book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. You wrote it in one sitting. You won first prize. It was published. “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” Can you talk about the Civil Rights Movement to the antiwar movement? The antiwar movement, what good is it?

ALICE WALKER: Well, as I was saying about the Civil Rights Movement is that sometimes you can't see tangible results. You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they're internal. And a lot of it has to do with the ability to express yourself, your own individual dream and your own individual road in life. And so, we may never stop war. We may never stop war, and it isn’t likely that we will, actually. But what we're doing as we try to stop war externally, what we're trying to do is stop it in ourselves. That's where war has to end. And until we can control our own violence, our own anger, our own hostility, our own meanness, our own greed, it’s going to be so, so, so hard to do anything out there. So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one that we have dominant today.

AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker speaking in Oakland, California. We'll continue with the interview in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about movements, Rosa Parks just died. It was the 50th anniversary, December 1st, of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The corporate media, in describing Rosa Parks, talked about her as a tired seamstress who sat down on that bus, and when the white bus driver said, “Get up,” she simply refused. She was tired. She was no troublemaker. But Rosa Parks, of course, was a troublemaker. Can you talk about the importance of movements and what it means to be an activist, why it doesn't diminish what you do, but actually adds to Rosa's lifelong dedication? It adds to her reputation and her legacy.

ALICE WALKER: I was thinking about Rosa Parks, because I was in Africa when she died, and I missed everything.

AMY GOODMAN: Where?

ALICE WALKER: I was in Senegal in a little village South of Dakar. I was visiting this great African writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, who wrote a famous and wonderful book called 2,000 Seasons, which I recommend to everyone. He's a great, great writer, but when I got back and I realized that she had died, I didn't actually feel like doing anything. I waved. I waved to her.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [inaudible]

ALICE WALKER: What? And what I remembered about her was when -- the last time that I had seen her, which I would like to talk about, because there was the public image, and one of the reasons that I wrote a book like Meridian is that I lived through that period of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and a lot of the images were just that: they were images. But there was a lot happening behind the scenes.

So with Rosa Parks one day in Mississippi, we happened to be at the same event. I think she was being honored for, you know, everything that she had given us, and we were at the same table, and I think that I may have offered to escort her to the restroom, and I was in there with her. And she -- while she was getting herself together to go back out into the reception or whatever the thing was that we were doing, she suddenly took down her hair, and Rosa Parks had hair that came all the way down to her -- you know, the lower back, and she quickly ran her fingers through it. And I was just stunned. I had no idea. She then twisted it up again, and she put it the way you’ve seen her, you know, always with the little bun, very neat, and I said to her, “My goodness, what's all this, Miss Rosa?” And she looked at me, and she said, “Well, you know, I'm part Choctaw, and my hair was something that my husband dearly, dearly loved about me. He loved my hair.” And she said, “And so, when he died, I put it up, and I never wear it down in public.” Now there's a Rosa.

So, I then, as, you know, writers are just -- you know, we live by stealth, and so I immediately had this completely different image of this woman, the little, quiet seamstress, you know, sitting on the bus, even the activist who was so demure and so correct. And I thought, this woman, hallelujah, was with a man who loved her and loved her with her hair hanging down, and she loved him so much that when he died, she took that hair that he loved, and she put it up on her head, and she never let anyone else see it. Isn't that amazing?

So, to answer your question, for me to be active in the cause of the people and of the earth and just to be – is to be alive. There is no compartmentalization. It’s all one thing. It’s not like I just exist to go into a little room and write. People have that image of writers, that that's how we live, but it’s not really accurate, not the kind of writing that I do. I know that what I write has a purpose, even if it’s just for me, if I'm just trying to lead myself out of a kind of darkness. So it broadens everything, being active in the world. You see the world. It’s like, you know, I'm learning to paint now, and what I realize, learning to paint, is that I'm learning to see. And activism is like that. When you are active, and you must know this so well, that the more you are active, the more you see, the more you go to see. You know, you are curious. One thing leads to another thing, and it gets deeper and deeper, too. And there’s no end to it...read whole interview and support DemocracyNow click here