What’s Wrong With This Storyline?

Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Color Purple,� recently sat down with Bebe Moore Campbell, winner of the NAACP Image Award for outstanding literature, at the invitation of the nonprofit author lecture series Writers Bloc. The authors’ discussion ranged from Walker’s new book, “By the Light of My Father’s Smile,� to religion and society at large.

“This book is about a particular kind of healing between fathers and daughters, and it reinforces my very strong belief that if fathers could be in alliance with their daughters from birth and support them completely to the point of embracing their autonomy, we could actually change the way the world is going, and we could change society within a couple of generations,� Walker said.

“To make a very complicated story somewhat less complicated and brief, two black anthropologists in the ‘40s received money from their church to go and study an endangered tribe of people called the Mundo. The Mundo people have a distinct way of looking at life, which the church, of course, does not recognize as valid. And this anthropologist’s father, even though he’s an agnostic, goes there and tries to force a sort of indoctrination that he doesn’t believe on these people. And in doing this, he comes up against the very strong sexuality of his own daughter, and in a fit of being unable to control her, he beats her and scars her very badly.�

Following is an edited version of the authors’ conversation.

Bebe Moore Campbell: I read your book this week, and it suggested to me that fathers need to support the sexuality of their daughters. Something I feel is true, but I understand the fear that can block that, particularly now, we’re living in an age of treacherous sexual disease and then there’s also the fear of pregnancy. So how can, if you’re talking to the fathers in the room, how could they negotiate that for young daughters? What does your book suggest on that?

Alice Walker: Well, it’s precisely because we are living in a time of disease and death that fathers must be more up-front honest and truthful with their daughters. And fathers tend to know what’s out there, and it’s a good thing, I think, for them to share that knowledge with their daughters, so that the daughters do not go out into the world unarmed.

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Campbell: Do you think it’s more the fear of pregnancy, the fear of disease, or is it basically the fear of the daughter’s sexuality that is the greatest fear?

Walker: Well, it’s indoctrination of at least 5,000 or 6,000 years of patriarchal thought and also the Judeo-Christian religion the church especially has really made many of us deeply fearful of sexuality in women because it has been demonized as something that Eve is responsible for, basically the evilness of it. I think even fathers--like the one in this book, who’s an agnostic--who don’t subscribe to that, there’s still a way in which it is just so entrenched in the culture that people don’t even think about it. They just think that as the child begins to look like a woman they have to back up.

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Campbell: Do you think that when we can’t find [support] can women, particularly in this society, although they haven’t been the only ones hurt by the repressiveness of the sexuality, but I think we’ve been the most hurt, can we nurture ourselves back to health? If we’ve been repressed, if we’ve been molested, if we’ve been wounded in whatever way that Magdelena in the novel “The Light of my Father’s Smile� has been wounded--she seemed unable to nurture herself back, at least on this side of . . . life.

Walker: Yes, I think that, as she says in this novel, there are some things you don’t heal from in this lifetime and, fortunately, the people of the Mundo have a belief system that permits them to heal after this lifetime. In fact, their belief is that you continue after death for just a short period of time in which you do repair the damage that you’ve done to others and to yourself and then you disappear. I mean you’re gone. They don’t have this sense of, you know, coming back again and again and again. It’s a very different way of looking at things, and it’s very indigenous in that these are people who don’t feel like they have to stick around or necessarily be remembered. They’re more like the people who live a life and then carefully erase it so that the Earth remains very clean of any kind of inflicted damage done by them.

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Campbell: I think when you all read this, you will want to hang out with the Mundo. They are the kinda people, I mean, they’re living in the moment . . . they were cool, they were just easy-come easy-go, permissive, open, friendly.

Walker: Well, it has a lot to do with facing genocide, which is basically what is happening with indigenous peoples and which has been happening for 500 years. It’s their determination to hold on to a belief system and to not let it die because they see that it is really valuable.

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Campbell: Getting back to the sexuality aspect of it, why do you think that with this character, Magdalena, for example, who was brutalized by her father in an effort to suppress her sexuality and then her wounds are expressed sexually, why do you think that happens so much?

Walker: Well, what happened with her was that she had just had her first really wonderful sexual encounter with this young boy, and she was feeling all of her sexual power, her sensuality. She finally really got it that her body was hers, you know, that it had its own rhythm and its own light and its radiance and she came home full of this feeling to a father who was just completely freaked out by this and whose only response to it was to become violent.

He’s dealing with at least 2,000 years of patriarchy and indoctrination about how you deal with just this situation, you try to control it. So this young girl then, who is told that you mustn’t ever see this person again and instead is given food, becomes this huge person and she turns on her body. She actually turns on her body, she pierces everywhere she can pierce. She has chains through her nipples, she has a crucifix through her labia. She has turned all of that beauty, all of that warmth, all of that sensuality, and what I’m saying is how different the world would be if she had come home at that point and instead of meeting this violence she had met someone who said, “What you’re doing is a little dangerous, but let me tell you, I know it’s wonderful and I can help you not be victimized by your own feelings� and sat with her. That would have been ideal.

. . . And could I just say something right here about how this book connects to “Possessing the Secret of Joy,� which was about [the practice of] female genital mutilation. I worked on that issue for almost a decade, and I was able to see where this goes in its extreme. If you demonize the genitalia of females, you end up literally erasing them. And it was after really feeling very depressed about the situation and working on it that I realized that what we need to do is affirm this sexuality and the sensuality of women and of young girls and to be protective, but also in such solidarity that what we have is affirmation of autonomy rather than locking them in the house and putting them behind veils and, you know, treating them like the Taliban might.

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Campbell: I like you. This is all from a child from Eatonton, Ga. Tell me a little bit about what that was like growing up, because here you are espousing really kinda global ideas and a different kinda spirituality, a different way of looking at sexuality, and you came from a very small rural town. What nurtured you there so that you could become who you are? Were you that kid in the second grade saying, ‘No, teacher, you’re wrong,’ or speakin’ out at church?

Walker: No, no, no, I wasn’t. I was very accepting. I was very loving. I was very open. And I was very loved, and I think that’s it. Also, I wasn’t even in a town; I was in the countryside, and it was rare to see anybody other than my family for days and weeks, so nature was very present and I really learned a very deep respect for nature.

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Campbell: Did your parents see your gifts?

Walker: Well, my mother says that she saw my gifts but she didn’t know what they were. She said, ‘My God, what are those?’ No, actually, she says that when I was crawling I used to be missing a lot and she found me curled up behind the house with a Sears Roebuck catalog and a twig and I was writing in the margins. I love that story because it seems to say to me something that I often feel, which is that writing for me is an ongoing past-life experience and that it’s not just now. I’m reading a wonderful book by Malidoma Patrice Some, who’s a shaman from West Africa, and she talks about how artists and writers and people like us, part of what we do is we heal ancestors and when we are that young, like when you’re crawling, you’re still very close to them and so you’re trying always, I think, to make that connection and to reach back and to understand the ancestors and to bring peace. If you could heal the ancestors, you bring peace to the present. And this thought has really kept me going through a lot of the turmoil that has accompanied my life as a writer, because I have felt like I know what my job is even if nobody else ever gets a clue.

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Campbell: Are you Buddhist?

Walker: I’m really a pagan.

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Campbell: What does that mean?

Walker: Well, another way of saying it, because people have so many preconceptions about paganism, is to say I’m a naturist. I believe that nature is my rock, you know, that nature is what feeds me spiritually and is what I feel connected to totally and supported by.

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Campbell: Now when you were in Eatonton growin’ up I’m gonna assume that you went to a black Baptist church.

Walker: Methodist.

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Campbell: When did you start moving away? I mean, because some of us have been sitting in these churches for years going, “I don’t know . . . ,� but we remain there.

Walker: Well, when I was 13 I left, because it was very clear to me that nature, which was outside the window, was far more fascinating than what was going on inside. Even though I liked the music, and I think if we had been Baptists instead of Methodists I would have stayed longer because Baptists can sing better. . . . My mother was the mother of the church, and I used to go with her, and she did everything. She mopped the floor. She upholstered the pulpit. She put carpeting down. She washed the windows. She emptied the ashes out of the stove. She did everything. She got it perfectly beautiful. On Sunday, she would come bearing an armful of flowers from the garden, and so here was this perfectly beautiful place, because my father and brothers would have cleared all the outside part, and she was never asked to speak. Never.

But the thought that here she has infused this place with whatever spirit it is ever gonna have and she can’t speak.

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Campbell: You know and it’s very interesting, particularly for traditional African American churches, the women are not only the backbone when it comes to the financing of it but also, as you said, doing the work.

Walker: And then the preacher gets up there and he talks about how evil we are, and I just really had too much self-respect.

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Campbell: Let me just segue because we’re runnin’ out of time into the writing aspect. Of all the books you’ve written, which has been the most difficult to write?

Walker: I would say “Possessing the Secret of Joy� because of the, just the sheer horror of trying to deal with the practice that eradicates or severely cripples the sexuality of women and the physical health of women and children.

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Campbell: Your recurring theme is that women heal through self-love. Do you think we’re getting that yet?

Walker: Yes, I do. I think that women are really becoming very different people. And I think that one way that you can see that, and it’s not necessarily the greatest way at this point, is that they’re trying to figure out a new name for themselves. Unfortunately, I don’t believe the new name is “guy.� But there is being born a new kind of person, and I think that the way that people have latched on to that term, which is so obliterating of femaleness, indicates a search for some way of acknowledging we aren’t really the way we used to be. We are becoming something else. But what is it? I would say that whatever it is, it is in our interest to be sure that it still affirms our female selves and not let it be something that just completely cancels that out.