By the Light of My Father's Smile (25 page)

By the Light of My Father's Smile

A
LICE
W
ALKER

A Reader's Guide

A Conversation with Alice Walker

“Alice Walker: On Finding Your Bliss”
Interview by Evelyn C. White
This conversation is reprinted from a interview originally printed in
Ms. Magazine in September/October 1998.

“You look like you're dressed for summer,” says Alice Walker, skeptically, to a shorts-clad visitor who arrives at her majestic, 40-acre retreat in northern California. For Walker, who grew up in the blistering heat of rural Georgia, the mid-60s isn't anywhere close to her idea of warm. Indeed, bundled up in a black and gray striped shirt, crimson V-neck sweater, black pants and boots, Walker looks as if she's ready to curl up in front of a roaring fire. A friend from Hawaii, tanned and bright-eyed, is similarly attired except that her pants are a dazzling green; a green that mirrors the rolling, tree-blan-keted vista that extends for miles outside the window of Walker's luxuriant kitchen—which is where she and I settle after her friend excuses herself.

Sipping cups of ginseng tea, we sit at a gleaming wooden table that is adorned with a vase of peach-colored lilies. The petals of the flowers are fully open, making them appear as if they're flirting with a tall, leafy banana tree in an adjacent corner. “I'm going to put it outside on the deck,” says Walker, about the tree. “Maybe it'll coax some heat over here.”

Heat? The woman wants heat? Well, she can count on fire. Because fiery emotions are sure to be evoked in readers of Walker's stunning new novel,
By the Light of My Father's Smile
(Random House). A passionate, richly detailed celebration of sexuality,
By the Light
 … is by far Walker's most erotic novel. Moreover, the complex, multinarrated story, which is set in Mexico, features a ghost father who, from his spiritual perch, watches the rapturous lovemaking of his daughter.

As such, Walker knows that
By the Light
 … is likely to provoke a riot of Bible-thumping outrage. But if anything's clear after examining the life of the Pulitzer prizewinning author of
The Color Purple
, it's that she's no shrinking violet.

In fact, readers and reviewers could have predicted what was to come by taking a close look at Walker's first book, Once, a collection of poetry published in 1968. The title poem features a stanza that reads:

By the Light of My Father's Smile

Considering her literary beginnings as a black woman writer who came out of the block breaking taboos, is it any surprise that thirty years and twenty-two books later, Walker, one of the most censored writers in the U.S., still gets people upset? People like a reviewer of her 1989 novel,
The Temple of My Familiar
, who denounced the book, calling it a “pantheistic plea, lesbian propaganda, a hootchie-cootchie dance to castration.”

On that note, here's a bit of advice for folks wishing to spare themselves grief: Alice Walker is never going to conform. You'd best get with the hootchie-cootchie.

The youngest of eight children, Walker was reared by struggling tenant farmers who, she says, themselves never uttered an off-color remark, despite the indignities they suffered in the Jim Crow South. She entered Spelman College in Atlanta on full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred up north to Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville,
New York, graduating in January 1966.

Continuing the civil rights activism that marked her college years, Walker returned to the South, where she was involved in voter registration drives and campaigns for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi. While there, she met and later married a white civil rights lawyer. Upon taking their vows, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi—a union that brought them a steady stream of taunts, harassment, and murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Undeterred by burning crosses and firebombs, Walker continued to pen groundbreaking literature that chronicled the condition of black women—novels and books of poetry such as
The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and Revolutionary Petunias.

Divorced (amicably), and the mother of daughter Rebecca, Walker worked in New York as an editor for Ms. before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. Already a prolific and highly respected writer, she became internationally known in the 1980s with the publication of
The Color Purple
and its subsequent film release.

The calm, contemplative life Walker has created (typical days will find her tending the artichokes, strawberries, and collard greens in her magnificent garden) has given rise to an ever-expanding cornucopia of novels, stories, essays, and poems. In recent years, she has turned her eye to topics as varied as the Million Man March, Michael Jackson, female genital mutilation, Winnie Mandela, Native American rights, and the injustice of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. Indeed, speaking recently about her admiration for Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Walker proclaimed: “What's not to like about the man? If Fidel could dance, he'd be perfect!”

As evidenced by her new novel, Alice Walker, at age fifty-four, is a sassy, sensuous woman who maintains a passion and hopefulness about life that she seeks to impart to all who cross her path. Witness the neighbor who arrives midway through our conversation. A native of Alabama, the woman is also dressed in long pants and immediately launches into a lament about the “chill” in the air. Hoping to lift her spirits, Walker directs the woman to her kitchen window, from where they both gaze longingly at a huge swimming pond in the meadow below.

“Do you think it's going to get hot enough for us to go in?” asks the woman in a plaintive voice that belies her fifty-plus years.
“Honey, yes,” Walker replies assuredly, “we're going to be peeling off these pants soon.”

Q:
By the Light of My Father's Smile
is your first novel in six years. What prompted such an overtly sexual theme?

A:
At the end of the novel there's a poem that says “When life descends into the pit / I must become my own candle / willingly burning myself / to light up the darkness around me.” Because there's no sense of safety anywhere, no place we feel we can go that's not polluted or poisoned, for a lot of people life has pretty much fallen into the pit. When I was working on my last novel,
Possessing the Secret of Joy
, I realized that sexuality is the place where life has definitely fallen into the pit for women. The only way we'll ever change that is by affirming, celebrating, and acknowledging sexuality in our daily lives.

Women must begin to write more truthfully about the profound mystery of sex. I think that race is also a mystery. Which is to say that neither can be fully comprehended except as deeply mysterious expressions through which we can learn profound lessons about life. It is almost impossible not to learn something about yourself in the sexual act. So it's important for women to be alert to the spiritual growth and self-discovery they can attain by paying close attention to their sexuality.

I was also thinking about how organized religion has systematically undermined and destroyed the sexual and spiritual beliefs of millions of indigenous people. There have been people on earth who didn't think about sex the way white, Western men do. It is very painful to think that the “missionary position,” which reinforces patriarchal, male dominance over women, was forced upon people who once loved having women freely express their sexuality, whether they were on the top or bottom.

Q:
Given the prevalence of patriarchal repression of female sexuality, what was the process you had to go through to get to the extremely erotic language in your book?

A:
I think the process started with wanting myself. Women have to understand that regardless of who does not want us, we have to want ourselves. Then we can begin to see and appreciate other women and the amazing possibilities of self-love and acceptance we can find in our union with each other. We can sit back and wait for men to love us until we are blue in the face, but since I loved women
already, I decided, why wait?

There is also a place of humility that comes from really understanding that we have all entered this plane through the legs of a woman. And that it is a holy place. My love of women intensified during all those years I researched female genital mutilation and thought about women holding down other women and girls to destroy that holy and profoundly sacred temple. I feel this novel is connected to
Possessing the Secret of Joy
because after writing about the debasement and sheer hatred of female sexuality, my spirit needed to write about the joy, the pleasure, promise, and growth. And I wanted to show how women can grow in a relationship with each other.

By no means am I saying that such a relationship is smooth sailing. It definitely isn't, but there are some incredible lessons that can be learned.

Q:
What did you learn about yourself while writing the novel?

A:
That I am completely scandalous, rebellious, and stubborn! All my parts were telling me to write this book because it feels like a medicine for the times. Now, I could be terribly wrong. But with AIDS, we've reached a point where sex is scary for most people. We have lost the sexual spontaneity that most of us thought would be ours forever. That is a major loss. The youth are scared to make love and scared not to.

Q:
With all the taboos about speaking openly of the sexual experiences of black women, was there also immense satisfaction for you in crossing this boundary?

A:
Yes, breaking out is probably what I do best, it seems to me that there is so much joy going on between women that is happening as we live, simultaneously, in a death-dealing culture. It is very joyful to write about this reality.

Q:
This novel will probably turn you into a sex guru. Are you prepared for that?

A:
(Laughs) Yes.

Q:
What is some of the advice you'd offer to women searching for sexual bliss?

A:
Self-love is the first and hardest rule to stick by. Women need to not abandon themselves in their quest for bliss and love. You can love yourself spiritually, physically—in almost any way that anybody else can. I think that anatomically this is the reason we're constructed the way we are.

There are many years when women get caught up in reproductive sex. It's my experience that in their late forties and fifties, women aren't that crazy about reproductive sex because it's generally too late for us; it's not that easy to conceive. But there's something at that point that I've decided to call evolutionary sex. It's a sexuality that can be with women, men, or yourself. It's about exploring and expanding your bodily love and spiritual awareness. That's a form of sex that is within the reach of everybody.

Q:
You have an extraordinary reach and ability with characterization in your novels. Where did the characters in
By the Light
 … come from?

A:
I do a lot of spiritual preparation, so the characters evolve from what feels like a state of grace. I also have a home in Mexico, and being there had a lot to do with it. Going there and trying to learn the language and meeting dark-skinned Mexicans got me thinking about African Americans and American Indians who came to Mexico to find freedom.

I was really struck at one point that, while I don't live in Mexico all the time, I'd done the same thing. I had been chased to Mexico to find peace and freedom. I'd always wanted to go deeper into what it means to be black and Indian.

In the novel, I create a band of people, the Mundo, who are neither African nor Indian, but a blend. The spirit I had to go by in creating this culture is essentially mine. It's a reflection of how I think things should be rather than how they've been. Because when we look at the mess the patriarchy has made of the planet, it's clear that we're on the wrong path. We know that matriarchal societies existed before. It's important that we start thinking about ancient future ways, because this way is not working.

On the other hand, it may be that the whole world is gasping its last breath. As one of the characters in the novel says about black and Indian people, the dominant Western thought has been that we're all vanishing. And it seems as if millions of us are being wiped out every minute. But that doesn't mean that the white men are going to be happy by themselves. Because what they'll have left is a planet that they've ruined, with no idea of how to heal it.

Q:
In the novel, the ancestral spirit father witnesses and comments upon the sexual blossoming of his daughters. How did this narrative approach come to you?

A:
Again, it's my belief, based on my own self, that what women want most is to be blessed in our sexuality by our parents. As women, I believe we'd especially like to be blessed by our fathers. In that blessing, we'd like the father to know everything about us, just like when we were born, and to love us still. We want them to love what we love and bless what we bless. The only way to show that clearly was to have him witness the sexuality of his children. In the culture of the Mundo, whatever mess you've made during life, you have to come back and deal with after you die. So in coming back, the father gets to witness his daughters' sexual behavior.