Читать книгу Reflecting Rogue - Pumla Dineo Gqola - Страница 10

Along with millions of readers across the world, I have spent a significant amount of my reading life poring over Alice Walker’s words in the last two decades. Although I was to fall in love with many other Black women writers in that time, hers was the first book by a Blackwoman I had ever read. The discovery in her work that I still return to has been echoed as much in the thousands of university students I have taught as it has in conversations with writers. It changes you to see yourself reflected for the first time in what you read. There were no plays, novels, short stories or poems by Blackwomen in my literary syllabus until my Honours year.

By the time I encountered Walker for the first time, almost by accident, I had been taught written literature in isiXhosa, isiZulu, English and Afrikaans. I had read individual essays by Blackwomen, usually in magazines. I remember an article in a woman’s magazine, Femina, I think it was, that meant so much to me I must have read it a hundred times. I could not photocopy it, nor could I tear the page out; and, since the borrowed copy was a magazine no longer on the shelves, I could not buy it. It was an article by Lizeka Mda whose impact I will never forget.

So, my hunger for words by a Blackwoman on the page was real. I had known that I was meant to have a writing life since I was eight years old, and perhaps I needed an adult version of myself to affirm that dream. I loved the magazine Tribute and bought every issue I could after I left home, starting with Maud Motanyane’s column, even when she moved to France for a year and wrote from there in ways I may have been too young to fully appreciate. Then I would read the rest of the magazine – cover to cover until well into my adulthood, through its various changes, until it folded. But until Walker, I had never held an entire book by a Blackwoman in my hand.

And so, even as an avid reader since primary school, I encountered Alice Walker outside the curriculum. I was registered in two literature departments at a leading university, and given what I now know about the volumes of Black women’s writing, I can only shake my head. My own joy at discovering Walker as an undergraduate and my unapologetic admiration for her courage were part of the baggage I walked in with as she granted me an interview in September 2010.

Alice Walker was in South Africa as a guest of the Steve Biko Foundation, making her the second woman, after Mamphela Ramphele, to deliver the annual Biko lecture at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town, on Friday 9 September 2010.

As we wait for her – because I am so nervously excited I walk across Bertha Street from the University of the Witwatersrand campus on which I teach, to the Steve Biko Foundation offices in Braamfontein Centre twenty minutes earlier than I need to – the woman sent to photograph Alice Walker irritates me by questioning why there is so much fuss about her. She reveals herself unfavourably when it becomes clear that she is unaware of who Alice Walker is. I wonder out loud why this is who was allocated this brief by the paper.

But soon, Alice Walker arrives, while I have stepped out for another comfort break. When I walk back into the room, she is sitting behind a table next to her partner, with Nkosinathi Biko from the Steve Biko Foundation, whom I know from our UCT days, and the wonderful Obenewa Amponsah who ensured I was granted this interview. I walk straight to Alice Walker, breathless, and extend my hand in introduction.

“My name is Pumla Dineo Gqola, a womanist and a professor of literature”, and hope I do not sound too rehearsed. She understands what I am saying with my words, with my spirit and with my body.

She is physically smaller in person than I had imagined, sports a short afro and a purple shawl hugs her hip. In my head, she is larger than life, and I talk to her constantly.

In response to my question about what this trip means to her, she speaks about her layered connection to South Africa. She had been active in anti-apartheid politics as part of her lifelong activism against racist violence and any form of injustice. But she also feels deep love and comradeship with both Winnie and Nelson Mandela. “I’ve always wanted to visit South Africa and have been arrested for it before. In fact, it was my pleasure and honour to be arrested with Maya Angelou.”

Walker spoke of having been there with Winnie when she was banished to Brandfort, with her children, a place thought to be the middle of nowhere. “Many of us in the US suffered with her. I grew up in Georgia and so have a deep understanding of what it takes to be a soldier.”

Later on the same day, speaking at ‘An evening with Alice Walker’, she elaborates on this connection, declaring “it is unusual for me to speak at a place where one of my most important teachers is also admired: Fidel Castro”. The crowd roars and claps its approval. There is mutual recognition between Walker and the people who came to hear her read when she mentions Myanmar activist and author, Aung San Suu Kyi, who at the time is in her fifteenth year under house arrest, the brave Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and Bolivian socialist president Evo Morales. The latter two are mentioned as part of a global shift away from the politics of imperialist mineral and land grab. The former affirms the importance of love for humanity in radical politics, like Biko’s own legacy.

Walker is no stranger to criticism. The mixed responses to her third and best known novel, The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, partly illustrate this. In the United States, she was severely lambasted for shining a light on the misogyny that also exists in Black families, accused of judging Blackmen unfairly, and later for allowing a white director to be at the helm of the film adaptation of the same novel. It was inconvenient for many of these critics to pay attention to the manner in which the novel is really about the possibility of human transformation from violence to chosen gentleness, as well as from subjection to a life well lived. Interestingly, she would also later receive criticism for precisely this portrayal of the possibility of unlearning misogyny by some feminists. This novel, then, was criticised for being too hard on Blackmen, by anti-feminist Blackmen, and as too gentle on Mr________, the novel’s patriarch. Quite contrary to the allegation that her anti-racism could be placed in competition with her feminism, womanism allows for a vision of anti-racist feminism that places the lives of Blackwomen at the centre.

A woman who does not want to apologise for valuing herself is a dangerous thing.

In South Africa, many feminists continue to write about womanism as being a conservative form of gender consciousness. I have never been able to understand this, based on the writings of Walker, who obviously speaks a radical feminism. Walker published a definition of the word she coined in the same year as African feminist literary critic and cultural theorist, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi. Both definitions are unapologetic about womanism being feminist, and stress its valuation of Blackwomen and feminist imagination. The coincidence of two feminist women of the African world naming a specific feminism similarly without conversing is a delicious illustration of how we are all connected. It troubles those who need a more “factual” account that flattens how living beings fit into the world. Neither Walker nor Ogunyemi conceives of womanism as anything but a radical feminism of colour. Walker writes “womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” in In search of our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanism is also coined by both with Black women’s literary and other creative cultures in mind.

The novel she refers to most often to illustrate points in interviews, including in hers with me, Possessing the Secret of Joy, was to earn her a different round of criticism, this time from some African feminists. This group took exception to her criticism of female genital mutilation and her right to speak about this as an outsider. Her response to this criticism has illustrated the many ways in which Walker refuses to exile herself from any human condition. As we discuss how she determines which form an idea is to take, I refer to her statement about how characters in novels “do not leave her alone” until she writes them. I use the phrase “bug you”.

She disagrees with my word choice.

“They do not bug me. They are just present … until I understand what has happened to them – wounded them.” This is what happened with Possessing the Secret of Joy. But her poems and essays come to her in a form close to what she eventually shares with the world.

Her womanism is a resolute refusal to look away from such wounding, in as much as it is a commitment to recognising her loving connection to other living beings on the planet. This is not true of all Black feminisms, and need not be, and this is why it is sometimes important to show this difference. Because words are so powerful, they often frighten even the writer. Yet, Audre Lorde insisted that what is important needed to be said, even at the risk of misunderstanding and violence.

In that room with Walker, I want to know whether being so severely criticised for speaking her mind over twenty-six books and numerous interviews gets easier.

“I have a greater level of indifference. You start to understand that you’re like any other creation, so if I say things that people take offense to, that’s who I am. That’s what you get from me.”

She adds that we are all entitled to live and that criticism is not always important.

“Would you criticise a pecan tree? Really, what’s the point? That’s the place you get to.”

I pause and laugh.

And I realise that she is saying something about letting go of the need for approval and external validation, which is so central to how women are raised all over the world. Given that she will speak her mind, “irregardless” (her word), she has learnt this indifference. Importantly, she also adds thoughts on how she understands why people who have been wounded can think “any criticism can be used against all of us”.

I am glad to hear this from a writer whose unfashionable perspective on the world is likely to continue to earn her detractors. I tell her I look forward to this experience, as a writer who is sometimes afraid of her own voice. Her courage also continues to be rewarded by her readers’ appreciation of her vision and generosity.

In the interview she speaks softly. She declares later that evening at the State Theatre in Tshwane that she is soft-spoken. This almost seems like a contradiction, save for the fact of her clear gentleness during the interview.

I end the interview with a very clear sense of having had a conversation with an incredible human being, not a star, but a generous, attentive person. I realise that the power in her written work is like this power I feel in the interview at the Steve Biko Foundation offices. It only lasts twenty-five minutes, but for that period, turned towards me, in conversation, it is as though we are the only people in the room.

I ask her to sign copies of her books. I only bring two, even though I have multiple versions of all her books. At the last minute, I am too shy to offer her the copy of my first book I had brought as a gift.

I do not know what I expected, and I would have been thrilled by the opportunity to meet her. But there she was with no entourage, no restrictions, no apologies for being on the planet in her own fashion. I realise that the Walker I encounter on that Tuesday morning is very much the Walker who speaks to an adoring audience, and dances to Simphiwe Dana and Sibongile Khumalo’s genius later that night at the State Theatre. She is the Walker many of us encounter in her work, the Walker we return to time and again. This is the Walker who galvanises and inspires me to live courageously, who is my compass, and the writer who has written a book for every season in my life. In my late twenties, I once spent a heartbroken weekend in bed in my sixteenth-floor flat with the sun shining in, crying, drinking tea and reading The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart. Sometimes the conversation I have with her is that literal. It is her courage and her joyful embrace of life that makes it possible for her to change and save our lives so many times. It is this Walker that helps us believe that “we are the ones we have been waiting for”, the line from a June Jordan poem that she made the title of one of her books.

I ask my final question, given to me the previous weekend by Madi, whose spirit I chose to love in the same year I discovered Walker, “What have you learnt from your best friends – no matter what form they come in?” That life and this planet is wonderful, “so even if I am weeping as I am writing, there is joy because I know where I came from, from sharecroppers. And how my mother never asked me to come and wash dishes if I was reading. So, to be able to take all that nurturing and that thoughtfulness and to go and to learn how to do this. Every tear comes with laughter.”

“I cannot get over the wonder of this world. I live in a state of wonder … it is all connected”, and living life in both contemplation and wonder is rewarding.

“It is not for nothing that my name is Alice,” she quips.