The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Page A

in our work for the animals” when we adopt “artificial male language.” Please comment.
     
    A.W.: I read her article and I agree absolutely. I think the feeling that the animal rights movement and a lot of other movements are dominated by white men who have a very dispassionate, rational, linear way of approaching reality keeps away a lot of passionate Third World people who are really sick of that. That’s gotten us where we are today, which is on the edge of extinction.
    Who needs this? Who wants this? Who cares about trying to sit under that kind of tutelage—condescending, cold, cut off from feelings? Wherever I go, I take my passion. It’s part of me. The whole thing is what you get. In any case, it’s what I keep.
    Think of it this way. During the enslavement of black people in this country, white women were required to look on the most savage beatings and also to administer some of them. White women were not supposed to care, only to take care of business—to see that “Suki” was beaten and “John” had his foot chopped off. This made the white woman’s enslavement that much more profound. She couldn’t even be herself in that situation.
    A brave white woman looking at slavery would have had to try to see herself as one of the people enslaved. She would have had to know from her own suffering that there was a connection between herself and the slaves. She would have had to bond with the slaves and not with her husband.
    That is what it seems to me we have to ask ourselves in bonding with animals rather than with the killer. What permits us to be who we are? I think the animals give us much more freedom to be who we are than people who are oppressing all of us.
     
    E.B.: Why do you think that people who care about nonhuman animals are often called sentimental, and why does it seem that the word “sentimental” has a negative connotation rather than a positive one?
     
    A.W.: The people who call us sentimental have destroyed great tracts of feeling in themselves, and what else can they do but say that we’re sentimental? We are talking about people who have big holes in themselves that were probably punched out when they were children. Now when
they meet other people who don’t have the holes, they feel they have to say something. They have to project onto us.
    I think some people think of sentimentality as negative because they associate it with women. To say that someone is sentimental, in the sense of being like women, is, of course, a positive thing. It means you still have your sentiments, your capacity to care.
     
    E.B.: In your essay “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse,” you wrote, “But if by some miracle in all our struggle the earth is spared from a nuclear holocaust, only justice to every living thing will save humankind.” What’s your vision of that justice?
     
    A.W.: Obvious things like an end to hunger, an end to illiteracy. To put it another way, the beginning of health for everyone, food for everyone, education for everyone, respect for everything.
    Part of what justice means for nonhuman animals is that there will just have to be fewer people, because I think the insistence of people to cover the Earth is itself a grievous insult to the nonhuman animals whose space is squeezed into nonexistence. Just because people can have three, four, and five children does not mean that that’s the best thing for all creation. It definitely is not. Helping people to see that is an early project which has to go along with animal rights.

4
    “Writing to Save My Life”: An Interview with Claudia Dreifus from The Progressive (1989)
    CLAUDIA DREIFUS: Your new novel, The Temple of My Familiar , has been published to mixed reviews. You spent eight years writing it. Surely, this must hurt.
     
    ALICE WALKER: Well, you can only be hurt by the criticism of the people you respect. And failing that: the people you know. And failing that: the people who understand your life. Or care about your