The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Page B

worldview. When people don’t fit any of those categories, it’s hard to be really that concerned. Yes, you would like to be understood by people. But I do understand that my worldview is different from that of most of the critics. I think most of the reviews have been by white men, you know, real establishment white men. And they are defending a way of life, a patriarchal system, which I do not worship. They are not working-class white males. They are not progressive white males. They are not the white males I have worked with in all the progressive movements and causes I have been active in over the years. I can’t imagine any of these critics being at the pro-choice march. I can’t imagine any of them blockading arms shipments to Central America. I can’t imagine any of them being arrested at antiapartheid demonstrations. I can’t imagine any of them knowing about or caring about the lives of black women, or of black children, or of black men. So there is no reason I should really care that they are angry.
     
    C.D.: But they can hurt your work, your ability to reach readers.
     
    A.W.: They can try. But what can I do about it? I can only persist in being myself.
     
    C.D.: It’s not just white male critics who get very angry at your work. When The Color Purple was first published, black male critics fell all
over each other to denounce what they said was your negative portrayal of black male characters.
     
    A.W.: My feeling was that the way some of the black males revealed themselves to be was far more negative than anything I would ever have even thought about black men. I would not have expected such pettiness. You know, they had no identification with the struggle of women! That’s shocking in a people who, I had always assumed, identified with every struggle for human rights in the world. If you have in your cultural background Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Du Bois, all these people, how then can you really totally ignore a progressive movement like the women’s liberation movement? So that when you read my work, you read it without any acknowledgment that my work, especially The Color Purple , is in the context of a struggle for liberation that women all over the world are engaged in.
    What I did was to go on writing The Temple of My Familiar . But I just wish in general that people would truly read what you write, rather than launch attacks against you based on hearsay, based on what they think you mean. And I wish that men could have more of an appreciation of gentleness in men and not find it so threatening. That’s part of the problem of men who can read The Color Purple and only find negative things about men in it. Because once the men in my book change from being macho men, [the critics] just lose interest in them, they can’t recognize them as men.
     
    C.D.: The striking thing about the men in The Color Purple is how much you permitted them to change, to grow. Mr. ___ starts out as a brute, but he ends up rather loving toward Celie.
     
    A.W.: Right. They would have been bad if they had just remained macho brutes. But they don’t.
     
    C.D.: Do you think some of the attacks on you are really jealousy of your worldly attainments? You’ve got the prizes, the money, the fame—many of these gentlemen critics would like that stuff too.
     
    A.W.: I suppose. There is nothing I can say about it except I’ve worked very hard all my life. I have not had an easy life. I did not start out writing to attain worldly goods. I started out writing to save my life. I had a
childhood where I was very much alone and I wrote to comfort myself. I’ve been very suicidal at times in my life, for various reasons that I don’t want to go into here. But I’ve had some really hard times. And whenever that has happened. I have written myself out of it. And it may look to other people like “silver-platter time,” but to me, it’s just been a very long struggle; so it was always just astonishing to me