Walker closes speakers series
Author of "The Color Purple" tells audience to "interbe"

By JENNIFER LEWANDOWSKI
Reporter Contributor

Alice Walker, the author perhaps best-known for her novel, "The Color Purple," enlightened the audience in the Mainstage Theatre April 26 with her words of poetic justice when she said, "You cannot just be yourself alone. You have to 'interbe.'"

These sentiments, taken from her poem "Interbeing," reflected the tone of Walker's conversation with the audience as she wove together the narrative of her own childhood memories, the histories of African-Americans living in a racist South and stories of her own struggles, largely through poetry, in an effort to emphasize harmony with nature and with each other.

The final speaker of the Distinguished Speakers Series for 1999-2000, Walker talked of hearing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech during the "March on Washington" in 1964-when she was in her late teens-and his request for those individuals from the South to return home.

"He said, 'Go back to Georgia, go back to Mississippi,'" she said. "And I had not thought I would go back to the South. And he said go back, and so I went back."

When Walker returned, she joined the Friends of the Children of Mississippi, an organization dedicated to teaching children. The lack of history books available to the children was staggering, and so she set out to acquire a history through the written autobiographies of people living in the South.

She recounted several histories given to her to share with children: one man talked at length of repeatedly witnessing the savage killings of African-Americans by law enforcement officers; one woman spoke of how her home was bombed several times by the Ku Klux Klan; another man questioned "how he feels about the country his son will have to grow up in."

Spurred on by such stories, a soft-spoken Walker asked members of the audience to engage in a dialogue with themselves and with each other about several major issues swirling in today's mainstream.

"I want you to think about Elian Gonzalez, I want you to think about freedom, I want you to think about the meaning of democracy, and I want you to think about Cuba, andŠIndiaŠI want you to think about all of those things," she said.

"We are living in a time that is so frighteningŠso wondrous, and I wanted to share with you some of the things I've been thinking aboutŠbecause of what is happening in our world, in our communities," Walker said.

She used her poetry as a vehicle to convey some of her thoughts on the world, reflecting often on her own struggles.

"In the face of all of this, as we set out to do in Mississippi-among other things, I was interracially married-there was poetry, which was such a help," she said, dedicating the first poem she would read to "all the women here, and all of the men who love them, and all of the men who love the feminine in themselves."

The poem, "A Woman Is Not A Potted Plant," pays homage to a growth unheeded by domesticity, by sex, in its lines: "A woman is not a potted plant, her roots bound to the confines of her houseŠher leaves trimmed to the contours of her sexŠA woman is wilderness unbounded, holding the future between each breath."

"Let the feminine live if you are to be as beautiful as you can be," she said, calling the ways in which the feminine has been slighted in the world "one of the major crimes against ourselves."

Remaining true to her "womanism," a phrase coined by Walker to describe her approach to feminism, she touched on the frequent disappointment and disregard rampant in today's world.

"When you live in a society that crushes you, and a society that is ignorant of the fact that it is crushing itself, what do you do? How do you live?" she asked.

Her response again came in the form of a poem she wrote, "Expect Nothing, Live Frugally on Surprise," through which she told the audience to "Stop short of the urge to bleed," "Tame wild disappointment" and "Discover the reason why so tiny human giantŠexists at all, so scared, so unwise."

Walker, who recited several more of her poems throughout the evening, turned her focus from poetry to activism, sharing with the audience excerpts from a letter written to her by an individual involved in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. She also talked about Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and writer who remains on death row in Philadelphia. A long-time supporter of Abu-Jamal-whom she likened to Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X-Walker recently finished writing the preface to his latest book.

Walker reminded the audience that we all "walk quite alone-and there is the coming to terms with that." But, she said, we all need encouragement.

She urged members of the audience to heed the advice of the Hopi Indians who believe that "all that we do must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we've been waiting for."