Alice Walker meditates, and it was from her meditation cushion in Mexico that Walker, then 60, suddenly rose with a particular conviction to help those bearing greater burden than herself. The renowned poet and author, who became the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize with her novel The Color Purple in 1982, is now 70, and her most recent book The Cushion in the Road is a collection of meditations on Walker's expansive history of activism and her place in the world.
"I realised when I heard about the bombing of Gaza and it coincided with my sister's death ... I knew I had to get off my cushion," she tells a packed house at the Sydney writers' festival. Walker had a compulsion to travel to Gaza, if only to connect with anyone who had survived the destruction and tell them that there was at least one person who did not agree with where her American taxes were going "and what what they were doing to them".
Walker's activism pre-dates her Gaza trip. The eighth and youngest child of impoverished Georgia share-croppers, Walker's childhood was spent under the Jim Crow law in an atmosphere of institutional racism. In order for their black children to receive an education, her community had to build its own school and protect it. "The white children had a school bus, they had adequate schooling, adequate medical care and we did not and we had to make do," explains Walker, who learned young that "in a terrible situation, people are very generous and very kind."
For this reason, her love of literature flowered even amidst this deprivation; her parents were both great storytellers, encouraged their children's education and filled their household with whatever books they could find. Walker had had one of her eyes destroyed as a child when her brother deliberately shot at her with a BB gun, and the self-conscious girl retreated into a literary world of English literary classics.
It's reading that she credits with the ability to develop political empathy. "If our children could just read everything and feel themselves into everything they're reading, things would be very different when they grew up," she says, recalling a particular fondness for Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. "I recognised myself in Jane Eyre. It amazes me how many white people can't read themselves in black characters. I didn't feel any separation between me and Jane. We were tight."
Walker's parents struggled but put her through college, and she became committed to the American civil rights campaign of the 1960s. She and the man she married in 1965 were the first legal interracial marriage in the state of Mississippi. She knew Martin Luther King; on the day of his murder, she miscarried her first child.
The activist need to "show up for others" discussed in the book has carried her across to the world, not merely to arriving in Gaza on the flotilla (her participation was perhaps the reason that a subsequent visit to Ramallah for an arts festival saw her interrogated by Israeli border security for nine hours without food or water). Amongst decades of political activity, she has met with Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela and started an orphanage in Kenya.
Walker feels great disillusion with the political limitations of the Obama presidency, and supported of the the Occupy movement in the United States. It's this last political project she cites as her greatest current inspiration. "My vision of change is a rumbling underneath, that is us, a rumble of us," says Walker. "A change that is coming, that is inevitable. If we don't come up with a system that is egalitarian, empathetic, loving, giving ... There really isn't much of a reason for us to continue to survive."
