 Good evening everyone and welcome to this wonderful occasion today. My name is Reverend Embaba Henry O'Doone LeBron. I am an interfaith minister as well as a Yoruba Lukumi priest. I am honored to be here and I'm honored that so many of you today have taken the time to be here. I just want you to just close your eyes for a minute, just to sort of relax for a second and just concentrating your breath. Take a deep breath and relax. Just relax so that we can let go of the day and be in the now, presently here at this moment. One more breath and open your eyes, relaxing. Before we begin to give honor to the Creator, we must give honor to the native people of this land. We must give honor for all that was taught by them. To this continent called the Turtle Continent by native people, we are going to commence by saluting and giving salutation to the east, to the north, to the south and to the west, to Father Sky, to Mother Earth and to all the spirits of this land that have supported all of us through all these years. I will now start a libation. A libation is a way of honoring the ancestors through the African traditions by pouring water or sometimes spirits on the ground to honor. We use water because water is the most simplest element and the highest conduit and way of communing with God. If we have nothing in the world to give God as an offering, water is always available. Omitutu, freshwater, iletutu, freshen this home. Onatutu, freshen our road, ariku bababwa, freshen our ancestors. Ariku mojuba olofi, blessing be of God the Creator. Mojuba olo dumari, blessing be of the female aspect of the Creator. Mojuba shedda, mojuba kodda, blessing be to those teachers that came before us. Mojuba babatobi, blessing be to those mothers and fathers who came before us. Mojuba boboegungung, blessing be to all the ancestors that made our way here and paved the path for us to be here. But we have to remember how we all got here. It wasn't by coincidence, but it was by the effort of our ancestors that made it in their efforts, made it happen that we are able to enjoy this place, this now moment. Mojuba orisha, blessing be to the divinities that God has as emissary to take care of all of us. And mojuba bobo, babalocha iyalocha kekawaile, blessing be to all the highest priests and all of the priests who take care of the land, take care of the traditions, and take care of all of us. Ashe. We're going to do an affirmative prayer. God, you are love, you are source, for you are the beginning of everything. You are the sun beaming in our faces, the gentle breeze whispering in our ears, a mother's touch. You are omnipresence. We see you in our brother and sister's faces, on the oceans, rivers, streams, trees and landforms. We are the constant state of awe at your magnificence. Your wisdom, intelligence, you are the awe in awe. We know that you are in us and express yourself as us. We dwell on this divine intelligence. We breathe and live in your truth. Our sister Alice Walker is your channel of pure expression and genius. She has a loving relationship with you, God, and you respond to her unconditionally. God, we know that this book and title, taking the arrow out of your heart, is your creation. It will assist us in all our personal transformation and the understanding of others, our community and ourselves. We know that these poems will inspire us all, support and heal us in all aspects of our lives. We are grateful to you, God, our ancestors and divinities for all that you have and continue to do for us. For the opportunity to share this evening in support and solidarity with our sister Alice Walker. We anticipate with much joy in our hearts the pure success of this book and the pleasure we will have reading this insightful and inspiring words. God, we are so grateful for you. We are so thankful for what you have done to us all in your love. Thank you, God. With much gratitude today, we give you thanks. We ask you to bless us. And with this, I release these words in much thankfulness. Gratitude. Asheh. Amen. I have listened to you and Lucille my whole life. Sometimes when I have had the blues, I have listened to you and thought, it can't be all that bad. I'm on this planet while he is too. And he is singing. It's hard to take this leaving of us that you've done and get how tired, how exhausted you must be singing to us all those years. And what did you eat out of ponder? Pondering your portliness, especially in the early days at the back door of how many of those respectable establishments. You know that word, irrepressible? That describes the joy and pain of our resistance to darkness giving up, wearing out? This is what I thought of you. Who knew what kept you going, except the spirit that refused to surrender to spare? When she was three or four, I took my daughter to hear you sing in Mississippi. You were amazing. My favorite word in observation about life. And you, large and dark and radiant with your special brand of unstoppable joy, kiss her with warm delight, cheek. And smiled at her father and me outlaws in the land and we stood in awe. This painting by Charal Van Dyke. I watched her one day in her studio in Amsterdam. You were on one easel, Billie Holiday on another. I chose Billie, but the painting of you never left my heart. Twelve years later or something like that, I called Van Dyke and she remembered perfectly how much I wanted you. Guess what she said. When I said at last I can afford that green BB, I still have it. But you came across the ocean, across the continent, across my living room, to my rest where I can see you. Every day, the greenness of your skin, testifying a word you loved. To your supreme earthliness, thank you for being here while I am here. While we are here, you radiant soul, thank you for your guidance, truth, honesty, passion, sincerity. Most importantly, most beautiful of all, your charm I found. Thank you for your special darkness that illuminates both shadow and light, that magic. All those days and nights on the road, you gave all you had, your ways, all of your dying wealthy. Thank you for teaching. Thank you for reaching. Thank you. Because we did not have money for fancy futon sit-ins with doctors who had speck-filled eyelids. See, our therapy sessions resided in the verses of the person whose realms meant a connection, which meant a weapon, which meant assault and my possession. See, my position was to listen even if the red lines got tested. See, my position was to listen even if my mind was messed up. Hmm, every woman wonders where her secret lies. See, I said my position was to listen even if I was destined. This time boy who loved rapping like girls that like rap, had his tight curls, love skull caps and basketball. Shade baby dolls, toy cars and all that, but what can you call that when every sample of a woman was a damsel or a damn hoe or a dusty trophy waiting at the lip of a mantle. See, and that's where feminism dismantled rap for me. No room to access the chimneys, no heat, but plenty of room to consume hate and plenty more for envy. Still, our stomachs were empty with the fingertips at the radio, so all of the statistics tempt me to write this just in the fifth grade, y'all. Listen, I'm the best of the dress-ups and the best thing you can do is have a lever holding your vest. You like spatters to catch up, but while my statuses go up, you would be quicker to lessen. I was counting my stacks and you were over there stressing. I'm secure with my own while you constantly checking. Taking women on your decks to take a kiss on your neck and yo, she doggie you, dude. Thought that you would expect that you'll use a weenie-beenie baby. Thought that you would expect that you're the matter, the meaner, and I'm also the queen of bringing. It's like Serena Wiccan, now you're the dreamer and I'm the girl you want to be with no Victoria's secrets. Looking for a girl to sleep, but then I'm planning to keep it. Huh. Y'all can keep that. Yeah. Because in the fifth grade, that was my second rap. I can't believe I got sucked in that. So I had to find my way and naturally I seconded that. Southside to them section cats. North 25 back to Stuyvesant. Down to hill back to Carter Ratten on Hermitage. On Hermitage. That's where little Benny Wop and Sean Carter met. Not only to give me a blank roadmap, but to give me a portrait, to portray the poor kids to see the streets of something else besides the trap. So I have no choice but to use this voice. I get nasty with my rap because it allows smooth roughness to help fill voice to speak to little girls who has little interest in boys other than to compete. Where running the streets could possibly only mean allowing your place sneakers and the gravel to meet into the fast one such as the finish line disguised as two hands. Both hands. That was our vision of a resurrection. Forward moving was the only sign of perfection and keeping it real was the only sign of perfection. So no sir. We did not have money to talk to someone who got paid to listen. Our only counsel hugged our ears and exchanged hardship for political prescription. So we are the doctors and the clients. And we fulfill every requirement between those two spectrums. More than PhD qualified. So when a new guy comes, we don't use our eyes to inspect them. No, we dap them. We headphone, might check them and allow our ears to accept or reject them. Protecting our homes with deadly musical weapons is not only what's expected. It's the B side of the record when the tables are turned. It's the chills that we feel after the CD gets burned, after the record gets dropped to your seat. This seat is not equipped for this bodily detox. So give me a dougie fresh beatbox or repeat rock track. Give me the chills on the hill as if Lauren was back. Put public enemy in front of me so I can feel pro-black no matter the fact. You can sit down and see the crowd react. See the gospel detach. See my bodily get beat back. Ventress of God. Yahweh! You've decided to spend your Friday night with us as we all celebrate the release of Alice Walker's newest book of poems Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. As you may know, the book is presented in both English and in Spanish. In this timely collection of nearly 70 works, bears witness to our troubled political moment while chronicling a life well lived. It is such a blessing that Alice Walker sincerely wants us to celebrate life and honor the divine within ourselves. It's really a blessing, right? She really cares about us. Tonight's program has been presented in partnership with Atria Books, which is an imprint of Simon and Schuster. And I want to acknowledge Yona de Moniz and Milena Brown. So if we could please give them a hand. They've been wonderful partners. They're continuously supporting black women in presenting their best works and we need fierce supporters like them in our lives. I really have this bouquet of flowers for Yona. She's struggled with cancer actually and has been going through chemotherapy all summer as we've been planning this beautiful offering. Yes, for Miss Walker, but also for all of you. So I really want to acknowledge and thank you for your leadership and your continued support. Not only of me, but of all the beautiful black women, black girls that are going to feel empowered and inspired and motivated to create because you're putting our work out in the world. So thank you so much. It is my pleasure to introduce tonight's conversation between the brilliant and kind Alice Walker and scholar, writer, and activist Salamisha Tillett. Salamisha Tillett is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing Programs at Rutgers University Newark and the founding director of the New Art School Justice Initiative at Express Newark. She's also a regular critic for the New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery, Citizenship and Racial Democracy in Post-Civil Rights America and is currently working on two book projects in search of the color purple with Abrams Press and all the rays Mississippi goddamn and the world needed Simone made with eco books. In 2003, her nurse sister co-founded Along Walk Home, a Chicago based nonprofit that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women and is subject to the writer of Story of a Rape Survivor, multimedia performance. So without further ado, I'm happy to introduce it to Salamisha. So I have the good fortune of being in conversation with Alice Walker this evening and I would like to invite you to the stage. Not only have I had the good fortune of being in conversation with Miss Alice Walker this evening, but a couple of weeks ago my sister and I took the voyage to Northern California and I had the opportunity of spending two glorious days with you and there's something you said that day that I held on to and that you know sometimes you don't have to spend and it's also in your book here in terms of your relationship to your translator that you don't have to spend a lot of time with someone for them to have a meaningful impact. So I wasn't sure if I'd ever see you again so I was holding on to that and now that I have this gift I feel so blessed and so there's something for me as an avid reader of your work as a student of your work and as someone who's been deeply molded by your politics and your poetry and that when I met you I didn't realize that your starting place is as a healer and I thought of you as a writer and an activist and it seems kind of silly because obviously your work is deeply about healing but I felt that energy so profoundly when I was with you and so that brings me to the title of this collection of poetry and for those of you who haven't had a chance to read it yet Alice writes in the introduction that the original title was The Long Road Home inspired by the poem that you have here about Muhammad Ali and that you were invited to do a lecture at a university and you changed the title of the book as a result and so here you say that you know but life will change course and so you're invited to give this talk and at that talk you talk to them about how that arrow many feel in their hearts is not theirs alone remind them it is worthwhile to train to learn how to remove it so what do you mean by this arrow this wound that many of us have and this journey of taking it out it's a metaphor and lastly it changed the course of the book for you in many ways well when I was very deeply in love with someone and the relationship ended I was in incredible pain this is leading you from the romantic angle we're gonna get to the other angle but I was very hurt and the pain I don't know how many of you have had this kind of suffering oh that's what I thought yeah you know no matter what you do it's just there you wake up in the morning it's there you go to bed at night it's there well anyway this went on for far too long and I really was at the end of my wits and then just by chance someone brought some a tape by Pema Chodron the Buddhist nun called Awakening Compassion and she was talking about how part of our problem with our suffering is that we were shot in the heart with an arrow not just a romantic one or you know where you're having a terrible time with someone but in any case you're suffering but instead of actually taking the arrow out or learning how to take it out you stand there and you scream at the person who shot you ooh and what a waste of time that turns out to be so what is important to do is to learn how to take it out the whoever shot you they're gonna be somewhere you know doing whatever they do and not even thinking about how much pain you're in so you might as well just not even be concerned about them so part of the practice is founded in meditation which I hope a lot of you do because in this period it is what will help you a lot and a very quick way of describing one of the ways that this particular kind of meditation that she taught me as I was lying there for a full year of suffering imagine that this room is completely filled with very hot heavy dark like you know we had big fires in Mendocino so I'm describing basically what I saw out of my window but that kind of smoke where you can't even hardly breathe but imagine that in this room this room is full of that smoke and you need to be able to inhale all of it you need to sit up straight and draw it all of it every corner of it that's in here wherever it is you take that into your body and as you're doing that you imagine that you are taking in all the weight of the world and your own suffering and whatever is really plaguing you and then you hold it just for a minute and then on the out breath you decide right before you let it go you decide what would you rather have this is what we got we got floods, we got earthquakes we got tsunamis, we got storms we have you know presidency but what would you rather have you know and so you conjure that and for me it is a you know being on the beach I love the ocean and you breathe that out but the catch here is that you breathe it out whatever it is that you want to replace the arrow, the suffering the smoke, whatever it is that you want to replace that with you don't breathe it out for just yourself and your family and your friends you breathe it out for everyone so that you cover the earth with your own dream of what is wonderful which would mean in our case if we're dealing with the beach we would cover the planet with people all over being able to walk out of their doors as they have done for so many hundreds and thousands of years to a clean beach you know to wonderful fishing to great swimming and that's what you wish for everyone and this eventually begins to relieve your own suffering does that make sense to you? see? so I mean the image of the beach and many many years of people coming to it and now in some ways it not being corrupted and changing in the environment one of the things I was curious about with this book is the way in which it defies national borders or at least you're such a global citizen that in terms of topics and countries and people that you empathize with it's such a terrain but this is your first book and make the borders you know and I don't really respect them as something that's going to keep me separate sorry I was thinking about the turn to and we talked about this before but that it's bilingual and do you see this as your first clearly bilingual book it's in English and Spanish and so practically I know you live in Mexico or you have a house in Mexico but when I was when I read about it being in Spanish it was during the summer intense crisis around children and parents being detained and separated and so I thought what a timely and you're always both ahead of time and on time but I thought aquariums are like that ok there are so why do this book in two languages well ok but then I do want to go back to Mohammed Ali and the changing of the title I just got off on a tangent actually yeah since the early 80s I've lived in Mexico as much as I can and that usually means a few months out of the year and I have really good friends there and I have you know grandchildren by you know my friends and people that I really love however because I'm constantly writing in English and rather long things in English even though I have the best intentions my Spanish study just falters which means that my spent and I can get around but my Spanish is actually poor it's really poor and I'm very aware of it so that when my friends often say to me well you see what do you really do what are you doing why are you writing in that book and I felt the need to especially on my blog because more people relate to blogs and the internet and the computer I felt the need to have my work in Spanish so that my friends could know what I do they I'm a mystery they may think I'm running something and so you know lucky for me I met this incredible Cuban many many years ago when I was in Cuba and he has become my translator and so it's wonderful how it works I write you know poems or whatever and I send them to Manuel within three or four days and he's not you know the computer situation there is sometimes very tricky but when he can work on what I send him within days I can put it up in Spanish and I just love that and I feel like you know just as my Spanish is not great well their English is not great so we kind of we're just working our way as well as we can toward each other and that is what I think we can do I don't think we will all ever really have everybody you know other people stuff down totally you know we would like to but that doesn't mean that we can't do what we can and so you know I I love the people that I love you know in countries where they speak Spanish and I just want to be more known you know yeah Muhammad Ali the change in title oh yeah Muhammad Ali well you know the Long Road Home and what's so amazing is that you that's the name of your organization the Long Road Home is yours the Long Walk Home the Long Walk Home yeah behind us the Long Road Home basically I wrote that for Muhammad Ali because he was so inspiring to me not as a boxer because actually I can't bear it when people are hitting each other in the ring I anyway but what I loved about him was that even though he beat up people for a living when they tried to force him to fight against the Vietnamese people he refused and went to jail he just said well come and just take me to jail I'm not going to kill these people now to me that represents part of his Long Road Home we get on a road home we're lucky we're lucky we get on that Long Road Home and what is that road is the road to the true self so whatever you think of Muhammad Ali he had his sexist ways and his whatever but when it came to what truly mattered at a time that really made a great deal of difference in the way our people could see who they had to remain people who don't just kill other people because somebody tells you he did what was right and that is so inspiring because we hope that when our time comes we can say no just take me to jail FEMA just come get me I won't do what you're asking I will not because the Long Road Home is to get you to who you really are where you actually live I mean we can exist that's what we do already a lot of us but to actually live you know so anyway but then I went to Stanford and they were talking about something else and somehow I changed the title I mean 2015 and 2016 these are from those two years that many of us in this room have lived through so I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of both writing poetry in response to those years and then blogging and I'm assuming you're still taking are you still well a lot of my journal now is on my website because I felt all along that it was crazy to write something and then wait for it to be published a whole year because by year after year who are you you know and with my memory who knows I do I love it I love the immediacy of it I like to just send things out on the air it seems very natural to me I mean so I think it's probably astonishing to a lot of people in the audience who've read much of your published work that the poetry itself is an urgent response and then the blog is an even more immediate response for you is that how do you see them in different things or you know it feels just very natural I mean I in fact you know the problem is if I talk about something then I probably won't write about it but I'm going to talk about it anyway and just hope that I forget that I've talked about it but you know I've been having a lot of trouble with the pronoun situation you know the them, the her, the they and I've been taking myself to task you know because I can't seem to quite get it right you know and I don't have many people to practice with but I just read a poem from Split This Rock by someone who in their poem made so much sense that I got it I think for the first time I really understood it so this is a poet who refers to themselves as they, them and their ancestry is Cherokee white oh god two or three other things that I can't quite remember but what really impacted me was that I looked at this person's their face and I could see exactly what they meant and that in a way it was so right to figure out how to acknowledge all of those entities in addition transgender them got a lot I mean really you'd have to look this up but I really see now how liberating it can be to be able to in language acknowledge all of your parts is amazing so I was thinking about myself about how she her is fine and that's what I'm going to stick with because honestly I don't know if I can get all of them together but I do understand that if I truly wanted to acknowledge my possibly Nigerian Ghanaian Cherokee Irish Scottish English ancestry I would have to say they wouldn't I doesn't that make sense? I mean it's so clear what was your question? I think what you were answering was what poetry gives us because in that poem you were able to see the poem gave you the answer to something you were struggling with it just was laid bare so my question to you was about the difference between your avid blogging and then your writing poetry but I mean I think you answered it two poems and then if I feel like they are shareable I put them on the blog I wrote two poems for the audience here at the museum I don't know if you're probably not the same audience but I wonder if you saw them because I went home after my last visit and you would have, well I don't know, probably not you but assume that is you and anyway the audience had been so wonderful I was so touched that I went home and I wrote these poems and I dedicated them to you and I put them right on my blog so you could see them right away and that felt really good because that also is what poetry does makes you feel really good even when it's sad because you're able to add to the imagined discussion what it is that you see and it's like everything, it's an offering you know so is it different for you than writing because you have so many forms, so short stories essays, novels blogging poetry you wrote a screenplay so are they all different are you trying to do something with the different genres the way you talk about writing it's a calling, it kind of comes to you but do you actually think of the genres as doing different things yeah well you have to if you're writing a screenplay for instance they want a screenplay, they don't want you know book of poems they can hardly handle the screenplay yeah I feel just so incredibly grateful when the inspiration happens that it's like being given this wonderful understanding of something or this wonderful flowering of a dream or just a wish to be able to to praise something for instance I've written many poems just in praise of the wonder of where we are, wherever this is you know just the magic of being humans here on this planet and not having much of a clue how we got here going to church and hearing these tales but really they start to wear it then and then you're left with the true mystery of it which I think is preferable just be in the mystery of how amazing it is it's not going to be solved in our lifetime about how it happened so we might as well just really enjoy those trees out there that park, I love Prospect Park it's just beautiful so in your note about the translator Manuel Garcia you talk about that moment when you realize that you and eight or other so beings were soul mates and then you said something that was really profound I mean many things are profound but this really stood with me so you said there was a luminosity to the moment that went straight to my heart and soul, none of us could imagine how many defeats lay ahead of us to their revolution, to my success as a mother and as an artist to bring light but we knew we were the ones offering ourselves to the journey the task of trusting each other as companions on the way and so one thing to open the book with this even though the book is a reflection and a meditation on 2015 and 2016 it also is a retrospective in many ways with your homage to Muhammad Ali or to B.B. King to Julian Bond to many many souls or spirits and also to the civil rights movement itself you dedicate you have three dedications, one is to Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King looms large in this pretty consistently and so I was just wondering if you could talk about that movement back and forth between like our fierce present but then also going back and either those figures have passed away and so we have to conjure them up in the present or you're summoning their energy for us in the present I guess well I'm concerned that we not forget we are people who have been so fiercely loved we have been so loved and it would be tragic if we forgot you know I mean I feel so fortunate to have been with people who you know just offered themselves you know we never knew they never knew what it could be you know that song I'm gonna run on I'm gonna run on a long time see what the end will be well that's how people were and if we forget that we've been loved so much we will start to value ourselves less and that would be really tragic in fact I was thinking you know before we came up here about how black people are so lovable you know the beginning of you know that was you know very strong especially in my younger years in high school but I can see that that feeling has been eroded as people have felt less and less lovable and less and less loved so it's important to remind us you know by going back to these Julian Bond Martin Luther King Jr Bannon Lou Hamer Marx all the people you think you know but actually you just know the shadow you know a little image that they put out there they've even moved the people's birthdays which is a terrible thing to do and I mean that you really should not celebrate people's birthdays on days that are not actually their birthdays it really destroys the energy it's a fracture so you know I just in writing these poems back to mind or some for some people for the first time that yeah you know you've been loved by people who never knew you they just knew that you were coming that's all they knew they didn't know you they said oh no they gotta come we gotta prepare and that's what they were doing they were preparing a day for you that they didn't even think they'd see so it's so humbling when you see your people like that so there's a speaking of not knowing that you're loved you have a poem here for called Issyli Actually Ugly and I know when you and I talked you were like what else is there to say about the color purple but then here it is so you know we dedicate it to Cynthia Erivo so I was wondering you say it's a question that people either ask you or ask characters who play her or the character Issyli and so I was wondering why you felt like you wanted to include that here well okay I know I'll tell you well the last Issyli on Broadway was actually from London and she was excellent she actually just said to me well is she really ugly because I think if you are a smash on Broadway and the image that people are set up to have is that you're ugly it is bound to weigh on you you may be the strongest actor in the world but every time you come out you feel like people expect you to be ugly it's very harmful to you so I wrote this poem to help her understand how I was you know also trying to help us understand beauty itself but in a more prosaic way what's really amazing about readers of the book and viewers of the film but especially readers of the book is that even though Pa who is a rapist and a terrible being a horrible person never tells the truth about anything he is still believed by readers even though in the book itself she is saying for instance I am 14 years old then when Pa is trying to get rid of her by marrying her off Mr. says well how old is she and Pa says she's near 20 now you know the point behind you is that people believe basically what they want to believe but in this case they believe that she's ugly but also that she has been abused in ways that would make you ugly so if you are basically a slave to a horrible person who is sexually molesting you and abusing you for years and you have to take care of his very terrible children and do all the cooking and a lot of the plowing you would look very different from your sister who manages with your help to escape so what happens though is that Celie's beauty develops as she becomes aware of her own beauty which she does through the grace and the beauty of another sister another woman gives to each other I mean we know that so many people that are considered quote ugly are really beautiful why don't we tell them why don't we just tell them you know just I don't know where they can be upset or whatever but you know just tell them and then walk away well gosh you're beautiful you know take a while for them to internalize this but it's a lot better than having them feel like because they don't look like somebody on TV you know joy and happiness and good fortune pass them by it didn't so if you have okay I will repeat exactly what she just said thank you June you all have questions so you have cards that you're supposed to put questions on and so we're going to collect them and then we'll pick a few to ask Alice soon but if you can make sure that you put your questions on the cards that you got when you entered the auditorium that would be great so we'll collect them and then we'll choose from them so you have two poems that are kind of related to each other I think they will always be more beautiful than you and then the lesson and I don't know if you want to read from either of those but I well sorry you know the poem I really want to read but I forget which and I've lost my reading huh okay it's sweet people everywhere but I can do that after oh yeah I think it's 193 actually yeah but I'd like to read it after the other two or after the other one whichever you want me to do one or two I'll read that one okay well the lesson is short so I can do maybe that one but I do want to read the one they will always be more beautiful than you because this is a medicine poem it's a medicine poem for us especially Indigenous people everywhere because you know we've suffered so horribly from people who have come to tell us how ugly we are when just think about what they look like and I mean no no no seriously I mean here they came in 100 degree weather wearing these metal suits I mean just really and they didn't believe in hygiene you know and there we were for the most part you know swimming in the ocean anyway so it's about you know looking at the hatred that we face really realistically you know as we now can look at Trump and see his treatment of Obama for what it is you know isn't that helpful if we don't get anything else out of this and we might not it's a lesson there that is really you know really good to have and really just you know just keep it there just understand that what's going on there they will always be more beautiful than you many of these poems are about Palestine and I was in Palestine you wouldn't believe what it's like I mean nothing could prepare you for it and then another time I was trying to get there and they wouldn't let the boat go you know that was trying but in any case they will always be more beautiful than you no matter what they will always be more beautiful than you the people you are killing you think it is hatred that you feel but it is really envy you imagine if you destroy them we will forget how tall they stood how level their gaze how straight their backs how even the littlest ones stood their little ground meanwhile you stand hunched as a cobbler in your absurd killer's gear yelling like a crazy person your face contorted dripping sweat from what would be with or without your lethal weapons a bullying brow and feral chin killing everyone but especially children for sport looking cool in your own mind as you crunch bones beneath your boot that is still forming conquering don't forget the entertainment value of your daily work for the folks back home who witness from the hillsides in their lounge chairs what beautiful fun we are not like those people being broken over there they tell each other and for this moment they are right they are not but what does this mean what does this mean for broken humanity selfie this this is called sweet people everywhere and this was written for a young friend who had just gotten his first passport some of the people in turkey are very sweet some of those in afghanistan are very sweet some of the people in the americas are very sweet in canada too some of the people are sweet in mexico you will definitely find sweet people likewise in the sudan there are sweet people among the zulu in south africa and every language group in africa has some sweet people in it there are sweet people in island and in russia there are many sweet people in korea there are millions of sweet people in china there are sweet people in japan if the sweet people were the leaders in these historically warring asian countries they would treat each other much better there are sweet people in the kongo there are sweet people in egypt and sweet people in australia many sweet people are in norway numerous sweet people are in spain there are many sweet people in gana and kenya and sweet people also in guam in the philippines there are sweet people in cuba many sweet people in iran there are sweet people in libya and colombia sweet people are in vietnam sweet people exist in england and berma there are sweet people for sure in ireland sweet people are in france sweet people are holding on in syria they are doing the same in iraq some sweet people live in benzuela many very sweet people live in brazil there are sweet people in israel and there are sweet people also in palestine actually in almost every house on the planet there is at least one very sweet person that you would be happy to know sweet people are everywhere being sweet they must not be disappeared we are lost if we can no longer experience how sweet human beings can be promise me never to forget this no matter how far you go on this new passport where you are directed to land your own sweet self or who sends you so the poem i believe the women which we talked about before but we talked about it before two things happened before bill cosby was sentenced and before the cavanaugh hearings and dr ford had testified and so i said to you then and i'll say it now in your work you always believe the women meaning that you've highlighted or spotlighted or told you're one of the pioneers at least for my generation of breaking silences around sexual assault and domestic or gender based violence and personal violence so i wanted to talk a little bit about this poem in this three weeks later and also in this moment of me too because i think you both offer us this book in general offers us both a diagnosis of our condition and also a way through it and i don't know if you want to read this poem or just talk about it but what were you you wrote this as the me too movement was gaining steam i believe the women all the stuff on television about bill cosby and all these women that he drugged and molested and the people who were saying that they made it up and at the same time the people who had no compassion at all for him i have to say and i do somewhere lately i'm concerned when we you know there's something we have to really think about which is we can believe stories of brutality, atrocity, violence you know and they're often very true however it's damaging to us if we cannot feel compassion who's done the violence and the damage so we just think about it that way so for me i i feel compassion for bill and i think i think compassion is a feeling you really can't go wrong with it's not like you're trying to you know liberate him or free him or anything what you're basically trying to do is liberate your own heart you know because it just it just doesn't help us really to ever close down on people so that's part of it and i was saying too in that point but there's a later point but in this point i'm talking about how how in our culture and in many cultures little boys by the time they're five have to be so confused about what it is to be a man and what they're supposed to be doing there's a in this context i want to recommend a book called perfect peace by daniel black and in this book said in the south you know black as a black family and these people have had seven boys the woman you know they had seven boy children one after the other and she just says i'm sick of having boy babies and the next one that comes she turns into a girl and she dresses and names her perfect and she you know dresses her like a girl and she you know goes through the whole thing and eventually of course she's discovered but what we learn is so so many things about you know the gender issues that children grow up with and how confused they can be so just as i felt that my own grandparents who are the basis of some of the rotten men and purple you know just as they were damaged in different ways and you know it took a granddaughter to come so much toward the end of their lives to see the parts that they had tried to kill off in order to be men you know i got to see the feminine in a way of my grandparents grandfathers i mean where they were not trying to protect some weird thing so that's kind of some of that you know yeah thank you we're gonna turn it i'm gonna pull from the questions from the audience so so this is also a call to action and i don't know if you would like to do a call to action after we go through this list of questions but my final question will be you know what is the call to action that you would like us what would you like us to do in terms of the healing that you propose here or just the political realities that we're in that you so beautifully really tackle and wrestle with and present to us in this book do you want to answer that now or you can meditate on it to like well i'm happy you mentioned meditation because i really feel again that when i think about the civil rights movement for instance now it's true that in the south the meditation state was accomplished in some of our churches i mean if you ever think about the calm and the assurance of the measures of the civil rights movement i mean the warriors a lot of that actually came out of our tradition of having a meeting place a meeting place is pretty important and that meeting place was our church and the singing in the church and the possibility of being yourself being loved, being surrounded by people who truly they didn't come in there to do anything to support you and whatever we were about to get into so that is very essential to find a circle that is something that i really recommend in my own case one day my women friends and i decided that we need to have women's council and i mean you may want to have men and women but at that point we felt like we had to be women and we just basically picked up the phone and called 11 women that we knew and most of them came and came for the next 10 years so you know it's valuable to have a structure but not one where you have an agenda exactly one of the things that we decided was that we would never come into the circle with an agenda that we would trust that whatever this need would arise that subject would arise automatically and it always did i mean it's one of the things i think that can happen especially with women maybe with other people too so i would recommend that a lot of sitting a lot of getting to know who you really are because the other part of activism is knowing what you're willing to give up you know are you ready to give it all up you may have to and if you're not ready it has to be a mess and you don't want to leave here with your soul in a mess really hmm so i think i could agree to this question profoundly because my sister and i did not want to leave i mean i wanted to go back to my kids and my partner so i did that's true but i did not want to leave your presence because you were so well the question here is how do you because i loved you that's why you didn't want to leave serenity that you're projecting to us it's soothing after the nightmare of this past year and i guess that's what i mean like you just admit so much goodness and serenity and love and so how do you maintain that i guess you're a true empath i said this to you when i was leaving that there's a Steven Spilger quote about you that you're otherworldly and what i realized is like Alice is so worldly like she's so connect like a plant dying is going to really an animal like everything you take in and you feel it so profoundly so how do you to this question how do you work how do you stay so still you know i think it's love actually i mean it seems trite but i really do i think it is and i think it i remember when i was little i was really so little and i would feel so much love that i actually thought i would burst and so i figured i had to be really calm i would just be really calm you know oh don't let him know yeah i think so i mean it's i mean first of all it's just a wonder this whole situation that we somehow in and we're so in a way immune to the magic of it which is so you know i couldn't live that way i need to be you know where i can you know we're doing my journals next and and at the last page the editor left so far they're cutting all kinds of stuff but maybe they won't cut this i was in Hawaii and i was feeling you know how you get you know where you just like oh god you know and i felt that the wind had come up outside the window and i went to the window and i looked out into a mango tree and there was a little nest of leaves just a little nest of leaves and they were just doing like that doing like that and i was you know intrigued and then i realized that actually it was speaking to me and what it was saying was oh stop muttering about get on with it it's going to be okay and i and i realized that i had been telling the trees to give me more mangoes i had been going out there every morning with my little bucket and and and and they wouldn't you know well one was a one tree was a male so he didn't have any i mean even though i knocked you know but but the other one i would say you know um you know mangoes before i have to go home you know so so the world that i live in is aware that the trees are constantly communicating now they will figure this out later probably and i'm sure indigenous people have always known this that they are communicating and that in the same way that they communicate to them to each other that they all also communicate to us but we have to be really open to it you know um so i don't know you know was that in the part of your question yeah well yeah it was yeah whatever whatever your prolific voice writer womanist a light source what was it like in the beginning finding and standing in your voice did you know believe you'd be who you are now it was terrible sometimes i was so suicidal oh no i mean i i have been down there you know really far i'm not now you know and that's good and also that's but that's what you learn you learn that as you go along and it's a good thing to know in fact when i hear of all the suicides you know i my one hope and wish is that somebody had just been close enough to say wait until tomorrow you know just just hold on one more day and see what happens so i do know you are now though being in your archives i don't know if you knew you were going to be Alice Walker but you kept everything i mean you kept it like you knew someone was going to go through your archives eventually so i do and so this is me adding to that question like why did you do did you know that you know what i mean like there was some and Beverly and i talked about this and Valerie and i talked about this like did you know you were going to be who you are in that way it's different than i know you didn't know you just kept everything no no no no no no what i knew was that i have a responsibility to the people coming after me and if i can be helpful by leaving a map that's what i'll do mm-hmm okay so this is a two part question and then we have one more after this so part one do you have any writing rituals that you do before and after you write part two are there any self-care rituals that you do before or after writing about trauma and this is from a budding novelist i think the writing is the therapy and i think the writing is the healing and i think it's the joy and it's the magic because there is just something so remarkable about the process of writing out of nothing i mean where does it come from i mean it's true that you can write a story based on whatever or you can write a feature about something you actually experience but at another level it's a kind of magic and that is what i like and to the extent that there is trauma it's healing i find that i heal myself all the time through my work you know it's so wonderful to write something and then put on just some wonderful rocking music and just dance you know until i just feel completely free and silly and you know just fine and dance i think is the closest i feel to what writing is the last question we love you this person loves you as well and their question is you fill your skin with water strength and sweetness what would you say to guide the next generation to find their way to their contribution well you know i worry about our youth not knowing their own beauty and i worry about them not appreciating who they are and what has gone before them to hold them i mean we've been holding these children it wasn't like just going out there for yourself and trying to vote with people shooting at you really and at that time i must tell you and you know this there was more of an innocence of voting in our political situation we have to all vote now though but it still doesn't mean we have to believe in the system and i would really like to make that very much my contribution that this will have to be a strategic vote and maybe there will be many of those to come but you can no longer rest at all after voting for anybody you know just forget about it there is no one of the problems that we have had is that we you know get a few nuggets of freedom quote and we just party you know it's the truth and you know then they republicans for instance never sleep those people don't sleep i mean look at them they don't but we do and we somehow we have really thought that you know freedom once you get some that's it and everything is going to be fine it is never like that it has never been like that it never will be like that so you know vote strategically when you have to but never believe in it that it's going to be the cure end of our time here well thank you so much i really enjoyed it you're beautiful so are you