Alice Walker finds herself "in heaven" at IRA Convention

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker gently took the stage at the General Session Thursday during IRA’s 53rd Annual Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. She paused and smiled at the audience, saying “I feel like I’m in heaven—I feel like I’m in heaven with all these teachers.” Walker, who won the Pulitzer in 1983 for The Color Purple, praised teachers for what they do. “There is nothing more important in the world than to teach children to read,” she said.

She said that when was very small she was very curious about words, the magic of words on paper. One of her early experiences was watching her parents order things from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It was one of the books she learned to read from—especially, she smiled, the old catalog that went to the outhouse for recycling.

Though reading is wonderful and magical, Walker said, we should impart to children the idea that wisdom can also come from those who can’t read. She read her poem, “Bring me the heart of Maria Sabina,” about an Indian woman she met in Mexico who could not read, but who nonetheless was very wise, and a great healer who used mushrooms and her knowledge of herbs in her medicinal rituals. Walker asked those in audience to close their eyes—and many did—so they could better connect with and visualize the imagery in the poem.

Walker also read another poem, “For my sister Molly,” the one in her family who went away to school and came back to teach her brothers and sisters how to read. She said every family has one of “those who go away,” who must go away to leave the smallness or narrowness of where they come from, where they cannot thrive. “These people come back,” she said, as did her sister, to say “I’ve been there” and share their knowledge of the wide world outside.

That knowledge and her ability to read enabled Walker to research what she called a 10-year project, her book Possessing the Secret of Joy, which follows Tashi, one of the characters from The Color Purple, back to Africa to the Olinka tribe, where she allows genital mutilation to be performed on her. Walker said the practice still goes on in many places and there is no information available to the women, for whom it is taboo to speak about the custom.

She also read from the letters of characters in The Color Purple, and spoke about how the power of writing allows us to maintain contact with people over time and space. In that context, she also spoke of the power that being able to read and write in various dialects can give, for instance in Standard English and in slang, as the character Celie speaks. “You don’t have to speak Standard English to communicate,” she said.

Walker, who is known for her outspokenness on a variety of issues, talked about a new worry she has: “Students are unavailable, they are not present.” She said she recently spoke with educators in Atlanta about how today’s children possess such an array of “gimmicky gadgets” that plug into their ears and that they fiddle with in their hands that they do not know about the “sacred space of silence.” Reading can help with that because part of what is great about reading is its quietness, she said. “It can hold the world at bay.”

She closed her time on stage with a paean to peace and a plea to “we, the adults, the elders of the planet, to end war because if we don’t change it, there will be no future for our children.” Walker cited the huge numbers of children who are maimed, blinded, and emotionally traumatized by war. “We have to be responsible,” she said.

Walker read her new children’s book Why War Is Never A Good Idea, with its graphic imagery of the destruction of animals, plant life, people and the very ecosystem itself—the land, the water and the air. She said the violence of warfare is happening to children all over the world and that keeping that information from our children is treacherous to them: “We have a responsibility to teach them why it is vitally wrong to choose to hurt other people.”

But despite all the horrible things that happen, the world is still amazingly beautiful, she said. Again to the teachers and educators, she said before she quietly left the stage, “Thank you so much for what you do. For the freedom, the pleasure, the delight, for the joy you bring into the world.”