The Color Purple, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about black communities and interpersonal relations between men and women of color in the South, catapulted Alice Walker to fame as a writer. But beyond this work (actually her tenth novel) many of us do not know the complexity and richness of her life, not only as a writer but as a global activist.
True to her artistic career, filmmaker Pratibha Parmar is continuing her efforts to make history through her latest film, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, which premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 31. In this inspiring and informative documentary, Parmar tells the story of Alice Walker, from poverty-stricken child of the unbearably racist South to acclaimed writer and activist. Through a blend of archival footage that recreates the political and social contexts of Walker’s life from the mid 1940s onward with interviews from a range of Walker’s friends-including Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg-Parmar presents audiences with a detailed landscape of the “beauty” and “truth” of Walker’s life.
Like Shola Lynch‘s Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, Parmar’s Beauty in Truth is a much needed contribution to the slow but ever growing archive of African-American women who have indelibly shaped our discourses of race, gender, sexuality, class, and oppressive regimes of power.
In the below interview Parmar discusses her latest documentary, her personal interactions with Walker, in addition to offering her own interpretation on pivotal and complex issues broached by her documentary.
AfterEllen.com: When did you first encounter Alice Walker, in her writing or in person? How soon after this first encounter did you know you wanted to tell the story of her life?
Pratibha Pamar: I first encountered Alice through her books. From the get go her words and stories inspired me like it did so many others. Her insights into the lives of women who lived and loved on the margins of cultures especially resonated with me.
One of the first books I read was In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, where she had written a revelatory definition of “womanism,” which empowered me literally to continue being “willful, womanish and question everything,” It gave me permission to be the feisty feminist I was becoming at the time.
Exactly 20 years after meeting Alice and us becoming friends, it struck me that her story needed to be told. As activists we need to grab every opportunity to reclaim feminist histories for ourselves. Given the dearth of stories about women on various media platforms, I wanted to make sure that our feminist foremothers’ are brought center stage where they belong.
AE: As everything in one’s life is connected, do you feel there is a kernel or origin of Beauty in Truth in your earlier documentary on Angela Davis and June Jordan, A Place of Rage? How would you connect these two documentaries, both in terms of your own career and in terms of subject matter or theme?
PP: It was through meeting June Jordan when I interviewed her for a feminist magazine in London that I met Angela Davis and Alice Walker and made A Place of Rage so June Jordan was really THE catalyst.
I often get asked how come an Indian woman from the UK is making a film about African American women icons. I don’t think many North Americans realize the incredible ripple effect the civil rights and black power movements had on the rest of the world. As a 14-year-old immigrant girl trying to make sense of racism in the United Kingdom, it was Angela Davis’s autobiography that helped me to find a language and a way to understand what was happening to my family and other exploited immigrants. Whenever people are engaged in struggles for their rights, someone else in another part of the world can see how that might be possible for them too.
In the winter of 2008, I came across a bunch of DVDs on American icons who were deemed to have shaped American culture, not one in that bunch of DVDs was a woman, let alone a woman of color. It was a no brainer for me as a filmmaker to quickly see how Alice’s story would make for a fascinating film. Her journey begins from her birth on a plantation in Georgia to a sharecropper family, and moves to her historic win of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple.
AE: Was it difficult to make a documentary about a living subject?
PP: Not at all. In 2014, Alice will be 70, a perfect time to catch her reflecting on her life and engaging her in conversations about life changing facts and events. I particularly loved editing the section in the film where Alice talks about falling in love with Mel Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights attorney. It’s also the first time Mel speaks publicly about their “taboo breaking illegal, interracial marriage” and subsequent experience of intense racism when they lived in Mississippi. It was very moving to have the two of them revisit this historic time in U.S. history. As civil rights activists challenging segregation in the South they talk about how they navigated their love for each other amidst the fire bombings and the racist killings. That’s what I love about documentaries, that you can capture living testimonies, which become precious documents of both a personal and political history.
AE: “Justice and hope. Hope and justice. Let us begin”-these are the words spoken at the beginning of the documentary. What kind of framework does justice and hope lend the film?
PP: At the heart of Alice’s work and life is her commitment to justice and her hope that change is possible. In a way it’s beyond a commitment and as our film shows, it is in her DNA to speak out on behalf of all those who can’t. To make the film without including Alice’s activism would have been impossible. Through the film I show how her activism and her writing are intrinsically connected. As a filmmaker I am invested in exploring how we as artists can create work that might help to change the world, however small that change maybe. With Beauty in Truth I wanted to make a film that would give hope to future generations by witnessing the life of someone who has thrived despite the odds. To see unfold on screen what it takes to forge a powerful, authentic and compassionate self in the crucible of poverty, hypocrisy and cruelty.
Howard Zinn, who passed away a few months after I interviewed him, has said “that if you see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at the least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
AE: Walker speaks of her mother as strong, resilient, and loving, even though she “never said ‘I love you.'” Do you think these characteristics are evident in Alice Walker as a mother? I ask because her relationship with her daughter, writer Rebecca Walker, is strained; they are not on speaking terms. Gloria Steinem said Rebecca was “finding her identity by carving it out of Alice.” This, I feel, is shockingly insightful-how do you see the dynamic between Alice and Rebecca?
PP: This was a very difficult sequence in the film. Mainly because I have witnessed first hand the rawness of Alice’s pain around the estrangement from Rebecca. I was committed to exploring this estrangement in an honest and real way, in a way that gave a sense of why it happened. Rebecca’s memoir, Black White and Jewish, gives some indication of her feeling of abandonment and as Evelyn White says in the film, “Rebecca was a civil rights baby and so when her parents split up she felt abandoned on some level.” Additionally, there is so little mention anywhere of how women of Alice’s generation have had to struggle as single parents as well as struggling to honor their creative muse and be activists at the same time. Trying to change the world so women can have rights and be free does come has had to come with painful sacrifices at times for many women artists and writers.
Earlier this year we had our world premier in London during International Women’s Week and during the post screening Q&A, Alice made an interesting comment: “I have a certain spirit and I didn’t suppress it. I have tried hard to honor it . . . It was the spirit of creativity-standing with people who are in danger, the commitment to the people I love, including my daughter . . . I was brought up in a culture where to be a mother . . . was to be the mother in the old, old, old sense, where you were the mother to children everywhere.”
Over the years, I have spent time with both Rebecca and Alice and for the longest time they were the best of friends and so it’s quite sad to have been witness to a public display of Rebecca’s hurt and anger towards her mother. But I remain optimistic that one day there will be a reconciliation, if that is what they both want.
AE: Towards the close of the film Walker speaks the words “We are expressions of humanity,” which I found nicely encapsulate what it means to be both an artist and an activist. Do you feel these words to represent your own life, as both an artist and activist, and as an activist through your art?
PP: Yes, very much so. I came to art through my activism. My first film was a ten minute video poem called Sari Red, a memorial to a young Indian woman who was killed by a group of white racist thugs on the streets of London. They ran her over with their van because she shouted back when they screamed racist abuse at her. When I showed that video for the first time to about 200 people at a little underground film festival in Brighton, I was blown away by the response. At that moment I saw the power of the moving image and sound to create visceral responses in audiences by bringing them into the world of that young woman. She was no longer a statistic; she became a real person to them. That was a turning point. I wanted to continue to tell stories of people on the margins, outsiders and outlaws.
AE: Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1983 with The Color Purple; both the book and the cinematic adaptation garnered heavy criticism from African-American men, as you highlight in your documentary. “The pain black people exact upon each other,” a theme of the book, is an pernicious effect of racism. Thirty years later, how do you think this “pain” is exacted or manifests today?
PP: Many people who have seen Beauty In Truth comment that they had no idea of the level of hatred and vilification Alice Walker experienced as a result of both the book but especially Spielberg’s movie of The Color Purple. I made a concerted effort to include archive footage of the protests against the film premier in Los Angeles, as well as talk shows where audience members, mainly men would lay into Alice. No doubt, thirty years on although the dynamics still remain fraught around these complex questions, we have also seen change. Sapphire‘s book, Push treads similar territory and was also made into a powerful movie, Precious by Lee Daniels. There were a few voices of aggressive attacks in fact, some by one or two of the same individuals who attacked Alice Walker, but on the whole Precious sparked debate in constructive ways. That’s movement forward.
AE: You include a lot of footage-stills and video-of police brutality of black people in the United States from the 1940s-1960s, which offers political and social contexts to Alice’s life. She describes this racism and state supported and induced racism as “terrorism,” and I literally raised my fist in the air when she said this word, because it’s so spot on, especially given the current climate of terrorism stateside. Do you think reframing racism in terms of terrorism could be productive? It seems like this reframing is one way to push for a discussion of race in our seemingly “post-racial” America.
PP: On the basis that the definition of terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims,” it’s absurd to talk about “post-racial” anything when you think about the disproportionate numbers of black men and black women incarcerated in prisons across the U.S. and the daily level of police violence and brutality towards black people and people of color. This looks very much like unmitigated state sanctioned violence.
AE: I loved Walker saying she wasn’t lesbian or bi or straight; instead, she is “curious.” To me, it illustrates the profound difference between race and sexuality, and between the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century and the Gay Rights Movement of today. What do you make of this (sexual) declaration?
PP: I think this declaration is profoundly and quintessentially Alice! I like what Jewelle Gomez has to say in the film, that because our queer communities are under siege so much of the time, we thirst for, if not demand, visible support from high profile “celebrities” but you know they have to live their own truths. And that’s one thing Alice is exemplary at, living her own truth.
AE: Your documentary concludes with Walker’s experiences in Rwanda, the Congo, and Palestine. Interest in Palestine has reached a fever pitch these days within the queer community; how would you describe Walker’s involvement or interest in Palestine?
PP: Right now, Alice is under intense attacks yet again for her views on Palestine and Israel. In Beauty In Truth we feature footage of her in Gaza and on the Freedom Flotilla, which was stopped from going to Gaza. What guides Alice is the belief that one of the ways we can change the world is to bear witness to the suffering of people wherever they are. Her support for the Palestinian people has made her a controversial figure because yet again she has put herself in the firing line. While we were fundraising for our film, we experienced the fall out of this controversy by being rejected time and time again for funding from several foundations and even ones that purport to support women filmmakers. When we showed the film to a woman film festival programmer, she basically put us on alert and said, “be prepared not to be selected by several progressive film festivals because of Alice’s views on Palestine,” which actually shocked me but then we saw it unfold in time. In the U.K there is a much more of an open climate to talk about the conflict between Palestine and Israel but it has been an eye opener that here in the U.S. it seems to be a no-go area for so many people which is a shame.
AE: You spent over two years working on the production of Beauty in Truth. What is next for you?
PP: Actually it was four very long years. Long because we had a very challenging time finding the funding for the film. Many people are shocked when I tell them that, but it really wasn’t easy. I couldn’t have made this film without the incredible talents of producer Shaheen Haq who is a brilliant architect and now a superb producer.
As for future projects, there are a number of scripts and ideas I would love to get into but first I need to pay off my debts. It isn’t sustainable to be just an indie filmmaker so my priority right now is to become sustainable. I am looking forward to teaching part time at Stanford University for a semester in the Fall and of course taking the film around the U.S to different Universities, colleges and schools and sharing it with audiences.
Beauty in Truth will appear at Outfest in LA on July 18 and at QFest in Philadelphia on July 20. The film will be broadcast on the PBS Emmy award-winning series American Masters in early 2014.
