The World Has Changed by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

like music—in my case, improvisational jazz, where each person blows the note that she hears—than like a cathedral, with every stone in a specific, predetermined place. Whether lines are long or short depends on what the poem itself requires. Like people, some poems are fat and some are thin. Personally, I prefer the short thin ones, which are always
like painting the eye in a tiger (as Muriel Rukeyser once explained it). You wait until the energy and vision are just right, then you write the poem. If you try to write it before it is ready to be written you find yourself adding stripes instead of eyes. Too many stripes and the tiger herself disappears. You will paint a photograph (which is what is wrong with “Burial”) instead of creating a new way of seeing.
    The poems that fail will always haunt you. I am haunted by “Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Johann” in Once , and I expect to be haunted by “Nothing Is Right” in Revolutionary Petunias . The first two are dishonest, and the third is trite.
    The poem “The Girl Who Died #2” was written after I learned of the suicide of a student at the college I attended. I learned, from the dead girl’s rather guilty-sounding “brothers and sisters,” that she had been hounded constantly because she was so “incorrect,” she thought she could be a black hippie. To top that, they tried to make her feel like a traitor because she refused to limit her interest to black men. Anyway, she was a beautiful girl. I was shown a photograph of her by one of her few black friends. She was a little brown-skinned girl from Texas, away from home for the first time, trying to live a life she could live with. She tried to kill herself two or three times before, but I guess the brothers and sisters didn’t think it “correct” to respond with love or attention, since everybody knows it is “incorrect” to even think of suicide if you are a black person. And, of course, black people do not commit suicide. Only colored people and Negroes commit suicide. (See “The Old Warrior Terror”: warriors, you know, always die on the battlefield). I said, when I saw the photograph, that I wished I had been there for her to talk to. When the school invited me to join their board of trustees, it was her face that convinced me. I know nothing about boards and never really trusted them; but I can listen to problems pretty well.... I believe in listening—to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling.

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    Interview with Claudia Tate from Black Women Writers at Work (1983)
    CLAUDIA TATE: Critics have frequently commented about the nonlinear structure of Meridian . Did you have a particular form or symbolic structure in mind when you wrote this novel?
     
    ALICE WALKER: All I was thinking of when I wrote Meridian , in terms of structure, was that I wanted one that would continue to be interesting to me. The chronological structure in The Third Life of Grange Copeland was interesting as a onetime shot, since I had never before written a novel. So when I wrote Meridian , I realized that the chronological sequence is not one that permits me the kind of freedom I need in order to create. And I wanted to do something like a crazy quilt, or like Cane [by Jean Toomer]—if you want to be literary—something that works on the mind in different patterns. As for the metaphors and symbols, I suppose, like most writers, I didn’t really think of them; they just sort of happened.
    You know, there’s a lot of difference between a crazy quilt and a patchwork quilt. A patchwork quilt is exactly what the name implies—a quilt made of patches. A crazy quilt, on the other hand, only looks crazy. It is not “patched”; it is planned. A patchwork quilt would perhaps be a good metaphor for capitalism; a crazy quilt is perhaps a metaphor for socialism. A crazy-quilt story is one that can jump back and forth in time, work on many different