Reflecting Rogue. Pumla Dineo Gqola

at the centre.

      A woman who does not want to apologise for valuing herself is a dangerous thing.

      In South Africa, many feminists continue to write about womanism as being a conservative form of gender consciousness. I have never been able to understand this, based on the writings of Walker, who obviously speaks a radical feminism. Walker published a definition of the word she coined in the same year as African feminist literary critic and cultural theorist, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi. Both definitions are unapologetic about womanism being feminist, and stress its valuation of Blackwomen and feminist imagination. The coincidence of two feminist women of the African world naming a specific feminism similarly without conversing is a delicious illustration of how we are all connected. It troubles those who need a more “factual” account that flattens how living beings fit into the world. Neither Walker nor Ogunyemi conceives of womanism as anything but a radical feminism of colour. Walker writes “womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” in In search of our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanism is also coined by both with Black women’s literary and other creative cultures in mind.

      The novel she refers to most often to illustrate points in interviews, including in hers with me, Possessing the Secret of Joy, was to earn her a different round of criticism, this time from some African feminists. This group took exception to her criticism of female genital mutilation and her right to speak about this as an outsider. Her response to this criticism has illustrated the many ways in which Walker refuses to exile herself from any human condition. As we discuss how she determines which form an idea is to take, I refer to her statement about how characters in novels “do not leave her alone” until she writes them. I use the phrase “bug you”.

      She disagrees with my word choice.

      “They do not bug me. They are just present … until I understand what has happened to them – wounded them.” This is what happened with Possessing the Secret of Joy. But her poems and essays come to her in a form close to what she eventually shares with the world.

      Her womanism is a resolute refusal to look away from such wounding, in as much as it is a commitment to recognising her loving connection to other living beings on the planet. This is not true of all Black feminisms, and need not be, and this is why it is sometimes important to show this difference. Because words are so powerful, they often frighten even the writer. Yet, Audre Lorde insisted that what is important needed to be said, even at the risk of misunderstanding and violence.

      In that room with Walker, I want to know whether being so severely criticised for speaking her mind over twenty-six books and numerous interviews gets easier.

      “I have a greater level of indifference. You start to understand that you’re like any other creation, so if I say things that people take offense to, that’s who I am. That’s what you get from me.”

      She adds that we are all entitled to live and that criticism is not always important.

      “Would you criticise a pecan tree? Really, what’s the point? That’s the place you get to.”

      I pause and laugh.

      And I realise that she is saying something about letting go of the need for approval and external validation, which is so central to how women are raised all over the world. Given that she will speak her mind, “irregardless” (her word), she has learnt this indifference. Importantly, she also adds thoughts on how she understands why people who have been wounded can think “any criticism can be used against all of us”.

      I am glad to hear this from a writer whose unfashionable perspective on the world is likely to continue to earn her detractors. I tell her I look forward to this experience, as a writer who is sometimes afraid of her own voice. Her courage also continues to be rewarded by her readers’ appreciation of her vision and generosity.

      In the interview she speaks softly. She declares later that evening at the State Theatre in Tshwane that she is soft-spoken. This almost seems like a contradiction, save for the fact of her clear gentleness during the interview.

      I end the interview with a very clear sense of having had a conversation with an incredible human being, not a star, but a generous, attentive person. I realise that the power in her written work is like this power I feel in the interview at the Steve Biko Foundation offices. It only lasts twenty-five minutes, but for that period, turned towards me, in conversation, it is as though we are the only people in the room.

      I ask her to sign copies of her books. I only bring two, even though I have multiple versions of all her books. At the last minute, I am too shy to offer her the copy of my first book I had brought as a gift.

      I do not know what I expected, and I would have been thrilled by the opportunity to meet her. But there she was with no entourage, no restrictions, no apologies for being on the planet in her own fashion. I realise that the Walker I encounter on that Tuesday morning is very much the Walker who speaks to an adoring audience, and dances to Simphiwe Dana and Sibongile Khumalo’s genius later that night at the State Theatre. She is the Walker many of us encounter in her work, the Walker we return to time and again. This is the Walker who galvanises and inspires me to live courageously, who is my compass, and the writer who has written a book for every season in my life. In my late twenties, I once spent a heartbroken weekend in bed in my sixteenth-floor flat with the sun shining in, crying, drinking tea and reading The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart. Sometimes the conversation I have with her is that literal. It is her courage and her joyful embrace of life that makes it possible for her to change and save our lives so many times. It is this Walker that helps us believe that “we are the ones we have been waiting for”, the line from a June Jordan poem that she made the title of one of her books.

      I ask my final question, given to me the previous weekend by Madi, whose spirit I chose to love in the same year I discovered Walker, “What have you learnt from your best friends – no matter what form they come in?” That life and this planet is wonderful, “so even if I am weeping as I am writing, there is joy because I know where I came from, from sharecroppers. And how my mother never asked me to come and wash dishes if I was reading. So, to be able to take all that nurturing and that thoughtfulness and to go and to learn how to do this. Every tear comes with laughter.”

      “I cannot get over the wonder of this world. I live in a state of wonder … it is all connected”, and living life in both contemplation and wonder is rewarding.

      “It is not for nothing that my name is Alice,” she quips.