What is the writer’s responsibility? Obviously, it is to clearly and precisely write your ideas. There are different ideas about this, but is it to change society, to make society aware of injustices?  With some social issues, you are dealing with ideas and instances that are very immediate in our culture.

I think the writer’s basic responsibility, whatever form you are working in, is to tell the truth.  That doesn’t necessarily mean the truth that exposes the government or exposes where the government or the powers to be have lied to us.  Although a product of the Sixties, that’s a big part what was going on in my writing and in my life as I was growing up.  The truth, even necessarily the social truth, is all the emotional truth - what do you know about human beings, why do human beings act the way they do?  For me, a person whose work is very much tied to social-activism because of my family - people knew my father who was very active in the Civil Rights Movement, a very radical person who ran for office all the time - so my formative years, what an artist’s responsibility and role might be, was very much shaped by my father and my mother’s activism and by the fact that my family always tied everything, whatever it was that you did to the fact that we were trying to get free.  That has always been very important to the work I do..

As I got older, I realized the truth of human beings is equally important and is equally important to me as a writer.  What do people look like when they fall in love?  What do they sound like when they fall in love?  That has less to do with the social circumstances they find themselves in and more to do with the fact that at the heart of it human beings are very much the same.  When we fall in love we all do the same kinds of things, have the same insecurities, the same euphoria when the other person says, “I love you.”  We have all of those things - concerns about getting older, an interest in family (either good or bad depending upon how our family gets along).  What I am trying to do is push myself to tell the truth and push myself to look at the heart of the matter, to look at what is really going on with people, what holds people together rather than to write about my own specific little group because we are different than everybody else.  At twenty, I might have thought that.  At fifty-six, I think we are all pretty much the same.  My writing has reflected more of a connection to a wider response to humanity than I thought when I was much younger.  The advantage to being a writer who was fortunate enough to live a long time - you can see your own work growing as your own understanding of the world grows.

Do you find that when you visit your older work that you’re less satisfied with it because of your maturity as a writer?

No, because I never try to evaluate what I did before based on what I now know.  Of course, I am smarter now.  Thank God.  I look at the love poems and love stories I wrote when I was eighteen and I think, “Who was that woman?  What did she really believe?” (laughing)  There is no way I could have known at eighteen what I know at this age.  I actually feel very protective of my younger self when I read things.  My sister recently discovered a bunch of letters I had written from the time I left home when I was seventeen and went to college up until the time my parents passed when I was in my forties.  They saved every letter I had ever written.  So my sister came upon this group of letters and sent them to me.  It’s the same way reading those letters as I feel reading my work - which is I can’t remember being that young, I can’t remember being that naive.  I do intellectually, but when you actually read your thoughts when you were seventeen years old, you cannot help but feel protective and affectionate toward yourself because you are so innocent.  I mean, I was very innocent.  And I was very idealistic.  Very passionate.  I’m still very passionate about things, but I’m not nearly as innocent as I was.  I don't miss that, but I do feel forgiving of the things I didn’t know because there was no way to know them.  I would be horrified if I looked back at things I wrote when I was seventeen and I was still writing the same way.  Then I would think, “What happened to those thirty years?”

Maybe you’d go back and think, “Wow, I was a genius!”

Yeah.  (laughing)  I was really smart.  Didn’t they know that!

It’s interesting that you brought up your past and your father’s political life - he started his own church, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, then ran for the governor of Michigan on the Freedom Ticket.  He was very political.  How much of an influence was that and how it shaped your view of the world?

My father had a profound influence on my life as a writer, and my mother, too.  I also have a step-father so that all three of them were involved.  My father was the most public of them and what he was doing was a great influence on me because it formed my political view of things.  I grew up in Detroit and we always lived in all black neighborhoods.  My father was very involved in the activity of organizing the neighborhood, picketing grocery stores.  It was the Freedom Now party.  He founded the party.  I always knew that I was a writer, so I understood the work I was doing artistically was tied to the work my father was doing politically and that all of us were involved politically.  I understood that early on.  Later, I came to understand another part of my father’s influence - my father was a brilliant person, a really smart man and read widely.  He loved the movies.  We used to go to the movies all the time.  He just read everything.  As a minister, he was always trying to connect what he was thinking and feeling and reading politically to the spiritual side of what the congregation was looking for, but also his ability to simplify all of this very sophisticated political jargon and international forward thinking material, to synthesize it in a way that a congregation of regular black folks on the west side of Detroit would understand what was going on in Algeria, what the Cuban revolution really meant to us as black folks in Detroit.  The fact that he was able to do this so people could understand and respond emotionally in a way that made them want to be active and involved and register to vote was really impressive to me because I would see what he was reading.  I was always very focused on my dad so that I would watch him with all these stacks of books and he would talk to me when I was ten years old like I could really understand these things, but then I would hear him stand up on Sunday morning and talk about these things in a way that was immediately accessible to people.  That was very much a part of what I absorbed as a writer -  you don’t have to speak in a way that alienates you from the masses of the people that you are trying to move.  You can have that information and think at that level, but the trick is to relay it in a way that people understand.

The balance is, for me, to write and think at that level but not in a way where people who are trying to move into action don’t get it.  It’s a balance.  As a writer, you want to keep pushing yourself to think about things in a deeper way but not get caught in that trap of writing propaganda.  You are trying to get people to march downtown and push over city hall.  That is always the tension that I try to balance, to push myself.

You have a journalist background, much like Hemingway, and he had that same simplistic quality of presenting ideas and themes without a convoluted text.  In your work, like in The Sun Also Rises, the text is not sophisticated, but it is precise.  Your writing is the same way.

I have a lot of journalist experience.  I don’t really have a lot of journalist training. My major in college was play writing and dramatic literature.  I didn’t take any journalism courses.  Most of my journalism writing is free-lance work -  trying to make a living other than taking a full-time job.  I did some free-lance feature writing and interviews, but much of what I have done as a journalist is really opinion columns, talking about how I feel about the mayor.  It’s less than sending dispatches back from the Spanish Civil War where you are really trying to be very clear because it’s a news story.  But I do believe the discipline of journalism is involved with opinion pieces because you have such a limited amount of space to say what you want to say.

You are under the canopy of playwright, essayist, poet, and a novelist - how do you like to view yourself as a writer?

As a writer.  I like the fact that I work with so many different forms.  It’s the revolutionary in me.  Some people will never go into the theater to see a play but they will pick up a newspaper to read a column.  Some people are never going to read a book of poetry but they’ll read a popular novel.  So, I am always conscience of the fact that if I can’t get them one way, I might be able to get them another.  And it’s of interest to me to see what it feels like to write a play, a novel.  It never was my intention to become a novelist.  I love theater and writing plays.  That is really what my training is in, but I had an idea for a play that didn’t fit the stage - you can’t make it more than an hour and a half these days.  People aren’t going to sit in the theater for five hours and you have all the conventions you have to deal with on the stage.  So I fell into writing novels because I had a story I wanted to tell and I think the good thing for me, not only in terms of reaching an audience, but for me as a writer, is that it forces me to keep pushing myself because I am always a little off balance.  I don’t have a chance to get really comfortable and say “I’m a really great playwright.  I don’t have to think about form anymore because I know how to do that.”  I’m always trying to learn.  My fourth novel is coming out at the end of next month and I’m working on the fifth one.  The first four were written in first person.  The one I am writing now is third person and is completely different, so that's exciting for me.  After four first-person novels, I feel that I got that.  I’m cool.

Although with your first novel you originally wrote it in third person but tossed out the first 200 pages.

Tossed them out because I wasn’t ready.  I couldn’t do it.  It wasn’t that I didn’t understand.  I was already nervous moving from theater to fiction and then trying to write third person because I was trying to be a serious novelist – I’ve got Alice Walker to think about and Toni Morrison - all of those girls to think about.  It was making me crazy.  I gave myself permission not to place that kind of artificial standard on myself.  With this latest novel, I really felt I was making myself crazy trying to continue writing in first person when I really didn’t want to because it confines you in a certain way.  You can only see what the characters sees.  You can only say what she says as opposed to being the “all-seeing eye of the novelist.”

You can’t leave the room without the first person character with you.

You can’t do it.  You can’t see it.  You can’t say it.  With this last book I felt that restriction for the very first time.  It was interesting because it had not occurred to me that I would want to write in third person.  Writing the new novel in third person is so exciting because I can see everything.  I am the “all-seeing eye.”  That’s what keeps it interesting.  There are always questions of craft, content, form, always something that you can do better.

Before you wrote What Looks like Crazy On An Ordinary Day had you tried writing a novel prior to that?

Never.  That was my first one.  I had written short stories but they never really appealed to me so that I didn’t peruse it.  I was writing plays at that time, too.  Plays were really what I was interested in.

One of the things you have done in your books is utilize popular culture, music, to bridge, to meld the generations and to connect the people from one generation to another.  Do you like our popular culture as it is today?

No.  Not the commercial culture, I don’t.  I’m distressed about it.  Actually, I’m going to a forum at Spelman College later on this evening where they are going to talk about rap music and all of that.  I have a real problem with much of the popular culture although I am fascinated by the power of it.  But I feel that so much of it is controlled by commercial interests that it is not really popular in the sense it’s not really people putting forward something they love.  It’s the record company saying, “Okay, you like Beyonce, let’s do twelve girls who look just like Beyonce.”  Or Tupac – he!’s dead, so let’s do twelve other guys who can make you remember how much you like Tupac.  That is the death of real creativity.

Didn’t that happen a lot during the Sixties with The Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Monkees, Herman’s Hermits, and all the imitations that strung from those artists?  Also, with the girl groups - The Supremes, etc.

I think that has always been a problem.  The difference now is that the commercial entities have such a hold on things it is very difficult to get anything off the beaten path.  They are looking only at sales.  Artists didn’t used to talk about record sales - they talked about what they were doing and the other musicians they knew.  Movies stars would talk about the movies they were in.  Now they talk about box office and records sales.  I think that’s too bad because it makes you think about money instead of the work you are trying to do.

The bottom line verses the creativity?

Yeah, what made you want to make this music?  It is important because we have so little in terms of a national culture anymore that we all agree that this is important, that we sing this song and love it.  We all do this when there is a death in the family and know this is how we behave.  The things that we all know tend to be things in the popular culture.  We know more about Madonna’s personal life than we do about the people who are related to us.  We know more about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s divorce than the people who live next door because we are being fed that all the time in a way that removes us from the real events in the world, the real events that are going on in our neighborhood.  It’s very difficult now for the audience that I am writing for to find references that are not popular culture, references that everyone knows. They know Densel Washington and Terry Macmillan, but I don’t know if they would know Arthur Miller or other kinds of references other than the ones that we see in the popular culture.

I call it the hyper-pop culture, because it is that hyper stratosphere where everyone is sort of hovering and underneath them is a private sub-culture of art, literature, painting or the things that really matter.  You are right when you discuss the very narrowly defined movie or novel -  you see this when a movie is released that is an art film that was produced on a shoestring budget and it’s brilliant.  Then all of a sudden it grosses $300 million in ticket sales, then the movie company says that this director is brilliant so they let him (or her) direct a new movie, but then they wrestle over what he wants to direct.

Exactly.  What is so terrible is the relentless focus on how many did it sell, how much money did it make.  It makes the artist think about things we shouldn’t think about.  It’s what you are talking about - how someone is working along the way they want to and they have tremendous commercial success and then they go crazy.  They have a block then cannot produce because the publisher thinks that since you sold this many this time that you have to write that same book.  People used to ask me, and they still ask me, are you going to move to New York.  Living in Atlanta has been a real blessing for me because New York and Los Angeles are so focused the commercial side of what you are doing that you end up reacting to it even if your reactions is “I’m not going to react to it.”  You have to because you are present in that environment.  The neighborhood I live in in Atlanta, some of the people know that I am a writer, but they don’t really.  They don’t think about it.  They don’t ask me how many books I have sold.  They don’t talk to me about all those things as if I was going to cocktail parties in New York.  I don’t have to think that all these people around here are going to be disappointed if the next book doesn’t sell as many as the last one.  All those questions became present for me when book was picked by Oprah because the commercial spike that it engenders is so intense and so immediate that the publishers loose their mind.  I know several of the younger writers who were picked and were traumatized by it.  They were in those environments in New York and L.A. - their publishers were very focused on making them write the same book with hopes Oprah would pick it again.  My experience was really wonderful.  I paid off every debt I ever had. But no one in my real day to day life really cares about that at all.

My neighbors see my picture in the paper because I had a play with Kenny Leon at the Alliance Theater or something commercially interesting happened to me and they congratulate me on the facts of it, but they won’t go see the play.  They are so happy that you are on Oprah, but they’re not going to read the book.  It really allows you to keep a perspective.  The truth of it is, you are doing just what people next door are doing -  getting up in the morning and trying to earn a living, and not really becoming that thing that elevates itself.  Am I more precious to the world because I write than I would be if I was looking in from the other side?

Randall Jarrell in an essay in Poetry and the Age has that wonderful quote, “Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous - for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.”  I remember that then tell myself now get back to work and earn a living.

Toni Cade Bombara, who was a good friend of mine, a wonderful writer who died several years ago, never called herself an artist.  She called herself a cultural worker because it kept her from distancing herself from the people.  She was a real revolutionary woman so that the people were always at the heart of what she was doing.  I always thought that was interesting.  I grew up in Detroit and my grandfather came from Alabama to Detroit to work at Ford’s factory.  He worked there for forty years.  I remember that he had one of those old-fashioned black lunch boxes that people took to work.  My grandmother would pack it in the morning and he would go to Ford and work on the assembly line all day, then come back.  For forty years!  And he never complained.  I never heard him complain how loud and dirty and tough the work was - never.  Whenever I think to myself in those moments when it is hard to write or find out what you are talking about, I remember my grandfather, and I say to myself, “On my hardest working day as a writer, it never was as hard as getting up at 5:00 a.m. and catching two street cars to work on an assembly line.  So get over it and go back to your desk find the words and write them down.” (laughing)  Don’t get distracted by “I don’t have this and I don’t have that recognition”.  Just find a part of it that you love and do it.

Have you ever visited an older relative, someone who is in their seventies, eighties or nineties and just look around their house - what they have in their house are just the things that they need.  Okay, I have like six televisions all around my house, and they have their one television, and still I’m not happy because all my televisions should be larger.  We’re spoiled.  And I know we all get caught up with keeping up with the Joneses -  we all do this - but our life is never as hard as we think it is.  We don’t need all of those things, we just want them.  Just like the recognition.

We’re trained to want them.  We’re programmed to want them.  My grandson says, “Oh, get that for me.”  It’s relentlessly beamed to him.  All you have to do, for me, and my husband is very good at helping me do this, is keep up with the international news.  Look at the BBC and what’s going on all over the world and you will stop thinking that you have a single problem.  All you have to do is look at the people in the middle of the Sahara in the desert carrying buckets of water and babies - women in situations where they can’t feed their children, there is no clean water, there’s the tsunami, there’s all of those things and we’re fussing because we have six televisions as opposed to seven - we want the flat screen.  The key is not getting caught up in that American materialist theme.  Look past the ads, keep looking past what people are trying to program you to want [and look] to what is happening to other people.  We don’t really have to go too far to find it.  In my neighborhood we can walk a block to see people living under the viaduct.  But we don’t do it.  We don’t want to know that they are there because then we will feel guilty about wanting a second wide-screen t.v. as opposed to saying, “I have all the stuff I need, now I am going to do this.  I’m going to do my work and change the world and when I can I’m going to send two dollars here or three dollars there.”

In an article I found on you it called you a “black revolutionary.”  Is that an accurate description and what does that mean to you?  Is that the same as a poet such as Amiri Baraka?

(laughing) God, that is such a big thing.  I take the idea of revolution so seriously that to call myself a revolutionary gives me cause only because I am not engaged full-time in trying to do what a revolutionary would have to be doing.  There is a tremendous need for revolutionary activity in this country at this time, but I am a writer and what I am doing is writing and hopefully clarify truth to people in a way that will move them toward progressive action.  Malcolm X has that wonderful idea about people calling themselves revolutionary but if you knew what revolution really was you would jump back in the alley because you would be afraid because revolution means bloodshed and land and resources have to change hands.  I believe that.  But I know on a daily basis when I wake up in the morning, that’s not what I do.  I am not engaged in trying to make resources and land change hands.  I’m trying to get words on paper that will awaken people to the idea that there is an injustice in the distribution of land and resources, which is revolutionary in a sense of being a cultural worker connected to progressive movements, but not in the sense that Fidel Castro went to the mountains and said I’m not coming down until we get rid of the dictator.  I am definitely a progressive person and committed to social change and I would be very happy if my work moved people to revolutionary activity.

You are a well-known feminist.  I wanted to discuss the current state of feminism in our country and where its strengths and weaknesses lay, and what can be done to advance this agenda?  Is it as strong as the movement was in the 1970s, at least as I remember it as a child, from my point of view.

The biggest two problems with American Feminism were race and class.  The people who most clearly articulated the need for an American Feminist movement then proceeded to define it were middle-class, white, urban American women, and certainly it is not punishable by death to be that, but it is also a very insulated group of people where you ended up with meetings where this group of people, middle-class white feminist were trying to define for women who were not white or middle-class or urban what it meant to be a feminist.  And many black women were beginning to define ourselves as black feminists and understand ourselves as feminists.  I grew up in a time that was very racially conscience but did not really talk about gender, so I didn’t discover myself as a feminist and become a serious feminist until I got to Atlanta at about age twenty-five or twenty-six.  What happened was - many of us went to the meetings and found that the women who were so progressive on issues of gender where not progressive and had not examined themselves on questions of race or class.  You ended up with a very rarified group of people trying to make us all think one thing of feminism - a feminist is this.  We would end up many times in meetings (when we should have been able to bond on issues of gender) going back and talking about issues of race, saying that was a very racist thing that you just said so before we can talk about women we need to talk about me as a black woman and you as a white woman.  Many times that discussion was not welcomed.  Those of us that wanted to get that straight, left the meeting.

Was the umbrella of feminism for all these different groups too small?

The people who were defining it made it small.  Feminism itself is large because it means that women should not be penalized for being women and all the specifics of it are the basic theme.

The metaphorical umbrella, the definition, was too small.

Exactly.  Because it was controlled by a group of women who had really good intentions but were confined by their own race and class.  It is very difficult to talk about class in America because everyone pretends it isn’t true.  But to be a professor at New York University, born and raised in New York who always went to private schools, is very different than being a black woman working in a chicken processing plant in Valdosta, Georgia who graduated or didn’t graduate from high school standing in water all day up to your ankles plucking chickens - that couldn’t be more different as an experience but they are both facing issues that would be addressed by feminism, but the inability of this woman in New York who was calling herself a feminist to understand that feminism has to be defined in a way where this woman working in Valdosta can also accept that definition - made it impossible for us to bond in a way that we should have.  Women are the majority in this country – there’s no reason to look at Congress, the Senate and see so few women there.  There is no reason to look at the captains of industry and see so few women there except that we cannot bond because we are not clear on issues of race, class, and because women have the problem of having our primary alliances, most of us, with men.

As a black nationalist, as a person who was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I grew up in neighborhoods where they weren’t any white people.  I live in southwest Atlanta - there aren’t many white people in my neighborhood.  My family is black, my husband is black, all the people I regularly interact with are black, but as a woman, a feminist, that’s not true.  I’m married to a man so all of that rhetorical “sleeping with the enemy” is really true.  It makes the issues much more complicated.  It makes navigating them much more complicated.  For women who are in a position of economic dependence on men, it’s almost impossible to raise those questions.  What feminism was able to do was raise a lot of questions, raise the conscieneness of a lot of middle-class, well-educated women but not really find a way to work across those race lines, those class lines to make the movement inclusive enough to get to this woman in Valdosta, inclusive enough to speak to younger women about the fact that it is not over and that we still have to be concerned about it.  My daughter is thirty years old and was raised by a feminist mother but she does not feel that those issues are as present now as I wish that she would.  We still need to look at what is going to change the country.

There was a wonderful interview in Oprah’s magazine where she was talking with Bishop Tutu, and he thought that in order for the world to change, women needed to make a revolution.  I screamed when I read that.  He didn’t apologize.  He didn’t say, “I’m sorry guys, I don’t mean to talk bad about men.” He said that if the world was going to change, women are going to have to do it.  They are going to have to make a revolution, and I believe that’s true and that feminism, if it had been able to address those issues could have taken us a lot further toward that goal.

If they had done this thirty years ago. . . .

Then we wouldn’t have to be talking about it right now.  The dialogue is almost gone.  We don’t talk about feminism anymore in the same way we don’t talk about black nationalism, about non-violence versus violence.  All of the progressive movements have been silenced by assassinations, by the fact that people are getting older and having to pay their rent as opposed to being college students with somebody else who is taking care of that.  There is a pendulum happening in terms of historical movement.  I think feminism will have another moment in this country where we will talk about it in a different way.

Since you mentioned your daughter, I see the parallel between second and third generation immigrants who are acclimated into the U.S. culture and unlike their first-generation parents who worked very hard and accomplished things, established themselves and prospered - each generation tends to be a little less hungry because it is oftentimes given to them too easily.

They don’t remember that there was any struggle at all.

You may have fought your daughter’s battle for her and she may be comfortable.

Her generation.  I think that is true.  They don’t see what the problem is.  They are doing much better today.  They have easily accessible birth control.  Legalized abortion.  I come from the generation that remembers people dying of illegal abortions.  In college, I remember, I knew people who died from illegal abortions.  My daughters generation doesn’t have a clue about that.  Now they definitely know that those rights are under attack, some of them, but the idea of what you had to go through when I was eighteen or nineteen years old is inconceivable to them.  The fact of life without the birth control pill is - they don’t have a clue.  Now, they have different challenges - they have to deal with AIDS.  We didn’t have to deal with that.  They have all kind of other things to deal with.  But, it would be so much more productive for them if they were dealing with those questions under a general over-arching discussion of being a young feminist, but we didn’t do a good enough job, my generation, in translating what we believed to them.  That is why I feel very strongly now.  We have to look at the work we’ve done for the ten or twenty years and see what we believed as black feminists and how it translated into the work we did, and these girls who are reading our novels, plays and poetry - did they get the point.  If they didn’t, it’s because we didn’t do a good enough job and America is so all-consuming in its otherness that we couldn’t get through the commercial culture to talk to them.

This is a very open-ended question – what’s wrong with the world?  (laughing)

(laughing) Well, let’s see. Our country is symptomatic of what is wrong with the world.  The leadership of this country has a feeling of entitlement that is ridiculous.  We feel, at the elected level, at the leadership level, in Washington now, that there is a feeling (and many American people have it, too) that we are owed the oil that we need to run the country at the level we run it.  It doesn’t matter whose oil it is, we are owed that.  We are owed the right to invade other countries and change their leadership because we think it is the right thing to do.  All of those things that are happening are completely out of sync with what the world is like now.  The idea that this country can police the world is completely wrong and scary.  Part of what needs to happen -  people must look at other cultures, other people, as full human beings.  We must be able to say, “Yes, we think it’s terrible the way they treat women in Afghanistan but we don’t know anything about that culture.”  Most of us don’t.  What we know is what we get from Peter Jennings, that these women must wear burkas and these women need to do what the Taliban makes them do, but we don’t understand what that came from and out of.  What we take with us is our American arrogance, feeling that woman should be able to do this, this, and this.  We feel that men should behave this way, that democracy is the only form of government you should have, that capitalism is such a wonderful form that we should punish people who don’t buy into it, and the ability to hear different points of views, to not be so arrogant, to not feel like we have the right to use 80% of the world’s resources for our wonderful country because we want all those televisions we were talking about and all those big cars. Until we stop having that cultural arrogance, we’re going to be fighting with people around the world and governments who will say to us, “You have a bomb and we have a right to have a bomb, too.  Yes, you don’t like us having it, but we don’t like you having it either.”  It’s inconceivable to me that our country feels like we can have all the nuclear weapons in the world but tell North Korea we don’t trust them. North Korea has never used an atomic weapon.  Only the U.S.  We are the only ones who have ever dropped it on anybody.  The idea that we would say to Iran, “You can’t develop atomic weapons” or to Cuba, “You can’t have missiles”  - we are the ones should look at ourselves and say, “We are a part of a community of people in the world.  We are not the only people deserving a high standard of living and a good education and good health care and the rest of it.”  I think it is very difficult for us as an extremely privileged population to embrace that idea, to understand that we must find a way to talk to people about buying their oil.  We can’t just go in and take it.

Now, I’ll agree with you on some of those issues, but I cannot let some pass without comment.  To begin with, we have not taken their oil.  It’s still there.  The idea that the United States went in to liberate Iraq was not driven by the confiscation of the oil.  I would think that as feminist and someone who is interested in human rights to such a degree that you are would want people to be free at whatever cost there is.  We just liberated Iraq so that they can vote for the first time in eons and freed the women from a lifestyle of absolute oppression.  I would think that you would be in favor of that.

I’m totally against [the United States] looking at another country and saying we think that your leader is so bad that we are going to come in there and kill him or kick him out and in the process we are going to bomb your children.  The number of civilians killed is just mind-boggling.  They are continuing to kill civilians and that is part of the response to the invasion of their country, but the idea that we did this because we care about the women Iraq is just not true at all.  If we actually cared about human rights, why did we pick a place that has oil that we need?  There are human rights violations all over the world.  What I believe is that our country tends to go to war and invade people because they want their resources.  The idea that the American people have been sold on the fact that al-Qaida and Osama Bin Ladden and the Iraq leadership are the same thing, is not true.  Iraq did not harbor Bin Ladden.  He was in Afghanistan.  What we’ve done is overlaid that in such a way people don’t know the difference.  People in my neighborhood don’t know the difference between Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria - we believe what the president says because he’s supposed to tell us the truth.  The problem we have is that he’s not telling us the truth so that the things we allow this country to do in our name are completely unacceptable to me.  There are peace demonstrations all over the world and the Middle East saying, “Don’t do it.  Don’t do it.”  If we are concerned about nuclear weapons and human rights violations, why is our position the way it is with Israel?  What about Gaza?  What about all of those people who were in Palestine on the same farm for 900 years and now there is a wall through their farm so they can’t be there?  It’s much more complicated than national leadership makes it for us, and as long they simplify it, it means we as Americans are discussing it on a level that doesn’t really help communicate adequately and honestly with the rest of the world.

We had about twelve years between the Gulf War and when we invaded Iraq.  During this time, Saddam Hussein had ample time to open up and show the inspectors what he had, to abide by the sixteen United Nations resolutions, specifically UNSCR 687, and he continued to refuse time and again.  So, we invaded his country.

While the inspectors were there.  Every single inspector said he didn’t have WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction).  We’ve looked.  Afterwards, what did the president finally say - well, it’s true, we haven’t found any but they could have had them.

Yes, but we knew Iraq had WMDs because even under the Clinton Administration it was acknowledged that they had them, and we have since found canisters of such things, although they have not found the smoking gun.  I’ll admit that.

Right, and think of how many people died.

Let’s just say for the sake of the matter – we’ve liberated the country. . . .

I don’t accept that.  I don’t except that term that we’ve liberated the country.  I don’t think so.

Maybe the means justifies the ends.

No.  I think they have a country and that they have to deal with what they believe should be happening in their country.  I don’t think this country has the right to bomb them and to send troops to do all the things we have done since we have been there because we think their leadership should be changed.

Even with all the atrocities against women and children. . . .

But there are atrocities against women in Liberia.  Why didn’t we go there?

Well, in time, perhaps.

But why didn’t we?  Because we need oil.  This county needs oil.  That’s the reason we are in the Middle East.  Why are we not in all those other places in the world where there are human rights violations?

If it were about oil and we needed their oil solely we could get the oil from Alaska or Canada where there are huge oil reserves.  Of course, in Russia, too.  There is readily available oil.  I would have to say that our role over in the Middle East, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, is justified in the fact that we were attacked. . . .

Not by Iraq.

Not by Iraq.  Not directly, but by al-Qaida with ties to Iraq.  And coupled with the injustices that Saddam Hussein administered against his own people -  I don’t think you can ignore that.

Why pick that country?  There are injustices and dictators who are torturing people all over this world, why would we pick that one and attempt to make our people believe the reason we picked [Iraq] was because he was responsible for the bombings in New York.

I don’t think the American people believe that.

I think they do.  They do.  They’ve asked people on the street.  People believe that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, that Saddam Hussin was responsible.  The president presented it to us and continues to present it to us as if it is true.  And it’s not true. Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 9/11.  There was definitely an attack and we know who did it, Bin Ladden claimed he did it.  The fact that we chose to invade a country not responsible for the attack is unacceptable to me.  I know the women there are treated horribly. The women in Saudia Arabia are treated horrible. The women in Pakistan are treated horribly. Those are our allies. So, why is it that we are concerned with the women in Iraq but not concerned with the women in Saudia Arabia who were not allowed to vote in the last election?  We are talking about how wonderful it is because we had a great election in Iraq.  Our ally doesn’t let women vote.  They can’t walk down the street without knowing in Saudi Arabia, as a woman, there is a certain decorum that they must have.  For our country to decide this is the one place [Iraq] that we are invading in all the world when women are treated badly all over the world, you have to say, “Why?  Why is it that we want to go specifically there?” This is what I try to do, and I am sure you try to, because we are talking about it. 

The problem we have is that so many people don’t have any information to make an informed decision.  You think about it and read about it.  You have an informed decision.  It’s different than mine.  I read about it and think about it.  I have an informed decision so that when we talk we can discuss this country and that country.  Most folks in America can’t.  How then do they form their opinions?  They form their opinions through what the government say, what the president says, and what Peter Jennings says on the six o’clock news.

You say that we are not informed, but we should be.  If anything, we should be more informed these days than we have ever been in the entire history of our country simply because of the Internet..

We should be but we are not.

Cable and satellite television.

But we’re not.  We are informed about celebrity culture which is a sad, distressing thing.  I no longer teach at Spelman College, but I could ask my students any question about any popular rock star and they could tell me.  With international affairs, they’d give me that blank look (laughing) that college kids give you.  The American people have to address that by looking deeper.

If a person is not informed then that must be an individual shortcoming, because the information is available.

It’s totally available and they could do it.  The information is everywhere but they don’t.  We end up with the situation we are in where the majority of the population is completely uninformed.

I still believe that the United States was completely justified in liberating the people of Iraq, and in the long run, the means will justify the ends.

And to realize that everyday mothers are losing their sons - American mothers are losing their sons and daughters, Iraqi mothers are losing the sons and daughters and husbands, and there is no end in sight.  It’s something that we have a different opinion on, but we can do that.

This has happened since day one.  Man cannot get along.  Countries don’t get along.  And as a final resort, they lash out violently to whatever degree.  Not to say that it is right or wrong, but it has always been that way.

That’s what men do.  That’s the way men organize their societies and governments.  That’s what Bishop Tutu was talking about - there is a different way to look at how people can get along.  The older I get the more I try to find the one thing we all agree upon.  One thing.  The only thing I can find that sane, caring people agree upon is that we want to have a safe place for children to grow up.  We don’t want to bomb babies.  We want to have safe, well-feed, well-loved little children.  What does that mean?  How then can you use that as the center of foreign policy.  I know even as I say it how idealistic that sounds but there has to be another way to organize relationship between people and countries.  There has to be a better way than the one men have found.  Men are in charge everywhere so I blame your gender.  (laughing)

Sexism and racism seem to manifest themselves because we don’t always hold people accountable for their actions. But pop culture says it’s okay to be sexist, and at times racist - just look at music videos. Do we let people off too easily, including pop culture, television, movies, and what is the solution?

Pop culture has never taken a position against racism and sexism.  The music and movies that came out of the Sixties and Seventies were reflecting the artists who were working at that time, not any official position of record companies and movie companies.  The artists were, in turn, reflecting the mood of the country, especially the young people who drive pop culture.  The Vietnam War and the draft shook young people up and made them become more actively involved in politics. But once the war was over, many people who had been activists, retreated back into their individual lives.  We also had the presence of movements to help push people in a more progressive direction. The Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement were all active forces in shaping the politics and the culture of the country.  But those movements are no longer the forces they once were.  Assassinations, economics and getting older seem to have put people on another path.  That being said, I would argue with your generalization about “pop culture.”  There are lots of strains within that big umbrella.  Britney Spears couldn't be more different than Erykah Badu. Alicia Keys is certainly not Jessica Simpson.  50 Cent is in no way similar to Brian McKnight.  So there's still variety, but the pop culture, which my husband says is really commercial culture, doesn't encourage variety.

What boundaries do you believe still hold you back, if any, in life, as well as in your writing?  Are there areas in your writing that you haven't explored, and if so, why?

I don't believe that any boundaries are holding me back.  I have been extremely fortunate in every phase of my work.  I've never written a play that hasn't been produced. My novels have sold very well and been critically praised.  I have lots of perceptive readers who give me lots of positive response to everything I'm putting out there.  I do not feel that at this point in my life racism and sexism are keeping me personally from doing the work I want to do and live the life I want to live. There are always new stories to tell.  I don't know if I would say there are areas I want to explore as much as I want to develop my craft.  I want to be a better writer.  I want every book or play to be better than the last one.  I'm not competing with anyone.  I'm about the business of doing my work.

You have talked about how people need to be grounded in reality, but isn’t that the antithesis of what our hyper popular culture projects to society through television, movies, music, as well as literature at times?  How do we (especially young people) find the reality?

The only way I know to fight unreality is to make sure that my work is always fully grounded in the truth. I think my responsibility as an artist is to be sure that what I write reflects what I know to be reality.  I would make myself crazy if I thought my job was to defeat the pop culture.  It's like Judith Massina and Julian Beck talking about capitalism many years ago when the living theatre was at Yale.  She said it is difficult to be a revolutionary because capitalism is like a jellyfish.  Everywhere you touch it, it smiles.  Pop culture is like that, too.  You can waste a lot of time and energy ranting about how bad it is and how influential it is and while we're ranting, Snoop Dog is making another nasty video and strippers become the new female role models.  I try to keep up with it enough so that I know what I'm up against, but to keep the focus on the work I'm doing.

I found a quote of yours where you stated that you are “writing for your life.” I really love that idea. That’s pretty passionate. Does the passion ever wane?

My passion for writing never wanes and my belief that writing is a way that I can change people's thinking, and therefore, change their lives, never wanes.  I grew up watching my father use language in a way that inspired people by clarifying their understanding of the world around them and their specific place in it.  That example has stayed with me.  I have been told that my essay (and later the book) “Mad at Miles” has helped many women who were stuck in violent relationships with their husbands and lovers. The cultural specificity of the work allowed them to think about domestic violence without making the excuse that race was the reason the man behaved in such a violent manner. This makes me feel really good about the piece.  I also know that writing is what I do best.  If I am going to do anything of value in the world, it is going to be writing.  Since I believe my friend Toni Cade Bambara who said the struggle of the 21st Century is going to be whether or not we are defeated by the psychopaths, I also believe that it would be foolish of me not to use the stronger weapon I have against that madness.

You also said that you are “writing to expose and explore the point where racism and sexism meet”. . . “ [helping to] understand the full effects of being black and female in a culture that is both racist and sexist.” Reginald McKnight told me thirteen years ago that he felt as long as there was race there would be racism. Would you agree with him?

I would hope that isn't true. I try to take the long view.  I refuse to believe that the way we're doing things now is the only way things can be done.  If I believe that, I will also have to believe that as long as men can dominate women, they will do so.  I think that people can get to the place where we can appreciate the differences between us.  It's kind of like that song in the old musical South Pacific where the woman sings “you have to be taught to hate and fear/you have to be carefully taught.”  It's a great song and I think it points out the problem.  If we weren't raising children to be hateful, I don't think they would automatically begin to despise each other based on skin color and texture of hair.  This may take a very long time to happen, but I have faith that we can do better.

Where do you see your writing moving toward in the future? What issues have you not tackled or would like to?

I don't think about my writing in terms of issues, although there are certainly issues explored in my work.  I'm always thinking about characters, stories, situations, settings.  The issue comes from the characters, not the other way around.  The only time I remember consciously wanting to create a character to examine an issue was in What Looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day.  I wanted to create a black, female character who was HIV positive, faced the challenge and in the process, fell in love and found work she cared about and a community that needed her.  In that case, the story grew out of my desire to get my readers to think more deeply about HIV/AIDS and to think more compassionately about people who were dealing with HIV/AIDS.

I am interested in writing another play.  I have a great character in mind, but I'm not clear about her story, yet, so she's still simmering back there, waiting for me to come around to her full-time.  I am currently writing my first novel in third person and that is very exciting to me.  There is so much to learn about the craft of writing.  There are so many ways to get better at what I do and I know that comes with discipline, patience, courage, confidence and faith. I would like to explore the idea of writing an autobiography or a memoir.  I am interested in writing a screenplay.  I would like to write a book for young people.  There are so many ideas I'd like to pursue.  I am never at a loss for projects.  My challenge is to find the time to do everything and still get some sleep and see my family and friends!  “Babylon Sisters” places the main character in a job where she's working with women from all over the world.  I see more of that in my work.  I see myself more and more as a citizen of the world and I believe that Bishop Tutu is right when he says what we need is “a women's revolution.”  That means we have to develop the kinds of bonds that cross all artificial boundaries.  I think literature is one of the ways to do that.