Alice walker as a feminist writer
...bornness. Adam, the son of CP's Celie, narrates, in PS J, what his foster father Samuel taught him: "Adam, he would say, What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think of and posit many things, but the answer was always the same: Why is the child crying?" (PSJ, 165). Many of the men in Walker's works Grange Copeland (TLGF), the husband in "Coming Apart" (YCK, 41-53), "Mr. _____" in CP, Suwelo in TMF among them - learn as best they can to hear the cry and ask the question. In WM, the book which bears witness to the interventions and interviews involved in the making of the documentary against the genital mutilation of women, Walker shows her activism in educating people to stifled and denied cries. She also shows how old taboos, tribal loyalties, misplaced priorities, and a desire for the panoply of progress can skew the ability to hear and respond, the ability to see alternatives. She expresses dismay at the persistence of poverty in Africa amid politicians' apparent efforts "to create Europe where they are, for example Houphouet-Boigny's replication of the Roman basilica in the Ivory Coast." She observes: Much of this is understandable, this longing to be where there is comfort, and plenty, and "freedom." But no cathedral or basilica, not even (or especially) the basilica in Rome itself, is worth the suffering of a single child. Africa and the world must choose (WM, 82). As far as Walker is concerned, the capacity to choose is cultivated by watching, attentive listening, opening to "disarmament . . . in the heart and in the spirit" (LBW, 147), turning to "the way of conscious harmlessness" (AWL, 42). Her dedicated writing and her on-the-scene reportage of excruciating rites of initiation, emotional suffering, the silencing of women, the stymieing of life, well-being and growth, and the erection of monuments to tradition or prestige are her efforts to inform the capacity for choice, for ethical decision making. From the beginning of her writing life, it seems, Walker has seen her role as voice for the voiceless. In LBW she describes her sense that ancient voices sometimes guide her pen. In the same collection she relates in "Am I Blue?" what she perceives as a horse's pathos. Unselfconsciously, Walker comments in 1987, after a trip to Bali, that a chicken was the most interesting and engaging thing she saw there. She wishes to give voice to the value of its being. Walker adds: "I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouth of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by a writer - a fool, and so why should one fear? - horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens, can step forward and expound on their lives" (LBW, 170). The call to listen, to attend, is one which Walker repeatedly issues, whether through the "Dear God" letters of Celie, through the poems and stories which often arise from pain, through blissful lauds of women and landscapes and lovers and Earth, or through explicit invitations to readers to join her in a "journey. Hazardous. But guaranteed to work the heart into a bolder shape" (WM, 3). Raising her voice and using loving weapons of resistance are Walker's ways to Earth-saving and people-saving. In her 1997 essays, AWL, Walker comments, beneath a photo of a brush taken by Sue Sellars: "The broom, the pen, and one's body can be used to stir things up" (AWL, 135). Speak and stir she does, motivated by an indefatigable trust in the power and persistence of love. Despite her candor about gynocidal horrors, the degradation of the Earth, and the demoralizing of people, Walker introduces her book of essays on activism with a credal statement which is summed up thus: "I believe the Earth is good. That people, untortured by circumstance or fate, are also good. I do not believe the people of the world are naturally my enemies, or that animals, including snakes, are, or that Nature is" (AWL, xxv). Walker acknowledges the forces that disappoint and the powers that destroy. But she insists that every effort on behalf of blessed change, every gesture of reverence, every act of love matters. The imperative, as Walker sees it, writes for it, rallies for it, is "rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small imperfect stones to the pile" (AWL, xxiii). Later on in the 1997 essays, she makes it clear that these "stones" are "collective stones of resistance against injustice" - rather like the stone piles which raised the carved heads on Easter Island, perhaps. The bringing together of these "collective stones," she explains, is the felicitous redirection of "the need, singly, to throw rocks at whatever is oppressing us" (AWL, 2). Walker indicates more than once that activism is the constructive alternative to suicide, murder, wholesale slaughter. Yet she also allows for the possibility that the rage which fuels resistance may also require killing. Grange Copeland kills. Tashi kills. A young black woman used and abused by a wealthy white lawyer kills.(4) It is as if to say that where life is suppressed and growth is stunted, where persons and systems conspire not to "breathe with" but to suffocate,(5) resistance and activism may sometimes have to kill before anyone or anything can begin to heal. That is the tragedy which "conscious harmlessness" might prevent. And it is Walker's hope that cultivating a sense of the good, the beautiful, and the holy will avert violence and let the killing cease.. Walker Against a society of men The difficulties of living in a society for an individual who is in some way different from the norm or somewhat nonconformist is a subject which is thoroughly explored not only in modern literature but in literature throughout the ages. In Walker's writings we will come to touch her problems which she believed that it was inflicted on her for being a women. She believe that stringent laws have been laid down by her predecessors, by the men and even by the women in her society. Much of her work deals with her difficulty in coming to terms with these rules, the effect the rules have on her and sometimes her attempts to overcome them. Alice felt that women, particularly black women, were typecast and have a lot to deal with is Alice Walker. However, her outlook on her plight is a lot more positive than that of Plath. Her work deals not only with the problems of being a black woman, but also with the possibility of change and progression, even if it is a slow process. The poem, On Stripping Bark from Myself, from her collection Good Night Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning, embodies her ideas to an extent: I find my own Small person A standing self Against the world An equality of wills I finally understand Alice Walker believes that to bring about societal change, a person first has to change their own way of thinking. Her novel Meridian is about a young black woman who wishes to change the place black women have in society, but she attempts to do this mainly through her inner person, her pursuit of 'wholeness'. Although she is a member of the 'movement', she is chastised by her friends for saying that she would not kill for its sake, as she sees this as destroying something that she is trying to create,i.e.peace. One of the major issues in the novel is the fact that black women are often seen as little more than baby-making machines. Meridian tries to break out of this mould by giving away her child and going to college. Barbara Christian writes: Since, in the principle, society places motherhood on a pedestal, while in reality it rejects individual mothers as human beings with needs and desires, mothers must both love their role as they are penalised for it. True for all mothers, this double-edged dilemma is heightened for black women, because society does not value their children. As they are praised for being mothers, they are also damned as baby machines who spew out their product indiscriminately upon society. Although Meridian is a strong individual, in many ways she is still portrayed as a victim of typecasting. Her first sexual encounters were sordid and demeaning and so she sees that what is expected of her is 'giving in', rather than mutual love or affection. She knows that, to an extent, her worth and person is to be seen (by others rather than by herself) in being 'so and so's girl'. So she indulges in it, although she eventually rejects this and, after her abortion, has her tubes tied to reinforce the idea that she is not going to succumb to the dubious 'ideal' of black motherhood. However, the novel is not merely about the problems faced by black women. The author acknowledges that white women also have a role set for them which is no better and equally difficult to break out from. She writes: Who would dream, in her hometown, of kissing a white girl? . . . they only seemed to hang about laughing, after school, until they were sixteen or seventeen they got married. Their pictures appeared in the society column, you saw them pregnant a couple of times, then you were no longer able to recognise them as girls you once 'knew'. They sank into a permanent oblivion. One never heard of them doing anything that was interesting. The author also deals with the fact that because the roles of black and white are so set and so different it is difficult for them to mix. Lynne allows Tommy to rape her because of the guilt she feels at being white, or as Tommy says to her husband Truman: 'she's been atoning for her sins.' Also, the death of Cameron, the 'mulatto' baby, could be symbolic of the fact that blacks and whites will never naturally be able to live in harmony and equality. In a conversation with Claudia Tate, Alice Walker talked about the end of the novel. She said: I can see that the expected end to that kind of struggle his death. However, Meridian does not die at the end of the novel, nor does she get married (which the author suggested was the other end which an audience might expect). Instead of this, she passes her struggle on to Truman, so the hope for change is still there (although it is perhaps significant that she passes her struggle on to a man). "The work of Alice Walker explores the conditions which society places on women, and black people in general. It is, however, more positive than the work of Plath in that it also explores the possibility of change. Meridian breaks away from the roles which are set for her and finds wholeness that way, whereas Sylvia Plath gets torn down by the demands of her society, which eventually caused her to commit suicide as she saw this as the only way of breaking free from the rules which constricted her, (rather like Hedda Gabler). Both writers however, see society both past and present in a conspiracy against women, it is just their ways of dealing with it which are different". Harlod Bloom on Alice Walker Walker's Women Be nobody's darling Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. —Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community. — In Search of Our Mothers' Garden's The strength of Alice Walker's writing derives from the author's inexorable recognition of her place in history; the sensitivity of her work, from her profound sense of community; its beauty, from her commitment to the future. Many readers probably associate Alice Walker with her most recent novel, The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. But the best place to begin to define the whole of her writing is with the semi-autobiographical novel, Meridian, and in that novel I suggest we first consider a very minor character: "Wile Chile." For "Wile Chile" is not gratuitous, not an aberrant whim on the part of the author, but an epigrammatic representation of all the women Walker brings to life. I think this is how Alice Walker intended it, precisely because she begins telling about Meridian by describing her confrontation with "Wile Chile,' a thirteen-year-old ghetto urchin, who from the age of about five or six when she was first spotted, has fed and clothed herself out of garbage cans. More slippery than a "greased pig" and as wary as any stray, the Wild Child is virtually uncatchable.", Meridian. Walker's message Alice Walker's work has universal appeal while at the same time speaks to issues of concern for women and for women of color. Walker's work especially speaks to the day to day realities of women, as we confront issues that are significant and large in our lives. One of the things that I most appreciate in Walker's work is her ability, as a writer, to reach out to all women by writing about those things that are personal, painful, and sometimes taboo for her characters, whether they are fictional or real. Walker certainly helps the readers to understand the phrase that came out of the women's studies movements in the 1970's and 80's "the personal is political" by taking issues that are personal and makes them significant enough to be place in the center of political arenas. Walker also makes it clear that the problems that her characters face in her fiction, and that the women about whom she writes in her non-fiction (including herself) are not unique in their experiences. She speaks loudly, but gently, to those whose experiences are similar to the women about whom she writes. For example, in a poem entitled: "Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?" Walker discusses the pains of loving a man who is "not worth my love." She follows the line with "Did this happen to your mother? Did your grandmother wake up for no good reason in the middle of the night?" and later in the poem she writes, "Did you sister throw up a lot? Did your cousin complain of a painful knot in her back? Did your aunt always seem to have something else troubling her mind?" Much of Walker's work during the 70's and 80's focused on painful relationships of young women who were attempting to find themselves and in the midst of their varied relationships. While the focus may have been on love relationships with men, Walker also focused on how those relationships were impacted by relationships with family, community, other women, and society. Walker closely examined ways in which the characters' daily interactions with the world around them deeply affected their own physical, emotional and mental well being. This is evident in the collection of short stories In Love and Trouble. Walker dared to step out of the confines of prescriptions for writers, especially for women writers and for African American women writers when she wrote about characters who challenged the mores of society and those of our specific circles. She was not afraid, for instance to discuss abortion, rape or suicide, nor was she afraid to discuss the ramifications of these issues for African American women in African American women's communities. This discussion of suicide is obvious in a poem entitled "Suicide" which is about suicide notes. What is most important is that Walker even addressed the topic. Walker wrote of suicide, she says, for two reasons. Walker wrote of suicide to celebrate, as she says, her own survival. "Then I wrote the suicide poems, because I felt I understood the part played in suicide by circumstances and fatigue. I also began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body". (p. 248, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens) She also says in an interview: Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems - and I write groups of poems rather than singles-are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. (p 249, In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens). Walker is also not afraid to discuss the stigmas and stereotypes that serve as responses to the issues African American women confront. When Walker discusses the suicide of the young African American woman whose suicide influenced the poem entitled, "The Girl Who Died" she discusses the common response -- that Black women don't commit suicide. Walker writes: 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." (P. 271 In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens.) Suicide First, suicide notes should be (not long) but written second, all suicide notes should be signed in blood by hand and to the point- that point being, perhaps, that there is none. Thirdly, if it is the thought of rest that fascinates laziness should be admitted in the clearest terms. Then, all things done ask those outraged consider their happiest summer & tell if the days it adds up to is one. Walker also addresses the resistance to seeking and receiving help for emotional or mental illness in her poem entitled. At First At first I did not fight it. I loved the suffering. I felt my heart pump the blood that splashed my insides with red flowers; I savored my grief like chilled wine. I did not know my life was being shredded by an expert. It was my friend Gloria who saved me. Whose glance said, "Really, you've got to be kidding. Other women have already done this sort of suffering for you, or so I thought." (from Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning) In this section of poems, in "Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You In the Morning" Walker writes poetry about women who make decisions about painful relationships with men, who sacrifice themselves for relationships with men, and who must define themselves for themselves in their environments despite conflicts with factors that attempt to define them differently. In this collection, she also includes a few poems in which the characters work out relationships with a therapist. In these poems, the reader can see the struggle and conflict with the idea of therapy as much as the struggles themselves. Considering that the friend Gloria, in the above poem "saves her" from her relationship with the therapist, for example, it is difficult to ascertain whether the suffering was because of the therapist or the issues she carried to the therapist. She also perceives that her life has been "shredded by an expert." On the other hand, her friend's interpreted response, that "other women have already done this sort of suffering" for her, implies, once again, that African American women have no need, not only for therapy, but for the type of suffering that brought her to therapy in the first place. Walker re-creates the complexities of handling the stresses of being a woman, and of being an African American woman, and of the succumbing to the pressures of prescriptions and limitations of dealing with these pressures in this poem. After the Shrink Without my melancholia I am lonely dazed. Under the doctor's care I can remember nothing very long that is sad. Round and round I travel enduring my comfort. The character in this poem is also revealing a duality in her perception of her relationship to therapy. She starts out by indicating that she misses her melancholia. The ambiguity in the poem, however, is most evident in the next few lines. "Under the doctor's care, I can remember nothing very long that is sad." This can be interpreted in several ways. I read it in two ways. Under the doctor's care I can remember nothing very long. The character may not be able to remember sad things any longer, under the doctor's care. Or the character may not be able to remember anything because of (or under) the doctor's care… which is very sad. The short poem ends with the character moving in a circular motion, enduring her comfort. The circularity connotes lack of progressive movement. The phrase, "enduring my comfort" indicates that the comfort is something that is, ironically, not necessarily comfortable, but needs to be endured. Walker's characters dare to step out of restrictions that are set for them as African American women; often finding themselves involved in more complications. They must confront the stereotypes that are perpetuated in their own environments as well as those that are imposed by external arenas. For her characters in her poetry, their only solutions are often to find answers within themselves. Walker demonstrates this in the following poem. On Stripping Bark From Myself Because women are expected to keep silent about their close excapes I will not keep silent and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will please mark the spot where I fall and know I could not live silent in my own lies hearing their "how nice she is!" whose adoration of the retouched image I so despise. No. I am finished with living for what my mother believes for what my brother and father defend for what my lover elevates for what my sister, blushing denies or rushes to embrace. I find my own small person a standing self against the world an equality of wills I finally understand. Besides: My struggle was always against an inner darkness: I carry within myself the only known keys to my death - to unlock life, or close it shut forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow. and the sun, I am happy to fight all outside murderers as I see I must. Walker's work addresses very difficult issues for women. They are often issues that others, even women, do not dare address. She has opened avenues for women, over the years, to address unspoken issues by refusing to succumb to silencing that is generally imposed on women. In this way, Walker offers the venue to ask difficult and often unasked questions and ways to find answers, even (and especially) within oneself. In a society that discourages admitting that women, and particularly women of color, confront many issues Walker addresses, her work becomes extremely useful and empowering for her readers. Walker's The Color Purple The Color Purple: A Study of Walker's Womanist Gospel Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves.... For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Womanism has brought Alice Walker and her characters safely to the land of psychic freedom after a perilous journey fraught with fear, self-hate, and guilt. The transforming agent (and transporting agency) is "womanish" gall, the courage to be daring in the face of a conspiracy of conformity and, if not silence, acquiescence. A traditionalist in the sense of one who believes in the authenticating capacity of orality, Walker locates womanism in the speech culture of black women. Being or "acting womanish," Walker writes, is "the folk expression" black female adults used to describe young girls who were overly curious, "audacious," and eager to enter the world of grown-ups. Womanishness is similar to, yet different from, its nonfolk correlative, precociousness. While both suggest prematurity or early ripening, the former takes on the added elements of willfulness and excessive curiosity, which are not necessarily a part of precocity. "Womanish," I think, links better with the West African pidgin expression "big woman" (pronounced "big ooman"), used also by adults (male and female, though it is female derived) to refer to the sassy demeanor of young females. Mrs. Dalloway. "Somebody I Can Talk To": Teaching Feminism Through The Color Purple its talk and talk ..." — Alice Walker, The Color Purple "She Tell Lies" In The Color Purple, Alice Walker gives us a heroine, like the others I've discussed, whose being in some way hinges on her ability to narrate her life story and to find an audience fit to hear and understand it. Where the other texts I've discussed use tropes of discursive and social exchange to critique the liberal premise that anyone can participate as an equal in the cultural conversation, Walker gives us a heroine whose story works transformative magic, putting all of its listeners—including the reader—on the same footing and thereby representing exchange as just the equalizing and fair social machinery it represents itself to be. If Their Eyes Were Watching God can only imagine a satisfying discursive exchange within a dyadic, female, identificatory, homogeneous, and private public sphere (the back porch), Alice Walker's The Color Purple is prepared to celebrate the utopian possibilities of discourse, community, and social exchange without the reserve and distrust exhibited by the other texts I've discussed. Those texts distrust the transformational effects of narratives written from the social margins to be read by those in positions of relatively greater power even as they attempt to generate just such effects. The Color Purple, by contrast, suggests that there is no need for skepticism. Whereas many black feminist critics stress the racial specificity of Walker's portrayal, reading the novel as an allegory of "the process and problematics of writing for the black woman," white feminist critics have often universalized the novel as a "paradigm of change," rejoicing in how "Celie wrests language ", Newsweek. sympathize with it, understand it (and her), and respond accordingly. Walker makes explicit what Jane Eyre and Their Eyes Were Watching God imply: Celie's ideal listener—a woman—is also her ideal lover, and vice versa. Shug and Celie, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., norms actuality. "You Got to Fight" It would be hard to disagree with Gates's assessment that The Color Purple is an exemplary text of "voice." It does not merely represent a new version of Hurston's Janie on a quest for voice.with Nettie, Celie presumes that she is dead. Celie does not know how to "overread": filling in gaps, reading between the lines, learning to hear the "voice" of silence, madness, babbling, muttering, or screaming—women's "self-talk." Before Celie can learn to "fight," she must identify herself. Celie's pointed inability to do this opens the novel, much as negation and dissatisfaction open Jane Eyre and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Self description becomes self-erasure in her aborted effort to proclaim herself a good girl. family was against it. They hoped she'd marry. Me marry! she hooted." The North (where Nettie travels prior to leaving for Africa) versus the South. This web of contestations, formally at least, suggests a heterogeneous speech community and the importance of speaking across it. Unlike Hurston's Janie, for Celie, finding a listener and finding her voice are inextricably related, just as believing one has an ideal and sympathetic listener may give one the courage to fight back against others. Only when her sister-in-law Kate tells her, "'You deserve more than this,". The epistolary form is particularly well suited for dramatizing this. While epistolary narratives may well...