Queerview: Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born the daughter of sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia in 1943. She is an author, activist and Womanist (a term she coined in her book of essays <i>In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens</i> as an alternative to the term “Feminist”) who has written eight novels, four collections of short stories, nine collections of poetry, and eleven collected works of non-fiction. In 1983, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel <i>The color Purple</i> which has been made into both a film and a musical. And in 1997 she won the O. Henry Award for her short story “Kindred Spirits.”

The Color Purple is arguably her finest work, if not simply her best known. It is the harrowing story of Celie Johnson and her struggles with the men who abuse and oppress her– beginning with a step father who rapes her then gives her away in marriage to the abusive Albert, or “Mr._______” Her life is saved, quite literally, by Albert’s lover, the free-spirited blues singer Shug Avery. The novel is peopled by a cast of deeply flawed but lovable characters who struggle, as Celie does, to overcome their oppressors, their history and their demons. While the book has been criticized for it’s negative depictions of African-American men, Walker pointed out in her essay, “In the Closet of the Soul,” from Living by the Word that,

“It is a mistake to think that Celie’s ‘meekness’ makes her a saint and Mister’s brutality makes him a Devil…They are, in fact, dreadfully ill, and they manifest their dis-ease according to their culturally derived sex roles…They proceed to grow, to change, to become whole…by becoming more like each other…Celie becomes more self-interested and aggressive; Albert becomes more thoughtful and considerate of others.”

Walker’s work is marked by an abiding love and faith in humanity and nature in the face of shared, universal adversity born largely of a lack of awareness both of self and others. In response to the AIDS epidemic, for example, Walker wrote in her essay, “All the Bearded Irises of Life: Confession of a Homospiritual,”

“So many cultures have died it is hard to contemplate the possible loss or dulling over of another one, or to accept the fact that once again those of us who can appreciate all the bearded irises of life will be visually, spiritually, and emotionally deprived.
How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks, they are holding guns.”

In the late 60’s Walker married civil lawyer Mel Leventhal, with whom she had a daughter, Rebeca Walker, herself now a writer and activist. Rebeca Walker has chronicled her childhood and her relationship with her parents in her book, Black, White and Jewish. Alice Walker has, in recent years, written and spoken openly about her evolving sexual identity. Though she remains private, for the most part, about her personal life, she wrote in The Guardian in December 2006 about her relationship with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, saying,

“[the relationship] was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”

 

 

 

Source:
Walker, Alice,

Living by the Word: Selected Writings– 1973-1987

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York: 1988

~ by erc2008 on June 28, 2008.