Alice Malsenior Walker Photograph: Ana Elena By: Thao Vo AFAS 160D
“ A gifted and prolific writer, a bold thinker, and a woman who is determined to confront and embrace the contradictions of her life and the paradoxes of our time! ”
Life Born in February 9, 1944 (age 70) in Eatonton, GA. Valedictorian of her HS class. At 8 years old, she was shot in the right eye with a BB pellet while playing with two of her brothers. After the incident, Walker largely withdrew from the world around her because she was self-conscious. Walker married activist Melvyn Leventhal in The couple had one daughter, Rebecca Walker, before divorcing in 1976.
Education Went to a segregated high school. Spelman College in Atlanta. Sarah Lawrence College in New York City. Visited Africa as part of a study-abroad program. Graduated in She started publishing fiction & poetry during the Black Arts movements in the 1960s.
Jobs Social worker Teacher/ Lecturer Women's Rights Activist Civil Rights Activist Voter Registration in Georgia Welfare Rights & Children’s Programs in Mississipi Welfare Department in New York – Wrote “Advancing Luna” Author
Books
Books (cont.)
Full List: Recent The World Will Follow Joy; Turning Madness Into Flowers (poems) 2013 The Cushion In The Road; Meditation and Wandering As The Whole World Awakens To Being In Harm’s Way (essays, travels and dreams) The Chicken Chronicles, a Memoir, Novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland Meridian The Color Purple The Temple of My Familiar Possessing the Secret of Joy By the Light of My Father’s Smile Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart Short Stories In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women Alice Walker Banned You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart
Full List (cont.) Essays and Prose In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Womanist Prose Anything We Love Can Be Saved Living By the Word I Love Myself When I Am Laughing….A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (editor) The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult Sent By Earth Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (with Pratibha Parmar) We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For Overcoming Speechlessness The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering As the Whole World Awakens To Being In Harm’s Way Books for Children To Hell With Dying Langston Hughes, American Poet Finding the Green Stone There Is A Flower At The Tip Of My Nose Smelling Me Why War Is Never A Good Idea
Full List (cont. 3) Poetry Once Revolutionary Petunias Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You In the Morning Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Earthling Poems Absolute Trust In The Goodness Of The Earth A Poem Travelled Down My Arm, poetry and drawings Hard Times Require Furious Dancing The World Will Follow Joy; Turning Madness Into Flowers Collected Interviews The World Has Changed; Conversations With Alice Walker, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd. Video Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (video)
Notable works: The Color Purple was her most famous novel and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in It was also controversies; detractors who censured the novel for its representation of incestism, as well as its depiction of lesbianism. Brutally honest, originality, command of black vernacular English. Renders the novel in singular voice of her barely literate protagonist No mediating narrator intervenes. It joined women together by their love for each other, and experiences with the men who abuse them, and the children they care for.
3 types of black women in her work: Those who were exploited both physically and emotionally; hose were narrow and confining, and who were driven sometimes to madness. (Margaret & Mem Copeland in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970’s). Those who were victims not so much of physical violence as of psychic violence, women who are alienated from their own culture. Those woman character who despite oppression they suffer, achieve some wholeness and create spaces for other oppressed communities. Represented most effectively by Celie & Shug in the Color Purple
Sample Reading from class: “Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning” Looking down into my father’s Dead face For the last time My mother said without Tears, without smiles Without regrets But with civility “Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you In the morning.” And it was then I knew that the healing Of all our wounds Is forgiveness That permits a promise Of our return At the end.
Favorite Work (By her, from me) “Before you knew you owned it” Expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise. become a stranger To need of pity Or, if compassion be freely Given out Take only enough Stop short of urge to plead Then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger Than your own small heart Or greater than a star; Tame wild disappointment With caress unmoved and cold Make of it a parka For your soul. Discover the reason why So tiny human midget Exists at all So scared unwise But expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise. -Alice Walker
Style / Themes Creates powerful women figures, not men. Walker's inspiration derived from the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South. Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution. "One thing I try to have in my life and my fiction is an awareness of and openness to mystery, which, to me, is deeper than any politics, race, or geographical location." – Alice Walker
Sources: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature – Third Edition – Volume 2