English Literature

Alice Walker has constantly articulated about her life in her work of art which relates to her parentage, her life in Georgia as a sharecroppers daughter, her relationship with her parents and siblings, her school and college life, her grandparents and her distant aunts, the social movements and much more. All these have molded Walker to a great extent and their influence has been registered by her in her fictions and non-fictional prose apart from her poetry collections. She was born the youngest child of the family, eighth in the order, in a share croppers family and was brought up in poverty in the Deep South. In spite of being in destitution she was brought up with all dignity by her mother who had been a constant source of inspiration and has been frequently referred to in her essays. She insists that it was her mother who had granted permission to become a writer. Although Walker grew up in a poor environment, she was supported by her community and by the knowledge that she could choose her own identity. Moreover, Walker insisted that her mother granted her permission to be a writer and gave her the social, spiritual, and moral substance for her stories. (Notable Biographies 2009)

Alice Walker takes an ambivalent stand when she writes about her Southern influence. At one level she rejoices that she has derived a sense of community and commitment, and is able to relate to the millions of people who are in a similar situation. She has got her inner strength and the spiritual stamina from her life in the rural South. On the other hand, she also painfully recounts the untold hardships that the Blacks had to undergo to meet their ends. For instance, she states that her father was paid around two hundred dollars for a year and the White employers worked him to death. Alice Walker has not failed to relate to her Southern experience in her works and she remembers the childhood stories narrated by her mother and her friendship with an old man in the neighborhood which had been a source of inspiration to write the childrens literature titled To Hell with Dying and The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.

Walker shared a strong maternal bond with her mother and in her personal website, she recounts about the most poignant and moving moment in her life which transported her abruptly from a happy, innocent childhood to a sudden lonely and serious adulthood. She was rather forced to mature by a gunshot incident. When she was eight years old, she and her brothers were playing cowboys and Indians.  One of her brothers accidently shot her in the eye with a BB gun and in order to escape the punishment, her brothers forced her to accept a concocted fiction. She lost her sight in her right eye leaving a disfiguring white scar. After this incident, she grew more introspective who was otherwise quite tomboyish because she was haunted by a mixed feeling of sadness, betrayal and alienation. She recalls about this incident and states An accident became my accidentthereby absolving my brothers of any blame. She recalls this incident in her biography by Evelyn C.White, The unhappy truth is that I was left feeling a great deal of pain and loss and forced to think I had somehow brought it on myself, Walker remembers. It was very like a rape. It was the first time I abandoned myself, by lying, and is at the root of my fear of abandonment. It is also the root of my need to tell the truth, always, because I experienced, very early, the pain of telling a lie.(White 21)

Walker relates her disfiguration in her eyes to the African women who undergo genital mutilation and this identification becomes the theme of her Possessing the Secret of Joy and Warrior Marks. This shooting episode marked the death of her childhood and the birth of a writer in Alice Walker that she started writing as early as thirteen years. Maria Lauret refers to Alice Walkers quotes where the later relates her position as a writer thus From my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast I began to really see people and things, to really notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to see how they turned out.  I felt old and read stories and began to write poems. (p. 5-6 2000)

The adolescent period had passed in silence and this was the time when Walker started to introspect into her life, a journey towards her inward self began. Her perspective towards life and her environment around her underwent a metamorphosis. Her family supported her to enter Spelman College, Atlanta and after two years she left for Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Her intellectual, spiritual world opened up. She was taught by Muriel Rukeyser, the poet who encouraged her writing and passed her poems to Langston Hughes. Hughes was instrumental in publishing Walkers first collection of poems titled Once in 1968. The inspiration of most of her poems in this anthology has been a harrowing experience at the college. Lauret writes about this experience that  another traumatic experience occurs when Walker finds herself involuntarily pregnant whilst at college. She feels suicidal and undergoes illegal abortion, but this second scarring produces the same creative impulse as the first That week I wrote without stopping almost all of the poems in Once  (2000, p.6)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had a remarkable influence over Alice Walker and in the mid of 1960, she actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement. This participation made a lasting impression on her writing expertise and in her book In Search of Our Mothers Gardens she carries several essays reflecting her orientation towards Civil Rights. She involved herself in the Campaign for Civil Rights between 1965 and 1968 and canvassed for voter-registration in Georgia, her native state. Walker taught Black History to adults for Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and she felt it to be cumbersome because of the white biased outlook of history. She also denounced Christianity during her college days and during her involvement in Civil Rights Movement she married Mel Leventhal, the Jewish Civil Rights Lawyer when interracial marriage was still illegal. Her personal choice of life affected her literary career and Walker recalls that her literary production during 1960s was dismissed by Black reviewers very often because of her life style which refers chiefly to her interracial marriage. In spite of the repeated threats, they continued living together and the birth of their Rebecca Leventhal Walker is referred as a miracle by Alice Walker. That prerogative, embattled as it was, results in the birth of Rebecca Leventhal Walker in 1969, which was miraculous, in Walkers words, both because she helps her father evade the draft and because she arrives three days after the completion of  The Third Life of Grange Copeland. (Alice Walker A Life, 8)

Motherhood and the death of Dr King reduced Walkers involvement in the Civil Rights Campaign in the South. Walker hence shifted to writing and teaching at Wellesley College in New England and moved closely with the academic circle which included authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Watkins Harper and Paule Marshall. But frustration pushed her into writing from academic teaching and she started receiving several scholarships and grants for her creative work. Radcliffe Institute Fellowship facilitated her to write In Love and Trouble and Meridian and later in 1979 Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship enabled her to write The Color Purple which won her the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Thus the scholarships and funds allowed her to devote herself complete to her creative work. It was then she divorced Leventhal and set up home with the fellow writer Robert Allen.

The Color Purple was a turning point in Walkers literary career and brought her accolades and appreciation. It was an instant success and it brought Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones to Walker as they wished to make a movie of the book. But this novel stirred controversy among the black community since it dealt with sexual violence, lesbianism and domestic abuse. Walker responded to this criticism in her essay In the Closet of the Soul stating that she was utterly disappointed with the opposition from the men folk that instead of empathizing with the oppressed women and changing their conduct, black men were voicing their protest for depicting them in bad light. In The Same River Twice, Walker once again defends the much acclaimed The Color Purple. Later, her writing took a different style, an experiment in creative writing centering on social and political arguments. Increasingly the personal accounts of the late 1980s and 1990s concern what can be dismissed as life styles, or more accurately described as the authors awakening to new age thinking. (Alice Walker A Life, 10)

Alice Walker has proven her mettle as a versatile poet and Dieke states that Walker insists that the raw material out of which the poet constructs the world of her art must necessarily originate from the common people for whom she clearly writes (171). In her first volume of poems Once and the second volume Revolutionary Petunais she reflects her sympathetic interest in the day to day affairs of the common man. Being a hard core feminist, she pays homage to the generation of black women who have toiled hard and had undergone untold sufferings in the hands of the white owners and the black men. The ordinary black woman is an epitome of physical fortitude, endurance and perseverance and Walker venerates such women in her poem.

Alice Walker has constantly been engaged in articulating her thoughts about the African American women who are struggling to establish their identities in a society where they had been treated like sub-humans until recently. Most black women, like Walker derived their strength and endurance from their mothers and a developed a sense of comradeship even more than a mother-daughter relationship. Walker elaborately portrays the physical fortitude and the mental stamina of these women along with the hardships and sufferings they undergo, which were hardly noticed by the society. Walker, with a warrior spirit, has explicitly dealt with the problems encountered by women in their domestic life, pertaining to their relationship with men, be it a brother, father or husband. She has focused on those women who were looked down upon just because they were  black. Walkers stories focus not so much on the racial violence that occurs among strangers but the violence among friends and family members, a kind of deliberate cruelty, unexpected but always predictable. (Notable Biographies 2009)

Alice Walker, the new age writer, though appears to have dealt profoundly with the lives of the black women, still her books have a universal appeal. She could easily relate to the suffering and hardships of the oppressed class because of her humble beginnings and the environment in which she grew. All these factors have strengthened her and equipped her to face the world in a different angle which many of the fellow women have failed to see. She is extremely gifted enough to draw her stamina and fortitude from those suffering a lot, those who have endured their anguish and torment through silence and submission. On the whole, Alice Walker is definitely the liberated voice of the black woman who has been subjugated for centuries together.