Understanding Alice Walker by Thadious M. Davis;

Author:Thadious M. Davis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The World of the Word

Mediating Self

The world—the animals, including us humans—wants to be engaged in something entirely other, seeing and delighting in, the stark wonder of where we are: This place. This gift. This paradise.

—Alice Walker, The World Will Follow Joy (2015)

The elongated arc of Alice Walker’s attention to justice, equality, and peace thickened as the twentieth century was coming to an end. With an increased sense of urgency in her messages, Walker moved to an elevated plane of spiritualism in her activism and her understanding of the force and potential of her writing. Fictional texts—such as By the Light of My Father’s Smile: A Story of Requited Love, Crossing Over, and the Sexual Healing of the Soul (1998); The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000); and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel (2004)—turn toward introspection that casts again her autobiography and the concomitant biography of the contemporary world as coevals. Concurrently, she produced books of social and political essays and of topical and philosophical poetry. She acknowledged that this work has much to do with the state of the world and the condition of the earth, as well as with her fluid way of interconnecting all. The emphatic titles she has given her work tell the truth of her convictions and aesthetic vision. Her poetry book titles speak to multiple but convergent concerns: Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003); A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems and Drawings (2003); Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems (2010); The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (2015); and Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart, Poems (2018). Similarly, her titles for her essay collections leave little doubt about the urgency of her thematic messages: Sent by the Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (2001); We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness (2006); Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel (2010); and The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to be in Harm’s Way (2013). These titles also reflect her mimetic conception of art and its place of honor within a matrix of nature and a matrilineal heritage. No matter the specific, convergent content, the essay and the poem appear more frequently to be her preferred genres, even though she has not abandoned fiction.

The spaces that Walker identifies are both natural and infused with spiritual values, and the eye of Walker herself as poet-witness is consistent across the formats for the message. Her texts become her responses to the degradation of a world distorted by the divisions of racial segregation, gender discrimination, economic exploitation, class suppression, and their visible inequities in material and human conservatorship, in horrific landscapes of war and brutality, and in the injustice of extraordinary oppression rendered ordinary. One result has been

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