I will begin my introductory remarks by thanking English department colleague and festival organizer William Miller, who graciously invited me to participate in a true milestone, the celebration of The Color Purple’s 30th anniversary.
Professor Miller’s invitation to introduce Alice Walker led me back to my first encounter with The Color Purple as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, in what was then the only African American literature class the College of William and Mary’s English department offered. A few years later in 1985, my first year of graduate study at the University of Kentucky, I was invited to be on a panel exploring the filmed version of the novel, a discussion which I must admit produced a profusion of sparks but was less than illuminating. Even prior to the novel and film, however, Alice Walker’s work has been a staple in American literature and across so many disciplines: African American literary studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Gay and Lesbian literature and theory, Cultural Studies––any discipline, really, grounded in our collective humanity and committed to unpacking dominant cultural narratives and epistemologies.
In its opening description of Alice Walker, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature identifies her as: “poet, novelist, essayist, biographer, short fiction writer, womanist, publisher, educator, Pulitzer Prize laureate.” (King 749) A fairly detailed and accurate description, though I would add documentary filmmaker and, more importantly, activist—an indispensable part of her identity which undergirds her artistic vision and endeavors. Reflecting a life rooted in the quest for aesthetic and cosmic truths, Alice Walker’s works are shaped by a liberatory impulse, foregrounding the physical, geographic, psychological and spiritual landscapes and lifescapes of women in global contexts, while embracing the belief that anyone can be spiritually redeemed regardless of gender, color, nationality.
In my survey course on contemporary African American literature, I pinpoint for students the year 1970, for it marked a seismic shift in African American literature and culture, and was the genesis of what some critics call the ‘renaissance of black women’s literature,’ akin to the more famous one that flourished in Harlem in the 1920s. Three seminal works appeared that year: Alice Walker’s debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland; Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye; and an anthology entitled, The Black Woman, a revolutionary polyphony of essays, poems, and fiction edited by the late, great fiction writer Toni Cade Bambara. The volume included a range of inspiring and inspiriting voices––Audre Lorde, Abbey Lincoln, Paule Marshall, Nikki Giovanni––and a short story by a young Alice Walker entitled, “The Diary of an African Nun.” Collectively, Bambara, Morrison, and Walker were at the vanguard of women artists committed to interrupting and contesting the orthodoxy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which too often conflated blackness and maleness; recall here the daringly in-your-face title of another groundbreaking anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1983). Edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, this important work owes a tremendous debt to the incalculable work of Bambara, Walker, and so many others.
The volume The Black Woman performed vital literary and cultural work, given that black women’s literary production was routinely either dismissed outright or rendered ancillary, not merely in the 1960s, but since the 1700s and 1800s, a time of damn scribbling black women like Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs. Commenting on this not-so-benign artistic neglect in a 1973 interview, Alice Walker contended:
Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women…It seems to me that black writing has suffered, because even black critics have assumed that a book that deals with relationships between members of a black family––or between a man and a woman––is less important than one that has white people as a primary antagonist. (O’Brien 201-202)
Walker spearheaded an unsparing but necessary critique of many black men’s embrace of white patriarchal ideology and its ill effects. This represented a radical shift from interracial protest embodied in enshrined “canonical” African American literature––read black men’s literature; think here of Richard Wright’s landmark Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man (1952)––to intraracial conflict within the domestic realm, specifically emphasizing black women’s oppression in what was, presumably, their “safe” space, the homeplace.
From 1970 fast forward to 1973, another red-letter year in a life/career chock full of them, with the emergence of the writer Alice Walker as literary activist and excavationist. As is now widely known, she single-handedly resurrected the life and art of Zora Neale Hurston, a monumental act of remembrance, reclamation, and restoration, given that Hurston had been persecuted while alive by too many of her own people and relegated to the periphery by a literary establishment often hostile to black women’s literary creations. Indeed, Hurston’s own demonization would sadly foreshadow Walker’s own disparagement upon her publishing The Color Purple.
It is so easy in 2012 to overlook the indispensable role Walker played in finding and restoring Zora, given the latter’s prominence in the 21st century: there are festivals held in her honor, endowed professorships in English departments bearing her name, library shelves lined not only with books by her but books about those books, at least three biographies on her life and writing—and, of course www.ZoraNealeHurston.com. As a corollary to this kind of activism, as I researched Alice Walker’s unflagging commitment to both her own art and to political/literary activism, I was also heartened to learn of what might be deemed her pedagogical activism as well: not only has she taught at several universities, including HBCUs Jackson State University and Tougaloo College, both in Mississippi, but she taught what was probably the first course devoted exclusively to African American women writers in the 1970s at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
From the 1970s I fast forward to 1982 and the appearance of The Color Purple, a work that continued Walker’s overarching fictive project: shining a light on the white and black South and how enmeshed oppressive racial and patriarchal systems from without affect and infect women as well as men within the domestic milieu. Assailed by major and minor writers as some sort of wayward race traitor, Walker was the subject of barbed critiques that echo what my colleague Stefan Wheelock discussed in a talk he presented to English majors on Walker’s beautifully crafted, multi-layered short story, “Everyday Use”: to contextualize what he deemed the history of disavowing black women’s literary production, Professor Wheelock journeyed back to Thomas Jefferson’s deplorable condemnation of Phillis Wheatley’s artistic endeavors. According to Sally Hemings’ owner, “Religion, indeed, has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” (Jefferson 140) Jefferson’s denunciation of Wheatley as mere literary imitator/minstrel would be subsequently echoed in the 1960s by none other than the major creative and political force during the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka (ne, LeRoi Jones), who would denigrate Wheatley as “paternalistic”––a euphemism for those branded insufficiently black and militant. Sadly, Alice Walker, like her literary forbearers Wheatley and Hurston, would be dragged before the bar of the patriarchal, racially correct literary hegemony, and also be accused of being a heretic, a traitor to the race.
Just as Wheatley’s critics would miss her coyly subversive and radical leveling of the citadel of white supremacy in her seemingly benign verse, what The Color Purple’s detractors missed in their reductionist conception of the novel as agenda-driven is a rich imaginative tapestry that offers a radical counter re-presentation of blackness and southerness and femaleness and maleness––of personhood itself. In their myopic and male-centric gaze, such critics missed the liberatory essence embodied in a character like Sofia (Oprah’s character for those of you whose knowledge of the work doesn’t extend beyond the 1985 film), in one of my favorite, and one of the most powerful scenes in all of American literature. Recall how the mayor’s wife is so taken by Sofia’s well-mannered and well-dressed children, and naturally assumes that Sofia would jump at the opportunity to care for her children, an assumption that Sofia would privilege the welfare of the mayor’s children over that of her own. When Miss Millie asks, “[W]ould you like to work for me, be my maid?,” Sofia offers an unambiguously, full-throated “Hell no” (Walker, The Color Purple 86). Consequently, Sofia would pay a wretchedly high price for speaking truth to patriarchy and supremacy: she is savagely beaten and forced into a role that has too often provided the only economic lifeline for black women and their families. So vigorously dismantling the myth of the mammy––the fiction that all big southern black women just love all little white children, and risking her life in doing so––Walker’s Sofia incarnates the legacy of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, the real-life fearless Mississippi woman who endured potentially soul-killing psychological and physical violence.
Alice Walker’s outrageously courageous women are thus part of a historical legacy of what the mayor, who oversees Sofia’s battering, calls “crazy women,” a pejorative descriptor in the mayor’s lexicon that’s sadly seconded by black characters, such as Miss Celie’s (Whoopi’s character) husband Mr. Albert––unruly and unbounded women vilified for daring to create, daring to assert agency inapprehensively oppressive circumstances.
One other point about a novel that troubled so many different waters is the criticism the book evoked because Alice Walker dared to speak the love that dare not speak its name, perhaps the greatest taboo in too much of African America. How dare Walker imagine that a woman could love another woman spiritually, emotionally, and physically? The shrill denunciation that accompanied this portrayal unveiled a rampant homophobia that too often divides the black community. This point sadly reverberates in September 2012 when scores of so-called mainstream ministers who enshrine themselves as “Civil Rights activists” rail against marriage equality, often at the urging of their white counterparts––and benefactors––who otherwise have had little use, historically or at any other time, for black folks of any orientation (refreshingly, enlightened clergy such as Rev. Al Sharpton, not to mention the late Coretta Scott King, have countered such voices in advocating full marriage equality). Too often these self-appointed emissaries of God “tolerate” the gay presence in their churches, as long as they’re simply seen and heard—gay folks can tickle a piano and organ so fabulously. This is the steep price of admission too many same-gender-loving folks are forced to pay to enter such inhospitable houses of worship: gay congregants’ “sinful,” “wicked” natures must be checked at the church door.
As the Oxford Companion’s comprehensive description made clear, Alice Walker’s prodigious talents extend into the realm of non-fiction as well, best evidenced by the path-breaking 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” an aesthetic treatise that chronicled black women’s creative traditions as resistive responses to manifold oppressions, and how women subverted such conditions by fashioning different artistic forms––cooking, quilting, gardening. I don’t think it an overstatement to compare this foundational essay in Black Feminist theory and criticism to British literary icon Virginia Woolf’s barrier-shattering 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” which Walker herself cites as a guidepost in articulating her own theory of black women’s artistic ontology and practice. Here’s one particularly revelatory quote from “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”:
But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women––our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves––have not perished in the wilderness. And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we black American women are. (235)
In her radical reconfiguring, the grandmother and mother become ancestral beacons; Walker thereby clears the space for a matrilineal literary tradition, the amputated distaff branch of the literary tree that often found black women’s literary art as a type of strange fruit that didn’t fulfill the dictum that black writing focus exclusively and parochially on “solving” interracial strife and inequality.
Almost a decade later, in a volume entitled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker would coin and define the term Womanist, which she delineates as a black feminist––note black and not African American––a person who is “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female”. (xi) This holistic and inclusive vision starkly belies the caricatured image projected of Walker amidst the imbroglio sparked by The Color Purple. I mention the pioneering essay and subsequent book of the same name as a reminder that Walker’s voluminous body of work didn’t begin and end with The Color Purple. One particularly courageous post-Color Purple work is the 1992 novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and the accompanying film, Warrior Marks. Here, the full scope of Walker’s aesthetic vision comes into sharp focus in a novel dramatizing female genital mutilation (circumcision), or FGM. One can see in this work the full blossoming of Alice Walker’s Diasporan consciousness, and how the scourge of patriarchy can figuratively and literally destroy the bodies and souls of women across boundaries of place, nation, and time. Incurring the wrath of many as an African American woman daring to talk back to Mother Africa, Walker has nonetheless remained steadfast and unbowed in her quest for women’s and all people’s liberation in all corners of the globe.
As a vital architect of a matrilineal literary tradition, Alice Walker stands on the shoulders of artists/activists––from Frances E.W. Harper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Lorraine Hansberry and Audre Lorde. And as Walker has ascended in literary stature, one can hear echoes of her voice in the work of recent artists, such as the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat; in Sapphire, the author of the novel Push; in the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, whose 2009 play Ruined dared to explore the emotional and physical toll paid by women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a rapacious environment where women’s bodies, like the land in which they reside, are ripe for profiteering, pillaging, and torture. One can hear and see the light of Walker’s smile in such voices and creations: continuing her legacy, these women honor the difficult, daring to utter the unutterable––uncomfortable and disturbing but life-saving truths.
In lauding another literary foremother, Alice Walker once praised Gwendolyn Brooks in this way: “If there was ever a born poet, I think it was Brooks. Her natural way of looking at anything, of commenting on anything, comes out as a vision, in language that is peculiar to her.” (O’Brien 199) Walker’s boundless creative imagination and the art it has borne put her in this same rarefied air: She too is a born poet who has blessed us with a luminous and crystalline vision unblurred by the beams in the eyes of so many who put profits or power over personhood and the rights inherent in being fully human.
Works Cited
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1787. William Peden, ed. New York: W.W.Norton, 1972.
King, Debra Walker. “Alice Walker.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997. 749-51.
O’Brien, John, ed. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982.
---. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” 1974. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 231-43.
*AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to writer and friend Kenyatta Dorey Graves for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.
May 23, 2013
