Bad-Ass Women: Alice Walker
Welcome to the first in a series celebrating bad-ass women.
Alice Walker
Born: 9 February 1944
Nationality: American
Profession: Poet, novelist, activist, feminist
Website: http://alicewalkersgarden.com
Bio:
Born in Georgia the eighth child of share-cropper parents, educated in segregated schools, blinded in one eye by a childhood accident, Alice Walker should not have risen. But she did.
Everything America’s racist history and culture could throw at her it did, including threats of violence when she lived to Mississippi with her Jewish husband — a relationship that was still illegal when they married in 1967.
Walker rose, and rose, mingling her work as an artist, activist and womanist. As a feminist and civil rights activist, she was at the forefront of intersectionality decades before Kemberlé Crenshaw coined the term. It says plenty about America that Walker’s close friend and comrade-in-arms Gloria Steinem is a living icon of Second Wave feminism, while Walker barely ever gets a mention.
The Color Purple isn’t just her best known novel, it’s all a lot of people know about her. Including myself, until I stumbled across an essay called “In Search of our Mother’s Garden”. It gripped me, fueled my own writing.
Walker’s words have that effect. Deceptively conversational, they evoke the intimacy of a face-to-face discussion combined with the effortless-seeming elegance and depth of a master writer.
Ms Walker embodies Orwell’s definition of writers as people prepared to face “unpleasant facts”. Her work tackles the ugliness most people prefer to avoid. Racism, rape, violence, patriarchy, genital mutilation, slavery, poverty, betrayal, history, divorce — there is nothing she won’t weigh with words, holding up the horror and sordidness to the touch of the light.
Equally fearless in life, she felt no need to explain her long-term relationship with singer Tracy Chapman, saying: “My life is not to be somebody else’s impact — you know what I mean? And it 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.”
How awesome is that?
Walker continues writing, speaking out, insisting on the importance and power of black women’s stories. She was instrumental in reviving the work of anthropologist and novelist Zora Neal Hurston, helping her powerful words reach new generations. Through Ms Walker’s efforts, we all have the chance to be better-educated and better-read. Her gift to us is reams of writing that tells the hard truths we have to learn from if we are to change anything.
In her own words:
“You will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money… women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and times when you will wonder if independence, freedom of thought, or your own work, is worth it.”
“Be nobody’s darling; be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
of your life
And wrap around you like a shawl
to parry stones”
“I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing. It has been like being born again, literally.”
Further reading:
In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
