Xiaoying Wang: Alice Walker: The legend of a womanist

1 Introduction

Alice Walker is not only an outstanding American writer, but also an advocate and leading light for womanism. Her unique writing style and her courage to tackle social problems in her writings make her a legend in American literature. Taking this as the background, Xiaoyin Wang’s Alice Walker: The legend of a womanist comprehensively (艾丽斯·沃克: 妇女主义者的传奇) reveals Alice Walker’s legendary life as a black woman writer in her striving for social justice and equality between genders and races. Along the track of Walker’s life, this book not only relates in detail the important events in Walker’s life experience, the main content and background of her literary creation, and the acceptance of her works, but also comments in a profound and enlightening way on Walker’s womanist thoughts and values, literary achievements, and social influence, so as to present a truthful and comprehensive image of Alice Walker as a legend in American literature.

2 Introduction to Alice Walker: The legend of a womanist

The book consists of 12 chapters, and can be divided into six parts. The first part starts by recounting Walker’s childhood. Alice Walker was born into a black tenant family in Georgia. Walker’s ancestors were black slaves auctioned at a black slave market in Virginia. Her parents were typical southern black tenant farmers. The fate of the Walker family, like most black tenants in the south, was associated with poor life, dilapidated housing, laborious farm work, and greedy and ruthless white planters. Despite their difficult life, Alice Walker’s parents took every opportunity to strive for and defend their rights, and created conditions for their children to change their destiny. From her people, her family, and especially her mother, Walker not only nourished the spirit of resisting racism, but also inherited her black culture. The book describes many interesting stories about Walker’s childhood, but the most important event in that period was when she was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers, and this accident had a far-reaching impact on Walker’s self-awareness and growth: “The feeling of loneliness and being an outsider made her begin to strengthen her observation of the people and things around her, and also made her have strong sympathy for the weak and disabled people” (Wang 2020: 13).^[1]

The second part is about Walker’s educational experiences at two colleges. When Walker was still in high school, the African–American civil rights movement began. The movement and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired Walker so greatly that at that time she established her life goal of striving for equal rights for blacks. After graduating from high school, Walker received a scholarship from Spelman College, where she achieved excellent results in the first two years. The book graphically describes Walker attending the famous demonstration in Washington on August 28, 1963, at which Martin Luther King delivered his speech “I have a dream.” Because Spelman College did not support students in participating in the civil rights movement, Alice Walker transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. At Sarah Lawrence College, she met three teachers who had an important impact on her future life, especially her writing career.

The third part gives a lively description of Walker’s experience of participating in the fierce struggles of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and her love for and marriage to Melvyn, a white legal worker from New York, making them the first legally married black and white couple in Mississippi history. During this time, Walker also worked as a consultant in black history for the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program, and as a writer in residence at Jackson State College and Tougaloo College.

The fourth part describes Walker’s early literary creation and her efforts to revive African-American women’s literature. In 1970, Walker was awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe College in the northern city of Boston. It was during this period of time that Walker discovered many great black women writers. As Wang puts it:

[T]heir works have never been valued; even if they are highly praised by the critics, their works will soon be forgotten. Because they rarely appear in the list of classic literature, there is almost no introduction to black women writers and works in the literature class of the university. This made her have a strong idea that the works of black women writers should be introduced to the university classes. (Wang 2020: 132)

So she submitted a proposal to Wellesley College to set up a course to introduce black women writers, and this was approved. Therefore, for the first time in the history of American universities, a course on black women writers appeared, and Alice Walker became the first lecturer to teach black women’s literature. Encouraged by this, Walker started to dig out those black women writers who had been ignored or abandoned by white mainstream literature. At the same time, she tried to collate and document the cultural tradition and the artistic creativity of black women, producing a large number of essays. Wang’s elaboration of this background demonstrates that it is during this period that Walker’s womanist thinking began to sprout.

The fifth part introduces the writing and publication of Walker’s most popular novel, The Color Purple, and the awards it garnered. The publication of The Color Purple caused a great sensation because it is very different from most works dealing with black life. Although the novel caused great controversy, this did not prevent it from winning the three most important awards in American Literature in 1983: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Association Award. With its adaptation into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985, The Color Purple exerted even greater influence and became one of the most important literary classics in the United States.

The last part of the book expounds the background, content, and value of Walker’s womanism from four perspectives, “womanism,” “living by the word,” “activism,” and “beauty of truth” respectively, and sums up Walker’s unique personality as a spokeswoman for American black women and an artist with a strong sense of social responsibility. As the author concludes: Telling the truth is what Alice Walker has held to firmly throughout her life. She is a gifted writer, an outspoken political activist and a womanist who adheres to the values of black women. Poetic, passionate and true are the keynote of her literary creation. Walker’s truth telling shocked many readers, so she has become one of the most controversial writers in the United States. However, Wang points out that “it is because of this that she has become a legendary writer of our time” (Wang 2020: 287).

3 Significance of the book

In exquisite strokes, Alice Walker: The legend of a womanist presents us with the personal development of Alice Walker, her education, her love and marriage, and her struggle between career development and family responsibility. Wang’s work not only records Alice Walker’s legendary life, but also depicts the factors that shaped the personality of the legend. In fact, the most impressive part of the book is the prominent description of Walker’s personality as a legend.

Walker was born into a black tenant farmer family in southern Georgia, where racial segregation was very serious. She faced the same pressures of life and hopeless future that her parents and grandparents had borne before her. “As descendants of black slaves, the fate of the Walker family, like most black tenant farmers in the south, was associated with poverty, dilapidated housing, grueling farm work, and greedy, ruthless white planters” (Wang 2020: 2). However, Alice, who was “smart,” “courageous,” and “full of curiosity and love for everything about nature,” found a pathway out of this fate Although she lost one eye due to an accident at the age of eight, with the ugly scar giving her six years of “Dare not look up” and leading her to become a lonely and desperate girl, she soon learned to be strong from her teachers and the love of her brothers and to sympathize with the weak and others in her “outsider” situation. More importantly, she learned to resist – resist social injustice, and oppose the “arrangement” of “fate” for blacks and black ethnic groups.

At Spelman College, Walker studied hard, read widely, dared to strive for justice, and she disliked the conservative atmosphere of the college more and more. She was very sorry that her beloved teacher was dismissed by the school. She wrote to the school to complain about his grievances. Although this letter did not change the decision of the college, it reflected Walker’s sense of justice, rebellious spirit, and practical ability. She believed that Spelman College was training black girls according to the so-called “Lady” standard, which “imprisons the development of students’ personality and sense of freedom and independence” (Wang 2020: 34). Therefore, she rejected the school’s nomination of her as the winner of the $2000 scholarship to be an exchange student at a European University, saying that “the school did not have any support for those black students who risked their lives to resist Jim Crawford, but used money to support me to study in white Europe, which made me very uncomfortable, so I refused to accept it” (Wang 2020: 35). All of this highlights the extraordinary courage and sense of social justice of Walker, who was not rich in economic terms but was particularly eager to change her fate through education.

What reflects her strong personality best is her active participation in the civil rights movement and her pursuit of social justice. Walker bravely came to Mississippi, the frontline of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, to help blacks deprived of the right to vote to strive for their rights as American citizens, because she knew that if she could not live freely in Mississippi, “she could not live happily in the United States or anywhere else” (Wang 2020: 65).

What is more, in this academic commentary, while describing Alice Walker’s character and legendary life experience, Wang focuses intensively on Walker’s literary creation and criticism, introduces her literary achievements, and her groundbreaking contributions that paid attention to neglected and forgotten black women writers and re-excavated the traditional resources of black women’s literature, especially Hurston’s “rediscovery,” which laid a solid foundation for establishing the tradition of American black feminist literature and for us to deeply understand the development of American black female literature in the 1970s.

It is from the perspective of a researcher that Wang emphasizes Walker’s civil rights practices and social engagement, and highlights her contribution to revitalizing black women’s literature. More importantly, the book places Walker in a specific American cultural context, focuses on her achievements in literary creation and literary/cultural criticism, and explains in detail the womanist thought she advocated and its embodiment in literary creation and criticism. More importantly, Wang attaches great importance to the distinction between “oral text” and “written text,” which are particularly important in the study of African–American literature and culture, and the differences between “story” and “history” and their ideological characteristics. This work will certainly become an important reference book for the study of Walker and of black women’s literature.