Alice Walker

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Alice Walker (October 2007)

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944 in Eatonton , Georgia ) is an American writer and political activist . She became internationally known as the author of the novel The Color Purple , which won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985 . Along with Toni Morrison , Alex Haley , Maya Angelou and August Wilson, she is one of the most important representatives of Afro-American literature .

Life

Childhood and youth

Alice Walker was born in the southern United States as the eighth and last child of tenant farmers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. As a child she was lively and open-minded and enjoyed performing in front of other people in church on Sundays, for example.

In 1952, when she was eight years old, her right eye was badly injured while playing cowboys and Indians when a brother was shot with a BB gun, a type of air rifle . The eye became infected, eventually hardened into a cataract and went blind. For a long time she was afraid of losing sight in her left eye. As she herself says, this accident did a lot to help her retire and start reading and eventually writing poetry. Other children repeatedly teased her with the clearly visible damage to her eyes, until she finally found herself unsightly and was ashamed of her appearance. She remembers this time as years when in her daydreams she “dreamed of falling into swords rather than living happily ever after as in a fairy tale”. At the same time, as she herself states, this difficult time allowed her to grow as a person. She discovered the classic authors, read for hours while other children played outside or had to help the adults, now observed other people even more intensively and learned to see them “for who they really are”.

At 14, she visited her brother Bill in Boston . He realized the emotional problems the injury to his sister's eye caused, took her to a hospital and paid for the operation to remove the clouding of her eye. After that, her life changed fundamentally. She found the courage to meet others without looking down, took part in school life more actively again, finally finished high school as the best in class and was voted the most popular high school student by her classmates.

After high school, when she was 17, she was able to attend Spelman College for African American girls in Atlanta thanks to a scholarship she received for her eye injury and school grades . During this time she already took part in protest rallies against racial segregation in the USA, including the March on Washington , where she heard Martin Luther King's famous speech “I have a dream…” . The historian Howard Zinn was one of her teachers in Atlanta .

Two years later she moved to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers , New York . During this time, she traveled to Uganda as an exchange student for one summer . Already during her school days she wrote a series of poems that were to form the basis of her first volume of poetry, not least under the impression of an abortion that plunged her into depression. In the winter of 1964/65 she graduated from college as a Bachelor of Arts.

family

After graduating from college, she moved to Liberty County, Georgia , for a summer , where she took part in a voter registration campaign. The encounter with the poverty in which many of the people, especially the Afro-Americans, lived, and the realization of the influence these living conditions had on the coexistence of people, left a deep impression on her. Whenever she found time, she wrote and these experiences flowed into her work.

She then moved to New York for a short time, where she worked in the welfare office, and then returned to the southern United States. On March 17, 1967, she married Melvyn Leventhal, a lawyer who was also active in the civil rights movement. They were the first civil marriage “multiracial” couple in the state of Mississippi. While her husband was fighting segregation in schools in court, Alice was active in social programs promoting black children. From their environment, which was still characterized by racist prejudice, the couple repeatedly experienced hostility up to and including threats of violence. In the same year she became pregnant again, but lost the child. In 1969 their daughter Rebecca was born, who is now a well-known author and activist herself. At this time, in 1968, her first volume of poetry, Once , was published, and in 1970 her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland . Up to the early 1970s, the family lived in Tougaloo ( Mississippi ).

During this time she discovered the works of the author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston . While she had heard exclusively from white writers during her school and university days, reading this Afro-American woman was an inspiration and a decisive influence on her own further work. In Hurston's books, contrary to the stereotypical portrayals of white authors, blacks were real people with biographies who had part of the complexity of human destinies.

In 1972 Alice Walker moved to Cambridge with her daughter , where she worked as a teacher at Wellesley College . There she founded the first course that studied African American authors. A little later she taught at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and published her second volume of poems Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems in 1973 and shortly thereafter the first anthology of short stories In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women . She has received prizes for both volumes ( Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award and Lillian Smith Award ).

Creative time (the color purple)

With her husband and daughter, Walker moved back to New York in 1974 to work as editor of Ms. Magazine and to devote more time to writing. In 1976 the novel Meridian was published , which tells of the life of African American women in the civil rights movement. In the same year, their marriage ended by mutual consent. While her daughter stayed with her divorced husband for a year, she decided to move to San Francisco to start work on her new novel. She had estimated it to be five years. In fact, it only took her a year to finish her best-known work to date: The Color Purple (English: The Color Purple (novel) ).

In 1983 she was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Die Farbe Lila . In the same year she published a collection of essays: In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose . The term "womanist", which was largely influenced by her, stands for the women's movement among African American women : "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender".

In 1984 Alice Walker founded her own publishing house: Wild Trees Press . When producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters informed her that Steven Spielberg would film their book and that Quincy Jones would write the score for it, she agreed after initial hesitation. She herself worked on a script for the film Die Farbe Lila , which was not used. Ultimately, she was involved in the making of the film as a consultant. At the same time she fell ill with Lyme disease , a condition that had not been well researched in the early 1980s and that sometimes confined her to bed for days. Her mother had recently had a stroke and Alice Walker believed during that time that they would both die soon. The film was a huge success internationally and was nominated for eleven Oscars , but ultimately did not receive any. In the meantime - which was seen by some as an expression of the racism that was also prevalent in Hollywood - Out of Africa was awarded seven Oscars, the married drama of a family of European colonial rulers in Kenya.

Warrior Marks

Alice Walker's fourth novel The Temple of My Familiar (dt .: the temple of my heart ) was published in 1989, she had worked about eight years of it. The book was received with reluctance by critics and the public.

In the following years further anthologies of short stories and poems, texts for children and finally the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy in 1992 , in which she deals with the practice of female genital cutting , appeared. As a result, she was accused of promoting cultural imperialism and of writing about things of which she did not understand and about cultures that she did not know. However, Walker persisted in her vehement rejection of this practice and created the film Warrior Marks: Female Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women together with filmmaker Pratibha Parmar . With her book, film and public appearances, she helped to draw more public attention to this topic.

In 1996, Walker published The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult & The Making of the Film, The Color Purple, Ten Years Later, a very personal account of her Lyme disease and of the criticism that both the novel and the film Die Color purple had been presented. The volume also contains her script for the film.

Anything We Love Can Be Saved , a collection of essays on her political engagements, was published in 1997. Walker's last novel to date, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), is the narrative of the travels of a 57-year-old writer called Kate Talkingtree who embarks on inner, spiritual and outer wanderings.

Alice Walker now lives in Mendocino , California , north of San Francisco .

Political commitment

Alice Walker has been an activist in the civil rights movement for black equality since the 1960s . When she attended Spelman College, Howard Zinn was teaching there , later best known for his work A People's History of the United States . He encouraged the students to be politically active. This encounter encouraged Walker to further strengthen her social commitment, especially in the Civil Rights Movement . She took part in protest marches and demonstrations, and after finishing college she supported various welfare and equal treatment programs as a social worker . Over time, she expanded her commitment to include issues of the women's movement and social and environmental policy .

To this day, Walker has repeatedly commented on current political and social issues. For example, she spoke out against the apartheid regime in South Africa and is consistently committed to the genital mutilation of women in some African countries. In the USA she is interested in not only the civil rights movement but also in lifting the US embargo against Cuba . On March 8, 2003, the news that she was arrested by the police , along with author Maxine Hong Kingston and 25 other women, while attending a protest against the Iraq war and George W. Bush attended.

Criticism of Israel and accusation of anti-Semitism

In December 2009, she took part in the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), a non-violent campaign to end the blockade of the Gaza Strip, along with around 1,400 people from 42 countries . In June 2012, she refused to license a Hebrew translation of the novel The Color Purple because Israel was "an apartheid state worse than South Africa". Their political rejection of Israel has been expressing itself increasingly with anti-Semitic undertones since 2013; In 2017, for example, she published a poem on her blog that saw the Talmud as evidence of an “ancient history of oppression”. In 2018 she supported the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement and, in an interview with the New York Times, recommended the right-wing esoteric David Icke as an important author , whom she approved in a BBC interview in May 2013 explained to her favorite author. In 2020 she distributed an interview by David Icke with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the COVID-19 pandemic .

Oeuvre

Range, topics, characteristics

Alice Walker (left) with Gloria Steinem in 2009

Alice Walker's oeuvre includes poems, short stories and novels as well as essays on literature, politics and society. Some of the writers who, in their own words, influenced her the most include Flannery O'Connor and Zora Neale Hurston .

Shaped by her childhood in the south of the USA, her trip to Africa and her involvement in the civil rights movement, Alice Walker's works are about the life of African Americans - especially women -, their difficulties with and their struggle against a society that is racist , sexist and is not infrequently violent. She contrasts these depictions of difficult fates as positive forces with family cohesion, communal community, a new self-confidence based on knowledge of one's own history and tradition, and last but not least, a deep spirituality.

The context in which she embeds storylines is mostly historical. This ranges from memories of the abduction and enslavement of the ancestors of today's African-Americans, as can be found in In the Temple of My Heart or The Color Purple , to the time of the world wars (for example, The Third Life of Grange Copeland ) to the time of the civil rights movement in the 1960 / 70s. She repeatedly describes the fate of families over several generations and historical epochs. Constantly recurring central themes are the emphasis on emancipation and the resulting strength of black women, their role as preservers of African and Afro-American origins and culture.

In addition to novels and short stories, Walker has published a variety of texts on African American authors, including a biography for children ( Langston Hughes : American Poet , 1973), contributions to anthologies such as Daughters of Africa , book reviews and reviews, and essays on feminist ( In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose , 1983) and political issues.

Awards

The Color Purple , 1983, is regarded as Walker's greatest success , for which she received the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize . She received the O. Henry Prize for her short story Kindred Spirits (published in Esquire magazine , 1985) .

She has also received a number of other honors, including the Lillian Smith Award , the Rosenthal Award , a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship , a Merrill Fellowship , a Guggenheim Fellowship , the Townsend Prize , the Lyndhurst Prize and the Front Page Award of the Newswoman's Club of New York for best magazine review.

Works (selection)

Fiction

Autobiography
  • The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart . 2000.
stories
  • In love & trouble . Stories of Black Women. 1973.
    • German translation: Roselily. 13 love stories . Kunstmann, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88897-422-4 (EA Munich 1988).
  • You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. Stories . 1982.
    • German translation: Don't rejoice too early. 14 radical stories . Goldmann, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-442-09640-5 (EA Munich 19987).
  • To Hell With Dying . 1988.
  • Finding the Green Stone . 1991.
  • Devil's My Enemy . 2008.
Poetry
  • Once . 1968.
  • Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems . 1973.
  • Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning . 1979.
  • Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful . 1985.
  • Her Blue Body Everything We Know Earthling Poems 1965–1990. 1991.
    • German translation: From the collected poems 1965–1990 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993/95 (English-German)
    1. Your blue body is all we know . 1993, ISBN 3-499-13256-7 .
    2. Your brown hug . 1995, ISBN 3-499-13529-9 .
  • Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth . 2003.
  • A Poem Traveled Down My Arm. Poems and Drawings . 2003.
Novels
  • " The Third Life of Grange Copeland ". 1970.
    • German translation: The third life of Grange Copeland . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1998, ISBN 3-499-22230-2 .
  • Meridian . 1976.
    • German translation: Meridian . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, ISBN 3-499-13359-8 (EA Munich 1984).
  • The Color Purple . 1982.
  • The Temple of My Familiar . 1989.
    • German translation: In the temple of my heart . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, ISBN 3-499-13163-3 .
  • Possessing the Secret of Joy . 1992.
    • German translation: You guard the secret of happiness . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, ISBN 3-499-13660-0 .
  • By the Light of My Father's Smile . 1998.
    • German translation: The smile of forgiveness . BLT, Bergisch Gladbach 2001, ISBN 3-404-92079-1 .
  • Now is the time to open your heart . 2004.

Non-fiction

Essays
  • Everyday Use . 1994.
Texts on literature, politics and society
  • In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Womanist Prose . 1983.
    • German translation: In search of the gardens of our mothers Goldmann, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-442-09442-9 .
  • Living by the Word .
  • Warrior Marks. Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (with Pratibha Parmar) . 1993.
    • German translation: Scars or the circumcision of female sexuality . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-498-07336-2 .
  • The Same River Twice. Honoring the Difficult; A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art & The Making of the Film, The Color Purple, Ten Years Later . 1996.
  • Anything We Love Can Be Saved. A Writer's Activism . 1997.
  • Letter to President Clinton
  • Letter from Alice Walker to President Clinton . (on Walker's engagement against the US embargo on Cuba, March 13, 1996)
  • Go girl! The Black Woman's Book of Travel And Adventure . 1997.
  • Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation . 1999.
  • Sent by Earth. A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center And Pentagon . 2001.

Work editions

  • The Complete Stories . 1994.
  • Collected poems . 2005.

literature

  • Donna E. Allen: Toward a womanist homiletic. Katie Cannon , Alice Walker and emancipatory proclamation . Peter Lang Verlag, New York 2013, ISBN 978-1-4331-1361-1 .
  • Carmen Gillespie: Critical companion to Alice Walker. A literary reference to her life and work . Facts-on-File, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-8160-7530-0 .
  • Maria Lauret: Alice Walker . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoker 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-57588-2 .
  • Nagueyalti Warren (Ed.): Alice Walker . Salem Press, Ipswich, Mass. 2013, ISBN 978-1-4298-3730-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Message: break the siege (English) , Al-Ahram Weekly . December 30, 2009. Archived from the original on October 10, 2010. Retrieved on July 14, 2010. 
  2. ^ Author of The Color Purple refuses to authorize Hebrew version because "Israel is guilty of apartheid" ; Ha-Aretz on June 19, 2012
  3. ↑ `It is our frightful duty to study the talmud´
  4. ↑ Alice Walker. Retrieved December 20, 2018 .
  5. ^ The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. December 17, 2018, accessed December 20, 2018 .
  6. ↑ BBC 4, May 24, 2013
  7. ↑ Peter Körte: Writer Alice Walker: She likes the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 7, 2020, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed June 7, 2020]).

Web links

Commons : Alice Walker  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 16, 2005 .
personal data
SURNAME Walker, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Walker, Alice Malsenior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Eatonton , Georgia