The official website of Alice Waker is a good place to start to learn about the writer, best known for her novel The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Find more information about Walker at the New Georgia Encyclopedia and make a visit to her pages at the Poetry Foundation and at Biography.com. Watch the video documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth that was broadcast on PBS: American Masters.
In an interview (The Guardian, March 9, 2013) Walker discussed the film and her life as a writer:
Interviewer: Pratibha Parmar's film Beauty in Truth, about your life and work, makes for fascinating viewing: you've done so many different things in so many different places with so many different people. Is that how it feels to you?
Walker: I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens. But, yes, I live in Mexico, I live in Hawaii and I live in northern California and all my life has been like that. It's as if I got all of this energy from ancestors who were not permitted to leave the plantations for 400 years and I got all of their desire to be part of the world.
Interviewer: The film begins with your upbringing in Jim Crow Georgia, one of eight children, the daughter of sharecroppers. Your family had very little money, but you did have an extremely determined mother.
Walker: I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.
Interviewer: Would you that your first motivation as a writer was to bring hidden lives to light?
Walker: When I was 13, my sister was a cosmetologist – she made up the bodies in the funeral home. One day, she showed me the body of a woman who had been murdered. Her husband had shot her in the face. Now, many people would hear this tale, and they would categorise it; they would try to box it into some little corner, but actually that kind of brutality against women is endemic and it's now coming more and more out into the open.
Interviewer: That's something to see at the age of 13.
Walker: It had a big impact on me. And her daughter was in my class, and had the same name as my own grandmother, who had been shot to death. I think that, when you start out writing, it's often like following the thread of Ariadne: you never know which minotaur you're going to find. But you often find one – or two or three!
Interviewer: You were involved with the civil rights movement and with feminism, the latter especially when you moved to New York and worked with Gloria Steinem on Ms Magazine in the 1970s.
Walker: I love the women's movement and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population. I loved working at Ms Magazine, especially because of Gloria, because she understood that I really needed a room of my own, even there.
Interviewer: What are your feelings about contemporary feminism?
Walker: The conundrum, in a way, is why, after all the struggle, and all the teaching – teaching was so important: we taught each other, and we taught other women and girls – women, at this point, are comfortable referring to themselves as guys, and basically erasing their femininity at every opportunity. I don't get it.
Interviewer: You're very open about what it's cost you in terms of personal relationships, for example with partners and with your daughter [Walker and her daughter, Rebecca, are estranged].
Walker: I accept it. What can I do? I am this being who, for whatever reason, feels completely dedicated to the whole of humanity. I do. I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine. I absolutely always tried to do the very best that I could with the spirit that I have.
Essay by Alice Walker
from Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987
by Alice Walker
I am going to talk about an issue even closer to home. I am going to talk to you about hair. Don't give a thought to the state of yours at the moment. Don't be at all alarmed. This is not an appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own experiences with our friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain and amuse you.
Read the entire essay here.
The photograph that accompanied her interview with The Guardian, March 9, 2013.
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