Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 44

9 February 1944—

Writing Down the Truth of Peace

In Alice Walker’s 1983 novel The Color Purple, Celie pleads with her sister Nellie “to write.” Nellie promises that “only death can keep me from it.” Her response reflects Walker’s own passion for writing.

When a freak childhood accident robbed her of vision in one eye, Walker longed for death. Once confident and self-assured, she became a shy, introspective child who battled bouts of depression. But the accident and its aftermath eventually turned her toward writing and what she described as “a need to tell the truth.”

The eighth and last child of Georgia sharecroppers, Walker attended the only nonsegregated high school in her county and graduated at the top of her class. In 1961 she enrolled in Spellman College and became immersed in the civil rights movement. Her mentor, conscientious objector and peace activist Staughton Lynd, urged her to transfer to Sarah Lawrence College to hone her already considerable writing talent.

In college, Walker combined activism with her passion for writing. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, championing the rights of Southern blacks evicted from their homes because they registered to vote. It was during this period that she met and married Melvyn Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They divorced in 1976, five years after the birth of their only daughter.

Walker was instrumental in bringing the work of Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937) out of obscurity and into the literary mainstream. Her talent in multiple genres (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) seamlessly weaves scholarly and imaginative focus onto the experience of oppression.

Her novel The Color Purple earned Walker the Pulitzer Prize; she was the first African American to receive it. The novel highlights the many variables, including the suppression of female spirituality, that inhibit a vision for peaceful human existence. More recently, Walker has been an outspoken critic of war in general and the Iraq War in particular, commenting before the war that “the women and children of Iraq are just as dear as the women and children in our families . . . and so it would have felt to me that we were going over to actually bomb ourselves.” She has also championed the cause of the Palestinians by visiting the people of Gaza in 2009 with the anti-war group Code Pink.