Volume 1, Issue 5 (June, 2014)
Online ISSN-2348-3520
Published by: Sai Om Publications
Sai Om Journal of Arts & Education
A Peer Reviewed International Journal
BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM, WOMANISM AND ALICE
WALKER
Priya K.
Research Scholar, Sree Kerala Verma College,
Kerala, India
Email: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
The Afro-American womanist Alice Walker who was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her
path-breaking epistolary work The Color Purple (1982) , advocates women bonding and female
creativity to derive strength and inspiration to survive the plethora of sufferings encountered by the
triply burdened Afro- American women. Walker belongs to the Third-world feminists who reject their
Western counterparts homogenization attitudes. The paper delves into how the black feminist critics
and the womanist Alice Walker deal with the frank treatment of sexism within black community and
also the white racial oppression of blacks both in U.S and Africa.
Keywords: Black Feminist Criticism; Womanism; Oppression; Violence; Womanist
To be a Woman
Does not mean
To Wear
A shroud
The Feminine
Is not
Dead
Nor is she
Sleeping
Angry, Yes
Seething, Yes
Biding her time;
Yes.
Yes.
- Alice Walker
“To Be a Woman”
The growing influence of the post-colonial agenda since the 1980‟s has resulted in the creative
expression of voice which was till now silenced by the Western master narratives. The painstaking
efforts of non-white women from the margins has brought cross-cultural and inter-racial discussions
into the arena of academic feminist theorizing which was till now based on gender. One of the primary
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Sai Om Journal of Arts & Education
A Peer Reviewed International Journal
aims of third-world feminism was to reject homogenizing impulses of Western feminists who analyzed
women issues purely with regard to gender. The prominent black theoretician Bell Hooks criticizes her
contemporarian Betty Friedman (whose book The Feminine Mystique had became a marked feature of
the contemporary feminist movement) for giving only a one-dimensional perspective of women‟s
reality by concentrating only the specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class housewives and
ignoring the existence of all non-white women, poor white women and masses of women who are
concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination.
In her path-breaking study, Feminist Theory-from Margin to Centre, Bell Hooks comments:
White women who dominate feminist discourse who for the most part make and
articulate feminist theory have little or no understanding of white supremacy as a
racial politic, of the psychological impact of class, of their political status within a
racist, sexist, capitalistic society.
(4)
The central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that all women are oppressed
irrespective of their individual experience of race, class, caste, religion and sexual preference. Hence it
lacked the comprehensiveness to encompass the experience of black women and other women of
color. As a group, black women are in an unusual position in the society as their overall status is lower
than that of any other group. They are triply burdened as they are forced to bear the brunt of sexist,
racist and classist oppression. Comparatively white women and black men are placed in a better
position. Though white women may be victimized by sexism, racism enables them to act as exploiters
and oppressors of black people. Similarly, though black men may be victimized by racism, sexism
allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black women. The brutal complex systems of
oppression of black women‟s experience and culture are “beneath consideration, invisible and
unknown” in the “real world of white and or male consciousness” (Smith 168). Hence black women
share a totally different lived experience which makes it essential for them to criticize the dominant
racist, classist, sexist hegemony and create a counter hegemony to voice their experiences.
A concrete definition and process of Black feminist criticism has not yet been given by the black
female scholars who had begun by resurrecting forgotten black women writers and revising
misinformed critical opinions of them. Black feminist critic Deborah Mac Dowell in her critical piece
of study, New directions for Black Feminist Criticism, says that she uses the term “ Black Feminist
Criticism “ to:
…simply refer to Black female critics who analyze the works of Black female writers
from a feminist or political perspective. But the term can also apply to any criticism
written by a Black woman regardless of her subject or perspective - a book written by
a male from a feminist or political perspective-a book written by a Black woman or
about Black women author4s in general or any writings of women.
(191)
A black feminist critic is considered to be one who is fully aware of the political implications of her
work and would assert the connection between it and the political situation of all Black women in real
life.
The primary concern of Black feminist approach to literature is the realization that the politics of sex
as well as the politics of race are interlocking factors in the works of black women writers. It is
generally observed that black women writers manifest common approaches in the creation of literature
as a direct result of the specific political, social and economics experience they are obliged to share.
As, for instance, Barbara smith cites the incorporation of the traditional Black female activities of root
working, herbal medicine, knitting etc. And the use of specifically black female language by Zora
Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker which breaks the confines of
established white and male literary structures. Deborah Mac Dowell makes some interesting
observations regarding the thematic parallels among contemporary black female writers. She cites the
imagery of clothing as a significant example. In Zora Neale Hurston‟s Their Eyes Were Watching
God, Jane‟s apron, her silks and stains, her head scarves and finally her overalls symbolize various
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Sai Om Journal of Arts & Education
A Peer Reviewed International Journal
stages of her journey from captivity to liberation. In Alice Walker‟s Meridian, Meridian railroad caps
and dungarees are emblems of her rejection of conventional images and expectations of womanhood.
In The Colour Purple, Celie‟s pants sewing business becomes an empowering source of economics
independence for Celie.
A major theme that recurs in the novels of Black women writers is the motif of the journey. Though it
is also seen in the works of black male writers, it is used differently. For example, the journey of the
Black male character in the works by Black men, takes him underground. It‟s a descent into the
underworld and is primarily political and social in its implications. Ralph Ellison‟s Invisible Man,
Amiri Baraka‟s The System of Dante‟s Hell and Richard Wright‟s The Man who Lived Underground
exemplify this quest. On the other hand, though the black female‟s journey seems to have political and
social implications, it is basically a personal and psychological one. They move from victimhood to
self-realization. The heroines in Hurston‟s Their Eye were Watching God, Alice Walker‟s Meridian,
The Color Purple, Toni Cade Bambara‟s The Salt Eaters are a few to be mentioned.
An eminent black feminist critic Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought comments
that the primary guiding principle of black feminism is a recurring humanistic vision. She says:
Black feminism is a process of self-conscious struggle that empowers women and men
to actualize a humanistic vision of community. Many African- American intellectuals
have advanced the view that Black women‟s struggles are part of a wider struggle for
human dignity and empowerment. Alice Walker‟s preference for the term „womanist‟
address this notion of the solidarity of humanity.
(39)
She describe the term as “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (collins38). According to
her one is “womanist” when one is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male or
female.” She further adds that. “…..the colored race is just a flower garden with every color flower
represented. By redefining all people as “people of color,” she universalizes what are typically seen as
individual struggles.
Alice Walker says that she replaces the term „feminist‟ with „womanist‟ because she wants to give
expression to a specifically black feminity which she does not see reflected in American feminism
dominated by white women. In her preface to her collection of essays In Search of Our Mother‟s
Gardens, She explains the origin of her term “womanist”:
From womanish (opposite to “girlish‟, i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious). A
black feminist or feminist of color from the black folk expression of mothers to female
children, “You‟re acting womanish”, i.e., like a
woman…Interested in grown up doings…acting grown up. Being grown-up.
Interchangeable with another black folk expression. “You‟re trying to be grown up”
Responsible .In-charge. Serious. (Eagleton 158)
It is interesting to see how black women of Africa and Afro-America derive strength and inspiration
from women-bonding and the way female creativity has been kept alive in the most adverse
circumstances. Matrilineage has always been seen as a significant characteristic of feminism. Virginia
Woolf in A Room of One‟s own says that “ the experiences of the mass is behind the single voice”
(60) and she claims that she and other women writers “ think back through our mothers”(69). Similar
is the opinion voiced by Alice Walker in her ground-breaking easy “In Search of Our Mother‟s
Gardens‟ which has became an important text in the study of literary matrilineages. She extends the
meaning of „mother‟ from her own biological mother to other female relatives and neighbors‟ and then
to women of strength and significance from whom Walker feels that she has learned much.
As a womanist, Walker also claims that the construction of feminity based on the life experience of
white is not necessarily relevant to the Black women. For example, she refutes the western
iconography of Madonna who is depicted as white. Monica A. Coleman in her article Must I be a
womanist observes that womanists and black feminists tend to see Christ as black and also consider
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Sai Om Journal of Arts & Education
A Peer Reviewed International Journal
non-Christian and pagan religious asserting that “ the religious practices can be used to harness power
and direct it toward social changes.” (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals-of feminist-studies-in religion/v022/22.1coleman.html.)
It can be seen that the term „womanism‟ was inspired by Walker‟s real life experience of multiple
oppressions as an Afro-America woman and writer. It is interesting to note how her life is deeply
entrenched in her works. One of the most prolific, versatile and acclaimed writers of contemporary
African American feminist authors, she has earned wide spread recognition for her considerable
achievements as fiction writer, poet and essayist. Born in Georgia in 1944, Alice Malsenoir Walker
was one of the eight children of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, both sharecroppers. As
well as being African American her family has Cherokee, Scottish and Irish Lineage. Although she
grew up in Georgia, she states that she often felt displaced there. In an interview to „The observer‟ in
2001, she said:
I felt in Georgia and on the east coast generally very squeezed… People always want
to keep you in a little box or they need to label you and fix you in time and location. I
feel a greater fluidity here. People are much more willing to accept that nothing is
permanent, everything is changeable, so there is freedom and I do not need to live
where I cannot be free. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice-Walker)
Although her childhood of rural poverty was a difficult one she had gained strength and empowerment
from her mother, whom she had honored as an important source of artistic inspiration in her essay „In
Search of Our Mother‟s Gardens‟.
Walker was blinded in one eye when eight years old, when her brother accidently shot her in the eye
with a BB gun. Ashamed of her facial disfigurement, she isolated herself from other children, spending
most of the time reading and writing. The incident had a large impact on her especially when a white
doctor in town swindled her parents out of 250 dollars they paid to repair her injury. She refers to this
incident in her book Warrior Masks, a chronicle of female genital mutilation in Africa, and uses it to
illustrate the sacrificial marks women bear that allow them to be warriors against female oppression.
After high school in 1961, Walker enrolled in Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship for
disabled students, where she became active in the African-American Civil Rights movement. Later she
was transferred to Sarah College in New York and eventually travelled to Uganda as a student in an
exchange programme. When she returned for her senior year, she was shocked to learn that she was
pregnant and afraid of her parents reactions, she contemplated suicide as illegal pregnancies is
considered a sin in their community. However her classmate gave her moral support and helped her to
obtain a safe abortion and she graduated in 1965. The incident shows why Walker stresses the
importance of women-bonding to overcoming the oppression and traumatic experiences in life. At this
time she composed her early landmark piece To Hell with Dying, her first published short story.
Continuing the activism that she had participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the
South where she became involved with voters registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights and
children‟s programmes in Mississippi and Georgia in 1965 and 1966. In 1965, she met Mel Leventhal,
a Jewish Civil Rights lawyer ad married him in 1967, with whom she had one daughter in 1969. They
divorced eight years later. They became the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi
which brought them harassments and even murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1968, Walker published her first volume of verse Once based on her experiences in Civil Rights
work and her travels to Africa, and she continued to publish volumes of poetry which include :
Revolutionary Petunias (1973), Good Night, Willie Lee, I‟ll see you in the Morning (1974), Horses
Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (19885), Her Blue Body, Everything We Know, Earthling
Poems (1965-1990), Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003).
Although her early volumes of poetry met with critical acclaim, Walker first gained national
prominence as a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine where she published such landmark essays as In
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A Peer Reviewed International Journal
Search of our Mother‟s Gardens‟ (1974) and Looking for Zora (1975) which is about her journey to
mark Zora Neale Husston‟s grave and to honor the important yet neglected African American literary
foremother. In 1979, Walker edited a Zora Neale Hurston reader entitled I Love Myself When I am
Laughing. She has been one of the key people credited with rescuing Hurston‟s work from obscurity
and securing her place in the American literary canon.
Above all, Walker has received recognition for her achievements as an inspired fiction writer. Her
first novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland was published in 1970 – the same year as Toni
Morrison‟s debut novel The Bluest Eye. Critics have seen these two works as inaugurating the
astonishing black feminist writing that has continued unabated ever since. Her second novel, Meridian
(1976) was followed by her path-breaking work, The Colour Purple (1982) winner of the American
Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983, the novel earned her enormous praise and also
brought her accusations of male bashing because of its honest and unflinching representation of sexual
oppression and domination of black women by black men. In 1985, it was adapted into a film by
Steven Spielberg and starred Whoopie Goldberg as Celie.
Her fourth novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989) was followed by the powerful and controversial
novel Possessing The Secret of Joy (1972), an indictment of the patriarchal practice of performing
clitoridectomis of Afrian women. Walker had also written two critically acclaimed volumes of short
stories – In Love and Trouble (1973) and You Can‟t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981).
In her non-fiction prose writing Walker articulates the sensibility which she designates as „womanist‟
in her beginning of her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers Gardens : Womanist Prose (1983).
Her other essay collections include Living By The Word (1988), Warrior Masks : Female Genital
Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993) and Anything we Love can be saved : A
Writer‟s Activism (1997).
It can be seen that her works typically focus on the struggles of African-Americans, particularly
women and their struggle against a racist, sexist and violent society and how they survive the
multifaceted oppression by strong female bonding, questioning the gender roles, reimaging God and
spirituality through an inward journey of consciousness.
Walker presently lives in Northern California where she continues to live and write. She has won
prestigious awards and recognitions like O. Henry Award in 1986, honored with the title „Humanist of
the Year‟ by the American Humanist Association in 1997.
The Color Purple, since its publication in 1982, continues to enjoy enormous popularity. Written as a
series of letters by the central protagonist Celie and her sister Nettie, this epistolary novel honestly
explores the damaging effects of male domination upon Celie‟s spirit and her eventual redemption
through the love of her husband‟s mistress Shug Avery. The novel breaks the silence surrounding such
taboo subjects as incest and lesbianism and explores the theme of sexual oppression of black women
by black men and situates its frank treatment of sexism within the blacks community and also white
racial oppression of blacks both in the United States and in Africa in the period between the turn of the
century and second World War.
REFERENCES
1. Collins, Patricia Hills. Black Feminist Thought. New York :Routlege Press, 1991.
2. Eagleton, Mary. Working with Feminist Criticism.UK : Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1996.
3. Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory – From Margin to Centre.London : Pluto Press, 2000.
4. Mac Dowell, Deborah “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism”.The New Feminist Criticism.
Ed. Elaine Showalter, New York: Pantheon Press, 1985.
5. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London : Penguin Publishers, 1929.
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A Peer Reviewed International Journal
6. Coleman, Monica. A. Must I Be a Womanist. 12 July, 2008. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals of
feminist studies in religion/Vol 22/22, Coleman.html.
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice-Walker
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