Beyond Feminism

IN THE BEGINNING of her new collection of essays, Womanist Prose: Alice Walker defines the word she coined to describe her world view of enlightened Black feminists, a view that goes beyond the limits of typical feminism:

Womanist 1. From Womanish (Opp. of "girlish," i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color... 2 Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. Some-times loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually.

In this tongue-in-cheek but highly self-descriptive definition. Walker hints at many of the key issues she addresses in the essays that follow. Womanist Prose is as much about mothers and daughters as it is about American social history: it is as much about race relations as it is about the need to express one's creativity.

Consisting of articles she published in Ms., Mother Jones, and other magazines, as well as lectures she delivered at various women's colleges during the last 15 years. Walkers collection takes up the civil rights movement and its after-math, her own search for and admiration of other Black female writers, the bonds between mothers and daughters, and a myriad of social schisms that plague society. She discusses the dynamics among Black and white women within the feminist movement, and those among heterosexual women and lesbians. Presenting her opinion of the common ground between Blacks and Jews, and the tendency toward anti-Semitism among Blacks, she describes why she has evolved from unilateral Zionism' to a position of sympathy for both Jews and Palestinians.

In a fascinating essay, she frankly describes her own growth, paying tribute to her roots and discussing the writing of her Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Color Purple. Those who first come to know Walker through this remarkable piece of fiction will be delighted by her lucid and insightful essays, which are infused with as much warmth and wisdom as her fiction, but moreover reveal a Walker that differs appreciably from the groping, just-awakening character of The Color Purple's Celie.

Writing with an immediacy and vivacity on even such well-documented topics as the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the lives of Jane Austen and the Brontes, Walker mixes in with these subjects highly personal accounts of her own struggles as a feminist and an artist, in the end earning the right to call herself more than a feminist.

Although her historical accounts of key events in the civil rights movment and accompanying evaluations of their consequences are intelligent and thoughtful. Walker is at her best when she weaves her own experience into the narration. In a 1971 essay about Coretta Scott King, the author remembers having met her as a freshman at Atlanta's Spelman College, when she and some classmates met with Mrs. King at her home. Having idolized Dr. King, she remembers hoping that Coretta was good enough for him Years later, after his assassination, she glimpses Coretta King once again, and has very different thoughts.

We could only see her from a distance, she stood on a platform on the Morehouse campus. In my heart I said goodbye to the nonviolence she still professed. I was far less calm than she appeared to be. The week after, I lost the child I had been carrying. I did not even care. It seemed to me, at the time, that if "he" (it was weeks before my tongue could from his name) must die no one deserved to live, not even my own child. I thought, as I lay on my bed listening to the rude Mississippi accents around me, that with any luck I could lose myself. I do not recall wanting very much to live.

Walker has endured much personal suffering, and the passages describing her pain--including a riveting account of an abortion she had while in college--are the most moving and frequently enlightening in the collection.

As the result of a childhood accident. Walker lost the sight in one eye, and writes that she felt disfigured and ugly for a long time afterward. It is through the bond with her daughter, her own creativity, and the strength she has found from the stories of her (female) ancestors. Walker writes, that she has finally learned to accept herself as complete and even beautiful. She dedicates the book to her daughter. Rebecca, in a few lines that sum up the creative process through which she has discovered herself and her heritage.

In fact, the title essay. In Scarch of Our Mothers' Gardens, is arguably the best work of the collection. It is a lyrical paean to maternal ancestry, a tribute to the Black women who suffered and died and were enslaved in this country and elsewhere, women who stifled their formidable creativity in order not to lose their minds. In it, she captures the mystical, earthy qualities of mother-hood and spiritual creativity, two of her central themes. She recounts the poet Jean Toomer's discovery in the South of the 1920's women: whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconscious, that they held. In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them, they became more than "sexual objects," more even than more women they became "Saints". Instead of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines what was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship. These crazy Saints stared out at the world, wildly, like lunatics or quietly, like suicides, and the "God" that was in their gaze was as mute as a great stone.

Who were these Saints' These crazy, loony, pitiful women.'

Some of them, without a doubt, were our mothers and grand mothers.

In her examination of creativity's demands and its essential place in the artist's life, she holds up the example of Virginia Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own, and rewrites it from the Black woman's perspective. What, she asks, were women to do who not only could have no room and no financial independence, but who could barely claim their bodies as their own' And what of women like her mother, who raised a large family with hardly a moment to themselves' They found a way, she responds.

PART OF WALKER'S definition of the difference between Black and white American writers concerns their varying degrees of hope for mankind:

White American writers tended to end their books and their characters' lives as if there were no better existence for which to struggle The gloom of defeat is thick.

By comparison, black writers seem always involved in a moral and/or physical struggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom.

Many readers may disagree with this statement, nevertheless, the second half forms one of Walker's central points about the Black women's movement, and the struggles of Blacks in America as a whole. It is neither a new observation nor a surprising one that the struggle for freedom and individual expression has shaped the ideas and actions of Blacks, women, and artists throughout a history of hardship. However, at is the manner in which Walker portrays particular stories, most notably her own, and the wisdom with which she evaluates such a wide range of topics, that make Womanist Prose fresh and vital Both entertaining and sobering, yet always full of an organic wisdom worthy of Shug Avery, it is highly recommended reading for all who would like to consider themselves enlightened feminists.