Writers

Alice Walker, perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple (1982), has always been committed to social and political change. This was nowhere clearer than in The Color Purple, which brought to light questions of sexual abuse and violence in the black community, while demonstrating the liberatory possibilities inherent in every life. The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, who is the victim of systematic gender oppression, at the hands of first her stepfather and then her husband. Despite the severe abuse Celie endures, she is a triumphant character who ultimately achieves a free and comfortable life. The principal male character—Celie’s husband, Albert—is also redeemed and so transcends his abusive past. Many critics have argued that The Color Purple is Walker’s best work, noting its inspired epistolary style (i.e., written in the form of letters) and the dynamic voice of its protagonist.

Although The Color Purple was an enormous success, it sparked considerable controversy. Some black men, who felt that her portrayals of them reinforced animalistic and cruel stereotypes about black masculinity, condemned Walker for her complexly drawn male characters. These unfair criticisms coincided with the premiere of the film The Color Purple, which did not depict domestic abuse in the complicated ways the book did. This iniquitous criticism obscured the significance of the novel, which exposed aspects of black female struggle unfamiliar to a mainstream American readership. Yet long before The Color Purple drew the attention of popular audiences, Alice Walker’s work had already established her as an accomplished artist and activist. Her work explores race, gender, sexuality, and class, building on Walker’s observations and experiences as a child and young adult in the rural South.

Childhood and youth

Alice Walker was born on 9 February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children. Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, which meant that they farmed land belonging to someone else in exchange for living there. The system of sharecropping was one of cruel inequity; black workers were often exploited for their labor and rarely were paid what the crop they produced was worth. Because of this, Walker has often said that the system of sharecropping was worse than slavery because unlike slavery, sharecropping masqueraded as paid labor when in reality it was not. Walker was a hard worker and applied these lessons to her studies. Walker was an excellent student and valedictorian of her high school class; for her academic achievements she won a scholarship to Spelman College and ultimately completed her education at Sarah Lawrence College.

After graduating from college, Walker participated in various progressive movements. Never content simply to wait for an injustice to disappear or be rectified by someone else, Walker was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and worked in the voter registration drives. She had the opportunity to meet Martin Luther King Jr., and she attended the March on Washington. Embodying the feminist adage that “the personal is political,” Walker was married to a Jewish civil rights lawyer, Mel Leventhal, and they became the only legally married interracial couple in Mississippi at the time. She was also among the first people in the United States to teach a women’s studies course, which she instituted at Wellesley College. That these events had quite an impact on the young Walker is evident in her writing.

Art as activism

Just as her experience growing up in the rural South in a sharecropping community would influence and shape her later work, so too did her experiences with activism during the civil rights movement. In Walker’s work, the relationship between her activism and her art is clear, as she repeatedly examines and exposes oppression. Walker does not simply draw back the curtain on injustice; she also imagines the transcendence of that injustice in her work. For this reason, it has often been said that all of Walker’s novels have “happy endings.” What this suggests about Walker is not that she is unrealistic but rather that she is interested in ways people who have been marginalized can overcome oppression.

Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), clearly draws on her experiences as a child in a sharecropping community and offers not only a critique of gender and race relations under that system but also a vision of what is possible through change. The Third Life of Grange Copeland depicts the family of Grange, his wife, Mem, and their son, Brownfield. Sharecropping renders Grange abusive and neglectful of his family; he leaves them and goes north. When his mother commits suicide, Brownfield decides to go in search of his father but never makes it farther than a few miles from home. Slipping into the same c

ycle of sharecropping and abuse that characterized his parents’ relationship, Brownfield becomes far more abusive than his father and ultimately ends up in jail for murdering his wife. Grange returns, largely reformed during his time in the North, to lovingly raise his granddaughter, Ruth, who, as the heroine, anticipates the strong female protagonists that characterize Walker’s work.

Like all of her heroines, Alice Walker is herself an agent of change. Walker once said that the best role model is someone who is always changing. Instead of desiring a long shelf life, Walker asserts that she wants to remain fresh. This commitment to fluidity and evolution characterizes both her life and her work. This is especially clear in her novel Meridian (1976). Walker’s experiences at Spelman College may have provided her with the setting for Meridian, the story of a young woman of the same name who attends a college, much like Spelman, for young black women and becomes a daring activist, willing to die in order to protect black people from injustice. It is a book that also draws on many themes in Walker’s own life, specifically her Native American heritage. In the novel, Meridian’s father educates her about the Native Americans who occupied the land before they did and shows her their ancient burial grounds, which are eventually destroyed in the course of the novel. Meridian also articulates Walker’s notion of “womanist” politics, in that it features a female protagonist evolving through the pain of gender and racial inequity.

Womanism and beyond

The term “womanist,” coined by Walker in 1983, asserts that not only gender oppression but also race oppression must be confronted, which affects and shapes gender in inexorable ways. Furthermore, the term “womanist” conjured a conception of blackness and womanness that feminist theory had been unable to represent; it not only provided the meaning of these intersecting identities but also connoted something of the spirit of them. Womanism enabled black women to articulate their commitment to gender liberation while not requiring them to forsake their struggle for race liberation as well. In womanism, Walker synthesized various liberation ideologies that have often been at odds. Womanism has repeatedly been invoked to describe the complicated interplay between race and gender faced by African-American women and represents another of Walker’s major contributions to the study of literature and feminism.

In keeping with her womanist politics, Walker continued to engage difficult issues in her later works. Her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) focuses on a character who was featured minutely in The Color Purple, Tashi. Tashi, an African woman married to Celie’s son in The Color Purple, subjects herself to the practice of female circumcision. In Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker explores her physical and emotional pain around this “traditional” African practice. This novel drew less mainstream controversy but engendered some academic controversy. Many scholars, especially scholars working in the area of Africa, saw Walker’s novel as an Americanized condemnation of African culture, arguing that she was an outsider interfering in a culture she knew nothing about. Walker, however, felt that she was able to understand what it means to be physically maimed because when she was eight years old her brother blinded her in one eye with a BB gun. In Walker’s view, a lifetime of partial blindness provided a fitting metaphor to help her understand the burden of going through life with a part of your body violently excised by a society that does not take seriously the pain inflicted on the bodies of girls. Walker referred to her blinded eye and the wounds born by the women who endured circumcision as “warrior marks” in a film of the same name she made about female genital mutilation with Pratibha Parmar. Despite the criticism engendered by Walker’s discussions of female genital mutilation, what remains indisputable is that Walker’s concern for young women was the impetus for the creation of the film and her book Possessing the Secret of Joy.

Like Possessing the Secret of Joy, much of Walker’s work is characterized by a thematic interest in cultures and people outside the American context. These themes are fully developed in her novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989). This novel features characters from a range of cultural backgrounds, including South American, African American, and Native American. Walker’s interest in Latin-American culture, which was first articulated in The Temple of My Familiar, can also be seen in her novel, By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998). In another work, Walker focused on questions of interpersonal and communal healing. Titled The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), this work is a semifictionalized account of her relationship with her former husband and chronicles other important relationships in her life. She also wrote Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit after the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), which proposed peace, love, and healing as antidotes to tragedy and tyranny.

Walker’s work demonstrates a remarkable grasp of the political realities of systematic oppression. Walker is such a prolific writer that it would be impossible to discuss all of her work; she has written in almost every form and genre. Her first published work, in fact, was a book of poems called Once (1968). Her poetry embodies some of her most profound insights. Walker’s legacy of activism is to be found not only in her work but also in her contribution to the lives of emerging writers and in her homage to the black writers who preceded her. Because of Walker’s interest in Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God is now considered an essential African-American text. Walker has also written about Langston Hughes, another figure important in her life, and established a scholarship for emerging writers in the name of Hughes and Hurston at Spelman College. In this way, Walker has unambiguously contributed to the art of writing, both on and off the page. Like her work, which always offers the unexpected but necessary commentary, Alice Walker is an artist who has succeeded at remaining fresh.

source: Blog.oup

A necessary, beautiful novel, written from a place of love. Sandeep Raina has the great gift of memory and empathy. It is a novel that has been in the making for decades, a novel Sandeep had to write to be able to live,” says journalist Basharat Peer about A Bit of Everything (Rs 599, Context) in the blurb on the back of the cover. Inside, we enter English professor Rahul Razdan’s life with the young and old in Kashmir’s Varmull (also known as Baramulla), nestled amidst the Pir Panjal range and the Jhelum river. However, when violence overwhelms the streets, Pandits begin to flee to the sweltering plains in 1990. Rahul, Doora and their young son find Delhi rude and alien, where the landlord calls them Muslim-Brahmins, and their Pandit relatives want them to join a Hindu extremist group. Soon Rahul flees again, this time to England. Decades later, the past meets the present when he makes a visit to the Valley.

Born and raised in Kashmir, where Raina graduated as an engineer, he has spent much of his life in Delhi, Istanbul and London. Based in Surrey, after penning several short stories for news publications, Raina has written his first novel. Excerpts from an interview:

From thinking about writing on migration in Turkey to penning the novel after moving to England, what drew you towards writing?

In our years in Turkey, I witnessed a very special reunion. Our family went on a holiday trip from Istanbul to Athens. All other families on the coach were from Cappadocia in central Turkey. We stopped at a café in Komotini, Greece, where a group of very old Turkish Christians came to meet the Turkish Muslim families from our coach. 75 years ago, these Christians had fled from Cappadocia to Komotini. Over coffee and baklavas, they all spoke about the families and neighbours in Cappadocia, exchanged gifts, sang Turkish folk songs, and wept. The reunion of the two communities, after seven decades, was a heartbreaking yet uplifting event that stayed in my memory. When we moved to England, I decided to use my writings on Kashmir and expand them into a novel. The reunion of the Turkish Muslim and Christian communities, split because of war and strife, played an important role in my Kashmiri story.

What were those initial writings about?

Mostly about the relationships of people who lived in a small town in Kashmir. Of the desires and ambitions of its young people, of loves and weddings. Of how Pandits, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians lived together, of their common culture and innate humanity despite the differences.

An English professor, who wants to fix the lives of all teenagers on Varmull’s Tashkent Street, he leaves his wife and son in Delhi to live a lonely life in England. What did you want to explore through Rahul Razdan?

Rahul Razdan wants to help the teenagers of his street. But like all humans, he is constrained by his own limitations, and despite his best intentions is able to only do so much. This is when life is normal in Varmull, Kashmir. In peace times, we seldom realise how little is needed to keep things ‘as is’. But when things crumble around us, at many levels, as happens to Rahul, it is much harder to rise and hold things together. So, in such difficult situations, would one choose escapism instead of stepping up and taking responsibility?

In the novel, Rahul remarks about how it is hard for refugees to write. Was it difficult for you too?

It is easy to write about happy memories. Releasing unpleasant memories on paper can make you relive those difficult times, unleashing anger and bitterness. For a refugee to write without becoming sad or angry could be a tall order. But my experience was different. Writing about Kashmir was extremely cathartic. Doing it over many years and reflecting deeply, perhaps, brought about the healing. Recollecting life in Kashmir, writing about it in small details through the novel’s characters, especially about its colours, scents and flavours, gave me tremendous happiness, almost like a return. The challenge was not knowing how it was after I left Kashmir, what happened of its people in the decades that I had not lived there.

Rahul consciously pushes away Kashmir and its memories from his mind. How is your relationship with the memories from life in the Valley?

In the early years of migration from Kashmir, I did block out memories, including good ones. It was as if that chapter in my life had closed forever. Perhaps, a change of place leaves you no time to think of your past, survival in the present matters so much. Memories from Kashmir started trickling in only after 10 years of having left Kashmir, when I felt more settled, and more at peace with myself. I began to derive much joy from those memories. Now I remember Kashmir with a lot of love with pleasant memories of my childhood spent with family, friends and neighbours.

In the novel, you make limited contact with the political events of the late 80s that led to the rise of militancy and the exodus. Why is that?

When you are caught in an impending political upheaval, you don’t always realise what is happening, or what its outcome could be. It is like background noise. That is what comes across in the book. Not many, at my age then (or Rahul’s age in the book) were overtly preoccupied with the political events or elections, which contributed to militancy and the rise of fundamentalism in Kashmir. Also, there was no private television, social media or internet at that time. So, in reality, the impact of political bungling was not so apparent to an ordinary person.

You briefly highlight how the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits is used and misused by right-wing organisations, which feeds Hindu-Muslim polarisation in India. What is it that they miss understanding about the issue?

Any vulnerability of a community that feeds the ideology of an organisation will be used by the organisation. I have seen this play out in Kashmir in the late 80s, and now elsewhere in India. Such organisations do not care about the splits that such positions cause and the loss of a composite modern society. They deny that the world is becoming increasingly heterogeneous, not monolithic. Preying on the pain of the refugees and scratching their wounds makes them bleed, not heal. It also creates a ripple effect in the larger communities sending signals of fear, anger and insecurity across a nation, which creates further divides.

Why did you want to tell this story?

Because love must prevail, which sees us through the most difficult of times, the worst of tragedies and bridges all divides that we bring upon ourselves.

source Indian Express