Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan Willis

SOURCE: "Alice Walker's Women," in Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, pp. 110-28.

In the following essay, Willis discusses the women of Walker's fiction, in particular Meridian, and their relationship to their history and community. She asserts that revolution can only succeed when an individual commits herself to the community.

      Be nobody's darling
      Be an outcast.
      Take the contradictions
      Of your life
 
      And wrap around
      You like a shawl,
      To parry stones
      To keep you warm.
 
      What the black Southern writer
      inherits as a natural right is
      a sense of community.

The strength of Alice Walker's writing derives from the author's inexorable recognition of her place in history; the sensitivity of her work, from her profound sense of community; its beauty, from her commitment to the future. Many readers associate Alice Walker with her most recent novel, The Color Purple, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. But the best place to begin...
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