ALICE WALKER

Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Introduction

There is no question that Alice Walker's works are directed towards effecting social change that she is a writer with political intent. Black women writers have little choice in this regard. Even if they could manage blindness and deafness to the state of black people, their status as black female writer, a triple affliction, would at some point force them to at least consider the effect of societal forces on the lives of individuals.

Statement of the Issue to be investigated

I make this bold-faced statement at the beginning of this essay on political content in Walker's novels, because it seems to me that OUT supposedly most radical avantgarde critics seem to consist upon the unimportance of external reality that the text ought to be dispersed. Deconstructed that writers do not mean what they write, do not even know what they write that language is devoid of meaning, and is primarily a system of signs that refer lo other signs rather than to anything that exists. Probably many of these critics would agree if they thought they could say it aloud that the best text would be silence and that such a term as a political writer is a backward reactionary one.

I am particularly concerned with emphasizing my disagreement with this point of view, since I believe it would demolish much of the tradition (a bad word. I am told) of Afro-American writers who have always had to refer to that reality out there which has its all too real foot on their necks.

Literature Review

Like many other black women writers. Walker intends her works to affect something in the world. That is why she speaks and that is why she writes. But in her work intention is not the only political factor. The process of political changing the envisioning of social transforming is central to her work. Her forms, themes, imagery, critiques are marked by her belief in a coherent yet developing philosophy of life (an ideology in other words) which has some relationship lo external reality. Her works are not merely her fictions they are her fictions in relation to the world(Lorde 1991).

The core of her works is clearly her focus on black women, on the freedom allowed them as an indicator of the health of our entire society. This focus may seem a simple one. But if one considers the reality of black women's conditions in American society, her focus must involve a complexity of vision, if that condition is to be probed. In looking at what it means to be a black woman in the world. one must confront the vortex of sexism, racism, poverty so integrated that the parts of the whole can hardly be separated. Many of Walker's literary ancestors had attempted to illuminate one part of this vortex, racism, primarily because of the tremendous oppression black women and men have suffered because of their race. But in so doing these writers have not consciously probed the ...