In the mid-1990s,  Alice Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman  In her explorations of the damage done to the individual by racism and sexism, Alice Walker depicts lesbianism as natural and freeing, an aid to self-knowledge and self-love.

This is the fifty-sixth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.

Walker, Alice (b. 1944)

Alice Malsenior Walker was born February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, to an African-American sharecropper family. She attended Spelman College from 1961 to 1963, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. In 1964, she traveled to Africa and began to write poetry, some of it published in the 1968 collection, Once.

After college, she worked for New York City's welfare department and for the civil rights movement in Mississippi. In 1967, she married Melvyn R. Levanthal, a civil rights lawyer, and they had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. In 1976, they were amicably divorced.
In the 1970s, Walker's writing career began to blossom. By 1974, she was a contributing editor at Ms Magazine.

Walker has received many writing fellowships from, for example, the MacDowell Colony, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught at several universities and has published numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays.
Among the prestigious awards she has received are the Lillian Smith Award for Revolutionary Petunias (1973), which was also nominated for a National Book Award; the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1974); and the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple (1982).
In 1981, she moved to California, where she continues to live and write.

Alice Walker's work speaks to such universal themes as spiritual survival; the achievement of individual identity, freedom, and power; and the interconnectedness of self and community. Her concern with these issues is effectively cast within the framework of black female experience. She explores the damage to the individual self wrought by racism and sexism, which she sees as related consequences of patriarchal cultures.

As she depicts racial and sexual taboos, she diagnoses abusive behavior as an expression of self-hatred and the fragmentation of female wholeness as effected by conformity. Walker's recurrent argument is that healthy self-definition stems from self-knowledge and self-love.
Within these contexts, she treats lesbianism as natural and freeing, notably in The Color Purple. Here Celie, the protagonist, is figuratively reborn from a death of the spirit through her sister/friend/lover's teaching. She is sexually and spiritually awakened to both the beauty of her body and the possibility of personal autonomy within a shared and reciprocal relationship.
It is clear from Walker's entire work that there are no forbidden loves or themes. She demands that conventions be questioned. Her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is about the practice of performing clitoridectomies on African women. She forces the reader to share her character's physical pain but even more to empathize with the mutilation of her spirit. Fact and metaphor join.
Alice Walker sees women as scarred by rigid, constricting gender categories. As her last novel announces, the "secret of joy" is resistance. Her entire work says that society must change to enable personal transformation and wholeness.
Resistance to inhibiting taboos is potentially redemptive, and affective bonding, of which lesbianism is an example, can be curative and liberating. Walker is important both for her expression of these themes and for her fictional representation of characters who break conventional stereotypes.
Dorothy H. Lee
       


Selected awards and honors
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Color Purple (1983) (first black woman).
National Book Award (First black woman)
O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985.
Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995)
American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997)
The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts
The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters
The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York
Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006)
Selected works
Novels and short story collections
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
Meridian (1976)
The Color Purple (1982)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
To Hell With Dying (1988)
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Finding the Green Stone (1991)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
The Complete Stories (1994)
By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998)
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000)
Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005)
Devil's My Enemy (2008)    Poetry collections
Once (1968)
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985)
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991)
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003)
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003)
Collected Poems (2005)
Poem at Thirty-Nine
Non-fiction
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Living by the Word (1988)
Warrior Marks (1993)
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure (1997)
Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)
Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001)
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006)
Mississippi Winter IV
Overcoming Speechlessness (2010)