Walker, Alice (Vol. 103) - Susan Willis (essay date 1987)
Susan Willis (essay date 1987)
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...
[The entire page is 6413 words long]
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