Understanding Alice Walker by Thadious M. Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Alice Walker by Thadious M. Davis Shermaine M. Jones DAVIS, THADIOUS M. Understanding Alice Walker. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. 176 pp. $59.99 hardcover; $19.99 paperback; $14.99 e-book. Thadious M. Davis’s Understanding Alice Walker comprehensively examines Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Alice Walker’s rich and multifaceted oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and essay. As the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple (1982), Walker’s work has been met with great critical acclaim as well as harsh and sometimes soul-crushing criticism, as Davis illuminates. A self-affirmed daughter of the South, Walker’s work is informed by and operates within multiple registers of “vernacular history, community wisdom, and formal education” (32). Walker’s work is at once philosophical, personal, and political, engaging subjects of racial oppression, gendered violence, economic exploitation, spiritual transformation, global interconnection, and joy. Davis illuminates the ways that Walker’s deep belief in “a moral function of art” and specifically that “art save[s] lives” (11) consistently inspires and animates her prolific literary career and activism. Understanding Alice Walker is organized into four chapters: “Understanding Alice Walker: The Sign of the Family” (Chapter 1); “The Sight of the Familiar: ‘I Love Myself…’” (Chapter 2); “The Work of the Woman: Coloring Purple” (Chapter 3); “The World of the Word: Mediating Self” (Chapter 4). These chapters trace the thematic and ideological development of Walker’s multifaceted writing and philosophical consciousness from her earliest works to her later meditations. Davis begins with Walker’s biography as a child of the South raised in poverty and the Jim Crow era. Specifically, Davis foregrounds Alice Walker’s early vision loss in one eye, due to a childhood injury, to suggest that “[w]hat distinguishes her prolific artistic production is her way of seeing herself and her world….Her writing underscores her attention to debilitating injury, inner vision, and spiritual awareness that attends to the wounded, the lost, the oppressed, the dismissed, the maligned, and the invisible” (2). With an ethic of care, Walker represents the interior lives of characters that are often discarded and neglected in society as evident in her early works Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Walker critiques patriarchal abuse and the way that it stifles Black womanhood, creativity, and agency as evident in her most celebrated works In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose and The Color Purple. Davis’s keen attention to Walker’s less critically engaged works is Understanding Alice Walker’s greatest contribution and intervention. Davis’s reading of Walker’s Civil Rights novel Meridian is particularly rich in its assertion that, “[d]ecidely utopic in its rendering of a Black woman’s body as pangendered, Meridian ultimately locates itself not merely in an analogy to the South but to all political spaces of [End Page 123] society, and as seminal in Walker’s reading of transfiguration” (46). Davis illuminates Meridian’s significance in exploring the cost of survival in the fight to create a beloved community. Moreover, Davis argues that “Meridian may be Walker’s most brilliantly conceived and realized novel” (46) despite its relative obscurity in comparison to The Color Purple. For Davis, Meridian represents an important turning point in Walker’s identity as a writer, revealing Walker’s “tendencies toward mysticism and philosophical musings” (60), which become increasingly centered in Walker’s later writings such as The Temple of My Familiar and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. While Davis diligently illuminates the successes of Walker’s career and corpus of work, she seems less eager to pursue criticism of Walker’s output, even in areas where such criticism would be useful. In particular, a deeper treatment of criticism regarding Walker’s representation of Africa in works such as The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy is warranted. Though Davis notes Walker’s seeming preference for essay and poetry in the latter part of her writing career, a fuller discussion of the limitations and possibilities of genre and form for Walker would enrich the...