Alice Walker: Poetry

Activism

Alice Walker (left) and Gloria Steinem on the Fall 2009 cover of Ms. magazine

Civil rights

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington with hundreds of thousands of people. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.[28][29]

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For".[30]

Womanism

Walker's specific brand of feminism included advocacy on behalf of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term womanist in her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, to mean "a black feminist or feminist of color". The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at "the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression".[31] Walker states that "'Womanism' gives us a word of our own".[32] because it is a discourse of Black women and the issues they confront in society. Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women's concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives."[31]

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Walker is a judge member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and she also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.[33]

In January 2009, Walker was one of over fifty signatories of a letter protesting against the Toronto International Film Festival's "City to City" spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, and condemning Israel as an "apartheid regime".[34] Two months later, Walker and sixty other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink traveled to Gaza in response to the Gaza War. Their purpose was to deliver aid, meet with NGOs and residents, and persuade Israel and Egypt to open their borders with Gaza. She planned to visit Gaza again in December 2009 to participate in the Gaza Freedom March.[35] On June 23, 2011, she announced plans to participate in an aid flotilla to Gaza that attempted to break Israel's naval blockade.[36][37]

In May 2013, Walker posted an open letter to singer Alicia Keys, asking her to cancel a planned concert in Tel Aviv. "I believe we are mutually respectful of each other's path and work," Walker wrote. "It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists." Keys rejected the plea.[38] Walker has refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated and published in Hebrew,[39][40] saying that she finds that "Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories" and noting that she had refused to allow Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel to be shown in South Africa until the system of apartheid was dismantled.[41]

Support for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange

In June 2013, Walker and others appeared in a video expressing their support for Chelsea Manning, an American soldier who was imprisoned for releasing classified information.[42] In recent years she has spoken out repeatedly in support of Julian Assange.[43][44][45]

Animal advocacy

Walker has expressed that animal advocacy is one of her central concerns. Her fiction has increasingly embraced animal ethics over the past four decades, as she works to include animals as both active participants in her novels and as symbols for what she has called "consciousness." Her earliest fiction represents nonhuman animals inasmuch as they are part of human life – namely as farmed animals, food sources, and absent referents for animalized epithets directed at humans, and her fiction increasingly incorporates the animal experience.[46] She has advocated for greater consciousness in human beings and their relationships with animals, stating: "Encouraging others to love nature, to respect other human beings and animals, to adore this earth, is part of my work in this world."[47]

Pacifism

Walker has been a longtime sponsor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In early 2015, she wrote: "So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one we have dominant today."[48]

Transgender rights

In 2023 Walker publicly defended J.K. Rowling from criticisms of her views regarding trans people and shared that her own views matched Rowling's. She wrote on her website: "I consider J.K. Rowling perfectly within her rights as a human being of obvious caring for humanity to express her views about whatever is of concern to her. As she has done."[49] Walker was criticized on social media for taking this position with many referring to her as a TERF.[50]


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