Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Putnam County, Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children born to Willie Lee Walker, a sharecropper whom Alice described as “wonderful at math but a terrible farmer,” and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant, who supplemented the family’s income by working as a maid. Alice grew up during a time when Jim Crow laws–laws that enforced segregation and privileged white people living within their jurisdiction–were in effect, and Alice and her siblings were all expected to work as sharecroppers, helping their father. Her mother defied convention, however, insisting that her children learn how to read and write. As a result, Alice began writing her first stories at the age of eight.
Around this same time, Alice was wounded in her right eye by a BB pellet fired by her brother. Because her family didn’t own a car and couldn’t easily travel, it was a week before Alice could get to a doctor and, as a result, lost the sight in her eye. For years, scar tissue built up around the wound, making Alice extremely embarrassed and shy. The scar tissues was removed six years later, however, and by the time she graduated high school, however, she was valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class. However, Alice noted that the physical and emotion trauma of that event had given her the opportunity “really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out”.
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship, and then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1965. During this time, she began to publish her poetry, and devoted herself to the Civil Rights Movement, even taking part in the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. She also joined Ms. magazine as an editor in 1971, before moving to California and writing the novel that would forever after be associated with her name.
The Color Purple was released in 1982. The novel follows a young troubled black woman fighting her way through racist white culture, as well as patriarchal black culture as well, highlighting in a devastating, insightful, and deeply emotional way how oppressions work together to keep people from achieving their dreams. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical, which was revived just this past year. Alice Walker also received the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for her work–and became one of the most censored authors in contemporary American history.
In 2012, Alice Walker gave an interview to Guernica magazine in which she discussed her book, and the many reactions readers have had to it, as well as her own thoughts on censorship and the need to read ‘dangerous books’. In honor of Banned Book Week, here are some highlights from the interview (you can read the whole thing here by clicking on this link).
Alice Walker: Writing What’s Right
Guernica: In the introduction to Alice Walker Banned, Patricia Holt writes, “Along with her Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, Alice Walker has the honor of being one of the most censored writers in American literature.” Did you ever feel that the censorship of your work created duties for you—moral, ethical, or otherwise—that you didn’t ask for?
Alice Walker: Not at all. I considered it part of what can happen to anyone on the journey of one’s life. In Southern Black culture we are sustained more than most people might imagine by our ancestral songs; these songs, called “sorrow songs” (from the days of enslavement) and later “spirituals,” later morphed into gospel, jazz and blues. In this canon we find songs that, even under the most brutal conditions, consider Life itself to simply be a race with one’s self. The object is to reach the end intact as you. So one of the songs goes: “Guide my feet, while I run this race; Guide my feet, while I run this race. Guide my feet, while I run this race. ’Cause I don’t want to run this race in vain.” This plea is addressed to The Creator, who is also the deep Self. The truest work is not to run the race of life in vain; ending up completely severed from your true self. I am so thankful for songs like this! When I speak and write about being under the protection of ancestors, it is because of messages and wisdom like this that I know sustain me.
Also, I think it is anyone’s right to do what they feel they have to do. They have a job. I have a job. I will write what I think is right for me to write. They will oppose it. In a way that makes us equal. Though when one’s work is completely suppressed this is a bitter acceptance. However, my work has always been championed. Stood up for. Thousands of people in California and beyond spoke up for The Color Purple and for my short stores. There was a great outpouring of support. From everywhere! And actually I left the struggle up to others. I had delivered my gift. It was given in complete love to everyone. If they wanted to keep it, it would have to be their work to fight for it. They did.
Guernica: As a censored writer, you’re keeping hallowed company: Dorothy Allison, Harper Lee. Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn have all been challenged, and that’s just the tip of the censorious black marker. What are some of the banned books you most admire?
Alice Walker: I have so loved the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn, especially while a student, both of them dedicated to the exposure of the insanity of war. I also love Mark Twain for his clear denunciation of American imperialism and for his wise and humorous, often quite sly, sendup of organized religion.
Guernica: What’s most at stake when a book like The Color Purple is banned? What’s at stake for women, and women of color, when a story like this is silenced?
Alice Walker: Great Literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests. And, in fact, I have approached writing in a distinctly priestess frame of mind. I know what The Color Purple can mean to people, women and men, who have no voice. Who believe they have few choices in life. It can open to them, to their view, the full abundance of this amazing journey we are all on. It can lift them into a new realization of their own power, beauty, love, courage. It is a book that unites the present with the past, therefore giving people a sense of history and of timelessness they might never achieve otherwise. And even were it not “great” literature, it has the best interests of all of us humans at heart. That we grow, change, challenge, encourage, love fiercely in the awareness that real love can never be incorrect.