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Good Reading : March 2005
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22 goodreading author profile The novel is Walker’s attempt to urge women reaching their late middle-age to go ‘walkabout’ cowboys and Indians with her brothers.The scar tissue left a lasting disfigurement and Walker was ostracised in the school- yard for her cloudy eye.The once sassy and outgoing girl grew introverted and dispirited. But later Walker came to view that injury as ‘a kind of strange gift’, qualifying her for a disability scholarship to the prestigious Spelman College. From the trauma of her blinding,Walker drew the powers of empathy that later spurred her fiction and activism.Walker first became aware of the horror of female genital mutilation when she visited Africa on a scholarship at the age of 20. But it was not until three decades later with her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1993) and her documentary Warrior Marks (1996) that Walker understood that her childhood scars obliged her to take action. ‘Finally I realised I was the one who understood what it feels like to be wounded as a child,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t evade it, couldn’t put it off.’ On that formative trip to Africa Walker fell pregnant.With her ever-swelling compulsion to fight racial segregation, and only midway through her tertiary education, the prospect of marrying and settling down into quiet domesticity was anath- ema.With abortion illegal, the options for an unmarried, black student from a poor family were close to nil.Walker began sleeping with a razor beneath her pillow, determined to com - mit suicide if an abortion remained unattainable. ‘It was a very despairing situation − to have come so close to this magical education that was so necessary to help the people and yet be on the point of losing it all,’ she says. Fortunately Walker’s friends, on learning of her predicament, became hell-bent on raising the otherworldly sum to pay for an illegal abortion.Yet as Walker insists, ‘I’ve never been of the opinion that suicide is the worst thing that can happen to you. I would have missed life, and I love life, but I also don’t see suicide as being a com - plete tragedy.’While Walker’s pregnancy brought depression, her resolve to have an abortion bolstered her sense of self-worth. ‘It said you have made a decision, you have chosen yourself, which is very strengthening. Because often women are trained to choose others before we choose ourselves, we then go through life always feeling second best,’ she says. Two years later she was married. In wedding Jewish civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal,Walker refused to be swept along in the anti-white current of the rising Black Nationalist move- ment.Their marriage sent shock waves through Walker’s family, while Leventhal’s mother sat shivah, considering her son dead. United by their shared activist goals, the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, the city then notorious as the site of America’s most ironclad racist rule.They lived under the constant threat of having firebombs hurled through their windows. Invectices like ‘Nigger go home’ inevitably trailed the couple at nights when they dared to venture beyond their home. ‘People had all these old patterns – of white men with black mistresses, of black men who’d been lynched and castrated for being with white women – that I think they didn’t really know what they were seeing,’ she says.With the threatening atmosphere surrounding the interracial couple, it became impossible for the fledgling author to attain the serenity of mind necessary for her writing. Eventually the couple split, with Walker heading to Cambridge to teach black literature and forge ahead with her fiction. Their daughter, Rebecca, would move between cities, spending two years with each parent. After an adolescence of drug addictions, depression and sexual promiscuity, Rebecca Walker emerged as one of America’s most visible ‘third wave’ feminists. In her 2000 memoir Black,White and Jewish, the younger Walker writes of how her mother would pen ‘good- bye notes’ for her daughter to discover on arriving home from school, by which time she would have already headed off for a week’s seclusion to nourish her creative energies. ‘In interviews, my mother talks about how she and I are more like sisters than mother and daughter. Being my mother’s sister doesn’t allow me to be her daughter,’ she writes. ‘I never knew the feeling of an extended womb.’ I expect Walker to pass up my question about her daughter’s public accusations of parental neglect, given her previous refusal to discuss Rebecca in interviews. But instead she responds, ‘I was sorry she never seemed to fully grasp what we were trying to do, because she felt we were trying to change the laws and the country and should’ve focused our attention strictly on her. And it’s true − as a writer of fiction I am often in a fictional world.’ She sighs lethargically, ‘I don’t know, I guess it’s just one of the hazards of the occupation of writing.’ So where is her relation- ship with Rebecca at now? ‘I think it’s okay. It will probably be quite rocky from time to time but I think it’s okay now.’ In 1982, the same year that her 14-year-old daughter aborted her first pregnancy,Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Colour Purple. That a novel written in black folk idiom which opens with a letter to God, depicts graphic incest and charts the transfiguring power of a lesbian relationship might create such a publishing tsunami was previously unheard of.Yet a storm of controversy raged for months after Walker was crowned with the
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