Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker - Afro-American author

Having come through those days and recommitted herself to life, Walker has pursued in her writing the expression of a commitment to life-giving, pleasuring, and preserving.

Walker holds a womanist theory of eros which she sums up thus:

Men and their religions have tended to make love for anything and anybody other than themselves and their Gods an objectionable thing, a shame. But that is not the message of Nature, the Universe, the Earth, or of the unindoctrinated Human Heart where everything is profusion, chaos, multiplicity, but also creativity, containment and care. Love. Wildness. And to me, Wildness means following the growth of love. Like a plant that reaches through stone toward the sun (SRT, 171-72).

In her life and art, Walker's pursuit of the freedom to love, to be, to revel, and to rest has led her not only to express life's passion and promise but also to be an advocate for whomever or whatever she perceives to be submerged, subjugated, oppressed. In Warrior Marks she has commented: "I am a great believer in solidarity. Nicaraguans say something very beautiful. They say that solidarity is the tenderness of the people and real revolution is about tenderness" (WM, 280).

The erotic expression of Alice Walker, then, is far more than a celebration of sexuality and sensuality. It is an embrace of life-force and Earth energies. Carter Heyward speaks of eros as "our embodied yearning for mutuality."(23) Sam Keen has spoken of an "erotic metaphysics" in which "Plato and Aristotle both saw eros as the prime mover of stars, acorns, and the affairs of men [sic]," and Christianity "defined the ultimate reality - God - as love," while numerous other traditions and thinkers have given rise to "an erotic vision" which emphasizes the unitive urge of beings, the powers and passions that move toward harmony.(24) It is such an erotic vision to which Walker subscribes.

Activism

In the life and work of Alice Walker, eros, thus broadly conceived, forms ethos. Walker declares in the poem "On Stripping Bark from Myself" that she, evidently the persona of the poem, is engaged in a "struggle . . . against inner darkness," a struggle which impels her "to unlock life." She concludes the poem with this self-description:

. . . A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow and the sun. I am happy to fight all outside murderers as I see I must.

(HBB, 271; also GNWL, 23-24)

Over the more than three decades of her writing life, Walker has immersed herself in protest, civil disobedience, writing, speaking, traveling, and film making on behalf of numerous causes. The civil rights movement of the 1960s involved her in demonstrations, the voter registration campaign, and defiance of Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws during her marriage to Mel Leventhal. The 1970s saw her entry into the feminist movement as a regular contributor to Ms. magazine and a friendship with Gloria Steinem. The 1980s brought international attention with her Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the book to film. During this decade Walker defined, and in some ways invented, womanist awareness and the womanist movement. In the 1990s she stood firmly against the Gulf War, visited Cuba and promoted a conciliatory view of Castro, mounted a campaign against "female circumcision" (genital mutilation). All of these causes have figured in her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. And with them has been a persistent strain of attentive concern for the fate of the Earth.