Walker’s love of poetry and writing in general combined with the fire in her heart to establish equality for African-Americans, especially African-American women give her writing a unique stamp. Her style takes freedoms structurally and her writing is put together in a beautifully poetic way allowing her creativity to shine through; however, at the same time she ingeniously weaves in themes that hold a lot of weight and have the quality of raising awareness to the issues that she and other African-American’s go through in their struggle to be recognized and appreciated.
Poetic
The first distinctive element of Alice Walker’s writing style is her ability to make what she is writing sound and feel rhythmic and poetic. Although Walker is best known for her fiction, including Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), and The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Walker began her career as a poet. The first book she ever published, which was in 1968, is entitled Once, and is a collection of poems. Walker was aware of the difficulties that African-American women faced in expressing their creativity through forms of art. Mary Helen Washington, a professor of English at the University of Maryland and writer of African American literature, expressed this notion in her essay, “An Essay on Alice Walker.” In her essay, which was included in a book compiled with critical essays on Alice Walker, Washington says that Walker was aware of, from observation and direct experience, the prejudices against black women, and “pain, violence, poverty, and oppression,” (Washington 40), being the result of this prejudice. For Walker, the antidote for women to these ills created by years of oppression is therapeutic expression of their creativity; however, Walker knew that African-American women were discouraged from indulging in artistic expression. Walker expresses this problem in her essay, “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write…the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist,” (Walker 84). Also, earlier in that same essay, she comments on how these “Artists” were driven to madness “by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release,” (Walker 83). Because of this complication for black women to be the artists they truly were inside, it was essential for Walker to express their creativity for them, to be the channel through which black woman could show the world their artistry. Barbara Christian, professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, supports this in her essay on Walker entitled “Novels for Everyday Use.” Christian says, “The exploration, then, of the process of personal and social growth out of horror and waste is a motif that characterizes Walker’s works. For her, the creativity of the black women is essential to this process” (50).
Despite the actual content of Walker’s essays typically depicting deep and serious topics her writing is etheral and elegant. Walker achieves this in her essays and prose by incorporating elements that are abundantly found in poetry. These include elements such as repetition, imagery, metaphor, and a variety of sentence structure and sentence length. Christian praises her creativity, “We can feel her delight, sheer delight, in telling stories…Her tales are marvelous themselves, intriguing the imagination with wondrous touches juxtaposed to the mundane” (52). Repetition, specifically, is a major element of poetry and readers will find that Walker creatively weaves repetition into her prose. In many of Walker’s essays you will find the use of anaphora. For example in “Brothers and Sisters, Walker was questioning who she could talk about her feelings to. She says, “Not to my father…Not to my mother…Not to me…” (271). She repeats the beginning of sentences. She does the same thing in, “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” “…perhaps she painted vivid and daring decorations…perhaps she sang…perhaps she herself a poet…” (90). Walker also shows her creative use of sentence structures by often breaking up long flowing sentences with short, powerful sentences. This can be seen in “Journey to Nine Miles,” in the twelve paragraph, when she is describing the caretaker of the compound that Bob Marley’s grave is in. She juxtaposes longer sentences with short and simple ones such as, “That he loved Bob. Loved his music…I ask his mane. He tells me. I have sense forgotten it” (208). I explain further how these stylistic choices work with the content of her prose later when I analyze two passages from her essays. Finally, walker will sometimes incorporate some of her own works of poetry as well as poetry from other poets into her essays. She does this in “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” with her poem On Sight, and she also does this in “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”
Activism
"Activism is my rent for living on the planet." -Alice Walker
The second noticeable aspect to Alice Walker’s writing style is the way that she incorporates autobiographical elements into her prose in order to raise awareness to and to promote activism for the problems facing African-American women and the African-American race in general. As mentioned in the introduction, Alice was highly involved with activism in her college years. She creatively blends in the overlying message/moral that she is trying to communicate to her readers to push them to change the current situation. In Laurie McMillan’s essay “Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s in Search of our Mothers’ Gardens,” she refers to Walker’s effective use of autobiography to comment on important political matters and influence behaviors of the culture (McMillan 107-108). McMillan also acknowledges how this technique is especially useful for those in oppressed situations to get their opinions out, “First, autobiography allows scholars writing from traditionally marginalized positions to simultaneously assert the legitimacy of their viewpoints and challenge perspectives that have been presented as disinterested and universal” (108). In Walker’s essay “Brother’s and Sister’s” walker talks about her own experiences with her family and what she and them were taught about sex and the differences between the sexes. At the same time that Walker talks about her own experiences the reader can pick up on underlying messages of sexism and the way the African-American family operates. In her last two paragraphs of this essay Walker talks about how she wanted better male role models in her life. The reader can infer that she is communicating better male role models for the rest of society as well when she mentions how the media portrays men as “dominator, as killer, as hypocrite” (Walker 273). Finally, Walker’s essay “Looking for Zora is not so much an essay about the journey and experience of looking for the writer Zora Neale Huston’s grave, but it is more a commentary on how black women writers were treated and how Hurston was unappreciated. She is showing the reader how sad it is to be forgotten. Every so often she will break up the events of the essay with quotes of other writers on either biography of Hurston or praise for her works. I believe she does this because is telling the world that Hurston will not be forgotten; she will live on through the words of the people who recognized her talents. In this way walkers prose is compelling and instructive. Robert Atwan comments on this aspect of Walker’s style, “…there is a strongly didactic element in Walker’s prose, and this didacticism, usually in the interest of her “womanist” project, is best served by a style that is both direct and powerful in its rhetoric” (505-506). Atwan’s conclusion about Walker’s style is absolutely true. Walker’s prose is rhetoric; it is persuasive and calls for action, but because of her writing’s elegance and beauty it does not make the reader feel like they are being told what to do, and yet the reader will still be impelled to follow her command.
Link to Video where Alice Walker talks about some of these elements: http://www.makers.com/alice-walker
Sources:
Atwan, Robert. Ten on Ten: Major Essayists on Recurring Themes. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin's, 1992. Print.
Christian, Barbara. "Novels for Everyday Use." Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 50-104. Print.
McMillan, Laurie. "Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens." Journal of Modern Literature 28.1 (2004): 107-23. Academic Search Complete [EBSCO]. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.
Washington, Mary Helen. "An Essay On Alice Walker." Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. 37-49. Print.