Today this web site begins a long series about other blogs I follow. The easiest way to do this is to begin with the Blogspot blog roll, where about half of them are listed, mostly in alphabetical order with unusual formatting bumping a few blogs ahead of the list. The first blog on the list is AliceWalkersGarden.com.
Well, duh...everyone knows about Alice Walker. The one who wrote that novel that begins with such a horrible, disgusting premise that readers are glad to learn, if they persevere and read the story, that it's not true. That is, it's true that Celie is being abused, loses contact with her sister, and is bullied into marrying a man she doesn't like, but she's not being abused by her father, her sister's not dead, and even her husband turns out not to be all bad. And even though Celie is in no way responsible for her awful situation, has no way to change or control it, the higher power to which she's always attuned (whether she's raging against it or reimagining it or, in the end, loving it) is gradually working for her good...The Color Purple is not exactly a Christian novel, it makes more than a polite nod in the direction of twentieth-century-trendy Neo-Paganism, but it's a novel about a woman's life as a spiritual journey of faith.
Those who took the trouble to read Walker's nonfiction know a little more of her biography. She had a rough early life. The "scars" of her past weren't merely emotional, or even surface marks on the skin; they were permanent, though minor, disabilities. The basic story of a family working through deep dysfunctions in The Color Purple came from her family history, though the specific dysfunctions were of course changed, like the people's names and the family configuration, to protect innocent people's privacy. The twist on the love interest, in which Celie finds true love for life neither with Albert nor with another man but with Albert's "honey" Shug, may be merely trendy now but in 1980 it took real physical courage to write, and Walker was in fact harassed for writing it. She moved to Mexico for reasons of personal safety. Her blog is still mostly bilingual...
An astonishing number of people in cyberspace never knew that Alice Walker had a blog.
Not, of course, a very personal, confessional blog as maintained by younger people who have nothing but emotions and indiscretions to confess. Sometimes Walker treats readers to a new free-verse poem (free verse means the English and Spanish versions have equal claims to be called poems in the sense of "well polished prose with extra line breaks"). More often she announces events, or promotes other people's news and views, often news stories that aren't "big" enough for the commercial media.
Political bias? Yes, of course, that's to be expected. Walker is and has always been pretty far to the Left, except that Lefties of her generation had a clear moral sense that probably seems Right-wing to today's Left. There are historical reasons for this. I respect it as an artefact of her past and try to understand it as part of her work.
In that work there's a profound Humanism, a sense that the same Cosmic Mystery that is always working for the good of Celie's poor mixed-up family is working for the good of poor mixed-up modern people too. People tend to overlook, being uncomfortable with, Walker's other fiction, much of which was as edgy as The Color Purple. The Third Life of Grange Copeland is about a man who's done some very bad things as well as some good things, who ultimately commits homicide to protect a grandchild; Walker said about it that her own grandfather aroused mixed feelings even in her, leaving it to readers to infer that she felt that if she'd been in danger her grandfather would have died or killed to protect her. Meridian is the name given to a young woman some reviewers called a saint, a sort of civil rights movement saint, who doesn't exactly cheat on her husband so much as she submits to rape because she's so dang nice...oh, read the book. Possessing the Secret of Joy is just plain obscene, in the sense of being an indictment of obscene things. It should be read only by mature adults whose blood pressure tends to run low if anything, and, even then, on an empty stomach and after some time spent in prayer or meditation. The Temple of My Familiar is the mildest of Walker's five acclaimed novels; its characters have grown up with the privilege of being kind people, but they're certainly not a traditional family, not conformists, not averse to being controversial.
Walker never was averse to being controversial in her poems, her nonfiction, or her more recent, lighter fiction. (It's light, but it features "California Sober" characters who don't use alcohol or other drugs but smoke a lot of marijuana, and same-sex couples, and the "Driving While Black" phenomenon, and other controversial topics.) She was downright fangirly about Fidel Castro...I've known people who were loved by some mutual acquaintances and hated by others, but not because they'd hired thugs to shoot at people's heads, at close range, while those people's children watched. She came out in favor of letting curly hair mat into "dreadlocks" in, coincidentally, the year the "oppressed hair" of a child I knew not only "put a ceiling on the brain" but dripped chemicals down the child's body so that the child spent most of the summer in the hospital. She even disagreed with influential friends, Gloria Steinem and the men who funded her, in discussing abortion not as a "right" for swinging hippie chicks (which was a major misrepresentation) but as an injury that, at its best, is still often traumatic or even disabling for the women who "choose" it; we shouldn't blame or judge abortion survivors, but neither should we treat abortion like a liberating "choice" comparable with learning skills or owning real estate. Walker was her own thinker and writer, Right or Left. I've always admired that.
For obvious reasons, then, alicewalkersgarden.com is not an interactive blog. It would be a hate magnet. It's not even a widely publicized web site. It's a quiet, private cyber-place that publishes occasional posts like
It's bilingual and audiovisual. The audiovisual content on each post is often independent of the text and/or pictures. For as many as possible of those who find it, the Garden is meant to be a comfortable place to reflect on comfortable and less-comfortable thoughts.
I don't think it needs to be interactive. When Southerners of my generation visited Southerners of hers, we always expected that most of what we had to say was going to be "Thank you, Ma'am." If we don't agree with what we hear/read, and often we won't, we should still respect the fortitude it shows for her to say it.
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