SOMETIME IN 1980, a 36-year-old Alice Walker posed this question in her journal: "My God, what do black women writers want?"
Walker's answer was emphatic, as she wrote in her dark blue spiral notebook: "We want freedom. Freedom to be ourselves. To write the unwritable. To say the unsayable. To think the unthinkable." Boldly concluding, "To dare to engage the world in a conversation it has not had before."
As a Black woman writer who has read almost every novel, poem, essay, or short story Walker has ever published, I found this entry in the new book Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 19652000, remarkable for its ambition and radical honesty.
Writing this three years before receiving the National Book Award and making history by becoming the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Color Purple, Walker had envisioned freedom personal, professional, and political—that was unimaginable to generations of Black writers, and to Black women generally, before her. By doing so, she made a new blueprint for herself, and for those of us who have turned to her ideas and words as inspiration, even if we did not have access to her innermost thoughts until now.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Volume 2. No 2 - 2022-Ausgabe von The Oprah Magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Volume 2. No 2 - 2022-Ausgabe von The Oprah Magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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