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Stripping Bark-Alice Walker's Poetry in confronting the taboo

© Dorothy Harris

Alice Walker (b. 1944) has published several collections of essays, poetry, and several novels. Her work has universal appeal while at the same time speaks to issues of concern for women and for women of color. Walker's work especially speaks to the day to day realities of women, as we confront issues that are significant and large in our lives. One of the things that I most appreciate in Walker's work is her ability, as a writer, to reach out to all women by writing about those things that are personal, painful, and sometimes taboo for her characters, whether they are fictional or real. Walker certainly helps the readers to understand the phrase that came out of the women's studies movements in the 1970's and 80's "the personal is political" by taking issues that are personal and makes them significant enough to be place in the center of political arenas.

Walker also makes it clear that the problems that her characters face in her fiction, and that the women about whom she writes in her non-fiction (including herself) are not unique in their experiences. She speaks loudly, but gently, to those whose experiences are similar to the women about whom she writes. For example, in a poem entitled: "Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?" Walker discusses the pains of loving a man who is "not worth my love." She follows the line with "Did this happen to your mother? Did your grandmother wake up for no good reason in the middle of the night?" and later in the poem she writes, "Did you sister throw up a lot? Did your cousin complain of a painful knot in her back? Did your aunt always seem to have something else troubling her mind?"

Much of Walker's work during the 70's and 80's focused on painful relationships of young women who were attempting to find themselves and in the midst of their varied relationships. While the focus may have been on love relationships with men, Walker also focused on how those relationships were impacted by relationships with family, community, other women, and society. Walker closely examined ways in which the characters' daily interactions with the world around them deeply affected their own physical, emotional and mental well being. This is evident in the collection of short stories In Love and Trouble.

Walker dared to step out of the confines of prescriptions for writers, especially for women writers and for African American women writers when she wrote about characters who challenged the mores of society and those of our specific circles. She was not afraid, for instance to discuss abortion, rape or suicide, nor was she afraid to discuss the ramifications of these issues for African American women in African American women's communities. This discussion of suicide is obvious in a poem entitled "Suicide" which is about suicide notes. What is most important is that Walker even addressed the topic. Walker wrote of suicide, she says, for two reasons. Walker wrote of suicide to celebrate, as she says, her own survival.

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