Stripping Bark-Alice Walker's Poetry in confronting the taboo - Page 2
© Dorothy Harris
Then I wrote the suicide poems, because I felt I understood the part played in suicide by circumstances and fatigue. I also began to understand how alone woman is, because of her body. (p. 248, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens)
She also says in an interview:
Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems - and I write groups of poems rather than singles-are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. (p 249, In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens).
Walker is also not afraid to discuss the stigmas and stereotypes that serve as responses to the issues African American women confront. When Walker discusses the suicide of the young African American woman whose suicide influenced the poem entitled, "The Girl Who Died" she discusses the common response -- that Black women don't commit suicide. Walker writes:
She tried to kill herself two or three times before, but I guess the brothers and sisters didn't think it "correct to respond with love or attention, since everybody knows it is "incorrect" to even think of suicide if you are a black person. And of course, black people do not commit suicide." (P. 271 In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens.)
Suicide
First, suicide notes should be (not long) but written second, all suicide notes should be signed in blood by hand and to the point- that point being, perhaps, that there is none. Thirdly, if it is the thought of rest that fascinates laziness should be admitted in the clearest terms. Then, all things done ask those outraged consider their happiest summer & tell if the days it adds up to is one.
Walker also addresses the resistance to seeking and receiving help for emotional or mental illness in her poem entitled.
At First
At first I did not fight it. I loved the suffering. I felt my heart pump the blood that splashed my insides with red flowers; I savored my grief like chilled wine.
I did not know my life was being shredded by an expert.
It was my friend Gloria who saved me. Whose glance said, "Really, you've got to be kidding. Other women have already done this sort of suffering for you, or so I thought."
(from Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning)
In this section of poems, in "Goodnight Willie Lee, I'll See You In the Morning" Walker writes poetry about women who make decisions about painful relationships with men, who sacrifice themselves for relationships with men, and who must define themselves for themselves in their environments despite conflicts with factors that attempt to define them differently. In this collection, she also includes a few poems in which the characters work out relationships with a therapist. In these poems, the reader can see the struggle and conflict with the idea of therapy as much as the struggles themselves.
