Nobody will find the controversial writer, Alice Walker neutral, because of her fierce, unorthodox views. As an award-winning novelist, essayist, and poet, she has devoted her gifts to both observing the external and internal worlds. Complied by acclaimed scholar and editor Valerie Boyd, her current book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, is a hefty collection of her revealing journals dating from 1965 to 2000.
…Walker is conflicted about motherhood and the birth of an interracial child, Rebecca, in 1969. Her journal takes up her ambivalence about the responsibility of parenting: “And what of Rebecca? At least she is the only child I will have. Thank God for that. I will try to do what is best for her — the old cliché. Neither Mel (her husband) nor I should have had a child. We’re equally unready.”
Throughout the journal, she praises Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ernest Gaines, Anais Nin, Jean Toomer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the African modern novelists. Following Meridian and The Color Purple, male critics blasted her for her racial and gender politics, including Ishmael Reed’s statement about Walker’s depiction of black men as “rapists.” Read the Full Review ?
