Literary icon and celebrity Alice Walker was in Chicago on July 1 to promote two new books. She appeared as part of the summer program at Women and Children First (WCF) bookstore. Though sponsored by the bookstore, the event was held at the First Free Church, 5525 N. Ashland. The venue had been changed from the Swedish Museum in order to accommodate larger crowds.
Walker, most famous for The Color Purple, was introduced by Linda Bubon co-owner, with Ann Christopherson, of WCF. While most celebrated for her fiction, Walker has, over the last few years, become a visible figure in the public discussion on Palestine and has written about her travels to Gaza.
She has also discussed matters related to the environment and what she calls “womanism,” a term she made famous in her 1983 work, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.
She first read from her book of poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers. A packed audience nodded and clapped as she read pieces touching upon the themes of aging, environmental degradation, and friendship.
Walker began with a poem dedicated to her long-time friend, the feminist Gloria Steinem. The two women met in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. While Walker remembers them meeting in New York, Steinem recalls them meeting in Mississippi. Explaining the conflicting memories, Walker said, “If it was in the South, it would have been the same time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when we were not able to be in our bodies.”
In the poem, titled “She,” Walker praised several qualities of Steinem, including what she described as her capacity for friendship. Expanding on that, she said, “Our country is deeply, deeply racist and deeply misogynist. When we have these friendships, they’re worth pursuing.”
She went on to read poems about the Arab Spring, Egyptian martyrs, and environmental decay. In one, she called for solidarity, “We must walk together without fear.”
In another poem, she referenced solidarity more overtly by citing the words attributed to Jesus, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall enter the kingdom of Heaven.” Walker said that, here, Jesus was in fact calling for empathy with the downtrodden.
A poem about growing old and celebrating the aging process which, Walker said, is often denied by society, drew the greatest laughs, with lines like: “I get to know I will never speak German” and “I get to eat chocolate with my salad.”
Walker concluded the evening by reading an excerpt from The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way.
The title refers to a literal cushion, the sort used in meditation practices. Walker spoke of how, around her 60th birthday, she began to plan to retire and retreat into a more contemplative life. But events and people called to her, she said, and she decided to literally and metaphorically take her cushion on her journeys.
One of these events was a book fair in Brasilia, in Brazil, a uniquely designed city constructed in the 1950s, in the middle of otherwise arid land. Walker wrote about her lectures and travels in the city and of then traveling outside it, where she encountered the kind of “third-world” poverty kept invisible in Brasilia, the “real Brazil,” according to her.
The evening concluded with a book-signing.
Originally published in Windy City Times.