Alice Walker:  The 'Wandering Inspiration' Meanders (3/19, 92 St Y)

A modern classic of goose-gander gender justice, Ms. Jong's Fear of Flying has sold fifteen million copies worldwide since taking its place in 1973 alongside Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). (In the sequel, Isadora Wing saves her own life (1977).) Her latest novel, Sappho's Leap, is due out this month from W.W. Norton. In between, she has published seven highly acclaimed poetry collections and a memoir, Fear of Fifty.

Introducing Walker, Jong offered that a writer who is both a poet and a novelist can 'engage in a closer interactive dialogue with the reader.' Moreover, she shared Walker's conviction that a writer's role in the world is to be a healer, and in fact Walker's new book contains a tribute to Maria Sabina, an herbalist whom she met when she went to Mexico to study addiction, one of several stays along her chosen path as a 'wandering inspiration.' She was halted by the shock of 9/11, and wrote her first poetry collection in ten years, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (Random House).

"Bring me the heart of Maria Sabina, / priestess of mushrooms" is addressed to Life, with a river-boat epitaph by Pablo Neruda, and a bow to the "serenity of Ché," a hard vision of a dead father, the misery of life under conquest for a people "healed of grief," yet hungry. Despite its repeated "Bring me" line, its effects were pedestrian, but the person of Maria achieves dignity, if not art. "If They Come to Shoot You" followed, a poem intended as the "ally of the person who is walking the floor in the dark," reminiscent for the author of her years in Mississippi married to a Jewish civil rights lawyer:  "Ask them to let you find your picture of Ché Guevara.  . . .With what compassion he must have gazed at his killer. . . . Pray for them when they come for us." One hears strong shades of Neruda and of Kathryn Harrison's novel on the parallel lives of a queen and the peasant girl lover of a priest (whose earthy brown mother becomes wet nurse to the king), both tortured in their way, during the Spanish Inquisition (Poison).

Three disparate poems followed, the one engendered by an ad—'She Loves Her Fakes'—Walker uses to praise the angular Jane Goodall, impervious to beautification, always in the identical white cotton blouse among her primates, who "wears no make-up except character." In the second, "Dream of Frida Kahlo," the author is with others in a "sea of shit. / We didn't know what to do with it." Some older women show up. Frida dies, and at dawn all the roosters in the world begin to crow and a long line of elephants come "gravely down, emphatically down," to pay their respects. In the third, the author wants to marry her mother, who for thirty years had nothing from her father but a ring that left a mark on her finger. (Criticized earlier in her career for unflattering portrayals of Black men, Walker presses no further, and says nothing about racism, or even slave letters to God. Twice divorced, the program reprinted one of her lover-of-women pieces from the book, but she read no erotica.)

Moving to war, its incalculable damage, its killers and victims, Walker offered "Dead Men Love War" (with another Neruda quote) and "Thousands of Feet Below You." The wagers of war, she concludes, "must have something dead in them to be attracted to [it?]." She addresses them:  "a young boy running from your bombs . . . / You have shattered his bones  . . . into oily slimy bits . . . / Set a place for him." The audience had hardly finished their teeth-sucking before the author followed with a piece about love-making on an altar, as an honest way to "become married to the church." She herself noticed the stillness:  "How are you doing out there?" she asked. "You're mighty quiet." Applause.

The absolutely good world is full of tastes, many beyond the peaches and wild grapes Walker's narrator once thought were all. Mangoes. Plums. "In my garden, I thought I could live on plums.  . . . Tasting them, I spread out to cover the earth. I am everywhere at home." Primed now, the audience applauds the expansive sentiment enthusiastically. Like conscience, fame has its hazards:  After a rally in Oakland featuring Representative Barbara Lee ("the only one to oppose the power of you-know-who to commit war"), Walker received a hate call:  "You shitty bitch. I know where you live [in Mendocino]." Calmly she assures us, "All of us live in the same house." The famous have their quirks:  In "All the People Who Work for Me, and My Dog, Too," we learn her household staff thinks she's lost her mind. José's eyes [bulge?] when she asks him to "fly down the mountain for an egg." We don't discover whether this sharecropper's daughter relents and lets the craving subside and the go-fer loaf.

Turning again to humility, she tells us that her 'power animal' under the teachings of Shamanic wisdom is the lowly snail.… Well, because one's power animal has to come to one four times. Poems are like that. She sees now the house she has made, that it's solid. She carries it on her back, like a shell. (Applause) In the closing piece, "To Be A Woman," we learn that this condition "does not mean to wear a shroud, bidding [sic] her time. Yes, yes, yes."

When Alice Walker began fielding high schooler questions—"Is it hard to integrate your separate personalities as writer and activist?" "No, I am a holistic being." "Do people get mad when you write about them?" "Yes."—I too knew why José whistles as he walks, and wanted out of her temple of the too-familiar.

—MH

[A review by Jeff Guinn of Ms. Walker's Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth appears in the 3/27 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Decide for yourself whether the positives here are overwhelmed by the negatives, the latter most notably being syrupy paeans to Che Guevara and Frida Kahlo and too many loved-a-bad-man cliches in verse."—Eds.]