Alice Walker's Blog, page 53

Ayobami Adebayo, Ai Wei Wei, Oliver Stone, Ishiguro, Loving Vincent, The House on Coco Road, The Rainbow Comes and Goes

Stay With Me is a fabulous novel. Ayobami Adebayo has made such a moving commitment to fierceness and truth that the tenderness that emerges also in her characters is as welcome as a spring shower.  What a heart this writer has; how it renews our hope for a world in which it can continue to thrive. read more »

Ayobami Adebayo, Ai Wei Wei, Oliver Stone, Ishiguro, Loving Vincent, The House on Coco Road

Stay With Me is a fabulous novel. Ayobami Adebayo has made such a moving commitment to fierceness and truth that the tenderness that emerges also in her characters is as welcome as a spring shower.  What a heart this writer has; how it renews our hope for a world in which it can continue to thrive. read more »

It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud

It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud ©2017 by Alice Walker The first time I was accused Of appearing to be anti-Semitic The shock did not wear off For days. The man who charged me Was a friend. A Jewish Soul Who I thought understood Or could learn to understand Almost anything. He read more »

A Branch: Sexual Assault in the Present Time

A Branch:  Sexual Assault In the Present Time ©2017 by Alice Walker   Decades later I would undertake As a course of personal study Why they told us nothing Whatsoever about it. We entered puberty so ignorant That when we bled The euphemism Was that we had been visited By a red bird. An odd read more »

A Branch: Sexual Abuse in the Present Time

A Branch:  Sexual Abuse in the Present Time ©2017 by Alice Walker   Decades later I would undertake As a course of personal study Why they told us nothing Whatsoever about it. We entered puberty so ignorant That when we bled The euphemism Was that we had been visited By a red bird. An odd read more »

And Then There Were the Fires…

AND THEN THERE WERE THE FIRES… ©2017 by Alice Walker   I never experience October 9th Without giving thanks For John Lennon Someone who had his head On straight. This year was no different; I miss him still. Perhaps he and Medgar Evers Viola (Liuzzo:the Italian-American  Who came to help)the black Women and men with read more »

Or Were You Once A Child?

Or Were You Once A Child? ©2017 by Alice Walker If you were once a child Remember how it was When the big men Who were not smiling Came for you? They were not soldiers Then But uncles, fathers, Grandpas, Dentists. It was their bigness That scared you. Now they are coming Six feet tall read more »

Ain’t Too Proud, The Life and Times of the Temptations!

A dozen of us took ourselves to see Ain’t Too Proud, The Life and Times of The Temptations, now playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley.  It was wonderful.  And so was the audience, which grooved along song after song as if they remembered, as most of us did, the moment each melody first read more »

A Trinity of Enlightenment: Never Caught, Life’s Work, and Black Ink

  It is a delight to know that Never Caught is being taken up by readers as food for the merciless journey of our people in these United States.  Erica Armstrong Dunbar has pulled off a feat of major proportions.  So much so that I just learned her book was long listed for a National Book Award. read more »

Leaving Managua

Robert Allen, Rosario Ortega, Unrecalled Kind Person, Alice, Daniel Ortega Managua, Nicaragua, mid- Eighties   Leaving Managua ©2017 by Alice Walker You were never to know, until now perhaps, that I was weeping as my compañero and I left Managua all those years ago. We had witnessed the graceful dignity of your people that they read more »