Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, edited by award-winning writer Valerie Boyd and received from Jonathan Ball Publishers for review, is a tome of some 560 pages. It encompasses more than 35 years of Walker’s coming-of-age narrative and is a comprehensive and deeply personal account of her life’s work.
Walker’s journals paint an intimate portrait of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an artist, civil rights activist, and intellectual. It was a rare privilege to get a peek behind Walker’s proverbial curtain and to gain some understanding of what it took for her, an African-American woman in the 1960s and of little means, to realise her lifelong dream of becoming a published writer.
Valerie Boyd is the first to compile the complete journals of Alice Walker in order to better understand the complex, passionate and talented mind behind the brilliant and award-winning novel, The Color Purple. The journals afford rare insight into Walker’s thoughts and experiences as a woman, an African-American, a writer, wife, daughter, mother, sister, friend, and citizen of the world.
While I was initially intimidated by the thought of wading through four decades’ worth of the formidable Alice Walker’s journals, I found myself intrigued and fascinated from page one and proceeded to read every entry, including all of Valerie Boyd’s supporting notes – which certainly complement the journals and act as a guide to the reader.
The journals hold no shortage of action and excitement as the reader is made privy to Walker’s eventful life journey. Notably of how she marched in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr; how she defied the laws of interracial marriage by marrying a Jewish lawyer; her role in the Women’s Movement; her bisexuality and many erotic encounters; as well as the enduring relationships and events that precipitated her writing of The Color Purple.
Walker was admired and maligned in equal measure for both her work and her activism, yet she never deviated from her quest of achieving, as a black American, the freedom to be herself, to write the unwritable, to say the unsayable and to dare the world to engage in a conversation it had not had before. Boyd reaffirms this in her introduction of the book: “It is a primer for people of all ages who wish to live free lives.”
Her journals also reinforced a personal regret of mine: that I, despite noble intentions, never persevered in the practice of journaling. Not only are diaries a handy tool to capture events and emotions, but by assigning dates to entries, they serve to anchor specific moments both in one’s own life and in history. As Boyd succinctly states: diaries offer an intimate history of our time.
Now aged 78, Walker’s dream as young writer has been fulfilled: she has since published, at last count, 16 books in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, essays, films and children's books. Through her writing and her many readings and lectures, she proceeded to become an important influencer of public thought.
What an extraordinary woman, and what a joy to be able to share her journey through Gathering Blossoms Under Fire. For this, editor Valerie Boyd must be commended for the sensitive and reader-friendly way in which these journals were compiled and edited. Her death in February of this year is certainly a loss to the literary community.
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