Monday, August 23, 2010

African - American : Alice Walker

The Flowers
By Alice Walker

It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.

Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment, Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family's sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring. Around the spring, where the family got drinking water, silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Along the shallow banks pigs rooted. Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.

She had explored the woods behind the house many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweet suds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.

By twelve o'clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep.

Myop began to circle back to the house, back to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then she stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself. It was only when she saw his naked grin that she gave a little yelp of surprise.

He had been a tall man. From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him. When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he'd had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones. All his clothes had rotted away except some threads of blue denim from his overalls. The buckles of the overall had turned green.

Myop gazed around the spot with interest. Very near where she'd stepped into the head was a wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil. Around an overhanging limb of a great spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled--barely there--but spinning restlessly in the breeze. Myop laid down her flowers.

And the summer was over.

Background Information:
Alice Walker (1944- ), a leading black writer and social activist, was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children. Her father was a sharecropper while her mother worked as a maid. Both entertained their children by telling stories. When she was eight she lost the sight of one eye but this did not deter her from getting a good education. She did well in schooj, encouraged by her teachers and mother, whose stories she loved as a "walking history of our community". Later she attended Spelman College in Atlanta and finished college at Sarah Lawrence College on a scholarship. While working for a civil rights movement in Mississippi, she met a young lawyer, Melvyn Leventhal. In 1967 they settled in Jackson, Mississippi, the first legally married interracial couple in town. They returned to New York in 1974 and were later divorced. First known as a poet, Walker has published four books of her verse. She also has edited a collection of the work of neglected woman author Zora Neale Hurston, and has written a study of author Langstone Hughes. Her best known novel, The Color Purple(1982), won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and has been made into a motion picture by Steven Spielberg in 1985.

Walker is an accomplished writer of poetry, fiction and criticism. Her characters are mainly rural African Americans, often living in her native Georgia, who struggle to survive in hostile environments. Her writing displays a particular sensitivity to the emotions of people who suffer physical or psychological harm in their efforts to assert their own identities. Walker's books show her commitment to the idea of radical social change. In confronting the painful struggle of black people's history, Walker asserts that the creativity of black women, the extent they are permitted to express themselves, is a measure of the health of the entire American society. She calls herself a "womanist", her term for a black feminist.

Walker credits many writers for influencing her prose style in her short fiction. Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez seem to Walker to be "like musicians; at one with their cultures and their historical subconscious." Her two books of stories show a clear progression of themes. The women of In Love and Trouble(1973) struggle against social justice almost in spite of themselves, as does the title character in "Roselily", from that collection; the heroines of You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981) consciously challenge conventions. Walker has said, "Writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you were long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame."

In the third year of her marriage, Walker took back her maiden name because she wanted to honor her great-great-great-grandmother who walked, carrying her two children, from Virginia to Georgia. Walker's renaming is consistent with one of her goals in writing, which is to further the process of reconnecting people to their ancestors. She has said that "it is fatal to see yourself as separate," and that if people can reaffirm the past, they can "make a different future."

Walker's writing includes the story collections In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973) and You Can't Keep a Woman £tow?(1981); the novels The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of my Familiar'(1989), and Possessing the Secret of'Joy(1992); the poetry collection, Revolutionary Petunias(1973); and the volume of essays, In Search of Our Mothers'Garderns: Womanist Prose (1983) (Annas and Rosen, 1994).





Vocabulary Study

1.   smokehouse: an outbuilding on a farm where meat, fish etc. are smoked in order to cure and flavor them.
2.   sharecropper's cabin: A sharecropper is a tenant farmer who works (the land) for a share of the crop. He is usually allowed to live in a cabin near the landowner's farm.
3.   haunts: places one often visits
4.   overalls: loosefitting trousers of some strong cotton cloth (denim), often with a part extending up over the chest, worn usually over other clothing.
5.   noose: a loop formed in a rope, cord, etc.by means of a slipknot so that the loop tightens as the rope is pulled


Literary Concepts:
Africanism - literary representations of the Negroes or blacks in American literature. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, Pulitzer Prize winner and herself an African American, writes critically of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction written, for example, by Poe, Melville, Gather, and Hemingway. She says that the presence or inclusion of the black man in most of these novels served "the white authors' embodiment of their own fears and desires." Thus their themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly "unfae."
Mood: Mood is the feeling, or atmosphere, that a writer creates for the reader. The use of connotation, details, dialogue, imagery, figurative language, foreshadowing, setting, and rhythm can help set the mood.
Contrast: Contrast is a stylistic device in which one element is put into opposition with another. The opposing elements might be contrasting structures, such as sentences of varying length or stanzas of different configurations. They could also be contrasting ideas or images.
Connotation: Connotation refers to the attitudes and feelings associated with a word, in contrast with denotation which is the literal dictionary meaning of the word.

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