Absolute Alice: feminist-writer-poet-activist and literary high priestess Alice Walker returns to form with a collection of poems about war, falling bodies, the ancestors, trees and everything holistic here on Earth.

On my bookshelf, I have an old dog-eared copy of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens that over the years has become my favorite Alice Walker book. Actually, the copy belonged to my sister who gave it to my mother. But its history is irrelevant since I now possess the book, and therefore consider it my own. For reasons that are complicated and have mostly to do with my own creative ambition, Our Mothers' Gardens resonates for me much like Women Who Run With the Wolves does for other feminist writers. It fosters a certain boldness, as well as a measure of comfort and understanding for those who struggle with self-doubt in their writing.

The first essay in Our Mothers' Gardens is entitled "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life." I read it some years ago in an effort to find my own voice as a writer. But what was most revealing about the essay is that I never imagined such a supremely confident writer as Alice Walker would ever need a model in her writing. After all, having coined the term womanist, it seemed incredible that Walker would look for wisdom in someone else. And yet it is her confidence and her apparent vulnerability that make her such a contradiction.

At 59, Alice Walker is one of only a few writers who has enjoyed critical and popular success, albeit not without controversy. Her latest book, a collection of poetry entitled Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, includes works that are as literal as "Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday"; to seemingly pedestrian observations such as in "May 23, 1999"; to a series of poems that contemplate 9/11 and anticipate an increasingly hawkish climate in the U.S. While not likely to elicit as incendiary a response as some of her other books, Absolute Trust is no less radical in its ideas.

"In the introduction there is a section about Mari'a Sabina, a curandera [a healer] from Oaxaca," says Walker. "Her foundation in life is exactly that: absolute trust in the goodness of the earth," she says in a voice that's surprisingly soft. "Her foundation is actually my own, which is why I chose it. I also have absolute trust in the goodness of the earth. And I think that is my religion, to the extent that I have one," she adds. "I believe that what the earth produces, what the earth is, is good, and deserves our respect and adoration."

It is this decidedly more spiritual philosophy that Walker has expressed in her writing in recent years. And perhaps the best example of that philosophy and Walker's sometimes unconventionally temporal narrative is her novel The Temple of My Familiar, which the book jacket describes as "a romance of the last 500,000 years." The book is her favorite, says Walker. "It is more true to the way I live in the world," she says. "It is more contemporary to me. Even though it covers so much ancient history, it is still more the way that I have lived in the world, which is to be connected to many cultures, and many different kinds of people."

Throughout her life, Walker has always seemed something of a shaman--a wanderlust seeking higher consciousness, which at times has earned her both ridicule and celebrity. Though she received recognition early in her career, by and large she has earned somewhat mixed reviews. Critics and readers alike either love her or loathe her; there is no middle ground with Alice Walker.

Born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior was the youngest of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker's eight children, in a family of sharecroppers. When she was eight, Walker lost her sight in one eye when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun during a game of cowboys and Indians. It was a scar she bore for years, even after the disfiguring cataract was removed when she was fourteen. When she was in high school, says Walker, her mother gave her three important gifts: a sewing machine that let her make her own clothes; a suitcase, which allowed her to leave home and travel; and a typewriter, which gave her permission to write.

After graduating from high school as valedictorian, Walker enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961 on a scholarship. Two years later, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, to escape Spelman's "puritanical" atmosphere. It was at Sarah Lawrence that she wrote what would be her first published poems, Once. Written during a traumatic period shortly after having had an abortion, Walker's teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, herself a poet, gave Alice's poems to her agent, who in turn showed them to an editor at Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, which published the collection.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker received a writing fellowship and was making plans to go to Senegal, when her life took a different turn. Instead of going to West Africa, she flew to Mississippi. "That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa--or anywhere else--until I could live freely in Mississippi," she wrote. After spending time in Mississippi and Georgia registering black voters, she returned to New York and worked in the city's welfare department. In 1967, she married Mel Leventhal, a white civil rights lawyer and activist who she met while in Mississippi. And in 1969, she gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca.

During this time, she continued to write; and in 1970, at age 26, Walker published The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the manuscript of which she completed just days before giving birth. The novel, which chronicles violence and infidelity over several generations of a black family, marked an auspicious fiction debut. Two years later, she published In Love and Trouble, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry entitled Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, which was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Lillian Smith Award. In 1976, she published the novel Meridian.

"The first books were written partly as a duty to my ancestors, to my grandparents and my parents and the ones before that," says Walker. "Meridian doesn't fall into that," she acknowledges. "That was more because I was living in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and I wanted to write a novel that looked not just at the politics, but at the heart of the people. And I wanted to see what the relationships were like between men and women as they came up against the fascism, and racism, and Nazism of white supremacy. So since I was a writer and living in the South, it was very natural to write about what was happening," says Walker, who also taught black studies and creative writing at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College from 1968 to 1971.

"The thing about my work is that even when it's painful, it's joyful--because I can do it," says Walker. "I grew up in the South in what most people would consider fairly impoverished circumstances. It wasn't easy to actually be able to go to college and learn to write, and I did," says Walker.

"I saw a murdered woman when I was thirteen," her tone, sober. "She had been killed by her husband," she continues, "and I knew that somehow I had to learn--even as 13-year-old--I had to learn how to make sense of this. I had to learn to make people see it for what it was--murder. When someone kills you, it is murder," she says adamantly. "I don't care if they're your husband, your boyfriend or whatever. So the pain of writing about that 20 years later, or however long it was, was intense. But so was the joy, because I had looked at her face--which had been pretty much blown off--and I had made a promise to myself, and to her, that one day I would make other people see what I saw," says Walker, echoing a theme that runs through much of her writing.

In 1978, Alice Walker moved to northern California. Four years later, she published what is probably her most celebrated work, The Color Purple. Though, at the time, unusual in its epistolary form, the precedent for Walker's character Celie in The Color Purple can be traced to Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston's heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston, whose life and work Walker began researching in 1970, provides the model in Janie Crawford that Alice Walker chose for herself. She writes in "Saving the Life That Is Your Own":

   I love the way Janie Crawford
   left her husbands
   the one who wanted to change her
   into a mule
   and the other who tried to interest her
   in being a queen.
   A woman, unless she submits,
   is neither a mule
   nor a queen
   though like a mule she may suffer
   and like a queen pace the floor.

The novel The Color Purple, which takes place from 1900 to the 1940s, tells the story of Celie, a womanchild, who after years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father and later her husband, finds dignity, independence and kinship in her relationships with other black women. Told mostly in a series of letters written by Celie and her sister, Nettie, the novel won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

"Even though I wrote The Color Purple here [in California]--I actually lived in New York for a while. I couldn't really write there, because I was an editor at Ms. magazine and that took a lot of time. I had a child, and I was getting divorced, and all that life--just life, life, life," she explains.

At the time, Walker decided to move to San Francisco to write, resuming a relationship with an old friend from her college days at Spelman, Black Scholar editor Robert Allen, who had attended Morehouse. Almost immediately, the two decided to sell their house in San Francisco and move to Mendocino, an area in northern California that reminded Walker of her native Georgia.

"I wrote The Color Purple as a way of communicating with the spirit of black people and my people--in celebration. So that pretty much completed the cycle," says Walker of her early works. "I had written In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women--those were mostly black women in the South. And then, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down--those were women North and South. It was about their spiritual development."

But it was The Color Purple that became a best-seller and caused quite a stir--especially among black men. Among critics, Walker's book was decried for being overly harsh in its depiction of the brutality of its black male characters, while she was chided for being too much a feminist--or womanist, to use Walker's words. In what was a generally positive review in The New York Times, black literary critic Mel Watkins cited the "pallid portraits of the males," as the novel's biggest transgression." Others, like poet Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed, were far more biting in their criticism.

"I wrote a complete book called The Same River Twice, which is about the [Color Purple] controversy and my response to it," says Walker. "I wrote it and published it about ten years after the film The Color Purple." In The Same River Twice, she describes the sometimes vicious attacks surrounding the release of the movie The Color Purple, the rejection of her screenplay adaptation of the novel by Steven Spielberg, her mother's failing health, her own battle with Lyme disease and the breakup of her relationship with Allen.

"In general, I don't seem to care very much about what people think about what I'm doing," she says, pausing then, quickly adding, "if they don't actually try to physically harm me." For the most part, Walker seems to have quietly ignored her detractors. "I'm pretty clear about what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I do that," she says, calmly. "Their job is to criticize, and they do that. So I feel like, it works out. I write and speak, and band with people that I feel need me," she continues.

"I got very involved, after that, in the struggle to end genital mutilation and I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy. And that was very different from anything I would have written living in Georgia or Mississippi, because we don't have that there, thank goodness. So it depends, you know. Then, with By the Light of My Father's Smile, I was very much interested in showing how important it is for fathers to bless the sexuality of their daughters. And if they cannot do that, then the daughter cannot bless them by having confidence in them, and letting them be a part of their lives."

Her writing sometimes mirrors her own life. In a moving collection of short stories published in 2001, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Walker reveals some of the intimate details of her own life. In a chapter called "Memoir of a Marriage," she writes: "Beloved, A few days ago I went to see the little house on R. Street where we were so happy. Before traveling back to Mississippi I had not thought much about it. It seemed so far away, almost another dimension." Further, in the same chapter, she continues, "I went back with the woman I love now. She had never been South, never been to Mississippi, though her grandparents are buried in one of the towns you used to sue racists in." Like much of Walker's writing, The Way Forward is elliptical. There is an ambiguity as to whether Walker is writing for the reader, for an intimate, or for herself.

"My job, in a way, is helping people to have that closer look--whether it's female genital mutilation, or wife battering, or child abuse," she says. "On the other hand, being able to love wherever you wish and whoever you want, and seeing that as an expression of the freedom that we have. My personal life is just like everybody's," she admits, "filled with my friends, community and events that are pretty much mine."

With Absolute Trust, Alice Walker returns to the genre where her literary career began. While the poems vary widely in subject, they are strongly influenced by the events of 9/11 and embrace a more "outsider" global perspective.

"I don't think there is a limit to what people can say about grief," says Walker. "And I don't think there's a limit to what one can say about the need to sit ourselves down and talk about what kind of future we want, if indeed we have one.

"I think all I can say is that now I'm an older person. I'm someone who has had much more experience than in the beginning. But in some ways, I'm concerned about the same issues, the same emotions. I'm concerned with the safety of our people, the planet, people who are in deep trouble around the world," she explains, reflecting on how her poetry has changed over the years. "I think that with time, we begin to understand a little better that some things we thought were horrible, unbearable ... can be bearable as we get older. For instance, in my earlier poetry ... I wrote poems about suicide. And now I don't think about that very much. It's interesting because I think that to wage continuous war in the world is a kind of suicide. In a sense, the suicide that I see now is a global one. It's humanity that seems to be interested in ending itself. But I don't feel interested in ending myself. I think that's progress."

Finally, I ask her why she chose to publish Absolute Trust, since she acknowledges in the preface to the book that in the past two years she had resigned herself not to write anymore.

"Poetry comes when it wants, and it is not dependent on whether you want to write poetry or not," says Walker. "I was in Mexico a while ago last year and the poems just started to come. I think it was partly because they had been accumulating over a number of years," she says, recalling her first book of poetry. "That's why it's absurd to say I can give this up," she adds. "Creativity is so powerful that you can't give it up. It might give you up, but you can't give it up."

Womanist 1. From womanish. (Opp. Of "girlish," i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "You acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more in greater depth than is considered "good" for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: "You trying to be grown." Responsible. In charge. Serious.

--From In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose