By Alice Walker Random House, 1997 225 pages Hard cover: $23
Alice Walker has been accused of writing well, and of writing
badly. In the case of her most famous work, The Color Purple (1982),
both accusations overlapped dramatically, each bringing its own measure
of adoration and libel. Her admirers and detractors emerged from all
sectors of popular, public, and academic life yielding a range of
responses — from ostensible assessments of her craft, to open
judgement of her political affiliations, to speculative accusations of
ulterior (market-driven) motives. A similar response greeted the novel
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
Anything We Love Can Be Saved seems rooted in the emotional soil of
Walker’s literary past — its discoveries, trials, antagonisms, loves,
disappointments, and triumphs. She is telling her own story, with all
of its subtleties and seeming contradictions, rather than leaving it to
be constructed by strangers. In the telling, it is not condemnation
Walker seems to fear, but misunderstanding and dismissal.
Walker’s works are often arguments that extend from text to text.
The Color Purple is unquestionably an outgrowth of the portrait of
violent sharecropping life in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, her
first novel. Possessing the Secret of Joy complicates the story begun
in The Color Purple. Anything We Love Can Be Saved seems to carry for
ward the work begun in The Same River Twice (1996), a narrative that
documents the events of The Color Purple that Walker describes as a
“lingering look backward at a dangerous crossroad…”
However, Anything We Love goes beyond documenting the past,
justifying one’s artistic decisions, or filling the gaps in reader
curiosity. Here, Walker returns to her portrait of an artist as
activist begun in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). She argues
afresh for the embrace of activism as a natural and necessary risk of
the artist, and defends her work and perhaps herself within the context
of activist-as-lover-of-humankind.
In her introduction, Walker writes, “It has become a common
feeling, I believe, as we have our heroes falling…, that our own
small stone of activism…is a paltry offering toward the building of
an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their
offerings out of shame.”
Walker is insistent about the importance of adding our “small,
imperfect stones to the pile” that might form structures for hope. The
collection, then, is presented as a sampling of small, imperfect
artifacts — marked by the limitations, the prejudices, the
idiosyncrasies of the artist, and her contributions toward the edifice
of human possibility. Each essay, from the first, “The Only Reason You
Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Off
Your Land and Out of Your Lover’s Arms),” to the last, “My Mother’s
Blue Bowl,” tries to pry us up out of the ritual soil of received ideas
about ourselves and our world, and offer a different, emotionally
liberating, point of view.
