Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker - Afro-American author

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Pamela A. Smith

. . . [A]s with a lover, what can one really absolutely trust? Only that she or he will be themselves. And that, I see, is how I must love the earth and Nature and the Universe, my own Trinity. Trusting only that it will be however it is, and accepting that some parts of it may hurt (SRT, 43).

Walker arrives at a rather blithe acceptance of the suffering which comes from creatures or from the Earth as redemptive and instructive. "[S]uffering has a use; it helps push away the old skin, surely not empathically flexible enough, still clinging to our ankles," she asserts (SRT, 287). Unlike her attitude of adamant resistance to the suffering wrought by humans, she tends to a more laissez-faire approach to the suffering imposed by her "Trinity's" being itself. She would not leave such suffering untreated, but she sees no reason to rage against it.

Despite what may be read as a rather smug dismissal of her own suffering here, or a somewhat grudging resignation to it, Walker's overall pantheist vision may be described as upbeat - immanentist and eschatological in a generally hopeful vein. God, the Goddess, is no more transcendent for her than a distant galaxy is. The Universe spirit is in the garden grubs at our feet. Walker remarked to Oprah Winfrey in 1989: "There is no heaven. This is it. We're already in heaven, you know, and so in order . . . for the earth to survive, we have to acknowledge each other as part of the family, the same family. . . .(34) The "family," clearly, is larger than the human family. It is an inclusive family of cosmos, nature, creatures.

Walker's hope is that we can learn to live together in justice, solidarity, respectfulness. If heaven is here and now, Walker must be seen as the proponent (even prophet) of a realizable eschatology. Freedom and flourishing can and will win out, she believes, if we humans fulfill our own earthly and earthy functions in what might be summarized in the following imperatives:

1. Learn to survive life's sufferings with spunk and sass.

2. Protect ourselves and others from disabling suffering; prevent it when possible; walk with sufferers when we are powerless to protect or prevent.

3. Live lovingly in the present moment and revel in earthly delights without abuse or excess.

4. Work to transform our environments, shaping our households, relocating our breathing space, simplifying our lifestyles, slowing our pace, adorning our surroundings with beauty, reconfiguring our relationships, always opting for greater health.

5. Recognize, eschew, resist the dysfunctional; wait things through until wholeness and integrity prevail.

6. Look upon all that lives, all that is, with a worshipful gaze. That is, live and let live.

I offer this as an expression of the erotic, activist, pantheist code which can be derived from the Walker corpus.

Alice Walker's vision may be called eschatological not only because it is hopeful enough to prescribe new ways of being and relating but also because it embraces that element of eschaton which we term "consummation." Hers is not, however, the consummation of the world in apocalyptic end-time. Consummation for Walker is, rather, the consummation of love and passion, consummation of ourselves and our energies in tasks of social reform and artistic production, surrender to the consummate delights and surprises of beauty and life-force, and the recurrent consummation of Earth and cosmos in the sweep of change, generativity, and mystery.