Alice Walker

The Story of Why I Am Here: Or, a Woman Connects Oppressions

This article was originally a speech delivered at a Peace for Cuba Rally on February 1, 1992. We came across it recently and think that it is as relevant today as it was two years ago. —The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire. My wonder at the life of Celia Sanchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sanchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Sound Advice From a Friend: Words and Thoughts From The Higher Ground of Alice Walker@@@In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose.

In this collection of essays, reviews and articles, Alice Walker brings her most powerful, moving and poetic voice to the crucial subjects of art, politics and social change.

My Father's Country is the Poor

about my father. He died in the winter of 1973; but my dreams of him before were solely about an absence of something I observed, sometimes, in his eyes. My father, near his death, was a gaunt, coffee-colored man, with a fine large nose and immense dark and intelligent eyes. All his life he worked for other people; rough, unpleasant labor that forced him (along with a wife and eight children) to subsist on as little as three hundred dollars a year. My father was then, a poor man, exploited by the rural middle-class rich, like millions of peasant laborers the world over. But as a child I was not aware of any others. I thought it was my fathers own peculiar failing that we were poor. My excitement over going finally to