Sunday, February 9, 2014
ALICE WALKER ET. AL.
Inspiration can be direct, inverse, and perverse. I know. I partially watched a program about novelist, Alice Walker, last night.
She was featured autobiographically on PBS' "American Masters"series.
I was not directly inspired by it. Nor inversely inspired. Maybe perversely inspired I was, just to notice it at all.
I remember the black feminists of the 1970's, having felt both their feral fury and their fatuous folly, myself.
I remember THE COLOR PURPLE, a book I pointedly refused to read. Neither for similar reasons did I read Ntozake Shange's FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW WAS ENUF. I did attend a poetry reading by June Jordan in KC. I remember asking her in the Q & A: "Is rhyme dead?" She was offended, and vented her free-verse spleen upon my inquiry's veiled invective of her form. Nevertheless, I bought her book, which she perfunctorily signed dispassionately.Then, I read it and forgot it, until last night's program on Alice Walker, when I learned about their black women's writer's group, the "Sisterhood"-- Walker, Shange, Jordan, these three, and more.
Then, I understood. These were not random irruptions from the black soul. These were hired assassins of the black spirit. Through them flowed that woeful domestic dissonance which devolved into divorce, sexual deviancy, demonism, and the near-destruction of the black family.
When I saw Gloria Steinem and MS Magazine was one of their mentors, it became perfectly clear what I had long suspected; that American publishers, producers, and entertainment/ intellectual moguls subscribe to a meme: the black manhood beat-down, which these "black" women fulfilled, completely.
So, even if not inspired by last night's show: directly, inversely or perversely, I was at least, and at last, satisfied to write these word.
That was more than enough, itself.
Acclaimed Author Alice Walker Profiled on PBS’American Masters
examiner.com
On Friday, February 7th at 8pm (Central) on PBS, THIRTEEN's American Masters will air Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth. The documentary is in honor of Ms. Walker's