One of the highlights of day two of the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, 2023 was a session with Alice Walker of The Colour Purple (1982) fame. The author, feminist and activist who has written extensively on women’s rights and empowerment, race relations and gender, joined writer Urvashi Butalia and AKLF director Anjum Katyal from her home in Mexico on Saturday morning.
In the late 1970s, finding the feminist movement too ‘white’, she moved to California from New York and began to document the marginalised voices of black women. The Colour Purple, an epistolary novel, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985.
Asked to comment on ‘womanism’, the term she coined to make the feminist movement more inclusive, she said: “We— the people of colour— are culturally different from the mainstream. We have our own traditions, our own beliefs and activity, and I wanted to write about that.”
Ms. Walker spoke about Sojourner Truth, an African American activist, a “monumental figure” for women of colour all over the planet and particularly Black American women. Truth, she said, would often talk about the fact that “our mothers and grandmothers have lifted heavy weights, struggled over muddy roads, see children sold away….” Ms. Walker wanted to write these stories.
Reading out her poem, ‘Find your Parents, and Help Them,’ she dedicated it to all the homeless people in the world, refugees and migrants who are out in the elements trying to get to a safer place.
Art and creative fiction is important, said Ms. Walker, “As long as you have artists you will not be completely in the dark; art will provide the cultural nutrition and vitamins to help the planet grow in a better direction on every sphere, from nature to patriarchy to a robotic future.”
In other sessions on Saturday, Nilanjana Roy (Black River) and Anuja Chauhan (Club you to Death) discussed whodunnits; moderated by translator Arunava Sinha, two other translators Arshia Sattar and Syeda Hameed talked about how they bring languages like Sanskrit and Urdu to the modern reader; and transgender and activist Akkai Padmashali spoke about her memoir, A Small Step in a Long Journey.
