a bit rough still

She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering. ( )
--Alice Walker

I begin the chapter with a wry aside from Alice Walker’s 2004 novel Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart. A New Age parable set in Hawaii, Mexico, and Northern California, Now Is the Time narrates the midlife crisis of Kate, a writer on a series of self-funded spiritual wanderings that repel her boyfriend when they first meet. Walker’s critics and supporters have an equally violent reaction to her late work. Shuddering at the thought that “she must be New Age,” critics represent her interest in transcendent spirituality as an overt betrayal of her iconic status. Embodiment, healing and voice, self-discovery and subjectivity, political radicalism, Africana community, gendered violence, matriarchy—these are the major themes of interest for Walker critics, most of whom characterize her late work as a disappointing end to a stellar career.

However, very few critics have addressed Walker’s overarching theology as a lifelong pursuit, from Meridian’s civil rights martyrdom to Susannah’s transcendent sexual healing in By the Light of My Father’s Smile. The text through which critics approach Walker’s spirituality is usually The Temple of My Familiar, which she identified in 1999 as “transitional,” not culminating (cite; from Anything We Love). Critics note the diasporic and spiritual elements of this novel, its transcendent vision, but shrink from discussing the specifics of Walker’s spiritualism or her 21st century drift into American Buddhism and other New Age spiritual practices. In this chapter, I will explore what Walker transitioned into, arguing that Walker’s work has always linked embodiment, spirituality, and politics in a chain with which Walker hoped to bind post-1960s activism. Her essential politics is the notion that a strong community is powerful, that individuals who know themselves and use one another’s strengths are capable of changing lives. This essential political viewpoint is grounded in her civil rights experiences: the coalition politics of the civil rights movement was unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, but part of its internal tensions arose from the conflicting demands of embodiment, especially for women. As the divisions of the civil rights movement proved, once you enter the suffering of gender and race, it is difficult to turn away from or move past it. Walker tries to determine how to occupy a raced and gendered body while still contributing to a powerful community. She decides, ultimately, that embodiment is a phase of spiritual development, and once it has been dealt with, there is greater potential for who can be included in the revolution.

Walker’s emphasis on women’s bodies is one of the defining elements of her career. By acknowledging how African American women have suffered and hoping to heal that suffering, Walker strives to build a powerful community that can change lives. In her work before 2000, these concepts were grounded in personal and social growth narratives, in which an individual overcomes a stuck moment in her life and develops a new paradigm, often changing her material conditions at the same moment that she is overcome by a psychological and spiritual shift. This empowerment usually occurs directly with relation to how her protagonists accept themselves as raced and gendered subjects, suggesting that establishing community through shared experiences will create shared political strengths. For instance, in her most famous work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple, Celie grows from an impoverished life as an isolated sexual abuse victim to being a successful artist and businesswoman at the center of a complex, supportive community. Her awakening begins with a sensual affair with a woman; eventually, she lives in a communal household with her ex-husband, her lover, and her sister, flouting conventional family structures. Not only does this process defy conventions of gender, the support network has grown primarily through shared fights against institutional poverty and racism. Walker suggests with this complex solution that Celie’s acceptance of her racialized body, despite the suffering this awareness initially caused, was the first step to freedom.

Walker’s most recent texts have withdrawn from this culturally specific narrative to locate her protagonists in a universal context; she has replaced a black Southern dialect with religious (New Age) terminology and supplanted a first-person journey into her characters’ interior life with the characters’ abstract analysis of spiritual moments. In 2004’s Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart, Walker’s protagonist and stand-in, Kate Talkingtree, begins with a desire to transcend her body, which becomes the guiding metaphor for her spiritual quest. Kate’s body has become literally unfamiliar and painful; she feels alienated from her Buddhist spiritual practice and cannot find solutions for the pain of her aging process. The book narrates Kate’s growth through this awkwardness, using secondary characters Yolo and Lalika to refer to prior stages of Walker’s career and resting the book’s conscience in Kate’s mostly internal process of becoming a spiritual elder. Kate’s discomfort with her body is continually triggered by conversations, following an opposite pattern from Celie’s discovery that sharing internal thoughts in letters and conversation can heal spiritual wounds. Eventually, Kate becomes a spiritual elder, sharing her commitment ceremony with the emotional support group she has established on eclectic spiritual journeys in Colorado and Mexico. This shift to New Age humanist themes is paralleled by a formal literary shift to more explicitly ideological, spiritual parable, rather than the more evocative and character-based healing narratives that drive Walker’s earlier novels.