in progress

Embodiment limits community
How do you work through your individual embodiment to get to where you can be in community?

Walker’s politics are to be able to live in community, which is why spirituality/transcendency works—because we are all part of the spiritually human, the transcendent human

Include more focus on embodiment in the first paragraph

Why does Walker want to go transcendental not embodied?

Walker chooses to emphasize spirituality because her politics have always been defined by the ability to live in community with others, and the paths to community were short-circuited if they are defined only by one’s skin color or political views—the possibility for lasting, global change is limited.

How does spirituality relate to the political in the early days of Walker? In the later days?

She makes a link between the spiritual and the female body, arguing with her peers that women’s embodiment is both politically charged and spiritually empowering. Spirituality is often accessed by experiencing the body as a suffering object. But once you enter that suffering, it is difficult to turn away from or move past it, which is where the turn to spirituality and transcendence is helpful. By acknowledging your specific body’s suffering, while at the same time moving past it into a spiritual understanding, one can form community, and a powerful community can change lives.

Walker’s essential political viewpoint is grounded in her civil rights experiences: a powerful community can change lives, change nations. The coalition politics of the civil rights movement proved partial because of the suffering of embodiment, particularly women’s embodiment.

Walker’s essential politics is the notion that a strong community is powerful, that a community in which individuals know themselves and know one another’s strengths is capable of taking a great deal of action. Her texts reach toward a portrait of powerful communities, or of individuals who struggle with embodiment in their relation to the potential of communities. In Meridian, each individual struggles to understand that dynamic that could have made true change possible; that did change them all, but not in the ways they expected, because their individual suffering and programming couldn’t be transcended.

In By the Light, the community is bonded through an acceptance of embodiment, of sensuality, and thus made powerful.

But in Now is the Time, the community is Kate, is Kate’s imaginary, and that’s why the novel doesn’t work on literary grounds: the community doesn’t exist. Instead, Kate is trying to explain why or how she drifted into the life she’s now in.

The seeds of New Age in the Color Purple

What spiritual acts does Celie have to perform?
--she is grateful; sensually alive; open to criticism in the community; spiritually centered (knowing herself, her thoughts, her senses, her experiences); giving to others but not at the expense of herself and ability to be all of the above

how is that similar to or different from earlier black women’s spiritual narrative? –bring in 19th century autobiography here

does Walker go transcendental because there is an inadequate relationship between the spiritual and the political in her earlier texts? She is trying to reconcile these two dramas and she does it through the spirit/body of black women

The parable is a framing device for the legacy of civil rights: how much of this hurting body can Kate/Walker carry? This also contains a connection to Meridian.