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‘A strange way of trying to get well’:
Mysticism and Healing Civil Rights Trauma in Meridian

“What does one take away from the past, which is still often present, to create a new future? What does one throw away?” –Barbara Christian (205)

This chapter explores Alice Walker’s third novel Meridian as a healing response to the collective and individual traumas of the civil rights era. As Barbara Christian asks in her early essay exploring Walker: “What does one take away from the past, which is still often present, to create a new future?” At a meridian point in the history of African American justice struggles, the novel (published in 1976) narrates activist Meridian Hill’s pilgrimage to find a solution to the era’s defining ideological crossroads: violence and nonviolence, community and individuality, and political doctrine and human fallibility. In the novel, Meridian’s struggles end at the church, suggesting that one element to “take away from the past” is that activists were reconnecting their political activity with spiritual life.

Critics tend to address the novel as historical fiction that either mirrors the movement as it was or performs a feminist critique of its evolution. The novel has also been treated as a spiritual allegory, a regional southern artifact, and a foundation for Walker’s better-known work. Meridian’s cultural role as a healing narrative encompasses all of these elements, as part of Walker’s vision of political and personal healing. Meridian Hill, whom Walker characterizes as living “’… a life, ruled by its own spirits” (16), must move through each of the aspects acknowledged by critics—the historical record, the treatment of women, spirituality, Southern identity, and her extra-textual role as a Walker heroine—in order to heal from a psychosomatic illness and establish an ethical activism. As Erikson notes with regard to flood survivors, trauma is marked by a series of recognizable individual symptoms that Meridian shares, including a self-perception that she has “an altered relationship to the rest of humankind, to history, and to the ways of nature … [a] feeling that [she had] been set apart and made special [by surviving traumatic events]” (458). These results of her civil rights participation, rooted in the intersecting traumas of racism and sexism, are the wound that is healed by Meridian’s spiritual conversion.

The dialectic/dialogue between Meridian’s traumatic symptoms and her recovery, and Walker’s use of the novel as a reflection upon the civil rights movement in which she was an active participant, suggest that creative narrative, psychological trauma, and political activity must be explored as dynamic forces that build the whole of Meridian. For Walker herself, the novel could be read as a kind of “scriptotherapy,” a term applied to memoir writing in which the subject “reconstruct[s] ideologically and re-assess[es] the past” (Vickroy 9). Yet—like Celie working from a deep wound to a complete empowerment—the novel moves through this therapeutic function to serve a larger cultural role: in this text, a spiritual path is being defined and clarified, a secular and self-oriented awakening that frees the black female subject from internalized trauma and subjection. The novel is also a landmark in Walker’s career: Meridian links the body and spirituality with community concerns; and, like Celie in The Color Purple, resolves the traumas of political oppression through the dialectic of individual and community healing. In the second half of the chapter, I link Meridian with Walker’s interest in 19th century conversion narratives, suggesting that the novel marks a turning point in Walker’s career, foreshadowing her later interest in spiritual solutions to political problems.