Art, Action and the Ancestors: Alice Walker’s Meridian in its Context

Abstract

In an essay called ‘Coming in from the Cold’,¹ Alice Walker writes about the word ‘mammy’. She considers the racist stereotype associated with the word and explains her own decision to use it in The Color Purple.² She concludes her discussion thus:

And yet, we can learn from what has happened to ‘mammy’ too. That it is not by suppressing our own language that we counter other people’s racist stereotype of us, but by having the conviction that if we present the words in the context that is or was natural to them, we do not perpetuate these stereotypes, but, rather, expose them. And, more important, we help the ancestors in ourselves and others continue to exist. If we kill off the sound of our ancestors, the major portion of us, all that is past, that is history, that is human being is lost, and we become historically and spiritually thin, a mere shadow of who we were on earth. (p. 62)