In honor of Banned Books Month, I decided to review We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For by Alice Walker. Walker is an American novelist, poet, short story writer, and social activist. In 1983 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Color Purple. I chose a work by Walker because she is one of the most challenged and banned authors of the past 50 years.

We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For is an unusual work. It is a compilation of speeches, musings, and essays she has written. She tailors her speeches to her audience, but never varies her message. Walker is an unapologetic feminist and an advocate for racial and social justice.

In several of her speeches, she addresses the issue of censorship and why her works typically end up being challenged or banned. When we don’t see injustice in our own communities, it can be difficult to admit it exists. When we sanitize history and ignore the many acts of discrimination and violence perpetrated against minorities in our country, it’s easier to ban the truth than let our children read about it.

In this book, we get to know Alice Walker as a child growing up in rural Georgia attending segregated schools. Walker was blinded in one eye after being shot accidentally by one of her brothers with a BB-gun. She credits this event for changing her life in a positive way. After her injury, she became an avid reader and devoted many hours each week to her studies. Her efforts paid off and Walker won a scholarship to Spelman College followed by another scholarship to continue her studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Walker met and married a Jewish civil rights attorney and returned to the South in 1967 becoming the first legally marries interracial couple in Mississippi. The couple was often harassed and even threatened by the Ku Klux Klan.

Walker has studied several religions and her beliefs are an interesting mix of several philosophies. Walker seems the most comfortable at her farm in California close to nature.

This is a book I would recommend reading slowly…a few essays/speeches at a time. Walker is complex and trying to do a speed read does her work a great disservice.

Don’t expect to agree with everything she says, but if you read with an open mind you will always respect her well thought out opinions.

Works by Alice Walker:
New Poems, Taking The Arrow Out Of The Heart, 2018
The World Will Follow Joy; Turning Madness Into Flowers (poems) 2013
The Cushion In The Road; Meditation and Wandering As The Whole World Awakens
To Being In Harm’s Way (essays, travels and dreams)
The Chicken Chronicles, a Memoir, 2011.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland

Meridian

The Color Purple
The Temple of My Familiar
Possessing the Secret of Joy

By the Light of My Father’s Smile
Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women
Alice Walker Banned
You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down
The Way Forward Is with A Broken Heart

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Womanist Prose
Anything We Love Can Be Saved
Living By the Word
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing….A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (editor)
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult
Sent By Earth
Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (with Pratibha Parmar)
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
Overcoming Speechlessness
The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering As the Whole World Awakens To Being In Harm’s Way

Poetry

Once
Revolutionary Petunias
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You In the Morning
Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Earthling Poems
Absolute Trust In The Goodness Of The Earth
A Poem Travelled Down My Arm, poetry and drawings
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
The World Will Follow Joy; Turning Madness Into Flowers

Books for Children

To Hell with Dying
Langston Hughes, American Poet
Finding the Green Stone
There Is A Flower at The Tip of My Nose Smelling Me
Why War Is Never A Good Idea

Photo Credits:

Alice Walker: By Virginia DeBolt - Alice Walker speaks, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2968721

Book cover image:

https://alicewalkersgarden.com/books/