Books by Alice Walker

Why War Is Never a Good Idea  / The Third Life of Grange Copeland / Meridian / The Temple of My Familiar / The Color Purple

By The Light of My Father's Smile / Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems  /  In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

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The Lie That Unraveled the World

The Relevance of Alice Walker, the Mundo

& By the Light of My Father's Smile

By Rudolph Lewis

The general public, and a great number of black men, have misread Alice Walker, believing her criticism is directed primarily at black men. Many will thus take me as a madman when I speak of Walker's "relevance." I’ll go farther out on the limb and say she is probably today the most brilliant and gifted living American writer and philosopher—an artist/person of the highest ethical character. 

Until I read By the Light of My Father's Smile, the more superior novel, I believed, was her first The Third Life of Grange Copeland, a work in which the black male is much more brutal and malevolent than as he appears in any of her other works, including The Color Purple, technically an extraordinary piece of writing that far exceeds its cinematic representation. Stephen Spielberg’s The Color Purple is sentimental clap-trap, imaginatively on a level with An Imitation of Life, a real old-fashioned tear-jerker.

Disappointedly, I know that many religious fundamentalists and conservative-right politicians (black, white, etc.) would call me to task on the question of Walker's ethics. In that she is an avowed "lesbian," there are those assuredly who view her as immoral, especially in matters of sexuality. For instance, By the Light of My Father's Smile in its first chapter begins with an explicit (pornographic?) representation of a black lesbian (Pauline) making love to (having sex with) a bisexual married black woman (Susannah), a scene narrated by Susannah’s ghostly father!

All three characters are very middle-class, prosperous, and educated. An extremely titillating scene indeed, by any measure, yet not ethically irrelevant to the morality enmeshed in this novel and the conundrum in which we find ourselves.

By the Light of My Father's Smile is a feminist novel. No doubt about it. But it has a larger agenda, a larger social critique. And that can be said about all of Walker's literary works. A feminist does not translate anti-male. Nor anti-black-male, though her work can be easily read that way by the shallow and have been read by many indeed that way.

The African-American male is seemingly also the villain in By the Light of My Father's Smile.  Many will come to that conclusion, straight-away, as some (black and white) did with The Color Purple. They will be justified, if man is never more than his color or his race. For, in Walker's novels, race is indeed significant, but it is never the final determinant.

What concerns Walker are institutions, rituals, mores that create and replicate brutality among the earth's people.

Walker believes that the world and the culture we live in presently, a patriarchal one, is not the best of all possible worlds. Though our culture professes to believe in democracy and equality, America, Europe and also most of the nations and peoples of the earth have oppressive hierarchies ritualized and institutionalized that lend themselves to the brutal oppression of women, children, and the weak.

Walker removes herself thus from the Western landscape and the USA to find her model ethical society among the Mundo, an African-Ameridian group isolated in the mountains of Mexico often preyed upon by other Mexicans or American Protestant missionaries. They are a people of the moon and the seasons. They have no male concept of God in the Judaeo-Christian or Islamic sense. No priestly caste. One may say they have no elaborate ritual system at all. Their art is in their simplicity, one in which the world might become enlightened and fulfill its ideals of democracy and equality for all.

The key sentiment of Mundo wisdom upon which the novel hangs its plot is – " It takes only one lie to unravel the world."

The most outrageous lie is that woman brought sin into the world in the context of man having dominion over all things including woman. The Mundo felt that couldn't be right. Among them, man and woman were equal and there was no demeaning of the woman's body nor the man's body, for that matter. These people of nature, residing in the natural world, were comfortable in their skins and their sexuality. 

And they knew how to manage their sexuality and humanity for the health of the community. They practiced regulation of birth by a knowledge of ovulation (the connection of a woman’s body with the cycles of the moon) and by male withdrawal. They knew it would be harmful to the larger community to produce more children than could be fed.

In addition, the Mundo possessed an openness, a healthy transparency to their lives, to which outsiders were blind, dead certain that they themselves were at the hub, closest to the truth of things. And thus among the Mundo outsiders only hear their own voices (God) in their heads speaking to them.

The black anti-hero in By the Light of My Father's Smile, "Senor Robinson," along with his wife Langley and their two children Susannah and June, move to Mexico and for a year or so live among the Mundo. Both Robinson and his wife Langley are middle-class African Americans, anthropologists. In order to obtain the means to study the Mundo and write their books and advance their careers, they "mask" as missionaries. The public at large knew very little about the Mundo. This African-American people escaped American Southern slavery (brutality and oppression) and migrated south to Mexico and became one with an Ameridian people, speaking Spanish.

Robinson wore the "mask of a missionary," even among the Mundo, though he himself was an atheist and at best an agnostic. Trained by the "gringos," Robinson told the Mundo, "God had said man had dominion over all the earth." The Mundo concluded immediately, "It is the one lie that has unraveled your world." And indeed it was probably the larger lie of Robinson's life, though not consciously realized.

His lie (or lies) unraveled the spiritual health of his own family. This lie of man’s dominance manifested itself particularly in his brutal whipping of his older child June. A whipping with a leather belt with metal coins given to June by her lover Manuelito, a Mundo boy, a teenager. A belt that drew blood. Believing he had absolute control over his daughter's body, Robinson thrashed June righteously, mercilessly, a slave-like whipping observed through a keyhole by his younger daughter, Susannah.

Langley, Robinson’s wife, refused to speak to her husband for several weeks, but finally she relented after much knee bending and begging by her husband. And then they made love. This forgiveness was not so easy for June, the child violated. Broken by her father’s blindness and brutality, she went to her death obese and gluttonous, with a beer in one hand and chocolate cake in the other, hating her father. Of course, there was a choice here, but also a brutal event that led to limited choices.

Lies have consequences. That is indeed a novel idea for everyday life in America, from our President to our generals, to our politicians, to the ordinary Joe on the corner. Our country and its government were born and have been enmeshed in a web of lies which in over two centuries we have yet to extricate ourselves. Lies specifically regarding racial and gender superiority. Worst today, we have become more sophisticated, like Senor Robinson, in our ability to misrepresent the truth, and often only bamboozle ourselves by our sense of moral superiority believing that we are God’s representative doing God’s will.

This phenomenon—unraveling the world by lies—continues to be the horror upon which America has built her identity -- "The Land of the Free." Black folks’ response has always been with the question, "Free for whom?" Frederick Douglass wrote a wonderful July 4^th oration on America's "hypocrisy of freedom." Douglass’ stately critique of American character and behavior remains relevant today, in our two-tier society in which some children are assured status and wealth whereas those perceived as slow, inattentive, and lazy deservedly, believed by many,  receive a minimum life and minimum privileges of American citizenship.

Historically, in America, the hierarchy (patriarchy) has been structured white male, then white female, followed by all other persons, black male, black female, etc. At the very bottom of all these women in the world languishes the black female, cleaning up everybody's shit, always forced to defend her morality (read sexuality), her appearance (read beauty), her intelligence (read humanity). Walker understands that life is difficult.

She realizes that "Senor Robinson" too is a societal victim. Too often the African-American male is a poor imitation of the white American male, aping many aspects of that cultural/political perspective. In effect, the black patriarch is a destructive element within the black family, dangerous to wife and daughters with the potential to replicate his depreciation of women in his sons and worse in the females themselves, replicating also the most brutal aspects of patriarchy in their daughters as well as their sons. This passing down of cruelty and brutality from generation to generation is the most horrific aspect of enforcing the lie of male dominance with violence.

This phenomenon of the oppressed replicating their oppression among themselves, especially among females, can also be seen in Edwidge Danticat's first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory in which mothers in Haiti's peasant culture are required to assure their daughters' virginity by a test, the inspection of the body by the insertion of the small finger between the legs. The result here also leads to the girlchild growing up devaluing her self worth and her own body. And, of course, exceedingly unhealthy relationships with men in their lives ensue.

In the present political arena, the lie that has led to our undoing, our unraveling is, "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." On his moral high horse George Bush convinced us that we were in imminent danger of annihilation by the Iraqi Arab, the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. And thus we had to destroy him before he produced another Twin Towers massacre, 9/11. So we gave Bush and the military the thumbs up and sent them off to kill and die in defense of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In recent weeks, through pornographic photos taken by US soldiers defending America, we exposed to the world how hollow, how cruel we are capable of being. Of course, we now have complicated, elaborated on the lie that we told about WMDs. Now we want the Iraqis to believe that we want them to have what we have – it is something invisible that no one can put their hands on, really -- democracy and freedom.

Breaking in people's houses, kicking down doors, blowing up houses, threatening their life and their lives and forcing them to masturbate are not the proper ingredients for a recipe of freedom and democracy, neither here nor abroad. Worst, such acts dehumanize us/them, thus rendering them/us unfit for either democracy or freedom. Our brutal oppression of Iraq for the last year has produced more Mad Dogs, than adherents of American freedom.

Let us indeed be like the Mundo – open and transparent. Let us stop unraveling our world by lies that satisfy greed and sustain male dominance (white, black, or otherwise). Let us not be just "idealists" like Senator McCain, but rather let us live out our creeds and our ideals with the best of our exertions.

Presently, we are spending over $113 billion and still counting to sustain a lie and one of the worst political decisions made by an American president since LBJ. Money and natural resources needed for the education of America’s poor and working class children and the improvement of the health of its citizens are now expended in waste and destruction, and, yes, outright carnage.

Let us stop the lies, stop the cover-up, the brutality at which we are experts.  For without such expertise America could not have sustained slavery for two and a half centuries and Jim Crow for another hundred years. We are so rooted in racial and gender dominance that our domestic military (the police) prefers to further limit citizen rights and too often they violate those human rights. We have not yet seen the light.

Thus I recommend to the President, the Congress, the American people – read Walker carefully, and follow the life of the Mundo.

posted 13 May 2004

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updated 22 December 2007 / updated 28 March 2008