Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
Alice WalkerRead
What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the historical challenges faced by black women artists, emphasizing the harsh realities of their existence.
Alice Walker's quote invites us to ponder the significant struggles that black women artists endured during the times of their ancestors. It highlights the intersection of race, gender, and art, suggesting that the experiences of these women were fraught with societal constraints that could be devastating, a reality stark enough to evoke deep emotional responses.
In practice
During a panel discussion about art and identity, this quote can be used to highlight the historical struggles of marginalized artists.
Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.
When the weather's rough and it's whiskey in the rain it's best to wrap your savior up in cellophane.
And you know there’s nothing like writing a song about someone who’s mean to you, and just makes your life miserable…and then winning a Grammy for it.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
It needs great art, learning to play with one's own life, to play on one's own life. Meditation is the art to create music from your heart. Meditation is simply the method to transform noise into harmony, the method to shift your consciousness from the head to the heart. The head is noisy, it is all noise - a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing.
You should create a work that is so valuable it might eventually sell at a high price, but you've got to concentrate on how you create that artwork.
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