Jordan and Walker

This paper compares the works of Alice Walker and June Jordan, which deal with the same theme of love, conservation of African-American culture, human rights and personal experiences among others.

Alice Walker is an acknowledged writer amongst the African-American leading voices, she has written much-admired and different bodies of literature, together with novels, essays, poetry, criticism and short stories. Her literature depicts the fight of an African-American people all through history and admired for intuitive and exciting descriptions of the black life, particularly the black women’s experiences in a racist and sexist community (Muellero 1). Walker’s most celebrated work, best-selling and an award-winning novel “The Color Purple” narrates a story of an abused and poor black woman in the south who finally overcomes oppression by means of establishing female relationships. Walker has depicted herself as a “womanist” (her word for black feminist) that she describes in the introductory part of her essay’s book “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose” like someone who values and favors women’s culture, emotional flexibility, strength and commitment to completeness and survival of female and male (Walker 39).

Walker’s literature is normally based on one theme, the conservation of the black culture; the female characters in her writings build important connections to uphold stability in communities and personal relationships. The main concern of the Walker’s writings is heritage, which is not just the splendid sweep of the artifacts or history built, rather it is people’s relationships to one another, that is child to parent, old to young and woman to man. Walker acknowledges the fight of the black women all through history to uphold important creativity and spirituality in their being, and their success serves as motivation to others. Walker in “Out Mother’s Gardens” wrote that “we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know” (Muellero 1).

The women’s characters in her literature exhibit endurance, strength and inventiveness in overcoming and dealing with oppression in their survival. Nonetheless, Walker is honest in portraying the frequent overwhelming situations of affliction from sexism and racism. In “Our Mother’s Gardens” she stated that a black woman was termed, in the tradition that so suitably recognized personal status in the community because they had been given the loads that everybody else declined to carry (Muellero 1). In her work, Walker has a true compassion for the subjugated woman, which comes in all her literature, for instance, “crying out in abortion or childbirth, raising an ax, conceding to a man who is unaware to her factual name” which are the types of images that mostly appear in her writings. The strength of images provides insight into friendly contacts of personal being of the Walker’s characters; her stories’ background is religious empire where the spirit craves for unmet needs.

Similarly, June Jordan is also another much-admired and widely-published writer, in essay, poems, work-for-children and libretti. Jordan is also recognized for her stern commitment to the human rights as well as involvement in a political agenda. Jordan employed the fundamental efforts of her time over women’s rights, civil rights as well as sexual freedom. Jordan is a creative writer of a crossways genre and her poetry is well-known for its proximity and openness in addition to its concern for identity as well as the depiction of individual, lived experience, thus her work is at times profoundly autobiographical. Jordan’s writings may also be clearly political and also portray a radical, internationalized idea of cohesion among the globe’s marginalized and subjugated. In her works, such as “Some Changes (1971)”, “Living Room (1985)” and “Talking Back to God (1997),” she utilizes conversational, frequently vernacular English that addresses topics varying from bisexuality, family, political oppression, memory, African-American identity as well as racial inequality (Poetryfoundation.org 1).

Jordan is mostly concerned with children, particularly the African-American ones, which is noticeable in her writings. Her novel in 1971 for the youth, “His Own Where,” written in the Black English too, surveys Jordan’s concerns for environmental design in which a 16 year-old Buddy together with his girlfriend Angela who is much younger, attempts to build their own world in a neglected house close to the cemetery (Jordan 1-89). Her essays evaluate a broad array of topics, racism and sexism in addition to Black English and to journeys the writer made to different places, decrease of the educational system in the U.S. as well as terrorist attacks in the New York and Washington DC. Some of her essay collections offer proof of Jordan’s determined spirit. She writes on homosexuality and bisexuality and uses a combination of words in support of sex. She moved outside the indistinct “beauty of love” in order to defend the real beauty of the sexual desire and experience. In normally amusing style she criticized the rising demonization of sexual desire and sexuality (Poetryfoundation.org 1).

Jordan’s concluding essay collection provides as an indicator for the past four decades full of essential humanitarian thought. Jordan’s work like “Some of Us Did Not Die” consists of new quotations and works from the earlier books: “Technical Difficulties (1992)”, “Civil Wars (1981)”, “Affirmative Acts (1998)” and “On Call (1985).” At turns critical, hortatory, and meditative, Jordan’s concerns are not argumentatively arrangement (Poetryfoundation.org 1).

Both their literature, Walker and Jordan, sought to conserve the African-American culture, fight for human rights and particularly Walker and Jordan wrote more on the black woman subjugation, sexual freedom and racial discrimination. Throughout their work, they surveyed multiple individual, national-wide and global problems, taking in their relationships with male and female lovers, Black English, homophobia and racial violence. With their strong appeal for the black women and from the beginning of their career, both Walker and Jordan have presented themselves as advocates of the black feminism, creating their own terms for and building their own advance to the problem.