DATE: Sunday, May 18, 1997                  TAG: 9705070708

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

ALICE WALKER FINDS PLACE IN ACTIVISM

ANYTHING WE LOVE CAN BE SAVED

A Writer's Activism

ALICE WALKER

Random House. 225 pp. $23.

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, has not become one of the nation's most powerful voices by hiding her heart beneath her sleeve.

At her best she tackles issues by telling stories that shred pretense and relate to readers in a brutally personal way. But then there are the times, notably in some of her less-known short fiction and her ``womanist'' prose, when Walker plants her feet on the soapbox.

In Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, Walker collects essays, speeches and letters about her various causes. She tells stories and she ascends the soapbox. With subject matter ranging from the sublime beauty of dreadlocks to the cultural horror that is female genital mutilation, she takes us on a journey, her own path to understanding, and attempts to make her realizations ours.

In the preamble to the most moving essay, one titled ``You Have All Seen,'' she touches the facial scars of an Amnesty International official who was mutilated by members of his tribe when he was a young boy. She sees the pain in his face; she sees a boy held down and sliced by people he knew and loved.

Walker and filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, with whom Walker made ``Warrior Marks,'' a documentary film about female genital mutilation, connect the official's story to the topic of a human rights workshop they are attending in Africa.

``Both Pratibha and I are moved by Zan's story,'' she writes, ``because it links the suffering of small boys who are forced to endure facial scarring to that of small girls, who are sometimes scarred facially as well as genitally mutilated.''

In the same essay, Walker tells the tales of others as told to her, ``testimonies of adults who were overpowered as children and irreparably wounded. I notice that for some of the women speaking, it is as though a dam has burst. They tell their stories over and over, with the same stunned amazement that there is a circle of faces mirroring them.''

Their stories are wrenching, and Walker relays them with sensitivity, at times, and with controlled bluntness. Walker writes, ``all of us have wounds, of one kind or another, to share. And that somehow making sense of our wounds transforms them.''

Less effective is her essay, ``The Only Reason You Want To Go To Heaven . . revisiting writings in The Color Purple, in which Walker questioned what is viewed as the ideal Jesus and God in black Christian faith.

There has been and will be compelling writing on the alienation that some American blacks feel from their churches. But this sketchy essay explores faith from a womanist viewpoint, and Walker's connections to Nature, a universal Her, are not fully developed. Walker delivered more ground-breaking words on womanist doctrines in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.

Walker's fully realized essays, especially one on the work of Zora Neale Hurston, are strong. Also interesting are her rationalization of Fidel Castro's place in Cuba and his demonization in the United States, and her description of a hug between the bearded dictator and fellow-activist Angela Davis, whose prominent afro has evolved to dreads. The moment rides an odd fence between whimsy and poignance.

``He was fascinated by her long, copper-colored dreadlocks,'' writes Walker, ``and I was amused to see him surreptitiously examining a lock with his fingers when they embraced and he thought no one was looking.''

A humanizing moment, indeed. Not to imply that an affection for dreads denotes exceptional intentions for the people of Cuba.

The rest of Walker's material, from letters to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and President Clinton to frequent explanations of her decision to dread her hair, are not as powerful as the essays that evolve to an idea. The shorter selections are instead presented as expressions of a time or a moment of understanding from this writer's life. MEMO: John-Henry Doucette is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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