Black self-awareness and ecological integration in Alice Walker’s Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart (2004)

• In Event: Spiritualities and bodily practice

Description for Program

This paper offers a decolonial reading of Alice Walker's Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart (2004) focusing on the specificities of Black journeys towards self-awareness. On the move, Walker's protagonists Kate and Yolo have their spiritual discoveries enhanced by the Indigenous knowledges they find on their ways. Such encounters turn these characters’ journeys into ones of ecological integration with nature. Rivers, forests and animals, as well as the South-American Indigenous medicine yagé, have themselves voices in the novel. I argue that this constitutes Walker’s narrative strategy to equate human protagonism with nature protagonism in Now Is The Time … (2004). To present Walker’s eco-ethics, two specific passages depicting Kate’s remarkable experiences are addressed. The first one, on the waters of the Colorado River, narrates a journey she knew “was to be with women” (21); it allegorically illustrates life unpredictability. The second passage describes Kate’s trip to the rainforest in South America, in which she finds out: “I am an American […] Indigenous to the Americas. Nowhere else could I, this so-called Black person – African, European, Indio – exist. Only here. In Africa there would have been no Europeans, no Native Americans. In Europe, no Africans and no Indians. Only here” (77). Such a special perspective, a turning point in Kate’s journey, gives birth to new reflections that confirm Now Is The Time … (2004) as a story of Black self-awareness achievement. Based on all this, I argue that Walker’s Now Is The Time …(2004) is best read through a decolonial approach that in this paper is theoretically supported by Maldonado-Torres (2020), Grosfoguel (2020), Bernardino-Costa (2020) and Brugioni (2022), whose consistent opposition to Eurocentric thinking provides space for Afro Amerindian epistemologies used to examine and expand the meanings of the novel.

Author

• Claudio Roberto Vieira Braga, Universidade de Brasilia