Overcoming Speechlessness

(Paperback)

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Description

Poet Alice Walker writes of her personal encounters with the cruelty and horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel through her work with Women for Women International and Code Pink and of finding her voice again after a period of speechlessness. Bearing witness to a range of depravity, Walker presents the stories of the individuals who have crossed her path and shared their tales of suffering and courage. Self-imposed silence has slowed global response to those suffering and with this book, Walker aims to redress the balance.

Reviews

Perhaps ordinary language cannot convey adequately the horrors of our time. Perhaps it takes a poet to reach into her own heart and into ours, to break out of silence and despair, to speak the unspeakable truth. Alice Walker, a poet who does more than write, declares, by her words and by her actions, that she will not, that we must not, let this go on. She insists, in this poetic, powerful essay, that we will reach out to one another, across all boundaries, to create a better world. Howard Zinn

Walker has done what few North American writers are able to: bear witness to atrocities in places that are geographically far away, but politically connected to the West. Feministe

[Walker] links modern-day atrocities to older cruelties, including the Holocaust and the Trail of Tears. Finding resilience in the midst of atrocities, Walker uses her own voice, as poet and activist, to speak out against injustices in the world's trouble spots. Vanessa Bush, Booklist

Alice Walker's Overcoming Speechlessness leaves me breathless. She shocks us with stories of the most horrifying human interactions then pulls us out of despair with the most tender stories of compassion. Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK

Author Bio

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, ALICE WALKER is the author of more than thirty books including The Color Purple and Sent by Earth. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages. From her essays concerning the civil rights movement to her cries for intervention on the Gaza Strip, Walker continually and eloquently calls attention to ignored injustices around the world.