Anything We Love Can Be Saved by
Alice Walker
I Love This Book.
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, is an international activist and
self-professed womanist. This pleasing collection of short essays amounts
to a very personal stroll through her psyche. Sharing touchstones and
demons, she serves up a spirited defense of Winnie Mandela, accused of
taking part in kidnapping and torture; a quest to mark the grave of Zora
Neale Hurston, an African AmerIndian folklorist who chronicled the lives of
Southern American blacks in the 1920s and 30s; poignant, angry
witnesses at a conference in Ghana devoted to stopping female genital
mutilation; and life lessons her daughter taught her. Walkers opinions are
enriched by her poetry and highlighted by the whimsical phrases and titles
with which she frames serious subjects.
Personal Review: Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice
Walker
Alice Walker writes ideas I don't already know, and she gives me new
ways of interpreting people. She is worth considering, especially when you

think you disagree with her. It is better to engage her in thoughtful debate
than to not listen to what she has to say. Ms. Walker did not title this book
"Anything I Love Can Be Saved." Importantly, she chose "Anything WE
Love Can Be Saved." The book discusses pursuits she has shared with
others.
"Now I know that . . .activism is often my muse . . . All we own, at least for
the short time we have it, is our life . . . Whenever I experience evil, and it
is not, unfortunately, uncommon to experience it in these times, my
deepest feeling is disappointment. I have learned to accept the fact that we
risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act.
Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we
decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there
might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our
hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss
experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has
never appealed to me." pp. xxiv-xxv.
I've spent a good deal of time researching concepts of love. Many people
are familiar with Paul's description of love's attributes from 1 Corinthians
13. Alice Walker highlights the next chapter's oppression of women in the
verses of 1 Corinthians 14:33-35. "For God is not a God of disorder but of
peace. As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain
silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in
submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they
should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to
speak in the church." I have to agree with Ms. Walker's assertion that the
Bible was written by men. And I doubt any intelligent "god" would seek any
"peace" that silences women or dictates they become intellectual
subordinates to their husbands. As I have grown older, I've found more
community and guidance from the voices of women.
"If the women of the world were comfortable, this would be a comfortable
world."
To understand what the title of this book might be saying, a person must
interpret how Alice Walker is using the word "saved." "Saved" is a word I
have trouble with because I grew up in a religious community where a
person could only be "saved" by choosing one being and one way.
Seeking additional voices or additional community was "fallen" or
"depraved." Alice Walker does not appear to be primarily be using the
word "saved" in the commonly connotated evangelical "conversion to more
enlightened path" sense. She is also not primarily using the word "saved"
to promote "possession or acquisition of" another human being.
Ms. Walker emphasizes "saved" in the sense that any person, idea, or
object of good character can be remembered, preserved, nourished,
grown, and sheltered by love. She says "love and justice and truth are the

only monuments that generate everwidening circles of energy and life . . .
though trashed and trampled, generation after generation."
She discusses principles of preserving and sharing past loves in relation to
recounting how written word efforts and community acknowledgement
have honored Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who herself wrote in order to
honor and preserve the often concealed, but discretely passed down,
African American culture that survived hundreds of years of slavery and
discriminatory religious & cultural practices.
Zora also wrote to preserve the memory of specific loves from her personal
history. In Zora's work, Alice found a character named Shug, Alice's
"outside" grandmother, her grandfather's lover, whose descendant Alice
was named after. And if you've read or watched The Color Purple, you are
familiar with Shug. There are real people behind most great literary
characters.
Alice believes in preserving and sharing the good qualities of those who
were unjustly dishonored and have passed from view. Her essay "Anything
We Love Can Be Saved" was an address she gave at the the First Annual
Zora Neale Hurston Festival in 1990, a festival bringing attention to and
honoring the writings of Zora Neal Hurston. Injustice is not overcome
through silence. As the subtitle of this book "A Writer's Activism"
emphasizes, love is active, notorious, and publicized. The act of love may
start "First in their own hearts," but it must be communicated to and shared
with "the hearts of others. They have only to make their love inseparable
from their belief. And both inseparable from hard work . . . Paying homage
to her, memorializing her light, her struggle . . . brought us peace."
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