LIVE, LEARN, & LOVE Series #9: The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (autobiographical novel by Alice Walker)

LIVE, LEARN, & LOVE

Do you take delight in watching films or listening to pop music? For English learners, movies, songs, and books are one of the most wonderful sources to explore the language! You can indulge in your favorite pastime and still learn some expressions, words of wisdom, and oftentimes good lessons while you’re at it.

 

# 9. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart 

(autobiographical novel authored by Alice Walker)

 

“Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we’ve cried in each other’s arms. We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory “safety” of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We’ve never seen weather like the weather there is today. We’ve never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We’ve never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.”

 

….. As we are witnessing, America has been painfully polarized due to political and economic differences even among the elders. Furthermore, the drastically changed climate and the artificially/ genetically modified produce we eat are destroying the physical and mental health that we deserve to keep today. The author is pointing out the timid and irresponsible attitude of the old generation’s to avoid, hide, or withdraw from the aforementioned problems. In this semi-autobiography, Alice Walker wishes to tell us that moving the "forward" against all the odds in life requires the courage to face up to them even with pain.

 

·      ** Jean’s Small Thoughts:

Alice Walker is one of the most prominent writers in America in terms of bringing many a social issues and realization of one’s identities on the table for discussions. Through her novels and poems, she has tried to see through human emotions, self-empowerment, resilience, social justice, and the beauty and strength detected even in imperfection.

What I like about the author is that she never fears letting people know the inconvenient truth in the world we are living today.

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow." is her quote that highlights how she has been living her life and shows how we are supposed to behave in this world full of black-or-white or friend-or-enemy type of demarcations. Labeling, stigmatizing, or drawing the right-or-wrong lines among people would stop them from growing or learning from mistakes. Once we stop growing mature or trusting one another, the world will soon face the end as if the freezing point of temperature would kill humanity of life.