Alice Walker: The Power Of Words

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A voice comes in many forms--art, music, dance, and others. However, its most common form is words. Certain people can use words to do things other people cannot; they can fight wars, they can build up or tear down, and it all comes down to how you use them. One woman had such a talent and used it to beat down the invisible walls confining women and other minorities to stereotypes or roles society had placed upon them. In her poem “Women,” Alice walker writes a three simple words, “They battered down doors.” (Lines 7-8). This may simple or trivial, but it encompasses the base of Alice Walker’s voice--passion for determined, resilient, oppressed people. However, there’s much more to her than that. Alice Walker has proven that words can do magnificent things through her influential and thought-provoking stories and essays. The way that Alice Walker writes about her mother is a key aspect of her voice, and explains how other aspects of it developed. In “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” she writes, ...she battled with the white landlord …show more content…

What then did the men see, when they looked into the eyes of the women they married, before they could speak English? Apparently their own reflections.” (139).
There is a fine line between anger and passion; in this paragraph, Walker’s heart is being poured out onto paper in the form of ink. Her heart bleeds for these women, and her frustration with those men have given her the words to write. Her tone builds in power and volume with “blissfully” in italics for emphasis and in quotations for sarcasm, her question to make us think one final time, and, finally, in the last sentence of this paragraph, she slays with passionate sass when she writes, “Apparently their own

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