Meridian (W&N Essentials)

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Set in the 1960s and 1970s, Meridian centers on Meridian Hill, a student at the fictitious Saxon College, who becomes active in the Civil Rights Movement. She becomes romantically involved with another activist, Truman Held. They have a turbulent on-and-off relationship, during which she becomes pregnant by him. However the path to change for Meridian, like her people, is fraught with obstacles, not the least of which is her own community, filled with an assortment of unusual characters. Discussing Celie’s attempts to confirm her existence by writing to someone she is not certain exists, Gloria Steinem says, “Clearly, the author is telling us something about the origin of Gods: about when we need to invent them and when we don’t.” In a sense, Shug Avery becomes a god for Celie because of her ability to control the evil in the world and her power to change the sordid conditions of Celie’s life. Early in the book, when Celie is worrying about survival, about rape, incest, beatings, and the murder of her children, her only source of hope is the name “Shug Avery,” a name with a magical power to control her husband. Not even aware that Shug is a person, Celie writes “I ast our new mammy bout Shug Avery. What it is?” Finding a picture of Shug, Celie transfers her prayers to what is at that point only an image:

Other qualities in keeping with her spirituality are Meridian’s introspection, her ferocious will, and her inability to give her word without full moral commitment. Since her decisions are often painful, and since they conflict with accepted moral traditions, readers should pay special attention to the relentlessness of her introspection. In the tradition of spiritual leaders, she suffers for her choices, but she finds this a necessary stage of growth.The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult; A Meditation of Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the film "The Color Purple," Ten Years Later, Scribner (New York, NY), 1996. Washington Post Book World, July 25, 1982, David Guy, review of The Color Purple; May 29, 1988, Jill Nelson, review of Living by the Word; May 7, 1989, David Nicholson, review of The Temple of My Familiar, p. 3; July 5, 1992, Charles R. Larson, review of Possessing the Secret of Joy, p. 1. Walker’s various aesthetic and social concerns are harmoniously combined in Meridian, an exploration of a young woman’s coming of age and her journey from loneliness, guilt, and self-doubt, to self-acceptance, empowerment, and love. Like Walker once was, Meridian is set on a path to greater self-realization and endures the hardships of firmly and irrevocably establishing her identity amid the chaos of social upheaval, sexual alienation, and people who are not always approving or supportive of either the woman or the cause. all the people whoa are as alone as I am will one day gather at the river. We will watch the evening sun go down. And in the darkness maybe we will know the truth. (Meridian 220)” They have a saying for people who fall down as I do: If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls.

Meridian Hill longed for a sense of direction and therefore set out on a quest for personal transformation by turning to the civil rights movement. Walker utilizes this journey for self-discovery as a method of symbolizing the political activity of the 1960s, especially those emulating existing power structures: Lynne, like many Jews who supported the civil rights movement, is one of the more fascinating characters, for me, as Walker digs deep into her psyche, revealing her motives for activism, a woman who suffers for the oppression of her people. Like Germans who sheltered Jews during WWII, were they compassionate or were they compensating for the sins of their nations? Walker also deftly portrays the mixed feelings among her people towards the whites who invaded their movement and some, like Lynne, who loved their men as well. The novel points out that the Civil Rights Movement often reflected the oppressiveness of patriarchal capitalism. Activists merely turned political rhetoric to their own ends while continuing to repress spontaneous individuality. To overcome this destructiveness, Walker reaches for a new definition of revolution. Her hope for a just society inheres not merely in political change, but in personal transformation” (Stein). Walker Morris Construction & Engineering and Dispute Resolution experts Paul Hargreaves and Sue Harris highlight a game-changing decision on challenges to trial witness evidence and what it means for litigating parties. Why is Curtiss and others v Zurich Insurance plc of interest?Alice Walker Boxed Set—Fiction: The Third Life of Grange Copeland, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, and In Love and Trouble, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1985. The inside cover over of this book says it was published in 1976 and this fits. I can see it. The Civil Rights 60's are over. What was The Movement has either died or morphed into something else. This book is almost a reflective look at its history, humble beginnings, the height and what became of it. All this metaphorically speaking through the protagonist character of Meridian, the books namesake. The judge gave short shrift to Zurich’s argument that the bulk of costs would have been incurred in the litigation anyway, saying that that certainly wasn’t true of the claimants’ costs. He went on to say: “ There is a big difference between examining witness statements for the purpose of preparing cross-examination and submissions on the evidence and going through them with a fine tooth-comb for the purpose of identifying breaches of the Practice Direction”. Literary activism is fundamental in Walker’s novel, as it derives on the recognition that, internal thinking is connected to external change. Literature can be recognized as an instrument used to promote activism. Walker skilfully combines personal and political concerns in her text, chronicling a young woman’s journey to self-discovery. Through stressing the concepts of idealism, the correlation between past and present, as well as personal transformation, Walker is successful in justifying literature as a form of social advocacy. The text solidifies the ongoing moral that, true change relies on individual growth. As Anne Frank once said, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Although the novel is targeted on the 1960s, the messages enforced throughout the text are of ethics, love and loss, making Walker’s text a timeless one.

He...wondered if Meridian knew that the sentence of bearing the conflict in her own soul which she had imposed on herself—and lived through—must now be borne in terror by all the rest of them” (Walker). Other characters are presented with sympathy and understanding—from Meridian’s prim and limited mother and her dreamy father to various poor people Meridian encounters on her travels. Major sections of the novel, however, are devoted to two other characters: Lynne Rabinowitz and Truman Held.Newsweek, June 21, 1982, Peter S. Prescott, review of The Color Purple, p. 676; April 24, 1989, David Gates, review of The Temple of My Familiar, p. 74. Peden, William, The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940-1975, 2nd revised and enlarged edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1975. Part of the past’s hold on her is the sense of guilt she feels about her relationships with her parents. Although her father taught her the nature of the oppression of minorities through his knowledge of American Indians, her strongest source of guilt comes from her mother, who argues, like Brownfield Copeland, that the responsibility for all problems stems from outside oneself: “The answer to everything,” said Meridian’s mother, “is we live in America and we’re not rich.” Meridian’s strongest sense of past guilt comes from the knowledge she gains when she becomes pregnant: “it was for stealing her mother’s serenity, for shattering her mother’s emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very first, though she was unable to understand how this could possibly be her fault.”