From Womanism to Eco-spirituality: Ancestral Healing in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker

Early feminist criticism was by large exclusionary. Educated, middle-class white women initiated theories about members of their own status and ignored women’s varied ethnic, cultural racial and class identities. Although white feminists’ sexual and social self-concept stood in opposition to the dominant male-centered canon, the issues of race and class were briefly mentioned. That is why there has been an attempt in the recent years to form a feminist theory which investigates notions of race, class and gender along with the universal female problems. This project began with the necessity of developing a parallel tradition located in the unique shared political, social and economic experiences of black women. Alice Walker’s womanism is such a project aimed at the reconstruction of black female identity. Her womanist stance is a universal, non-separatist approach which explores the importance of community, wholeness and female restoration. But womanism is just the preliminary point of departure. She carried on her female empowering project and introduced eco-spirituality as an embodiment of dynamic energy, separate from the physical body, which is essential for the individual’s well-being. As part of the argument presented in this paper is to address the process of the reconstruction of the imposed identity and subjecthood of the black women, Judith Butler’s notion of “agency” is also used by the researcher to scrutinize black women’s potential for subversion and re-signifying the regulatory gender constructions to achieve agency. The present paper seeks to address Alice Walker’s 2005 novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart in terms of three basic critical concepts: womanism, eco-spirituality and agency. The newly-acquired agency promoted the characters to destabilize the symbolic, oppressive order, survive trauma and revive the transformative energy to work against fragmentation.