Midterm
Choose 1 question and respond in a 3 page, (750 word) essay. Utilize in-text citiations and paraphrase as evidence to support your claims. (Don't forget to include page numbers at the end of the citation. At the end of the essay include a works cited section.

You can email it to me professorwandasposse@gmail.com before class if this is easy for you. The essay is due Monday morning. Email the Initial Planning Sheet, an outline, introduction and conclusion freewrite and peer comments. Monday bring in the hardcopies of in-class writings on We Are the Ones, plus any chapter notes.

1. In this book Walker reflects on her life as a writer and how it has evolved over the years. In this short 251 volume she traverses much physical and intimate terrain to emerge a stronger person. She illustrates how the personal is political. For example, in the chapter How It Feels to Know Someone Died for You (164) she speaks of why she chose to live in Mississippi with a white man and what price they both paid for that choice; in Three Fates (15) she looks at the economics of poverty and crime of privilege; in I Call That Man Religious (111), she looks at “what is evil and obscene in the patriarchal world.”

Choose one chapter and analyze how Walker illustrates again and again how there is no separation between her personal life and the lives around her, how all is connected. Is this a metaphor for all?


2. Choose 1-2 chapters and discuss how Walker used poetry in the book. Does its inclusion expand or limit the discourse?

3. Several themes reoccur throughout the book: poverty, US imperial power, the natural world as in gardening, patriarchy, fatherhood, matriarchy, motherhood, innocence, children, the sacred feminine, meditation, education, ritual, first world and third world nations, war, citizen rights and responsibilities, censorship, health care, literacy, anger, fear, forgiveness, loneliness, love, the pain of loss, history, truth, role of the artist, religion.

Choose one theme, listed here or not. As you point out Walker’s arguments on this 1 theme as it reoccurs throughout the text (3 examples is enough), look at the evidence she uses to support these claims and evaluate its efficacy.

4. We Are the Ones is a celebration on the sacred feminine and maternal power. This is no where more clearly expressed than in “I Call That Man Religious” (111). What are some of her arguments here? How are they mirrored or expanded elsewhere in the text?

5. How did Walker come to meditation as a practice? What has been its role in her life? Why does she include a mediation practice in each chapter? What is she telling her audience?

6. What does Walker mean when she writes:
Love is not concerned
With whom you pray
Or where you slept
The night you ran away
From home

Love is concerned
That the beating of your heart
Should harm
No one (191)

7. What does Walker say about compassion? How is compassion tied to one’s humanity? How does “mudra” symbolize this (192-218)?

8. What does Walker mean: “To be black means to have a body and soul together” (240)? How is this statement an extension of comments earlier in the book about the plight of African Americans on this soil?

9. How does Walker’s life illustrate resistance to pain, suffering, oppression?

10. Walker presents a case for individual and collective power in creating change. What is her argument in We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For? What tools does she offer?