“Diary of an African Nun” by Alice Walker (thoughts)

As always, I’m posting this on Monday to participate in John’s Short Story Mondays feature. :)

One of the books I got from the library on Saturday (and I meant to do a vlog, but I was too busy crocheting as fast as possible to get a present done in time for a baby shower) was Children of the Night. It’s a short story anthology subtitled “The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to Present.” Since I didn’t even crack open the anthology I had before (You’ve Got to Read This: I’ll be revisiting it later, but it got pushed under my bed and I forgot about it…how awful is that?!), I decided that to make this one more approachable (it’s 500+ pages) I’d read from it randomly. Usually, I’m a big stickler for reading stories in the order they’re presented, so this is new for me! Scanning the table of contents, Alice Walker immediately jumped out. I made an abortive attempt to read The Color Purple last year (I find it very difficult to read dialect books, and I’m not a huge fan of the epistolary style), and while I intend to try again, I feel guilty that I’ve never read anything by her. So, I dived into the anthology with “Diary of an African Nun.”

This is a very short story, at only four pages, but Walker’s writing style manages to create vivid pictures in such a small space. The imagery is wonderful; here’s my favourite part:

Dearly Beloved, let me tell you about the mountains and the spring. The mountains that we see around us are black, it is the snow that gives them their icy whiteness. In the spring, the hot black soil melts the crust of snow on the mountains, and the water as it runs down the sheets of fiery rock burns and cleanses the naked bodies that come to wash in it. It is when the snows melt that the people plant their crops: the soil of the mountains is rich, and its produce plentiful and good.

Walker uses the voice of an unnamed Ugandan nun to explore the contrast between a white colonial mindset and a black native mindset. There isn’t much character development, and no plot, but the descriptive passages still manage to bring powerful life into the story.

That being said, I think it would have been more powerful if it wasn’t quite as stark a political message. Even though the narrator is a black nun, she doesn’t seem to believe in Catholicism at all, longing for her native customs, and Walker never really explains why she became a nun in the first place. I think a more nuanced approach, more story telling and less parable, would have been stronger. Still, Walker’s sheer writing ability has definitely impressed me. And I’m excited to explore the rest of this anthology!