Set in the American South in the 1960s it follows Meridian Hill, a courageous young activist who dedicates her self heart and soul to her civil rights work. Like when I read James Baldwin for the first time, I was moved to racial rage many times, and I learned so much about how it was (is) for people of colour, and for those who loved them. The second novel written by Alice Walker, preceding THE COLOUR PURPLE is a heartfelt and moving story about one woman’s personal revolution as she joins the Civil Rights Movement. I don't mind non-chronological narratives, nor shifting perspectives, but the way it was done here felt incomplete to me. An alternate meaning, “distinctive character,” applies just as well to the novel’s protagonist and namesake.

For it is now a question of deciding if it is possible to kill someone, whose resemblance to ourselves we have at last recognized and whose identity we have just sanctified. Het is mij onduidelijk waarom dit boek Meridian heet - tweederde van het boek gaat over twee andere karakters, namelijk: Lynne en Truman. This Zen-like dedication to good turns her into the ultimate civil rights superhero, changing the world by facing down one tank at a time. Meridian has had a tough life: she was married with a child by seventeen and denied an education because of it, despite her prodigious intelligence. The story seems to provide something of an inside scoop into what it was like to be a part of the Movement, but altogether, very, very little of it is about the day to day struggles in the fight for civil rights, as the messy interpersonal relationships of the fighters themselves dominate the text.

And there is the history of the women her mother came from: a great-great-grandmother who, as a slave, repeatedly stole back her children each time they were sold away from her, and who, when finally allowed to keep them, starved to death trying to feed them; a great-grandmother, also a slave, who painted faces on barns across Georgia; Meridian’s grandmother, who killed herself working to get her daughter through school; and her mother herself, who got through school and helped four of her brothers and sisters do the same. The action then shifts, in flashback, to Lynne’s younger years, when she leaves her family for her new life with Truman and the movement. Born in the midst of the Great Depression, the theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was “The World of Tomorrow” - a theme that captured the hearts of a generation. Meridian' is a heartfelt and moving story about one woman's personal revolution as she joins the Civil Rights Movement.

Several literary critics believe that the novel is a critique of the Civil Rights Movement from that period. Meridian mengisahkan perjuangan seorang perempuan bernama Meridian -as usual kulit hitam- dengan cita-citanya mensosialisasikan salah satu hak azasi manusi -pemilu-.To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, it felt like I had to have gone there to know there, and therefore, a great deal of the book felt as if it had a very particular audience (that was not this reader) in mind. Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde Islands, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, European Union, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gabon Republic, Gambia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Niue, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Republic of Croatia, Republic of the Congo, Reunion, Romania, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vatican City State, Venezuela, Virgin Islands (U. Though her books are motivational, in a way, you generally have to go through some tough times to get there.

Although the 1976 novel would not reach the heights of popular success that The Color Purple would six years later (having Oprah make her film debut in the adaptation certainly doesn't hurt), Meridian touches on the same ideas that made that novel so famous.

The story follows her life into the 1970s through a relationship that ultimately fails, and her continued efforts to support the movement. She an American black woman and me a Scottish white woman had no knowledge of each others lives at all.

Truman first spots Meridian staring down a tank at the mummified woman on a day the children, mostly poor and black, are forbidden to attend. In 1983, Walker became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple, which also won the National Book Award. Throughout Meridian, Walker stresses the universality of the human experience and suggests that no one has cornered the market on suffering.She's a pretty memorable character, in one of those in between time periods I always feel I don't know enough about. Mutely, she pleaded for it, because she knew the curse of her native land: Without one’s tongue in one’s mouth or in a special spot of one’s own choosing, the singer in one’s soul was lost forever, to grunt and snort through eternity like a pig.