From Exile to Healing

For Alice Walker, a womanist is “not a separatist.” This chapter discusses the experience of an otherwise privileged white woman exiled from her home by the separatist Parti Quebecois coming to power in Quebec, Canada, in 1976. Then and now, the separatists believe the only way to preserve French-Canadian culture is to exclude and marginalize English speakers. They have successfully passed many discriminatory and xenophobic laws to this end. The author shares how the exile experience influenced her not only to become a lawyer advocating for refugees forced to cross borders because of oppression in their homelands but to self-identify as a womanist.