Summary of My Diploma Thesis

This diploma thesis attempts to introduce the real-life stories from Alice Walker´s non-fiction to the reader. The stories illustrate violence, which happens not only as a result of war conflicts in developing countries, but also violence which has become an everyday reality for little girls and boys all over the world. Those children are exposed to physical violence (such as female and male circumcision, spreading of HIV/AIDS, body scaring, and rape), consequently they lead an inner struggle with unjustified feelings of guilt, and face betrayals by people from their own ranks. 

The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first one explains terms such as culture, society, traditions, values. Also, the reader finds out how these terms are uderstood by Alice Walker and two crucial sociologists of this thesis: Alvin J. Schmidt and Bkikhu Parekh. 

The second chapter opens the main body with a topic concerning violence on two concrete people, who in their adulthoods managed to overcome betrayals from their own communities, forgive their perpetrators and they live in those communitites up until now. The third chapter opens up with much concrete and brutal examples of violence – rape. Trauma that emanates from this form of violence does not affect only the victim, but the whole community, because it actively aims at disintegration of the community’s values. As well as in the second chapter, in the third there is an instance of violence commited on a man. The fourth chapter narrows down the demonstration of violence and interprets the causes, kinds, myths and consequences of female cirucumcision. The fifth chapter shifts the attention from violence, which has been analyzed thoroughly, to the attitude that take up mothers and adult women to violence in their communities. Their positive or negative stance reflects on the way they look and on the way they treat themselves. 

In the conclusion I attempt to find means of reconciliatoin: reconciliation of perpetrators with their victims, brainwashed mothers with their daughters, the society with its members. Means that would stop spreading evil. Alice Walker and Tim Murithi agree on the following: the only means to achieve peace is forgiveness and love.