In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens
Author: Alice Walker
Published by: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than
not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they
themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly
read.” —– Alice Walker; in her essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’
Throughout her literary life,
Alice Walker has spoken about her mothers and grandmothers; women who were not
saints, but artists living a life of spiritual waste. In an era of darkness and
deprivation, when it was quite a punishable crime for people of Black origin to
even read and write, the agony of these women who might very well have been
poets, short story writers, painters and musicians remained unspoken, while
they kept on toiling as unheard slaves in households year after year, decade
after decade in a White dominated America. This was the America where Walker
was born, where she eventually grew up. As an observant child, insightful
adolescent and creative adult, she has witnessed all of this; the deprivation
of creativity, the emptiness, the savagery these women were subjected to in
their lives as Black southerners in the United States. She had felt the ensuing
conflict between the pain of enduring unused and unwanted talent, and the numb,
bleeding madness provoked by the springs of creativity in those brave women.
Later on, throughout the sixties
and seventies, she writes a series of essays in which she reflects on the lives
of these fiery African-American women of the past and how these women have had
an impact on her literary pursuits. “In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
consists of all of these works and even more, where she emphasizes on an
identity, a spiritual connection she has discovered with these women,
principally due to their exposure to the African culture. These women have
searched for independence, creative and spiritual liberty and aesthetic
fulfillment within their restrictive sociocultural milieu. Walker expresses the
spark, the activities, the challenge found in the creative spirit of these
women. It is amazing how she celebrates the lives of these phenomenal women,
the Zora Neal Huston’s, the Rebecca Jackson’s, the Flannery O Connor’s as well
as her own mother and grandmother; while she perceives their lives as unspoken
inspirations in her own life.
In the exploration and analysis
of Walker’s essays in the book “In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens”, it is
essential that we look deep into the multiple themes of identity, historical
racism, independence, and inspiration and the unique way she has dealt with all
of these. A striking aspect of the book is the unique resonance of ‘womanism’
(a coinage by the author herself) in the chapters replete with her relentless
search for black women’s roots and role models.
However much she addresses the
themes of racism, civil rights movement, discrimination and the humiliation of
the black southerners, what lingers in the mind after reading all the essays of
“In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens” is her search for the root of spirituality
in the Black Americans, especially the women writers. It is this search which
makes her feel how these writers and phenomenal identities have been able to
work and survive through many decades of abominable oppression and negligence.
It is this search, which, critics have commented, has made her ‘refashion
feminism into a new paradigm’, while addressing itself to the black American
women of all classes.
Looking for Zora Neal Hurston,
the forgotten Black woman writer, folklorist and anthropologist and
rediscovering Zora in her unmarked grave several years after her death makes
for a landmark in the book, particularly the way she has narrated all her efforts
to reach through the mists of time, blow the dust away from the covers and
reintroduce Hurston’s works into the mainstream of American literature.
Hurston, a pioneer in Black feminist writing, whose path has been followed by
black woman writers throughout the 70’s and the 80’s, has been the writer of
two phenomenal novels (‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and ‘The Color Purple’)
that embody the attempt to define and express the totality and essence of the
Afro-American woman.
All the expressive, metaphoric
speech of Hurston, her ability to explore and celebrate black life in its own
terms, her attempts to challenge racism and oppression while focusing on a
woman’s identity and spiritual fullness went into oblivion in a white society;
and she was forced to choose a penniless death for herself in a Florida welfare
home. However, the feeling of spiritual kinship asserts itself in the most
unusual of ways. Little did Hurston know when she died that her bibliography or
biography would be recovered years after her death, her legacy uncovered to the
world and her grave located in the most unpredictable and dramatic turn of
events.
It is in the chapters ‘Looking
for Zora’ and ‘Zora Neale Hurston’ that Walker, the unknown friend and
successor to Hurston, enacts the most spiritual task after her death,the
reclamation of a fore-mother and the exploration of that mother’s literary
‘garden’. For Walker, the lines of “Mules and Men”, and the minor classics of
Hurston, four published novels, two books on folklore and an autobiography–open
up doors of a voyage of transforming vision, a voyage that unfolds the wisdom
in Hurston’s writings that has transformed communal relations and spiritual
lives.
“This was my first indication of the quality I
feel is most characteristic of Zora’s work: racial health, a sense of black
people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking
in so much black writing and literature…..”
Years and decades ago, when Zora
Hurston used to write about fruit pickers and hoodoo workers in sawmills and
turpentine camps, and create an intimate picture of southern black rural life
in America, little did she know that her writings would be analyzed thus by an
unknown friend in a relentless attempt to craft a voice for black culture. For
Walker, Hurston stands as the epitome for the oppressed black woman, providing
the ‘cultural nourishment’ and ‘spiritual food’ for black women writers of all
times.
Moreover, it is the particular
affinity between the author and Zora Hurston in terms of both the language of
black folk culture and the experience of the rural southern black women that
makes Hurston’s works true to the spiritual, creative consciousness of the
author. Blind, unquestioned slavery and
an uninterrupted dependence on a white society’s oppressive class system
remained a persistent reality in Hurston’s times and her works. The two essays
by Walker, ‘Looking For Zora’ and ‘In Search of Zora Neal Hurston’ represent
the horizon that explores the powerful dimensions in the life of this
phenomenal woman the world hardly recognized or knew.
In ‘Gifts of Power’, the writings
of Rebecca Jackson’, Walker recounts lots of personal details and stories of
the life of Rebecca Cox Jackson, a phenomenal black woman from Philadelphia, a
preacher and Shaker leader, who wrote about her dreams and spiritual visions
related to Christ’s miracles as well as mundane realities of everyday life. A
charismatic itinerant preacher, Rebecca Jackson, the religious visionary
writer, has recorded some immensely powerful religious awakening experiences in
her spiritual autobiography ‘Gifts of Power’, which Alice Walker reviews with
extreme care and precision. It is the voice of a powerful essayist, who, with a
comprehensive coverage, attempts to present the scholarship and wisdom of such
phenomenal women in the context of African-American feminism.
On the other hand, it is this
comprehensive coverage of the various aspects of scholarship in these
phenomenal women that makes ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ a rich and
diverse history of a quarter century of ‘womanist’ thought. Through the various
chapters that delve into the subconscious and ever-present spirituality found
in African-American women, particularly the chapters about Zora Neal Hurston,
and ‘The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor’, ‘The Black Writer and the
Southern Experience’, A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children’, and
the title-essay, she presents a bridge that hopes to connect the black women of
the past and their quest to express their creativity and spirituality to the
world.
What is more interesting is that
in this voyage to discover the inherent spirituality in black Americans, Walker
not only discovers the forgotten voice of Zora Hurston, but also returns to
white American authors like Flannery O’ Connor whose writings, shunning white
women as ridiculous and approaching black characters with unusual humility and
restraint, had been discarded along the way. In the essay ‘Beyond the Peacock:
The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor’, Walker presents a lucid, detailed
account of her intimate visit to Andalusia Farm, home of Flannery O’Connor from
her lupus diagnosis in 1951 until her death in 1964. While she undertakes a
visit to the house along with her mother, her account of this visit in the
essay presents a rich, intense spiritual journey of her own recognition that a
segregated literature, such as she had been brought up since her days in Sarah
Lawrence college, could no longer be tolerated, and both black and white
writing had to be read alongside, intertwined with each other, as she describes
in these lines:
“I would have to read Zora
Hurston and Flannery O Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer
and Willian Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all”.
Flannery O Conner’s observations on race, class and time
inspires Walker unknowingly over the years, and her visit to the home of
O’Connor serves to lead the readers through time, forward or back, to
eventually explore the Southern literary trail of O’ Connor, an exceptional
writer whose works showed the courage to destroy the last vestiges of
sentimentalism in White southern writing.
In the truest sense, all essays
compiled within ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ encompass the legacy of
Sarah Lawrence college, an institution where she was taught “How to Be Shocked
and Dismayed but Not Lie Down and Die” (A Talk: Convocation 1972). While
writing about the generations of black mothers who lived and survived in the
darkest depths of oppression, and yet managed to maintain their deep rooted
spirituality intact, she conjures the power of back women in fiction and
literary tradition, emphasizing a lot on the themes of identity, independence
and inspiration.
As the reader reads through ‘In
Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’, he witnesses Walker retrieving black women
writers from oblivion, while at the same time spiritually growing with a unique
power and humility, as she confronts the pieces of her own identity. It is the
identity of the writer gifted with the spirit of self-indulgence and loneliness
which sometimes turns out to be a radical vision of society.
“The writer-like the musician or
painter”must be free to explore, otherwise she or he will never discover what
is needed (by everyone) to be known. This means, very often, finding oneself
considered “unacceptable” by masses of people who think that the writer’s
obligation is not to explore or challenge, but to second the masses’ motions,
whatever they are. Yet the gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of
society or one’s people that has not been previously been taken into account.”
(‘From an Interview’)
For Walker,
being confronted with this gifted loneliness and writing about it is an
enriching task which she undertakes by presenting writers of this ilk,
including Jean Toomer and his work ‘Cane’, Zora Neal Hurston, and certainly,
herself. Her work continues to bear testimony to the loveless marriages, the
social discriminations, the slavery and the sexism of all times, while she
continues with her faith in these phenomenal young black women of the past and
present. She personally feels it is their rough, rocky road which she has
traveled all her life and which she is still traveling, for which she writes:
“Be nobody’s darling; / Be an
outcast. /Take the contradictions/ Of your life/ And wrap around you like a
shawl/ To parry stones/ To keep you warm.” (A Talk: Convocation 1972)
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