BOOK TITLE: In
Search of Our Mother’s Garden
AUTHOR: Alice
Walker
AUTHOR HISTORY:
Born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9th of 1944, Alice
Malsenior Walker is a Black American novelist, essayist, poet and activist. She
is most famous for her novel, The Color Purple, which was adapted into a film
by Steven Spielberg in 1985. Her parents, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah
Grant were sharecroppers and had eight children, Alice being the youngest. She
began school at 4-years-old, attending East Putnam Consolidated. In her teenage
years, she attended the only high school available to Black youth, Butler Baker
High School. She graduated as the valedictorian and enrolled in Spelman College
after being awarded a full scholarship by the state of Georgia in honor of her
academic achievements. She transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York
after receiving a scholarship offer and used her time there to study abroad in
East Africa. She began writing the poems that would eventually be compiled into
her first book of poetry during this time as well. After graduating college in
1965, she worked as an educator and social worker, remaining heavily involved
in Civil Rights efforts. Her expansive writing career also includes Temple of
My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy and Meridian, amongst others.
BOOK HISTORY:
In Search of Our Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose was
published in 1983 and as a collection of 36 essays written by Walker. The
essays were a dynamic array of articles, reviews, speeches and other forms of
prose written on various topics, using Walker’s womanist lens. She uses the
pages of the text to explore the most pressing issues including the Civil
Rights Movement of 1960s, anti-semitism, childhood and motherhood.
In Search Of Our Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose is a
collection of 36 essays, divided into four parts. As you explore this text, it
is important that you take the time to consider the learning points of each
chapter. Use the discussion questions to further interrogate the reading and
expand your understanding of womanist concepts and ideologies.
Part 1
The opening section of Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s
Garden: Womanist Prose sets the pace for the overall thematic progression of
the novel. The introductory essays found in the first section explore Walker’s
relationship with Zora Neal Hurston’s work and Walker’s personal relationship
with the Black southern landscape. These relationships encourage her to seek
out the stories of Southern Black folks who have been forgotten and/or shunned
throughout the course of history. She looks to Hurston as a beloved ancestor
and travels to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida to uncover more of her work
and personal history. "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of
Models in the Artist's Life" The first essay explores the artist’s need
for models (understood to be role models; inspiration) and the difficulty of
finding them. She begins this essay with a brief discussion of a quote found in
a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his friend, Emile Bernard. Written from a
mental institution near the end of his life, Van Gogh wrote that he is
“suffering from an absolute lack of models”. Walker interprets this as evidence
of how serious Van Gogh took his art and subsequently, a commentary on the importance
of having models for your work.
"The Black
Writer and the Southern Experience"
In this essay, Walker continues the story she alluded to in
the first essay. She begins with detailing her mother’s humiliation at a flour
distribution center in the small Georgia town where they lived. Because her
mother had dressed up to exchange vouchers for flour, the official—a white
woman— refused to serve her, stating that she looked too prosperous to be on
social welfare. Walker sees the story as an ultimately triumphant one, for the
reason that her mother was able to lean on others in her community for flour:
“In this small story is revealed the condition and strength of a people”.
Walker further states that this sense of community is an
inheritance of the black Southern writer. Recalling her own rural Southern
childhood, she writes that she is not nostalgic for poverty —her parents were
sharecroppers—but for the sense of community and the closeness to the earth
that her childhood nurtured in her. She recalls a “white Northern professor”
suggesting to her that her childhood was not an adequate one for becoming a
poet, and she refuted him for it.
• Walker’s mother is humiliated during a trip into town for
flour, due to the clothing she decided to wear. She is ridiculed and turned
away with the white woman saying that, “Anybody dressed up as good as you don’t
need to come here begging for food.”
"But Yet and
Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…"
This essay concerns Walker’s experience teaching at the
Headstart Friends of the Children of Mississippi. This was a teacher-training
program with no government funding, designed for the black children of
Mississippi. Walker’s role was as a consultant and a mentor for these aspiring
teachers, most of them poor and uneducated black women. In an effort to get
these women to understand their own histories, so that they could then pass
these histories on to the children that they taught, she had them write short
testimonies about their experiences with racism in the South. The essay includes
their segments from these testimonies, many of which deal with Klan violence,
as well as the less organized violence of bigoted townspeople.
"A Talk:
Convocation 1972"
“A Talk: Convocation” is a transcript of a graduation speech
that Walker delivered at Sarah Lawrence College, her New York based alma mater.
The speech, directed at young women and giving specific attention to young
Black women, urges them to believe in themselves and to learn to face prejudice
head on. Walker recalls her time editing the memoir of Mrs. Winston Hudson
(detailed in the essay “‘But Yet and Still the Cotton Gin Kept on Working…’”)
and cites Hudson’s own struggles with racism. She suggests that racism remains
a problem even at a progressive college such as Sarah Lawrence and notes the
scarcity of Black writers on the reading curriculum saying, “I am discouraged
when a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence says there is not enough literature by
black women and men to make a full year’s course […] It is shocking to hear
that the only black woman writer white and black academicians have heard of is
Gwendolyn Brooks”.
She does however go on to praise three formative teachers
that she had while a student at Sarah Lawrence: her philosophy professor Helen
Merrell Lynd, and the two poets and literature professors Muriel Rukeyser and
Jane Cooper. She states that she learned from Lynd that even sadness and
loneliness “have their use”; that Rukeyser taught her how to live bravely; and
that Cooper taught her the value of listening and patience. She ends her speech
by reading two original poems, entitled “Be Nobody’s Darling” and
“Reassurance.”
• Black women’s experiences in higher education are often
saturated with instances of violence on the basis of misogynoir, even when the
institution hails itself as “progressive” and modern. In this case, how is
progressivism used not only to mask, but to promote race and gender based
violence and oppression in academia, work spaces or societally?
"Beyond the
Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor"
In this essay, Walker returns to her childhood home after
becoming ill with lupus. Accompanied by her mother, the women decide to visit
the Georgia house of Flannery O’Connor, one of her favorite writers. O’Connor’s
home is not far from Walker’s own childhood home, which is now in a state of
neglect and abandonment. Walker contrasts her old house with the tended state
of O’Connor’s empty house saying,
“What I feel at the moment of knocking is fury that someone
is paid to take care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that her
house still, in fact, stands, while mine—which of course we never owned
anyway—is slowly rotting into dust”.
"The Divided Life of Jean Toomer"
This essay considers the writer Jean Toomer through a review
of his collected writings, The Wayward and the Seeking. Many of these writings
are autobiographical, and through them Walker comes to understand Toomer as a
racial opportunist, embracing his blackness when it was convenient for him to
do so and renouncing it when it became a burden. Toomer came from a mixed-race
background and could generally “pass” as white. His most famous and influential
novel, Cane, was concerned with the lives of Black Southerners, and in selling
the book, Toomer emphasized the Black side of his own history. However, he
refused to identify himself as Black when it came time to promote the book. He
eventually married a wealthy white woman and moved with her to a Quaker
community in rural Pennsylvania.
"A Writer
Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children"
This essay is a review of the novel Second Class Citizen by
Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta. While Walker finds the style of the novel plain
and unremarkable, she considers it to be an important book for its frank and
unusual depiction of the role of motherhood in the life of the female artist.
The novel, which is semi-autobiographical, concerns an intellectually ambitious
Nigerian woman who moves with her husband and children to London, where she
must contend with open racism and sexism while raising five children. She
ultimately transcends her circumstances not by pushing her children away, but
rather by integrating them into her writing: she decides that she will write a
novel, not for herself, but for the adults that they will become.
"Gifts of Power:
The Writings of Rebecca Jackson"
This essay is a review of Jean McMahon Humez’s Gifts of
Power. The book is a biography of the 19th century minister and
mystic Rebecca Cox Jackson. Walker traces Jackson’s trajectory from a poor,
illiterate girl in Philadelphia with an older minister brother to a spiritual
leader in her own right. Jackson believed in divine visions and overcame her
illiteracy by calling on the will of God to learn how to read the Bible. She
later left her husband—also involved in her family’s African Methodist
church—to establish a black Quaker community of her own. She lived with a
younger woman, Rebecca Perot, until Perot’s death; the two may or may not have
had a romantic relationship.
"Zora Neale
Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View"
This essay is an appreciation of Zora Neale Hurston, whom
Walker regards as a role model. She recalls coming upon her book ‘Of Mules and
Men’ as a college student and being delighted by its portrayal of Black
southerners. Hurston’s portrayal gave Walker’s own family history back to
herself: “For what Zora’s book did was this: it gave [my family] back all the
stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed […] and showed
them how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are.” Hurston is an important
figure to Walker for her style and spirit, as much as for her writing. Walker
notes that she was ahead of her time in her sexual independence/identity and
also in her proudly African style of dress. At a time when most other Black
American writers were modeling themselves on European intellectuals, Hurston
was more focused on “Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, and—for a little racial diversity
(Indians)—Honduras”. She frequently wore elaborate headwraps, a style that, as
Walker notes, would become popular among black women in the 1960s.
Looking for Zora
In the final essay of part one, Walker travels to
Eatonville, Florida- the hometown of her ‘model’, Zora Neale Hurston. She takes
the trip with her friend Charlotte, a white Southern graduate who, like Walker,
is interested in the literary and activist contributions of Hurston. Walker
poses as the illegitimate niece and finds that while most of the townspeople
remember Zora, their memories differ and often contradict each other. She is
unsuccessful in her attempts to find the Hurston’s unmarked resting place, but
she does leave with a renewed understanding of her roots in this all-Black
community.
Part 2
Part Two consists of eleven essays and primarily focuses on
the Civil Rights Movement and the various leaders within it. Through this
collection of essays, she discusses the aims of the movement and describes her
personal involvement while also exploring the positive and negative impacts and
outcomes. She visits Hurston’s final resting place and in her honor, purchases
a memorial plaque to place upon the previously unmarked site. As reverence
leads much of the conversation in regards to Hurston’s literary ancestors, she
also holds the Black southern landscape in high regard.
"The Civil
Rights Movement: What Good Was it?"
In this essay, written when she was 23 years old, Walker
defends the Civil Rights Movement against disaffected white liberals, who
believe that it accomplished nothing. The central point of her essay is that
the gains of the Movement are as much spiritual as they are material being that
the Movement taught many black people to conceive of themselves, for the first
time, as human and deserving. Walker also makes the point that Black people,
unlike white people, do not have the luxury of giving up on the struggle for
racial equality: “If the Civil Rights Movement is dead, and if it gave us
nothing else, it gave us each other forever
"The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties
of the Black Revolutionary Artist, or of the Black Writer
Who Simply Works and Writes"
This is a transcript of a speech that Walker presented to
the Black Students’ Association at Sarah Lawrence College in 1970. She begins
the speech by recalling her own time at the institution during her
undergraduate years and how she appreciated the freedom she was afforded. She
speaks about how she only later came to realize that her education there was
one-sided. While she admired and loved many of her literature teachers there,
she believes they did not expose her to enough Black writers, stating she “...
began to feel that subtly and without intent or malice, I had been miseducated”
• Consider this quote:
‣ “I have not labeled myself yet. I would like to call
myself revolutionary, for I am always changing, and growing, it is hoped for
the good of more black people. I do call myself black when it seems necessary
to call myself anything, especially since I believe one’s work rather than
one’s appearance adequately labels one.”
“The Almost Year”
This essay is a review of the novel “The Almost Year” by
Florence Engel Randall. The novel itself is a combination of a ghost story and
a realistic novel, concerning an underprivileged young Black woman’s year at
the home of a wealthy white suburban family. While the family members are
“well-intentioned”, they are of course unable to wholly connect with the girl.
The girl then begins to see spirits in the family’s household, which for her,
reaffirm her of her own slightly unwanted and awkward presence there. This plot
twist inspires both the girl and the
family to connect with each.
Walker found the novel to be a realistically “warm”
portrayal of a difficult human dynamic, and also to be “remarkably free of
cant”. However, she finally understands it to be a conventional and limited
effort, in that it does not push for or encourage long lasting social change,
only for provisional moments of warmth between people of different social
classes: “What one yearns for (and indeed must have if we are to share this
earth as unashamed friends) is a […] family that is radically involved in
changing society, not merely giving succor to its oppressed”.
"Choice: A
tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
“Choice: A tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” is the
transcript of a 1972 speech that Walker delivered in a Jackson, Mississippi
restaurant, which up until around that time, had refused to serve people of
color. In the speech, she discusses King’s legacy and what it meant to her. The
word “choice” in the speech’s title refers to what Walker sees as one of King’s
greatest legacies: the fact that he made it possible for Southern black people
like herself to remain in or return to the South based on their own decision.
Walker states that prior to King, it was standard and practically expected for
Black Southern people to leave their hometowns as they were generally driven
away. Despite their attachment to the land, they were pushed away whether it be
by poverty, racism, or overall heartbreak with the horrors of the American
south. However, King, through his “acts” and “books,” was able to restore Black
folk’s sense of connection to their land and furnished them with enough pride
to claim it: “He gave us back our heritage”.
"Coretta King:
Revisited"
“Coretta King: Revisited” is the title of an interview
Walker held with Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. The
interview takes place in King’s Atlanta home and is subtitled “revisited” as
Walker recalls having interviewed her many years ago, prior to her husband’s
assassination. She was a student at Spelman College at the time, one of a group
of students who were on their way to the World Peace Festival in Helsinki,
Finland. King herself was about to leave for a peace conference in Geneva.
Walker finds the older, widowed King to be more guarded and
introverted than she had been, writing “The first thing I noticed was that her
eyes have changed. They are reserved, almost cool, and she is tense; perhaps
because she has been written about so often and because she is bored with it”.
Nevertheless, Walker still finds her to be an impressive
force to be reckoned with, a beacon of light on her own terms. King remained
involved in political campaigning and often sang in “Freedom concerts”. She
directed the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, working out of the
basement of their home and aided by Mrs. Farris, King Jr’s sister. Walker and
King discuss feminism, social justice, and the role of non-violence in the
Movement. The disengagement of many Black women with the feminist movement
frustrates Walker, and she asks King for her thoughts on this to which King
replies that she can understand why Black women might not want to concentrate
only on women when they feel that their entire people need saving; however, she
also believes that “[t]he Black woman has a special role to play”
"Choosing to
Stay at Home: Ten Years after the March on Washington"
In this essay, Walker recalls her participation, as a
college student, in the March on Washington, where she heard Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. speak. She contrasts the view of him that she had in Washington, as a
powerful, charismatic speaker, with an earlier impression that she had of him
when she saw him speak at Atlanta University: “It was a surprise […] to find at
the March on Washington that the same voice that had seemed ponderous and
uninspired in a small lecture hall was now as electrifying in its tone as it
was in its message”. Walker recalls how King inspired her, and other Southern
Black folks like her, to return to the South and to reclaim their Southern
heritage. She remembers how, growing up poor and black in Georgia, she had
often felt like “an exile in [her] own town”, despite feeling an overall
connection to the landscape. As a young aspiring writer, she had always most
loved and admired writers whose writing showed a connection to their landscapes
and nonviolence, she maintains that “[i]t is very difficult to get people
beyond the point of seeing nonviolence as something you do in marches and
demonstrations.
"Good Morning,
Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest"
This is a review of a collection of poems by Langston
Hughes, edited by Faith Berry. The poems share themes of revolution and
protest, and Walker notes that Hughes was little-appreciated as a poet of
social change. She discusses Hughes’s interest in communism and his visits to
Russia, which he wrote about in his essay, “The Soviet Union and Color.” He
felt that communism solved the problem of racism, along with other societal
problems, and that Russia as a society was more advanced than the United
States.
“Making the Moves and the Movies We Want”
This is a short review of a movie titled Countdown at Kusini.
The movie was produced by Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. which at the time of
writing, Walker hails as, “the largest black sorority in the world”. The movie,
set in Nigeria, concerns a visiting musician who joins an anti-colonial
uprising. Walker finds the movie flawed in some of its casting choices, but
despite that element and its difficult subject matter, a worthy and inspiring
work writing, “It is basically an upbeat, joyous film, with incredible vistas
of Africa […] and African ceremonies, music, and customs. One leaves the
theater ready to join the next revolutionary battle, not in dejection over how
much there is to be done, but in awe of the possibilities for change once an
oppressed people decides to rise.”
• Walker hopes that Countdown at Kusini will prompt the
women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. to continue producing meaningful
films that shift the narrative. Specifically, she is hopeful that they will
create “one movie a year”. While she is mildly critical of some content, she is
more so pleased with the pushback against the disparaging narrative of Black
women.
"Lulls"
This is a descriptive personal essay, concerning Walker’s
visit to the South (Atlanta, Georgia and Jackson, Mississippi), although she is
now living in Brooklyn. The title refers to “lulls” in political activity, and
Walker’s focus is on the lives of people she knows in the South: family,
neighbors, teachers, and former boyfriends, and the degree to which politics
has altered or not altered these lives. Many of the people to whom she talks,
for example, her childhood friend Joe Harris, have themselves lived up North
and disliked it to the point where they returned home. Other people, such as
her daughter’s old kindergarten teacher Mrs. Cornelius, have remained in the
South and seem content with their lives and their roles in the community.
“My Father’s Country Is The Poor”
This essay concerns a trip to Cuba that Walker made as a
young woman, along with a group of Black American artists. The editors of a
magazine called The Black Scholar sponsored them, while the Cuban Institute for
Friendship among Peoples hosted them. The essay is interspersed with segments
from memoirs by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Cardenal, and Angela Davis, as well as
with poems and journal entries by Walker herself.
"Recording the
Season"
This is a short essay concerning the seven years that Walker
and her husband spent in Jackson, Mississippi, a time that was both joyous and
challenging. Walker recalls the opposition that she and her husband, a white
Jewish integrationist lawyer, faced there, as a racially mixed couple. She
remembers the isolation and frustration that she felt as a new mother
attempting to be a writer and the estrangement that she felt both from her
racist neighbors and from “the scholarly type of revolutionary” who visited her
and her husband from Boston. Walker locates her depression at that time as an
uncertainty about the usefulness of her fiction writing, in this contentious
climate.
Part 3
Section three includes eight essays focusing on issues
pertaining to Black women and the political concerns of the Black American
community. She tackles issues of self-worth and respect and aims to uplift
Black women and men. Walker explores her relationship with other Black women
artists who have used activism and prose to fuel their creative work. She
explores Black women’s relationship with their self-definition. The title essay
begins this section and explores the untapped creativity of older Black women-
both enslaved and descendants thereof. “The garden” is a both literal and
metaphorical symbol, elaborated upon more in this essay as Walker details the
life of her own mother- an accomplished gardener.
"In Search of
Our Mothers' Gardens"
The title essay explores the buried and often untapped
creativity of an older generation of Black women- both enslaved and descendants
thereof. The “garden” in the title is to be understood in both the literal and
metaphorical sense. Walker’s mother, an accomplished gardener, would often draw
attention from strangers who would pause to admire the beautiful blooms in
front of her home. Walker viewed her mother’s gardening as her own way of
“ordering the universe,” an instinct that she believed to be alive in all Black
women, but that was not allowed to be expressed by enslaved Black women.
Ultimately, she believes that the Black woman artist is expressing the thwarted
and misplaced dreams and imaginings of her ancestors, her silenced mother and
grandmothers.
"From an
Interview"
These are excerpts from a 1973 interview with Walker, in
which she discusses her life, beliefs, and work. The interview opens with her
discussing a difficult period in her senior year of college, during which she
was both pregnant and suicidal. Her college friends found her a doctor who
would perform an abortion, and this period ultimately led to the writing and
eventual publication of her first book of poetry, Once. Walker states that ever
since this formative period, the writing of poetry has always come for her out
of a feeling of sadness and despair. Walker also talks about her political
commitments, which for her are linked to her art. She states that she
“believe(s) in change: change personal and change in society” and that she has
“experienced a revolution (unfinished, without question, but one whose new
order is everywhere on view) in the South”.
"A Letter to the
Editor of Ms."
This is a letter of appreciation, regarding a meeting of the
National Black Feminist Organization, which featured the politician Shirley
Chisholm—the first women to run for the Democratic nomination for the President
of the United States in 1972. Walker finds this gathering special both because
it is enjoyable and because it is rare for her to find such consensus and
community: “I realized at the National Black Feminist Organization conference
that it had been much too long since I sat in a room full of black women and,
unafraid of being made to feel peculiar, spoke about things that matter to me”.
"Brothers and
Sisters"
In this short personal essay Walker recalls the sexism she
experienced during her poor, rural, Southern upbringing; a sexism that in
different ways had an impact on both her brothers and she and her sisters. She
recounts how sexist traditions and ways of living ultimately influenced the
paths taken by her brothers and sisters, alike.
"If the Present
Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?"
In what many may view as the most contentious letter found
within the text, “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look
Like?” concerns itself with the issue of colorism. According to Walker,
colorism is “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based
solely on their color”. Walker grapples with the issue as the mother of a
biracial, light-skinned daughter and because of this, searches for a remedy
writing that in order for Black people to be released from the issues of
colorism, they must question this white imposed “fantasy” and “cleave to
reality”.
"Looking to the
Side, and Back"
In “Looking to the Side, and Back”, Walker interrogates the
perception that the Black community has towards Black women who are trapped in
abusive relationships. She believes that this lack of empathy is a result of
the pressure placed on Black women to be both strong and resilient- a pressure
that is imposed both societally and internally.
• At the time of this reading, are you able to pinpoint
personal negative biases towards Black women who are currently in or at some
point remained in an abusive relationship?
• Consider these quotations:
‣ “They could take the black woman as invincible, as she
was portrayed to some extent in my speech (what they heard was the invincible
part), but there was no sympathy for struggle that ended in defeat. Which meant
there was no sympathy for struggle itself—only for ‘winning’.”
‣ “I was reminded of something that had puzzled me about
the response of black people to Movement people in the South. During the seven
years I lived in Mississippi, I never knew a Movement person (and I include
myself) who wasn’t damaged in some way from having to put her or his life,
principles, children, on the line over long, stressful periods. And this is
only natural. But there was a way in which the black community could not look
at this. I remember a young boy who was shot through the neck by racist whites,
and almost died. When he recovered, he was the same gentle, sweet boy he’d
always been, but he hated white people, which at that time didn’t fit in with
black people’s superior notion of themselves as people who could consistently
turn the other cheek. Nobody ever really tried to incorporate the new reality
of this boy’s life. When they spoke of him it was as if his life stopped just
before the shot.”
"To The Black
Scholar"
This chapter is a letter to the editors of The Black
Scholar, in response to an article by Dr. Robert Staples entitled “The Myth of
the Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists”. His essay was a reponse
to feminist sociologist Michelle Wallace’s book, “Black Macho and the Myth of
the Superwoman”. Walker ‘calls out’ Staples and deems his actions reactionary
and defensive, suggesting that “instead of arguing, at once, about whether
there is or is not sexism in the Black community (and how could our community
possibly be different from every other in that respect),” he should look
around. She continues however by pointing out that while Wallace’s book has its
imperfections, they are not the misogynistic issues alluded to by Staples.
Instead, Walker pinpoints that Wallace has a “deep reluctance to criticize
other Black women,” along with a reductive view of the “superwoman”.
"Brothers and
Sisters"
In this short personal essay Walker recalls the sexism she
experienced during her poor, rural, Southern upbringing; a sexism that in
different ways had an impact on both her brothers and she and her sisters. She
recounts how sexist traditions and ways of living ultimately influenced the
paths taken by her brothers and sisters, alike.
Part 4
Silver Writes
The title of this section is a distortion of the term “Civil
Rights”, a phrase that Walker finds to be bureaucratic and incapable of fully
encompassing the contours of the struggle for Black liberation. She titles her
poem Silver Writes, and uses this essay to delve into the meaning of the poem
which she says, “... reveals why the term ‘Civil Rights’ could never adequately
express Black people’s revolutionary goals, because it could never adequately
describe our longings and our dreams, or those of the non-Black people who
stood among us.”
Walker also notes that “Silver Writes” is how older,
southern Black folks tended to pronounce “Civil Rights” and how they “did their
best to instill what accurate poetry they could into this essentially white
civil servants’ term.”
Only Justice Can Stop
A Curse
This short essay concerns the anti-nuclear war movement and
is ultimately a call-to-action for people of color to join the movement, rather
than to give in to feelings of anger and helplessness about a disaster that
they had no part in creating. Walker opens the essay with a lengthy and
elaborate curse that she clarifies was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, in her
capacity as an anthropologist. She then states that “I am sure it was a woman
who first prayed this curse” and that her curse (which involves ruined
farmlands and widespread sickness) is moreover coming to pass.
• This section opens with a curse-prayer by Walker’s model,
Zora Neale Hurston. After reading this introduction, consider the role of
religion and prayer in the Black south and in Black liberation movements? How
does this curse-prayer deal with ideals of forgiveness often found in
monothesitic religions? What is the significance of Walker both validating and
honouring Hurston’s anger?
Nuclear Madness: What
You Can Do
This essay is a consideration of the book Nuclear Madness,
by the pediatrician and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott. It is also, as
its subtitle suggests, a call to action, and like the previous essay it
particularly focuses on people of color: “As individuals we must join others.
No time to quibble about survival being a ‘white issue’.
To The Editors of Ms.
Magazine
This is a letter written in response to an article by Letty
Cottin Pogrebin that appeared in Ms. Magazine, entitled “Anti-Semitism in the
Women’s Movement.” Walker writes that while she has always been sympathetic to
Jewish people, and feels that as an African-American woman she has in common
with them a keen sense of social injustice, she does not approve of Israel’s
actions in Palestine; nor does she support the idea that expressing disapproval
is the same thing as anti-Semitism: “[People] are against [the war on
Palestine] not because they hate Jews (though some of them may) but because
they recognize and condone imperialistic behavior”.
Writing The Color
Purple
This is an essay about Walker’s process of writing her novel
The Color Purple, a novel that ultimately won both the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award and was made into both a movie and a musical. Walker writes
about the restlessness and the financial difficulties that she experienced in
writing the novel, as well as her bereft feelings once her novel was finished
and her characters had “left” her. She began writing the novel in New York City
and found that her characters would not “speak” to her in New York City, nor in
San Francisco once she relocated there. It was only when she found a place in
rural Northern California did her characters begin to express themselves: “And
no wonder: it looked a lot like the town in Georgia most of them were from,
only it was more beautiful and the local swimming hole was not segregated”.
Walker’s daughter, who’d been staying with her father following their divorce,
came to stay with her during the writing of her book. While Walker was
initially worried that her daughter’s presence would be disruptive to her
already lofty writing process and to both her and her characters, her daughter
proved to be a stabilizing influence instead. Her daughter’s adventures in
school even come to inform the plot of the book. She then left for summer camp,
and Walker finished the novel on the day that she left.
Beauty: When the
Other Dancer is the Self
This is an essay about Walker’s blind right eye which was
the result of a childhood accident when one of her brothers shot her with a BB
gun. She uses the space to write about how she came to terms with her partial
blindness, which as a child and eventually a young woman, made her feel
freakish and self-conscious. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, she
withdrew and began to perform poorly in school, even while her family now
repeatedly insisted that she “did not change” (366). A surgery that got rid of
the white “glob” (364) in her afflicted eye helped to restore her confidence,
and she went on to become an academically and socially successful high school
student, earning the title of both valedictorian and homecoming queen.
One Child of One’s
Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s)
The closing essay of the text is about the role of
motherhood in the female artist’s life. It begins with an excerpt from a speech
that Walker delivered on Muriel Rukeyser Day at Sarah Lawrence College, where
Rukeyser, a poet, once taught. In her speech, Walker praises Rukeyser as a
teacher for her refusal to acknowledge divisions between things, including
children and art: “She taught no separations where there are, in fact, none,
which so much of the instruction in the world is expressly for. If the world
contains War, it also contains The Child. If the world contains Hunger, Nuclear
Reactors, Fascists, it also contains The Child”. Walker goes on to recount her
personal experiences in early motherhood, and how she learned to perceive her
young daughter, Rebecca, as an ally rather than a burden. This involved not
listening to a lot of conflicting received opinions, which Walker regards as
“Women’s Folly”, about both the ill-advised “wisdom” of (not) having children
if one is an artist and the advisability of having more than one child so that
they can “keep each other company” (374). Walker remembers being motivated to
get pregnant largely so that her husband would not have to be drafted for the
Vietnam War. She also recalls the difficult time spent as a single mother
teaching in New England, while Rebecca was still a young girl as she herself
was getting accustomed to motherhood and having to adjust to a frequently
hostile and racist environment. Walker ultimately realizes that in an often
harsh and unfair world, her daughter is a comfort, not a burden.
In Search of
Our Mothers’ Garden
Alice Walker’s essay, In Search of Our Mother’s
Garden, talks about her search of the African American women’s suppressed
talent, of the artistic skills and talents that they lost because of slavery
and a forced way of life. Walker builds up her arguments from historical events
as well as the collective experiences of African Americans, including her own.
She uses these experiences to back up her arguments formed from recollections
of various African American characters and events. Walker points out that a
great part of her mother’s and grandmothers’ lives have been suppressed because
of their sad, dark pasts. But all of these are not lost because somehow, these
are manifested in even the smallest things that they do, and that they were
also able to pass it down to the very people that they loved. Our search of our
mother’s garden may end back to ourselves.
Walker builds up her argument by mentioning the
experiences of other people in the essay. One of them is Jean Toomer, a poet in
the early 1920s. He is a man who observed that Black women are unique because
they possessed intense spirituality in them, even though their bodies endure
every aspect of punishment in every single day of their lives. They were in the
strictest sense Saints – crazy, pitiful saints. Walker points out that without
a doubt, our mothers and grandmothers belong to this type of people. By
building up on the observations of Toomer, she was somehow able to show how
hard it was to be a mother or a grandmother or even just a woman at that time,
one reason perhaps is that they are black. The mothers and grandmothers at that
time endured all of this without any hope that tomorrow will be different, be
better. Because of this, they were not able to fully express themselves. They
were held back by their society.
Another black character that she used to build her
argument is Phillis Wheatley, a Black slave girl with a precarious health.
Phillis is a poet and a writer at her own right, but unfortunately, she wasn’t
able to do much with it because she was a slave. She didn’t have anything for
herself, worse, she didn’t even own herself. Her futile attempts for self
expression would be washed up by forced labor and pregnancies. She lost her
health, and eventually her life without fully expressing herself through her
gift for poetry.
Alice Walker used the story of Phillis to establish
the understanding that indeed, African American women at that time were not
allowed or didn’t have the luxury of time to exercise their gifts, to hone
their talents and abilities, and use them to fully express themselves. By doing
so, Walker proves that our mothers and grandmothers lived a boxed life back
then, with no way to channel to them emotions and thoughts other than hard
labor and forced servitude. She pointed out that we wouldn’t know if anyone of
them would’ve bloomed to be poets, singers, actresses, because they never
really had the chance to know what they can do.
By building up her argument using these two accounts,
she is also presenting very strong evidence to her claim. These accounts were
personal experiences of real African American people, and these are not just
isolated cases. These are shared experiences not just by these two but by all
of their people. Walker can confidently say that there is a lot of Phillis
Wheatley in those times, perhaps including her mother and grandmothers. This is
concrete evidence because it is not fictional, it is not imaginary, or
something conceived out of Walker’s creativity. Slavery, forced pregnancies,
poverty, and artistic suppression were the realities during the time of our
grandmothers. No one can deny this, and no one can deny the existence of
Phillis or the accounts of Jean Toomer.
Considering Alice Walker’s authority in her arguments, she could be
considered as an expert, a reliable source of information on the topic. First
off, she is an African American woman, who had her fair share of poverty in her
childhood. She was born and raised by hardworking parents, who really had to
work day and night to provide for their family. Also, she witnesses first hand
that even though her mother may not be a poet or a novelist; she was an artist
in the truest sense. Her artistic side is manifested in her gardens and the
beautiful flowers that she grows. Alice Walker witnessed all of this,
experienced first hand what it was like to be poor and seemingly talentless.
The accounts that Alice Walker used to prove her
points and back up her arguments were African American history that she was all
too familiar with. It may have been shared to her by her families, or simply a
collective knowledge passed down from one generation to another. She is also
well-educated, a wide reader, and an artist. She often cites Virginia Woolf’s A
Room of One’s Own, relating a white woman’s plight to a black woman’s
hardships. She emphasizes that even though she recognizes Woolf’s point about
society’s unfair treatment to women of her time, Walker still believes that
black women suffered the most (Walker). There is simply nothing that could
compare to the artistic suppression that her mother and grandmothers
experienced.
In this essay, she is appealing to a general
audience, with no specific race or ethnicity. I think this essay was written to
highlight the African American women of her mother and grandmother’s time, who
were unable to express their talents and hone it to its full potential. This
essay is written to inform anyone and everyone reading it about their stories,
and of her discovery of her mother’s garden. She was glad to know that it is
possible for African American women to express themselves even unknowingly,
that it is up to us to discover these “gardens.” She is appealing to the
readers in general that even though some people like our mothers and
grandmothers seem talentless or artistically inferior, it doesn’t mean that
they really lack the talent. It just means that were not looking hard enough to
find it.
Alice Walker’s method of using personal experience
and historical accounts allow her to truthfully see and say what has really
happened. She doesn’t have to make up hypothetical events because she already
has a basis for her arguments. Jean Toomer’s recollections and Phillis
Wheatley’s experiences are enough proof of her argument. If some people would
disagree with what she’s saying, she can always go back to their experiences,
to how Phillis suffered without fully using her gift, or what Toomer saw in the
streets in the early Twenties. But because of this, I think Walker is somehow
limited to the sad and pitiful stories of the past. Well, in reality, most of
the stories of African Americans were really sad and pitiful, but still, Walker
failed to mention of any successful artist who rose from the ranks of slaves to
write her own story. It is either this kind of story really didn’t exist at
that time, or Walker just didn’t mention it, since it wasn’t the focus of her
essay.
Alice Walker concluded her essay by saying that
Phillis Wheatley’s mother was also an artist, and that the achievements of
their daughters were in some way brought about by their mothers. Her conclusion
states that the mother is somehow responsible in every achievement of their
daughter. Any artistic output by a person is also a product of their mother.
Indeed, their children are their best creations, their very own wonderful
gardens. This conclusion is related to her method because it goes back to how
Phillis Wheatley’s mother was somehow responsible for her daughter’s artistic
sense, and that beyond the poverty and the hardships that our mothers and
grandmothers experienced during their times, they were still able to
artistically express themselves through their children, their very own
wonderful gardens.
