About book In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (2004)
Alice Walker's life and writing legacy intrigues me. I stayed with this book longer than I normally would have, since some parts of me couldn't let it go. Walker always seems to speak to my experience, to my trajectory, and her words both console and exhort. Yet she's speaking to a larger audience, to America, to the world. For her career starts from Georgia to Mississippi, to California and Cuba, to sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Like Baldwin and Hughes, she was well-traveled, so when she spoke of race and gender issues, she did so from a global perspective. She, a writer who traversed the globe to study various cultures and their race and gender identities. In doing so, she found her ancestry and, she discovered the layered nuance of writers like Toomer: Who were these Saints? These crazy, loony, pitiful women? Some of them, without a doubt, were our mothers and grandmothers. In the still heat of the post-Reconstruction South, this is how they seemed to Jean Toomer: exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey, toiling away their lives in an era, a century, that did not acknowledge them, except as "the mule of the world."What we don't hear much of is Walker's research within academia and literature, how she worked to bring female voices to the forefront (which led to her search for Zora Neale Hurston's out-of-print works and unmarked grave). She loves African women writers as much as she loves Virginia Woolf. She worries about the works of women who made their mark in African and African-American literature, the pioneers so easily forgotten because they're not taught in our universities, and because they're not included in 'American Literature.' What will happen to them? When will egotistical and same-minded university heads get over themselves and allow diversity of thought within our schools by ensuring a diverse faculty and by allowing professors this thing supposedly called "academic freedom," a choice that is antithetical to the infamous and stale 'required anthologies' used in some schools?(After the mini-rant, maybe I'll return for a better review of this…)________________________________And back...I won't go into the personal insults I, or my colleagues of color, have endured within academia; the kind we sit and discuss over coffee, or while at a conference, marveling at the similarity in wording and tone. I won't discuss the conversations I've had with professors of American Lit II, who do not include African American literature. When pressed, some argue that their literary studies did not include a concentration in African American literature. "I studied American Literature in my doctoral program, not African African American studies," one professor told me. I won't go into discussion about the professors who want to teach African American literature as a part of their literature course offerings, but who are told by their department chairs and deans that they cannot. I won't discuss the absence of African literature on most World Literature course offerings. However, I will say that what Walker writes about then (these essays ranging from the 1970s to 80s) are things that sound and feel familiar to me, things I've experienced as a college student and as a college professor, things that still trouble some of my friends who are senior faculty members ( I emphasize some because there are lucky ones who have found great university/communities). I will say that when I quietly offered an educator a solution like the one Walker offers in the following quote, it was seen as ludicrous, that a student should even consider these things: I realized sometime, after graduation, that when I studied contemporary writers and the South at this college --taught by a warm, wonderful woman whom I much admired -- the writings of Richard Wright had not been studied and that instead I had studied the South from Faulkner's point of view, from Feibleman's, from Flannery O'Connor's. It was only after trying to conduct the same kind of course myself -- with black students-- that I realized that such a course simply cannot be taught if Black Boy is not assigned and read, or if "The Ethics of Jim Crow" is absent from the reading list. In reading her works, like her I've had a newfound love for the strength of Camus' style, I've remembered why I love O'Connor's dark and layered prose, and I'm reminded that I need to explore Faulkner more. Yet I'm also mindful of Emecheta, she who sits on my bedside table, and of Petry, she who waits from my shelf. Walker admires the works of Chopin, the Brontes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Doris Lessing, yet unlike some writers of her generation, her admiration for women writers know no racial or cultural lines, for she also admires the works of Margaret Walker, Frances Ellen Harper, and Nella Larsen; as well as African women writers like Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Bessie Head. To her, the importance of exploring women writers was not about simply making a feministic point about male versus female, but at its core, it was about preserving the history and richness of our literary culture, about unearthing truths and humanity through literature. It was because they wrote "on the condition of humankind from the perspective of women."She discusses colorism, an important aspect of race issues. In terse, non-accessorized prose, she writes of the Harlem Renaissance, the Women's Movement, and the conflict in Cuba. With imagery, she lets the reader enter her travel through the life and work of the woman who inspired her: Zora Neale Hurston. In lucid yet simple strokes, she paints the portrait of herself as a mother and daughter; her trajectory as a wife, writer, and activist. Most importantly, she speaks of what it means and feels like to be a woman, a black woman, in America and in the world. The women of China "hold up half the sky." They, who once had feet the size of pickles. The women of Cuba, fighting the combined oppression of African and Spanish macho, know that their revolution will be "shit" if they are the ones to do the laundry, dishes, and floors after working all day, side by side in factory and field with their men, "making the revolution." The women of Angola, Mozambique, and Eritrea have picked up the gun and, propped against it, demand their right to fight the enemy within as well as the enemy...The enemy within is the patriarchal system that has kept women virtual slaves throughout memory. Favorite Essays: "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens""Writing The Color Purple""One Child of One's Own""Looking For Zora""A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children""Saving The Life That is Your Own""Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor"
To future readers of this collection of essays -- first read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. I was very happy that I'd read Hurston's book first because so much of Walker's discourse is about Hurston and her book. We read this book for book club and my basic response was the realization that I learned so much from it -- I almost felt as if I should be taking notes -- and for me, that is an enjoyable feeling. So much info about black writers, the Civil Rights movement, and the perception of color as it relates to white black women and black black women. And while covering such topics, the book still reads quite easily. Very well written.
Do You like book In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (2004)?
The essays in this collection of prose are heavy with the delicateness of feminine power, revealing the strength of and for black women artists. I am not a black woman, so it is very hard to relate to many of the issues Alice discusses in which her mother, grandmother, sisters, friends, etc. went through. While I am aware of the struggles and hardships of the African-American race, I will never fully understand them. I appreciate Alice's ability to present them as immediate works to the fullest, and am inspired none the less. The stories about Zora's grave and the last chapter about the world in her eye will stay with me, but my favorite essay remains In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
—Sarah
Currently re-reading...There are plenty of strong theories here, but I strongly prefer the bits where Walker shares personal rules and anecdotes: a call in the middle of the night; standing on Hurston's overgrown, snake-lurking grave; sharing lunch with her mother near Flannery O'Connor's home; attempting to document older women's lives in the rural south. The writing is funny and inviting within a serious context of critically analyzing race/gender/sex. On the negative side, there's some over-generalization on what black women are like and what we want.
—Alyssa
This collection of essays made me wish that I knew Alice Walker. Her writing is not only inspiring, beautiful, and passionate, but also horizon-widening to those of us who know too little of the Civil Rights Movement, African-American writers, and the experience of being dark-skinned in a society that so highly prizes pale skin. I really respect the thoughtful way that she writes about the world and her personal experiences, tempering passion with the occasional acknowledgment that there may be motives and unperceived forces that will never be absolutely understood.
—Mahjong_kid
