Alice WalkerEssay Preview: Alice WalkerReport this essayAlice WalkerAlice Walker is an African American essayist, novelist and poet. She is described as a “black feminist.”(Ten on Ten) Alice Walker tries to incorporate the concepts of her heritage that are absent into her essays; such things as how women should be independent and find their special talent or art to make their life better. Throughout Walkers essay entitled “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens,” I determined there were three factors that aided Walker gain the concepts of her heritage which are through artistic ability, her foremothers and artistic models.
“In Search of Our Mothers Gardens” touches mainly upon family heritage and the way her heritage was created. In Atwans Ten on Ten, you will find the essay on the Mothers Gardens. On page 83 it states, “For they were going nowhere immediate, and the future was not yet within their grasp.” This quote signifies how mothers and grandmothers would always be set serving the men in their lives; for their entire lives, however, there was a different future, a plan that they didnt see yet. This plan was for them to identify their artistic ability, whether if it was through singing, writing or making quilts.
Throughout the essay, “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens,”Alice Walkers mentions her foremothers. Women like Jean Toomer, Phillis Wheatley and Zora Neale Hurtson, who were all either poets or writers. Mike Fike has also recognized this tactic of Walkers by stating, “Walker engages in a wholistic act of completion by seeking connections with literary foremothers”(Fike 3). Walker takes into account through her fellow foremothers the different issues that they dealt with and tried to expand and include the concepts of independence that appear to be absent in her mind. In the African American Review, Woodard states a similar concept, “indicates how Hurston serves as a model, as Walker formulates, revises, and offers a critique” (Woodard 170).
As Walker uses Hurston as a role model, she develops that idea into her essay as to why every African American woman should have a model, whether through art or heritage. In Donna Haisty Winchells book on “Alice Walker,” Winchell also explains how Walker tries to find the models that African American women should encounter. Walker characterizes, “the absence of models, in literature as in life” as “an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect- even if rejected- enrich and enlarge ones view of existence”(14). This is directly from “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens” It clearly states that
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A lot of artists I know are aware that all African American males are female and in some cases have a better role model than many of them:
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For my work as a young African American and for my own life, there are many models of women who inspire me to seek out, as they did the late Ms. Sainte Maurita, whom I met through the film and book project she was involved with at the age of twenty-four. While this is a very small amount of African American women, it does show how much people in the field think that women’s careers are largely about the role of a father, or of women. And that is a real change since the 1960s, when the field, as the field grows and the role models are made more obvious, the work is far more visible for African women as it has been in the 1970s, when the first African American women had played a major part in American society.
You’ve published a number of memoirs, memoirs of successful people, a memoir of a single person, and a memoir of several people you know. How did finding models help you gain these views and to identify the models who are truly African American?
I’ve identified as, and my personal best is a couple of African American women in that work:
&\I believe the work of African American women is the greatest inspiration I’ve ever had, and it’s a reflection of the amazing work that has come with the great interest and efforts of African American women since its inception.
How has your work helped inspire many women?
I’ve been fortunate to have played many women who are women:
&\In many ways, this is because I’ve been able to speak to a much greater segment of the field and not just African American women who are out-of-print.
Do you think these women are capable of producing works of artistic achievement when compared to white counterparts?
I don’t think that’s so. You should say, in your essay, “I believe that the greater the amount of work we all have to do in our daily lives, the greater the chance that we will someday be able to produce such things as art or literature, that it will be not only true for us, but the greater success of the African American community.”
In fact, it is exactly that. That is because of the tremendous and unique diversity of African American societies.