African American women and feminism: Alice Walker's womanism ...

Marta Mazurek
African American women and feminism:
Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition
of a dialogic encounter
Summary
The paper presents the possibility of dialogue resulting from African American
women’s position at the intersection of feminist critical framework, which gives
priority to gender politics and Black racial/ethnic critical framework, which focuses
on antiracist politics. In the context of marginalization of African American women
in the academic discourse of feminist critical theory, Alice Walker’s proposition of
womanism is analyzed as a possibility of articulating a Black woman’s standpoint,
which allows her to address gender issues within the framework of African American
tradition and culture.
Womanist. 1. From womanish. (Opp. of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible,
not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black
folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,”
i.e., like a woman [...] Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually
and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture [...] and
women’s strength [...] Committed to survival and wholeness of entire
people, male and female [...] traditionally universalist [...] Womanist is to
feminist as purple to lavender .
When the first African American poet Phillis Wheatley wanted to publish her
collection of poems in 1773, she had to undergo a thorough examination before
a group of prominent white male citizens of Massachusetts, who attested in an
official certificate attached to the publication that they had found her “qualified
to write them” . Wheatley was examined in order to demonstrate her intellectual
capacity to have authored the poems, because visible in her highly imitative liter-
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: A Harvest Book Harcourt,
Inc., 1983, p. xi-xii.
H. L. Gates, Jr. and N. Y. McKay: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New
York and London: W.W. Norton&Company, 2004, p. 371.

10 Marta Mazurek
ary production mastery of the Bible and the poetry of Milton, Pope and Gray was
contrary to the eighteenth-century conviction that Black slaves were naturally unable
to create literature, which proved their sub-human position in the chain of beings
and justified the institution of slavery in America. Two hundred and twenty years
after the first African American woman proved her humanity by writing poetry, the
first African American woman Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature
for the outstanding value of her creative writing. Morrison’s novels are not art for
art’s sake, as she claims, but they are tightly linked to the culture and history of her
community. “I write [...] village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the
tribe”, she asserts, adding that her novels “should clarify the roles that have become
obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those
things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment” . In order to write literature
deeply rooted in the African American culture of her community, she incorporates
the major characteristics of Black art, that is oral quality, a choral note, myth, music,
folklore and, most importantly, the trope of the ancestor and memory .
As many other African American women writers, Morrison asserts that she
situates herself within the African American community and its tradition of resisting
discrediting views of the dominant society rather that aligns herself with
the Black feminist model of critical inquiry, “because any model of criticism that
excludes males from it is as hampered as any model of criticism of Black literature
that excludes women from it” . Morrison’s assertion implies that for an African
American woman writer it is more important to create for the nourishment of
the African American community including both men and women than separate
herself from it by assuming a Black feminist stance. Discernible in the essay
Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation is her choice to remain loyal to the politics
of Black nationalism/ethnicity and the rejection of Black feminism as separating
African American women from men. Moreover, Afrocentric values that permeate
the African American family, community, religion and culture point to a value
system that existed before and independently of the system of racial domination,
and reliance on Afrocentric tradition, that is precisely on what differentiates the
African American community from other communities, seems to be particularly
empowering for Morrison, as it is for her characters.
African American women’s anxiety caused by their necessity to choose loyalties,
as Morrison did in her essay, stems from an apparent conflict between feminist
critical framework and African American unity. On the basis of a selection of
T. LeClair: The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison. “New Republic” 1981,
184, p. 26.
T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation. In: What Moves at the Margin. Ed. C. C. Denard.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008, p. 61.
T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, op.cit., p. 64.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 11
African American women’s critical essays this paper demonstrates how Alice
Walker’s proposition of the womanist critical (and practical) perspective might
serve the politics of reconciliation rather than radical separation from feminism
without the necessity to give up commitment to uphold the unity of the African
American community. The presented improvisational analysis of Alice Walker’s
essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens aims to demonstrate womanism’s potential
of employing the politics of a friendly dialogue with feminism to both support
feminist politics and assert its uniqueness by stressing womanism’s rootedness
in African American tradition and culture.
Locating African American women’s standpoint
Responding to the dominant and universalizing academic discourse of poststructuralist
theory in the 1980s, Black feminist critic Barbara Christian articulated
her disappointment with – and the feeling of being “intimidated, devalued” by
– the intellectual hegemony of Euro-American abstract logic that surrounded the
definition of knowledge in the academia . As a woman of color she felt excluded
by what she called “the race for theory”, which she saw as the “takeover” of white
philosophers who had “reinvented the meaning of theory”, seeing that the world
was “fast escaping their political control” . According to her, the popularization
of Western abstract theory as constitutive for the definition of knowledge in
the academia was alien to emerging literatures created by people who struggled
to be heard, that is people of color, feminists, radical critics and creative writers.
Christian felt particularly discouraged by the incomprehensibility of the language
of theory, its prescriptiveness and the tendency to relegate to a marginal position
of “minority discourse” those African American writers for whom “literature is
not an occasion for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishment of their
people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better” .
In her critique of “the race for theory”, Christian also indicates that in their
effort to follow the injunction to theorize – and thus legitimize their place in the
academia – feminists exclude women of color who have always theorized, but
their notion of theory does not necessarily converge with what is considered
academic theory. Consequently, her statement: “my folk [...] have always been
a race for theory” may be interpreted, on the one hand, as pointing to mar-
B. Christian: The Race for Theory. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W. Napier.
New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, p. 280.
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 280.
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 282.
Ibid.

12 Marta Mazurek
ginalization of people of color by the dominant theoretical discourse; on the
other hand, it is claiming recognition for African American women’s thought as
a legitimate source and form of knowledge. More particularly, Christian’s assertion
voiced criticism of globalizing gestures of feminist thought which insisted on the
unified identity of “woman”, basing the construction of this category on shared
experience of gender oppression instead of recognizing multiple cultural, social
and political intersections which define women’s experience.
Christian’s “controversial essay” 10 can be understood as a gesture of separation
from and rejection of the academic theoretical discourse of the 1980s,
as well as a call for opening up space for reconceptualizing Eurocentric epistemologies
and revealing new ways of knowledge which would allow African
American women to define their own experience. By stating that Black women’s
theorizing “is often in narrative forms, in the stories [they] create, in riddles
and proverbs, in the play with language [...] celebrated in the works of writers
such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker” 11 , Christian postulates what might be
called a risky reversal of the theory/creative writing opposition. By repeating
the gesture of postmodern philosophers who abolish the opposition between
theoretical and literary texts, she invites African American women critics to
treat creative writing as theory.
Despite the fact that Deborah E. McDowell critiques Christian’s reversal of
“theory/creative [writing] binarism in order to claim for the literatures of ‘people
of color’ status as ‘theory’” as still giving “primacy to ‘theory’” 12 , the latter’s proposal
might be understood as a shift toward embracing Afrocentric feminist epistemology
in analyzing African American women’s literary output (also postulated by
Barbara Smith over a decade earlier). Such a traditional Afrocentric understanding
of the connections of knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment
focuses on “Black women as agents of knowledge”, that is it concentrates
on such women as “blues singers, poets, autobiographers, story tellers, and orators
validated by everyday Black women as experts on a Black women’s standpoint” 13 .
Consequently, African American women’s thought, which represents – to use the
Foucauldian term – subjugated knowledge as well as their long-standing culture
of resistance to the situation of oppression, forms what Donna Haraway labeled
situated knowledge, challenging the superiority and truth claims of Eurocentric
and masculinists disembodied and detached observation in favor of understanding
that is partial, embodied and located in a specific context.
10
D. E. McDowell: The “Practice” of “Theory”. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W.
Napier. New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, p. 575.
11
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 281.
12
D. E. McDowell: The “Practice” of “Theory”, op.cit., p. 579.
13
P. H. Collins: Black Feminist Thought. New York & London: Routledge, 1990, p. 230, 231.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 13
In 1990 Black sociologist Patricia Hill Collins pointed to the revolutionary
potential of placing African American women’s experience at the center of analysis
of processes of domination in the redefinition of “either/or dichotomous
thinking of Eurocentric, masculinist thought” 14 . This role is crucial due to the
fact that African American women are most profoundly affected by the interlocking
systems of race, class and gender oppression “within a more generalized
matrix of domination” 15 . African American women’s experience of oppression
rejects the possibility of applying additive models, that is of analyzing race, class
and gender as competing hierarchical frameworks for analyzing oppression (as
racist and economic and sexist) but calls for a new theoretical framework of
intersectionality, which is a paradigm viewing race, class and gender (sexuality,
age and ethnicity might be added here) as mutually constructing systems of
power, which both shape and are shaped by African Americans 16 . Assuming
the intersectional paradigm has allowed Collins to analyze how excluded groups
of African Americans may be penalized and simultaneously enjoy privilege
depending on the context. For example, Black men may be penalized by their
race but are privileged by gender in their race, while white women are penalized
by their gender but are privileged by their race. Consequently, an individual
might be a member of an oppressor and an oppressed group at the same time.
Black feminist critics, for example, are penalized by their race and gender but
they are simultaneously privileged by their class (as is sometimes pointed out
by womanist and Africana critics).
On the one hand, this particularly vulnerable, intersectional position of African
American women has made it necessary for them to constantly interrogate
feminist thought which has colonized colored women in the gender framework
that neglects the role of racism. On the other hand, they interrogate African
American antiracist politics which gives priority to “race as a consensus issue
[because it affects all group members] while assigning gender and sexuality
a secondary status as crosscutting issues [because they affect only certain segments
of the group]” 17 . As a result, African American women are engaged in
a dialogic relation with feminists (as women and as colored persons) and with
Black men (as colored persons and as women), simultaneously and respectively
affirming identity with and asserting difference from both groups which assign
colored women marginal positions in their discourses and politics 18 .
14
P. H. Collins: Black Feminist Thought, op.cit., p. 225.
15
P. H. Collins: Black Feminist Thought, op.cit., p. 226.
16
P. H. Collins: Black Sexual Politics. New York & London: Routledge, 2005, p. 351.
17
P. H. Collins: Black Sexual Politics, op.cit., p. 47.
18
M. G. Henderson: Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary
Tradition. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W. Napier. New York and London:
New York University Press, 2000, pp. 348-368.

14 Marta Mazurek
Drawing on the selected propositions voiced by Christian, Collins and Henderson,
I will analyze the implications following from the dialogic position of
a womanist as an outsider-within, which Alice Walker first assumed in an effort
to creatively re-articulate a Black woman’s standpoint and engage in dialogue in
her commitment “to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” 19 .
Very helpful in this analysis is the anthology titled The Womanist Reader – a much
needed “compendium of womanist scholarship”, documenting over a quarter
century of womanists’ creative and scholarly output, as the editor and contributor
Layli Phillips asserted in her illuminating introductory analysis 20 .
Phillips associates the absence of any systematic treatment of womanism
with two phenomena, namely the exhaustion of the debates within feminist
critical theory at the end of the 1990s, which foreclosed the possibility of any
serious discussion on the significance of this perspective for academic feminism.
Moreover, the fact that womanism has been widely employed rather intuitively
than analytically since the mid-1980s outside the academia resulted in its transformation
into “a venerable and persistent underground movement” 21 . The lack
of a systematic theoretical analysis of womanism on the one hand contributed
to its resistance to canonization and accessibility to people living in different
cultural context, which also proves its productivity and relevance as a “polyvalent,
polyvocal, dialogic, noncentralized and improvisational” perspective 22 . On
the other hand, however, womanism became less visible and misunderstood as
merely a version of feminism.
Additionally, what may have discouraged feminist critics from embracing
womanism as an acceptable academic proposition in the 1980s and 1990s was its
endorsement of Black nationalist assumptions and racial separation from (white)
feminism, which seems to be implied in Walker’s distinction between “womanish”,
that is responsible, mature and serious, associated with black women, and “girlish”,
that is “frivolous, irresponsible, not serious”, associated with feminists 23 . Moreover,
womanists’ “vernacular loyalties and grassroots sensibilities”, accessible language
and explicitly spiritual character excluded them from the academic discourse of
poststructuralism despite the fact that they propose building community around
lines of affinity – a feature which allows Phillips to call womanism “postmodernism
at street level” 24 . Phillips admits that some womanists, labeled “race women”, do
19
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: A Harvest Book Harcourt,
Inc., 1983, p. xi.
20
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2006, p. xix.
21
L. Philips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xix.
22
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxi.
23
P. H. Collins: What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond. In: The Womanist Reader.
Ed. L. Phillips, op.cit., p. 59.
24
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxx, xxxii.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 15
place their anti-sexist politics within Black cultural framework rather than align
it with feminist framework; however, their position should be seen as antiracist
rather than antifeminist 25 . Womanism and feminism can be then viewed as potentially
mutually supportive rather than exclusive or competitive.
The assumption that it is possible for womanism to reconcile feminist and
Black nationalist perspectives can be discerned in dialogue, which is one of the
womanist methods of social transformation aiming at collective well-being. Dialogue,
“by which people express and establish both connection and individuality”,
is “a site for both struggle and love” and is associated with the kitchen table
metaphor, which connotes the woman in the centre, nourishment, egalitarianism,
interpersonal relations and, last but not least, informality 26 . The kitchen table
metaphor very neatly underscores the vernacular character of womanism, which
Phillips connects with “the every day” 27 , possibly echoing Alice Walker’s first use
of the term “womanist” in her 1979 story Coming Apart. In the story, Walker’s
narrator states the following: “The wife has never considered herself a feminist
– though she is, of course, a ‘womanist’. A ‘womanist’ is a feminist, only more
common” 28 . This emphasis on the “common” aspect points to the womanist perspective
as one that results from the suppression of African American women’s
self-definition in traditional sites of knowledge, which relegated the expression
of Black women’s consciousness to such “alternative sites as music, literature,
daily conversation, and everyday behavior” 29 . However, dialogue as a womanist
method may also be considered as acknowledging the African presence in
African American culture, which insists on the African-based call-and-response
dialogic pattern preserved in the Black vernacular oral tradition.
Making Woolf ’s text speak
Alice Walker’s 1974 title essay of the collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
is an example of a dialogic re-visioning of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, through
which the colored woman both asserts her difference from the Eurocentric
category of “woman”, that is – to use Henderson’s distinction – enters into
dialogue of contestation, and acknowledges affinity with Woolf, that is enters
into dialogue of affirmation, to signify her position. Consequently, Walker’s
essay might be read as a womanist “kitchen table” dialogue, to which Woolf is
25
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxxiv.
26
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxvii.
27
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxiv.
28
A. Walker: Coming Apart. In: The Womanist Reader. Ed. L. Phillips, op.cit., p. 7.
29
P. H. Collins: Black Feminist Thought, op.cit., p. 202.

16 Marta Mazurek
invited and in which she plays a part equal to those of other African American
female participants. The rhetorical gesture performed by Walker invoking the
feminist icon is as “outrageous, audacious [and] courageous” as the womanist
herself, according to Walker’s definition 30 ; however, it cannot be interpreted in
terms of a reversed (and thus matriarchal) pattern of Bloom’s theory of literary
tradition known as anxiety of influence.
Walker’s incorporation of the well-known fragments of Woolf ’s canonical
text into her own critical production is a strategy which Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
defined as “Signifyin(g)” – “generated from within the black tradition itself [...]
a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary
tradition” 31 . In other words, Walker’s essay might be understood as a translation, or
a repetition with a difference, of Woolf ’s text, with which it has a lot in common,
and through/against which Walker asserts herself. This strategy can be illustrated
on the basis of the following passage as an example:
Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis [Wheatley],
that ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert
‘eighteenth century’, insert ‘black woman’, insert ‘born or made a slave’]
would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some
lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert ‘Saint’],
feared and mocked at’ [...] 32 .
In the fragment Walker fills in the gaps in Woolf ’s text to broaden its appeal;
thus, by inserting the historical context of slavery and racism that shaped African
American women’s history she seems to criticize the feminist icon’s Eurocentric
vision that excluded colored women from her text. Consequently, this gesture could
be treated as pointing to Woolf ’s sins of omission on the one hand; on the other
hand, paradoxically, Walker re-writes fragments of A Room of One’s Own precisely
to express herself and the African American tradition that shaped her as an artist
through this text. She does it by inserting Black womanhood in the spaces of the
white woman’s text, and thus making room for her own voice.
In order to find herself in the white woman’s canonical text, the colored woman
has to make this text speak to her, which she achieves by the strategic application
of the traditional African American trope defined by Gates as the Talking Book.
Gates associates the first occurrence of the Talking Book trope in one of the
very first narratives of enslavement, written by Gronniosaw, An African Prince,
30
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, op.cit., p. xi.
31
H. L. Gates, Jr.: The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xx, xxi.
32
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. In: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose,
op.cit., p. 235.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 17
As Related by Himself in 1774. Gates starts his analysis of the trope by quoting the
famous passage of Gronniosaw’s narrative, in which the narrator describes how
he unsuccessfully tried to hear the master’s book talk to him by literally putting
his ear close to it, which brought Gronniosaw to the (only logical for him) conclusion
that everybody and everything despised him for his blackness. Gates sees the
book’s refusal to speak to the Black man as the renaming of “the received tradition
in European letters that the mask of blackness worn by Gronniosaw and his
countrymen was a trope of absence” 33 . The fact that Gronniosaw could not hear
the book indicates that this “canonical text of Western letters – either the Bible
or the prayer book” – could not see him or hear him, as “texts can only address
that which they can see”, concludes Gates 34 . On the one hand, Gronniosaw’s
conflation of vision and voice, that is the visual and the oral, is paradoxical; on
the other hand, it becomes logical in Gronniosaw’s narrative, in which the text’s
voice “presupposed a face; and a black face, in turn, presupposed the text’s silence
since blackness was a sign of silence, the remarkably ultimate absence of face and
voice” 35 . Many years later, Gronniosaw managed to undo the relationship between
silence and blackness by writing his autobiography, “a text that speaks his face
into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition”, thanks to
the fact that he “was fully able to structure the events of his life into a pattern
that speaks quite eloquently, if ironically, to readers today” 36 .
The trope of the Talking Book, as analyzed by Gates, is illustrative of the
tension “between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the
spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary
discourse”, which has been addressed by Black writers since the eighteenth
century, when slaves attempted to prove their humanity “by literally writing
themselves into being” 37 . Hence, Gates connects the paradoxical trope of “the
oral within the written” as notions of voice/presence and silence/absence with
African American literary tradition 38 . The recourse to the Talking Book trope
demonstrates that Walker, by literally finding “a room of her own” in Woolf ’s
essay, makes this text speak with a Black voice.
Walker is of the opinion that an African American woman artist has to align
herself with “the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not al-
33
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 137.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 138, 142.
37
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 131.
38
Ibid.

18 Marta Mazurek
lowed to know” 39 , and thus to attest to African American women’s artistic talents
which were never recorded in letters for the simple reason that their enslavement
prevented them from learning to write. In her personal account, Walker points to
her mother as a source of the artistic spirit in her as follows:
[N]o song or poem will bear my mother’s name. Yet so many of the stories
that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I
fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of
her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of
the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the
knowledge that her stories – like her life – must be recorded 40 .
Therefore, by echoing her mother’s manner of speaking in her writing, Walker
assigns to herself a role of a mediator who records in the form of the literary
discourse the African American oral artistic tradition passed down to her by her
mother. By incorporating her mother’s voice in her literary output, Walker acknowledges
her mother’s participation in the dialogue with Woolf.
Walker’s application of the trope traditional for African American literature,
with which she writes herself into being by tailoring her story to the contours of
Woolf ’s text, does not imply that she merely adopts the eloquent pattern to tell
her own story. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens points to Walker’s originality and
creativity as an African American writer, which she reveals through her application
of both the vernacular traditional tropes and rhetorical strategies of the Talking
Book and Signifying. However, another important vernacular strategy, discussed in
Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic publication Characteristics of Negro Expression,
can be analyzed with reference to Walker’s polyvocal and dialogic text, namely that
of “universal mimicry”. In her essentialist analysis of the Black expression, Zora
Neale Hurston speaks of African American mimicry as “an art in itself ” 41 and
underscores that in imitation an individual style is important. Her claim that imitation
is originality is meant to counterbalance the current “views of acculturation
and assimilation as dominant patterns in African American culture” 42 . Hurston
maintains that originality “is the modification of ideas”, and that even “the most
ardent admirer of the great Shakespeare cannot claim first source even for him” 43 .
Gates connects Hurston’s idea of modification with that of re-interpretation, so
39
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 237.
40
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 240.
41
Z. N. Hurston: Characteristics of Negro Expression. In: The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. Eds. H. L. Gates, Jr. and N. Y. McKay. op.cit., p. 1047.
42
L. M. Hill: Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington D.C.: Howard
University Press, 1996, p. 8.
43
Z. N. Hurston: Characteristics of Negro Expression, op.cit., p. 1046-1047.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 19
crucial for his definition of traditional African American Signifying: “Instead,
borrowings, echoes, and revisions characterize modern art of all forms, and
in this ‘new art’ is to be found the truly original” 44 . A recourse to Zora Neale
Hurston, a great modernist African American artist and a model for Walker, is
particularly appropriate in the context of Walker’s reinterpretation of Woolf,
who was herself a fervent proponent and practitioner of modernist literary
methods. African Americans imitate “for the love of it”, claims Hurston, not
“from a feeling of inferiority” 45 , and Gates understands her claim of the false
distinction between originality and imitation as a liberationist gesture: “[F]or
the black writer to suffer under the burden of avoiding repetition, revision,
or reinterpretation is to succumb to a political argument that reflects a racist
subtext” 46 .
By Signifying upon Woolf ’s text Walker makes it speak with a Black voice
and thus enables Woolf to participate in the kitchen table dialogue with other
African American women whose voices are echoed through Walker’s strategy
of Signifying. Walker’s revision of Woolf is performed by Signifying on (that is,
repeating with a difference) Sojourner Truth’s famous assertion “Ain’t I a Woman”.
The strategy of Signifyin(g) on the Black feminist icon, who claimed for
herself the identity of “woman” but, at the same time, rejected the existing
category of “woman” as a false and exclusive construct (because recognizing
only white womanhood), indicates the necessity of turning to the authority of
African American woman’s experience (literally written on her body) shaped
by specific historical, political and economic context (that is, nineteenth-century
racist America). Paradoxically, the gesture performed by strong, tall and
muscular Sojourner Truth, who had to bare her breasts to prove to her hostile
audience that she indeed was a woman, destabilized the constructed category
of woman shaped by nineteenth-century white masculinist ideology of the
angel in the house.
Similarly, Walker’s rhetorical gesture challenged the concept of the woman
as artist proposed by Woolf by the indication that Black women’s artistic tradition
could only be discovered “high – and low”, that is by looking at quilts and
gardens to find an illiterate African American woman as “an artist who left her
mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position
in society allowed her to use” 47 . In this way Walker legitimizes discredited
44
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 118.
45
Z. N. Hurston: Characteristics of Negro Expression, op.cit., p. 1047.
46
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 118.
47
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 239.

20 Marta Mazurek
sites of expression of African American woman’s consciousness and points to
Black feminine art as a marginal and maternal space. Rather than focusing on
official sites of artistic expression of an artist as writer, as Woolf does, Walker
turns to African American women’s everyday practices such as church singing,
story telling and taking care of gardens to trace expressions of their spirituality
and art. In her mother’s daily care of the garden Walker sees artistic expression
of a creator, “[o]rdering the universe in the image of her personal conception
of Beauty” 48 , whose art compels strangers to aesthetic contemplation. Walker’s
mother’s “screen of blooms – sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia,
spirea, delphiniums, verbena” 49 – becomes the artistic legacy that she has left to
her daughter. In the essay Walker identifies with this legacy and pays respect to
African American women’s endurance, which she calls “the ability to hold on,
even in very simple ways” 50 .
In her essay Walker also invites the first African American poet Phillis Wheatley
to participate in the dialogue, not only by invoking her name and history that
illustrate the conditions limiting African American women’s creativity historically
but also by quoting a passage from Wheatley’s poem upon which In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens can be argued to Signify. Referring to Wheatley’s image of the
Goddess with golden hair, Walker explains what Woolf’s “contrary instincts” meant
for a Black slave woman poet who could only resort to the white ideal of femininity
and modes of poetic expression as “the one thing she saw elevated above all
others” 51 . Instead of criticizing Wheatley’s imitative “stiff, struggling, ambivalent
lines [which] are forced on us”, Walker praises her ancestor for struggling to
write and keeping alive “the notion of a song”, despite the fact that she lived “in
a world of barbarians who praised [her] for [her] bewildered tongue” 52 . In her use
of Woolf ’s text Walker seems to repeat Wheatley’s method of using the existing
and available official modes of expression, but she alters it to signify her African
American difference. With this, Walker’s repetition of Wheatley’s gesture reveals
a radical difference, as Walker places herself safely in African American women’s
artistic tradition discovered in their daily lives, which Wheatley could never achieve.
As a result, Walker’s application of the fragments of a white canonical form of
literary expression differs from Wheatley’s attitude of a humble apprentice, who
adopted the authority of universal European patterns, and becomes a declaration
of cultural independence.
48
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 241.
49
Ibid.
50
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 242.
51
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, op.cit., p. 237.
52
Ibid.

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 21
Conclusion
Alice Walker’s proposition of womanism as a standpoint for African American
women to voice their difference from white feminism was formulated in the
1970s in reaction to the marginalization of colored women in the framework
of feminist critical theory and politics, which was caused by feminist focus on
gender oppression and by its embracing of poststructuralist methods in the
scholarly discourse of feminist criticism. Womanism originated then as a sign
of emerging differences between those African American women who, like for
example bell hooks, found feminist agenda sufficient and useful for addressing
issues crucial for them, and those who found it too indifferent to the problems
of racial and classist issues which were for them of vital importance. As a result,
the new political and critical framework of womanism stemmed from the desire
to take up gender issues without turning against men – as womanists believed
feminism did – and to foster bonds between African American women and men
in order to successfully resist racism.
However, womanism does not necessarily entail a radical break from feminism,
and Alice Walker’s essay might be understood as tribute paid to white
feminism as well. One may venture a statement that by making Woolf ’s text
speak with a Black voice Walker emphasizes the importance of A Room of One’s
Own for herself and demonstrates that it also appeals to Black women. I choose
to read Walker’s essay as her aseertion of affinity with the white feminist and
an admiration of how capacious Woolf ’s room is. In the improvised kitchen
table dialogue (which one can imagine taking place in Virginia Woolf ’s room)
Walker does not treat Woolf with disdain; if she did, the conversation would
not be nourishing and strengthening to the interlocutors, and the metaphor of
the kitchen table would fail to operate.
In the ongoing debate on the consequences of embracing womanist agenda,
which some see as a gesture of racial separatism from white feminism and a turn
to Black Nationalist politics, it is also important to explore the possibilities of
womanism as a practical and critical stance which does not easily blend with
Black Nationalism although it relies on African American racial/ethnic solidarity.
African American women, with their position at the intersection of gender
and race/ethnicity politics, face a challenge of how to simultaneously maintain
group solidarity and recognize heterogeneity.

22 Marta Mazurek
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