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

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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.
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