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

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.