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

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.