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

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.