This writing begins simply, in gratitude. I have found three wise women artists whose works of great beauty and insight have helped me on my way. Each one shares a story of a difficult journey back to her past to fully claim her creative powers. In so doing, each one befriends all of us who dare (or wish to dare) to undertake such journeys. Each one encourages us, in spite of the mixture of despair and triumph that we are likely to experience as we face the deep-rooted sources of our own oppression. Reading their works, we feel that although reencountering our matrices may be bittersweet, the claiming of them is necessary and potentially empowering.

The first model for this journey is Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, a collection of reviews and essays that chronicle a Black woman artist's quest for context that can nourish and challenge her in her life's work. The second is Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, a lyric prose-poetry collection of short vignettes, fragments, or cuentos del corazón describing a young girl's growing up in an urban Hispanic neighborhood. And the third, Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems, and particularly “Sources,” the longer work within it, which portrays a Jewish woman's return, after sixteen years' absence, to a place in New England that had been her home.

As an Anglo-Christian scholar, I embark humbly on this study of the work of three sister artists. I listen to Audre Lorde's warning in Sister Outsider not to pretend to “a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist” (116). Instead, I intend to respond as fully as I can to her injunction to “recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles” (122).

As an academician, I choose these texts for my teaching and writing as part of my own effort in canon re-vision, in engaging in the “difficult dialogues” Johnnella Butler speaks of when she asks us to consider “How does the world really look—and what is there, that was and is that can help us live better in it?” (16). I join her in the search for “A non-hierarchical methodology [that] would refuse primacy to either race, class, gender, or ethnicity, demanding instead a recognition of their matrix-like interaction” (Butler 16). Because I chose these three texts mostly by synchronicity and intuition, I have assembled, without directly intending to, a broadly varied set of works.

As an artist/writer I find each of these stories is like a lost piece of my own. Each one explicitly speaks to, with, and from a specific communal matrix; still, each one has the potential to expand and enrich our sense of the larger matrix for all our stories, for all our woman/human selves. In a sense, they help us consciously to write a larger, more compassionate, and more diversely appreciative human biography, a composite of uniquely different autobiographies that are interwoven in the “matrix-like interaction” named by Butler.

The title images—house, native land, and mothers' gardens—epitomize the bittersweet matrices of these artists' stories. House, native land, and mothers' gardens can represent undeniable sources of power—if only the seeker can overcome their negating, isolating aspects and then claim the positive aspects that create nurturing channels within community. But that community must be carefully chosen, because it, too, can either enslave women or enable them to transform their pain into power.

1

Walker names a possible gift of the community in the dedication for In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: “TO MY DAUGHTER REBECCA / Who saw in me / what I considered / a scar / and redefined it / as / a world.” In the last essay of her book Walker recounts how at age eight, having enjoyed a childhood of adoration as the “cutest” child around, her right eye was blinded by a BB from one of her brothers' guns. She remembers six years of not raising her head because of the “glob of whitish scar tissue, a hideous cataract” on her eye. Only when she was fourteen, after a doctor removed the “ugly white stuff,” did she regain her previous self-confidence.

Of all the memories associated with her eye, the most significant stems from a time when she was 27 and her daughter was almost three. She remembers that every day Rebecca watched a television program called “Big Blue Marble”:

It begins with a picture of the earth as it appears from the moon. It is bluish, a little battered-looking, but full of light, with whitish clouds swirling around it. Every time I see it I weep with love, as if it is a picture of Grandma's house.

(392)

When she went to put Rebecca down for a nap one afternoon, the child took her mother's face between her dimpled hands and said seriously, “Mommy, there's a world in your eye.” Then “gently, but with great interest: ‘Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?’” (393).

Walker ran crying and laughing to look into the bathroom mirror. “There was a world in my eye. And I saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, I did love it.” In a dream that night she danced in loving embrace with a dancer who was “beautiful, whole and free,” who was and is also herself (393).

As one who has felt both the advantages and the humiliations of “white skin privilege,” the story of the whitish scar tissue reminds me that from the context of a woman of color, it has a double meaning. When Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, writes about herself as “the new mestiza,” she urges Anglos to delve into the restorative “spiritual life and ceremonies of multicolored people” in order to “lose the white sterility they have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries, and missile bases” (69). She reminds us that “Though in the conscious mind, black and dark may be associated with death, evil and destruction, in the subconscious mind and in our dreams, white is associated with disease, death and hopelessness” (69).

From the point of view of autobiographical writing, Walker's story also exemplifies the “self” of Black autobiography that manifests more as a member of an oppressed group seeking freedom than as a lone individual. Bernice Johnson Reagon writes of Black women's autobiographical writing as “cultural autobiography”: “We are, at the base of our identities, nationalists. We are people builders, carriers of cultural traditions, key to the formation and continuance of culture” (81, as quoted in Friedman 43). Thus Walker's eye/I comprehends a compelling image that links her with her daughter and her mother's house, her people and the home they have made in an alien land. “Home” also becomes fuller in its meaning as she connects it with the Earth itself. To be “beautiful, whole and free” as a Black woman within a dominant White culture requires such multiple disentanglements, such multiple layers of brave insight.

These three women artists seek a healing vision both personal/individual and communal/planetary in scope. Telling of this story of the beloved image of the world that she loves “as if it is a picture of Grandma's house” and of her daughter's seeing the world in her eye are Walker's gifts. They are the sweetness distilled from the bitter experience of the compounded oppressions of racism and sexism; they are the boon wrested from whoever or whatever wounds our eye/I.

This story bears a blessing for all of us: may this loving vision vouchsafe our daughters against the bitterness we have seen and suffered. May they keep this vision alive for us, their mothers, for themselves, and for their/our own daughters and granddaughters to come.

2

Sandra Cisneros dedicates The House on Mango Street “A las Mujeres/To the Women,” the women she loves but whose lives she cannot use as models for her own. Her protagonist is a young girl named Esperanza, whose name means hope and also sadness and waiting in Spanish. Esperanza also loves Mango Street and yearns to leave it. She describes her family's house as “small and red with tight little steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath” (8). She tells her friend Alicia that 4006 Mango is not the house she wants: “No, this isn't my house I say … I don't ever want to come from here” (99). She dreams, instead, of a house “with my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories (100).” And nobody to scold or pick up after: “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (100).

If Esperanza doesn't find this dream house for herself, she knows she may end up like the lady down the street who is homesick for her lost Puerto Rican “pink house, pink as hollyhocks,” or like Rosa Vargas and Minerva whose husbands left them alone with a house full of kids. Or she might become like her own namesake great-grandmother and other women like her beautiful friend Sally, lonely at windows, who “sit their sadness on an elbow” because their jealous husbands have locked them in. Esperanza says “I am an ugly daughter. I am the one nobody comes for” (82). But that is far safer than to be like Sally “the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke” of whom her father says “to be this beautiful is trouble” (77).

The development of Esperanza's consciousness parallels that of her creator. Cisneros grew up in a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago. Like Esperanza, she told herself “I've gotta get out of here!”, yet she recognized also that the power of her voice as a writer would always be deeply connected with her heritage: “My stories are dedicated to women. They are stories from my mother and from other [working-class] women in the barrio. They are stories I lived and stories my students lived, the stories of voiceless women” (Britt 5). Knowing that she is writing stories never before put down on paper, Cisneros finds that “It's an amazing and wonderful time to be alive, and to be a Latina writer” (Fletcher 25).

She started The House on Mango Street at the University of Iowa, accidentally discovering her own voice in rebellion against the prevailing poetics of the prestigious Writers' Workshop. “I knew if I wrote about the flat where we lived on top of a Laundromat in Chicago, other writers couldn't touch it. They didn't know the language I grew up in” (Britt 5).

Cisneros seems to have taken the advice that her three aunts, las comadres (the voices of her necessary community!) give Esperanza: “When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street” (98).

Cisneros's work shows us how an artist may transform a Mango Street from a patriarchal, ethnic minority prison into a vehicle of success within a dominant culture. But no matter how delighted we are (I am!) with the prose/poetry product—the vivid laughter of sisters “all of a sudden and surprised like a pile of dishes breaking,” who live in a “house with its feet tucked under like a cat,” the stunningly poignant evocation of adolescence's dreams and dangers—the matrix is deeply bitter and sweet.

In an Afterword for The House on Mango Street, the editors of Arte Publico Press describe it as chronicling “the psychological and social development of a writer who struggles to derive emotional and creative sustenance where material and educational resources are absent. Her sensitive portrayal enchants us and reaffirms our belief that art and talent can survive, even under the most adverse conditions” (103). For those women who have in any way known the dangers of such a matrix and escaped it, the fact that they will “always be Esperanza” is an enduring gift/curse. In a general way, any woman who has been fortunate and persistent enough to gain a sense of her own personhood in a patriarchal society has a sense of the fragility and importance of her achievement for herself and for other women—and men. …

4

The epigraph for Alice Walker's book contains an extended definition of “Womanist” that in part seems to expand upon Rich's “edges that blur”: A women who is “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: ‘Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?’ Ans.: ‘Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented’” (xi).

For Walker and for other Blacks in the South especially, she traces the growth in empowerment that has come from choosing to leave, to stay, or to return. “Black writers had generally left the South as soon as possible. … But their departure impoverished those they left behind” (164). They knew that “to stay willingly in a beloved but brutal place is to risk losing the love and being forced to acknowledge only the brutality” (143). She says this changed after Martin Luther King “gave us back our heritage,” a “continuity of place, without which community is ephemeral. He gave us home” (145).

Walker lays solid claim to this heritage:

No one could wish for a more advantageous heritage than that bequeathed to the black writer in the South: a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility as well, for we must give voice to centuries not only of silent bitterness and hate but also of neighborly kindness and sustaining love.

(21)

This declaration seems to sum up the message that Cisneros and Rich give in their works, perhaps not always so fully or directly (owing partly to differences in genre and length of the works compared). We can and must return to the bittersweet matrix, acknowledge it. It commands a responsibility from its artist progeny and offers particular sources of strength for them in carrying out their tasks. For Walker the central image of strength, of the “neighborly kindness and sustaining love” is “our mothers' gardens.” Of her own mother she writes: “Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms …” (241).

Walker notices that “it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. … Her face as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life”. (241-42).

In an interview, Walker talks about a poem, “Revolutionary Petunias,” and its “incorrect” heroine, Sammy Lou: “she does not even know how ridiculous she is for loving to see flowers blooming around her unbearably ugly gray house” (267). Sammy Lou represents to her “all-around blooming people” who, like petunias, “bloom their heads off” in any kind of soil. The poem reminded her also of a lone lavender petunia bush her mother had told her husband to rescue from a deserted house yard they had driven by in their wagon. Thirty-seven years later she brings her daughter Alice a piece of that same bush when her granddaughter is born.

Walker claims this story (“almost a parable”) for her work: “In a way, the whole book [In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens] is a celebration of people who will not cram themselves into any ideological or racial mold. They are all shouting Stop! I want to go get that petunia!” (268).

5

I have been encouraged by the journeys that these three women have recorded in these three evocative works. They tell us that from our detested scars may come beloved worlds, from the sad houses of streets we want to leave forever may come the stories that give us life, and from the sources of dis-ease may come the healing gift of art. They tell us of bittersweet matrices that keep them awake, conscious, compassionate: they remind us that our sources, including our own bodies, may become in Rich's words “resource, rather than a destiny” (quoted in Spelman 126). The three varied forms of autobiographical story telling here show us the richness of the transformative modes available for this resource claiming. (In women's work, my own included, the boundaries between genres often are blurred, a freeing up of the restrictions of form.)

Audre Lorde's assertion that “poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women” (116) opens important awarenesses of the “effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art” (116). More questions in such vein are to be asked, as we might ask why even Hispanic writers must bend their ideas into English (though writers like Anzaldúa show us the rich intertexturing of English and Spanish in their writing). Still, our autobiographies—whether personal essay, transmuted prose/poetry fiction, poetry, or a mixture of these forms—may, in all their differences, enlighten us about “the edges that blur.”

We do not know from what deserted house yard we may gather up the living sign of strength and beauty that may sustain us and our beloved community—if we have the courage to return to our bittersweet matrices and claim it. But we must also caution ourselves that this is not a work without danger; there are those who return and do not reemerge—for a very long time, or ever. It is also a work of extraordinary complexity, demanding our sensitive patience as well as a vulnerability to transformation. Despite, or perhaps because of this danger and this complexity, however, this is a necessary work we do for ourselves and for each other. In it we risk what we must, in our deep desire to see us all “beautiful, whole and free.”

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/aunt lute. 1987.

Britt, Bonnie. “In Literature, Writer Sandra Cisneros Sees Power,” Houston Chronicle, 24 June 1984: 8:5.

Butler, Johnnella. “Difficult Dialogues,” Women's Review of Books, VI.5 (February 1989): 16.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. 2nd revised ed. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1988.

Fletcher, Melissa. “Sandra Cisneros,” San Antonio Light, 8 March 1987: 24-5.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women's Autobiographical Selves,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P, 1988: 34-62.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1984.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “My Black Mothers and Sisters or On Beginning a Cultural Autobiography.” Feminist Studies 8 (Spring 1982): 81-95.

Rich, Adrienne. Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems. New York: Norton, 1986.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8.1 (Spring 1982): 109-131.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1984.