In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

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What are the main points in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens?

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"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" makes the central point that black women have always been artists who found outlets for their creativity and spirituality in the applied arts, as well as in storytelling and singing. The essay gives various examples of such creative power.

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The principal point Alice Walker makes is that black women have often shown intense spirituality and creativity in a way that was, and remains, generally unappreciated.

Walker begins by pointing out how black women have been so abused that they have often seemed to become "Saints" without any sense of selfhood, existing entirely to be used by others. However, Walker argues, these women were really frustrated artists, afforded no outlet for their creativity by society. Sometimes these women were able to find some means of self-expression, as Phillis Wheatley did in her brief, painful life. Walker responds powerfully to Virginia Woolf's contention that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write, by pointing out that Phillis Wheatley was a slave who did not even own herself, yet she managed to be a poet nonetheless.

Other anonymous black women have found ways to express themselves through arts...

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and crafts. A quilt which is now in the Smithsonian, made by a black woman in Alabama, shows the "powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling" of its creator. Black women have expressed their creativity through singing and telling stories, as well as through such arts as quilt-making and painting their houses. Phillis Wheatley's mother, in Africa, may well have been such a woman, and black women today can find their own creativity by searching for the ways in which their mothers expressed themselves.

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Alice Walker's In Search of our Mothers' Gardens is a series of essays informed by what she calls "womanist" theory. She defines "womanist" as related to black feminism, and she writes about the history of black women who, in spite of the racism and harsh conditions around them, nurtured a sense of spirituality that was intense but whose depth they themselves did not totally appreciate. In the post-Reconstruction South, these women were what Walker calls "exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey." This "evil honey" was the brutality with which they were treated, as, in Walker's word, "mules." The work of the world was forced upon them, and they were considered the workhorses and even the matriarchs of the world around them. Walker attempts to redefine and elevate the history of black women—a history that has often been overlooked.

Walker writes that despite the harshness of their existence, black women allowed their spirits to soar and to reach heights of creativity. They had the souls of artists. Walker points to the example of Phillis Wheatley, a slave in the 1700s who managed to use her gift for poetry. Walker also discusses the career of Zora Neale Hurston, who was a literary genius but who had an unmarked grave when she died. Even though black women were overworked, they produced art through objects such as quilts. And Walker's own mother "adorned with flowers every shabby house we lived in." Walker suggests that black women are still strong because of their mothers' gardens, a metaphor for the ways in which the black women before them exercised their own soulful creativity despite the burdens they bore. In several essays, Walker also examines the Civil Rights movement and the importance of its leaders and goals, seeing it as a quest for human rights.

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Many specific points of interest emerge from Walker's collection of essays.  I think that one of the most overwhelming is that the artist's journey is one the embraces freedom to construct both their own identity and the shape of their world.  Walker delves into this through reflection about self and society.  At the same time, one of the critical points that arises from the work is that the current artist owes a great deal to those that preceded and as large of a debt to those who follow. Walker stresses that the artist is not isolated from a social and political commitment to others.  This takes the form of being able to identify forces that compel one to model themselves in the light of others.  For example, Dr. King is one such model for Walker, herself.  Another is the role of other writers such as Hurston.  In this light, Walker creates both a sense of intellectual intertextuality and a sense of solidarity between those that precede the artist and those that follow.  This creates a powerful dynamic where one understands their own artistic freedom, but also grasps the need to guide it towards end that connect the artist to others.

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What is Alice Walker's thesis in "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"?

Alice Walker argues that though black women were kept from pursuing their artistry and spirituality, they found ways to pass it on to future generations. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens details the spirituality and artistry passed down between generations of black women, how the lack of an outlet affected the older generations, and what the lack of an outlet means for their descendants. Walker says that she was guided by her mother's strength in continuing to follow her passions—even when it was difficult to do so.

Walker begins by discussing how generations of black women were kept from expressing their talents. She discusses the case of a woman, a great-great grandmother, who was a genius but died at the hands of an overseer. The same woman could have been a skilled painter but had to spend her days working for slaveowners. She could have been a skilled sculptor; instead, she had to bear children "who were more often than not sold away from her." 

She asks how it is possible that women continued to create and pass down such a rich set of talents and spirituality to their daughters and granddaughters. It was a crime for a black person to read or write. How many writers or poets were lost in generations of people who were forced to be illiterate? 

Walker tells the story of her mother, who ran away at seventeen to marry her father. She had many children and spent her days running the household; she made clothes, canned food, and worked in the fields with her husband. She asks the reader, "But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?" 

In response, Walker discusses a quilt hanging in the Smithsonian. It is not made with any kind of known pattern, and it tells the story of the Crucifixion. The note under it credits it to an unknown black woman from Alabama in the 1800s. Walker says the quilt "is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling." The woman worked in the mediums she had, with the time and tools she was allowed, to express something spiritual and artistic inside of her.

In the same way, Walker argues, the mothers and grandmothers of black women have handed down their passions and creativity. Walker's mother, too, shared this with her in different ways. One way was her way of telling stories; she spoke with an urgency to pass those stories on. Another way she shared that creative spark was through her gardening. She gardened and decorated their house with flowers. She says:

Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms-sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on.

People came to her mother for flowers; people praised her ability to make beautiful things grow. Walker says her mother was radiant and absorbed in the work she was doing when she was gardening. Through her mother's passionate creativity, Walker was able to find her own. In the same way, she says, other women have passed down that spirituality and artistry to their descendants. 

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