“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker

Alice Walker passionately writes about the interesting scenario and struggle of black women in this essay. Not only do black women have to fight against the racist forces of literature and try to accurately portray the plight of the African-American expression, they must also find their own female tongue within their specific ethnicity. To be totally honest, I’m not sure if this essay would fall more under a feminist critique identity or under an ethnic critique category…because it touches on both topics simultaneously.
I can say that as a woman, I could completely grasp the feminist critique effect of the essay. I especially identified with the following quote:
Yet so many stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through the years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.
Women “absorb” the knowledge that their mothers impart, just as men absorb the knowledge that their fathers impart. This is true even if the mother or father is not present—the information comes out indirectly in how a person views the world and acts in different situations (as seen in family studies, etc.). We carry out in our own lives the stories of our mothers, some of whom did not have the privilege of recording their story through written word. This is where the essay moves towards African-American critique.
The freedom to tell the story through writing was essentially unavailable to African-American women, so they had to tell the story through song (linking with Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” with the blues/jazz tradition), or through gardening (like Walker’s mother), and other such methods. Yet these methods are not the methods which make a word or a person immortal. Much like Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s sister, Walker wonders if, because she was subject to slavery and silence by the whip, her ancestor was a genius bursting with creative storytelling ability but could not tell her story.