In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
First edition
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| Author | Alice Walker |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | essay collection |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
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Publication date
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1983 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 418 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 55112154 |
| 818/.5409 19 | |
| LC Class | PS3573.A425 Z467 2004 |
Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose is a collection composed of 36 separate pieces written by Alice Walker. The essays, articles, reviews, statements, and speeches were written between 1966 and 1982. Many are based on her understanding of "womanist" theory. Walker defines "womanist" at the beginning of the collection as "A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female".
In addition to writing about womanhood and creativity, Walker addresses subjects such as nuclear weapons, anti-Semitism, and the Civil Rights Movement. In a 1984 review of the collection, Lynn Munro noted that: "Reading these essays not only gives one a clearer sense of Alice Walker but also countless insights into the men and women who have touched her life." As Munro put it, Walker "captures the voices of unsung heroines" with whom she has crossed paths.
Essays in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Part I:
Within these essays, She speaks about her search for early black writers such as Rebecca Jackson. She speaks of unsung heroines whom she has come into contact with who wish to tell their stories; for example Mrs. Winson Hudson. Hudson, the director of a Headstart center, wished to tell her story so that people would know "the agitation she caused in her community…was not for herself or for any one group but for everybody in the county". However, of all the writers she introduces, Zora Neale Hurston becomes a focal part in this section of essays.
As Walker begins to research the practice of voodoo by rural Southern blacks in the thirties, she becomes aware of Hurston's works. Other than white anthropologists with racist views, Walker finds no one other than Hurston studied voodoo extensively. Hurston's book Mules and Men, a collection of folklore, sparks Walker's interest immediately because it provides all the stories that Southern blacks "had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed…and showed how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are". In her essay, "Looking for Zora," Walker speaks about her trip to Hurston's hometown of Eatonville, FL to discover the life of her ancestral teacher. Despite Hurston's notoriety, when she passed in 1959, she was buried in an "unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery". When Walker arrives in Florida, she purchases a tombstone that reads: "Zora Neale Hurston 'A Genius of the South' Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist 1901-1960". The line "a genius of the South" comes from a poem by Jean Toomer, whom Walker applauds for his "sensitivity to women and his ultimate condescension toward them". Walker's exploration for the black writers of the past connects to her search for the kind of books that are underrepresented in American literature. She confirms this based on her referral to a comment by Toni Morrison: When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which 'accepted literature' is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She said she must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself. Walker's search for 'models' is an attempt to "capture the voices" of writers who are often overlooked and/or forgotten such as Zora Neal Hurston.
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