Exploring Creative Kinships and Finding Black Women Voices with Alice Walker’s Anthology

How does the Black woman writer-artist come of age in a world where the only available role models are White and/or male; how does the Black woman writer-artist survive the “oppression of silence” forced upon her purely because she is Black and a woman; and where are the Black creative women the young writer-artist may turn to? Alice Walker’s meditations in her 1983 anthology of essays, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens, are motivated by these three key questions.

Long before coming across this book, I had read Alice Walker’s famous Ms. magazine essay about Zora Neale Hurston, in which Walker recounts the story of the Southern Black woman novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist who was a leading figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. She details the poverty and obscurity that marked the end of Hurston’s life and her burial in an unmarked grave. This essay was first published in 1975, more than a decade after Hurston’s death. The forty-odd works of fiction and non-fiction that the prolific writer produced during her lifetime had been out of print for even longer. What Walker undertakes in this essay was an act of literary excavation, reclaiming Hurston from obscurity and restoring her forgotten legacy for future generations. That Walker is deeply invested in this search was evident throughout the essay, but the reasons that prompted her to go looking for Zora in the first place remained less clear.

That point of clarity emerges in this 1983 collection of essays, In Search of my Mother’s Gardens and this book provides the wider context in which to understand the need to unearth Zora and her literary legacy. Walker tells us what it’s like to be a Black woman writer and artist in a deeply hostile world, and why reclaiming the lost and hidden creative expressions of her Black foremothers is key to her survival.

We are introduced to Walker as an emerging Black woman writer in a racist and sexist world, struggling to come into her own. As a young college student, the only literary role models available to her are White and/or male. And so, Walker’s search for Zora–and other forgotten Black women like Phillis Wheatley, Rebecca Johnson, and Nella Larsen–is an attempt to rediscover and restore the stories of creative Black women with whom she can identify, and whose artistic and spiritual expressions can inspire her own.

This book is in some sense Walker’s archival project. She positions these little-known stories as her gift and legacy to future generations of Black women. However, there is a lot in this rich repository that will appeal to readers everywhere. As a South Asian reader, I find that the context in which Walker is writing is far removed from my own. And yet, having grown up on a steady diet of the classics–dominated almost entirely by male authors–it is not difficult to relate to the young Walker’s sense of alienation from the White-male literary canon. For someone interested in the question of feminist solidarity, Walker’s kinship with the creative Black women who came before her offers another point of identification.

Throughout this collection, Walker is preoccupied with looking for her female literary ancestors and understanding her own relationship with them. She is equally interested in exploring the role of the Black writer and artist in dismantling the systems of oppression that led to their invisibility in the first place. Unearthing these stories is her act of resistance against Black women’s erasure. Equally, it is an act of care: Walker restores to the Southern Black community the knowledge of and appreciation for their rich and beautiful heritage. Her essays cover a broad range of topics but ultimately converge into one key point: that her survival as a writer was in large part dependent on the creative kinship she forged with her Black foremothers.

Reclaiming ancestral knowledge, forging community

Written between 1966 and 1982 in the post-Civil Rights era in the United States, Walker’s essays echo the underlying themes that characterise her oeuvre: racism and sexism outside and within the Black community, the role of the artist, the relation between art and life, and spiritual growth and self-definition. But at their core is the importance of ancestral memory and community within Black culture. Like the benevolent ancestor figures in Toni Morrison’s fiction are a voice of wisdom, Walker’s literary foremothers inspire and influence her writing and activism. The phrase “womanist prose” in the book’s title signifies the creative kinships and intimacy that are forged between generations of Black women through this sharing of ancestral knowledge.

The 36 essays in the collection take on diverse forms–personal statements, speeches, articles, and literary and cultural critiques–but are mediated by the author’s voice so that the effect is more autobiographical than ethnographic. Together, they trace Walker’s evolution from student to poet, writer, activist, historian, and teacher; though these roles are often fluid and overlapping. In the arrangement of essays, Walker and editor John Ferrone have opted for a thematic rather than a chronological approach. Each of the four sections, despite some overlaps, tells as much a story as any of the individual articles and the overall collection.

In Search. . . of a role model

Accordingly, the first section begins with the collection’s overarching theme: the search for the Black woman writer-artist as an ancestor figure or a role model. In Saving the Life That Is Your Own, Walker speaks to the artist’s need for models to identify with, emulate, and learn from. In a deeply unequal world, however, the “right” model is more easily available to some than others. Through four years of college, Walker encounters “not one word about early Black women writers.” Instead, the only literary role models available to her are White and/or male. The young Black woman writer may find valuable lessons in the tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh and the wry empathy of Flannery O’Connor but, at the same time, is left traumatised by the racism of William Faulkner. The White and/or male author, for her, can only be a precarious role model.

The violence of white dominance in recorded archives becomes most evident when Walker begins collecting material for a story about voodoo practices among Southern rural Black communities in the 19th century. She has a ready repository of oral histories in her mother’s stories about root doctors of the South but the search for recorded histories yields only the works of male “all White, most racist” anthropologists whose ruminations invite little confidence, filtered as they are through the White gaze. It is the chance discovery of Hurston’s 1935 autoethnographic Mules and Men in the footnote of one of these texts that finally provides the basis for Walker’s short story. Without this record of “authentic Black folklore, viewed from a Black perspective,” Walker’s story may have remained untold. This is precisely what provokes her insistence on the Black female role model.

Stories of intergenerational teaching abound in this section. We learn of the Black Southern activist Winson Hudson who, after her house is bombed more than once by the Ku Klux Klan, writes an autobiography to leave a record for her community; of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emacheta’s female Black immigrant protagonist in the semi-autobiographical Second-Class Citizens who writes a novel addressed to “the adults her children will become”; of the anonymous older Black women who persist in learning their own history so that they can, in turn, teach the children of the community. Walker finds in the commitment of these women to pass on their stories the “sense of community” inherent in the Southern Black experience. Through these stories, free of the distortive White male gaze, she hopes that young Black women will find their own.

In Search. . . of the artist in the revolution

If the first section traces Black continuum through literature, in the second Walker shifts her focus to activism. This group of essays focuses on the Civil Rights Movement, its legacy, its key figures, and the role of the Black artist or writer in it. Martin Luther King’s influence on Walker is evident throughout the section. Just as the discovery of Hurston’s words infuses in Walker a feeling of continuity with her

literary ancestors, King’s call to Black Americans to reclaim the South as “home” gives her, and all Southern Black people, “a continuity of place.”

The role of the artist, Walker says, is to “write” the revolution and extend this continuity to future generations. Raging at her own early “miseducation” devoid of the works of Black authors, she entrusts the Black writer with the role of the “remedial teacher” who must create and preserve an archive “of things our people should know, of works they should read.” Indeed, this is a task Walker is already doing through this book. Essays in this section record her interviews with Coretta Scott King and the exiled Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton. In others, Walker documents Black Southern life both preceding and in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and looks for lessons from the Cuban Revolution for anti-racist activism back home.

Of the four sections, this is perhaps the most relevant for contemporary readers. Standing at the cusp of the 80s, Walker is both despairing and hopeful about the future of the anti-racist struggle in the United States. Many of the issues she raises in the book–police brutality against Black people, the ghettoisation of poor Black Americans in inner cities, all-White reading lists in universities–have intensified or taken on new forms in its aftermath. The resurgence of White supremacist provocations under the Donald Trump administration, the escalation of racialised police violence, the simultaneous pushback against anti-racist feminist movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name, and the furious rejection of calls to decolonise university curriculum are all evidence that the refusal to acknowledge Black lives and perspectives in the present-day United States is as entrenched today as it was when Walker wrote these essays.

Yet, Walker’s hopefulness is borne out by contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter which keep alive the sense of continuity that she is rooting for. Born 50 years apart, the movement galvanised the same frustration with police brutality as the Black Panther Party, and combines the Black Power Movement’s structural critiques of White supremacy with the tactics of Civil Rights-era disobedience. The #SayHerName campaign echoes Walker’s fight to recuperate the stories of forgotten and anonymous Black women by committing to public memory the women and girls killed in police violence.

In Search of. . . creative kinships

The autobiographical turn of Walker’s essays intensifies in the third section as she shifts the gaze inward to talk about her own evolution as a writer. The title essay, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, which forms the apex of this collection, is a rumination on Walker’s relationship with the generations of Black female ancestors whose creative excellence, forever hindered and intruded upon, found imaginative ways to manifest and survive. She traces this artistic endurance through primarily two figures: her mother and Phillis Wheatley, a slave woman of the 1700s who became the first African-American and the second woman to publish a book of poetry.

Walker’s incisive juxtaposition of passages from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own with Wheatley’s story, “the slave girl who owned not even herself” let alone a room with a lock and a key, reveals the stifling burden of racism on Black women’s creative expressions. Yet, Wheatley’s poems, held up to ridicule for over a century, managed to survive. In Walker’s imagination, her poetry bore the “signature” of an unknown artist-mother, just as her own mother Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker left an imprint on the author’s lines.

Besides the half-finished and oft-repeated stories, Walker also sees her mother’s legacy in the many flourishing gardens she raised. It is in this context that she uses the metaphor ‘our mothers’ gardens’. The garden is a material manifestation of Minnie Lou’s artistic expression but it is also a symbolic affirmation of the “muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit” of the Black woman. In these symbolic ‘mothers’ gardens’, Walker says, future generations of young Black women will find their own.

In keeping with Walker’s enduring theme of exposing and challenging sexism within the Black community, the essays in this section dwell on the dismissal of Black women’s written work by Black male authors and reviewers. Walker writes of Black feminist spaces which turn a blind eye to the sexism of Black men and treat Black lesbian women as anathema. She also scrutinises colourism within the Black community, including early Black literature where the figure of the working-class, darker-skinned Black woman does not exist except as a problem or a joke. It is not enough for the Black woman writer to create and preserve past archives, Walker says building on her earlier arguments in the book. She must also “present a fuller picture of the multiplicity of oppression” and write into existence those Black women who found no place in the archives of the past.

Walker’s use of the autobiographical form throughout this collection, but especially in this section, is reminiscent of other critical anthologies in the canon of Black feminist literature. Like Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) and Sister Outsider (1984) and June Jordan’s On Call: Political Essays (1985) and Technical Difficulties (1992) which often start from personal anecdotes to bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of racism and sexism on Black women’s lives, Walker too delves into the self to visibilise these intersecting systems of oppression.

In Search of. . . among other things, mothers and daughters

The cohesion of the first three sections are missing in the final one where essays on the antinuclear movement and the Israel–Palestine conflict are clubbed with the author’s reflections on her childhood, motherhood, and mother-daughter relationships. The two essays that round up this collection are a meditation on the compatibility of writing with motherhood, bringing to the fore an issue that dominated (predominantly White) feminist debate of the 1960s and 1970s.

Walker acknowledges that the apparent tension in simultaneously inhabiting the roles of mother and writer is a product of “the racism and sexism of an oppressive capitalist society.” Yet, her ruminations on whether the physical act of giving birth reduces her to a womb and her insistence that having more

than one child reduces the writer-mother to a “sitting duck” also reflect an ambivalence towards motherhood that would later be criticised, perhaps rather unjustly, in her daughter Rebecca Walker’s 2007 book. In the final essay, One Child of One’s Own, it is clear that Walker’s ambivalence does not crowd out affection. “We are together, my child and I,” she writes, “Mother and child yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.”

In any case, the note of ambivalence is perhaps a fitting end to a volume of essays that does not shy away from critiques of what the author holds dear. Walker challenges sexism, colourism, and classism in the Black community even as she affirms the richness and beauty of its heritage. She lays bare homophobia and mistrust of interracial relationships in Black feminist spaces even as she finds in them moments of solidarity and joy.

Ambivalence is also what marks Walker’s relationship with some of the figures who occupy these pages. The author’s relationship with her father Willie Lee Jones is strained but not devoid of empathy or affection. Her admiration for Flannery O’ Connor, the first (White) female Southern writer she read and loved, is laced with tension. On a trip with her mother to their former home and the home of O’Connor down the road, Walker finds the author’s house still standing while their own abandoned sharecropper shack rots into dust. The disparate states of their homes becomes a marker of the difference that race makes to the lives–and afterlives–of Black and white artists through legacies of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In O’Connor’s house, Walker sees a “symbol of [her] own disinheritance.”

These ambivalences allow Walker to resist singular narratives and present the same event or person from multiple perspectives. In each essay, she is far more interested in exploring loose threads, questioning, and soul searching than in arriving at final conclusions. Like Morrison, Lorde, and Jordan, Walker makes extensive use of symbols, archetypes, and myths throughout this collection. The use of specific symbols like O’Connor’s house and her mother’s garden, for instance, allows Walker to dwell on the complexity of racial and gender power dynamics without resorting to broad-strokes essentialism. The use of myths is less obvious in this collection, but there is an interplay of history and fantasy in Walker’s retelling of Hurston and Wheatley’s stories that resonates deeply with Saidiya Hartman’s work.

Understanding womanism

Walker positions the collection as “womanist prose,” introducing four meanings of the term womanist–“a Black feminist or feminist of color”; “a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually” and is “[c]ommitted to survival and wholeness of entire people, male or female”; and a woman who “[l]oves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself.” The fourth and final usage is a comparison, defining womanist in relation to feminist “as purple to lavender.”

Walker often uses the term womanism interchangeably with feminism, but through these definitions, she situates it firmly within Black culture to articulate and challenge the unique position of Black women–doubly marginalised for being both Black and female. In this, Walker’s womanist worldview finds parallels with Lorde’s exploration of the “erotic” as the source of Black women’s power and the Combahee River Collective’s definition of Black feminism.

Some scholars suggest that womanism is one of the many concrete definitions that Black feminism acquired through the years, others identify contradictory agendas in the two terms, and yet some others find commonalities since both are ultimately concerned with Black women’s struggles against sexism and racism. In any case, womanism like Black feminism was a response to the historic exclusion of women of colour and Black women from White (middle-class and heterosexual) feminist spaces and discourses which, as Walker puts it, are “unable to imagine Blackness and feminism in the same body, not to mention within the same imagination”.

At its core, womanism articulates a Black feminist consciousness oriented towards community. The emphasis on community, or more specifically, the shift from alienation toward kinship within Black culture and among Black women, is a running theme in Walker’s prose and poetry. The young female protagonists in her second novel Meridian move from isolation to intimacy through their participation in the Civil Rights Movement. In The Color Purple, Celie moves out of her isolation through her kinship with Nettie, and later with Sophia, Squeak, and Shrug and finally with African communities. This similar shift toward kinship, guided by a womanist ethos, imbues this 1983 collection of essays as well. Gathering the stories of Black female writers and artists who came before her gives Walker a sense of belonging that cuts across time and space. In the fable-like essay Writing The Color Purple, Walker also finds kinship with the imagined characters who populate her novel.

The search lives on…

While creative kinships form the very crux of this collection, its starting point is Black women’s lived experiences of racial and gender oppression. As a Black woman author writing about this double marginalisation, Walker is writing both from and about the margin. At the same time, she offers an archive of persistent and collective histories of resistance and survival of the Black community, especially Black women. In this, the margin in her work is more than a site of deprivation, it is a site of resistance, or in the words of bell hooks, a space from which to offer “a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds”.

Walker’s alternate world centres the untold stories of Black women like Hurston, Wheatley, and even her mother, in a radical reversal of a racist and sexist world where they experience only derision, neglect, and oblivion. She is able to do this precisely because of her own lived experience at the margin: as a young Black woman writer she has no knowledge of or access to the artistic expressions of Black foremothers.

This void that Walker encounters is, however, a productive space. It is the vantage point from which she conceptualises the womanist worldview and embarks on a search for the words and legacies she can reclaim and inherit as her own. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is a rich archive of this search but it is also more than that. By documenting herself, her writing, and her activism in this book, Walker offers it as a gift for future generations of Black women. The book is, therefore, an ode to the creative kinships between Black women as well as a conduit for the intergenerational transfer of the knowledge.

This article was first published by the Literature Collective, Belongg.

Recommended Reading

1. The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (1980)

2. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984)

3. On Call: Political Essays by June Jordan (1985)

4. Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union by June Jordan (1992)

5. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman (2019)

6. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond by Patricia Hill Collins (1996)

7. Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (New Yorker, July 2020)

8. #SayHerName movement of the African American Policy Forum

9. Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter–parallels and progress (The Conversation, November 2015)

10. Queen of the Harlem renaissance by Gary Young (The Guardian, May 2003)