Everyday Use
Helga Hoel in her paper “Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” identifies this story like “…central in Alice Walker’s writing…” (1) and which “…particularly represents her response to the concept of heritage as expressed by the Black political movements of the 60s” (1). David White in his essay “Everyday Use: Defining African-American Heritage”, wrote: “This was time, when African-Americans were struggling to define their personal identities in cultural terms. The terms ‘Negro’ had been recently removed from the vocabulary, and had been replaced with ‘Black’. There was black power, black nationalism, and black pride. Many blacks wanted to discover their African roots and were ready to reject and deny their American heritage…” (1). In “Everyday Use” Alice Walker describes Dee-Wangero like brilliant representative that “…black power…” which prefer different attributes for representation her characteristic to African: words (Wa-su-zo-Tian-o), cloth in bright colors “…yellow and oranges enough…” (465), jewelry “Earrings gold…Bracelets dangling and making noises…” (465). So, the theme of African-American heritage was very popular in that time.
“Quilts”, like bright example of heritage, are referred to in many of Walker’s works. In “The Color Purple”, she uses to help a dying woman remember the mother of her adopted daughter (159). In her story “In Search of Mother’s Gardens”, she writes about a quilt that was made by an anonymous black woman. “If we could locate this “anonymous” black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmother’s” (14). Alice Walker uses quilts to symbolize a bond between women of several generations. With her story, “Everyday Use”, Alice Walker is saying that art should be a living, breathing part of the culture it arose from, rather than a frozen timepiece to observe from a distance. To make this point she uses the quilts in her story to symbolize art; and these quilts represent her story of...
View Full Essay
