Interpreting Alice Walker
In her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," Alice Walker celebrates mothers and grandmothers as artists who had their creativity repressed. More specifically, she writes about African American women of our mothers' generation who were not given the opportunities to nurture or develop their artistic abilities in the accepted ways, such as writing or painting. Walker writes, “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?” (Walker, 678) The answer is that they found ways by which to express their creativity, even when not supported, with materials found in their everyday life or by telling stories. By doing this, mothers and grandmothers have handed on the creative spark through the generations.
For an example of this everyday life art, Walker writes about her mother. Her mother was a very hard working woman, raising a family and working in the fields next to her husband. Her days started at sunup and ended as the sun went down. To “feed her creative spirit,” as Walker puts it, her mother tended to a garden. Not any garden though, a garden that blooms from early March to late November. People traveled to her mother’s yard to be given cuttings from her flowers. She used this form of art to decorate shabby houses that her family lived in. Just as gardening was her mother’s creative outlet, writing is Alice Walker’s, which brings me to the subject of this paper: what is Walker creating as she writes this essay?
Clearly, this can be interpreted as an informative essay, on the subject of African American women and how their artistic sides have been repressed. She proves that when looking for creative expressions, we must not only look at what is commonly considered art, but we must look at what is not considered art, but can be looked at as artistic. Walker spends the last half of her essay...
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