Blog Post Number 1

My favorite piece that we have read so far in class is Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. In class today I tried to express how much I enjoyed this section and I will continue to add onto my thoughts via blogger! First off, I loved the positive energy I got from reading Walker’s opinions. In comparison to other woman writers we have read (like George Elliot specifically), she did not put down any female writer. In fact, she praised them for being able to speak their mind and added onto their thoughts with her own opinion. This is what I believe makes a strong writer, being able to see things from other writers perspective and use it to influence their own.

For example, when she talks of black woman writers, she speaks

“What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time? In our great-grandmothers day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood”

This is an extremely powerful quote. We might read a piece of literature written by a black woman and think nothing of it! But if we were to really think of all of the hard ships that black woman had gone through in terms of personal freedom and equality, their writing is now seen on an entire different level. Thinking of this can give you that extra motivation to say “these people had it harder than I did, if they can do it, so can I, and I owe it to them to express my talents since they fought so hard for me to do so”.  Alice Walker definitely took their point of view into consideration and understood how they had personal obstacles to overcome yet still managed to create a piece of literature. She did not look down on other woman; instead she looked up to them.

“Therefore we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some of our great grandmothers were not allowed to know”

-          Since we have more freedom today than our great grandmothers did, we need to continue to fight for it just as they had done for us. These women paved the way for us!

Another direct quote from the reading,

“Who were these Saints? These crazy, loony, pitiful women?
Some of them, without a doubt, were our mothers and grandmothers.”

I interpreted this quote to mean that she believes that somehow, all women share a similar background. We should look up to our ancestors for they have overcome struggles, and if it weren’t for their successes, where would we be today? She does not take things for granted; she seems to be strong and independent because she knows she has a large group of woman writers as her backbone.

Which now leads us to the main reason of why this segment was written.  Of course, it has always been an ongoing argument about where a woman’s place lies. Most argue that a woman belongs in the home, performing chores throughout the day: cooking, cleaning, raising children, etc.  Just as Walker’s mother had been doing her whole life. “But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit?”

It seems as she ‘planted the seeds in her garden’ both figuratively and metaphorically. Her soul, spirit, and creativity had been implanted in her daughter’s soul for her to take advantage of. But the stories that Walker tells seem to come “straight from her mother’s lips” in a sense that her soul had been passed down onto her and her writing is the outlet her mother had lacked during her womanhood. Which now leaves me, the reader, wondering about other woman writers and how their writing might just be coated with traces of their ancestors, and how unbelievably important it is to keep in mind the history of woman writers when reading any piece of literature.