On "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" by Alice Walker

Summary:

What is more important than simply chronicling intergenerational or multigenerational learning is the actual learning that takes place between women and their female children. Alice Walker (1983) speaks of both the conscious and unconscious sharing of creative knowledge throughout the African American female's history in the United States. Walker insists that all of our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers were artists whose overwhelming maltreatment by those who sought power over her fed her creative drive.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read...She has handed down respect for the possibilities-and the will to grasp them. (Walker, 1983, p. 408)

By looking at the past and present lives of the women who came before us, Walker suggests that we can blossom into creative beings as well. This can be applied to the ability to share knowledge about survival, resistance, and liberation through artistic expression.

Walker ends her essay by demonstrating her own creative genius when she shares:

They were women then
My mama's generation...
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies...
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves. (Walker, 1983, p. 709)

 

This art was/is activism because it was driven by dreams of multigenerational survival and liberation.  

These women, our foremothers, worked tirelessly ironing and starching white shirts and cooking food while simultaneously learning and sharing knowledge to carry on for generations.

 

 

Reflection:

 

Alice Walker's (1983) "In Search for Our Mother's Gardens" provides an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between the creative, knowledge production and dissemination, and activism. In what ways were our foremothers resisting through artistic expression and teaching by leaving a record of that expression? The research that I am planning to do on the relationship between intergenerational learning and female activism in Detroit's hip-hop communities speaks to this very subject. How much of the teaching/learning that is necessary for survival and liberation actually take place in academic spaces? And, how much is  disseminated through the five elements of hip-hop (emceeing, dancing, visual artistry, deejaying, or self actualization)? These are two questions that I hope will guide my research.

 

 

Citation:

Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mother's gardens. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books.

©Nicole Carter