In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

In these essays, Walker reveals herself to be a creative and solitary person who is also politically engaged—not only in the struggles of her own African-American community, but in the feminist movement, the socialist movement, and the struggle for Palestinian rights. In a 1983 letter to Ms. Magazine—in which she accuses the writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin of being too narrowly concerned with her own Jewish community—Walker writes: “Every affront to human dignity necessarily affects me as a human being on the planet, because I know every single thing on earth is connected” (353). In the two essays in this book on the dangers of nuclear war, Walker exhorts people of color to join in the anti-nuclear movement, rather than dismissing it as a “white issue”: “No time to claim you don’t live here, too” (345).

At the same time, Walker reveals herself in these essays to have a classically artistic temperament. She is sensitive, restless, prone to depression, and needs a substantial amount of time to herself. In a 1973 interview, she writes about the period of darkness and isolation that preceded her first published book of poetry. In her essay “Recording the Seasons,” she also details the darkness that has visited her on and off throughout her life: “Always a rather moody, periodically depressed person, after two years in Mississippi I became—as I had occasionally been as a young adult—suicidal” (224). In an essay on the writing of The Color Purple, Walker describes the amount of moving around that the book necessitated, in order that her characters be able to “speak” to her. She writes that she finally ended up writing the book in an isolated spot in Northern California, where she was able to commune with her characters without too much distraction from the outside world.

Walker’s artistic temperament and her political engagements are sometimes in conflict; at other times, the one informs and deepens the other. As a political person who longs for “revolution,” Walker sometimes has a sense of the decadent privacy and seeming inutility of being a fiction writer: “Unable to murder the oppressors, I sat in a book-lined study and wrote […] In short, I could see that I felt Art was not enough and that my art, in particular, would probably change nothing” (226). As a fiction writer, on the other hand, Walker is often frustrated by the dogmatism and narrow-mindedness of much political art. In a speech on the “duties of the black revolutionary artist,” Walker cautions her audience—members of the Black Students’ Association at Sarah Lawrence College—against this sort of dogmatism: “It is boring because it is easy and requires only that the reader be a lazy reader and a prejudiced one […] A man’s life can rarely be summed up by one word; even if that word is black or white. And it is the duty of the artist to present the man as he is” (137). 

Yet Walker’s artistic temperament also gives her a receptivity to the world that allows her to see beyond political partisanship of different kinds and to see that “every single thing on earth is connected” (353). In her 1973 interview, she speaks of the appreciation that she felt for the world even while she was considering committing suicide: “In those three days, I said good-bye to the world […] I realized how much I loved it, and how hard it would be not to see the sunrise every morning, the snow, the sky, the trees, the rocks, the faces of people, all so different […]” (247). In her essay “Recording the Seasons,” Walker makes a different sort of peace with the usefulness of her art. She realizes that fiction writing is valuable for recording consciousness, moments of quiet change that are not given much time in the noisier and more impatient realm of political activism. During periods of apparent political stagnation, when little social progress seems to have been made, fiction writing can remind an oppressed community of its own visibility: “Fifteen years of struggle would seem to have returned many of us to the aspirations of the fifties […] And yet, there is a reality deeper than what we see, and the consciousness of a people cannot be photographed. But to some extent, it can be written” (228).