Walker, Alice - In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

[oyceter]

I had tried to read this around 2003, but got stuck on Alice Walker's insistence on mentioning "womanism" as a thing somewhat separate from feminism, and as a black thing at that.

I picked it up again last week to alleviate some of the anger I was still feeling about the whole cultural appropriation debate stuff. This time, instead of feeling left out or excluded, I found so much comfort in her knowledge that often feminism fails to address racial issues (and class issues, but that's a whole 'nother post). It isn't that the failures of feminism comfort me; they don't. Feminism is one of the axes of my existence, and while I think the Platonic version would address race and class, in practice, it often doesn't. And I find myself torn between feminism and anti-racism, both of which are very important to me, and that's a very uncomfortable place to be.

It feels as though Alice Walker wrote many of these essays about that divide, specifically to address that divide, to say: This isn't fair. This isn't right. We deserve more. We shouldn't be forced to choose.

There's such a sense of strength in these essays, even when Walker's writing about being insulted by all sorts of people for being black, for being female, for being herself. She feels centered and fully aware of herself; she writes about moments of joy as well as moments of pain, and her anger comes from injustice. From this book, I would love to just sit down and talk with her. She finds strength even in the midst of suicidal despair.

I can't even start to say how much I loved this, and I suspect many of these essays will be reread through the years and grow to be close friends.

Comments

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

You might want to look into "third wave" feminism which involves a racial/ethnic critique of the feminism of the 60s and 70s, which was primarily in the US a feminism of upper middle class white women, necessary in a lot of ways but insufficient. In particular, look at Donna Haraway's "The Cyborg Manifesto" and also bell hooks. Or rather, especially bell hooks. hooks was born Gloria Watkins in rural Kentucky, but took the penname bell hooks to honor her grandmother. She uses the name lower case in order to signify the status of black women. Trinh T. Min-ha is another to look at.

[oyceter]

I think I've read a little from them; I've been meaning to look up both the Haraway and bell hooks for quite some time and never quite gotten around to it.

Thanks for the recs!

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

I think you'll enjoy "The Cyborg Manifesto." In addition to raising the issues of ethnicity and race, she also has a nice reaction to what I call "goddess" feminism, you know the kind --in which every woman should revel in the glorification of the divine feminine--which is a kind of feminism I don't have much patience with. It's as if we should all be Belldandy when we're not being Kali.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

While you may be correct about US second-wave feminism, there is a long long history of feminism being dismissed as merely about the dissatisfactions of relatively privileged women, and therefore somehow not to be taken seriously, because they didn't really have anything to complain about. Apart from the fact that in many instances such women were a) only very relatively privileged, indeed possibly only so because women are assumed to acquire their husbands' status b) nonetheless sometimes in a position to be able to articulate and take action about issues of relevance to a much wider constituency of women, certainly in the UK situation there is substantial evidence for significant working-class involvement in feminist campaigns.

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

there was also plenty criticism of feminism (and black nationalism) written by black women in the 1970s-- i would suggest toni cade bambara's anthology 'the black woman', written around 1972 as a good place to start...

[oyceter]

Oh, thank you! I really need to read bell hooks and Audre Lorde too.