alice walker in search of the garden

lice Walker’s essay, In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, talks about her search of the African American women’s suppressed talent, of the artistic skills and talents that they lost because of slavery and a forced way of life. Walker builds up her arguments from historical events as well as the collective experiences of African Americans, including her own. She uses these experiences to back up her arguments formed from recollections of various African American characters and events. Walker points out that a great part of her mother’s and grandmothers’ lives have been suppressed because of their sad, dark pasts. But all of these are not lost because somehow, these are manifested in even the smallest things that they do, and that they were also able to pass it down to the very people that they loved. Our search of our mother’s garden may end back to ourselves.

Walker builds up her argument by mentioning the experiences of other people in the essay. One of them is Jean Toomer, a poet in the early 1920s. He is a man who observed that Black women are unique because they possessed intense spirituality in them, even though their bodies endure every aspect of punishment in every single day of their lives. They were in the strictest sense Saints – crazy, pitiful saints. Walker points out that without a doubt, our mothers and grandmothers belong to this type of people. By building up on the observations of Toomer, she was somehow able to show how hard it was to be a mother or a grandmother or even just a woman at that time, one reason perhaps is that they are black. The mothers and grandmothers at that time endured all of this without any hope that tomorrow will be different, be better. Because of this, they were not able to fully express themselves. They were held back by their society.

Another black character that she used to build her argument is Phillis Wheatley, a Black slave girl with a precarious health. Phillis is a poet and a writer at her own right, but