Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Marta Mazurek
Womanist. 1. From womanish. (Opp. of girlish, i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black
folk expression of mothers to female children, You acting womanish,
i.e., like a woman [...] Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually
and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers womens culture [...] and
womens strength [...] Committed to survival and wholeness of entire
people, male and female [...] traditionally universalist [...] Womanist is to
feminist as purple to lavender.
When the first African American poet Phillis Wheatley wanted to publish her
collection of poems in 1773, she had to undergo a thorough examination before
a group of prominent white male citizens of Massachusetts, who attested in an
official certificate attached to the publication that they had found her qualified
to write them. Wheatley was examined in order to demonstrate her intellectual
capacity to have authored the poems, because visible in her highly imitative liter
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: A Harvest Book Harcourt, Inc., 1983, p. xi-xii.
H. L. Gates, Jr. and N. Y. McKay: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New
York and London: W.W. Norton&Company, 2004, p. 371.
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ary production mastery of the Bible and the poetry of Milton, Pope and Gray was
contrary to the eighteenth-century conviction that Black slaves were naturally unable
to create literature, which proved their sub-human position in the chain of beings
and justified the institution of slavery in America. Two hundred and twenty years
after the first African American woman proved her humanity by writing poetry, the
first African American woman Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature
for the outstanding value of her creative writing. Morrisons novels are not art for
arts sake, as she claims, but they are tightly linked to the culture and history of her
community. I write [...] village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the
tribe, she asserts, adding that her novels should clarify the roles that have become
obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those
things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment. In order to write literature
deeply rooted in the African American culture of her community, she incorporates
the major characteristics of Black art, that is oral quality, a choral note, myth, music,
folklore and, most importantly, the trope of the ancestor and memory.
As many other African American women writers, Morrison asserts that she
situates herself within the African American community and its tradition of resisting discrediting views of the dominant society rather that aligns herself with
the Black feminist model of critical inquiry, because any model of criticism that
excludes males from it is as hampered as any model of criticism of Black literature
that excludes women from it. Morrisons assertion implies that for an African
American woman writer it is more important to create for the nourishment of
the African American community including both men and women than separate
herself from it by assuming a Black feminist stance. Discernible in the essay
Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation is her choice to remain loyal to the politics
of Black nationalism/ethnicity and the rejection of Black feminism as separating
African American women from men. Moreover, Afrocentric values that permeate
the African American family, community, religion and culture point to a value
system that existed before and independently of the system of racial domination,
and reliance on Afrocentric tradition, that is precisely on what differentiates the
African American community from other communities, seems to be particularly
empowering for Morrison, as it is for her characters.
African American womens anxiety caused by their necessity to choose loyalties,
as Morrison did in her essay, stems from an apparent conflict between feminist
critical framework and African American unity. On the basis of a selection of
T. LeClair: The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison. New Republic 1981,
184, p. 26.
T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation. In: What Moves at the Margin. Ed. C. C. Denard.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008, p. 61.
T. Morrison: Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, op.cit., p. 64.
African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 11
African American womens critical essays this paper demonstrates how Alice
Walkers proposition of the womanist critical (and practical) perspective might
serve the politics of reconciliation rather than radical separation from feminism
without the necessity to give up commitment to uphold the unity of the African
American community. The presented improvisational analysis of Alice Walkers
essay In Search of Our Mothers Gardens aims to demonstrate womanisms potential
of employing the politics of a friendly dialogue with feminism to both support
feminist politics and assert its uniqueness by stressing womanisms rootedness
in African American tradition and culture.
B. Christian: The Race for Theory. In: African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. W. Napier.
New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, p. 280.
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 280.
B. Christian: The Race for Theory, op.cit., p. 282.
Ibid.
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African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 13
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Drawing on the selected propositions voiced by Christian, Collins and Henderson, I will analyze the implications following from the dialogic position of
awomanist as an outsider-within, which Alice Walker first assumed in an effort
to creatively re-articulate a Black womans standpoint and engage in dialogue in
her commitment to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female19.
Very helpful in this analysis is the anthology titled The Womanist Reader a much
needed compendium of womanist scholarship, documenting over a quarter
century of womanists creative and scholarly output, as the editor and contributor
Layli Phillips asserted in her illuminating introductory analysis20.
Phillips associates the absence of any systematic treatment of womanism
with two phenomena, namely the exhaustion of the debates within feminist
critical theory at the end of the 1990s, which foreclosed the possibility of any
serious discussion on the significance of this perspective for academic feminism.
Moreover, the fact that womanism has been widely employed rather intuitively
than analytically since the mid-1980s outside the academia resulted in its transformation into a venerable and persistent underground movement21. The lack
of asystematic theoretical analysis of womanism on the one hand contributed
to its resistance to canonization and accessibility to people living in different
cultural context, which also proves its productivity and relevance as a polyvalent, polyvocal, dialogic, noncentralized and improvisational perspective22. On
the other hand, however, womanism became less visible and misunderstood as
merely aversion of feminism.
Additionally, what may have discouraged feminist critics from embracing
womanism as an acceptable academic proposition in the 1980s and 1990s was its
endorsement of Black nationalist assumptions and racial separation from (white)
feminism, which seems to be implied in Walkers distinction between womanish,
that is responsible, mature and serious, associated with black women, and girlish,
that is frivolous, irresponsible, not serious, associated with feminists23. Moreover,
womanists vernacular loyalties and grassroots sensibilities, accessible language
and explicitly spiritual character excluded them from the academic discourse of
poststructuralism despite the fact that they propose building community around
lines of affinity a feature which allows Phillips to call womanism postmodernism
at street level24. Phillips admits that some womanists, labeled race women, do
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: A Harvest Book Harcourt,
Inc., 1983, p. xi.
20
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 2006, p. xix.
21
L. Philips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xix.
22
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxi.
23
P. H. Collins: Whats in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond. In: The Womanist Reader.
Ed. L. Phillips, op.cit., p. 59.
24
L. Phillips: The Womanist Reader, op.cit., p. xxx, xxxii.
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African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 15
place their anti-sexist politics within Black cultural framework rather than align
it with feminist framework; however, their position should be seen as antiracist
rather than antifeminist25. Womanism and feminism can be then viewed as potentially mutually supportive rather than exclusive or competitive.
The assumption that it is possible for womanism to reconcile feminist and
Black nationalist perspectives can be discerned in dialogue, which is one of the
womanist methods of social transformation aiming at collective well-being. Dialogue, by which people express and establish both connection and individuality,
is a site for both struggle and love and is associated with the kitchen table
metaphor, which connotes the woman in the centre, nourishment, egalitarianism,
interpersonal relations and, last but not least, informality26. The kitchen table
metaphor very neatly underscores the vernacular character of womanism, which
Phillips connects with the every day27, possibly echoing Alice Walkers first use
of the term womanist in her 1979 story Coming Apart. In the story, Walkers
narrator states the following: The wife has never considered herself afeminist
though she is, of course, a womanist. A womanist is a feminist, only more
common28. This emphasis on the common aspect points to the womanist perspective as one that results from the suppression of African American womens
self-definition in traditional sites of knowledge, which relegated the expression
of Black womens consciousness to such alternative sites as music, literature,
daily conversation, and everyday behavior29. However, dialogue as a womanist method may also be considered as acknowledging the African presence in
African American culture, which insists on the African-based call-and-response
dialogic pattern preserved in the Black vernacular oral tradition.
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invited and in which she plays a part equal to those of other African American
female participants. The rhetorical gesture performed by Walker invoking the
feminist icon is as outrageous, audacious [and] courageous as the womanist
herself, according to Walkers definition30; however, it cannot be interpreted in
terms of a reversed (and thus matriarchal) pattern of Blooms theory of literary
tradition known as anxiety of influence.
Walkers incorporation of the well-known fragments of Woolf s canonical
text into her own critical production is a strategy which Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
defined as Signifyin(g) generated from within the black tradition itself [...]
ametaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary
tradition31. In other words, Walkers essay might be understood as a translation, or
a repetition with a difference, of Woolf s text, with which it has a lot in common,
and through/against which Walker asserts herself. This strategy can be illustrated
on the basis of the following passage as an example:
Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis [Wheatley], that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert
eighteenth century, insert black woman, insert born or made a slave]
would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some
lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert Saint],
feared and mocked at [...]32.
In the fragment Walker fills in the gaps in Woolf s text to broaden its appeal;
thus, by inserting the historical context of slavery and racism that shaped African
American womens history she seems to criticize the feminist icons Eurocentric
vision that excluded colored women from her text. Consequently, this gesture could
be treated as pointing to Woolf s sins of omission on the one hand; on the other
hand, paradoxically, Walker re-writes fragments of A Room of Ones Own precisely
to express herself and the African American tradition that shaped her as an artist
through this text. She does it by inserting Black womanhood in the spaces of the
white womans text, and thus making room for her own voice.
In order to find herself in the white womans canonical text, the colored woman
has to make this text speak to her, which she achieves by the strategic application
of the traditional African American trope defined by Gates as the Talking Book.
Gates associates the first occurrence of the Talking Book trope in one of the
very first narratives of enslavement, written by Gronniosaw, An African Prince,
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose, op.cit., p. xi.
H. L. Gates, Jr.: The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xx, xxi.
32
A. Walker: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens. In: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose,
op.cit., p. 235.
30
31
African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 17
As Related by Himself in 1774. Gates starts his analysis of the trope by quoting the
famous passage of Gronniosaws narrative, in which the narrator describes how
he unsuccessfully tried to hear the masters book talk to him by literally putting
his ear close to it, which brought Gronniosaw to the (only logical for him) conclusion that everybody and everything despised him for his blackness. Gates sees the
books refusal to speak to the Black man as the renaming of the received tradition in European letters that the mask of blackness worn by Gronniosaw and his
countrymen was a trope of absence33. The fact that Gronniosaw could not hear
the book indicates that this canonical text of Western letters either the Bible
or the prayer book could not see him or hear him, as texts can only address
that which they can see, concludes Gates34. On the one hand, Gronniosaws
conflation of vision and voice, that is the visual and the oral, is paradoxical; on
the other hand, it becomes logical in Gronniosaws narrative, in which the texts
voice presupposed a face; and a black face, in turn, presupposed the texts silence
since blackness was a sign of silence, the remarkably ultimate absence of face and
voice35. Many years later, Gronniosaw managed to undo the relationship between
silence and blackness by writing his autobiography, a text that speaks his face
into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition, thanks to
the fact that he was fully able to structure the events of his life into a pattern
that speaks quite eloquently, if ironically, to readers today36.
The trope of the Talking Book, as analyzed by Gates, is illustrative of the
tension between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the
spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary discourse, which has been addressed by Black writers since the eighteenth
century, when slaves attempted to prove their humanity by literally writing
themselves into being37. Hence, Gates connects the paradoxical trope of the
oral within the written as notions of voice/presence and silence/absence with
African American literary tradition38. The recourse to the Talking Book trope
demonstrates that Walker, by literally finding a room of her own in Woolf s
essay, makes this text speak with a Black voice.
Walker is of the opinion that an African American woman artist has to align
herself with the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not al H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p.137.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p.138, 142.
37
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p.131.
38
Ibid.
33
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lowed to know39, and thus to attest to African American womens artistic talents
which were never recorded in letters for the simple reason that their enslavement
prevented them from learning to write. In her personal account, Walker points to
her mother as a source of the artistic spirit in her as follows:
[N]o song or poem will bear my mothers name. Yet so many of the stories
that I write, that we all write, are my mothers stories. Only recently did I
fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mothers stories of
her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of
the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the
knowledge that her stories like her life must be recorded40.
African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 19
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African American women and feminism: AliceWalkers womanism as a proposition of adialogic encounter 21
Conclusion
Alice Walkers proposition of womanism as a standpoint for African American women to voice their difference from white feminism was formulated in the
1970s in reaction to the marginalization of colored women in the framework
of feminist critical theory and politics, which was caused by feminist focus on
gender oppression and by its embracing of poststructuralist methods in the
scholarly discourse of feminist criticism. Womanism originated then as a sign
of emerging differences between those African American women who, like for
example bell hooks, found feminist agenda sufficient and useful for addressing
issues crucial for them, and those who found it too indifferent to the problems
of racial and classist issues which were for them of vital importance. As a result,
the new political and critical framework of womanism stemmed from the desire
to take up gender issues without turning against men as womanists believed
feminism did and to foster bonds between African American women and men
in order to successfully resist racism.
However, womanism does not necessarily entail a radical break from feminism, and Alice Walkers essay might be understood as tribute paid to white
feminism as well. One may venture a statement that by making Woolf s text
speak with a Black voice Walker emphasizes the importance of A Room of Ones
Own for herself and demonstrates that it also appeals to Black women. I choose
to read Walkers essay as her aseertion of affinity with the white feminist and
an admiration of how capacious Woolf s room is. In the improvised kitchen
table dialogue (which one can imagine taking place in Virginia Woolf s room)
Walker does not treat Woolf with disdain; if she did, the conversation would
not be nourishing and strengthening to the interlocutors, and the metaphor of
the kitchen table would fail to operate.
In the ongoing debate on the consequences of embracing womanist agenda,
which some see as a gesture of racial separatism from white feminism and aturn
to Black Nationalist politics, it is also important to explore the possibilities of
womanism as a practical and critical stance which does not easily blend with
Black Nationalism although it relies on African American racial/ethnic solidarity. African American women, with their position at the intersection of gender
and race/ethnicity politics, face a challenge of how to simultaneously maintain
group solidarity and recognize heterogeneity.
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