How In 'Burial And While Love Is Unfashionable'

Alice Walker speaks of her mother and grandmothers’ dark pasts of slavery and discrimination throughout their lives. Although women through the years have had it tough, colored women have and continue to have a deeper struggle within society. Alice Walker’s essay is inspiring and heartwarming because it tells of how the women in their lives have found beauty within a dark part of history. Her mother although had little, found a sense of identity with the joy of her own vibrant garden. She speaks a lot about how many people of color continued to keep their identity and spirituality in a time where they could have been discouraged. I think that Walker’s essay is really eye opening because so many women have struggled before us to pave the way for women of all

Alice Malsenior Walker, an African American born into poverty, came into this world on February 9, 1944 in Eatonon, Georgia. She was the youngest child of eight children born to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walkers. Both of her parents were sharecroppers as well as expert story tellers. Things were not easy for the Walkers and Alice often witnessed her mother’s frustration of having the burden to take care of eight children with little means. Even though children of share croppers were usually made to work the fields, Alice’s mother made sure that her kids received an education. Alice was brilliant at writing poetry.

In “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”, Alice Walker looks to educate us on the hardships that almost all black women face when trying to express themselves through things such as art. She delves into many sociological and psychological concepts that have affected black women throughout human history. These concepts and ideologies created a realm for mass exclusion, discrimination, and oppression of many African American women, including Alice Walker’s Mother, who Alice utilizes as one of her particular examples. The writing thematically aims to show how these concepts of sexism, racism, and even classism have contributed to black women’s lack of individuality, optimism, and fulfillment for generations. The author does a tremendous job of defending and expanding upon her arguments. She has a credible background, being a black woman that produces the art of literature herself. As well as being raised by one, Walker’s first-hand experience warrants high regard. Therefore, her use of abstract and introspective language is presented clearly and convincingly. Also, her use of evidence and support from sources like Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and Phillis Wheatley, all produce more validity for her stance through poems, quotes, and even experiences. All these individuals have their own accounts pertaining to the oppression of black women and their individuality. Successfully arguing that the artistry plights of black women described in “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” are

Gender inequality was a big issue during the early 1900s, and especially for the African American women because some “Africa American women were used as sex slaves or just slaves in generally” (Karpowitz). These women were treated badly even if it was from their dad or their "husband"/owners, but at the end of the day they knew only one person who these women can trust which is God. In Alice Walker’s novel, she shows and expresses how women will have bad times or bumps on the road, but if they keep going towards their dream they will succeed. Walker also showed how women did not have a voice to stand up for themselves but later in their life they started getting together to fight back for their rights. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker demonstrates gender inequality in the lives of African Americans in the early 1900s.

Walkers essay is great of getting her audience to reminisce on the past by describing some childhood memories of life on the farm with the use of her beautiful language to share an image in Walkers memory.

Two-year-old Alice Walker was as boastful and energetic as they come. She was a product of her environment;

Alice Walker wrote ‘The Color Purple’ in order to capture and highlight the hardship and bitterness African-American women experienced in the early 1900s. She demonstrates the emotional, physical and spiritual revolution of an abused black girl into an independent, strong woman. The novel largely focuses on the role of male domination and its resulting frustrations and black women’s struggle for independence. The protagonist, Celie’s, gain of an independent identity, away from her family, friends, work, and love life, forms the plot of the novel.

Like it was previously stated, the author is primarily targeting black women to encourage them to appreciate what their female ancestors suffered through to keep their heritage and spirit alive. However, Walker may have also had the intent to inform other audiences what it was like to be an African American woman in history. To accomplish her aims, she used certain types of style and tone that were very effective. Her stylistic approach was the use of many different examples. She tells the heartbreaking tale of little Phillis Wheatley, a "sickly, frail black girl" who was taken from her home as a small child to live and die as a slave in America. She includes a short passage written by poet Jean

     Alice Walker is an African American essayist, novelist and poet. She is described as a “black feminist.”(Ten on Ten) Alice Walker tries to incorporate the concepts of her heritage that are absent into her essays; such things as how women should be independent and find their special talent or art to make their life better. Throughout Walker’s essay entitled “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” I determined there were three factors that aided Walker gain the concepts of her heritage which are through artistic ability, her foremothers and artistic models.

“Woman is the mule of the world”, Zora Neale Hurston once quoted in her famous novel “Their Eyes were Watching God.” For centuries this statement has proven as true; it’s even more accurately seen through the lives of African American women in past decades. What Toni Morrison displays in her novel Beloved is a glimpse into the harsh realities of life as an African American enslaved woman who endures the tragedies of rape, torment, and the pains of choosing to sacrifice her own child for the sake of freedom. African American women were oppressed at a much greater level because they were women that bore the responsibilities of childbirth and the strain of fulfilling the economic needs during the slave trade. Morrison’s literature captures

Alice Walker, born February ninth of 1944, was a child of tenant farmers in Eatonton, Georgia. As she lost sight in one eye from being shot with a BB gun, she read and wrote surrounding herself with her mother and aunts. As she witnessed the independence of these women, along with the oppression of the sharecropping system and violent racist acts, her artistic view was shaped. In 1961, she got involved with the Civil Right Movement at Spelman College, and became active after moving to Mississippi. Together with her husband, Civil Rights Lawyer Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, married in March of 1967, she worked registering blacks to vote in Mississippi. They divorced after her daughter, Rebecca, was born.

Alice Walker’s early life had a big impact on her future. Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia on February 9th, 1944. She was raised in a sharecropper family, and was the youngest of eight children. During her childhood, she was hit by her brother in the eye with a BB gun. Her eye developed scar tissue around it, and made her become self-conscious. She received a proper education, despite her parents economic and racial status. Her parents, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant, were sharecroppers from Georgia; they had received only an elementary school education. They both cared a lot about education and fought very hard for all

In Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1974),” the is basically about Alice’s classic and groundbreaking discussion of the Black women artist’s struggle for freedom of self-exploration and to see their expertise recognized for its value in the outside world. Alice starts her essay with her tone being explanatory, she introduces her topic in a unique way. She then becomes accusatory throughout her essay, making sure the reader pays attention to the legacy of Black women. Later, in her essay, she then turns her writing very personal as she provides Memoirs of her own life and others as supporting evidence to prove her claims.

Oh’ to be a woman, it can be magnificent it can be frightening. To be a Black woman it is exhausting, burdensome, and a phenomenal thing. Alice Walker’s groundbreaking epistolary novel The Color Purple exposes what it’s like to live in this world as a woman through the Black female characters. The novel commences with a letter written by the protagonist/narrator named Celie a fourteen-year-old African American girl living in Macon, Georgia. Throughout the novel she writes a series of letters addressed to “God,” she discloses her day-to-day life and the ill-treatment she endures at the hands of her stepfather and husband Mr. ______. The letter spans her transition from a fourteen-year-old girl who is being taken advantage of to a liberated woman.

As many radical feminists blamed motherhood for the waste in women's lives and saw it as a dead end for a woman, Walker insisted on a deeper analysis: She did not present motherhood itself as restrictive. It is so because of the little value society places on children, especially black children, on mothers, especially black mothers, on life itself. In the novel, Walker acknowledged that a mother in this society is often "buried