My Mother in Garden

Alice Walker also uses her own mother as a method to explain the way they are and the creativity they have lived in . She explains, “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and respect for strength-in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. “(Walker 675) This quote shows how Walker was able to find her own creativity by seeing her mother’s creativity in the creation of her gardens. Walker’s mother grew beautiful gardens at every single house they had ever lived in,it was so original in its design, and so magnificent with life and creativity.

These gardens inspired Walker to a degree and by viewing her mother’s creativity she was able to write and find her creativity in writing. This shows that even to this day, black women are keeping their creativity alive and passing it on to each new generation. Walker’s mother kept her creativity alive by creating these beautiful gardens and through her keeping her creativity alive, she has given her creativity to her daughter and allowed her daughter to become the magnificent writer that she is today.

Another quote said “the mule of the world”(Walker pg. 421 paragraph 4), explain how black women who were nothing more than bodies to be used were tread as tools for work or even impregnation . To the world around them, they had no creativity and certainly no intelligence, which forced their creative thoughts into suppression and their bodies into submission.

They were not allowed to have creative thoughts and not allowed to think of art, or anything other than the work they were assigned to do, breaking them further and further away from their creative instincts and deeper into the forced labor they had to carry out day in and day out.

However, even though they were so beaten down and ruined by the world around them, that creativity was still present within them and, given the chance, they could have been the artists they were meant to be, express themselves freely like so many white men and women of that time period .

Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” explains the hardships that black women had to endure and their perseverance in maintaining their creativity throughout. Although these women were beaten down and destroyed by the world around them, they still managed to use the little amount of creativity they had in them to create masterpieces and pass down their creativity from generation to generation.