Womanism
These are the "words" that connect us to land, people, our identity and purpose, across generations, across oceans.
by Susan L. Feathers
Womanism was first given name and definition in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Woman's Prose (1983). Observed in the earliest poetry and prose of Black feminist writers, Walker traces the intergenerational, woman to woman, passing of a particular kind of will to take one's place in the world, in the company of other women, and contrary to prescribed roles, which characterizesthe womanist tradition.
Womanism is rooted in the earth, connected with life-giving energies in the universe. A womanist exudes a creative, enduring presence — and like water, cannot be easily held in check. By its nature womanism is inclusive, cognizant of the universal struggles and needs of men, women and children, alike.
Womanism can be expressed or silent, but is present in a multitude of forms: gardens, recipes, songs, quilts, folktales, poetry, journals, plays and novels.
A womanist connects generations within her family, across time and space. A womanist evolves in the company of other women, and derives strength and resource from other women.
Few feminist literary traditions suffuse Black women's writing more than the womanist tradition. For Black women to endure the constant assault on identity by an intolerant white culture, the deep wisdom, quirky humor, and outrageous nature of the thing called womanism, holds the world in place with hope and a positive vision of the future.
In Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), sisters Celie and Nettie's deep love for each other links their families with the motherland in Africa. Through Nettie's letters to Celie, she shares her experience at the first scent, first sight of Africa, bringing the color, fragrances, and textures to Celie's awareness. Suddenly, Celie is re-connected to her people, her land — when only a moment before she experienced isolation in America. Celie's children, raised on the African continent by missionaries, return with Nettie, dressed in the brilliant colors of their homeland, speaking African dialect, but whose reunion with their American mother transcends language through the universal love of mother and child.
Song lifts Celie from her mental and emotional bondage, as Shug Avery sings "Sister, Sister" as a joyful call to awaken and become who she really is — an audacious, sexy woman. Shug is the medium for an old song sung by women for women during times of oppression and hopelessness. Shug Avery embodies the sexy, bubbling font of feminine energy as a womanist in her time. She turns sexual stereotyping and predation by men into a game, while she seeks the love of her father more than any other man. It is Shug who teachers Celie about the God of purple flowers, the God that is within her.
In another close and intimate womanist exchange between Shug and Celie, Shug sings to Celie and makes love to her in order to bring out the feminine energy that was buried deep undercover in Celie's psyche after years of rape, brutality, and constant social degradation. It is so deeply buried that Celie acts like a child, with little of the woman visible. Shug loves into reality that part of Celie. Shug is not a lesbian. She is a woman who loves other women for the beautiful and transcendent qualities they possess, and above all loves herself.
Walker's book is an epic tale, a cultural vision of how hatred and greed will finally be overcome by love — a womanist's view of the world.
The irrepressible quality of womanist energy is dramatically represented by Maya Angelou's Grandmother Henderson, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970).
The author recounts a time when she painfully observes the elder's harassment by a gaggle of poor white children, whose families live on her land, but who none the less feel superior to her. When they begin their rude behavior, Grandmother Henderson hums a hymn, intoning a strange low sound which she maintains until the girls finally leave. She never lost control, never moved her broad stance, feet wide apart and anchored to the ground as if to hold the Earth in place. When the children finally left, Angelou describes how her Grandmother's face was radiant and round like a moon. When her Grandmother touched her, it seemed to Angelou that it was like a healer's touch. In this scene in the story are many elements of womanism that Alice Walker described: the unmoving force of will, the earth rooted-ness, the conquering of hate with love as she sings fervently to God; the outrageous act of bursting into a louder hymn when the girls were at their worst!
Rita Dove (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987, and Poet Laureate of the U.S. between 1993-1995) brings into her poetry womanists like Rosa Parks (Rosa), and Billie Holiday (Canary), and womanist themes in works such as Mother Love — a book of poems about the reverberating song between mothers and daughters across time, richly illustrating the continuance of womanist interpretations of life and love in black feminist writers. Dove's powerful images evoke flashes of satin, fur, and the scent of gardenias in Hattie McDaniel Arrives at Coconut Grove, where the persona of Hattie McDaniel acts as a whole-earth resistance to the subtleties of token deference, even as she accepts an Academy Award for the cinematic smile that is both her liberation and her trap.
Dove's American Smooth (2003) is another example of how womanist writers use the metaphor of song, and song itself as she describes dancing to rhythms of the culture, coordinating steps with agonizing care to "get it right", the rhythmic ups and downs, and sudden turns of being a woman of color in an intolerant culture.
Janie Crawford, the heroine of Zora Neale Houston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), tells her story to a listening woman friend, passing to her the legacy of a hidden heritage (and thus to readers) that she regained as she journeyed to the Everglades and deeper into the roots of Black history and religion. Janie Crawford is a woman who does not respond to the prescribed social behavior for a Black woman in the South or for woman in general. She lives according to her own inner voice in true womanist form.
Womanist literature takes on new modes of expression and contemporary contexts in the Suzan-Lori Parks' play Top Dog/Underdog, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2001. Parks explores the theme of how history and family are defining forces at work in the lives of ordinary people.
In her first novel, Getting Mother's Body (2003), Parks follows Zora Neale Hurston's legacy by creating a story in which a daughter goes looking for her mother's jewels — in her grave. The metaphor for cross-generational continuity is further deepened by the interplay of voices between her mother, Willie Mae Breede (a call girl who died when her daughter was ten years old), and Billie Breede (pregnant, unmarried, and looking for a way to pay for her abortion). When Billie learns that her mother's body will soon be exhumed to make way for a new supermarket, she travels with her aunt and uncle to discover whether there is truth in the family stories that her mother was buried with valuable jewelry.
In Rebecca Jackson's Gifts of Power (diary written between 1837 - 1864, and published in 1980), we are drawn into the experience of a woman who overcomes the bounds of familial and cultural expectations, and the terrible limitation of never being taught to read or write. She nevertheless reads through a spiritual revelation. Jackson's account of her conversion and subsequent clairvoyant powers, the serious nature of her religious life, and the formation of a woman's religious community reveal other aspects of the womanist tradition. Jackson prefers the company of women, though she is married, and has a brother she loves. She lives with Rebecca Perlot in an intimate relationship for over 30 years. But of more importance is the fact that it is within the community of women that she can develop her true identity, having the space and time to nurture the more serious and creative aspects of herself. In her time and circumstances, forming a black women's Shaker community was the sanctuary from society in which she could accomplish this for herself and other women.
Other women writers of color further illuminate the nature of womanism.
Julia Alvarez's In the Name of Salomé is a historical novel about a daughter's search for her true identity through her mother Salomé Ureña, National Poet of the Dominican Republic at the time of its founding (1868). Salomé inspired an oppressed nation to throw off the shackles of foreign governments and military dictators, and form a new republic. Camila, her daughter, a sixty-year old college professor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. embarks on a journey to trace her mother's footsteps, a journey that brings her into the search for 'la patria', one's country.
In the first paragraph of the book, Camila looks at her light brown skin and broods over the years of passing in contemporary American white culture, but never feeling identified with any particular historical or physical landscape. She sees her ancestors as beads strung on a necklace and her self as a separated bead. With this image before her, she searches for her mother's garden on the Caribbean island where she was born (Dominican Republic), where her mother died when Camila was three years old. In the end she receives from her mother la patria, carried in her heart and soul, through the legacy of her poetry and the stories carried by the women of her family.
The linking of generations through the artistic work of women is beautifully illustrated by the symbol of the traditional 'rebozo', a woven shawl, in Sandra Cisneros' Caramello (2002), a novel that gives voice to three generations of a Mexican-American family. The quest for cultural continuity is embodied in a caramello-colored rebozo, handwoven by the grandmother, and worn and even chewed upon by her granddaughter when she wants to remember the stories her grandmother told her.
Alice Walker's definition of womanism as represented by certain colors, scents, and texture, can be seen in these literary works as veins or streams connecting women, and thus their men and children. Walker encourages us to look into the gardens, the recipes, quilts, and wordless creations of our grandmothers as their writings, as art, and music from generations of women who could not use those means of expression but rather found expression in the things that were at hand. These are the "words" that connect us to land, people, our identity and purpose, across generations, across oceans.
Womanism remains a deep purple ribbon of will passed from its deep roots in Africa, woman to woman, mother to daughter, sister to sister, wife to husband, and woman to the world. That ribbon forms a raiment of life's energy that is from eternity and indomitable.