Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

Deleuze and Guattari, who refer briefly to "what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language," say that in "minor literatures . . . everything . . . is political" and that "everything takes on a collective value" (17). They argue, too, that the minor writer--notably Kafka--often effects revolutionary advances in literary sensibility. I remain doubtful that such an argument is really needed to explain the ability of marginal writers to produce substantial work across a broad spectrum. I would argue that in the hands of a sufficiently resourceful literary practitioner language can always be made to subvert hegemonic structures. Walker casts her lot with writers who remain confident of the boundlessness of literary affect achievable in English--writers like the Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, who seem effortlessly to transcend the kind of anxieties Deleuze and Guattari would wish on them. These writers believe that culture is naturally enough eclectic, and that a language as rich as English, not to mention the manifold cultures that speak or are spoken by it, provides plenty of latitude for new voices, however subversive. They seem to view the possibilities of literary art as affording sufficient latitude to circumvent linguistic colonization. They prefer to see the resources of the English language and its canonical literature, as well as the larger cultural resources of the West, as theirs for the appropriating. Thus in Beloved, as Ellen Pifer has argued, Morrison rewrites Huckleberry Finn (511), and thus in Omeros Walcott reimagines several millenia of colonial history and culture to shape a vision that remains wholly of its Caribbean time and place. Thus, too, Walker loses nothing when she opts not to write in dialect--or Lugandan.

Walker refuses, then, to write "protest literature," in which "the superficial becomes . . . the deepest reality" (In Search 262). She credits Tolstoy with showing her "the importance of diving through politics and social forecasts to dig into the essential spirit of individual persons" (In Search 257). In "Everyday Use" Walker explores with great subtlety the demands--often conflicting--of ideology and art. She contemplates the culturally distorting pressures brought to bear on another kind of language, another vehicle whereby African American experience is embodied and transmitted. This other language--the quilts--exhibits a special integrity resembling that of the language in which the author writes her story. As this story engages the theme of heritage, it resolves the dilemma inherent in ideologically self-conscious art (how simultaneously to be politically engaged and free of a limiting topicality) by inviting a connection between writing and quiltmaking, a connection between types of textuality that prove complementary.

"In contemporary writing," Elaine Showalter observes, "the quilt stands for a vanished past experience to which we have a troubled and ambivalent cultural relationship" (228). Certainly the quilts over which Wangero, and her mother quarrel represent a heritage vastly more personal and immediate than the intellectual and deracinated daughter can see; indeed, they represent a heritage she has already discarded, for she no longer shares a name with those whose lives, in scraps of cast-off clothing, the quilts transmute. Moreover, Wangero herself has not learned to quilt--the art will die if women like Maggie do not keep it up. Yet as Barbara Christian observes, a "heritage . . . must continually be renewed rather than fixed in the past" (87). Thus for Maggie and her mother the idea of heritage is perpetually subordinate to the fact of a living tradition, a tradition in which one generation remains in touch with its predecessors by means of homely skills--quilt-making and butter-churning, among others--that get passed on. The quilts remain appropriate for "everyday use" so long as the art of their manufacture remains alive. They can be quite utilitarian, and, indeed, they are supposed to be a practical dowry for Maggie.