In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

This problem is very much at the heart of "Everyday Use." Part of what makes Walker such a powerful writer is her willingness to face such enormous problems straight on and, like Dee, not blink. And one of her attempts to work with this enterprise so fraught with contradictions is the narrative strategy she develops in "Everyday Use." One way into the problem is to begin with a narration that appears not to narrate at all. This is the significance of the present tense with which the story begins. This is Mama's voice and thoughts with no narrative frame. It is not the artist giving voice to Mama, but Mama's voice. It is not the artist telling the story of those at home, but those at home telling their own stories in their own words. This is what some would call authenticity; this is what some would call the true voice of true art; and this is what the Bakers hear: Mama represents that authentic art which is not "defined by social institutions such as museums, book reviews, and art dealers" (161). But what th ey don't attend to is the subtle, quiet, perhaps even reluctant, perhaps even guilty shift to the past tense, which is finally the mark, no matter how subtle, of the museum, book reviews, and art dealers. More importantly, however, is that this shift to the past tense is likewise the subtle mark of empowerment and control; for the possibility to frame, to represent one's own world, empowers. And while this may also be taken as the mark of a loss, one must ask-a loss for whom? The problem with those who desire to keep the voice "authentic" is that, to do so, they end up insisting that the voice stay at home, in its place, or her place, as happens to Mama when the Bakers say that she has "no categories for framed art" (163-64). Because Mama cannot frame her art, she must rely on those who, in the name of her best interest of course, will either tell it for her, or tell others that she isn't really doing what it seems she's doing. If she appears to be "writing," she's really only sewing. No matter how sacred the Bakers make the "sorority of quiltmakers," the "holy patchers" (156), that very appeal to sacredness would keep Mama in her place.

But Mama herself is a wayward artist. She drifts away from the present, not into a dream this time of distant fantasies far from home, but into a past tense, a narrative frame which creates distance at the same time that it makes possible a closeness, a coming home. This shift to the past tense allows for a present, as if the present, to be present, must be re-presented, re-proposed. It is likewise the condition necessary for a second thought. Mama's "epiphanic moment of recognition" (Baker and Pierce-Baker 161) is a re-cognition, made possible by the spatio-temporal difference that opens up with her wandering out from the present tense of home, out of that immediacy. These are not oppositional structures; or, rather, they are not the bipolar oppositions which work within a logic or politics of identity. What Barbara Christian has called Walker's "contrariness," and her creation of characters who act in spite of themselves, involves a doubling of each of the terms; and such a doubling opens up "differences w ithin identities" (Fuss 103), within what for identity politics would be the two mutually exclusive terms of an opposition. But the past tense is not opposed to the present. If the past tense indicates distance and control, it is also the moment when distances collapse and control is lost. It is in the past tense that Mama has her epiphanic moment, wherein "something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet," which in turn propels her to do something "I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me..." (34). But if the story ends with the embrace of this new intimacy between a mother and daughter, present to one another as never before, it is given in the past tense, and the story ends in that tense. And this leads one to reconsider the presentness of the present tense in which the story begins.