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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

We can say that the story begins with the claim that it is not a story. Hearing Mama speak in the first person, in the present, about the present, suggests that there is no aesthetic frame, no fictionalization. It's as if, in order to hear this story, we must be there with Mama, in her presence and present tense, listening to her voice. We are as close to Mama and her voice as she is to her world. We are not only close to home, whose proximity might lead us to think that we are in the realm of the authentic, but too close. While such an immediacy might tempt us to feel we are near truth, it is that kind of truth that is so true that we would never give it a second thought. The shift to the past tense, however, shifts this non-story into a story, into something moving toward art and representation. To shift from "I want to know" to "I wanted to know," is moving from speech to reported speech, and between the first moment and the second there is a temporal/spatial distance. When Mama shifts to the past tense, she is no longer inside, immediately stitched into that world; she is in a narrating "present" which is not identical to the moment she is writing about. A frame begins to emerge, with Mama outside, yet inside, separated by a critical difference. At this moment, in the space marked by the shift to the past tense, a spatio-temporal dimension opens up which makes possible reflection, knowledge, representation, epiphany, manipulation, and power. And it is in such a space that we can begin to see how Mama, Dee, and Walker are linked.

In this story, unlike in Toomer's fiction, it is not the women who run to the artist, offering to the artist their stories, or stories they don't know are stories, but the artist, who in the figure of Dee, has come to the women who have stayed at home. What does the artist do with this world? It seems that the artist can take a story away, either by stealing it or by carrying it away in the name of giving voice to those who have never had a voice, or the artist can really try to give a voice to those who are at home. But if the artist, rather than taking a story away, attempts to get those at home to tell their own stories, or take their stories back, the artist would cease to be an artist. He or she would have shifted From art to a form of socio-political activity. This is one of the contradictions Susan Willis mentions: What does it really mean to give voice to someone, or some group of people? How can the artist avoid, in the name of speaking for a people, even if they are his or her "own" people, silenci ng them? Barbara Christian writes that "Toomer's women are silent, their sense of themselves and their condition interpreted by a male narrator" (9). But does the situation change with a woman narrator? Doesn't a problem of silencing remain as long as there is a narrator--one who speaks for and in the place of someone else? Moreover, who are the readers of the fiction whose subject are the people down home? The blunt fact, as Washington notes, is that the story of "Everyday Use," which is claimed by many to give voice to people in and outside of the story, circulates in a market far beyond them. They never hear their voices being heard.