Tending My Mothers' Gardens in a Room of My Own: The Muse

Alice Walker celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday on Saturday. Walker's novels, essays, and poems are a receptacle for black women's intellectual traditions, culture, and language. She has been a force behind so much of my creative and intellectual exploits as a scholar and an artist. 

http://alicewalkersgarden.com is Alice Walker's official site.

On this blog I write a series inspired by her famous essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" in which I share my memories of how my grandmother and mother fostered my creative and intellectual potential.  I share their stories so that my daughter will never have to search for her mothers' gardens, but carefully tend them.

A Poem for Nerds: National Poetry Month

This poem is for those who feel like they have never fit in. It's for those who feel misunderstood, like a square peg. Up until I was thirty years old, I was calling my Mother, sometimes in tears, to ask her why I didn't fit in anywhere. I felt clumsy, awkward, and sometimes alone.

After my Mom passed away I mourned for the one who reminded me that I was a precocious child and as an adult I was peculiar, that is singular and special.  I was never meant to fit in...

Now that I realize where my place is in (or out) of this world, I have peace. Finding this poem was my consolation and my confirmation:

"Be Nobody's Darling" by Alice Walker

“Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.

Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.”

TENDING MY MOTHERS' GARDENS IN A ROOM OF MY OWN: Spoiled Rotten!

I designed this inspiration board of French women and expats because I've been pretty uninspired to study for my French exam lately. I've let go of the bitterness left by my University's French department failing me because I couldn't get my Mum's death certificate in time to prove I wasn't skipping out on French class; but, I digress. French is one of the two languages required for my PhD and Yoruba is the other. A little visual inspiration should be just what I need to get in gear...

Left to right, top to bottom:
film still from Noir De, Bessie Coleman, Lois Mailou Jones, Josephine Baker, French Vogue, Nina Simone

But as I cut and pasted women into my montage their amazing stories made me feel so small and petty. Elizabeth "Bessie" Coleman's level of determination made me hang my head in shame.

Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female pilot was born in 1892, the tenth of 13 children. Coleman got the idea of becoming a pilot while reading newspaper articles about World War I pilots. No flight school in the United States would train her, but Coleman didn’t let that stop her. She took a French language course in Chicago, then, using her savings and the help of some influential friends, she traveled to France. She learned to fly and got her license in 1921 from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale. When Coleman returned to the United States, now a celebrity, she performed in airshows and raised money to open her own flight school. She died in 1926 in an aircraft accident, apparently while flight testing a Curtiss JN-4 (from Bessie Coleman: A Life Less Ordinary, AOPA Pilot Blog, January 26, 2009 by Jill W. Tallman, Associate Editor ).

Nothing kept Bessie Coleman from her dream: not racial barriers, financial barriers, gender barriers, and MOST CERTAINLY NOT A FRENCH LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. 

TENDING MY MOTHERS' GARDENS IN A ROOM OF MY OWN

The premise for my musings about gardens & rooms:

"Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written. And they waited. They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead...

Walker's article speaks of black women during slavery: "They were creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality - which is the basis of Art - the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane...

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood." Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," MS Magazine Vol. 16 (April 20, 1981).

As I've mention ad nauseum, I am so very blessed to have had overtly creative female elders who encouraged and fostered that same well-spring in me. So rather than searching for my Mothers' gardens', I am reaping the harvest that they have sown in my life and making sure to tend my garden wisely. And although, Walker acknowledges that a room of one's own is not necessary to spawn the creative process, I am fortunate enough to have one.

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf deems a room and purse of ones' own a precursor to creativity. Walker uses Phillis Wheatley, an indigent slave, as a prime example that a room is a luxury - a decadence even. In the 21st century, I make the best of both world's in a room of my own with a reminder of the gardens I must tend.