Ikenna Dieke

In what has now become one of the most significant books of essays in the rich
repertoire of African American critical hypotheses-- In Search of Our Mothers'
Gardens-- Alice Walker enunciates what amounts to a thematic and quasi
ideological preoccupation of an artistic imagination that might well be dubbed the
earthling subjectivity. Firing back justifiably at a reader's disparaging remarks that
the daughter of a farmer (such as Walker is) could not possibly become the material
out of which great poets are made, ¹ Walker insists that the grubstake out of which
the poet constructs or entities the world of her art must have its essential
provenance in the humble affairs of the common people for whom she clearly
writes. Contrasting her humble, indigent beginnings with that of the young John
Keats, whom the reader apparently cited in his criticism, Walker dismisses as
baseless reverie the presumption that the only good poet is the one who salivates
and mimics Keats or those of his privileged background. She concludes by insisting,
very much in the spirit and tradition of Langston Hughes, that poetry written for and
about the common people, for and about one's own people, is infinitely more
ennobling, and therefore more satisfying, than that gaudy stuff composed
exclusively for and about the stiff upper lip royal court of England ( In Search, 18).

If we put aside, for the moment, Walker's oblique and sardonic swipe at
the English monarchy, the phrase "Queen of England" (royal court of England)
should be construed as an intensive troping of the concept of art as the domain of
the privileged aristocracy. By this phrase, Walker seeks to highlight the marked
difference between some art, which grows out of an inspired response to the
ordinary, the commonplace, the experiences of common people, and the other,
which has as its primary donnée the high and mighty in society--the privileged
elite. It is a distinction between the high mimetic art and that of the low mimetic. ²
In other words, at least as Ms. Walker sees it, the enduring aspect of art is the
artist's uncanny ability to hallow the commonplace, to imagine the limitless
possibility of the extraordinary in the common run of affairs--in the words of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, to see the miraculous in the ordinary everyday reality (qtd.
McNulty, 114-15). Barbara Christian explains what this means in terms of
Walker's own "unique" populist conception of Art:

But Walker turned the idea of art on its head. Instead of looking high, she suggested, we
should look low. On that low ground she found a multitude of artist-mothers--the women

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