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Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart
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.
Of course the quilts, like this story, are beautiful and merit preservation. Walker seems to intimate, however, even in her own literary art, a belief in the idea of a living, intertextual tradition, a passing on of values as well as skills that ought only occasionally to issue in canonization or any of the other processes whereby something intended for "everyday use" ends up framed, on a wall, on a shelf, in a library or museum. Indeed, as Faith Pullin notes with regard to the quilts, "the mother is . . . the true African here, since the concept of art for art's sake is foreign to Africa--all objects are for use. Dee has . . . taken over a very Western attitude towards art and its material value" (185). Walker, by the same token, seems to conceive of her own art as part of a dynamic process in which utility (domestic, political) meets and bonds with an aesthetic ideal. Her story/quilt is intended as much for immediate consumption--that is, reading--by the brothers and sisters of these sisters as for sacralization on some library shelf or college syllabus.
