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Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart
Thus Walker, though she mocks Wangero's idea of heritage, nevertheless aspires to project herself as sensitive artist of the African American experience, and she does so by inviting recognition of a further parallel between the contested quilts and her own fictive art. Quilts are the "texts" (the word means weave) of American rural life. Moreover, they are palpably "intertextual," inasmuch as they contain literal scraps of past lives. Engaged in her own version of quilt-making, Walker weaves in stories like this one a simple yet richly heteroglossic text on patterns set by a literary tradition extending into communities black and white, American and international. The interested reader may detect in Walker's work the intertextual presence of a number of writers she names as influences in the 1973 interview mentioned previously: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Gogol, Camara Laye, Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, Elechi Ahmadi, Bessie Head, Jean Toomer, and especially Zora Neale Hurston (In Search 257-60). Like any other writer, any other user of language, Walker "pieces" her literary quilts out of all that she has previously read or heard. Perhaps it is with Maggie after all that the author exhibits the most comprehensive affinity.
African American writing, according to Henry Louis Gates, enjoys its own distinctive brand of intertextuality, and I should like to conclude this discussion by glancing at a couple of the ways in which "Everyday Use" exemplifies the theory developed by Gates in The Signifying Monkey. Borrowing a term from the vernacular, Gates argues that texts by African American writers "Signify" on prior texts: they play with their predecessors in a perpetual and parodic evolution of meanings congenial to a people whose latitude for direct expression has been historically hedged about by innumerable sanctions. Gates explains Signifyin(g) with reference to Bakhtin's idea of a "double-voiced" discourse, in which one hears simultaneously the present text and the text being augmented or ironically revised. Not that Signifyin(g) need always be at the expense of its intertext: in one of the analytic set pieces of his book, as it happens, Gates reads Walker's The Color Purple as what he calls "unmotivated" (that is, non-disparaging) Signifying on texts by Rebecca Cox Jackson and Zora Neale Hurston.
In "Everyday Use" one encounters Signifyin(g) in both its street sense and its literary sense. "To rename is to revise," says Gates, "and to revise is to Signify" (xxiii). Thus Wangero thinks she is Signifyin(g) on white culture when she revises her name, but inadvertently she plays false with her own familial culture, as her mother's remarks about the history of the name Dee allow the reader to see. Indeed, if the mother were not so thoroughly innocent, one would suspect her of Signifying on her daughter's misguided aspirations. The master manipulator of the intertexts is of course Walker herself as she Signifies on Africanist pretension, calling into question the terms with which a number of her contemporaries are repudiating the language and culture of what Wangero calls "the oppressor."
