Mother’s Day 2021: In Search Of Our Mother’s Garden

This week I had the good fortune to see Patricia Francis’ brilliant new film, ‘The Art of Oppression’. In this film, three artists are given three weeks to produce a new work of art. The challenge is set – it is October 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic is raging and Brexit negotiations are ongoing. We follow each artist’s progress in a beautifully paced and exquisitely sensitive film.

First we are introduced to a survivor of the Serbian war, Ivana Puskas, a sculptor and visual artist whose work speaks of trauma, belonging, and ghosts. We then meet award-winning visual artist, Honey Williams, who speaks of her lived experience of racism, sexism and body-shaming abuse. Finally we meet poet Ferzana Shan, who speaks of historical amnesia and pervasive assumptions about what it is to be an Asian woman. By the end of the film we have seen that their experience of ‘oppression’ and ‘trauma’ do not restrict their creative potential, or limit their thoughts, feelings and experience. All three women artists have produced wonderful work that expands our collective horizons.

I was so enthralled with these stories in their own right. But also, watching the film, conscious that Mothering Sunday would be upon us this weekend, I was prompted to revisit the title chapter In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens in Alice Walker’s collection of essays.

In this Search, Alice Walker takes an equally beautiful, measured look at the production and meaning of women’s contributions to artistic and literary realms. Walker contemplates Virginia Woolf’s piece A Room of One’s Own. She expands on Woolf’s ideas as she reflects on black American women’s often unacknowledged contributions.

Walker then introduces us to Phillis Wheatley. We learn Wheatley writes poetry, despite being a black, kidnapped, enslaved woman snatched from her home and country. Walker’s reverence results less from what Wheatley ‘sang’, and more for keeping alive ‘in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song’ (p. 237). At this point in her essay, Walker issues a rallying cry and directs us back into the Garden of the essay title.

Walker suggests that ‘we must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity’ that was intrinsic to our great-grandmothers’ experience (p. 237). Rather than searching out creativity from far away, the ‘truest answer…can be found very close’ (p. 238).

Contemplating a hand-made quilt from the nineteenth century which hangs in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, Walker acknowledges that the quilt is priceless. Through time and beyond living memory of its creator, we connect with the obvious artistry of the creator’s powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling.

And this then returns us to ‘The Art of Oppression’. We understand that there is a role for oppression, but we also come to see how their art represents a triumph of spirit, resistance and hope. Although we don’t know their names at the time of introduction, by the end of the film, we have journeyed with each artist. Francis has curated our journey together with a delicacy that affords each of the women a unique voice, even as they share some commonality of experience.

And so to the title of Walker’s essay. By the end of the piece, Walker centres her own mother in her story. She expresses how although no song or poem will bear her mother’s name, so many of the stories that she writes are her mother’s stories. Walker has ‘absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories – like her life – must be recorded’ (p. 240).

Walker’s mother’s garden is a real space, one which fed her mother’s soul. In a ‘garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity’, ‘perfect strangers and imperfect’ ones too used to ask to walk amongst Walker’s mother’s art (p. 241). In searching for her mother’s garden, Walker found her own. Walker feels guided by a heritage of love of beauty and respect for strength, and gracefully leads us to a realisation that her mother, Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant, is a person we would want to connect with. Thank you Alice, and thank you to all our wonderful mothers.

At Conscience Collective, we would like to show gratitude to all our Mothers and take the opportunity to wish you all a very Happy Mothering Sunday.

Reference:

Alice Walker, 1983. In Search of our Mother’s Gardens Womanist Prose. The Woman’s Press.

Written by Amirkaur - Conscience Collective