The Search for Identity

The issues that Alice Walker deals with are that of oppression and stereotypes. Her characters are constantly held down by the social norms of the white man's society. Sexually, spiritually, and physically they are oppressed. One of Alice Walker's most famous works of fiction, "Everyday Use" represents these important themes. It is through these characters and their unique situations that Alice Walker voices her ideas for the advancement of African Americans in America. Every one of Alice Walker's characters endures the struggle of achieving self-awareness and a sense of identity. The ultimate resolution is that the main characters have a sense of pride in what they stand for.

"Everyday Use" is a short story about a low-income family. The main characters are the mother and two daughters, Maggie and Dee. It is told from the mother's perspective over a rather lengthy period of time (most likely years). The sisters are foils. They are polar opposites of each other. Maggie is sullen and withdrawn because she has burn marks running down her arms and legs from a fire in the house the family used to live in. Dee is the perfect young woman. She is intelligent, confident, and fashionable. Maggie stays home and sulks about her misfortunes and lack of intelligence while Dee goes off to college.

This is where the conflict starts. At the very beginning, the reader is meant to feel sympathetic toward Maggie because of her disabilities. Alice Walker writes, "Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way Maggie walks." By comparing Maggie to a poor, defenseless creature, Walker creates sympathy for Maggie's character. She is injured, like a dog that has been run over, and can not fend for herself as easily as Dee can.

What feeds this sympathy is the rather unsympathetic character of Dee. She is quite ignorant to the fact that her sister feels inferior. Near the end of the story she says to her handicapped sister, "You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie." She is completely ignorant of the fact that Maggie has a limited ability to advance herself because of her injury. She can not see how hard it is for her family to lift themselves out of the drudges of society when there are so many factors holding them back.

The reader, therefore, sympathizes with the views of Maggie's character and the mother. This causes the following events to be cast in a unique light. Dee learns of her African heritage while she is at college. She becomes "enlightened" before she comes back to visit her family and she adopts the African name Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. When she comes back, she makes a concerted effort to try to bring the "enlightenment" to her family. She tells them that they are being culturally unaware without directly saying those words. She is too embarrassed of their small house to bring anyone over and she sends eye signals over her mother's head to her boyfriend (or husband) Hakim-a-barber. In a regular setting, she could be seen as culturally aware and enlightened, taking pride in her heritage. However, as the story is told from the mother's point of view, we see that her actions make the mother and daughter feel belittled and inferior. She bullies them around with the knowledge she has obtained at school.

The heart of the story comes when Dee (Wangero) asks her mother for her great-grandmother's quilt. It is a quilt that has pieces of her great-grandmother's dresses sewn in it as well as a piece of a uniform from the Civil War that Dee's Great Grandpa Ezra wore. She loves the culture woven into the fabric and wants to take it to hang on a wall. The problem is that the mother has already promised to give the quilts to Maggie when she marries a man named John Thomas. Dee is appalled at this. She believes that her sister will be "backward" enough to put the quilts to everyday use. She believes that the only thing that can be done with those quilts is hanging them on the wall.

The mother's reaction is the lesson of the story. Her response is a blatant stand against all that Dee treasures. In response to Dee's assertion that Maggie will put the quilts to everyday use, she says "I hope she will!". This reverses the position of power in the conversation. Maggie and the mother know that using a quilt for its intended function would honor their ancestry just as well, if not better, than hanging it on a wall. When Dee and Maggie's great-grandmother made it, that was what she had hoped would happen with it. She never intended for it to be hung on a wall. In fact, Dee's plan to do this is almost detrimental to the remembrance of her great-grandmother as it might seem strange if she were still alive to see it so out of place.

The characters in this story (and arguably the society at large in this story) are searching for a sense of identity and a better self-awareness. Dee (Wangero) thinks she has found it at college. She is an emblem of African-Americans in the late 60s and early 70s who made an attempt to embrace true African culture. She has adopted a real African name, is wearing authentic African garb, and greets her mother in her native tongue. She is making an attempt to embrace her heritage. However, this story is unique in that it ridicules this approach relentlessly. Her entire persona seems fake and really out of place in her family's dingy home. It has no place among these people. Though Dee is trying to embrace her ancient ancestors, she has forgotten her most important ancestors: the more immediate relatives such as her aunt Dicie whom she is named after. She is embracing her culture only because it is fashionable at the time. She is still completely ignorant to her family's struggles.

Alice Walker gives her characters in this story names with a purpose. This contributes to how ridiculous Dee (Wangero) looks. First off, she claims that she has dropped the name Dee because it is the name given to her by her oppressors. This confuses her mother though because she can only trace back the name Dee over several generations and none of them had anything to do with any kind of oppressors. Perhaps somewhere way down the line, the name was given to their family by a slave owner, but most importantly, Dee was given that name in honor of the great women that had carried it over the last generations. It is almost a dishonor to these women that she has chose to drop it. After reading Helga Hoel's essay, "Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'", it became apparent that Dee's African persona is ironic too. Her first name, Wangero, is a mispronunciation or misspelling of the Kikuyu name Wanjiru. The same is true of her last name. Altogether, her three names has a mixture of East African origins. This, also, is ironic as most East African slaves during the days of slave trade were sent to the Arab peninsula and plantations on islands in the Indian Ocean.

Likewise, Hakim-a-barber, the man who accompanies Dee on her visit with her family, is ignorant to his African ancestry. Hoel writes that this may be a corruption of the Muslim name Hakim al Baba. The mother of the story shows cultural awareness by inquiring if Hakim is like the Muslims down the street because he greets her with the Muslim greeting "asalamalakim". He denies this and says "I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style". He accepts a part of the Muslim doctrine, but does not accept all of it. Like Dee, he takes what he wants from the fashion that is in style at the moment and does not truly investigate the heritage he claims to have.

The resolution of the story reveals to the reader that even though the mother and Maggie are not as intelligent as Dee, they are more self-aware. They embrace their recent past which seems to be far more important than the distant past. Dee gets her name from relatives of the recent past and the rich heritage in the quilt holds memories of the family's recent past. The mother rips the quilts, the objects that represent everything in the family's heritage that they hold dear, away from Dee and hands them to Maggie. Maggie knows how to sew quilts herself. She is the one that can truly appreciate the culture that she has come from. Maggie and the mother of this story look to be more "enlightened" and have a stronger sense of identity than Dee who changes her identity as swiftly as the fashions that she admires so much.

This is Alice Walker's social commentary on the movement of the era. She does not have a problem with people trying to embrace the motherland, Africa, and all the culture and traditions that are there. Rather, she has a problem with the uninformed people that choose to follow this trend only because it is popular. Alice Walker traveled to Africa herself and understands where the culture has come from, why it is the way it is, and the reasons why it should be embraced. Some African Americans that chose to follow this trend, like Dee, were misinformed. Some, like Hakim-a-barber, were careless and took what they wanted from the ideologies and fashions and did not bother to learn about or embrace the culture thoroughly.

Another important theme brought up in this short story is the role of education. It seems as if education in this story only serves to further Dee's ignorance rather than bringing her to a better understanding of her heritage. In this way, education can be seen as a tool of white society, keeping African Americans satisfied that they are able to receive an education, yet not teaching about African history with the sincerity that it deserves. Linda Abbandonato writes in her essay "Rewriting the Heroine's Story in The Color Purple" of Alice Walker's writing, "'female' is always the negative of the positive value 'male,' women find themselves situated in a negative space, neither participating in patriarchal discourses nor able to escape from them." African American women find themselves trapped in the diction of white men. Dee is acting falsely as if she truly knows about the history of her culture. She really knows about as much as white, male dominated society would want her to know.

The mother and Maggie, on the other hand, are uneducated. They have not received any formal education in a scholarly environment. Yet they seem to know more than Dee. They seem to be more culturally aware. This means that education is relatively useless. Dee gained nothing by spending all her energy raising money to go to school. Education falls short of accurately giving life lessons like where you came from and all the emotional baggage that comes with your race. Formal schooling can not give you these things, only close facsimiles. Education has offered Dee its own interpretation of her heritage. It knows the fashions of people indigenous to the area and it knows the language that the people speak, but it is completely oblivious to the struggles of African American people under the scrutinizing gaze of white culture.

What does this mean for Africans living in America? It means, yet again, that they are metaphorically stuck turning their wheels in the mud when it comes to upward social mobility. Their avenues are restricted as even the most ambitious of African Americans, like Dee, have only the opportunity to learn falsely about their culture. In the advancement of the African race, opportunities are limited because there is no possible way to dissociate African heritage from white heritage. In the end, those African Americans that are lucky enough to receive education are lumped in with white educated people anyways as the misconceptions of African culture lead this unfortunate bunch to be less "Africanized".

A good quote to support this assertion is when Linda Abbandonato writes about Nettie in The Color Purple that she has been "bleached white and her ethnicity virtually erased." In this case we are talking about an African mercenary who has gone to the area of the Olinkas to preach the word of God. However, this religion is a white religion and it seems ridiculous to impress such ideologies on a religiously self-sufficient people. This is the same case with Dee in a way. If Dee would simply open her eyes and see the struggles of her own blood relatives close at hand, she would know more about her culture than she can learn in any textbook or classroom. The mother and Maggie in this story can see this, while Dee can not. It is almost as if she has been brainwashed by this education filtered through a white lens.

The mother knows the good women that shared Dee's name with her and the struggles that Dee's great-grandmother went through are inherent in the quilt that she sewed. She used pieces of her own dress to complete the project. The implications of this are either that she did not have enough material and thus had to make use of what she had or that she chose to incorporate a piece of her style in this quilt. Either way, this makes the quilt culturally rich in a way that one can not see in a college textbook. Dee may very well see the culture interwoven in the fabric as she wants to hang the quilt to preserve the memory of her great-grandmother. However, if it is the case that she wove pieces of her own dresses in it because she did not have enough material, then the implications are that she made these sacrifices to produce a fully functional quilt. It would be a greater honor to her memory to use them for their intended purpose rather than to put them on a wall.

Alice Walker also brings up another important point in this story. A major question one must ask after they have read "Everyday Use" is which past is most important? Is it the recent one of your blood relatives or the past of people from long ago that you do not even know? This question seems to become more important as we move further and further from the days of slavery. Slavery in the United States was abolished around 1865. This means that no one alive today could possibly have seen slavery in action. Yet oppression may still be a part of an African American's culture. This history of oppression may have no direct affect on African Americans today, yet they are still affected by its aftermath. One example is affirmative action which is most evident in the college acceptance process. Possible students are judged on a point system and African Americans are given points for being African American. The reason given for this is because African Americans have started out on unequal grounds with whites. Given their culture's past, they have had less opportunities for formal education. In an attempt to equal this playing field, colleges have attempted to accept more African American students.

Alice Walker's story, however, makes it a point to venture that the recent struggles of this African American family's blood relatives are far more important than Dee's preoccupation with her distant ancestors. What is happening here and now in the world of the story is much more important than what has happened to their race in the past. What's evident in this story is that people in the here and now are still very much oppressed. The misinformation that Dee gets from her college education informs the readers that African Americans are still struggling for an identity within America. Furthermore, the house the family lives in is inadequate for their living space needs. This highlights the economic inequality of the races. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 24.7 percent of African American people were below the poverty level in 2005 while only 10.6 percent of whites were below this income. This means that the issues brought up in Alice Walker's story are still relevant today. Even though African American's have had to struggle with oppression ever since they were brought from

Africa for slavery, they are still dealing with oppression today in different forms. I think Alice Walker's message is that we should not be preoccupied with the problems of the past when we have the problems of here and now to attend to.

An interesting reading of "Everyday Use" is one in which we see Maggie and Dee as conflicting personalities within the same person. There is the one side of an African American that concerns itself with the distant culture and struggles of their people and there is the other side of the same person that concerns itself with the current struggles of their people. The interesting aspect of this reading is that these two concerns come into conflict. It seems as though if you concern yourself too much with the distant past, you will lose sight of your identity in your current situation. You will lose sight of what your blood relatives have struggled for such as the great-grandmother's quilt.

It is imperative, then, that this story is told from the point of view of the indifferent mother. She does not seem to have an opinion in either way in the beginning. Though she does mention her recent struggle to become closer with Dee, she does not seem to be all too concerned about the house that she lives in being too small or her way of life being ignorant. Dee is the one that brings this to her attention and Maggie is the one that kind of defends it in her shy, off-hand way. In the end, the mother chooses to side with Maggie in caring deeply about the people she knows and their struggles. She cares deeply for her great-grandmother and the quilt that she made and does not care when Hakim-a-Barber uses words from the African language.

Alice Walker makes some astonishing points in this very interesting story. "Everyday Use" is the struggle of African Americans for an identity. The question is one of identifying yourself with the struggles of your race from the point of view of ancestors long forgotten or the current struggle that is still strong of the African race fighting for its place in America. Alice Walker makes the point that African Americans should concern themselves with the problems they face now. They should attempt to carry on the struggles of the relatives that they have known. Little by little the race can make its way through upward social mobility and end the inequality that is still existent today. Dee is going through an identity crisis in this story as she chooses to follow the education she receives through the filter of the white lens. She has common misconceptions about the past that she tries to pay homage to because it is too distant from her to grab hold of. She looks ridiculous in the eyes of Maggie and the mother who know the struggles of their recent relatives and choose to carry on that struggle. They come to a realization of their identity as Africans still struggling to make their place in a white world.

Works Cited

Abbandonato, Linda. "Rewriting the Heroine's Story in the Color Purple." Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993): 296-306.

"Historical Poverty Tables." U.S. Census Bureau. 06 Sept. 2006. U.S. Census Bureau. 06 Mar. 2007 .

Hoel, Helga. "Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'" 03 Oct. 1997. Trondheim Cathedral School. 02 Mar. 2007 .