Can't wait to get engrossed in it.

I have just received this beautifully bind book today. I can't wait to finish it, so that I can give a review on it. Stay tune.

First, I must finish The King Never Smiles. I am near the end right now. I might do a short review on it, too.

Currently reading.

SAMBATH MEAS'S BLOG: Random Memories of Lok Oam Has Salorn

SAMBATH MEAS'S BLOG: Random Memories of Lok Oam Has Salorn: The curly haired man in a white suit, shaking the maracas, is oam Lorn. Whenever my parents and I sit down for breakfast, lunch, a...

"Heart of Darkness" and "Everyday Use" Are Relevant to Khmer People

Image borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:In_Darkest_Africa_forest_clearing.jpg


Stereotypes in Heart of Darkness and “Everyday Use”

By

Sambath Meas

Because I’m black and I’m a woman and because I was brought up poor and because I’m a Southerner … the way I see the world is quite different from the way many people see it.
--Alice Walker

The whole point of reading literature, it seems to me, is to learn to have sympathies, imaginative relationships with people who are different from one's self.
--Irving Howe

Although they were written almost a century apart, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” reflect on the stereotypes and prejudices of black people of their time. Readers who are highly sensitive to the negative portrayals of Africans might find the former the work of a racist white man, and the latter the work of an African-American woman who is an equal rights activist, representing justice and benevolence. Though the scholar Chinua Achebe might take offense to such a characterization, Conrad, in a way, is an activist, too. For a white man who lived in the late nineteenth century, whose world was dominated by an imperial view and attitude, he was ahead of his time, in showing the moral conscience to expose hypocrisy, greed and brutality of Europeans through Heart of Darkness. Both stories are plagued with stereotypes and racial issues.

In Heart of Darkness, one of Conrad’s main characters, Charles Marlow, has an exciting opportunity to make a living in an unnamed place in Africa. His fascination with maps and his childhood dream of exploring uncharted territory in Africa (which mirror the author) bring about this excitement. Before his arrival, his mind has already been fraught with prejudices and stereotypes of the country and people, expressed in terms such as “darkness,” “wilderness” and “savages.” He believes he is there to “civilize” the “savages.” He sees himself as “one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” (Conrad 27). He is proud to see the amount of red, the color of England, on “a large shining map” at the Company’s offices. It means “some real work is done in there”(24). To his disappointment, he is sent to the place marked in yellow instead.

Upon his arrival, Africans appear to him “black and naked” and he perceives the “deadlike indifference of unhappy savages” (Conrad 29, 30). He would be unhappy too if he were chained like an animal by foreigners who invaded his country, exploited his land, and enslaved him. But later, in reference to Africans abandoning their villages, he acknowledges, “Well, if a lot of mysterious n----s armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon” (34). Any reader with a conscience would further ponder how they would feel if the shoe were on the other foot, in this business of empire.

In the Outer Station, Marlow begins to notice the inefficiency and the greedy materialism of the colonists. Africans are chained together and perform useless tasks from which they drop from exhaustion. They are left to die in pain, abandonment, and despair (Conrad 31). He sees a native savagely beaten nearly to death for purportedly starting a conflagration. As if teaching a lesson to a dog, without communicating to this native about guarding against future accidents, the aggressor justifies his barbaric beating of the poor man. The victim moans, hauntingly, in pain before he recovers, after many days, and takes to the depths of the forest.

Marlow sees dead bodies of the natives wherever he goes. He hears about “a middle-aged negro” with a bullet-hole in his head (Conrad 35). Dead bodies, in skins and bones, amass on the earth like animals that have been claimed by famine and drought. Instead of dying from natural disaster, they died from the savagery of the men who came to “enlighten” them. Meanwhile, the Company’s chief accountant walks around in immaculately pressed clothes, completely oblivious or thoughtless of his surroundings.

Although Marlow sees and thinks about these things, real enlightenment has not yet come to him. He still views Africa and Africans as impenetrable, primitive and dangerous. “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet” (Conrad 50). These stereotypical fantasies are repeated throughout the novella. Another example is the narrator’s description of going up the river, which is akin to “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”

An empty stream, a great silence, and impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. (49)


Like men of his time and place, Marlow is devoid of the humanity of Africans—that is, their individualities, their feelings, their emotions, their spirits, their customs, their histories, and languages. Their language to him is just a “grunt” and “noise.” As for the people, they remain nameless, faceless, voiceless, and miserable. He views them, just like the country, as shadow and darkness, as if they were creatures from another world. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” Besides calling them creatures, monsters, and savages, much of the time he refers to them by the n-word.

He regards white men as superior, even god-like, in the words of Kurtz, and thus they should not be spoken to, let alone in an unmannerly way. “He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc. etc.” (Conrad 65). One must wonder what kind of deity would invade and enslave others, and to force the natives by fraud into submission of their conquest? With such an attitude of superior arrogance, Marlow is taken aback by the general manager for allowing “his boy,” a young African who appears to him to be overfed, to “treat the white men, under his very eyes, with provoking insolence” (37). Yet, it is okay for white men to treat Africans with contempt, hatred, and violence.

At the Central Station, Marlow meets a nephew and uncle who plot to squeeze out all the wealth in Africa and want to delay the trip to the Inner Station to pick up Kurtz—the hollow-to-the-core man who is revered and feared by both Africans and Europeans. They want to leave him to die, since he is already gravely ill. They want the ivory for themselves, because they see him as competition. After all, Kurtz high-handedly controls the natives and dominates the ivory trade surrounding his station. On the way to find Kurtz, they enlist some of the twenty cannibals for a crew. Marlow admires them for their work and their restraint from hunger by not eating the pilgrims, for throwing their hippo meat into the river. He sees these white men as flabby and scared, while the cannibals—broad-chested and strong—can easily overpower them. This is one of the few instances where Marlow thinks somewhat highly of the natives.

Marlow also becomes sentimentally attached to the helmsman, but he only sees this after the man is hit by a spear and dies when the steamboat is under attack by one of the African tribes, which ordered by Kurtz, who, in one of his mad moments, does not want to leave his compound. Now that Marlow has to steer the boat all by himself, he misses the poor chap. Still he manages to blame and denigrate him for having no restraint by opening the shutter. “The fool-n----- had dropped everything, to throw the shutter open and let off that Martini-Henry” (Conrad 61).

Another person he is somewhat in awe of is the mistress of Kurtz. He bestows great details upon her, which sets her apart from other Africans he sees. “She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress” (Conrad 76). His lavish praises say, in effect, “For a savage, she is gorgeous.” Contrary to Kurtz’s fiancé, the Intended, she does not have a voice. This does not sit well with Chinua Achebe because 1) she is in her place and 2) she fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman with whom the story will end. According to Achebe, “It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa. They only ‘exchange short grunting phrases’ even among themselves, but mostly they were too busy with their frenzy” (6).

By the third part of the novella, though Marlow is in awe and admires Kurtz, he sees the man has succumbed to darkness. Kurtz’s life is plagued with violence and greed. He has abandoned his civilization, “gone native,” butchered those who oppose him, and profited from the ivory business for himself, not the company he works for. He has become the true colonizer or the true tyrant of Africa—his part of Africa, anyway. Marlow calls him hollow—hollow to the core. He believes that since Kurtz has been away from the eyes of civil society and authority, especially for so long, he can do whatever he wants and no one can stop him. Besides, no one in the civilized world knows about his violent and corrupt ways. Marlow gives the “between the butcher and the policeman” speech to his listeners:

You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thundering exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. (Conrad 65)

This denouement, that “Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz,” infuriates Achebe (9). He eloquently attributes this kind of rationale to “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (2). However, this is not the message that Marlow or his string-puller, Conrad, wants to convey. Regardless of the location of the setting, the message remains the same—that men, without law and order and judgment of others, will let go of their restraint or inhibition to act on their urges, desires, lusts, greed, and primal instincts. And knowing that no one is there to stop them or that they will not suffer the consequences of their actions, they run wild and free. They will continue to rape, plunge, and destroy others and the world in which they live.

At the opening of the story, as he and four other men sit in the yawl called the Nellie, waiting for the tide to turn, Marlow points out the Thames as a place where 1900 years earlier the Romans had similarly stared into its darkness. He says it “has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad 19). He realizes that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (Conrad 21). In essence, he is saying that empire building is an ugly business. And at the ending of the story, the first narrator adopts Marlow’s word and braces himself as they head out to wherever they are going, perhaps the unknown. “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (94).

Marlow, as an enlightened person, reveals that Europeans have a heart of darkness. After all, “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Conrad 65). The stereotypes, prejudices, dehumanization, denigration, and violence against Africans are manifestations of people with dark hearts. Heart of Darkness remains one of the greatest or “genius” works of art for this moral lesson. If literature or arts were to have a moral lesson, this is it, contrary to Achebe’s outrage. In An Image of Africa, he writes, “I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. It seems to me totally inconceivable that great art or even good art could possibly reside in such unwholesome surroundings” (11). Yet this is the mindset of Europe back then; otherwise, Heart of Darkness would not exist. It shows that Conrad is ahead of his time.

Sadly, stereotypes and prejudices of black people continue, in life and in literature. Almost a century later, after Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” authors like Alice Walker continue to reflect on these issues, especially the portrayal of women. In “Everyday Use,” an oral story like Heart of Darkness, Walker confronts the stereotypes of black Southern women in the time of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

In the wake of these movements, educated young African-Americans try to separate themselves from the “mammy” type of representation and even degrade or ridicule those older Africans who fit such a description. Alice Walker takes notice. Further inflamed by the negative portrayal in historical representations of slave mammies whose existence is seen as “only to enhance her white folks’ lives,” as in the case of William Faulkner’s character of Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, and black women who are voiceless, as portrayed by black men writers such as Jean Toomer, Walker has to illustrate her own idea of black women and heroines and elaborate on their positive qualities (Walker and Christian 9).

In “Everyday Use,” not only does Mama have a voice—an eloquent and expressive voice—but she is also a well-rounded character. While she still fits the stereotypes of the historical slave mammy who is a “larger, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands” and wears “flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day,” she has no shame in these things, because, in her own right, she is a strong and independent woman who “can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man.” Her “fat keeps [her] hot in zero weather.” She can “work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing … can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog.” She “knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall” (Guerin 406). She is aware she is uneducated—that society or her daughter would prefer her to be “a hundred pounds lighter, skin like “uncooked barley pancake,” and with hair that “glistens in the hot bright lights,” but this is her, take it or leave it. She makes no apologies. She is an individual with feelings, values, emotions, and spirituality, and she works hard to attend to her children and her everyday living. She finds the means, through the help of her church, to provide an education, which she did not have, for her older daughter. She actively participates in her community. Moreover, she represents the “creator” and the “guardian” of the culture, and her legacy will live on (Walker and Christian 14).

Similar to Mama, Maggie represents the uneducated and “backward” woman who is left behind while the lucky ones go off to better themselves and advance in life. In contrast to Dee, she is mentally slow, dark, and has burn scars down her arms and legs.

It is ironic in light of the critique of Conrad as racist, that Walker, through the character of Mama, compares the way Maggie walks to 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” (Guerin 406). She does not say much, and when she sees her sister and her male companion, she lets out an “Uhnnnh” sound. Mama describes the sound like “when you see the wriggle end of a snake just in front of our foot on the road. ‘Uhnnnh’ ” (Guerin 408). Achebe crucifies Conrad for depicting Africans’ speech and movements as wild-like. But because Walker is an African-American woman, such comparison or analogy probably would not offend him. In spite of scars and physical and mental inferiority to her sister, Maggie understands something that her brighter sister does not understand, the real value and honor of her heritage in the creation and appreciation of quilts, which she puts into everyday use. She gets her gratification from knowing that her mother and matrilineal ancestors will live within her, her children, and grandchildren.

Walker bestows, through the narrative of Mama, social awareness, education, and middle-class status to Dee/Wangero. The older daughter also possesses beauty and fine taste in material things: clothes, arts and other luxury. “Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure,” says her mother. “Her feet were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them with a certain style” (Guerin 407). Just like Maggie, Mama admires and is in awe of her older daughter—the way she speaks her mind, the way she dresses, and the way she carries herself.

Dee represents the new generation of black people, educated and successful. Education gives her courage, a new outlook on life, and a sense of liberation. Recognizing their individual rights, she and others of like mind unite under the banner of nationalism in the roots of Africa, to combat the stereotypes and prejudices against African-Americans by white or Euro-Americans. She abandons her given name, Dee, which she feels represents oppression by white men. Instead, she opts for Wangero, an African name, to affirm her identity. Her knowledge of Africa, Africans and their culture are as limited as that of Marlow and other white people in “Heart of Darkness.” Unfortunately, it turns out that she is shallow and does not see the real connection between herself and her ancestry. She only appreciates art, in this case her family’s quilts, in aesthetic ways. She does not have the same connection that Maggie has with their ancestors, because she does not know how to make quilts.

In response to the stereotypes and the prejudices of the older, poor, and uneducated black women, Walker gives them a voice and assigns a positive attribute to them. Barbara Christian affirms that Walker reacts to these stereotypes and prejudices when she shapes her characters. This kind of focus might limit the development of the characters. E. Shelley Reid writes, “Knowing, as one of Morrison's characters explains, that ‘definitions belonged to the definers’ (Beloved 190), a generation of writers focused intently on helping their black women characters learn to define themselves positively instead of just reacting against others' stereotypes, and gave them the power to speak their own names and stories” (Reid 315).

Black women have a strong presence and voice in Walker’s writing. However, the presence and the voice of black men are missing. In her attempt to cast the women in positive light, she excludes black men or reduces them to just shadowy images.

Regardless of race, human beings and writers are still evolving. From “Heart of Darkness” to “Everyday Use,” stereotypes and prejudices remain societal problems. But, in the words of Irving Howe, “the whole point of reading literature, it seems to me, is to learn to have sympathies, imaginative relationships with people who are different from one's self” (Bloom 155). How one interprets such a depiction of different peoples is another story. The case in point is Chinua Achebe’s interpretation and many other interpretations of Heart of Darkness. The problem is, Achebe treats the novella as if it were written in today’s society, ignoring the fact that Europeans back then did not have the same mind-set as today. The stereotypes, prejudices, and racisms expressed in Heart of Darkness are based on ignorance, and on a colonial or imperial view. “Conrad could probably never have used Marlow to present anything other than an imperialist world-view, given what was available for either Conrad or Marlow to see of the non-European at the time” (Said 375). Conrad and Walker, though they represent a different race, gender, and time, they are morally conscience artists who care about what happen in their societies. Their works address the same issues and they will continue to inspire readers.


Works Cited


Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa. Research in African Literatures.” Vol. 9, No. 1, Special Issue on Literary Criticism. (Spring, 1978), pp. 1-15. Indiana University Press. .

Bloom, Harold. Alice Walker. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2007. Print.

Guerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Reid, E. Shelley. "Beyond Morrison And Walker." African American Review 34.2 (2000): 313. Academic Search Premier. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

Rice, Philip, and Patricia Waugh. Modern literary theory: a reader. London [u.a.: Arnold, 2001.

Walker, Alice, and Barbara Christian. Everyday use. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994.

SAMBATH MEAS'S BLOG: Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

SAMBATH MEAS'S BLOG: Alice Walker's "Everyday Use": Image borrowed from http://www.csd509j.net/staff/carricp/ Alice Walker is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I would love to emulate her w...

Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"

Image borrowed from http://www.csd509j.net/staff/carricp/

Alice Walker is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I would love to emulate her writings.


The Quilt Maker

By

Sambath Meas


In “Everyday Use,” a short story written from the perspective of a mother about her two radically opposite daughters, Dee and Maggie, Alice Walker conveys the significance of quilts, class differences, and her own self-depiction or self-projection in the characters of Mama, Dee/Wangero, and Maggie. The major conflict in this story is the quarrel, between the aggressive Dee and the submissive Maggie, over the ownership of the family's “priceless” quilts. While the two daughters value them differently, Mama has the final word. She decides to snatch the quilts from Dee and give them to Maggie not because she sides with her, but because it is the right thing to do. Her action represents the middle path between the two extremes of aggressiveness and passiveness. Here, Mama is not only giving herself a voice, but she is also giving Maggie a voice. This middle path represents Walker's own thought about the right path to take to combat hatred, prejudice, and violence, during the complex time of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Tragically, “Despite the [Civil Rights] Movement, in 1970 the United States continued to be racially divided and violent against black people” (Hendrickson 112).

The quilt is a recurring theme and metaphor in Alice Walker’s writings. She references it in her poems, short stories, essays, and novels. It has become a symbol of class, creativity, and legacy. As the daughter of sharecroppers in the South, she can identify with the poor and the uneducated class and knows the value of handmade goods. According to her, quilting signifies one of the many creative attributes of her hard-working mother. In “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker recalls how her mother worked tirelessly “along side” her father and selflessly took great care of her and her seven siblings. “She made all the clothes we wore, even my brothers’ overalls. She made all the towels and sheets we used. She spent the summers canning vegetables and fruits. She spent the winter evenings making quilts enough to cover all our beds” (238). Walker continues:

And yet, it is to my mother—and all our mothers who were not famous—that I went in search of the secret of what has fed that muzzled and often mutilated, but vibrant, creative spirit that black woman has inherited, and that pops out in wild and unlikely places to this day.

For example: in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures, it portrays the story of the Crucifixion. It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt-making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination and deep spirit feeling. Below this quilt I saw a note that says it was made by “an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago.”

If we could locate this “anonymous black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers—an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.” (Walker 238, 239)

A quilt is “priceless” not only because it showcases a poor and uneducated woman’s “creative spirit”; it is also a legacy that connects African-American women with their matrilineal ancestors. The art of quilting has been passed down to Walker from her mother. Though she admits, “I'm really more of a piecer, actually, than I am a quilter,” she has shown her own “powerful imagination and deep spirit feeling” through literature (Freeman 70). She has contributed tremendously to African-American studies and the Civil Rights Movement. History sees her as both a “piecer” and a “quilter” when it comes to writing and working as an activist. David Cowart says it best when he writes, “Self-chastened, Walker presents her own art—the piecing of linguistic and literary intertexts—as quilt-making with words, an art as imbued with the African American past as the literal quilt-making of the grandmother for whom Wangero was originally named” (Cowart 172).

It is apparent that Walker pays homage to her mother and other African-American women through the character Mama in “Everyday Use.” Mama is a poor and uneducated black woman who lives somewhere in the South with her younger daughter Maggie. She may not have any education or accolades, but her legacy and creative spirit can be seen in her everyday living.

The readers are left to assume Mama’s husband is deceased. She only references him when talking about Dee/Wangero. “Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs” (Guerin 409). Like many black women, Mama is both a mother and a father to her children. With the assistance of the church, she was able to raise money to provide education for her older daughter Dee. She has done her best to provide for both of her children, even if she has to perform both feminine and masculine chores. Mama does not pity herself. She actually sounds proud when she describes herself:

In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. (Guerin 406)

Her posterity may not remember these amazing things about her, but her memories will be forever stitched on the quilts, which her mother and big sister had left their own marks on.

They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star Pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Erza’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War. (Guerin 410)

Mama has given the hand-stitched quilts to Maggie to carry on this legacy. She will not only put them to “Everyday Use,” but she will also continue the legacy by adding to the quilts and by passing on this creativity to her own daughters. On the contrary, Dee/Wangero will only hang them on the wall for aesthetic purposes. Though Wangero sees this as a way of connecting, honoring, and remembering her ancestors, this is not how Walker, through the characters of Mama and Maggie, values quilts. In contrast, Dee/Wangero is pushing herself away, making the objects impersonal, using them only for hanging and collecting dust.

Here, Walker is exploring another conflict between the poor, uneducated mother and the educated, middle-class daughter. Instead of appreciating her mother’s sacrifices in giving her a better life, Dee/Wangero turns her back on her family and looks down on the very hands that feed her. She turns her back on her immediate ancestors by changing her name to “Wangero” and adapting herself to African custom and culture, which she does not know anything about. The message here is that she does not have to look to Africa to affirm her identity, when she could find it in her own given name and family. In actuality, she distances herself from her ancestors, in turning her back on her mother and Maggie. Mama sees this and does not appreciate it. Though Mama projects Maggie’s feelings of “envy” and “awe” of her sister, it appears that Mama herself possesses similar sentiments. Actually, Mama resents Dee/Wangero treating her, Maggie, and the house like objects and subjects of her research, in her distorted attempt to embrace her humble roots.

Dee’s new interest in her roots stems from her new awareness that aspects of her history can be used as accessories of style and as elements of interior decoration to elevate her in other people’s eyes and to solidify her middle-class status; she can appear more intelligent, more compassionate, more thoughtful, more in touch with her heritage. She has brought Hakim to visit her family in order to use Mama and Maggie and the house she hates and the quilts she didn’t want earlier to show him her humble roots. (Bloom 160)

When she arrives at the house, “Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on the forehead” (Guerin 408). Just as with the quilts, she is treating her family like objects. She is cold, condescending, and distanced from them.

However, Mama does recognize the value of education. She sees education as empowerment. In contrast to her shy and secluded daughter Maggie, Mama sees that education gives Dee/Wangero confidence and courage. It makes her aggressive. She speaks her mind without hesitation and is not afraid of looking people in the eyes when talking to them. This is an admirable quality. Mama cannot imagine herself having such a “quick tongue” and looking at someone in the eye, especially a white man. “Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can imagine me looking a stranger white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them” (Guerin 406). Mama is strong and courageous when it comes to her household chores and other physical labor, but she realizes her lack of education makes her and Maggie passive with people outside her realm, specifically white people. She admits, “I had never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now” (Guerin 407). Such passive acceptance is what makes a poor person remain poor and miserable. “Dee inspires in Mama a type of awe and fear more suitable to the advent of a goddess than the love one might expect a mother to feel for a returning daughter” (Farrel 180). Hence, Mama does have admiration for Dee/Wangero with her education; however, this, alone, cannot replace a mother¬–daughter bond.

Education and class can be divisive, but the moral lesson of “Everyday Use” is: the poor and uneducated have a voice, too. At the end, Mama’s voice speaks the loudest. Just like Walker’s empathy towards the ordinary Southern black women who are “not famous,” Mama’s compassion for Maggie’s purity and good-heartedness prompts her to snatch the quilts from Dee/Wangero and put them on Maggie’s lap—a statement that an educated person is not the only one with entitlement. Maggie is entitled to the quilts just as much as her sister, because she has a “deepseated understanding of heritage. Most readers agree that when Mama takes the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, she confirms her younger daughter's self-worth: metaphorically, she gives Maggie her voice” (Tuten 125).

Alice Walker wrote “Everyday Use” in 1973. This was a complex time for the Civil Rights Movement, because it was competing with the many factions of Black Power Movements. These other factions, the gun-toting Black Panthers and the nationalist men who were influenced by the ideology of the Nation of Islam, were seen as divisive. They undermined the Civil Rights Movement of nonviolent struggles for racial justice and equality. Unfortunately, many blacks grew impatient and gave up on the nonviolent approach. Many activists, including Walker herself, questioned the right path to take to combat the continued inequality, racism, and violence against African-Americans. Just as in her other essays, short stories, and novels, Walker here uses “her experience in the Movement and the experience of others of her generation to deal with the social, political and philosophical issues raised by the Movement, issues that continue to engage us today” (Hendrickson 111).

In “Everyday Use,” Walker creates two extreme characters—one who is aggressive and one who is passive—to demonstrate an ideological clash and a moral lesson. After weighing all options, at the end, she chose the middle path—the practice of nonviolence, which was influenced by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and which characterized the Civil Rights Movement. On the one hand, violence would only beget violence; on the other, passivity would only lead to a life of toil. One must not be extreme in one or the other of these responses. As if having an epiphany, Mama speaks up by giving the quilts to the more deserving daughter and in turns gives her a voice. The middle path is the way, and Mama represents this middle path.

Lastly, Walker projects herself into all three characters of “Everyday Use”: Mama, Dee, and Maggie. Mama is a poor and uneducated black woman who lives in the South. Her legacy is quilting. Walker was poor and had lived in the South. She also practices the art of quilting, in a literary sense as well. Mama and Alice Walker are both quilters, and they are both creators.

Walker depicts herself also in Dee, the woman who breaks away from ignorance and poverty. Unfortunately, her newfound education puts a strain on her relationship with her family, just like what happened between Walker and her father.

Walker’s relationship with her father became strained as she grew into adolescence and showed a proclivity for intellectual pursuits. Although her father was an intelligent man, his educational opportunities had been limited, and he feared that education would place barriers between him and his children. When Walker left her home for Spelman College in Atlanta, her relationship with her father effectively ended, but over time she has re-evaluated the relationship and has resolved many of her conflicted emotions toward this parent. (Johnson 1)

“Everyday Use” shows that no matter how educated you are, you should embrace your humble beginning by actively participating in the community and in your own family’s creativity. Education should not be a cause of divisiveness. It should enlighten a person to understand others better.

Walker also identifies with Maggie, who is ashamed of her “burn scar down her arms and legs.” She can identify with this physical scar. As a young girl one of her brothers accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB gun. The scar left her feeling “ugly” and “ashamed.” It destroyed her self-confidence. She turned into a completely different person then when she was a little girl. She stopped looking up, just like the character of Maggie. She always felt self-conscious about her scar.

These conflicts over interpretation of ancestry and heritage, class differences, and ownership of the quilts are central to identity. It is ironic that Mama sounds more educated and well-rounded while Dee, the learned and sophisticated daughter, appears clueless. It is as if, in her attempt to value the poor, unknown African-American women, Walker is making Mama more articulate and profoundly knowledgeable than the educated daughter.

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold. Alice Walker. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2007. Print.

Cowart, David. "Heritage and deracination in Walker's `Everyday Use.'" Studies in Short Fiction 33.2 (1996): 171. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 22 Oct. 2011.

Farrell, Susan. "Fight vs. Flight: A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”." Studies in Short Fiction 35.2 (1998): 179. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 22 Oct. 2011.

Freeman, Roland L. "Quilting a Legacy." New Crisis (15591603) 106.4 (1999): 70. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.

Guerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Hendrickson, Roberta M. Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement. MELUS , Vol. 24, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism (Autumn, 1999), pp. 111-128
Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468042

Johnson, Yvonne, “Alice Walker”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First Published 29 February 2004
[http://litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4945,accessed 30 October 2011.]

Tuten, Nancy. "Alice Walker's Everyday Use." Explicator 51.2 (1993): 125. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 22 Oct. 2011.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. Print.

Our language is alive and well

THURSDAY, 25 AUGUST 2011 15:00 SAMBATH MEAS

“Teh. Khnhom ott hoab teh. Khnhom ott khlean. Arkoun yeay,” I responded to my childhood friend’s grandmother. The woman stood aghast at the sight of me, an 11-year-old Khmer girl. I scoured the stored information in my brain to locate the cultural faux pas that I had committed.

How could she be offended by my response: “No. I’m not eating. I’m not hungry”? I did say “Thank you.” I couldn’t understand why she reacted so strongly.

"Hoab is a Khmer Rouge word!” she lashed out at me.

Granted that the Khmer Rouge was a demonic regime, I couldn’t understand how she could be so offended by this simple Khmer word: hoab (eat). Her look of horror and disgust remained in the back of my mind, and it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that it became apparent to me.

Like many Cambodians of Chinese descent, especially city dwellers who weren’t immersed in, or assimilated into, Khmer culture, my friend’s grandmother was deeply ignorant of the common Khmer language.

Tragically, these outsiders only came into contact with the everyday language after the murderous Khmer Rouge forced them out of the cities and dumped them in the countryside. They were threatened with torture and death if they were found using city words or demonstrating a city mentality, attitude or culture.

This is why I find Ms Theary Seng’s opinion about the Khmer language, which was published in The Phnom Penh Post on August 16, 2011, appalling and shameful. She reminds me of that grandmother; she probably doesn’t even know that she is out of touch and wrong about it until this day.

With the majority of city people using incorrect grammar, or misspelling, mispronouncing and misusing Khmer words (not to mention speaking the language in a lazy, slurry, and foreign accent), she is wrong to the people who actually speak it correctly.

Based on her “general observations”, she finds the following words “crude”, “earthy” and “offensive”: aign (it should be anhn); haign (it should be a-heing or ah-heing); veer (it should be vea); and phoeum. There is nothing crude, rude, impolite or dehumanizing about them.

Anhn (I/me), a-heing (you), vea (he/she/it, depending on the subject) and phoeum (pregnant) are familiar and common words. The beauty of the Khmer language is that we have formal and informal words to address ourselves, religious and political figures, the royal family, older and younger individuals and elitists.

For those of us who are familiar with each other, there are down-to-earth, neutral and intimate words, such as anhn, a-heing, vea and phoeum. They connect us together. To remove these words is to crush and destroy the Khmer spirit of closeness. Of course, you would have to be close friends, family members or relatives to use them. They are familiar words for the same class and the same age groups. Therefore, a younger person should not use anhn, a-heing and vea towards elders.

The irony is that the Khmer Rouge forced people to stop using city and elitist words. Now, as the “genocide activist” or “the daughter of the killing fields”, as Ms Seng calls herself, she is barring us from using common Khmer words, the language of our ancestors. It is similar to the situation when the UNTAC tried to ban, and even punish us, for using the word Yuon for “Vietnamese”. The cycle of ignorance continues.

Secondly, the Khmer written language already has a strong foundation: grammar (veyeakar), spelling (akharavirouth) and the art of writing (aksar selb) etc. There is no limitation to being creative.

Everything is there.

We have 33 consonants (pyunhchanak), 23 vowels (srak), 16 complete or independent vowels (srak penhtour) and 18 diacritics (vannakyuth or sanha samkual). Khmer has the longest alphabet and can make a vast variety of sounds. All you have to do is learn these things well, be creative and build from there. Being poorly informed of the language doesn’t mean that the language is dying.

In a nutshell, Ms Seng is a social and political activist. Her job is to raise awareness and help people learn how to help themselves. In order for her to do so effectively and efficiently, she must understand and possess the mentality of Khmer natives and our sophisticated language.

The saddest part about all of this is that the indigenous Khmers are less active in Cambodian society. They are the ones who know our language best.

Sambath Meas,
Chicago, Illinois

THE KHMER LANGUAGE IS ALIVE AND WELL; THE BRAIN IS IN CRISIS

The artwork is meant to be sarcastic. It represents the world in which the character lives, even though it looks wrong to everyone else.