In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

“To take Toni Morrison’s statement further, if that is possible, in my own work I write not only what I want to read […] I write all the things I should have been able to read.” 

For Walker, the black writer’s task involves gaining a sense of her past and the writers who have come before her. Since many of these writers have been silenced or neglected, this is often intuitive, imaginative work, as much as it is research. 

“One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people, not by the Queen of England.” 

As an aspiring black woman writer, Walker had to contend with established white male writers dismissing her background as unsuitable for a poet’s. She came to realize that there is more than one suitable background, and more than one way to write poetry.  

“Blindness about other human beings, especially for a writer, is equivalent to death.” 

The racist culture of the South in which Walker grew up often fueled this “blindness about other human beings.” Walker sees the job of the Southern writer, black or white, as looking past this blindness, trying to find the source of it and trying to see people for who they are.