LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 14:10 October 2014
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Envisioning the Past and Venerating Ancestors in Alice Walker’s
The Temple of My Familiar

N. R. Charrumathi, M.A., M.Phil.

Abstract

African American women writers are aware of the displacement and fragmentation that afflict African American individuals and so they turn to re-elaborate and reconstitute the influence of their African cultures. They use their imagination to reconstruct the omitted past. For African American artists, the past and the present are interdependent. Their works have the potential of healing any individual or collective identity through the remembrance of the ancestors. History should be reconstructed in such a way as to be a resource for the present. The works of African American women writers function as bridges between history and myth, because they join present experiences with those of the past, affirming cultural continuity and instructing new generations in survival techniques which are required for spiritual and moral growth and for the achievement of wholeness. Ancestors are a collective repository of wisdom that provides direction and inspiration to establish moral and ethical standards as precedents of the race. This paper attempts to present the ways in which the author demonstrates the facts mentioned here in her unique way.

Introduction

To a writer, literature is the noblest and most dignified form of resistance. The writer is like a spiritual healer, a Shaman who resurrects the dead from their lifelessness. She redeems them from the “sin of omissions”, reinvigorates their existence and helps them ‘survive whole’ through the concept of memory. In her interview with Claudia Dreifus, Walker explains the New Age quality in her writing and her ideas:

What I’m doing is literarily trying to reconnect us to our ancestors. All of us. I’m really trying to do that because I see that ancient past as the future, that the connection that was original is a connection: if we can affirm it in the present, it will make a different future. Because it’s really fatal to see yourself as separate. You have to feel, I think, more or less equal and valid in order for the whole organism to feel healthy. (31)

In “Saving the Life That Is Our Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” Walker argues that “What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immerse diversity” (In Search of My Mother’s Gardens 5). One of the valuable gifts Walker gained in discovering her literary ancestors was a sense of continuity with the past, a thread that bound her to a community of black artisans.

Hurston’s Writing as Model

As a writer, Walker discovered Zora Neale Hurston’s literary works and her efforts to preserve the cultural heritage that Hurston shared provided the model Walker had been searching for. Walker’s anger at being deprived of appropriate models during the years she was growing into her art made her discover the works of Hurston. She was largely denied the aid of black literary models. Through excavation of Hurston’s works, the link between the past and the present was accomplished, and that became the means of achieving continuity of time. In Hurston, Walker found a kindred spirit with whom she shared a concern for the survival of black people and their culture. Though Hurston’s genius was not recognized during her lifetime, it nurtured the “racial health: a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings”. (In Search of My Mother’s Gardens 85)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

N.R. Charrumathi, M.A., M.Phil.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Velalar College of Engineering and Technology
Thindal
Erode 638012
Tamilnadu
India
narayanacharu@gmail.com
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