Our Mother’s Gardens is an essay written by Alice Walker talking about African women’s talents and skills that are suppressed because of a forced way of life. Her arguments are backed up by her experiences between Africans Americans. She says that her mother’s and grandmother’s lives were suppressed by the sad and dark pasts that they experienced(Walker, 1972). Even though this was bitter in their lives, she confirms that all is not lost and that the search for our mother garden may still end back at us. Walker talks of Jean Toomer as a man who looked down upon black women as people who have intense spirituality in them. This essay will focus on the writer’s arguments and strategies used in writing.

The essay was most challenging as it addressed things that affected our parents. Slavery was an issue that touched people and suppressed their feelings(Walker, 1972). This is sad, and it changed mothers and grandmothers during the time of slavery. The writer uses a black slave girl called Phillis Wheatley whom through slavery had precarious health. She was a poet but could not do much because her talent was suppressed by slavery. These are the things that make the reader emotionally and can bring hatred between the readers and the people who were involved in the slave trade. All her attempts to express herself was washed up by forced labor and pregnancies. But there is a hope that she can come up with alternatives that will help them come out of this slavery.

The writer organizes her essay in a way that makes it easily understandable to the readers. Through this, it is useful in depicting the worries that women underwent during the time of slavery. For instance, according to paragraph three, of page 404, the writer says that Wheatley i8s a slave who owned nothing even herself(Walker, 1972). This organization shows that slavery was intense to the extent that the masters possessed the lives of slaves. This text backs up the writer’s argument as she relates the plight of the blacks with the women’s hardship. To connect well with the audience, the writer uses rhetorical questions that capture their attention. For example, on page 404 paragraph 6, the writer says that “but how could this be otherwise?”(Walker, 1972). This is a question that makes the audience to try to guess what could have been the choice that a slave could make to get out of it. The writer resists the idea of creativity as she says that it was a punishable crime for the black to read or write. Asa result, the expansion of mind with action did not exist. Through this, the creative ideas of being novelists or poets died through suppression of the original black women.

Conclusively, uses different strategies and style in her expression and arguments within the story. The story focuses on the black women being artists and how she resisted the idea of the single story. The creativity in the blacks was suppressed with a forced way of life as they were not allowed to own anything including their lives. As a result, to capture the attention of the audience, she uses the rhetorical questions that can make them guess the kind of treatment that the whites were undergoing.

Reference

Walker, A. (1972). In search of our mothers’ gardens. New York.

 
Do you need high quality Custom Essay Writing Services?