Homeland, Heritage, and Everyday Objects:

Homeland, Heritage, And Everyday Objects: The Writings of Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingslover, And Leslie Marmon Silko

The search of so-called 'hyphenated' Americans -- whether African-American, Chinese-American, or Native American -- for a source of identity is chronicled in the works of Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Leslie Marmon Silko. For Americans who are members of historically marginalized groups, having a place in the world is never assumed. Identity is something to be negotiated, contested, and fought over, often through the use of physical objects that represent home and heritage, in the stories of these authors. Their protagonists attempt with varying levels of success to find a means of self-definition that relates to contemporary American life, yet still honors the past.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," the two daughters of the narrator, Mrs. Johnson, are shown as embracing polarized visions of African-American womanhood. One girl, named Maggie, is content to stay at home and embrace traditional African-American culture in a largely segregated area of the country. The other daughter, Dee, tries to construct a new African heritage for herself. Dee embraces the objects of her childhood she once rejected. She regards them as artifacts of history, sources of political pride, but it is Maggie who knows how to make the quilts for 'everyday use' that Dee wants to frame. Both daughters are shown as incomplete: the reader cannot embrace Maggie's acquiescent nature and refusal to fight for a better life, but Dee does not appreciate her mother's strength and the real, lived experience of Mrs. Johnson's heritage.

In the Native American author Barbara Kingsolver's short story "Homeland," the contemporary Indian characters are shown as having to 'make do' with physical representations of the past that are now denuded of their original meaning: the central character, Great Mam, decides she wants to see the homeland of her Cherokee people before she dies but she can only gaze upon it: the old land and the old ways have been lost, as has the seamless continuity between Native past and present. But her family remains strong, even if they live their lives very differently than their dying matriarch.

African-Americans, as members of a group who were forcibly migrated to America are not immigrants, and Native Americans are the original inhabitants of this land. But Chinese-Americans such as Amy Tan, although she is a daughter of willing immigrants to America, also experience identity conflicts. In "Half and Half" Amy Tan explicitly identifies her protagonist Rose as feeling half American, half Chinese in a manner that often makes her feel adrift in the world. Part of this passivity, Tan suggests, is Rose's guilt and self-loathing from accidentally letting her brother drown when she was supposed to be watching him. In the midst of a bitter divorce, Rose eventually reconnects emotionally with her mother and resolves to fight for the house she loves. Asserting her right to a physical homeland in America becomes a source of pride for Rose -- her home becomes her homeland in America, and establishes her right to exist, a right she doubted after her brother died. Despite the fact that her mother and she have different understandings of the importance of physical space and objects, the two women, representing east and west, find common ground in Rose's right to her home.