"Women of Color" Writers and Feminist Theory

Abstract

LICE WALKER'S 1983 volume In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens ends with the autobiographical narrative/essay, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self. Haunted in adulthood by self-doubt because of an eye blinded and scarred in childhood by a brother's BBgun shot, Walker narrates in this essay the story of her healing, first surgical, then, in time, psychological. essay ends in this way: looking steadily into her eyes one day at naptime, and recalling a televised image of the earth from outer space, Walker's three-year-old daughter says to her, Mommy, there's a world in your eye. Rushing to a mirror while her daughter naps, Walker confirms the insight her daughter has given her: that her blemished eye is indeed lovable and integral to her identity or, as she puts it, deeply suitable to my personality, and even characteristic of me. She notes that her two eyes operate independently of each other, the blind eye drifting in fatigue or boredom, or bearing witness in excitement. final paragraph recounts a dream Walker has that She is dancing, happier than I've ever been in my life. She is joined by anotherjoyous dancer, and dance and kiss and hold each other through the night. This other dancer, the essay concludes, is beautiful, whole and free. And she is also me.' Barbara Christian writes in her 1987 essay The Race for Theory, people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. .... our theorizing . .. is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs ... since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking .... My folk [she says punningly] have always been a race for theory.2 If Christian is right, Walker's moving narrative is also doing the work of theory, and I believe it is. What is, then, the theoretical work that a scene like Walker's is doing? Before attempting to answer that question, I would like to frame it in the context of debates about black and white