The Search for Roots in Alice Walker's Everyday Use

An appetite for digging out our roots strikes us all at some point and to a varying degree. It is a call from within, to reach out and grab hold of our piece of the world; a yearn to claim ownership of the one true thing that can never be taken from us: our origin. In the late 1960s it became common practice for many African Americans to re-appropriate their long lost African customs and traditions, religious beliefs, and names (not their given names, but the names of their people). Though for the most part they had been separated from their African motherland for nearly two centuries, many sought solace and identity away from the land they were born and raised in, one in which their ancestors had toiled in slavery, then lived oppressed by the ruling class once freed.

In Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," we encounter one such person. Dee is a young African American woman with an education and a sense of style, who is likely swept up by the movements of the sixties and the calls for Black Power and cultural emancipation - so much so that she gives up the name her mother gave her and acquires an African one. However, as I intend to demonstrate, those that choose to pursue the traditions of their ancestors in lands already removed by several generations of their bloodline, to claim them as their true culture and heritage, do so at the peril and expense of their more authentic heritage which is found in the home of their parents.