closure, prehaps?

For me, chapter 21 could have been the beginning of a new, very short book. Walker seemed to stop tip-toeing around these big questions she has been living with and is instead on a more direct search for answers. Or maybe shes not so much searching for answers now as happening upon them. She spends much of the beginning of the chapter discussing how hidden memories are reappearing due, in part to the "...chicken and her babies in Bali so long ago..."(p101), yet does not tell us what about this chicken family brought about these memories, or even what, specifically these memories are. By leading us back in time through her memory we get a sense that Walker's failing memory was once used to protect her, but while exploring and expanding these memories we feel a sense of growth and of acceptance. That there is often pain connected to forgotten memories, but that if you dig deep enough you will discover the joy in these memories too. "But in order to forget Buddy she had to forget the pine tree under which he was tethered much of the time, the same tree under which he was shoot." (p.108) The intertwine-ment of these opposing feelings, hope and joy, loss and sorrow seem to shape Walkers journey and growth through this book.
In the last half of this book Walker seems to be more introspective than at first. Her questions seem more aimed at her own life than as general questions about life. She digs deeper into her own spirituality, pondering over what is right and wrong. "HOW CAN HUMANITY/look the deer/in/the face?/How can I,/having erected/my fence?" (p.111) Something about this poem stuck with me. It seems so simple, yet the questions it posses are very deep. Walker is obviously apart of humanity, and yet she includes herself separately from them in this poem, though they are both hurting the deer. In this poem you get a sinking feeling of guilt, of becoming what you once fought against. How can you fix this, I feel that is the question. And Walker is quick to ponder over how to answer it. "Often that is what stupidity really is. Not knowing what to do. You see the problem; it troubles your heart; but you have no idea what your part is in making a change." (p.122) How universal is that?!? Once you have the memories back, and you can see the problem, knowing how to begin to heal can be the hardest part, and often it can be so daunting it is never attempted. But Walker can see that and so instead of beating herself up for being 'stupid' or not immediately having the right answer she gives herself time to learn and adjust. Her chickens often help her to get past this stage of not knowing what to do. At the start of chapter 30, she refers to them as "Dear Feathered Mysteries" (p.145); Walker is always learning from these birds, they offer her a place to meditate and to reflect. Her gentleness to them, and the fact she refers to herself as their Mommy shows how much she respects everything they have to give her, from their eggs, to their beauty to their mystery. I get the feeling that while perhaps as a child she did get some of this kind of love and appreciation, she was not in a place where she could fully receive it. "...many old humans have said: Never abuse or harm a child, because s/he may go away so far s/he may never come back...And, not being there, she could not appreciate how they suffered too, along with her. She could not see, or pay attention to, the fact that they loved her." (p152-153). Obviously Walker had been hurt, but she never directly states what has hurt her and I feel that just being able to have the memory that she was hurt was enough for her to start to heal. Earlier in the book she is determined to find out what, exactly happened to her chickens when they die, but her relationship with death and with mystery has evolved. While she is still curious, she is able to let go and accept without having a full fledged investigation. This relaxed acceptance seems to lead to closure for Walker.

I dig this book

It seems like many people have pointed out the importance of the title and the chapter, "Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories". I believe Walker was drawing the readers attention to two key elements of the novel. The chickens forced her to sit, breath, relax, take time, etc. I would be willing to argue that without being forced to sit and take a moment for ourselves, we as humans, are not capable of thoughtful reflection. The second part of the title of this chapter has to do with her experiences in relation to her chickens and how these experiences conjure up, dare I say scratch away (in the way that chickens scratch at  the ground pushing the dirt aside in search for precious bugs) the busy distracting qualities of life and let us focus in on "the bugs" or the deep connections.

When walker sees her life and explains to her chickens about Buddy the bull and forgetting or the eating of other animals when she reflects on the absence of her attachment saying, "... we do not have to withdraw our affection when it is most needed and abandon our sustainers in their moments of transition." (Walker 118) I was overjoyed at Walker seeing animals outside of the childlike realm; all of a sudden her chickens, pigs, and cows became tasty and "sustainers". This memory is dredged up because her chickens are CHICKENS! They are sustainers for her body and her mind. They provide this place for her to reflect.

I loved her reflections on how chickens don't care about their appearances. "You look a bit mussed. But you don't seem to notice, which is a lovely trait. Did humans ever have this? id we ever go through our life changes without making a big deal about them?" (Walker 129) She goes on to say, "I like your lack of vanity. It is refreshing." In these few lines we see the power these chickens have and in a way how they have transformed from just being physically sustained to Walker, to be being idolized beasts. Chickens! Who would have thought.

This complexities of Walker's manner in approaching her chickens, as loving parent, hungry human, curious-for-answers-human, reflective human allows her to be so open with us as readers, she challenges us to see that "Life teaches as and when it will." (Walker 159) And that it is up to us to transform our experiences and give them meaning weather that be experiences with Chickens or not.

Chicken Chronicles II

Chapter 21 is the turning point of the book. It's not really a climax, there's not really a hero's journey, but I'd say chapter 21 is really the meat (tofu?) of the book. It's really the crux (clux?)

I'm sorry.

Up until now we've been plodding along, alternately having soft-spoken revelations and documenting chicken behavior. When suddenly, BLAM, we get to the whole point of the book: the chickens bring back her memories. Let me do this a la 9th grade immigrant student of mine.
The chickens bring back her memories. One quote that shows this is, "For, spending time with you, not only did Mommy recall and visualize her own mother's thumb with its deep, beloved scar, and from the thumb begin to see her mother's face and actions, but she also began to see, in stark detail, the house near Ward's chapel; the final and most wretched of all the gray shacks' the house that her mother attempted to hide, as she camouflaged all the others, behind the vibrant wall of flowers. (p102)" This is important because it shows that the chickens brought back her memories.

I'm sorry.

Chapter 21 is called "Sitting with the angels who have returned with my memories." Walker writes about writing this book (totally meta, right?), and it is not clear whether she's just gotten to the point of the book, or if the point of the book has just gotten to her. "That is why, just today, and after writing many chapters of this little book, Mommy realized what the subtitle should be: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories. You are the angels. (p102)" If you look at it one way, it's absurd that she wrote half the book before she figured out what the point was. But if you look at it another way, this seems to be simply the biggest/most valuable nugget (egg?) that she picked out of all her vignettes. And indeed, chapter 21 is most unlike the other vignettes. Walker goes on for much longer than the other chapters, describing in vivid detail her mother; her house; okra' chicken eggs that paid for piano lessons; pig sexuality; bull slaughter, communion, and meat. Here we fully leave the somewhat-chronological story and go way back to another world. The only connection: chickens.
Without this chapter, the book wouldn't be much more than a travel blog: oh, I did this new thing today! Oh, I saw something really nice. Wow, doing this thing really made me understand this other thing about life/myself. Chapter 21 is the keystone.

Chicken Chicken #2

            Chapter 27, ‘Hi, Gladys, Gladys, Gladys, Gladys, Gladys’ holds subtle differences from other chapters that create a didactic environment for the reader. Since Walker’s initial shift to a second person point of view directed at her chickens in chapter 9, chapter 27 is one of the first, if not the first, points in the text where Walker leaves out any address to a ‘you’. By removing the frame of dialogue between Walker and her chickens, the reader becomes the projected audience. Additionally, since Walker maintains her references to herself as ‘Mommy’, the relationship between herself and the audience subtly changes so that she is, in a way, adopting the reader. By speaking more directly to the reader, Walker allows for more intimate accessibility of her contemplations, as if she were inviting the reader to think on them as well. Thus, this chapter comes off as more didactic to me than others because of the removal of the framework she created between herself and the chickens.

            Walker’s point that she appears to be teaching is that “[h]umans like to think all humans of another race look alike, but that is because the glance of the uncaring stranger tends to be superficial” (134). Walker goes on to say that despite being unable to differentiate the members of the Gang of Five, “seeing them in all their russet glory always made her feel glad” (134). This concept is a bit complex: Though Walker claims that the inability to tell the difference between members of a separate race is due to apathy and being “superficial”, she also asserts that she, while blending one chicken’s identity with the other, transcends being “uncaring” and “superficial” because of the happiness that they provide her. Perhaps Walker is suggesting that, through allowing the positive associations of people to outweigh the unfamiliarity of them, compassion for other humans and species does not require a full understanding of them but rather an openness to being grateful for their differences and what they provide.

            The form of the chapter reflects the notion of individuality versus communality. Many of the sentences are broken up into short clauses: “Unlike the Barred Rocks with their crisp black-and-white swirls of feathers, or the Ameraucanas with their vivid colors and distinctive designs, the Rhode Island Reds, which is what the gang consisted of, all looked pretty much alike” (133). This sentence, as well as many others in the chapter, are mimetic of Walker’s discussion of groups and individuals. More importantly, it reflects the idea of songs that was mentioned in chapter 20: “we are our songs embodied; it is the song of all of us that keeps our planet balanced” (100), and is again mentioned in chapter 27: “They…respond[ed] with a chorus or two – not quite in the same key – of their own” (134). The short, broken up sentences lend to the rhythm of the piece, acting out the songs of beauty within individuality and communality and the blending of the two.

Why define Mother? Chicken Chronicles 2

In The Chicken Chronicles Alice Walker spends a lot of time meditating on family; who is family, what is their function? By sharing her experience of raising chickens with us Walker forms new definitions of family, and new understanding of her memories of her own family.

 Walker believes in the fluidity of family, that is to say you can make up your own and are not limited to include only your biological family in it. Walker addresses this in Chapter 16 Enough Mother, where she finds herself in a group of women who for one reason or another identify themselves as motherless. One woman in the group said, “if you collect seven women and form a circle together, enough Mother will automatically be created”(75). This woman taught Walker that whatever it is we expect to get from our biological mothers can be found in a group of people who are not her. One more example of Walker believing family is not limited to biological family would be when she talks to her chickens of “Grandfather Gandhi”, and defines grandparents by saying: “a grandfather, or grandmother, is someone who wants only your health and happiness and he or she doesn’t mind in the least being seen as a fool to see that these objectives are achieved” (114). By this definition anyone can fulfill this role.

The family member Walker spends the most time trying to define is Mother. She starts the book by sharing her observation of an “industrious and quick, focused and determined” Mother hen, who displays her motherly duties by providing for and protecting her chicks (1). Here her observations of the function of a Mother are pragmatic; Mothers are there to protect and provide. We see Walker take on this duty as a pragmatic Mother to these chickens she has decided to raise. She builds them a house, fences out predators, and feeds them. In return, the chickens help her discover and share deep insights, and find lost memories (102). From this we can conclude that Walker believes one function of the family is to teach, and learn from, each other. It’s important to note that it is Walker that is learning from the chickens and so it is not just parents who teach their children, but children have something to teach as well. Many times Walker acknowledges this exchange, (“What a gift you have given us!” (143), and “with your help” (154)) and thanks her chickens.

By the end of the book Walker comes to another realization about Mother; Nature is the real Mother of all beings. She says, “Mommies, especially human Mommies, can be wrong. And, there’s a very good reason for this... [they] are only surrogates. In fact, all creatures on the planet have the same parent… the real excitement for you comes when you are free to rush into your real mother’s bounty” (185). This is a significant insight that becomes even more significant when you couple it with the lesson learned about the nature of the relationship of children and parents; that the exchange of knowledge, lessons, gifts is not one-sided. I interpret this as Mother Earth needing her children to give to her as much as they need her to give to them.

This meditation on family is constant throughout the book and makes me wonder more about the author’s own family life. Descriptions of her family are sparse, and I found myself trying to put the pieces together to form her experience.   You get the sense that, as a child, Walker didn’t quite understand the way her parents showed her love. They fulfilled that more pragmatic role of providers, as evidenced in Mommy Is So Thankful To Have You Appear (151). I believe her family experience growing up left her wanting more:

when I was a little girl; members of my family were always leaving home and I did not understand why they wanted to go anywhere, especially if they loved me, as they seemed to. Nobody talked about “loving” anybody in those times. But you could still tell because love is that kind of emotion; where it exists, it’s all over the place.(77)

This was not helped by her accident that she alludes to, which seemed to cause her to close up: “Mommy believes this: that when small children are injured they do in fact leave their bodies…and terrible things are done, almost as if the human, who is now adult, is fast asleep” (152).

As an adult sitting with the angels who have returned with her memories, Walker is able to understand her own family more. This meditation on family is not just a way to understand the family of her childhood, but also the family she created as an adult (in the book she does not mention having children, but a quick googling uncovers a daughter from an ex-husband). I wanted to address this topic in my blog because I constantly found myself questioning what her relationship was like with her children if she had any.  Though I am not a Mother myself I’ve picked up on a common concern of parents. Many worry whether or not they’ve done a good job, and it seems important that their children know they did their best. With that in mind I wondered if Walker’s own daughter was on her mind when she was writing this story. The comforting thought of being able to create your own family, the idea that parents have as much to learn as their children, identifying Nature as our true Mother, sharing her scars from her childhood and how they made her close off some of the world, and the multiple ways in which she shows she strives to be a better person, all seem to me like an explanation to somebody more direct than just us anonymous readers. Maybe it’s a stretch, but it’s an idea I couldn’t stop thinking. An idea of inadequacy in parenting that Walker, like so many parents, may not be able to shake. An idea that urges me to end on this quote from the book: “whatever is learned can be considered, absorbed, and in the future (or the present) put to use on whatever or whoever is left behind. That is the prayer.” (139)

Concepts of Buddhism 2/25

Although it might be, "folly to try to understand someone else's religious/spiritual beliefs/practices. [And there may be] no point in trying to make sense of where Walker is spiritually," I found it fascinating to explore. For me, spirituality has always been open to understanding. It's something which is entirely internal and something which says a lot about a person. Even if we aren't meant to fully understand Walker's spirituality, one can explore the values behind her spirituality as it is a key element to her book. If we can't understand it, or at least try to, what is the point of using this element so richly? 


After reading the second half of this book, I realized something great about these vignettes.They allude to Buddhist concepts! Now, I may be jumping a little far for some people to follow but I will do my best to share with you what I have discovered. One major problem with my assumptions is that I know very little about Buddhism, but I feel like plenty of people are right a long with me. After all this is brief literary analysis, and I'm going with my gut here.


In vignette 23, Walker is describing a scene where she contemplates the life of the animal's she eats. Her wishes are for their deaths to be similar to a movie she admires, Cold Mountain, which portrays a beautiful death of a goat in a woman's lap. Walker accepts she needs to eat meat because her body needs it. But deep down, she holds onto, "That depiction, of how killing an animal might be done," as true because, "it reminds humans that though we must eat other living beings to live, we do not have to withdraw our affection when it is most needed" (117,118). This concept shows her coming into "mindfulness." Being mindful is an essential part of buddhism. 


The value and difficulty of "coexisting" drives vignette 24. She describes a small scene of her vegetable gardens being eaten by deer and than opens it up to a much larger scene. In describing things to her chickens, she brings up the killing off of deer by humans, and than the killing off of humans. A fence seemed to be a huge struggle for her to face. But eventually she discovers, "This was her stupidity. [And] [o]ften that is what stupidity really is. Not knowing what to do.You see the problem; it troubles your heart; but you have no idea what your part is in making a change" (122). Coexisting becomes her solution. And she figures out a way to satisfy her needs to not leave anything out of her solution. Coexisting is important for buddhism. 


Vignette 25 is the first time I thought about how her tone might be suggesting an entirely different message than what I had originally thought. I couldn't help but notice how her 3rd person perspective made the book sound like a folkloric tale. It made her be able to connect the entire book to chickens because she was telling them all her stories. But than I wondered if this style was meant to tell the chickens her basic concepts or if she was using this technique to talk to her readers. Now, it might not be the case for every concept she incorporates, but it certainly helps along the concept of spirituality. She could be using the chicken's as (yet another) vehicle to describe how she came across her spirituality. An easy way of describing buddhism in life. So as she dumbs down the stories of life for her chickens, she is actually making allusions to her process of enlightenment. After all, the book is about her philosophy of life! What better way than to explain it in simple chicken terms. Perhaps I am a little slow to notice this, and it won't be such a shocker of discovery to others. Also interesting is that buddhism accepts all religions. It is a process of a state of mind. Wonderful!


Now I could get very thorough into the extent of this topic of spirituality, but I am going to end here so this blog doesn't scare away any potential readers. I could write a very large paper on this because it fascinates me! And perhaps I shall later on… 


Other concepts of buddhism she brings up throughout are, kindness (vignette 27), reincarnation (28), attachment (29), slowing down and living in the moment (30), enlightenment (31), awareness (32), being present  (34), selflessness (35). etc etc etc! 


Spirituality is a wonderful thing to explore in this book because, I have found, it moved her throughout the entire book. Her spirituality is a part of her life philosophy. It is a big part of how she looks at the world. This book makes me feel invited to question her and question the world. Her spirituality is "genuine and true (for her)," but also genuine for her readers. 


(Sorry for quoting last weeks comment to my blog.)

Stewardship in The Chicken Chronicles

I noticed that along with using the chickens as a vehicle for communicating her life philosophy and working with her memories for personal growth, Walker also uses setting dynamically to not only set a scene but to communicate life lessons learned.  In chapter 24, “A Few Kind Words About Stupidity,” I feel that Walker uses setting to expose human folly in her dealings with the deer. She describes the change that happens on her land over time: long before the chickens, Walker would watch the deer wander across her property; then at some point, Walker fenced off a quarter of her land for the house/garden/orchard/yard; then the coming of vineyards that limited the deer’s access to the land; and finally the decimation of the deer population by hunters and traffic. She sets up this chronology to then make an interesting move: she links the hunting of male deer (bucks) to the hunting of runaway black male slaves and Native American men—both also called bucks. In this way, Walker brings together many of the complexities that have arose and haunt American culture in regard to land, space, ownership and the violence that began during colonial times, continued through manifest destiny, and is still affecting the natural world as more and more habitat space is being erased in the face of human “development” of land. By setting up her prose as if her audience were the chickens, Walker also serves her purpose here. By using simple language and syntax, and breaking down ideas to what she feels a chicken might understand, Walker is able to powerfully expose how ridiculous and (at their base) irrational many human behaviors in are. For example, she says “Discrimination often means having a hard time finding a place to live or feeding yourself and your family. People could starve. Like, for instance, some of you could starve if I gave food only to the Red Gang of Six…and very little or none to Rhode Island Reds, Barred Rocks, or Ameraucanas” (122).  Walker does not attempt to explain why discrimination happens but rather highlights what the dire consequences of it are. In this way, Walker shows how arbitrary discrimination is and the life or death disadvantages it creates; if you are dealt a certain card by fate, you may not have a home or enough food to survive.

 But fate, in this situation (or maybe Nature?), shows Walker the way to become a steward of her land, taking care of both herself and all the creatures on it in happy coexistence when a storm knocks down part of her fence. She says “The solution came to her in a flash of inspiration, which is simultaneously a welcome release from stupidity!...She saw how she and her kind, humans, were really the dangerous ones” (123). By knowing what to do, by coming up with the solution to build smaller fences around her garden and let the deer have more access to the other, safer parts of the yard, Walker becomes an active agent on her land, shaping it to everyone’s advantage. I feel in this chapter Walker is relaying a personal triumph in solving a problem, but I also feel she is calling humanity at large, and especially Americans, to think outside the box for solutions to problems of environmental conservation and discrimination in access to resources.             

1st chicken chronicles response

Alice Walker's deep appreciation of chickens at first baffled me. She sees such beauty in not only the nutrients they supply to human life, but in their "grey, scaly, entirely precious feet" (p.79) as well; not a place I normally find beauty. This type of unwavering love and dedication reminds me of the phrase "only a mother could love it..", and indeed Walker does portray herself as the mother hen. She writes of Mommy's adventures around the world, Mommy's garden,  Mommy's choice to grant her chickens more freedom, Mommy missing her children while she is away, Mommy grieving the loss of her little ones. Walker writes to the reader as though they are too one of her chicken-babies, however not in every chapter. Sometimes she seems to be expressing her love and curiosity to a close friend, or to herself, while at other times she adresses the chapter to "the girls". All of these references to the relationship between a mother and her young ones seem to lead to the scene where she describes her friend Jean (who, interestingly enough has a full name and is not just referred to as J.) enlightens her to the idea that enough women can create "Ample Mother" (p.75), and care for each other and themselves. "You can create the Mother you need. It is only Mommy, out flying about the Earth, who cannot create you..."(p.75) This passage brings up questions about Walker's relationship with her mother. When she loses one of here chickens in the chapter So I thought we would just go on like this forever, Walker asks herself (or is she asking the chickens?), "I blamed myself. For isn't that what mothers do?" (p.28).  Does she have the ability to create the mother she needs for herself? Or does she make herself into the mother she has wished for by becoming the mother to these chickens?

The theme of gaining appreciation for life, love and animals through experience seems to weave all of these pieces together. At first it felt a bit chaotic to me, Walker jumps from the past to the present, to the distant past and back again from chapter to chapter. However, looking at the pieces as a whole helps me to see the narrative she is creating. Walker is pleading for her reader to take the time to see the sacrifices made for their pleasure. In the chapter St. Michael, we get the sense that what she was mourning was the ignorance people have toward the things that they enjoy. "What pained her so much about the loss of Michael was the loss of his own innocence, seeing it offered to adoring fans who did not have a clue...how precious was the gift they were consuming." (p.84) Consuming, we consume the media, we consume chickens, never thinking of the artist's own personal loss of their sense of "self"; never thinking of how beautiful the chicken was that we have roasted in our sandwiches. "Not one chicken memorialized and worshiped in all these shrines. I don't understand it. With your flesh and eggs, surely holy, you feed the world. Yet no one bows to you. How can this be?" (p.63)

Walker drifts from one thought to the next throughout her chapters as one would in a letter to a dear friend or a journal entry; reminding me of the attention span of a chicken. Her short, to the point sentences seem to be just the right size for a chicken to peck at, pick up and carry away. "It is just her thumb. I recognize it because I loved it so well, along with the rest of her. But the reason I see it now is the chickens." (p.21) Sentences like these give the reader small, bite sized pieces to take away with them, like looking in a window for just a split second. Walker is able to pack emotion into her sentences while using very little detail. "I don't believe in a heaven other than Earth." (p.54), is one line that really stuck out to me. I felt like, even out of context it was a lot to digest and tells you a lot about Walker's personsality, the way she lives, the way she loves and her general outlook on life.

Seeing her chickens in the Pope!

Who knew chickens could be so interesting or force a person to reflect on so much? Alice Walker ponders all these great huge ideas about eternity, peace, death, silence, impermanence, experience, potential, and religion because of her chickens. These chickens started out as a desire that Walker had dismissed, eventually she gives into the desire and she gets them and boy do they enrich her life.

Walker speaks of these chicken as if they were her children. She writes to us, the readers, as if we were her chickens. To me this was the most fascinating part of the book. She is communing with a “being” that ultimately is incapable of understanding her and or responding. I felt an almost religious parallel as a result of this.  Being the reader I felt as though I was witnessing a confession or being the focus of her “teachings”. I found myself feeling like either a priest or a child.

I loved how we see her love and deep affection for these chickens progress. She refers to herself repeatedly as “Mommy”. I think of mothers as powerful and all knowing and as much as “Mommy” is trying to teach, console, and provide for her chicks, she is learning about herself.

The chickens and their presence in Walker’s life allow Walker to step back and think critically about her life, “Years ago I had bought a tiny meta stool and for a good twenty-five years never had time to sit on it. I had painted it green, though, with a bit of hope. I found it, placed it a corner of the chicken yard and sat.” (Walker 7) This sentence struck me as being so powerful. These chickens were so much more than just animals, they became her reason to self examine, her reason to sit and breathe and reflect. Her gentle approach to life with these chickens showcases her sensitive approach to life, it comes across in her recalling memories of her mother. She draws the comparison between her mother sitting and relaxing with her own chicks and I think this adds to the readers understanding of Walker’s perceived depth regarding the relationship she has with her own chickens.

The mother and child relationship weaves itself through the story in a very intricate way. When she is abroad she misses her children and allows us as readers to see a very vulnerable moment when she admits to wanting to be missed – by her chickens no less! She writes letters to her chickens that we get to read; they are signed “With Love, Mommy”. The mother child relationship gets even more complex when we see Walker disappointed in her “children” in the chapter “The Old Fox”. Walker introduces six new chickens and has to whiteness her “children” act in such a mean way that she considers it heartbreaking. This made me reflect ad wonder how parents deal with their children when they fail to grow into the ways that a loving mother has tried to teach.

Through Walker’s relationship with her chickens we see her becomes vulnerable; we are taken to places within Walker, her chickens as the catalyst. Walker writes, “The most important question we will ask ourselves – having long given up asking such questions of others – is “Did I love well?” (Walker 31) I can honestly say she didn’t just love her chickens well, she seemed to find a way to love herself more deeply through her relationship with her chickens. 

2/19 The (not so) Chicken Chronicles

"They" say the best stories tell two stories at once. Alice Walker tells many at once. She has found a way to successfully and creatively include history, self realization, motherhood, spirituality and excerpts of her life wisdom (amongst many other things), through chickens. At the heart of the story, and also, my inspiration for this weeks blog, the topic of discussion,"writing histories through metaphor,"becomes beyond prevalent. The story lives and breaths her intentions.

First, take her characters of choice, chickens. A chicken is generally overlooked because it is seen as a common food item or as a word used to insult people for having fear. A chicken has no choice or path other than to produce for it's domesticators. In other words, to the untrained eye, it is seen as anything but what Alice Walker sees as subliminal.

After watching birds "sweep the vineyards," Walker asks a series of questions addressing the chicken's:


"Did you ever fly wild like that? Were you once swooping waves of chickens descending from the sky? Did you ever know such freedom? Did you also, once upon a time know when the season was ripe (so to speak) for you to fly south, then north, then south again? Did every cell in your body know when each food source on your path was ready for your visitation and consumption? Or were you domesticated so long ago that it isn't even a memory?" (43)


 In the literal sense she is speaking of chickens. But her descriptions allude to the many historical moments of captivity. One being the captivation of human beings as slaves. A long process of manipulating a population of human's themselves, who were treated as nothing more than a bunch of puny minded chickens. Chickens, who were good for nothing, except to wait and be utilized for what they had to offer the users. For the purpose of humans. She then insults humans for ever captivating chickens, because humans are responsible for creating the entire alteration of the bird itself. She describes how humans, "have done much damage to other creatures because they think their own big brain is of major importance and any being with a smaller brain is somehow deficient" (44). Never thinking twice, or looking back. A chicken, like a slave, could not speak back, and could not talk about her own sufferings. At least not in a way that people were willing to listen to.

I am both bewildered and astonished by Walkers spirituality. At moments she seems to be religious with her reference to angels. Yet, in the same moment she states her, what I call, insecurity with religion. She calls herself one with a mind of "a believer in art, shamanism, and interspecies magic," however, after the death of her chicken Bobbie, and while reminiscing over her first chicken's death,  Babe, she purchases a form of burial which I cannot fully grasp (50).  Instead of cleaning up her chickens blood from the site of its doorway dismembering, she hung a "Haitian angel, hammered out of a metal drum… over the ill-fated door." She describes how, "In [it's] role as angel, she is both protector and liberator… and her presence of the place where Babe died would represent a tombstone" (50). I have never heard of an angel inhabiting a realm other than that of religion, but, perhaps her spirituality is meant to be uniquely her own and an all encompassing view of her path to enlightenment. She seems to hold onto this as one of her values as well. Her spirituality mingles with her thoughts constantly.

Walker's style is as equally admirable. The story line, written in the present tense, works well with her intertwining of the past. Without abruption she switches from first person to a sort of, third person  perspective as she calls herself, "your mommy," when speaking to the chickens. A phrase she invented, "space nuts," referring to the hurtling of the human race through space, starts the reader off on  their journey through Walter's train of thought (9). A spontaneous and unique experience of life. Her spirituality is intertwined, and in no way uniform, throughout her chapters. As the reader travels through the stories, she picks up on the many versions.

The metaphor of Walkers memoir holds strong. It is powerful in every aspect. The reader is left with plenty to be perplexed by. In fact, she isn't only writing her story, she is writing the chickens story and the story of humanity. Everyone can take something from her experiences.

Chicken Chronicles I

I think the most striking aspect of Alice Walker's writing in Chicken Chronicles is her intended audience. The first few chapters are addressed to the audience, and could be considered hesitant in comparison to her enthusiasm later on. The later chapters are addressed to her chickens, first tentatively, then full-on. I feel as though I am reading the diary of a lover. First the diary is about the lover in general, then sometimes is direct communication to the lover, then goes into head-over-heals adoration. Suddenly the chickens are her saviors.

Walker refers to her age several times ("now that I am old..." (p.23)), and she writes with the simplicity and honesty of a grandma. The tone is warm and wise. Despite her simple language, which she exaggerates by clarifying everything she says for the chickens ("Cremation is a notion of which you are innocent, and I will not attempt to explain." (p.56)) her ideas are actually quite deep. And it is in these asides that we see how silly some of our human ideas and behaviors are. Back to the cremation example: most of us don't think about death frequently, and probably even fewer of us contemplate how we dispose of human remains. Even fewer of us probably have any idea what cremation actually entails. So while it's not a terribly unusual, complex, or sophisticated word or idea, by not explaining it to the chickens, she is both acknowledging that it wouldn't make sense to them, and suggesting that it might not even make sense for us. Another blogger mentioned how each vignette seems to carry a message.

I'd like to contrast Walker's vignettes with those of Bernard Cooper in "Maps to Anywhere." As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Cooper uses long, low-frequency words to express himself. I felt that he had false depth: he tried to sound profound, but I really didn't feel like he was saying anything at all. Furthermore, I feel like writing like that is just an attempt for him to prove his sophistimacation. ANYWAY, I could see that Cooper was holding up a mirror to the world in his writing, and there was an inherent truth to what he was saying. But Walker does it better. She's writing unpretentious letters to chickens. In fact, she's so unpretentious, that she's just admitted to the world that she writes letters (highly affectionate ones, at that) to chickens. Somehow in raising chickens, she holds up a mirror to the world/society/her self. Her mirror is clear and pure. Her love comes through in her writing.

Alice Walker's The Chicken Chronicles

When reading The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker, I felt as though she were my best friend or great Aunt sitting next to me teaching me life lessons by sharing her experiences raising chickens. Her use of colloquial language creates this intimacy, and makes her story more relatable.

In the first vignette Walker uses her wry humor to point to the fact that she understands not all readers are going to understand her fondness for chickens:  “I realized I was concerned about chickens, as a Nation, and that I missed them. (Some of you will want to read no further)” (Walker 2). By making a joke of it the author keeps readers, who might otherwise feel alienated from the subject matter, interested. Walker continues to use humor throughout the book, and you find yourself as interested in chickens as she. One particular passage that sticks out to me is in a letter to her chickens:

“I’m sure humans domesticated you very early, because they discovered (perhaps after a forest fire) that cooked, you are delicious, and that uncooked, safe and happy, you produce eggs. No doubt you were enticed into captivity by being offered items of food. Or shelter. This happens to many of us. No doubt humans learned early to clip your wings. And did humans also eventually breed you to eat a lot, to be heavy, so you could not fly high or far? Hummm…. “(Walker 43)

It’s not just with humor that Walker creates these easy to relate to vignettes. The poet in her shines through in many of the stories such as when she describes the death of the chicken by saying, “The buoyancy of life had left her entirely” (Walker 27), or when there’s a notable rhythm:

“I called out to them, as I do: Hi, Girls, it’s Mommy. They rushed to the fence, as they always do, and I counted them, as I always do; then I informed them, which they’ve heard before, that I was going to get a special treat for them.” (Walker 9)

This combined with her speaking directly to the reader at times (“Long days golden to the bone, plenty of food dropping off every vine and bush, fish jumping and cotton high… you get the picture.” (Walker 49)), create the atmosphere of talking with a close relative or friend.

When this kind of relationship is established with the reader it makes the reader more open to the stories and lessons the author is sharing. There are all kinds of messages of interconnectivity, and the wonder of this earth. I was moved by the chapter Perhaps You’ve Seen Her?, where Walker shares her revelation that, contrary to what she’d been taught, having animals around while meditating brings a whole new dimension to the experience (“It feels so natural”(Walker 18)).

I enjoyed the way she took a pretty specific experience in her life and used it to share life lessons we could all relate to. Had Walker not taken the time to create this intimate atmosphere through her poetically conversational language the reader may have put the book down without discovering the messages.

The (More Than) Chicken Chronicles

What I found really neat about The Chicken Chronicles is the way that Alice Walker seamlessly weaves so many insights about life, her memories, and herself into her discussions about her chickens. Her prose is deceptively simple; informal, even at times childish, language when she is speaking directly to the flock, easy to follow sentences, but she packs so much wisdom and information about herself into her short chapters.  I especially saw this feat accomplished in chapter 17 “Leaving You” and 18 “St. Michael.” At the beginning of chapter 17, Walker frames a very elegant, heart wrenching discussion on her feelings of sadness and abandonment as a child when her siblings left home by pausing as she leaves the chicken house and imagining how the chickens feel about her leaving. Were the chickens really sad about Walker ending her visit to them that day? Does Walker have a psychic connection with her birds to the extent that her emotional attachment makes her feels she does? Either way, it does not really matter because the important part is that with these chickens, Walker has the opportunity to unconditionally love, take care of, and be present for these dependents and so work through the abandonment she felt by making sure she does not continue and participate that cycle of stoicism. She muses, “But when you’re really little, or even not so little, what do you do with this feeling nobody names? So in a way, Mommy, with you, is just waking up. Isn’t that funny? And this was one of those times.” (78). These chickens help Walker tap into the emotional and physical role of the mother and recreate a mother/dependent relationship that is full of the stability and emotional openness that she wished for as a child.     

Another moment I found very significant in its universality was in chapter 18 when Walker is thinking about freedom and her desire to let the flock loose in her garden to eat the bugs there. She is warned by a friend with chickens that she would regret such a decision because the chickens would peck at all of her plants and vegetables too, yet Walker decides to let the chicken have freedom, again projecting all of her human desires onto these birds. Watching them destroy her carefully maintained garden, Walker says “And in fact, the more I let go caring about the damage, the more I relaxed, even exulted, in the freedom you seemed to feel” (85).  There is no doubt the chickens enjoyed the experience—easy, plentiful food and new territory to explore, but again it seems that Walker is the one learning the lesson and getting the most emotional satisfaction out of the moment: she learns to let go of petty concerns about maintaining order and control of her garden space in order to give her beloved “girls” this freedom. Then again, later in the chapter when Glorious goes missing, Walker is heart broken but she realizes: “There is no reliable protection we can guarantee for another being, as much as we would like to do so. Freedom is a big risk, as is loving…Mommies can’t be everywhere. Only Nature can be everywhere. It has its ways” (87). The risks of freedom and of loving—of making yourself emotionally vulnerable—are universal experiences, that have nothing to do exclusively with chickens, but it is a testament to Walker’s way of seeing value in everything that she has learned such lessons through her “girls”. Another example, perhaps, of how Nature “has its own ways”—both heart-breaking and beautiful.    

The Funky Chicken Chronicles

In the chapter/vignette, ‘Dear Rufus, Agnes & Co.’, Alice Walker’s illustration of her close relationship with ‘the girls’ creates a notion of the human qualities of chickens. This is the first chapter in which Walker begins writing directly to the chickens (or, at least, writing as if she were composing a letter to them). However, by simply reading the title, a reader who wasn’t familiar with the chickens could mistake the names for names of human companions. The title, then, functions to humanize the chickens and, specifically with the word ‘dear’, create the expectation for a personal and possibly intimate vignette.

            Walker contextualizes the piece by writing, “I have taken a plane that has thus far flown me high over the hills where you (and I) live” (37). The aforementioned sentence also places particular emphasis on the chickens; Walker chooses to place herself in parentheses as if she were her own afterthought. Taking into account that Walker is supposedly writing to her chickens on her flight to India already shows the reader her devotion to her ‘girls’, but this devotion is emphasized by the syntactical placement of herself and her chickens.

            Walker continues the thread of placing herself and the chickens on the same level (or even placing them on a higher level) when she writes, “It was hard to leave you, and I will be gone for quite some time, in chicken terms, but at least before I left I was able to conduct the experiment with persimmons I had long envisioned” (37). Here, Walker discusses time on a scale relative to the chickens, acknowledging that what may seem like a short time to her may be a much longer time to her ‘girls’. The recognition of the difference in time communicates Walker’s empathy and care for the chickens, allowing the reader a subtle glimpse of the close relationship she has with them. Additionally, by using the specific word ‘the’ before ‘experiment’, Walker invites the reader into this personal relationship by alluding to inside information that she has already given in prior chapters about how she wants to see if the chickens love persimmons as much as she does. Walker invites the reader in again when she writes, “Space nuts”, as if she were sharing an inside joke with the audience.

            The intimacy of the piece is emphasized by Walker’s recounting of the morning that she brought persimmons to the chickens: “You were interested, as you always are” (38). The brief and assured mention of the chicken’s habits illustrates the close relationship between Walker and the chickens. Additionally, she also pauses before the aforementioned quote to describe the persimmons, which were “a wonderful and visually satisfying display of colors [she] love[s]: deep orange, red, and yellow” (38). Despite a more common perception of chicken feed being unwanted scraps or grain, Walker offers the chickens a chance to share her love of persimmons, which is illustrated by her passionate description of them. Through this detailing and the others mentioned above, Walker gives the reader a notion of the connection and care she has formed with and for the chickens; she seems to be attending to the reader in the same way that she tends to her ‘girls’ – with careful and loving attention. I speculated that the portion she wrote on her brothers tricking her about the tartness of persimmons may have to do with her desire to transform the reader’s notions about chickens; what the reader may see as common, mindless farm animals, she desires to expose as the devoted creatures she sees them to be.

Jewish Laura talks about blawgs

There's no reason to write a blog unless you think people actually want to read your informal musings/rants. Then you are full of yourself and/or pretentious. But then again, I'm a wonderful person and I used to write a blog. So there's an exception to every rule.
There are a few key elements which make blogs good: relevance, humor, and insight. Is the writer telling me something new that I want to hear in a way that I want to hear it?
I would say the Parkinson's piece has all 3 elements. I'm not terribly interested in Parkinson's, but I am interested in diseases and disabilities, and I'm also scared that the topic will one day be more relevant to me. Since the tone is informal, it sort of takes the edge off the depressing subject. I would guess that most of us wouldn't want to read a technical/medical account of Parkinson's disease, nor would we enjoy reading one that was written in a tragic tone.
Amy Tan's piece also embodies all 3 elements of a good blog. I'm sure all of us can relate to the challenges of signing an email. Letter-writing we learned in 5th grade; email we're still working on. (Even though I write dozens of emails a day and hardly one letter a month.) Her tone was also informal, though in this case I would have just as much enjoyed it being written from a formal linguistic perspective.
The typeface blog was rather dry. I know as much about Parkinson's as I do about typefaces, but I found that I just could not get into an interview with a typeface-r. (That's what I'm calling those toss-pots.) There was no point-of entry in this blog. I did not laugh, I was not drawn to new information, and I did not connect it to my own life. Perhaps you could call this one a BlogFail.

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

I’m not sure what to expect of blogs to be honest. I expect short excerpts in comparison to long novels. I expect free flowing thought. I expect people to use a friendlier tone than in written research papers. I can’t say that I expect a journey or an information fest because there are so many different types of blogs out there. I can expect the unexpected, to be cliché. I expect blogs to connect with others who have similar interests or ideas floating around. I expect blogs to be a mess of beliefs and different viewpoints from all over the world, representing different people and cultures. That’s about it though.

I won’t lie; I’m not a huge blog reader. I’ve even tried to write multiple blogs at various points in my life, and none of them panned out for me. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know who my audience is. Well, I guess the audience would be me, but then what if a liberal peace loving person read my blogs? They would be offended, share it with other people who would also be offended. Then someone would hunt me down and kill me because this is Northern California and people don’t go for my thinking at all. What can I say, I’m a rebel. I just went on a crazy rant that has nothing to do with the prompt.

I can appreciate beautiful writing, no matter what the topic is (please no poetry), but I like to know that a story will have an ending. Frodo ultimately destroys the One Ring. Harry Potter marries Ginny and defeats Lord Voldemort. Michelle regains her memories and the Tanner family is once again whole. Blogs can be wonderful, but reading about a bagel that deserves the perfect cream cheese… yes it’s interesting, but it doesn’t go anywhere. In one person’s life it can be an exciting life altering experience, but it’s hard for me to see the big picture; where does this bagel fit in? I can enjoy informative blogs because I know I am cracking an egg so that I can make zhi bao dan gou. There is an end, but I need to care about the topic as well.

Anyway, I will start with Amy Tan’s blog. I cannot believe that Amy Tan has a blog. She is amazing and her blog was as thought provoking as her novels. Maybe it is because she is a novel writer that I was immediately drawn to her blog over Howe and Okano’s. She brings up interesting ideas about e-mail writing; it’s such a simple concept with such intricacies behind the entire act of writing an e-mail. I love how she connects with the audience. She appeals to the everyday man (or woman) by the use of her language; it is informal and colloquial in nature. My favorite part is when she uses humor and says, “Maybe it's because oooooooxxx looks like a bull crying in pain” when exploring the use of x and o in e-mail signatures. Regarding her style of writing, it is similar to her novels in a way. Her sentences are short and often fragmented. I actually like the way she does this though because I feel as if those small sentences carry so much more weight than a lengthier one.

Howe’s blog about his relationship with walking and Parkinson’s disease is noteworthy. I especially enjoy how the blog begins with a quote centered at the top of the page by a person other people can connect with. This blog was very much like a novel beginning to unfold. The rate of revelation is gradual and the point of entry was brilliant. I honestly thought this was going to be a selection about walking or running exercises, and I was genuinely interested because I’m trying to get back into those exact forms of exercise. Then as I read on I discover slowly that this man’s ability to run has been taken away, he can’t even walk at times. My mood changed from excited about the topic at hand to poignant due to his nostalgic narrative. The allusion he uses to Animal Farm is also a very effective use of imagery in my opinion.

Kunihiko Okano’s interview was very lengthy and in depth. The title of the blog is I Love Typography. It’s no wonder why I couldn’t enjoy the reading. I can appreciate long thorough writing, but not when it’s about typography. I’m sure others who have interest in this area will be captivated by the article though. The use of the photographs was exceptional. I appreciate the layout of the article with all of the text on the left. The text box only filled up the left, while the pictures presented filled up the entire width of the webpage. The space on the right where the main text was not written communicated captions for the pictures. A lot of jargon is used within this interview, much of it I had to skip over. The audience is definitely not someone unfamiliar with typography.

I enjoyed Tan’s blog the most. Maybe it is because of the credibility she holds as the author of novels such as The Joy Luck Club, but I found it much easier to read her blog as well. When people want to read for leisure rarely will they pick up a scientific essay about molecular gastronomy; it’s full of jargon and formal tone! And I’m trying to become an English teacher, scientific articles use a lot of passive voice; it’ll confuse me when I’m looking for active voice in student papers. While I do appreciate Okano’s interview because he is obviously a very talented artist, I don’t think I am the audience he was looking for at this particular blog.