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.