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.