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.