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.