Cultural Identity In Alice Walkers My Mother Pieced Quilts

Alice Walker, a famous author, stated in her short story, Everyday Use, â€Å"Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. â€Å"You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts.† Each person’s identity is shaped from a culture that is built with the offering of everything in his or her surrounding environment. Culture is one of the most important factors, though there are many other contributing factors, that can influence someone’s perspective on the world because all of their opinions, decisions, and morals are all based off of their surrounding environment. In the poem and story, â€Å"My Mother Pieced Quilts† and Everyday Use, they both demonstrate how one’s cultural identity is influenced by his or her surroundings, changing the†¦show more content†¦Another piece of the literature that has similar attributes to the is the poem â€Å"My Mother Pieced Quilts.† The poem uses a mother’s handmade quilt to a ccess and explore the poet’s childhood memories. Like how a quilt is made, the poem pieces together memories in order to show the reader a complete image between the speaker’s childhood and the mother’s strong influence. The speaker shows how her mother’s influential ways shaped into the person the speaker is today. For example, â€Å"But it was just that every morning I awoke to these October ripened canvases passed my hand across their cloth faces and began to wonder how you pieced all these together.† This quote shows the interest that the speaker has towards her mother’s quilt, she then explains in great detail how her mother threads pieces of fabrics together, obviously admiring her mother’s works. This reason shows how a person’s identity is influenced by his or her environment. However, many can argue that someone’s identity is not always shaped because of their surrounding environment, which is believable to an extent. For example, a person could go to church for their whole childhood, but as they grown up they could interpret religion in a whole different way or not be religious in any way . If it was had just been based off their culture, then they would still be religious forever. Many people around the world may be trapped within their own culture like in theShow MoreRelated Alice Walkers In Love and Trouble Essay2326 Words   |  10 PagesAlice Walkers In Love and Trouble Stories from In Love and Trouble, like other Alice Walker’s works, are the portrayal of black women. I would interpret the term â€Å"black women† as women who have gone through all sorts of hardship and struggles, but not all women in the world or only those with black skin. I strongly argue that Walker’s characters are better represented as women who suffer the way African American women do, than as women with black skin. I will justify my argument by referringRead MoreEveryday Use By Alice Walker1948 Words   |  8 Pagesthemselves in different ways. Whether it’s by our names, our religion, or our sexuality, we all have something different that make us unique and that we identify ourselves as. In Alice Walker’s short story â€Å"Everyday Use,† an African American woman tells the story of her daughter Dee’s long awaited visit. Upon her arrival the mother and her other daughter, Maggie, discover some drastic changes in Dee: she has changed her name to Wangero, she also arrived with a mysterious man who calls himself Asalamalakim