This paper on Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" was first presented at ASANOR's pre-conference for high school teachers at Hamar, Norway on October 3, 1997 and was later printed in Språk og Språkundervisning no 4 1997. In this revised version aimed at a wider audience, the footnotes are incorporated into the text. A slightly different printed version can be found in American Studies in Scandinavia, Vol.31 - No. 1 - 1999, Odense University Press, Denmark. That version is also printed as ”Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker’s 'Everyday Use.'” American Studies in Scandinavia 31, no 1 (1999): 34-42. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol 97. Detroit: Gale, 2007. 311- 315, but this internet page is the ultimate version and the one I prefer to be quoted from, as I have found that I misinterpreted some information that was first given to me. I have also added an important postscript here as a warning against  jumping to conclusions without double checking sources.

You are welcome to copy this paper for academic use, but not for commercial purposes without the permission of the author.
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The short story «Everyday Use» is central in Alice Walker’s writing, particularly as it represents her response to the concept of heritage as expressed by the Black political movements of the 60s. Despite its importance, no adequate explanation of the African and Arab names used in the text has to my knowledge appeared. Yet Walker was very careful in her choice of names, which signify an important part of her characterization.

«Everyday Use» is found in Alice Walker’s collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble, which was published in 1973. (All my quotations from the short story are from the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, inc. paperback edition from 1973). This was in the heyday of the Black Power ideologies when «Black was beautiful», the Afro hairstyle was in fashion and Blacks were seeking their cultural roots in Africa, without knowing too much about the continent or the routes of the Atlatic Slave Trade. Or as Clara and Inger Juncker say in their notes to the short story in their anthology of Afro-American Women Writers, Black Roses from 1984:

Dee has joined the movement of the Cultural Nationalism, whose major spokesman was the black writer LeRoi Jones (Imamu Baraka) The Cultural Nationalists emphasized the development of black art and culture to further black liberation, but were not militantly political, like, for example, the Black Panthers. The ideas of the Cultural Nationalists often resulted in the vulgarization of black culture, examplfied in the wearing of robes, sandals, hairspray «natural» style, etc. (p 128)

«House» in Swahili is «nyumba», but the sign at Antioch reads "nyambi". Did they not know better? Their teacher was not a native Swahili speaker himself, but a Kisii from Kenya. The Kisii speak a related Bantu language and house is, incidently, spelt the same way in Kisii and Swahili. The way the Black Antioch students used it on their house of Unity was probably just an unfortunate spelling mistake. Umoja is, however, the correct form of "unity". (See Post Script for new information).

My point in writing about this is to illustrate the often misleading concepts the Blacks around 1970 had about Africa. The Atlantic slave trade had brought most Black Americans from West Africa where Swahili is not spoken, so it would probably have made more sense to learn some West-African language if they really were looking for their roots. The Arab slave trade from East Africa generally sent slaves to the Arab peninsula and to the plantations on the islands in the Indian Ocean.

The program at Antioch was one of the first of its kind, but it was not unique. As one can read about social history at the end of the 60s in Becoming American, An Ethnic History by Thomas J. Archdeacon from 1983:

A new generation of scholars discovered that blacks, too, had a valuable past, and  popular interest grew both in the elements of African heritage that had survived slavery  and in the Afro-American culture created under the conditions of the New World. Even  moderate leaders perceived a need for blacks to take control of the schools and  institutions that most directly affected their lives. (p.216)

College students pressed for black studies programs, and activists adopted the terms  black and  Afro-American in preference to Negro. Once again as in the 20s, African  Americans saw themselves as a nation within a nation. (p.1002)

I include this because it may tell us that fact and fiction may also be blurred when Alice Walker talks about Africa. The first two poems from the Tiger’s Back section read as follows:

The footnote on page 9 in her collected poems says «Wangari is a Kikuyu clan name indicating honorary acceptance into the Leopard clan». In «Everyday Use» Alice Walker lets the educated sister Dee introduce herself as Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. The uninformed reader may think this is an ordinary African name. I assure you, it is not.

Even a casebook on «Everyday Use» edited by Barbara T. Christian on Rutgers University Press from 1994 only added to the confusion of the African names since it mistakenly noted that,

...the name given to Walker by Africans during her trip there was Wangero, (sic!) a name she uses for herself in Once and for the educated sister in «Everyday Use». (p13)

Names are extremely important in African and African American culture as a means of indicating a person’s spirit. (p.13)

This idea is strenghtened when you look at the other African phrase Dee Wangero uses in the short story. She greets her mother: «Wa-su-zo-Tean-o». This is a Luganda phrase showing how the Buganda people of Uganda say «Good Morning». It can be translated as something like "I hope you have slept well". One can wonder why she uses this greeting when she must know that the phrase will make no sense for her mother.

What this adds up to is a pan East African mixture of names and phrases used by Dee in the story. Add to this her long, flowing dress, which is probably a West African feature. The only Africans I have seen in traditional flowing dresses in East Africa are the Muslim women on the coast hiding inside their black bui-buis. Otherwise colorful traditional dresses are made of two pieces such as the kangas in Tanzania or have a distinct waist line with a sash, such as the busutis in Uganda. Of course I have seen and even bought and used long, flowing gowns made for tourists, but they have nothing to do with traditions, only with fashion.

Then you may ask: Does Dee know or care? or Does Alice Walker know or care? I believe Alice Walker does know, and that she has made Dee embrace this confusion of misunderstood cultural bits and pieces from all over Africa on purpose either to let Dee represent anything African or to portray her as a very shallow and superficial young woman who does not bother to check her sources. Dee follows the fashion, and right now it is «in» to celebrate the distant African roots. She has discarded her given name, Dee because as she says: "I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me."(p.53 in In Love and Trouble). She fails to understand that the name, Dee, also goes back several generations on the American continent and therefore is more part of her heritage than an adopted African name which does not even make sense.

Christian goes on to say this about Walker and African names:

During the 1960s Walker criticized the tendency among some African Americans to give up the names their parents gave them - names which embodied the history of their recent past - for African names that did not relate to a single person they knew. Hence the grandmother (sic!) in «Everyday Use» is amazed that Dee would give up her name for the name Wangero. For Dee was the name of her great-grandmother, a woman who had kept her family together against all odds. Wangero might have sounded authentically African but it had no relationship to a person she knew, nor to the personal history that sustained her. (p 14).

Walker may know that Hakim means (religious) ruler or leader and she therefore adds to the irony when Mrs Johnson, who is a practical woman, shows that she has respect for her Muslim neighbors when she says: «You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road. They said «Asalamalakim» when they met you, too». But her daughter’s city dwelling companion answers: «I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style». He accepts what is suitable for him and leaves the rest. Some spiritual leader to guide you, you could say! He does not eat pork though, something Dee delights in, but she does not have a Muslim name either.

Alice Walker said in an interview with John O’Brien in 1973, here quoted from Barbara Christian’s book :

I am intrigued by the religion of the Black Muslims. ... «Everyday Use» a story that shows respect for the «militance» and progressive agricultural programs of the Muslims, but at the same time shows skepticism about a young man who claims attachment to the Muslims because he admires the rhetoric. It allows him to acknowledge his contempt for whites, which is all he believes the group is about. (pp 75-76)

In the story, and certainly in the many comprehension questions textbook writers and exam paper writers have made to guide our teaching of the story, Dee seems to be the villain and Maggie the hero. The ugly uneducated sister wins the love and affection of the mother at the end where they «sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed», as the story concludes. (p.59).

The quiltmaking sister is the one preferred and accepted because as Nikki Giovanni says in «Hands: For Mother’s Day» from her collection of poems Those who Ride the Night Winds from 1983:

...Quilts are the way our lives are lived...We survive on patches...scraps...the leftovers from a materially richer culture...the throwaways from those with emotional options... We do the far more difficult job of taking that which nobody wants and not only loving it...not only seeing its worth...but making it loveable...and intrinsically worthwhile... (p. 17)

The preference of Maggie over Dee makes me uncomfortable as an educated woman partly estranged from my roots myself.. I have no wall space on which to hang the quilt I inherited from my great-aunt, but the family churn has a prominent place in my living room as has also my mother’s spinning wheel. I do not know how to quilt, I do not know how to make butter in that churn and I cannot spin. Am I therefore a fool because I not only keep, but also strongly cherish this part of my heritage? And what about the Luo name that was given to me in Kenya which I still proudly use in certain circumstances?

Mary Helen Washington, has an insightful essay in the already mentioned casebook on «Everyday Use» where she refers to an interview she had with Alice Walker (also in 1973), where Walker said about the women in «Everyday Use» that she thinks of these three characters as herself split into three parts. Walker goes on to say:

...I really see that story as almost about one person, the old woman and two daughters being one person. The one who stays and sustains - this is the older woman - who has on the one hand a daughter who is the same way, who stays and abides and loves, plus the part of them - this autonomous person, the part of them that also wants to go out into the world to see change and be changed....I do in fact have an African name that was given to me, and I love it and use it when I want to, and I love my Kenyan gowns and my Ugandan gowns - the whole bit - it is part of me. But on the other hand, my parents and grandparents were part of it and they take precedence. (pp101-102)

...all three women characters are artists: Mama, as the narrator, tells her own story; Maggie is the quiltmaker, the creator of art for «everyday use»; Dee, the photographer and collector of art, has designed her jewelry, dress and hair so deliberately and self- consciously that she appears in the story as a self-creation. (p 101)

Like Dee, Walker leaves the community, appropriating the oral tradition in order to turn it into a written artifact, which will no longer be available for «everyday use» by its originators. Everywhere in the story the fear of the woman artist is revealed. The narrator-mother remains hostile to Dee and partial to the homely daughter, Maggie, setting up the opposition between the two daughters that Walker says mirrors her own internal struggles. The male triumvirate of «A Sudden Trip Home» has been replaced by these three women, but this female community does not generate reconciliation. (p. 102)

Postscript:
In January 2004 I received an e-mail from one of the three students who were responsible for the making of the sign at Unity House at Antioch College. He related that the sign was made in Dayton and that the painter made the spelling mistake and wanted money, which the students at that time did not have, to have it corrected. Thinking that it would go unnoticed, they put it up nonetheless. He goes on to say: "I remember saying at the time that I would change it when someone complained or when we had a little money. Obviously we later were given enough money to have changed it, but it continued on as our little joke. When we decided to close down Unity House we had a bonfire and burned the sign. It took almost thirty years (and destruction of the sign) for someone to complain about the spelling!"

Moral: Never jump to conclusions! Hypotheses need to be tested time and again!