What's Wanted To Forget In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

What’s Wanted to Forget No matter where one is from or where one finds themselves today, we carry with us in some way or another a specific heritage. Certain events and circumstances can lead to someone trying to forget their heritage or doing everything in their power to preserve that heritage. Alice Walker’s “EveryDay Use” was published in 1973, not long after the civil rights movement, and reflects the struggles of dealing with a heritage that one might not want to remember (Shmoop). Alice Walker is well known as a civil rights and women’s rights activist. Like many of her other works she uses “Everyday Use” to express her feelings on a subject; in this case African American heritage. Through “Everyday Use” it can be seen that Alice Walker has negative feelings about how many African Americans were trying to remove themselves from parts of their African American culture during the time of the short story’s publishment. This idea that Walker was opposed to this “deracinating” of African Americans coming out of the civil rights

Helga Hoel states in her essay “Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’”, “These important names Dee bases her new-found identity on resemble Kikuyu names, but at least two of them are misspelt” (Hoel). Hoel states that Wangero’s names are an unlikely mixture of names from various African ethnic groups, and that “ [Wangero] is confused and has only superficial knowledge of Africa and all it stands for” (Hoel). Wangero is losing sight of her true heritage, but the heritage she is trying to push upon herself is one she barely understands. This detail is important because, although it does require research to discover, it adds another layer of irony to the character of Wangero in which can be seen an indicator of how Walker