Analysis of Alice Walker's `Remember Me' : Justice and Injustice – Healing and Suffering
Analysis of Alice Walker's `Remember Me' : Justice and Injustice Healing and Suffering
Remember me?
I am the girl
with the dark skin
whose shoes are thin
I am the girl
with the rotted teeth
I am the girl
with the wounded eye
and the melted ear.
I am the girl
holding their babies
cooking their meals
sweeping their yards
washing their clothes
Dark and rotting
and wounded, wounded.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
with the blessed
dark skin
I am the woman
with teeth repaired
I am the woman
with the healing eye
the ear that hears.
I am the woman: Dark,
repaired, healed
Listening to you.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
offering two flowers
whose roots
are twin
Justice and Hope
Hope and Justice
Let us begin.
The poem, "Remember Me?" is a presentation of an ongoing theme in Alice Walker's literature. This theme is one that ignites Walker's passions because it is one that she lives day-to-day. Her life, particularly because she lives in an era of enormous progress for women is a well-woven filigree of injustice and reaction to that injustice. This specific poem represents the healing of a black woman via the hope for that justice.
While "Remember Me?" is written in first person, and does reference Walker's own childhood wound, the girl in poem is actually the personification of the plight of many black women whose lives are darkened by the injustice of being black and female in a world that favors the white male. Even Walker's own wounded eye is, for her, a representation of the masculine wound that men have placed on all women in this society. The women subject to that kind of injustice are allegorically (and sometimes literally) rotting in the shadow that is Other.
On the subject of this poem, critic, Tara Clark, that the poem deals with "a transformation of some sort from bondage to freedom." Clark also notes Walker's allusion to the BB gun accident that affected her eye. She notices that the deformed appearance of the woman in the poem may actually be the way that Walker truly felt after the accident in addition to a symbol of the deformed perception of black people in our culture. Clark says that "dark and rotting / and wounded, wounded" suggests "exactly how horrible the plight of the African American can be."
Nonetheless, Clark fails to realize that the "plight of the African American" isn't all that Walker is speaking of. Walker wants her audience to realize the intersectionality of the oppression that women of color face as not only women (who are robbed of their rights regularly) but as women that are part of an identity that is also marginalized. In fact, this intersectionality is not something that is confronted by women of color alone. Any woman, be she white, black, red, yellow, or brown faces this intersectional oppression. Walker wants her audience to comprehend this fact. Clark is obviously not familiar with the intricacies of Walker's activism.
Since the Bush's so-called "War on Terror" was initiated after 9/11 2001, ignorance about both the Middle-East and Islam has led to what is probably the highest level of discrimination Iranian immigrants in America have had to face yet. In addition to the airport searches, dirty looks, sly comments, and government-funded marginalization that Iranian people contend with, Iranian women are further marginalized just as Walker is marginalized as a result of the intersectional oppression she faces as a black woman.
This initial grievance comprises the first section of "Remember Me?" Clark notes that "the poem shifts drastically after these two beginning stanzas." The turning point is one in which the persona in Walker's poem "would give / to the human race / only hope." After Walker awards both the persona and the human race hope, the emotional curve of the poem turns upward. She allows the persona a new perception of herself. The woman seems to be reborn. She feels she is "blessed / with dark skin", repaired teeth, a healing eye, and hearing ears. It appears that the woman in the poem has completely reversed her own image of herself. It also appears that some time has passed since the woman was introduced in the first stanza. Rotted teeth take time to repair, just as it takes time for a wounded eye to begin to heal and a "melted ear" to begin to heal. The one part of herself that she cannot change the color of her skin she has accepted as a beautiful part of who and what she is. As a result, the reader is drawn into the beautiful dark skin and also accepts it as beautiful. Often, it is the presentation how one feels about one's own self that makes the spectators decide how they feel.
/>In addition to the physical changes of the woman in "Remember Me?" her "womanly" duties are nowhere to be found in the fourth (and corresponding) stanza. Also notable is the fact that Walker plays with plural and singular in the second stanza. The figure in the poem is "the girl / holding their babies / cooking their meals / sweeping their yards / washing their clothes [italics inserted]." That Walker included this contradiction in the number of persons involved in the poem shows that her intention is to show the universality of women in this poem. Correspondingly, that these duties are not mentioned in the matching stanza demonstrates that Walker aims to include her hope that women will no longer be condemned to perform these duties as rotting housewives. Hopefully, women now have a choice about their familial duties with the introduction of women's rights in the workplace and birth control.
In the fifth stanza, Walker contradicts the historically imperialist symbol of darkness as evil by pairing the words "Dark, / repaired, healed." Her words, "Listening to you" is her anticipation of the direction that her hope for humanity will take. She repeats third stanza as the sixth stanza purposefully to emphasize that intersectionally oppressed women can give humanity "only hope."
Her last two stanzas tell humanity what women are hoping for, which is "Justice and Hope / Hope and Justice." The woman that offers humanity that hope is offering them as a metaphor: flowers. These flowers are twin, she says. There cannot be justice without hope, and there cannot be hope without justice. With a sense of calmness, Walker tells her audience, "let us begin" the struggle to establish those twin flowers as a reality.
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