Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) shows how creative survival—quilts, hymns, kitchen-table artistry—transmits strength across generations. The Color Purple (1982) likewise frames letters as a lineage of courage: Celie’s written voice becomes both inheritance and departure gate. Walker treats memory not as a museum but as a workshop, where hard-won resilience is repurposed into new beginnings. In this way, her exhortation is autobiographical: she models how honoring foremothers authorizes bold starts in art and life. Having seen how literature embodies this passport, we can recognize it in the broader migrations and movements that reshaped societies. [...]
