Women writers
A motif is explored in Walker's essay(s) about the influence in her life that female writers held. This motif points the reader toward at least one serious consideration about the elevation of female voices in literature. Because she was a young girl reading work by grown women, she knew as a child that she could become a powerful writer. The converse is explored, because for a long time, women writers were not regarded highly at all, so that less and less women felt comfortable sharing their work, until over time, the example grew.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a symbol, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s example stood for something essential in the mind of Alice Walker. She believed he was a true hero of the truest form. In other words, one might say that her political theory is absolutely informed by his actual example. He is an archetype for the true purpose of one's political voice, which is to bring representation and enfranchisement where there is injustice and systemic disenfranchisement.
Racism
Through motif, Walker elaborates the ways that race has affected her sense of self. It seems obvious on the surface, but actually, the cultural assumptions about race are also relevant in this consideration, because the way she is treated is psychologically relevant. If she is rejected in a classroom for the color of her skin, that shapes her experience of self in that classroom, so that she is at risk of lowered self-esteem. The social reality shapes her sense of self, so that she has an inappropriately low self-esteem because she is chronically mistreated without understanding the details about why.
The symbols of time
In "Part Four," Walker takes the essay in a nearly-mystic direction by responding to various theories about the flow of time. She mentions the theory of karma, the theory of progressivism within the humanities (a modernist theory about time that alleges that technological advance should bring better futures) and contrasts it with the horrors of the post-modern age, like nuclear bombs, all to ask the reader to consider what time means. The issues is of the utmost importance, because she suggests that there might be threats looming in the future that we could work to avoid, but only if our political agendas are healthy.
Motherhood and gardens
So, what does all this have to do with motherhood and gardens? Well, for Walker, the search for self-esteem is a quest for an ideal sense of self. If the culture was perfect, what might her experience of self have been like? The question is a religious question, so In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is an invocation of an archetypal motif. She is invoking the theme of paradise, to examine what an ideal sense of self might have felt like, as if she were raised by her mother in paradise, instead of in the broken culture of her youth in America.
