39 pages • 1 hour read
Wangari MaathaiUnbowed
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Symbols & Motifs
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Rivers
Maathai employs the metaphor of a river, fed by different streams, to explain the origins of her Green Belt Movement: “A great river always begins somewhere. Often it starts as a tiny spring bubbling up from a crack in the soil […] But for a stream to grow into a river, it must meet other tributaries and join them as it heads for a lake or the sea” (119). In this case, the different streams that led to the creation of her movement are her academic work, her feminism, and her environmentalism. She has previously been involved with the National Council of Women of Kenya and the Environmental Liaison Centre, organizations focused on the needs of women and the necessity of protecting the environment.
The Green Belt Movement later becomes a stream itself, feeding the larger river of Maathai’s activism. While Maathai remains engaged in the Movement, she also involves herself in fighting for more democratic representation in Kenya and defending mothers with sons who have been imprisoned for their own political activism. Such commitments illustrate her belief that protecting the environment is inextricable from protecting human rights.
Trees
Trees are important symbols for Maathai. With their deep roots and high canopies, trees represent continuity and striving: “Trees are living symbols of peace and hope. A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to stay grounded, and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance” (293). Many of the chapter titles in this book employ tree or tree-planting metaphors (“Cultivation”, “Canopy of Hope”), suggesting that Maathai strives in all of her worldly accomplishments to remain connected to the landscape of her childhood, and also that her accomplishments have been informed by this connection.
As a child, Maathai is attached to a particular fig tree near her family’s farm. When she discovers as an adult that this tree has been cut down by new landowners—to make room for foreign tea plants—she sees it as a symbol of disregard for the past, as well as an environmentally foolish act: “I mourned the loss of that tree. I profoundly appreciated the wisdom of my people, and how generations of women had passed on to their daughters the cultural tradition of leaving the fig trees in place” (122).
Her subsequent activism is in large part an atonement for this loss, and an attempt to prevent other losses like it.
Names
Over the course of her life, Maathai has changed her name—or has had her name changed for her—many times. As a child, she was baptized with the name Miriam. Upon converting to Catholicism, she changed her name to Mary Josephine (as was known in college in the United States as Mary Jo). Once she returned to Kenya, she changed her name back to Wangari Muta, re-claiming her father’s last name and restoring the name Wangari to its rightful position as a first name. She took her husband’s last name, Mathai, upon marrying, and then changed her own last name to Maathai once they divorced: “As a way to deal with my terrible feelings of rejection, I got the idea of adding another ‘a’ to ‘Mathai’ […] Henceforth, only I would define who I was: Wangari Muta Maathai” (147).
If names are a part of who we are and how we define ourselves, Maathai’s name-changing is an illustration of how hard-earned her independence and self-definition has been. It is also an illustration of her thoughtfulness and deliberateness. As an African woman, she has had to face many imposed identities and societal roles and has therefore had to be insistent on carving out an identity of her own.
