Heart sick. Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and Gloria Anzaldua speak across nearly half a century to tell us they are heart sick.
And who can blame them? They are writing and searching, vainly, for other black women writers who have gone before them. But they could search all of English literature and find only crumbs when they need bread.
“I think of the thousands and thousands of books, magazines, and articles which have been devoted, by this time, to the subject of women’s writing,” writes Smith in her 1978 “Toward a Black Feminist” published in The Radical Teacher “and I am filled with rage at the fraction of those pages that mention Black and other Third World women.”
Rage. A righteous rage, surely.
I own a Concise Anthology of American Literature from 1974, edited by George McMichael of California State University, and in its first 1,000 pages there are only two, white women writers included: Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). McMichael writes in his preface that his anthology is “…a generous sampling of works and authors significant in shaping American literary history” (xiii); apparently, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs were not “significant” enough for McMichael to include in the 200 years of his anthology that lack any women’s voices, let alone black women’s voices.
It’s enough to make anyone heart sick.
Walker argues it’s this sort of dream deferred that left the land’s black mothers with a heritage of religious zealotry and exploding madness.
“Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life,” Walker writes, referring to the celebrated singers in her “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” from 1972. “Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our ‘crazy,’ ‘Sainted’ mothers and grandmothers.”
Yes, black women authors are left out, “a raisin in the sun.”
And we can see their absence, if we dare to lift the veil of literary canon. Of the 2,000 pages in McMichaels’ anthology only two are devoted to a woman of color — pages 1714-1716 belong to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gwendolyn Brooks. Would she, a black woman, have made it without the prize? Probably not.
Without directions to the trails already blazed through arduous, courageous toil, women of color are faced with the false choice to make a brand new path or just stay home.
“How hard it is for us to think we can choose to become writers, much less feel and believe that we can,” writes Gloria Anzaldua in “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers,” a 1980 love letter. “What have we to contribute, to give? Our own expectations condition us. Does not our class, our culture as well as the white man tell us writing is not for women such as us?”
It’s the reliance on the logic of European culture — white, patriarchal culture— as the only real civilization or path to freedom that leads women to forget and forsake their true creative powers, Audre Lorde argues in her 1977 article “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.”
“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am,” Lorde writes. “The black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
But where can we find these black mothers, these poetesses? They are not in my anthology. Some theorists thought they would be easier to find if they were grouped together, a kind of Black Feminist Criticism with a room of their own. “A viable, autonomous Black feminist movement in this country,” writes Smith in her “Toward a Black Feminist” essay, “would open up the space needed for the exploration of Black women’s lives and the creation of consciously Black woman-identified art.” So far, so good. But who holds the key to this sacred space? And which poetesses may come in?
“So often I have read books on feminist literary theory that restrict the definition of what feminist means and overgeneralize about so much of the world that most women as well as men are excluded,” worries Barbara Christian in her 1987 “The Race for Theory” published in Cultural Critique. “Nor seldom do feminist theorists take into account the complexity of life — that women are of many races and ethnic backgrounds with different histories and cultures and that as a rule women belong to different classes that have different concerns. Seldom do they note these distinctions, because if they did they could not articulate a theory.”
Place women in a box — even a well-meaning box, like the box of “Black Feminism” — and unintended miseries will fly out its open lid.
So where is the hope for black, women writers? Where can we find the virtue that remained when Pandora’s curiosity lifted the golden lid?
Well, it’s not in a 1974 literature anthology.
When we look at the canon of English literature — the writings of patriarchal England and its colonies — we should not be surprised that women authors are not there. It’s the wrong place to look. But that doesn’t mean the writings of hope can’t be found.
They’re found between the pages of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, certainly. In the lyrics sung by jazz greats, songwriters and black bisexuals Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. It’s in the fearless reporting of Ida B. Wells, a black woman and investigative journalist covering lynchings in the 19th Century.
Shaking off our European lens, we find more women of color and writers all!
Here are the Native Indian grandmothers, passing on oral literature to the children. Chinese women in Hunan are writing in their women-only script called Nüshu. Here are Egyptian priestesses writing in hieroglyphs in temple libraries. Travel back 4,000 years and discover the world’s oldest known poem — a hymn written by the priestess Enheduanna in modern-day Iraq (Ancient History Encyclopedia). Perhaps we women can take hope, like the ancient Greek poetess Sappho of Lesbos, knowing that, “Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.”
Response question: Is a separate black feminist criticism limiting and prescriptive or necessary and protective?
Response question: What should be included in English literature anthologies? What should be excluded? Who should decide?
