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?
Sarah, I want to start by acknowledging the rhythm and power of your writing in this blogging post. Just like the texts we read, it was bursting with energy; and like our texts, its energy came from a sophisticated style and voice that would not fit into the canon of traditional literary critique. Your point about “What belongs in the canon?” brings up the bigger question of: “What is literature?” Or to expand even more: should there be a “canon” and “literature” at all–or should students study simply what interests them and their teachers?
In A Room of Her Own, Virginia Woolf explains that while women from poor backgrounds are capable of “gifts,” they are unable to produce writings of value due to societal constraints. That line didn’t sit right with me–it felt unbearably paternalistic. To me, the spirituality that Walker mentions in the beginning of her article felt like a “gift.” Her mother’s art came through her gardening–but as Walker alludes to, it was her spirituality that was her voice. For Walker, literature is a larger field–art–that can encompass many founds. Likewise, the writers that you mentioned are all poets, but as you noted, their work won’t be found in a literature anthology in 1974. And yet at the same time, even when we look for literature in non-traditional places in the 21st century, there are still disparities. With so many talented female musicians throughout history, what can be made of the fact that Bob Dylan–a white American man–is the only songwriter to have ever won the Nobel Prize?
One final point: you mention Lorde’s critique “reliance on the logic of European culture”. I saw this come through in a big way with the texts so far in this course in terms of readability. Obviously some consideration needs to be given when each text was written, but so far, the only one of these texts that I feel like is at too difficult a reading level for my students is the Woolf text, which was the only one of our texts that comes directly from the European “canon.” If we expand our definition of not just what the “canon” is, but literature itself–and literary theory–we can make greater arts and ideas open to everyone.
Hello Sarah! I enjoyed reading your very well-written and insightful blog. Like Lexi had said, it flowed with a similar energy to that that was found in this week’s texts and video. With the multiple anthologies of British and American literature one compiles over their undergraduate years, I have had a similar experience in realizing that these textbooks were not as perfect a reflection of influential and diverse authors of the time as the reader would be set to believe. In Anzaldua’s letter, “Speaking in Tongues”, she asks to her women writer audience, “Who gave us permission to perform the act of writing? Why does writing seem so unnatural to me?”, and I can relate this to the lack of POC women writing in school books. Like Adichie indicates so well in her explanation of the single story, impressionable children who are given only a limited and non-diverse set of stories will learn to fall into the stereotypes that they provide. Anzaldua was taught the single story that she, as a woman of color, could not write because of her teacher’s lack of suggesting that she could. If only anthologies had examples (and not merely tokenized examples to place a check-mark in the “Diversity” box), the voices that Anzaldua heard in her head may have been lessened or completely expunged.
But who should decide what gets placed in future and more inclusive anthologies? Certainly, I believe that a more diverse board should be present—a board consisting of equal amounts of representation who have the same goal of making these future anthologies reflect the diverse world that that we live in and with what they believe would have been important for a younger version of themselves to read. I believe that any text that promotes the hate of race, gender, and/or sexuality at its forefront should be excluded in this anthology and instead focus on releasing the voices telling stories from different backgrounds that can connect millions.
Hi Sarah! I really loved your post and I really felt your passion on this topic while reading it! I really liked the part where you mentioned the anthology and how only a small fraction of it was dedicated to women of color whereas the rest was dedicated to white authors. I think that this goes along with your second question on who should decide what goes into an English literature anthology. I feel as though there should be a wide variety of people who are of different race, gender, and sexuality who are in charge of determining the works that go into the anthology. This would help to create a less biased view on what is deemed “good literature” according to people of various identities. With this set of different people, they could create a more diverse set of literature that might otherwise be omitted if it was just decided by a group of privileged white men. For me especially, being an English major, I love to see works of literature in an anthology that are written by people other than white men. I love this because through literature we get a sense of passion and understanding expressed by the author.
In response to your first question I think that separate black feminist criticism is necessary and protective. I think that having black women express their ideas in a united and collective way based also on their own personal experiences is so important. This criticism is necessary in opening the eyes to people who are blind to their simultaneous sexism and racism. I took a class on Audre Lorde last semester and it truly gave me a new perspective on how much I unknowingly take for granted the white privilege I have which allows me to have a good education and other advantages that black people are denied.