295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
"I went on vacation. I went to Jamaica thinking that I didn't want to be bothered. This young man ends up talking to me. I'm like `thank God he's young, I don't have to worry about him hitting on me.' But I was very surprised when he did. Despite the public bashfulness, she feels good about her own very new relationship. It's exciting, she's learning a lot and so is he. "It's just really refreshing to be with someone that doesn't know who you are. I don't really care if it lasts another month or two months or three months, it's all fine. Right now I feel so good and that's what I've written about. What's the point of predicting 20 years from now; after all how many relationships last that long. There's no point living in the future. F**k the future. How about now? After his attempt to get a share of her millions, she went a number of years without talking to him. "He was being a real dog. He was always crying broke and saying he didn't have any money. But I never bad - mouthed him in all these years, I just told [Solomon] `oh your father s under the weather' or `he's having hard times'. But he's pathetic, that's a better word for it."
[Rosa Guy]'s novels have explored the stifling consequences of poverty in settings as far away as the Caribbean, or as near as New York's Harlem for over 30 years. Once it is published, "The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind" will join an impressive body of literary material authored by Ms. Guy that includes "Bird At My Window," "A Measure of Time," "And Then She Heard of Bird Sing," "Edith Jackson," "Ruby," "Children of the Longing" and "Music of Summer." "I believe I write for everybody," says Guy., "Young people like my work because I don't talk down to them." This attitude helps explain the on-going popularity of her "Imamu Jones Mystery Series," a crossover favorite among both Black and White young readers. Many of them have come of age reading the suspenseful "Mystery Series" which focuses on the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn teen struggling to define his manhood.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
239 p., Collection of profiles, interviews, essays and reviews on such well-known black writers and artists as Nalo Hopkinson, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Lawrence Hill and Edwidge Danticat constitutes a frank conversation on the significance of race in contemporary Black Canadian and American literature.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.
