SOURCE: Perkins, Margo V. “Getting Basic: Bambara's Re-visioning of the Black Aesthetic.” In Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, edited by Berel Lang, pp. 153-63. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

[In the following essay, Perkins discusses how the writings of Toni Cade Bambara address the exclusion of African American women both by Black men and white feminists.]

Published in 1970, Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman continues to speak to many African-American women's experiences three decades later.¹ This edited volume of critical essays, poetry, and stories by black women writers and activists is one of the earliest feminist challenges to the overtly masculinist discourse of late 1960s-1970s black nationalist struggle. Many young women who first picked up the volume in the 1970s found the work affirming and empowering. Its popularity created new spaces for critical dialogue around issues important to black women that had been largely ignored within both black nationalist circles and the predominately white mainstream feminist movement. Such issues included the impact of racism on black women's self-image, the intersection of race and class in black women's experiences (sometimes referred to as “double or triple jeopardy”), and the lack of self-determination for black women with respect to reproductive freedom and health care (the former circumscribed by black nationalist ideology equating birth control with genocide, and the latter by the unethical practices of a racist and sexist medical industry). The writings anthologized by Bambara additionally explored sources of tension between black women and white women, regressive gender role expectations and sexist double standards on the part of black men, and the too frequent tendency of nationalist rhetoric to equate black liberation with the right of black men to reap the benefits of patriarchal privilege.

Convinced that there was in fact a market for black women's writing in the early 1970s (after all, as Bambara quips, “I knew 800 million Black women all by myself”),² she decided to put together what became The Black Woman as a way of “kick[ing] the door open.”³ The volume became a harbinger of an outpouring of fiction and critical writing by black women during the 1970s and 1980s. Given the resurgence of interest today in 1960s political and countercultural movements and the relative dearth (still) of texts about black women's experiences in nationalist struggle, it is no surprise that The Black Woman has been reissued in the 1990s. As a text that transgresses silences around black women's experiences during that era, it is an important resource for contemporary scholars and a cautionary tale for young black activists today who tend to romanticize 1960s black nationalist praxis.

I speak at length about The Black Woman because Bambara first lays out in that anthology much of her own artistic vision and activist sensibility. Her preface and two essays in the volume lay a critical groundwork for interpreting her subsequent collections of short fiction—Gorilla, My Love,⁴The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,⁵ and the posthumously published Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions⁶ (a collection of short fiction, essays, and interviews). In The Black Woman one gleans Bambara's uncompromising commitment to a nationalist agenda that is patently feminist. Against society's schizophrenia-inducing expectation that black women define themselves in terms of either race or gender, and the tendencies historically of nationalist rhetoric to silence women's concerns and of (white) feminist discourse to erase black women, Bambara's fiction seeks to merge nationalist and feminist impulses in ways that work holistically to affirm all aspects of black women's identity. Focusing on connections between Bambara's theorizing in The Black Woman and the short fiction in her last volume, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, I wish to explore the evolution of Bambara's activist sensibility and her reworking of the nationalist aesthetic to create affirming and empowering models of black subjectivity.

To be sure, The Black Woman is not an unproblematic collection. Some of the essayists adopt postures that can only be described as protofeminist at best. Others entertain homophobic rhetoric that should make readers of the 1990s cringe.⁷ The volume is very much a work of its time. But its spirit is what interests me. In order to appreciate this spirit, some attention to the nationalist aesthetic as context is pertinent. As the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s gave way in the late 1960s to the black power movement, nationalist ideology once again gained ascendancy in black America. This renewed push for self-determination had political as well as cultural dimensions.

The 1960s produced a vibrant black arts movement that sought to connect artistic endeavors with an avowedly political agenda. Artists and intellectuals of the period revisited a series of questions in their effort to define a new aesthetic. Among these questions were: What constitutes black art? Is there, in fact, such a thing? If so, what are its characteristics? Can an essential blackness be qualified? What are the functions of black art? Is all art produced by black artists automatically black art? By what criteria should this art be evaluated? And, finally, who is qualified to do this evaluation? Larry Neal, Hoyt Fuller, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Ron Karenga, and others called for art in the service of revolution. As Julian Mayfield succinctly put it, black art has to be about “the business of making revolution, for we have tried everything else.”⁸

Unlike black literature of previous eras, the new black literature, which aimed at the consciences of black readers, Neal maintained, was less a literature of protest (in the tradition of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, or Ann Petry, for example) than of black affirmation.⁹ Accordingly, much of the poetry and fiction generated sought to empower black readers by celebrating aspects of black identity, heritage, idiom, and experience. In many ways more prescriptive in their formulations than black theorists of earlier periods, leading figures of the black arts movement of the 1960s also, unfortunately, dismissed art and artists deemed insufficiently black based on what now seem specious criteria. Representing one of the more extreme positions in the debate over the definition and role of black art, Ron Karenga proclaimed that the social function of any work of art was the single most important criterion for judging its worth. In his 1968 essay, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” Karenga declared that

all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution, and any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid, no matter how many lines and spaces are produced in proportion and symmetry and no matter how many sounds are boxed in or blown out and called music.¹⁰

Implicit in Karenga's assertion is the notion of art as propaganda to (in his own words) “expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution.”¹¹

Until Bambara lost her battle with cancer in December 1995, her writing consistently reflected her deep commitment to the ideal of literature in the service of revolution. She once remarked of her own craft, “I work to produce stories that save our lives.”¹² In the preface to Deep Sightings, Toni Morrison comments on Bambara's ability to infuse storytelling with liberatory politics:

There was no doubt that the work she did had work to do. She always knew what her work was for. Any hint that art was over there and politics was over here would break her up into tears of laughter, or elicit a look so withering it made silence the only intelligent response.¹³

Bambara's fiction in the service of revolution embraces black cultural ways of knowing, consistent with the Nguzo Saba (seven principles of nationhood): umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith, specifically in black people, and the righteousness of their struggle against oppression).¹⁴ Her audience is assumed to be other blacks to the extent that she makes no apologies or qualifications to accommodate the comfort level of readers and critics outside her own cultural frame of reference. To meaningfully engage her texts, then, readers and critics must do their homework. Other ways in which Bambara's fiction manifests black aesthetic ideals include her emphasis on the importance of history, self-knowledge, and racial memory; her internal gaze or focus within the black community (black people's relationships to white people and white society constitute the backdrop but not the focus of her work); and her skillful capturing of the rhythm, style, texture, color, and humor marking black linguistic expression.

In certain important ways, however, Bambara's artistic sensibility moves beyond these characteristics of the black aesthetic, which are found (in varying degrees of success) among other black arts movement writers' works, as well. What makes Bambara's fiction unique is that she manages to invoke the rhetoric of cultural and revolutionary nationalism while subverting its masculinist assumptions. These assumptions include the equating of nationhood with black manhood (in its most patriarchal form) and the casting of race as the sole issue relevant to the black liberation struggle. In her preface to The Black Woman, Bambara affirms many of the tenets of the nationalist aesthetic as articulated by Neal, Fuller, Baraka, and others, but she takes issue with some of the narrow-minded dogmatism and especially the implicit or explicit marginalization of black women. Arguing for a broader conception of what constitutes “the enemy,” Bambara offers her own version of the new black aesthetic:

What characterizes the current movement of the 60s is a turning away from the larger society and a turning toward each other. Our art, protest, dialogue no longer spring from the impulse to entertain, or to indulge or enlighten the conscience of the enemy; white people, whiteness, or racism; men, maleness, or chauvinism: America or imperialism … depending on your viewpoint and your terror. Our energies now seem to be invested in and are in turn derived from a determination to touch and to unify. What typifies the current spirit is an embrace, an embrace of the community and a hardheaded attempt to get basic with each other.¹⁵

For Bambara, this “getting basic” involves black people holding each other accountable for what liberation means and for eliminating the counterrevolutionary sexist impulses that ultimately undermine the collective liberation struggle. Bambara challenges the related assumptions that women are ancillary to the struggle and that the personal is somehow separable from the political—that what is happening at the level of individual relationships has little to no bearing on the larger liberation struggle. In “On the Issue of Roles,” an essay anthologized in The Black Woman, Bambara cautions (black men) to the contrary:

If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain't out there. Yet. But it is here. Should be. And arguing that instant-coffee-ten-minutes-to-midnight alibi to justify hasty-headed dealings with your mate is shit. Ain't no such animal as an instant guerrilla.¹⁶

Bambara's dismissal of the notion of an “instant guerrilla” is a challenge to activists to not mistake style for substance.

Bambara's fiction repeatedly returns to the importance of self-work on the part of both men and women as critical prerequisites to effective revolutionary struggle. In “Salvation Is the Issue,” an essay anthologized in Mari Evans's Black Women Writers (1950-1980), Bambara charges that “outrage at oppression can be a dodge, a way of avoiding calling a spade a spade and speaking directly to the issue of personal/collective responsibility and will, or speaking frankly about the fact that we participate in our ambush every day of our lives.”¹⁷ Far from letting the powers that be off the hook, Bambara called for constant vigilance in order that black people might avoid, as much as possible, complicity with the power structure in their own oppression.

Reflecting her belief that revolution is built from the bottom up, much of Bambara's fiction takes as its focus the forging of transformative relationships (across gender and across generations) that create strong, cohesive (though not monolithic) communities that will ultimately be capable of overthrowing racist, sexist, and capitalist domination. Repeatedly, these transformative relationships are forged through individual characters' commitment to self-work. At least five of the six short stories in Deep Sightings reveal variations on this theme. All of Bambara's stories reflect a zero tolerance for sexism and chauvinism. Women characters are, furthermore, the doers and shakers in Bambara's fiction. Unafraid to “speak their speak,” they are on the front lines of the struggle, warriors in their own right, helping to organize the people alongside black men of like vision. Such portraits contrast markedly with idealized images of black women as muses or African queens (or alternatively, as mollifiers of black men's revolutionary rage) popularized in a good deal of the poetry and fiction by male writers of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, the three stories “Going Critical,” “Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain,” and “Luther on Sweet Auburn” all present women protagonists who are socially and politically conscious and take decisive action to transform their environments. Four principles of the Nguzo Saba are featured prominently in how the stories unfold: nia (purpose), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility) and imani (faith). That all three stories are set in the post-civil rights/black power eras (i.e., the early 1980s) implicitly stresses the continuing need to struggle against myriad forms of oppression and social injustice. All also suggest that this struggle requires characters to draw on spiritual as well as material resources.

The first of these stories, “Going Critical,” is about the relationship between a mother (Clara) and her daughter (Honey) and the lessons Clara must pass on to Honey before she (Clara) succumbs to terminal cancer. Clara wants to be sure that Honey's inherited gift of foresight will be put to proper use once she is gone. Clara's battle with cancer is presumably linked to her exposure many years earlier to radiation during government testing of a nuclear bomb. In the story, Bambara connects environmentalism with a feminist agenda. Spiritual practices are invoked in the struggle not only to heal Clara of cancer but also to heal the debilitating social ills of the community and the pollution and poisoning of the earth. Honey's gift of sight, which Bambara asks readers to take for granted, is assumed as a common phenomenon in black folk culture. Clara must pass on to her daughter instructions on how to respect the power she has been given and to use this gift for the benefit of humankind.

In “Madame Bai and the Taking of Stone Mountain,” the unnamed narrator must answer a spiritual koan put to her by Madame Bai, a Korean warrior-healer, who has been invited to present a workshop to members of the narrator's activist collective. In answering Madame Bai's koan: “Stone Mountain; what is it for?” the narrator discovers how to synthesize spiritual practice with political work in order to act on what she knows. The story is set in Atlanta during that frightening period in the early 1980s when a staggering number of black (mostly male) children in the city were mysteriously abducted and brutally murdered.

In the story, the narrator (an African-American woman) and her two companions, Tram (a Vietnamese man) and Mustafa (a Jordanian man), are accosted by a small gang of white bigots who first taunt and then physically attack Tram. The gang is outdone when the narrator and Mustafa, led by Tram, prove quite capable of physically defending themselves. Badly wounded, their assailants disperse and leave the three to continue along their way while struggling to recover their prior sense of peace. The narrator's eventual answer to Madame Bai's koan, “Stone Mountain is for the taking,” symbolizes her will to fight back against the kind of bigotry and racial violence associated with the murder of black boys and the terror of white supremacists. Readers familiar with the history of Stone Mountain, Georgia, will recognize it as the birthplace of the modern Klan, which until relatively recently remained a stronghold for white supremacy. The narrator affirms the power of the people (here meaning not just blacks but all people committed to justice and racial equality) to reclaim this monument from its historical association with racial bigotry and intolerance.

The third story, “Luther on Sweet Auburn,” is about an ex-social worker (affectionately nicknamed “Miz Nap” by the Brooklyn community she served in the 1960s) who encounters, years later, an acquaintance and former gang member, Luther Owens, from the Brooklyn neighborhood. The story contrasts the narrator's own continuing activism with Luther's complacency, stagnation, and squandered potential. “Luther on Sweet Auburn,” like “Madame Bai,” is set in Atlanta. Miz Nap has adapted her activist work, begun in the 1960s, to accommodate changing times. No longer a community youth worker, she is now a playwright, TV producer, and soon-to-be filmmaker who designs projects that give voice to the community's concerns. Contemplating the premise for her “new play in rehearsal,” she notes, “theme of hostage-keeping in U.S.—slavery, reservations, ghettos, prisons, internment camps for Japanese, GIs in stockades for organizing, cities hostages of Big Business, the whole country kidnapped by thugs. Station manager not interested. Fine.”¹⁸

When the narrator bumps into Luther Owens moments later, she is dismayed to realize in the course of their exchange that the spirit of the 1960s literally passed him by. Twenty years later, he not only has little to show for his life (which in Bambara's terms means: what have you done for the cause?), he's also talking the same jive (as the narrator comments: “all about need and you gotta and help me”). Weary of the tenor of Luther's conversation, Miz Nap cuts to the chase: “How old are you, Luther?” she inquires. “And how did the sixties manage to pass you by, you who were in hailing distance of Brooklyn CORE?” Implicit in the question is the idea of individual accountability and responsibility. In asking Luther's age, the narrator suggests that it is long past time for him to have gotten his act together. “Luther is confused,” she thinks to herself, “Thinks I'm still a youth worker. Thinks he's still a youth. Thinks this is Warren Street, Brooklyn. That is, 1962.”¹⁹ Having always assumed, by the narrator's demeanor and sense of purpose, that she was much older than he, Luther is surprised to learn at the close of the story that Miz Nap, at thirty-eight, is only five years his senior.

All three of these stories present women who are empowered, invested with a sense of purpose, and committed to uplifting their communities through progressive social action. The stories propose that activism continues to be an appropriate response to a range of contemporary issues. In “Luther on Sweet Auburn,” the enthusiasm of black and foreign students gathered for a rally at Bethel Church to draft position papers and to organize around pressing issues provides the story's narrator with an (as she says) “in-the-flesh refutation of the apathetic myth, the movement-is-over propaganda.”²⁰ In Bambara's fiction, movement for social change never ends; it merely changes its form in an increasingly broad set of issues from environmental racism to xenophobia to nuclear armament.

Bambara's focus on the importance of self-work and individual accountability in the interest of progressive social transformation is complemented by an equally strong commitment to the importance of collective work and shared responsibility. To advance individuals without advancing communities is to achieve nothing at all in terms of social change. While concern for community plays an important role in all of the stories in Deep Sightings, Bambara's ethic of community is perhaps most vividly revealed in the stories “Ice” and “The War of the Wall,” both narrated from the perspectives of children. Bambara's frequent use of child narrators reveals her respect for children's voices and often unique ways of seeing. Both stories emphasize the importance of intergenerational bonding. In the spirit of collective work and responsibility (ujima), all members of the community are responsible for and accountable to each other. The elders have a duty to provide the youth with a sense of who they are (through direct lessons, their own example, storytelling, etc.), as well as to nurture and instruct them in how to live ethically in this world. The young, in turn, have a responsibility to respect and care for their elders.

In “The War of the Wall,” the child narrator learns important lessons about grace and tolerance from the actions of the adults in her community. In the story, the narrator is nonplussed by the arrival of an outsider to the community who has been granted permission to paint a mural on the wall adjacent to a barbershop on Talbro Street. Attached to her childhood memories of the wall as it is, the narrator declares the “painter lady's” effort to transform the wall an “act of war.” The story illustrates the community's tolerance for someone different from themselves, as reflected in their capacity to embrace the painter lady (and her project) even as her lack of familiarity with the community's social mores and conventions causes her to inadvertently offend those who extend their hospitality.

The community's willingness, despite this, to grant her physical and psychic space to create additionally suggests their appreciation and respect for artistic work. At first vexed by the adults' failure to denounce the painter lady for her repeated social faux pas, the narrator is eventually pushed to rethink her assumptions about the woman and ultimately to expand her cultural horizons, when the finished mural is enthusiastically embraced by the community. Although the painter lady is an outsider, the community's reaction to the finished mural implies that she succeeds in creating a work of art that clearly speaks to, captures, or in some way validates the community that receives it. The respect she shows the community through her art is thus returned by them through their appreciation of the work.

In the final story to be considered from Deep Sightings, “Ice,” the narrator is incensed when the adults in her community fail to act to save a litter of pups who die of exposure to the cold while she and her classmates are at school. When they return from school, the neighborhood children discover the frozen puppies and give them a proper burial. Of course, what the narrator does not appreciate is that the adults, who are necessarily preoccupied with the weighty responsibilities of work and providing for their families, are not focused on Lady or her puppies. The adults' concern for their children and the children's concern for the puppies are simply on different levels.

The adults nevertheless indulge the narrator's fussing and insinuations about the dead puppies because they recognize that her concern emanates from something that they agree is important to nurture: an appreciation for the value of life and a sense of obligation to protect and care for those who are unable to protect and care for themselves. The narrator eventually makes an important connection between her own concern for the pups and the way her Aunt Myrtle cares for Mrs. Blue, an elderly woman in the neighborhood. Spooked by the sight of Mrs. Blue, the narrator is reluctant to voluntarily visit the elderly woman despite prodding from one of her agemates. Self-congratulatory in her own concern for the pups later that evening, the narrator looks forward to telling her own children someday the story of how she and her peers did what all of the adults in her community had failed to do. In the process of spinning the story, however, thoughts of Old Mrs. Blue interrupt her reverie.

But what if my kids notice there's a hole in my story, I asked myself, a hole I will fall right through in the telling. Suppose they ask, “But, Mommy, didn't you go and see about the old lady?” So then I'll tell them how I put my boots back on and put them silly pot-holder mittens on too to carry one of Aunt Myrtle's casseroles down to Mrs. Blue. And with the moon pushing at my back, I'm thinking that maybe I'll sit with Mrs. Blue a while even though she is a spooky sort of person.²¹

The narrator realizes that if she wants to be able to tell the story, she must tell it right. And that means that she must also be accountable herself.

In interviews, Bambara described herself as an activist who sometimes writes. To be sure, her literary achievements constituted only one facet of a woman whose talents and interests were multifaceted. Whether working in literature or, later, predominately in film, Bambara was committed to creating art in the interests of social change. In an interview with Louis Massiah included in Deep Sightings, Bambara explains how the community that named her also shaped her approach to storytelling:

It was Grandma Dorothy who taught me critical theory, who steeped me in the tradition of Afrocentric aesthetic regulations, who trained me to understand that a story should be informed by the emancipatory impulse that characterizes our storytelling trade in these territories as exemplified by those freedom narratives. … She taught that a story should contain mimetic devices so that the tale is memorable, sharable, that a story should be grounded in cultural specificity and shaped by the modes of Black art practice—call-and-response but one modality that bespeaks a communal ethos.²²

Bambara's artistic vision lends itself to stories that are constructed around a project of possibility. They are not only about what is but what might be. Pushing against the inertia of powerlessness and defeatism, she creates black women, men, and children who are fighters rather than victims, active subjects rather than passive objects. And while they don't always win their battles, the courage, resolution, and spirit evinced in the process present us as readers with a range of possibilities for thinking about how we choose to live our own lives.

Notes

1. Toni Cade Bambara, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970).

2. Toni Cade Bambara, interview by Louis Massiah, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 230.

3. Ibid.

4. Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla My Love (New York: Random House, 1972).

5. Toni Cade Bambara, The Seabirds Are Still Alive (New York: Random House, 1977).

6. Toni Morrison, ed., Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations [by Toni Cade Bambara] (New York: Pantheon, 1996).

7. The term “faggot,” for instance, is used uncritically several times throughout.

8. Julian Mayfield, “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I'll Touch Yours,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (New York: Anchor, 1972), 29.

9. Hoyt Fuller (paraphrasing Larry Neal) in Fuller, “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation,” in Black Aesthetic, 329.

10. Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” in Black Aesthetic, 31.

11. Ibid., 32.

12. Toni Cade Bambara, “Salvation Is the Issue,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980), ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), 47.

13. Morrison, preface to Deep Sightings, ix.

14. A brief overview of the seven principles (Nguzo Saba) can be found in, among other sources, Cedric McClester's Kwanzaa: Everything You Always Wanted to Know but Didn't Know Where to Ask (New York: Gumbs & Thomas, 1985), 3-7. Bambara's work embraces concepts (e.g., the Nguzo Saba) that were also celebrated by Ron Karenga and other cultural nationalists of the late 1960s and 1970s. However, Bambara was highly critical of Karenga and his cohorts for their virulent sexism.

15. Bambara, Black Woman, 7.

16. Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” in Black Woman, 110.

17. Bambara, “Salvation Is the Issue,” 47.

18. Bambara, “Luther on Sweet Auburn,” in Deep Sightings, p. 79.

19. Ibid., p. 78.

20. Ibid., p. 85.

21. “Ice,” in Deep Sightings, p. 77.

22. Deep Sightings, p. 249.