Black Women's Writing Revisited

by Terri Francis, Yale University, United States

1      Black women's writing is characterized by expressive multiplicity in three major ways: intertextuality, intergeneric textual strategies and the collective first person. Despite feted single-author publications by individual black women, it was the anthology, a collective expression of black womanhood as in the form of I and I, which ushered in the idea of black women writers as a discrete politicized and aesthetic phenomenon. It was initiated with the publication of Toni Cade Bambara's edited volume The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970) and followed by Mary Helen Washington's edited anthology Black-eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women (1975). Showing that the anthology was "the outgrowth of work that had been ongoing" in her introduction Bambara writes, "throughout the country in recent years, Black women have been forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses " which further complicates one-sided images of the black woman (qtd. in Alexander,Power 90-91; Power 91). Acting as both an institutionalizing platform and a metaphor of "the black woman" the anthology embodies and encourages the formation of a collective subjectivity.

2      Exemplary of this writing practice and black feminist ethic, contemporary scholar Elizabeth Alexander's writing is diverse, consisting of poetry and prose that includes literary and culture criticism, reviews, and interviews and it is anthological, moreover, in its featuring of various genres. In her poetry and prose alike, Alexander investigates the formation of subjectivity-as-historical consciousness, primarily through her persona poems as well as her use of a collective first-person voice, the invention of personas and combining genres in her essays.[1]Alexander's persona poems include: the title poem of her first collection, The Venus Hottentot, "The Josephine Baker Museum" and "Yolande Speaks" in Body of Life and "Narrative: Ali" in Antebellum Dream Book.

3      Alexander's prose is underappreciated in existing scholarship relative to her poetry, but the significance of her concern with subjectivity and culture in her essays has been noted[2]Alexander's awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, the George Kent Award, given by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is an inaugural recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that "contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954." One reviewer writes, for instance, that in The Black Interior essay collection, Alexander "explores the way in which the very notion of an African American "culture" impedes attempts at self-understanding and self-definition by its individual members" (Walsh 85). However, the reviewer's comment barely addresses what I have found in Alexander's prose: ground-breaking concepts of black culture around a racialized psychic spaceor dream life articulated as her innovative use of the first-person voice.

4      In this essay, I show the ways in which in The Black Interior and Power and Possibility Alexander speaks in the tongues of many genres and at times uses the first person collective or,"I and I," in a radical depth of identification between a reader and the text. I find that Alexander's anthological first-person voice is analogous to the Rastafarian (imperfectly realized) ideal of unity among people, which is expressed through the collective first person pronoun, I and I. This Jamaican/Rastafarian patois term, for which there is no counterpart in American or other forms of English and the concept of which is largely absent from modern languages, uniquely expresses the relational sensibility that Alexander uses as a black woman writer. She writes her social identity into being partly through explicitly addressing and representing the shared interests of a black female readership, breaking down traditional norms of objectivity and abstraction-without resorting exclusively to literal forms of direct address such as letters. Further, I contextualize these innovative rhetorical forms within Alexander's intellectual history, paying particular attention tothe use of intergeneric textual strategies and the collective first-person voice (I and I) among illustrative writers that she references and analyzes in her work and beyond. While a thorough analysis of all of Alexander's essays is beyond the scope of this essay, I refer to several of them, selecting three for closer reading: "Anna Julia Cooper: Turn-of-the-Century 'Aframerican' Intellectual," "The World According to Jet, Or, Notes toward a Notion of Race-Pride," and "'Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?': Reading the Rodney King Video(s)."Before delving into local analyses of Alexander's essays, I will look at her framing concept of black culture or what she calls "the black interior."

5      If in her essays Alexander presents her diverse interests then, on a deeper level, this anthological expression defines her subject, black culture, in terms of multiplicity.[3]In her 1992 dissertation, "Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women's Literature," Alexander argues that black consciousness is best understood as multiple not dual, against Du Bois' axiomatic formulation of black identity as split between irreconcilable strivings. Such ideas depart from both the simplistic one-sided views of stereotypes as well as the respected notions of "twoness" or double-consciousness in African American cultural philosophy, first established by sociologist and historian W.E. B. DuBois. In his 1903 anthology of essays, The Souls of Black Folk he emphasizes "irreconcilable" struggles between the two sides of black Americans' cultural origins (3). DuBois's words, "'One ever feels his twoness' would become a veritable mantra to legions of students of blackness and DuBois's image of an ineffably split African-American consciousness, and of bifurcation as the major twentieth-century trope for African American consciousness remains resonant today" (Power 35). It remains resonant despite major shifts in the modalities with which we view African American culture such as greater attention to the ways in which black culture has been shaped by migrations throughout the Diaspora, conflicts of race, class, and gender within the group and aesthetics that tend to favor multi-dimensional rather than two-dimensional fragmentation. Alexanderrevises DuBoisian double-consciousness by using collage as a metaphor for black culture.