The Womanist Reader

The First Quarter Century of Womanist Thought

Layli Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135919740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Comprehensive in its coverage, The Womanist Reader is the first volume to anthologize the major works of womanist scholarship. Charting the course of womanist theory from its genesis as Alice Walker's African-American feminism, through Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi's African womanism and Clenora Hudson-Weems' Africana womanism, to its present-day expression as a global, anti-oppressionist perspective rooted in the praxis of everyday women of color, this interdisciplinary reader traces the rich and diverse history of a quarter century of womanist thought. Featuring selections from over a dozen disciplines by top womanist scholars from around the world, plus several critiques of womanism, an extensive bibliography of womanist sources, and the first ever systematic treatment of womanist thought on its own terms, Layli Phillips has assembled a unique and groundbreaking compilation.

Part 1
Birthplaces, Birthmothers: Womanist Origins

1
Alice Walker's Womanism

Coming Apart (1979)

ALICE WALKER

These three paragraphs by Alice Walker tell why she wrote Coming Apart: “Many Black men see pornography as progressive because the white woman, formerly taboo, is, via pornography, made available to them. Not simply available, but in a position of vulnerability to all men. This availability and vulnerability diminishes the importance and power of color among men and permits a bonding with white men as men, which Black men, striving to be equal, not content with being different, apparently desire.

“Many Black women also consider pornography progressive and are simply interested in equal time. But in a racist society, where Black women are on the bottom, there is no such thing as equal time or equal quality of exposure. It is not unheard of to encounter ‘erotica’ or pornography in which a Black woman and a white woman are both working in ‘a house of ill-repute,’ but the Black woman also doubles as the white woman’s maid.¹ The Black man who finds himself ‘enjoying’ pornography of this sort faces a split in himself that allows a solidarity of gender but promotes a rejection of race. ‘Beulah, peel me a grape’ has done untold harm to us all.

“I have, as we all have, shared a part of my life—since the day I was born— with men whose concept of woman is a degraded one. I have also experienced, like the woman in this piece, Forty-second Street; I felt demeaned by the selling of bodies, threatened by the violence, and furious that my daughter must grow up in a society in which the debasement of women is actually enjoyed.”

* * *

A middle-aged husband comes home after a long day at the office. His wife greets him at the door with the news that dinner is ready. He is grateful. First, however, he must use the bathroom. In the bathroom, sitting on the commode, he opens up the Jiveboy magazine he has brought home in his briefcase. There are a couple of Jivemate poses that particularly arouse him. Studies the young women—blonde, perhaps (the national craze); with elastic waists and inviting eyes—and strokes his penis. At the same time, his bowels stir with the desire to defecate. He is in the bathroom a luxurious ten minutes. He emerges spent, relaxed—hungry for dinner.

His wife, using the bathroom later, comes upon the slightly damp magazine. She picks it up with mixed emotions. She is a brownskin woman with black hair and eyes. She looks at the white blondes and brunettes. Will he be thinking of them, she wonders, when he is making love to me?

“Why do you need these?” she asks.

“They mean nothing,” he says.

“But they hurt me somehow,” she says.

“You are being a) silly, b) a prude, and c) ridiculous,” he says. “You know I love you.”

She cannot say to him: But they are not me, those women. She cannot say she is jealous of pictures on a page. That she feels invisible. Rejected. Overlooked. She says instead, to herself: He is right. I will grow up. Adjust. Swim with the tide.

He thinks he understands her, what she has been trying to say. It is Jiveboy, he thinks, the white women.

Next day he brings home Jivers, a Black magazine, filled with bronze and honey-colored women. He is in the bathroom another luxurious ten minutes.

She stands, holding the magazine: on the cover are the legs and shoes of a well-dressed Black man, carrying a briefcase and rolled Wall Street Journal in one hand. At his feet—she turns the magazine cover around and around to figure out how exactly the pose is accomplished—there is a woman, a brown-skin woman like herself, twisted and contorted in such a way that her head is not even visible. Only her glistening body—her back and derriere—so that she looks like a human turd at the man’s feet.

He is on a business trip to New York. He has brought his wife along. He is eagerly sharing Forty-second Street with her, “Look!” he says, “how free everything is! A far cry from Bolton!” (The small town they are from.) He is elated to see the blonde, spaced-out hookers, with their Black pimps, trooping down the street. Elated at the shortness of the Black hookers’ dresses, their long hair, inevitably false and blonde. She walks somehow behind him, so that he will encounter these wonders first. He does not notice until he turns a corner that she has stopped in front of a window that has caught her eye. While she is standing alone, looking, two separate pimps ask her what stable she is in or if in fact she is in one. Or simply “You workin’?”

He struts back and takes her elbow. Looks hard for the compliment implied in these questions, then shares it with his wife. “You know you’re foxy?”

She is immovable. Her face suffering and wondering. “But look,” she says, pointing. Four large plastic dolls—one a skinny Farrah Fawcett (or so the doll looks to her) posed for anal inspection; one, an oriental, with her eyes, strangely, closed, but her mouth, a pouting red suction cup, open; an enormous eskimo woman—with fur around her neck and ankles, and vagina; and a Black woman dressed entirely in a leopard skin, complete with tail. The dolls are all life-size, and the efficiency of their rubber genitals is explained in detail on a card visible through the plate glass.

For her this is the stuff of nightmares because all the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity. He will return, another time, alone. Meanwhile, he must prevent her from seeing such things, he resolves, whisking her briskly offthe street.

Later, in their hotel room, she watches TV as two Black women sing their latest hits: the first woman, dressed in a gold dress (because her song is now “solid gold!”), is nonetheless wearing a chain around her ankle—the wife imagines she sees a chain—because the woman is singing: “Free me from my freedom, chain me to a tree!”

“What do you think of that?” she asks her husband.

“She’s a fool,” says he.

But when the second woman sings: “Ready, aim, fire, my name is desire,” with guns and rockets going off all around her, he thinks the line “Shoot me with your love!” explains everything.

She is despondent.

She looks in a mirror at her plump brown and blackskin body, crinkly hair and black eyes and decides, foolishly, that she is not beautiful. And that she is not hip, either. Among her other problems is the fact that she does not like the word “nigger” used by anyone at all, and is afraid of marijuana. These restraints, she feels, make her old, too much like her own mother, who loves sex (she has lately learned) but is highly religious and, for example, thinks cardplaying wicked and alcohol deadly. Her husband would not consider her mother sexy, she thinks. Since she herself is aging, this thought frightens her. But, surprisingly, while watching herself become her mother in the mirror, she discovers that she considers her mother—who carefully braids her average length, average grade, graying hair every night before going to bed; the braids her father still manages to fray during the night—very sexy.

At once she feels restored.

Resolves to fight.

“You’re the only Black woman in the world that worries about any of this stuff,” he tells her, unaware of her resolve, and moody at her months of silent studiousness.

She says, “Here, Colored Person, read this essay by Audre Lorde.”

He hedges. She insists.

He comes to a line about Lorde “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” and bridles. “Wait a minute,” he says. “What kind of a name is ‘Audre’ for a man? They must have meant ‘André.’”

“It is the name of a woman,” she says. “Read the rest of that page.”

“No dyke can tell me anything,” he says, flinging down the pages.

She has been calmly waiting for this. She brings in Jiveboy and Jivers. In both, there are women eating women they don’t even know. She takes up the essay and reads:

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

He looks at her with resentment, because she is reading this passage over again, silently, absorbedly, to herself, holding the pictures of the phony lesbians (a favorite, though unexamined, turn-on) absentmindedly on her lap. He realizes he can never have her again sexually, the way he has had her since their second year of marriage, as though her body belonged to someone else. He sees, down the road, the dissolution of the marriage, a constant search for more perfect bodies, or dumber wives. He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels somehow as if her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights.

Now she is busy pasting Audre Lorde’s words on the cabinet over the kitchen sink.

When they make love she tries to look him in the eye, but he refuses to return her gaze.

For the first time he acknowledges the awareness that the pleasure of coming without her is bitter and lonely. He thinks of eating stolen candy alone, behind the barn. And yet, he thinks greedily, it is better than nothing, which he considers her struggle’s benefit to him.

The next day she is reading another essay when he comes home from work. It is called “A Quiet Subversion,” and is by Luisah Teish. “Another dyke?” he asks.

“Another one of your sisters,” she replies, and begins to read aloud, even before he’s had dinner:

During the Black Power Movement, much cultural education was focused on the Black physique. One of the accomplishments of that period was the popularization of African hairstyles and the Natural. Along with (the Natural) came a new selfimage and way of relating. It suggested that Black people should relate to each other in respectful and supportive ways. Then the movie industry put out Superfly, and the Lord Jesus Look and the Konked head, and an accompanying attitude ran rampant in the Black community. … Films like Shaft and Lady Sings the Blues portray Black “heroes” as cocaine-snorting, fast-life fools. In these movies a Black woman is always caught in a web of violence. …

A popular Berkeley, California, theater featured a pornographic movie entitled Slaves of Love. Its advertisement portrayed two Black women, naked, in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip! How such racist pornographic material escapes the eye of Black activists presents a problem. …

Typically, he doesn’t even hear the statement about the women. “What does the bitch know about the Black Power Movement?” he fumes. He is angry at his wife for knowing him so long and so well. She knows, for instance, that because of the Black Power Movement (and really because of the Civil Rights Movement before it) and not because he was at all active in it—he holds the bourgeois job he has. She remembers when his own hair was afro-ed. Now it is loosely curled. It occurs to him that, because she knows him as he was, he cannot make love to her as she is. Cannot, in fact, love her as she is. There is a way in which, in some firmly repressed corner of his mind, he considers his wife to be still Black, whereas he feels himself to have moved to some other plane.

(This insight, a glimmer of which occurs to him, frightens him so much that he will resist it for several years. Should he accept it at once, however unsettling, it would help him understand the illogic of his acceptance of pornography used against Black women: that he has detached himself from his own blackness in attempting to identify Black women only by their sex.)

The wife has never considered herself a feminist—though she is, of course, a “womanist.” A “womanist” is a feminist, only more common.² So she is surprised when her husband attacks her as a “women’s liber,” a “white women’s lackey,” a “pawn” in the hands of Gloria Steinem, an incipient bra-burner! What possible connection could there be, he wants to know, between her and white women— those overprivileged hags, now (he’s recently read in Newsweek) marching and preaching their puritanical horseshit up and down Times Square!

(He remembers only the freedom he felt there, not her long pause before the window of the plastic doll shop.) And if she is going to make a lot of new connections with dykes and whites, where will that leave him, the Black man, the most brutalized and oppressed human being on the face of the earth? (Is it because he can now ogle white women in freedom and she has no similar outlet of expression that he thinks of her as still Black and himself as something else? This thought underlines what he is actually saying, and his wife is unaware of it.) Didn’t she know it is over these very same white bodies he has been lynched in the past, and is lynched still, by the police and the U.S. prison system, dozens of times a year even now!?

The wife has cunningly saved Tracey A. Gardner’s essay for just this moment. Because Tracey A. Gardner has thought about it all, not just presently, but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a Black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is cold—she is furious. The wife, given more to depression and self-abnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardner’s high-spirited anger.

She begins to read:³

Because from my point of view, racism is everywhere, including the Women’s Movement, and the only time I really need to say something special about it is when I don’t see it—and the first time that happens, I’ll tell you about it.

The husband, surprised, thinks this very funny, not to say pertinent. He slaps his knee and sits up. He is dying to make some sort of positive dyke comment, but nothing comes to mind.

American slavery relied on the denial of the humanity of Black folks, on the undermining of our sense of nationhood and family, on the stripping away of the Black man’s role as protector and provider, and on the structuring of Black men and women into the American system of white male domination.

“In other words,” she says, “white men think they have to be on top. Other men have been known to savor life from other positions.”

The end of the Civil War brought the end of a certain “form” of slavery for Black folks. It also brought the end of any “job security” and the loss of the protection of their white enslaver. Blacks were now free game, and the terrorization and humiliation of Black people, especially Black men, began. Now the Black man could have his family and prove his worth, but he had no way to support or protect them, or himself.

As she reads, he feels ashamed and senses his wife’s wounded embarrassment, for him and for herself. For their history together. But doggedly, she continues to read:

After the Civil War, “popular justice” (which meant there usually was no trial and no proof needed) began its reign in the form of the castration, burning at the stake, beheading, and lynching of Black men. As many as 5,000 white people turned out to witness these events, as though going to a celebration. (She pauses, sighs: beheading?) Over 2,000 Black men were lynched in the ten-year period from 1889–1899. There were also a number of Black women who were lynched. (She reads this sentence quickly and forgets it.) Over 50 percent of the lynched Black males were charged with rape or attempted rape.

He cannot imagine a woman being lynched. He has never even considered the possibility...