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PART ONE
THEORY
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ONE
Toward a black feminist criticism
BARBARA SMITH
For all my sisters, especially Beverly and Demita
I do not know where to begin. Long before I tried to write this I realized that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous merely by writing about black women writers from a feminist perspective and about black lesbian writers from any perspective at all. These things have not been done. Not by white male critics, expectedly. Not by black male critics. Not by white women critics who think of themselves as feminists. And most crucially not by black women critics who, although they pay the most attention to black women writers as a group, seldom use a consistent feminist analysis or write about black lesbian literature. All segments of the literary world â whether establishment, progressive, black, female, or lesbian â do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that black women writers and black lesbian writers exist.
For whites, this specialized lack of knowledge is inextricably connected to their not knowing in any concrete or politically transforming way that black women of any description dwell in this place. Black women's existence, experience and culture, and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these, are in the âreal worldâ of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible, unknown.
This invisibility, which goes beyond anything that either black men or white women experience and tell about in their writing, is one reason it is so difficult for me to know where to start. It seems overwhelming to break such a massive silence. Even more numbing, however, is the realization that so many of the women who will read this have not yet noticed us missing either from their reading matter, their politics or their lives. It is galling that ostensible feminists and acknowledged lesbians have been so blinded to the implications of any womanhood that is not white womanhood and that they have yet to struggle with the deep racism in themselves that is at the source of this blindness.
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 and I am filled with rage at the fraction of those pages that mention black and other Third World women. I finally do not know how to begin because in 1977 I want to be writing this for a black feminist publication, for black women who know and love these writers as I do and who, if they do not yet know their names, have at least profoundly felt the pain of their absence.
The conditions that coalesce into the impossibilities of this essay have as much to do with politics as with the practice of literature. Any discussion of Afro-American writers can rightfully begin with the fact that for most of the time we have been in this country we have been categorically denied not only literacy, but the most minimal possibility of a decent human life. In her landmark essay âIn search of our mothersâ gardensâ, Alice Walker discloses how the political, economic and social restrictions of slavery and racism have historically stunted the creative lives of black women.1
At the present time I feel that the politics of feminism have a direct relationship to the state of black women's literature. A viable, autonomous black feminist movement in this country would open up the space needed for the exploration of black women's lives and the creation of consciously black woman-identified art. At the same time a redefinition of the goals and strategies of the white feminist movement would lead to much needed change in the focus and content of what is now generally accepted as women's culture.
I want to make in this essay some connections between the politics of black women's lives, what we write about and our situation as artists. In order to do this I will look at how black women have been viewed critically by outsiders, demonstrate the necessity for black feminist criticism, and try to understand what the existence or nonexistence of black lesbian writing reveals about the state of black women's culture and the intensity of all black women's oppression.
The role that criticism plays in making a body of literature recognizable and real hardly needs to be explained here. The necessity for non-hostile and perceptive analysis of works written by persons outside the mainstream of white/male cultural rule has been proven by the black cultural resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s and by the even more recent growth of feminist literary scholarship. For books to be real and remembered they have to be talked about. For books to be understood they must be examined in such a way that the basic intentions of the writers are at least considered. Because of racism, black literature has usually been viewed as a discrete subcategory of American literature and there have been black critics of black literature who did much to keep it alive long before it caught the attention of whites. Before the advent of specifically feminist criticism in this decade, books by white women, on the other hand, were not clearly perceived as the cultural manifestation of an oppressed people. It took the surfacing of the second wave of the North American feminist movement to expose the fact that these works contain a stunningly accurate record of the impact of patriarchal values and practice upon the lives of women and more significantly that literature by women provides essential insights into female experience.
In speaking about the current situation of black women writers, it is important to remember that the existence of a feminist movement was an essential precondition to the growth of feminist literature, criticism and women's studies, which focused at the beginning almost entirely upon investigations of literature. The fact that a parallel black feminist movement has been much slower in evolving cannot help but have impact upon the situation of black women writers and artists and explains in part why during this very same period we have been so ignored.
There is no political movement to give power or support to those who want to examine black women's experience through studying our history, literature and culture. There is no political presence that demands a minimal level of consciousness and respect from those who write or talk about our lives. Finally, there is not a developed body of black feminist political theory whose assumptions could be used in the study of black women's art. When black women's books are dealt with at all, it is usually in the context of black literature which largely ignores the implications of sexual politics. When white women look at black women's works they are of course ill-equipped to deal with the subtleties of racial politics. A black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of black women writers is an absolute necessity. Until a black feminist criticism exists we will not even know what these writers mean. The citations from a variety of critics which follow prove that without a black feminist critical perspective not only are books by black women misunderstood, they are destroyed in the process.
Jerry H. Bryant, the Nation's white male reviewer of Alice Walker's In Love and Trouble: Stories of black women, wrote in 1973: âThe subtitle of the collection, âStories of Black Women,â is probably an attempt by the publisher to exploit not only black subjects but feminine ones. There is nothing feminist about these stories, however.â2 Blackness and feminism are to his mind mutually exclusive and peripheral to the act of writing fiction. Bryant of course does not consider that Walker might have titled the work herself, nor did he apparently read the book which unequivocally reveals the author's feminist consciousness.
In The Negro Novel in America, a book that black critics recognize as one of the worst examples of white racist pseudoscholarship, Robert Bone cavalierly dismisses Ann Petty's classic, The Street. He perceives it to be âa superficial social analysisâ of how slums victimize their black inhabitants.3 He further objects that:
It is an attempt to interpret slum life in terms of Negro experience, when a larger frame of reference is required. As Alain Locke has observed, âKnock on Any Door is superior to The Street because it designates class and environment, rather than mere race and environment, as its antagonistâ4
Neither Robert Bone nor Alain Locke, the black male critic he cites, can recognize that The Street is one of the best delineations in literature of how sex, race and class interact to oppress black women.
In her review of Toni Morrison's Sula for The New York Times Book Review in 1973, putative feminist Sara Blackburn makes similarly racist comments. She writes:
Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life. If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality than this beautiful but nevertheless distanced novel. And if she does this, it seems to me that she might easily transcend that early and unintentionally limiting classification âblack woman writerâ and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working.5 [Italics mine]
Recognizing Morrison's exquisite gift, Blackburn unashamedly asserts that Morrison is âtoo talentedâ to deal with mere black folk, particularly those double nonentities, black women. In order to be accepted as âseriousâ, âimportantâ, âtalentedâ and âAmericanâ, she must obviously focus her efforts upon chronicling the doings of white men.
The mishandling of black women writers by whites is paralleled more often by their not being handled at all, particularly in feminist criticism. Although Elaine Showalter in her review essay on literary criticism for Signs states that: âThe best work being produced today [in feminist criticism] is exacting and cosmopolitanâ, her essay is neither.6 If it were, she would not have failed to mention a single black or Third World woman writer, whether âmajorâ or âminorâ, to cite her questionable categories. That she also does not even hint that lesbian writers of any color exist renders her purported overview virtually meaningless. Showalter obviously thinks that the identities of being black and female are mutually exclusive, as this statement illustrates: âFurthermore, there are other literary subcultures (black American novelists, for example) whose history offers a precedent for feminist scholarship to use.â7 The idea of critics like Showalter using black literature is chilling, a case of barely disguised cultural imperialism. The final insult is that she footnotes the preceding remark by pointing readers to works on black literature by white males Robert Bone and Roger Rosenblatt.
Two recent works by white women, Ellen Moers's Literary Women: The great writers and Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, evidence the same racist flaw.8 Moers includes the names of four black and one Puertorriqueña writer in her seventy pages of bibliographical notes and does not deal at all with Third World women in the body of her book. Spacks refers to a comparison between Negroes (sic) and women in Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women under the index entry, âblacks, women andâ. âBlack Boy (Wright)â is the preceding entry. Nothing follows. Again there is absolutely no recognition that black and female identity ever coexist, specifically in a group of black women writers. Perhaps one can assume that these women do not know who black women writers are, that they have little opportunity like most Americans to learn about them. Perhaps. Their ignorance seems suspiciously selective, however, particularly in the light of the dozens of truly obscure white women writers they are able to unearth. Spacks was herself employed at Wellesley College at the same time that Alice Walker was there teaching one of the first courses on black women writers in the country.
I am not trying to encourage racist criticism of black women writers like that of Sara Blackburn, to cite only one example. As a beginning I would at least like to see in print white women's acknowledgment of the contradictions of who and what are being left out of their research and writing.9
Black male critics can also act as if they do not know that black women writers exist and are, of course, hampered by an inability to comprehend black women's experience in sexual as well as racial terms. Unfortunately there are also those who are as virulently sexist in their treatment of black women writers as their white male counterparts. Darwin Turner's discussion of Zora Neale Hurston in his In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American writers and their search for identity is a frightening example of the near assassination of a great black woman writer.10 His descriptions of her and her work as âartfulâ, âcoyâ, âirrationalâ, âsuperficialâ and âshallowâ bear no relationship to the actual quality of her achievements. Turner is completely insensitive to the sexual political dynamics of Hurston's life and writing.
In a recent interview, the notoriously misogynist writer, Ishmael Reed, comments in this way upon the low sales of his newest novel:
but the book only sold 8000 copies. I don't mind giving out the figure: 8000. Maybe if I was one of those young female Afro-American writers that are so hot now, Iâd sell more. You know, fill my books with ghetto women who can do no wrong. ⊠But come on, I think I could have sold 8000 copies by myself.11
The politics of the situation of black women are glaringly illuminated by this statement. Neither Reed nor his white male interviewer has the slightest compunction about attacking black women in print They need not fear widespread public denunciation since Reed's statement is in perfect agreement with the values of a society that hates black people, women and black women. Finally the two of them feel free to base their actions on the premise that black women are powerless to alter either their political or their cultural oppression.
In her introduction to âA bibliography of works written by American black womenâ Ora Williams quotes some of the reactions of her colleagues toward her efforts to do research on black women. She writes:
Others have reacted negatively with such statements as, âI really don't think you are going to find very much written.â âHave âtheyâ written anything that is any good?â and âI wouldn't go overboard with this woman's lib thing.â When discussions touched on 1he possibility of teaching a course in which emphasis would be on the literature by black women, one response was, âHa, ha. That will certainly be the most nothing course ever offered!â12
A remark by Alice Walker capsulizes what all the preceding examples indicate about the position of black women writers and the reasons for the damaging criticism about them. In response to her interviewer's question âWhy do you think that the black woman writer has been so ignored in America? Does she have even more difficulty than the black male writer, who perhaps has just begun to gain recognition?â Walker replies:
There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as seriously as the black male writer. One is that she's a woman. Critics seem unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black women. Generally, they do not even make the attempt; they prefer, rather, to talk about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since black women writers are not â it would seem â very likable â until recently they were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy â comments about them tend to be cruel.13
A convincing case for black feminist criticism can obviously be built solely upon the basis of the negativity of what already exists. It is far more gratifying, however, to demonstrate its necessity by showing how it can serve to reveal for the first time the profound subtleties of this particular body of literature.
Before suggesting how a black feminist approach might be used to examine a specific work I will outline some of the principles that I think a black feminist critic could use. Beginning with a primary commitment to exploring how both sexual and racial politics and black and female identity are inextricable elements in black women's writings, she would also work from the assumption that black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition. The breadth of her familiarity with these writers would have shown her that not only is theirs a verifiable historical tradition that parallels in time the tradition of black men and white women writing in this country, but that thematically, stylistically, aesthetically and conceptually black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature as a direct result of the specific political, social and economic experience they have been obliged to share. The way, for example, that Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker incorporate the traditional black female activities of rootworking, herbal medicine, conjure and midwifery into the fabric of their stories is not mere coincidence, nor is their use of specifically black female language to express their own and their charactersâ thoughts accidental. The use of black women's language and cultural experience in books by black women about black women results in a miraculously rich coalescing of form and content and also takes their writing far beyond the confines of white/male literary structures. The black feminist critic would find innumerable commonalities in works by black women.
Another principle which grows out of the concept of a tradition and which would also help to strengthen this tradition would be for the critic to look first for precedents and insights in interpretation within the works of other black women. In other words she would think and write out of her own identity and not try to graft the ideas or methodology of white/male literary thought upon the precious materials of black women's art. Black feminist criticism would by definition be highly innovative, embodying the daring spirit of the works themselves. The black feminist critic would be constantly aware of the political implications of her work and would assert the connections between it and the political situation of all black women. Logically developed, black feminist criticism would owe its existence to a black feminist movement while at the same time contributing ideas that women in the movement could use.
Black feminist criticism applied to a particular work can overturn previous assum...
