[Claudia Tate’s 1983 collection of interviews is an important
look into the trials writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou faced
on their way to mainstream acceptance]
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HOW BLACK WOMEN WRITERS GOT IT DONE  
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Marina Magloire
June 6, 2023
The Nation [[link removed]]

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_ Claudia Tate’s 1983 collection of interviews is an important look
into the trials writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou faced on
their way to mainstream acceptance _

Nikki Giovanni standing by the lectern and woman singing during a
performance at The Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival., 1973. , Photo by
Jackson State University via Getty Images

 

In the early 1980s, two Black women sat at a table, a tape recorder
between them. One, Margaret Walker, was an elder, a trailblazing
writer and educator who had endured untold obstacles since her career
began in the 1940s. The other, Claudia Tate, was a young academic hard
at work on her first book: a study of Black women writers who, like
Walker, had found success in spite of the misogynoir of the American
literary landscape. “People think that [Richard] Wright helped me
and my writing,” Walker told Tate, the hurt and indignation in her
voice. “But I was writing poetry as a child in New Orleans. I had
published in _The Crisis _even before I ever met Wright…. Do you
believe I was just being introduced to literature by Wright?” Though
Tate had never suggested that, decades of snubs and indignities
animated Walker’s defensiveness. Eventually, though, she softened.
“Here’s one of Wright’s letters,” she said, and I can imagine
Walker rummaging through an armoire, or a filing cabinet, to deliver
these precious yellowed memories into Tate’s lap. It is a beautiful
thing to picture her, after shadowboxing her invisible detractors,
realizing that the young Black woman sitting in front of her can be
trusted.

BOOKS IN REVIEW 

BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AT WORK By Claudia Tate 

Buy this book [[link removed]]

This is just one of the many vulnerable moments that make up Tate’s
1983 collection _Black Women Writers at Work, _a genre-defying
compilation of interviews with some of the foremost Black women
writers of the 20th century, including Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Toni
Morrison, and Alice Walker. Tate’s interviews bear the indelible
mark of intimacy: the rustle of papers, the chatter of public spaces,
the laughter and prickliness of Black women speaking frankly. Rather
than disappearing behind her questions, Tate’s presence as an
interlocutor is the mark of her skill, like a watermark on every
interview. Her thoughtful introduction and guiding questions frame
these Black women writers within the historical shifts of postwar
America, as the 1960s’ revolutionary fervor gave way to the
fractured 1970s and the reactionary 1980s. Haymarket Books’ timely
reissue of the collection, which has been out of print for decades,
restores the immediacy to this conversation between Black women
writers on the brink of canonization. Indeed, this book should serve
as a primary source for those hoping to understand the sacrifices
Black women writers have made to ensure that their art is always
accountable to its political and social context.

By 1983, the community of Black women writers was at a crucial
historical juncture, one in which their celebrated works across genres
had become a national phenomenon. Toni Morrison had already published
her first four novels. Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem
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colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is
enuf _had become the second play by a Black woman to reach Broadway.
Maya Angelou had been a household name for decades. While many of
these writers were already famous, they still chafed under the demands
of what Black women writers had become known for in the publishing
marketplace: subjective tales of victimization and resilience,
centering abuse within Black families and couples. After decades of
toil, rewards were finally being reaped, but at the same time these
writers were constrained by their collective success. “What has
success done to you?” Tate asks Shange, regarding the Broadway debut
of _for colored girls _in 1976. Until that point, no work by a Black
woman playwright had received the same level of mainstream success and
fanfare since Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play _A Raisin in the
Sun. _However, Shange replies to Tate, “I was totally devastated.
It took me five years to do anything at all.” Shange’s despair was
perhaps prompted by her position between the poles of the responses to
Black women’s writing: a backlash from Black men, who felt that the
women were airing the community’s dirty laundry for profit and fame,
and the backhanded praise of a white-dominated arts industry in the
business of selling Black suffering.

For the Black woman writer seeking to write about her own experience,
every text was contested ground on which she staked her right to
exist. In a world where writers like Ishmael Reed could muse bitterly
that he would sell more books if he were a Black lesbian poet, what
was a Black lesbian poet to write about but herself? Audre Lorde poses
a rebuttal to this sentiment in her poem “Blackstudies”: “For
how else can the self become whole / save by making self into its own
new religion?” Rather than repressing or denying the presence of
homophobia, misogyny, and internalized racism within the Black
community, Black women writers pressed the full weight of their
experiences down on these phenomena in order to counter them.

The painful reality is that many attacks on Black women writers in the
1970s came from within the Black literary community itself, in the
form of disgruntled Black men. Tate alludes, with some impatience, to
these debates in her introduction, when she says that “a few people
believe that they are witnessing a kind of conspiracy on the part of
black women writers to overshadow black male writers.” Her project,
which surveys four decades of Black women’s writing, shows that
Black women writers had an intergenerational commitment to using their
experiences to end systems of oppression that affected the entire
community, not just Black women.

Of course, not everyone saw it that way. In 1979, the journal _The
Black Scholar _devoted a full issue to the “Black Sexism Debate,”
with contributions from Black writers across genders responding to the
accusations that works like Shange’s promoted divisions within the
entire Black community. The poet Askia Touré compared the work of
Black feminist writers to the destabilization efforts of COINTELPRO.
Like the FBI program that infiltrated and destabilized Black
revolutionary movements, he argued, “these writers’ works have
been utilized by our oppressor as weapons against our overall
liberation effort.” Meanwhile, writers like Audre Lorde, June
Jordan, and Kalamu ya Salaam pushed back, with Salaam arguing that
Black women’s exposés of Black men’s abuse were an act of
self-preservation: “As Zora Neale Hurston so eloquently addressed
the issue in her book _Their Eyes Were Watching God, _it
will _sometimes_ be necessary for our women to literally, as well as
ideologically, kill the men they love.”

Alice Walker, herself an oft-targeted recipient of Black literary
men’s vitriol, states it more baldly in her interview with Tate:
“That black male writers, no less than black men generally, think
that when they don’t get something they want, it is because of black
women, and not because of the capitalist system that is destroying us
all, is almost too much irony to bear.” The Black sexism debate was
nothing more than a symptom of the false scarcity created by the
corporate publishing industry, which only published and promoted Black
writers it could market in accordance with its preexisting assumptions
about Black victimhood and abjection. Maya Angelou puts it this way in
her interview: “A number of black men in the sixties fell for a
terrible, terrible ploy. They felt that in order to be total and free
and independent and powerful, they had to be like white men to their
women.” The themes of sexual abuse, domestic violence, and trauma
detailed in Black women’s writings were often symptomatic of this
desire to emulate the unfettered power, mobility, and access to
capital of white men. “Do women write differently from men?” Tate
asks a few of the writers she interviewed, in order to explore the
contours of this deep intra-community wound.

The novelist Gayl Jones gives an astute response: “Women writers
seem to depict essential mobility, essential identity to take place
within the family and community. But perhaps for male writers that
‘place’ as well as those relationships are insignificant,
restrictive, circumscribed.” In this response, Jones identifies the
way that the terms of the Black sexism debate were often predicated on
a false binary between individual and collective, between
introspection and militancy, between home and the world. When Tate
tries to characterize Nikki Giovanni’s earlier work as more militant
than her later work, Giovanni balks: “I’ll tell you what’s wrong
with that question,” she says. “The assumption inherent in that
question is that the self is not a part of the body politic.” For
most of the Black women writers interviewed—including Giovanni,
Jones, Shange, and Sonia Sanchez—there is no separation between
individual and collective liberation. Shange, who often wrote love
poems about poverty, racism, and imperialism, argues that love can
animate political struggle: “It’s simply that when I love
somebody, I want my beloved in a world where those things aren’t
occurring.”

In interviews like this one, one might recognize the primary theme of
Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” which argues that
feeling is a form of knowledge with the potential for radical
transformation. Lorde elaborates on this in her interview with Tate:

Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we
feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we
will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once
we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel
deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts
of our lives produce that kind of joy.

Writing, it seems, often provokes or embodies the feeling that will
lead the writer to demand more from an unjust world. In the work of
Black women writers, the most intimate thoughts and feelings of Black
women could be the impetus for challenging some of the most
foundational systems of oppression, and their ripples could travel far
beyond the inner world of one Black woman.

In a powerful rejoinder to the alleged provincialism of Black
women’s writing, Tate asks some of the most politically active
writers of her generation to weigh in on politics as well as
literature. Writers like Giovanni, Sanchez, Walker, and Toni Cade
Bambara were active participants in Black and Third World liberation
movements, and they came to these interviews armed with their own
sophisticated analyses of the interplay between the personal and the
political. “What happened to the revolutionary fervor of the
sixties?” Tate asks them, a question that clearly expresses a
growing dissatisfaction with the backsliding of civil rights gains of
the ’60s. Bambara, herself a seasoned organizer, pushes back against
the notion that the 1970s were years of political failure or
complacency. Though the achievements of the ’60s have been labeled
as unprecedented, Bambara argues that “the workings of the
seventies, while less visible and less audible and less easy to
perceive, were no less passionate and no less significant. People
attempted to transform themselves cell by cell, block by block.” The
work of Black women writers in this decade is precisely this kind of
scalable, intimate work—radiating outward from individuals to
communities. “We’re about building a nation; the inner nation
needs building, too,” Bambara says.

Many writers shed crucial light on their inner nation-building over
the course of the interviews. Take, for instance, the case of
Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the oldest interviewees in the collection.
Brooks had been publishing poetry since the 1940s, but in 1967 she
changed her writing to respond more directly to the political moment
after meeting a younger generation of artists. She became an integral
part of the Black Arts Movement, linking the formal innovations of
African American poetry in the first half of the 20th century with the
political preoccupations of the second. She does not disavow her
earlier poetry (“I’m not afraid of having a few remaining
subtleties,” she says, alluding to the formalism of her earlier
work), but in her later poetry, working-class Black Chicagoans move
from its subject to its audience: “This is what I’m fighting for
now in my work, for an _expression _relevant to all manner of
blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the
halls of a housing project.” Brooks’s late-life pivot is a moving
testament to writing as a way of being awake to the world, of being in
dialogue with the changing times.

Tate’s question “Why do you write?” is a repeated refrain in
these interviews, and each answer is different in its own way but
rooted in the same struggle. According to Tate, each Black woman in
the collection writes “because she is driven to do so, regardless of
whether there is a publisher, an audience, or neither.” She also
asks each writer a series of process questions that amount to “How
do you write?” Maya Angelou rents a “tiny, mean” hotel room to
write in; Ntozake Shange likes to write in cafés drinking a single
bottle of Perrier; Gwendolyn Brooks writes on scraps of paper; Toni
Morrison gets writing done by never going out or entertaining; and
Sonia Sanchez writes around her children, not in spite of them. These
answers paint a landscape similar to that of the Black heroine in
novels by these very women, who, according to Tate, “teaches her
readers a great deal about constructing a meaningful life in the midst
of chaos and contingencies, armed with nothing more than her intellect
and emotions.”

Most of the writers in the anthology, including Tate herself, have
passed away in the years since its first publication. Because of their
status as ancestors now, it would be easy to view this text as a kind
of hagiography, with martyrs of the past leaving behind a record of
the illustrious deeds of a bygone era. However, writers throughout the
collection caution against putting people on pedestals; as Walker
observes, “The revolutionary worth following is the one who is
flawed.” Pedestals breed feelings of inadequacy and hesitation, when
working writers need just the opposite. “People have to
have _permission_ to write, and they have to be given space to
breathe and stumble,” Bambara says.

_Black Women Writers at Work _returns to give us permission to write,
in part by reminding us that the work of Black women writers is not
finished. The material conditions that Black women writers were
responding to in the 20th century have changed surprisingly little:
The hydra heads of oppression continue to multiply in the mass murder
of Black trans women, in the restriction of abortion access for many
working-class Black women, and in the banning of Black women’s
writing in public schools and universities. If the earlier work of
Black women writers has anything to teach us, it is that a polyvocal
community of writers can (and should) rise to meet the challenges of
their political moment. As Bambara says in her interview, “That we
keep each other’s writing alive is the point I’m trying to make.
The literature of this crucial time is a mixed chorus.” In an
equally crucial time, it may be more than just our writing that we
keep alive.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
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_MARINA MAGLOIRE
[[link removed]] is an assistant
professor of English at Emory University. Her first book, We Pursue
Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism, is forthcoming from
University of North Carolina Press._

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