Autobiography and Black Women Activists

165 Award. The text, a story of young love addressed to adolescents, became the first novel entirely written in Black English. Indeed, through her career Jordan openly demanded recognition of BE as a distinct form of expression and a legitimate American language.

These concerns were discussed through several essays, among which we may highlight

“White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation” (1972) and “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” (1985). Likewise, her 1982 essay “Report from the Bahamas” clearly exemplifies her views on the bidirectional relation between the political and the personal and the impact of the former upon the latter. According to Giacoppe (2006, 501), Jordan’s essays also document her refusal

“to be pressured into privileging or denying her identity as a woman, as a black person, as a bisexual”.

As Roy Pérez points out, Jordan’s work has often been sidelined “precisely because she challenges both African American and women’s movements to extend the boundaries of identity politics, or abandon such a project altogether in favor of a new politics of race, gender, sexuality, and transnational action” (2007, 328). Actually, in her review of Civil Wars, Toni Cade Bambara argued that the cultural value of Jordan’s lifetime work could be compared to W.E.B Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). Likewise, her poetry is often examined by scholars in the field in relation to that of Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich or Ntozake Shange.

166

against tradition; from Euro-humanistic positivism to a questioning of canonized isms; from the establishment of more isms to a critique of all isms; from naturalism and realism to re-vision; from protest to assertion. (Traylor 2009, 63-64)

In this context, the BAM witnessed the proliferation of autobiographies and prose writings which were promoted by writer-activist organizations.

As occurred with June Jordan, it is impossible to confine the artistic contributions of Maya Angelou to one single genre. Poet, actress, dramatist, movie director and autobiographer, Angelou was involved in the BAM through the Harlem Writers Guild.

Her greatest contributions to the movement came in the form of her autobiographies, thus contradicting the general appeal of performative poetry at the time. Angelou’s first work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), received widespread critical acclaim which led to the publication of six subsequent autobiographical volumes: Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).

According to Nancy Kang, a constant thread in her autobiographical works is the struggle to preserve “a healthy sense of individuality” amid the social terrors faced by the African American population within a social context dramatically rooted on sexual and racial oppression (2006, 11). King considers Angelou’s autobiographies historiographical documents which depict key events and figures in African American history and likens her contribution to Langston Hughes’s chapters on Harlem life in The Big Sea (1940). Likewise, Hilton Als has argued that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was groundbreaking in its presentation of the black woman writer at the center of her own narrative, thus empowering her to publicly discuss her personal live and experiences at the end of the Civil Rights Movement (2002, 24).

While Angelou’s poetry has been less recognized than her narrative volumes, a good number of her poems have earned critical and popular acclaim, and are nowadays part of the American collective consciousness. According to Keith D. Leonard, the affirmation of the integrity of the poet “who writes for the sake of changing material circumstances” motivated Angelou to produce “some of the most accessible, most

167 directly affirming and most popular poetry in the United States” (2009, 181). The anthology Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die (1971) was published as a reaction to the painful events occurring to and within the African American community, which stemmed from the assassination of Malcom X and Martin Luther King, and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Likewise, especially remarkable are the collection And Still I Rise (1978) and the poem “On the Pulse of Morning”, which Angelou recited at the presidential inauguration of president Bill Clinton in 1993.

Actually, after Angelou’s recitation, book sales of her autobiographies and poetry collections rose to 300%, and Random House had to print 400.000 copies of her works to meet the national demand.

Angelou’s long and multifaced career also included the production of a good number of plays, scripts for television programs and speeches. She also starred in several plays, movies as well as the 1977 television series Roots, which obtained international acclaim. Her script for the feature movie Georgia, Georgia (1972) was the first to be written by a black woman. Likewise, Angelou was also the first African American woman to direct a movie, namely Down in the Delta, which premiered in 1998.

Parallelly, through their association with the Black Panther Party, Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown and Angela Davis (never a member) contributed noteworthy autobiographies about their personal struggle for freedom and liberation in the United States.

Significantly enough, the autobiographical accounts of these three women are the subject of Margo V. Perkins Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000), who studies their work in the light of their shared “commitment to radical leftist politics and the building of a society free of race and class oppression”

(Perkins 2000, 2). According to the author, these autobiographies offer important insight into the range of women’s experiences in the midst of the nationalist struggle that prevailed in the United States during the 1960s and the 1970s.

According to Perkins, Shakur’s, Davis’s and Brown’s works collectively shape the genre of the political autobiography, together with other accounts published not only⸺but especially⸺during the development of the Black Power Movement. The works of these women in particular share a relational understanding of the self as imbricated within the story of the Movement and “a notable uneasiness with the genre

168

of the autobiography” because of its historical approach and its emphasis on heroic individualism within the Western literary tradition (2000, 22).

While Shakur and Brown have traditionally been identified more as political activists than as writers, Davis’s written production is of special interest to our study. With an anticapitalistic sentiment underpinning her lifetime work, Angela Davis’s writings have become key to black studies and contemporary feminist thought. During her incarceration in 1970, she completed If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), a non-fiction volume that collects her views on the nature and structure of race oppression in the country as well as it reflects her activism for the liberation of political prisoners. Her autobiography, published in 1974, openly condemns the capitalistic system in favor of the ideals of the Communist Party. According to Amy Sparks Kolker,

“her autobiography is not just the story of a life but a story of the struggle to overcome oppression itself” (Kolker 2006, 248). Indeed, Davis’s autobiographical work can be read within a tradition of political writings that focus on the collective conscience, the individual’s service to the community, the empowering of the dispossessed and the resistance to individualist values brought forward by the capitalist ideologeme.

In her volume Women, Race, and Class (1982), Davis explores the ways in which intersectionality has historically shaped social relations in the United States. The examination of gender, race and class relations is further tackled in the collection of essays Women, Culture, and Politics, published in 1989. According to Portia H. Shields, these works “should provide direction for resurgence and continuing momentum in both the women’s and civil rights movements” (1982, 361). Still, Davis’s work as a writer was not free from criticism. In his review of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1989), Phillip M. Richards brought forward the question “Would she have achieved her intellectual authority without her earlier political celebrity, the integration of elite universities, the growth of the black studies movement, and the academic development of cultural studies?” (1998, 132). However, more recent criticism of Davis’s written production has asserted the relevance of the author’s work to contemporary feminist and political thought. Deirdre Osborne, following Shields’s line of thought, has praised Davis for her ability to identify “uniquely black-centered concerns” and has acknowledged the function of her work as a point of continuity in liberation politics between the 1960s to the twenty-first century (2007, 147).

169

5. CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS: NEW