Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

I read everybody I can get to, and I appreciate the way "American literature" is being redefined now that the Black community is dialoguing without defensive postures, now that the Puerto Rican writers are coming through loud and clear, and the Chicano and Chicana writers, and Native American and Asian-American.

The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. When I replay the tapes on file in my head, tapes of speeches I've given at writing conferences over the years, I invariably hear myself saying "A writer, like any other cultural worker, like any other member of the community, ought to try to put her/his skills in the service of the community."

Since the breakthrough achieved in the sixties by the Neo-Black Arts Movement, the possibilities are stunning. Characters that have been waiting in the wings for generations, characters that did not fit into the roster of stereotypes, can now be brought down center stage.

Grandma Dorothy, in an effort to encourage our minds to leap, would tell us, "Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly; fear of sinking, though, sometimes keeps us from the first crucial move, then too, the terrible educations you liable to get is designed to make you destruct the journey entire. So send your minds on home to the motherland and just tell the tale, you little honeys." And my mama-not one to traffic in metaphors usually, being a very scientific woman-would add, "Yeah, speak your speak, 'cause every silence you maintain is liable to become first a lump in your throat, then a lump in your lymphatic system."

But in the storytelling arenas, from kitchen tales to outdoor university anecdotes, "women's morality" was much more expansive, interesting, it took on the heroic-Harriet T. and Ida B. and the women who worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, the second wife of Booker T. and the Mother Divine of the Peace and Co-op Movement, and Claudia Jones, organizer from Trinidad who was deported during the Crackdown, when the national line shifted from "blacks as inferior" to "blacks as subversive" and wound up in a stone quarry prison and wrote "In every bit as hard as they hit me." These women were characterized as "morally exemplary," meaning courageous, disciplined, skilled and brilliant, responsive to responsibility for and accountable to the community. The other type of memorable tale bound up in these women heroics was tales of resistance-old and contemporary-insurrections, flight, abolition, warfare in alliance with Seminoles and Narragansetts during the period of European enslavement; the critical roles men and women played in the revolutionary overthrow of slavery; and in the Reconstruction self-help enterprises founded, the self-governing townships founded, the political convention convened and progressive legislation pressed through; and in days since the mobilization, organization, agitation, legislation, economic boycotts, protest demonstrations, rent strikes, parades, consumer-cooperative organizations.

I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in struggle-one of the ways I help to keep vibrant and resilient that vision that has kept the Family going on. Through writing I attempt to celebrate the tradition of resistance, attempt to tap Black potential, and try to join the chorus of voices that argues that exploitation and misery are neither inevitable nor necessary. Writing is one of the ways I participate in the transformation-one of the ways I practice the commitment to explore bodies of knowledge for the usable wisdoms they yield. In writing, I hope to encourage the fusion of those disciplines whose split (material science versus metaphysics versus aesthetics versus politics versus...) predisposes us to accept fragmented truths and distortions as the whole. Writing is one of the ways I do my work in the world. There are no career labels for that work, no facile terms to describe the tasks of it. Suffice to say that I do not take lightly the fact that I am on the earth at this particular time in human history, and am here as a member of a particular soul group and of a particular sex, having this particular adventure as a Pan-Africanist-socialist-feminist in the United States. I figure all that means something about what I'm here to understand and to do.

So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.

For my own writing, I prefer the upbeat.

There have been a lot of things in ... the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I'm trying to find a way to do that....I'm trying to break open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains meaning, but how a word gains power."

If I'm not laughing while I work, I conclude that I am not communicating nourishment, since laughter is the most sure-fire healant I know. I don't know all my readers, but I know well for whom I write. And I want for them no less than I want for myself-wholesomeness. It all sounds so la-di-da and tra-la-la. I can afford to be sunny. I'm but one voice in the chorus. The literature(s) of our time are a collective effort, dependent on so many views, on so many people's productions.

"I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”

Then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.”

Muhammad Ali, in his autobiography, I Am the Greatest, defines a champion as one who takes the telling blow on the chin and hits the canvas hard, can't possibly rally, arms shot, energy spent, the very weight of the body too heavy a burden for the legs to raise, can't possibly get up. So you do. And you keep getting up. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is not my classic. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is. Sylvia Plath and the other obligatory writers on women's studies list-the writers who hawk despair, insanity, alienation, suicide, all in the name of protesting woman's oppression, are not my mentors. I was rasied on stories of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, and my grandmother, Annie, whom folks in Atlanta still remember as an early Rosa Parks.

She would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.