There aren't even phrases in the languages for half the things happening just on the block where I live, not yet anyhow. - Toni Cade Bambara

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."

It was Grandma Dorothy who taught me critical theory, who steeped me in the tradition of Afrocentric aesthetic regulations, who trained me to understand that a story should be informed by the emancipatory impulse that characterizes our storytelling trade in these territories as exemplified by those freedom narratives which we've been trained to call slave narratives for reasons too obscene to mention, as if the "slave" were an identity and not a status interrupted by the very act of fleeing, speaking, writing, and countering the happy-darky propaganda. She taught that a story should contain mimetic devices so that the tale is memorable, shareable, that a story should be grounded in cultural specificity and shaped by the modes of Black art practice-call-and-response but one modality that bespeaks a communal ethos. I would later read Fanon on the subject-"To speak is to assume a culture and to bear responsibility for a civilization." Later still, I read Paolo Freire, speaking on activist pedagogy, engaged cultural work. "The purpose of educational forms is to reflect and encourage the practice of freedom."

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."