Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself
Toni Cade Bambara, right, and her cousin Carole Brown, from
https://thefeministwire.com/2014/11/children-who-get-cheated/
When I was in seventh grade, I left public school for the private school my sister and cousin and uncle had all attended—usually as one of the few black students in their grades. Before I got there, I was excited to go. I had read enough YA novels, seen enough tv and movies, to know that a public junior high would not be kind to the likes of me. I thought the more genteel “middle school” would be easier—if anything, it had to be filled with kids softer than me. Wasn’t that what private schooling was about?
It was, as you can guess, as seventh grade is for everyone, a disaster. I will spare the particular humiliations and injustices, only to say—part of our seventh grade year was, for science class, they drove the whole class out to a nature preserve and dropped us in the middle of the woods and then we were supposed to use the map reading skills and triangulation skills we’d been working on all semester to find our way back. You were supposed to go with a buddy—unassigned, you had to put your name on a sheet of paper and have someone sign up to join your group. No one signed up to join mine. That was sad enough, but to bring it to the attention of a teacher, I knew, would be even more painful. So I said nothing, and when we got there, whatever teacher was in charge didn’t seem to see the problem in sending me off, alone, in the woods, a party of one.
I wish I could say I learned to trust myself in the woods and I returned triumphant, beating everyone at their game. In reality, I realized pretty quickly that I could either be prideful and get really lost out there or I could suffer the indignity of kind of following around another group of students and essentially copying their route back. I chose the latter and promptly compartmentalized the whole humiliating experience until I could unpack it with a much better therapist than the one I had in seventh grade (a lady who, when I told her I had no friends, suggested I join a Yahoo chat room, introduce myself as a black thirteen year old girl and “maybe you’ll even find a boyfriend there!” “Has this idiot never watched Dateline?” I remember thinking).
Anyways, I tell this sad and funny tale because I am thinking a lot about orientation, about losing my way and finding a way back, and about what to use to guide ourselves.
I have had an uptick of new subscribers in the last few weeks. I am not sure what drove it, but I’m glad you are here.
Since I haven’t posted in a few weeks, I thought I would take a moment to reintroduce the purpose of this substack which is, essentially, cultural criticism based in the archive(s).
This substack takes its name from a great Toni Cade Bambara essay, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing.” If you haven’t read it, please do!
In the spirit of setting the tone for this year, I am going to include some Bambara quotes that I’ve been thinking about as the new year begins, as I set my intentions for 2021, as I try to reset my compass for the next few months.
All quotes below are taken from University of Mississippi Press’s Conversations With Toni Cade Bambara.
Bambara on gender roles:
I think within my household not a great deal of distinction was made between pink and blue. We were expected to be self-sufficient, to be competent, to be rather nonchalant about expertise in a number of areas. Within the various neighborhoods I’ve lived in, there was such a variety of expectations regarding womanhood or manhood that it was rather wide-open. In every neighborhood I lived in, for example, there were always big-mouthed women, there were always competent women, there were always beautiful women, independent women as well as dependent women, so there was a large repertoire from which to select. And it wasn’t until I got older, I would say maybe college, that I began to collide with the concepts and dynamics of “role-appropriate behavior” and so forth. I had no particular notion about being groomed along one particular route as opposed to another as a girl-child. My self-definitions were strongly internal and improvisational.
Bambara on literary influences:
I have no clear ideas about literary influence. I would say that my mother was a great influence, since mother is usually the first map maker in life. She encouraged me to explore and express. Particular kinds of women influenced the work…In every neighborhood I lived in there were always two types of women that somehow pulled me and sort of got their wagons in a circle around me. I call them Miss Naomi and Miss Gladys, although I’m sure they came under a variety of names. The Miss Naomi types were usually barmaids or life-women, nighttime people with lots of clothes in the closet and a very particular philosophy of life, who would give me advice like, “When you meet a man, have a birthday, demand a present that’s hockable, and be careful.” Stuff like that. Had no idea what they were talking about. Just as well. The Miss Naomis usually gave me a great deal of advice about beautification, how to take care of your health, not get too fat. The Miss Gladyses were usually the type that hung out the window in Apartment 1-A leaning on the pillow giving single-action advice on numbers or giving you advice about how to get your homework done or telling you to stay away from those cruising cars that moved through the neighborhood patrolling little girls. I would say that those two types of women, as well as the women who hung out in the beauty parlors (and the beauty parlors in those days were perhaps the only womanhood institutes we had—-it was there in the beauty parlors that young girls came of age and developed some sense of sexual standards and some sense of what it means to be a woman growing up)—it was those women who had the most influence on the writing.
I think that most of my work tends to come off the street rather than from other books.
On Decolonizing the English Language
I do know that the English language that grew from the European languages has been systematically stripped of the kinds of structures and the kinds of vocabularies that allow people to plug into other kinds of intelligences. That’s no secret. That’s part of their whole history, wherein people cannot be a higher sovereign than the state. At the time when wise folk were put to the rack was also a time when books were burned, temples razed to the ground, and certain types of language “mysteries”—for lack of a better word—were suppressed. That’s the legacy of the West.
I’m just trying to tell the truth and I think in order to do that we will have to invent, in addition to new forms, new modes and new idioms. I think we will have to connect language in that kind of way. I don’t know yet what that is….
I’m trying to successfully break words 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 its meaning, but how a word gains its power.