Happy Birthday, Toni
Toni Cade Bambara, Southern Collective of African American Writers (SCAAW), 1988 ©Susan J. Ross.
Today, March 25th, is Toni Cade Bambara’s birthday. Bambara’s words are where the title of this newsletter comes from and I try, as a writer, to use her high artistic, intellectual and ethical standards as a guide, though it is sometimes very hard to do so.
Anyways, in honor of her and her words, I thought I would include an excerpt from an interview she did in 1980. The interviewer is Kalamu Ya Salaam. It appeared in First World. I first came across it in January, when Dr. Imani Perry posted it on her instagram.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts…..
First World: Are you consciously trying to do anything in particular with your style of writing?
Toni Cade Bambara: I’m trying to learn how to write! I think there have been a lot of things going on inn 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 the language. I’m trying to find a way to do that.
FW: Why hasn’t this happened before? Do you know any writers who have tried to do this and been successful?
TCB: I don’t know. I do know that the English language that grew from the European languages has been systematically stripped of thee 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.
FW: Do you see any models or any path breakers?
TCB: I think most poets play with that. I think musicians are far more successful with their language. It become an obsession with me now. I’m trying to 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. (!!!! those emphasis exclamation marks are mine because I got chills transcribing this).
FW: When you were doing The Salt Eaters, in the process of actually writing it, did you at any time consider yourself in a state of altered consciousness?
TCB: I think that when I write at any time I’m in a state of altered consciousness in the sense that I am self-remembering, that is, I’m acutely aware of a dialogue that is going on between me and the characters which are conjured. I am acutely aware of myself as a reader. I am acutely aware of my relationship between what’s going on in my head and what I can do with my hands, and that is not the state that I normally walk around and fry eggs in.
FW: How do you prepare yourself for that?
TCB: Sit down and be still. Unplug the phone and be quiet.
FW: Do you do any type of research for your fiction?
TCB: Not in any conscious, deliberate way, but I’m reading all the time, talking to people all the time, and traveling a lot. I jot down notes….I’m not a good researcher. I’m a good research teacher because I’m a detective and I’m nosey. But I’m not a trustworthy researcher because I reconstruct and most reconstructing means fictionalizing.
FW: Actually you’re looking for something to validate a conclusion you’ve already made rather than just gathering information.
TCB: Right.
(The interview goes on to talk about the interplay between the arts and political organizing, which is where this excerpt picks up…)
TCB: During the Sixties, we had the Young Lords and the Panthers on the East Coast, and Asian student unions working with Black student unions and that kind of thing, but I’m trying to get at something a little more than that. It’s not only a common…well it’s not only a call to unite to wrath or to unite to vision, but there’s also an awful lot in our own cosmology that is so similar that it’s really striking. That suggests to me that if the warriors and the medicine people were merged that you would tap into a potential that is stunning.
FW: Which goes back to the point that you aren’t actually calling for a coalition as much as a recognition of commoness. For some people, the attempt at coalition has resulted in a denial of self and adoption of a whole alien culture….
TCB:….of someone else’s interests. Someone else’s agenda.
FW: Which is the opposite of what you’re calling for.
TCB: Right.
FW: Do you think fiction is the most effective way to do this?
TCB: I don’t think fiction is the most effective way to do it. The most effective way to do it, is to do it!
FW: Well, what makes you think that fiction is an effective way to lay the call out there? For example, why didn’t you write an essay?
TCB: Because I don’t know how to write an essay, seriously. It’s not that I think literature is a “deep paramount tool for transformation” but I think it has potency and it’s what I know how to do. Literature is what I do….
(After detailing her travels and research and shouting out the Black and working-class Cuban filmmaker Sara Gomez, the interview concludes with this)
FW: It is the Third World woman of color, in fact the lower class, third world woman of color who has, after all the various liberation movements have gone on through the late Sixties and Seventies…who still remains oppressed and exploited and whose voice is still not fully heard.
TCB: Yes. they have the greatest stake in finding a new mode, a new idiom….
FW:…a new language.
TCB: Yeah.
FW: And we will all benefit from it.
TCB: Right.