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[[image - black & white photograph of Maya Angelou]]

[[caption]] Maya Angelou: "Gather Together in My Name" [[/caption]]

[[image - black & white photograph of Margaret Walker]]

[[caption]] Margaret Walker: "For My People" [[/caption]]

[[image - black & white photograph of Nikki Giovanni]]

[[caption]] Nikki Giovanni: "My House" [[/caption]]

       A Special Vision, A Common Goal

  Early in the history of the New World, the Black woman learned that she could not define herself through anyone's eyes but her own. During that time Europeans prepared for the slave trade by destroying all evidences of her influence, such as the statues of Black madonnas in the churches; and African collaborators undermined her place in their society so that she could be sold. And so, because the Black woman had nothing to fall back on—not Whiteness, or maleness, or ladyhood—as Toni Morrison, a writer and editors, observes, she invented herself. This in turn created a special perspective from which she would view her world and herself.
  The Black woman's new responsibilities were twofold: survival of the body and survival of the spirit, the latter of which she seemed to understand better than anyone else and which she centered her energies on. So as a creative being the Black woman tended to look within when her male peers concentrated on the external forces that shaped their lives. "The Black woman writer has always been more attentive to the subtleties of oppression," commented Mary Helen Washington, a critic and editor of a forthcoming anthology of stories by Black women. It is the literary expression of this perspective that has constituted the Black woman's contribution to American letters.
  Although brought to Boston as a slave, Phillis Wheatley was the second woman to publish a volume of verse in the colonies. Wheatley's achievements are extraordinary not only because of her youthful age of 20, but also because she would write at all in a country whose White women of status were not even expected to read. In terms of Wheatley's poetry, critic Merle Richmond points out that it is the things not said that were her most revealing artistic statements. That she would make only a fleeting reference to slavery and that her most famous poem—composed soon after Crispus Attucks fell, just blocks from her home—was written about a dead White minister should tell us something of the internal struggle that would not be released. But Wheatley's struggle was finally stilled in a cheap boarding house in which she died unnoticed as a servant at age 31.
  The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw free women such as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Angelina Grimke, Georgia Douglass Johnson, and Frances E.W. Harper publish significant works. Probably the most important of this group was Harper, an abolitionist, who worked for the Underground Railroad and published

[[image - black & white oval-shaped drawing of Phillis Wheatley]]

[[caption]] Phillis Wheatley: The first Black woman to be published [[/caption]]

the first novel by a Black woman, Iola Leroy. Although she wrote about that "peculiar institution," her approach was usually a personal one, such as in her poem, "Slave Auction." Unlike her male peers such as Frederick Douglass who wrote about slavery in more political terms, except when using themselves as examples, Harper's mind's eye often rested on the inner impact of being considered less than human.
  The spirit of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties brought the Black woman writer a new freedom of style and subject matter. The era was marked by the publications of several female novelists, among them, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmond Fauset. 
  An indication of the Black woman's approach to the harsh realities of her people in this country can be found in the literature of this period. External circumstances had to be subordinated to the internal needs. The character Janie in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God will not let her search for love and personal fulfillment be deterred either by the vestiges of racism, her cynical neighbors, or the myopia of her family. She listens to her own mind, and even the physical elements of floods and swamps cannot stop her. In contrast, Jake in Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, who undertakes the same journey of romantic fulfillment, is daunted by the societal and even circumstantial forces that fatalistically get in his way. The same is true with James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Larsen's Quicksand. The former's main character sees himself almost totally victimized by society, while Helga Crane in the latter novel shows the complexity of not only being a victim of racism, but of her own neuroticism. A similar comparison can be made with Jessie Fauset and Walter White, both of whom wrote novels on the theme of "passing."
  The forties and fifties were dominated by three Black women in literature: Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Many critics consider Petry's The Street as the most successful novel to emerge from the Richard Wright School of naturalist fiction. Of course any comparison with Wright, the harbinger of the modern Black novel, is difficult. Yet Wright's work is the epitome of the approach of the male writer as distinguished from his female counterpart. Black male characters are seen as almost helpless victims of their environment, like and unanchored object in a hurricane. Black

[[image - black & white photograph of Nella Larsen]]

[[caption - Nella Larsen: "Quicksand" [[/caption]]

Encore American & Worldwide News, June 23, 1975


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