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women characters are more often than not seen as obstacles in their men's quest to find the strength required to weather the storm of racism. Black women writers, on the other hand, tend to view the discriminatory society as a legitimate but not omnipotent enemy. Their characters can win if they can tap the strength within themselves to wage the fight. The male Black characters that emerge in their works, if significant at all, are rarely negative. But few take heroic proportions.

Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks have probably written some of the finest poems in American literature. Although their styles differ, both reflect the internal perspective by making one feel the hot breath of the people brought to life by their poetic meter. The poetry of Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden is also brilliant, but it is the brilliance of sunlight shimmering through the symmetrical branches of an ice-laden tree. Langston Hughes's work is warm, but one wants to appreciate many of his characterizations from a stage. With the exception of Sterling Brown, few men let their readers become intimately involved with their work, as do Walker and Brooks.

Margaret Walker, both in her novel and her poetry uses large themes-the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the essence of Black people's lives. Although this approach often dictates an omniscient narrator, Walker is never a deity "tolerating" the human flaws of "her flock." Instead, especially in such poems as "For My People" and "We Have Been Believers," she is more of an earth mother who shares the responsibility for her noble, but imperfect children.

[[image - black and white photograph of Margaret Danner]]
[[caption]] Margaret Danner:  "To Flower" [[/caption]]

Gwendolyn Brooks poses smaller questions that her individual characters must confront for their emotional survival. In "The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith" the act of dressing up to "shed the shabby days" confronts Satin Legs with the challenge to find his identity.

Brook's consistent theme of intraracial color prejudice in her poetry makes one wonder if Mabbie's scars in "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" healed or festered. Adept at using a large number of standard and sometimes complex poetic forms, Brooks has always been able to use them as effectively as an expert art framer who knows how to enhance a dramatic portrait without dominating it.

Although both Walker and Brookes continue to be major influences in the literary scene, the sixties brought in a plethora of significant writers. More than ever the Black woman writer placed the stamp of her special sensibility on the cultural expression in this country. But the politics of Black power issued another kind of challenge to her. Perhaps the female poets—who at first seemed reluctant to deviate from the monolithic, militant, political appeal of the men who lead the movement—were like Phillis Wheatley in that what they did not say was the most revealing. But unlike Wheatley, they were able to grow. And so books published in the seventies by Marie Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde, among others, showed the Black woman's traditional concern for more than their relationships with a movement, but relationships to themselves and their past, to their lovers and the future.  

Unlike poetry, prose (except the essay) is rarely affected immediately or directly by new political thought. What the Black movement did provide was a sense of the lack of self-consciousness for the Black woman to be the "ideal"—mother, lover, or pillar of the community. Black literature unearthed some of its most compelling and complex characters to date. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula are masterpieces of characterization. The psyche of each protagonist is excruciatingly flayed, revealing the characters' emotional roots. Their psychological imbalance results in the breakdown of "moral" responsibility toward those whose fate are dependent upon them. This responsibility is not the kind dictated by the broader society, but that of providing the emotional fulfillment that keeps the mind from twisting out of shape. 

Alice Walker's works, which include The Third Life of Grange Copeland, In Love and Trouble, and Revolutionary Petunias, explore the gothic depths of "love and trouble" encountered by Black women. Much of her literature is set in the rural South in which the quality of life reveals women as both the strongest and most vulnerable. Because of this Walker's characters, who somehow emerge intact after their experiences, more often take on the proportion of true heroines than do those characters of most of the novels of her peers.  

In contrast, another heroine, Ernest Gaines's Jane Pittman in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, although extraordinary, is defined by more of the external events that challenge her spirit. Her heroism emerges by virtue of her physical courage and through the eyes of those who witness it.

The author of Soul Clap Hands and Sing; Brown Girls, Brown Stones; and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Paule Marshall consistently uses the theme of cultural conflict to activate her characters. Within that context she relentlessly makes her characters come to terms with their past to assure their present and future. Ralph Ellison uses the same theme in Invisible Man, but the confrontation he presents is with the abstract symbols of that past. So spiritual victory is impossible, but defeat is proved by the physical circumstances his character finds himself in.

In her two autobiographical works, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, Maya Angelou artfully expresses the major themes Mary Helen Washington notes are prevalent in literature by Black women. Those themes are the intimidation of Black women by American standards of beauty, the growing up of young females relatively unprotected, the negative feeling toward White women, and the myth of romantic love. One would be hard-pressed to find these same themes dominating literature by Black men because of the intense emotional component inherent in them.

[[image--black and white photograph of Gwendolyn Brooks]]
[[caption]] Gwendolyn Brooks: "A Street in Bronzeville" [[/caption]]

[[image--black and white photograph of Alice Walker]]
[[caption]] Alice Walker: "In Love and Trouble" [[/caption]]

Many Black women writers themselves have emerged as almost folk heroines because of their sageness on several levels of human experience, most notably Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. Although the comparison of Black literature by male and female writers is not meant to place one above the other, one feels that it is the literature of the Black woman writer which has revealed the inner sensibility of her people.

Paula Giddings

Paula Giddings recently joined the staff of this publication as bureau chief of the Paris office.

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Reprinted from ENCORE AMERICAN AND WORLDWIDE NEWS, June 23, 1975. copyright 1975, Tanner Publications Company, 515 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.