Tag: black women writers

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery and the Haunting that Persists.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery and the Haunting that Persists.

Posted by | Sep 22, 2020 |

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel about the enslavement of Black Americans and its lasting emotional, physical and psychic effects. It takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio right before and after the Civil War. Beloved is the story of Sethe, a woman so strong, she survives the unthinkable, over and over and over again. Beloved is the name of the angry baby girl haunting the home of her younger sister, Denver, and Sethe, the mother who murdered her. The ghost, in her eighteen-month-old, non-physical form has driven everyone else out of the house, including Sethe’s two sons whom she tried...

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Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All

Posted by | Aug 11, 2020 |

While reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism for #NastyWomenWriters, I was stopped in my tracks by the praise coming forward in that book for black feminist, writer, activist, film maker and mentor Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995). brown writes: “Toni Cade Bambara, author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible. Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways she wove community,...

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A Tipping Point: Open Spaces in Our Public Places

A Tipping Point: Open Spaces in Our Public Places

Posted by | Jul 21, 2020 |

My sister Theresa and I started this website, Nasty Women Writers, three years ago, our goal being to highlight feminist women writers, artists, and activists, many of whom have been marginalized, silenced, and erased. Last year I wrote a post about Dr. Tererai Trent (The Awakened Woman: Remembering and Reigniting Our Sacred Dreams), an incredible woman from Zimbabwe who wrote the book The Awakened Woman. Occasionally my sister and I will follow up on a woman we’ve written about to see what’s happening, if there are any new projects they may be working on, or any updates in general....

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A Re-Declaration Of Independence That Includes Everyone This Time

A Re-Declaration Of Independence That Includes Everyone This Time

Posted by | Jul 14, 2020 |

I guess it is true that humans often resist change. Hold on to tired old things that are no longer working. I guess we all feel this within ourselves when we need to change and we cannot make ourselves do it because things are comfortable enough as is or we are “attached.” I guess that could be what is going on with white people in the United States around the most recent request for change from the black community. I guess even having the option to resist change is a form of privilege. If it ain’t broke…well guess what?...

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Toni Morrison’s Sula: Available to and for her own imagination—a rare kind of freedom.

Toni Morrison’s Sula: Available to and for her own imagination—a rare kind of freedom.

Posted by | Jun 30, 2020 |

Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) has long been one of my favorite books. Besides simply wanting to immerse myself back into the mastery of Morrison’s writing, I repeatedly return to Sula to contemplate the friendship between Nel and Sula, the issue of betrayal that unfolds within the novel’s plot, and to feel Nel’s grief and long and lasting cry in my own throat and chest in the last lines of the book; the ones that finally set her free: “‘We was girls together…Oh, Lord, Sula,’ she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl,              It was a fine...

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