Gorilla, my love Book

I am a white woman with what might meaningfully be called a ‘middle class’ British state education. A few months ago I attended Bare Lit Festival and in one of the talks there was some discussion of the implications of publishers’ belief that their market is middle class middle aged white women. Eventually a black woman in the audience spoke up to say enough time had been given to this topic; here’s an audience primarily of readers and writers of colour, and can we please talk about what this audience wants and does and feels? And she was right. But one of the effects of those publisher assumptions (an effect of publishers’ whiteness, is that books that don’t reflect the perspectives or experiences or fantasies or desires for an other to eat of middle class white women are less likely to be published. I don’t know how it is across the Atlantic but my guess is that when this book first appeared in the year of my birth 1984, Usian women who were black & poor found fewer books in which to find themselves reflected than those who were white & well off, and this incandescent text was an exception.

If seems to me that this is a book that successfully ignores the white gaze entirely (note to self: Read Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination soon). Personally, I took a while to get used to the vocabulary, and some words and stories remain far enough out of my orbit that I grasp their meaning and import only loosely.

Yet there is a sense of tenderness and exultation that held me and carried me into and through the lives of these women and girls like the mood of the crowd at a protest march. I felt their power and grief, I was awed by their creative resourcefulness and acts of self-determination and communion.

In ‘The Lesson’ a group of poor black kids are taken to an upmarket toy store and stunned by the prices. The narrator responds with disgust, rejecting the challenge levelled by the educated black woman who has brought them there. Her friend Sugar, on the other hand, rises to it, grasping the need to fight injustice. Often the stories work in this way, with the narrator’s viewpoint played gently and sympathetically against what I feel to be the author’s opinion. In this way, she demonstrates the obstacles to even arriving at a liberatory perspective in a culture of domination as a marginalised person.

The pieces have a feeling of sweet intimacy and interconnectedness; they feel like episodes in the life of a single community. This is achieved less by continuity of events but by a limited range of names and sense of community within each story.

I feel… vicarious relief! Toni Cade Bambara opened a window and the oxygen floods in to give breath to stifled voices of black women and girls. Yet their full significance is something I will only be able to unravel and absorb on rereading. As in Toni Morrison’s work, there is absolutely zero gloss, no shining hero(in)es. It is ugly because life is ugly, and beautiful because freedom is beautiful and the truth will set you free.