(1981)
Midnight Birds is a collection of fifteen recent pieces of short fiction, all of them by women who are also Black and American. There’s an excellent preface by Mary Ellen Washington, and each writer also introduces herself in a short preliminary piece, an arrangement that makes the book handy for teaching.
It’s of note that the book’s subtitle mentions “women,” “contemporary” and “Black,” but doesn’t bother with “American.” (Black women do exist elsewhere.) It’s also of note that this book is being reviewed in an issue of this magazine devoted to “Third World” writing. And it’s also of note, given these contexts, that I myself am female, but neither Black nor American. I am in fact Canadian, a citizen of a country which was until recently dominated by one imperial power and is now dominated by another. Could it be that the editors of The Harvard Educational Review perceived that I have something in common with the writers in this collection? Could they be right?
The writers themselves have no doubts about their identity as Americans, nor should they. Their prose is American, their settings are American; even their assumption, shared by the editor and most of the writers, that things can be improved almost by sheer faith, is at its core profoundly American. These women are not writing about genital mutilation or polygamy or purdah, which luckily are not problems they have to deal with directly. These women are writing, these women can write, which makes them different at once from most Third World women. They are as American as jazz and lynching. By what strange squint—the same one, presumably, that sees white male American writers as the norm and everyone else as the exception—have they been relegated to the “Third World” category?
It certainly cannot be a reflection on the quality of the writing. This is American writing at its finest, by turns earthy, sinuous, thoughtful, and full of power. Midnight Birds includes such well-known names as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambera and Ntozake Shange, as well as names not quite so well-known but which deserve to be: Alexis Deveaux, Paulette Childress White, Frenchy Hodges, Gayle Jones and Sherley Anne Williams. Prose techniques range from the window-pane clarity of Alice Walker to the verbal improvisations of Alexis Deveaux and Ntozake Shange. The writers as a whole are concerned with the need to forge or re-discover a language of their own, since the mainstream white male language they were taught they ought to think in has served them so badly. As pieces of writing, there’s not a dud in the lot. It’s no disparagement of writers like Achebe, but simple curiosity to wonder why this book has been placed on the “Third World” shelf. Isn’t Harlem in New York? Is it perhaps that white Americans would rather not see the visions of these women as visions of their own society, but as visions of somewhere else, somewhere foreign and other? But there are many more worlds than three, even in America, and some of them overlap.
I once met an academic who specialized in Commonwealth Literature. When I asked him why he had chosen to do that, he said that he found it much easier to trace the patterns of relationship between writer and audience, to investigate the social function of literature, at the periphery rather than at the centre. If you are a member of an imperial culture, a Roman rather than a Gaul, you can take things for granted, to the point of ignorance or amnesia, in a way that the Gauls cannot. Black American women are, paradoxically, both Gauls and Romans, but these writers identify most of the time with the Gauls.
Which makes a difference in their own attitudes towards what they are doing. For instance, if you were to ask a white American male writer who he’s writing for, you would probably get a somewhat abstract answer, unless he’s a member of an ethnic minority. But the writers in Midnight Birds know exactly who they’re writing for. They’re writing for other Black American women, and they believe in the power of their words. They see themselves as giving a voice to the voiceless. They perceive writing as the forging of saving myths, the naming of forgotten pasts, the telling of truths. They do not want their books to be admired merely for their aesthetic qualities. They want them to be taken back into the society from which they have sprung and to change things there.
These writers think it’s important that a people be able to see its own reflection in the mirror of art, and they see art very much as a mirror, when they aren’t seeing it as some even more practical tool such as a shovel. Almost every writer talks about the extent to which she has written out of her own experience and derived the power to do so from her own community. Alexis Deveaux stands for many:
Writing helps me unravel the images and forces at work in my own life, and therefore, by extension, in the lives of Black women and Black people around me. I hope to ^communicate something not just about my life, but about our life. It’s all one life —isn’t it? And I’m very concerned about the images of Black women in literature because whatever is written down becomes the word, and stays…. I want to say something about the Black woman as a three-dimensional human being. So often we’ve seen her depicted as… ugly and useless. I want to change that. In the most radical and revolutionary ways possible.
(p. 15)
Both the writers’ attitudes and the readers’ anticipated responses depend on factors which we’re used to thinking of as extra-literary; which should probably lead us to reexamine what we mean by this term. Can art and the world really be separated? Perhaps art for art’s sake is a luxury, one you can afford only when you’re well-fed. Despite their private successes, these women are still very close to hunger.
As in early feminist theory, there’s still some confusion between the desire to create heroic figures and the pull towards truth-telling. Gayle Jones, for instance, has been criticized for not making her characters more admirable. The editor comments:
Diane Johnson said in The New York Review of Books that a white reader, like herself, could not relate to such dehumanized pictures of black life and lamented that all of Jones’ women characters were brutalized and dull…. One wishes for the heroic voice, for the healing of the past; but it is presumptuous to demand that these things appear before their time.
(p. 127)
There will always be a conflict between those who want writers to create good role-models and the kind of writer who feels that a picture of life that leaves out the rock bottom would be profoundly untrue. For the most part, these writers resolve the conflict in that most American of ways: by seeing the ordinary as heroic.
White American feminists might have some trouble, too, with the way men are dealt with here, though nobody from a colony would. In a colony, both men and women are oppressed, the women doubly so, though the men feel emasculated by having their decision-making powers taken away from them. The writers in Midnight Birds display a tenderness, a pity, towards their Black male characters which it would be hard to match among contemporary white American feminists. The men are often dying, of dope, bullet wounds and other forms of violence slow and swift, and the woman characters, although often badly treated by them, cannot turn their backs on them. One of the most harrowing scenes in the book is from Toni Morrison’s Sula, in which a woman burns her own son to death because he has become a hopeless addict; yet even this act is rendered as profoundly maternal.
In a recent discussion about writing, someone described to me a cartoon in The New Yorker: a small girl is hunched over a book, in tears, and her mother is warning the returning father, “Shh! Beth is dying!” The girl’s capacity to be moved is seen as comic. But isn’t that moment what the act of writing is supposed to aim for? Not sentimentality, to be sure —and these writers are rarely sentimental—but empathy on the part of the reader. These writers have no doubts about that. They want to involve the reader, they want to move her, and, at their best, they succeed. “Universal” literature is not literature that ignores the local, the particular. On the contrary, it is literature that renders the particular so concretely that even readers from outside the constituency can be moved. It’s not the Third World that these women are writing about, but it is a world very different from the one most people who read books in America inhabit. Or rather its the same world; though it is seen, with honesty, passion and painful clarity, through different windows.