The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction

Tarpley, Natasha (b. 1971, Chicago, Illinois) Most of Natasha Tarpley’s contributions to African American literature have been poetry and nonfiction, although she has brought the conventions of fiction to the latter genre. She is, therefore, part of the recent “creative nonfiction” movement in American literature. Her major contribution in this area is Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of Black Women in Motion (1999), an extensive memoir of her family’s history. Girl in the Mirror was roundly praised for its lyrical invocation of her ancestor’s voices, which most reviewers rightly found closer to a novel in most respects. It therefore resembles Audre Lorde’s Zami (1982), which also blends the autobiographical with the conventions of the novel.

Tarpley is also well known for her children’s book, I Love My Hair!, which encourages young African American girls to take pride in their hair and appearance. Recently, Tarpley has also published proper fiction in a few venues, notably her story “All of Me,” found in Carol Taylor’s collection, Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction (2001). To date, though, no critical articles on Tarpley’s work have emerged.

Taylor, Mildred (b. 1943, Jackson, Mississippi) Although Mildred Taylor is known primarily as an author of young people’s fiction, several books within her body of work are now recognized classics in the field and assigned frequently in primary school classes. Her books are based upon incidents in Taylor’s childhood in Mississippi, whence her family fled to avoid a violent and potentially deadly confrontation between her father and a white man.^* The novella Song of the Trees (1975), which won first place in the Council on Interracial Books for Children’s competition in 1973, is a history of the Logan family from slavery to freedom and life in the twentieth century. The family’s saga is continued in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), a universally acclaimed and assigned classic that explores the insidiousness of personal racial prejudice and systematic racism through the eyes of young Cassie Logan. It won the Newbery Medal in 1977. Let the Circle be Unbroken (1981), which won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984, and The Road to Memphis (1990) both continue Taylor’s analysis of the successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement through the Logans, especially Cassie. The Gold Cadillac (1987) is the story of an African American family traveling to the South in a gaudy car; The Friendship (1987) is based upon the incident that preceded the Taylor family’s flight from Mississippi.

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color This 1981 essay collection, edited by Chicana writers Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, holds a permanent place as one of the foundations of contemporary intellectual thought by feminists of color, rivaled only by All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982), edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith.

This Bridge Called My Back represents Moraga’s and Anzaldúa’s desire to provide a collection by and about feminists of color, as the subtitle indicates, and in this it is highly successful. Although it is not dominated by African American women’s concerns, the anthology contains several indispensable essays that advanced the development of African American women’s studies, including the Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”; Barbara and Beverly Smith, “Across the Kitchen Table: A Sister-to-Sister Dialogue”; and Cheryl Clarke, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance.” Other African American authors of note are Gabrielle Daniels, Hattie Gossett, and Toni Cade Bambara, who provided the foreword.

The essays are not by any means uniform in focus, content, or direction, beyond the overarching editorial goal of giving voice to silenced women, and it is precisely this goal which gives the volume its power. Each writer addresses a subject that either the greater American society or the mainstream women’s movement has labeled a taboo. By broaching these boundaries, the essayists have inspired a generation of women of color to be more outspoken, whether in writing or in other public forums, and helped to ensure that the modern women’s movement neither exclude nor minimize the views of women of color to the degree that it did in the past. This is due largely to This Bridge’s frequent assignment in innumerable women’s studies courses, whether in whole or in part. It also won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award (1986). Unfortunately, the volume also frequently goes out of print, despite being an unqualified classic in its field. Interested readers and instructors are encouraged to seek secondhand and library copies.

Thomas, Joyce Carol (b. 1938, Ponce City, Oklahoma) Novelist, poet, and playwright Joyce Carol Thomas is best known as the author of many books of poetry and young people’s fiction. Although her first novel, Marked by Fire (1982), is also placed in that category, it is considered her finest work and a landmark in the field for its luxuriously poetic prose. It introduces Abyssinia “Abby” Jackson, a young African American girl with a gift for storytelling and poetry. Over the course of the novel and its sequels, Abby is forced to deal with many trials stemming from a horrific tornado that hits her community, in addition to the threats posed by jealous, bigoted, and otherwise disturbed members of that community and the rest of her Oklahoma town. Marked by Fire garnered an American Book Award (1982), the National Book Award, a designation as an “Outstanding Book of the Year” from the New York Times, and a TABA Children’s Books Award, all in 1983. Thomas’s other young-adult novels include Bright Shadow (1983), winner of the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award from the American Library Association (1984); Water Girl (1986); The Golden Pasture (1986), winner of Pick of the List distinction from the American Booksellers Association that year; Journey (1988); and When the Nightingale Sings (1992). In 2001, Thomas also published House of Light, her first novel for a more adult audience.

Thomas was one of the authors featured in AAR’s special issue on “Children’s and Young Adult Literature” (32, no. 1; Spring 1998). Darwin L. Henderson and Anthony L. Manna’s “Evoking the ‘Holy and the Terrible’: Conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas” in that volume is particularly trenchant.

Transition (1961–1974; 1975–1976; 1991–2003) Transition was founded in Uganda in late 1960 by Indian graduate student Rajat Neogy as a medium for intellectual debate primarily about the future of the African continent. At the time, many African states were either in the process of obtaining or had already obtained their independence from colonial European powers. Each issue focused considerable attention on political issues within specific African countries, but Transition was also well known as an outlet for poetry, fiction, plays, and essays discussing cultural and artistic questions relevant to the continent. Some of the many famous contributors to the magazine’s first incarnation included Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Christopher Okigbo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, V. S. Naipaul, D. J. Enright, David Gill, Paul Theroux, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, and Julius Nyerere. By the late 1960s, and with the help of financing from the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), it was arguably the best magazine published in and about Africa, but it also came under fire from the Ugandan government for being subversive, resulting in editor and publisher Neogy being jailed for sedition in late 1968. After his release in 1969, Neogy moved the magazine to Ghana but soon found the magazine again persecuted by the government. To avoid imprisonment and losing the magazine again, Neogy resigned his position in 1972. Wole Soyinka became the editor from 1972 to its 1975/1976 issue (which was intended to be both the ultimate issue of the magazine and the premier of a new title, Ch’indaba), with an editorial policy that was more black nationalist in outlook and clearly focused upon the “black revolution” in Africa and among the African Diaspora, especially the United States. Contributors to this incarnation included Henry Louis Gates Jr. (one of Soyinka’s former graduate students), Ted Joans, Eldridge Cleaver, and Kofi Awoonor. After Soyinka cut off the magazine’s funding from the Ford Foundation in response to reader’s criticisms that the magazine was funded by neocolonialist forces, only the 1975/1976 issue saw print. It lay fallow until 1991, when Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah revived Transition at Harvard University in the same spirit as its earlier incarnations, albeit with more attention paid to American and African American issues concerning race, culture, and public policy. Some of the many contributors between 1991 and 2003 included Soyinka, Gates, Appiah, Ken Burns, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams, Robert O’Meally, Lindsay Waters, Darius James, Houston A. Baker Jr., Julie Dash, Ali Mazrui, Walter Benn Michaels, George Elliott Clarke, Rita Dove, Robert Elliot Fox, Manthia Diawara, Ice Cube, Martin Bernal, Kathleen Cleaver, Naipaul, Marjorie Garber, William Julius Wilson, Caryl Phillips, Philippe Wamba, and Eric Lott.

Tyree, Omar Rashad (b. 1969, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Omar Tyree is among the more prolific and successful authors riding the new wave of African American popular fiction that swelled in the 1990s and an enterprising advocate of other black writers, both new and established. Since 1996, he has published eight novels, as well as a screenplay and some poetry. Tyree’s appeal to his rather sizeable audience stems largely from his attempts to portray the lives and thoughts of everyday African Americans realistically while addressing a number of political and social issues. Critical reception of his work has been lukewarm; many critics have found Tyree’s plotting cumbersome and repetitive but have appreciated his desire to give a voice to a generation of African Americans whose stories have been written only within the last dozen years of the twentieth century. The concerns of the Post-Soul/post–Civil Rights era are Tyree’s forte, particularly the personal relationships that bind its members to one another. Tyree has emphatically declared that while his novels do explore some of the complexities of relationships among African Americans, he does not intend “to follow … [Terry McMillan’s] lead in writing about the continuous bedroom issues of African-American men and women.” Rather, he wishes “to create new literature about those countless other subjects in [the African American] community that need to be explored from a fresh voice and perspective,” a literature that does not eschew complexity and confrontation of challenging issues (www.omartyree.com/mission.html).

This mission is arguably most prominent in his debut, Flyy Girl (1996), a morality tale focusing upon the life of Philadelphian Tracy Ellison, who seeks a largely material and superficial lifestyle until this search brings various forms of hardship, including drugs, poor relationships, and violence into her life. As Tracy learns the art of self-discovery, she slowly extricates herself from the emptiest and most dangerous situations in her life. Her surname is not coincidental; similar to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tracy is forced to go beyond superficial meanings and values to transcend her world, if only temporarily. In addition, like many of Tyree’s protagonists and major characters, she is meant to embody a significant part of her generation, particularly those who grew up immersed in the music and culture of hip-hop. Her saga is continued in For the Love of Money (2000), in which the teenage Ellison has grown into a successful young author chronicling her life story (her first novel is entitled Flyy Girl). A Do Right Man (1998) tells of a young professional disc jockey, Bobby Dallas, who struggles to find a satisfying romantic relationship while keeping his principles. Single Mom (1998) chronicles the travails of Denise Stewart, who finds herself trying to establish a life for herself, her children, and a prospective husband, even as the children’s fathers try to reenter her life.

* Nagueyalti Warren, “Taylor, Mildred D.,” The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 386.