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Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 4.2 (2004) 205-235



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"Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere"

Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s


Claiming their place as a significant force in U.S. literature in the 1970s, African-American women writers faced difficult choices involving contradictory values within a shifting terrain of political, cultural, and aesthetic movements. A critical examination of two unconventional novels of this decade underscores the complex interaction of conflicting affiliations in the life and work of two African-American women writers: one prolific and well-known; the other a rather obscure author of one published book who is writing her second novel after a thirty-year hiatus. Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and Alison Mills' Francisco (1974) share as context and content the emergence of black and feminist consciousness within communities of bohemian artists in the 1970s. As black nationalists clashed with feminists and bohemians—over issues of sexuality and reproduction, as well as the role of artists in relation to the community—these authors created characters that articulated the political and cultural discord in which black women strove to define themselves as artists. Their characters, passionate lovers of black men, criticize sexist black male artists; yet they also reject elements of feminism. While they desire personal freedom, they also view themselves as part of a collective struggle for equality. These authors examine the heart of the Black Arts movement as participant observers, showing that African- American women were committed yet critical partners in the conception of black aesthetics. [End Page 205]

Their work exemplifies innovative practices rather than prescriptive theories of this movement to make art relevant to the experience of black people. Emerging at the peak of the Black Arts movement (1965-76), Mills and Shange followed in the wake of older writers such as Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, its founders and theorists, as well as Ishmael Reed and David Henderson, whose activity in the Umbra Writers Workshop helped to launch the literary movement. Umbra Writers participated in the Black Arts movement while remaining open to diversity rather than strict nationalism. Reed, Baraka, and Henderson were key influences on Shange and Mills, who also benefited when older women writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Kennedy, and Audre Lorde addressed feminist issues overlooked by male writers.

While Shange is best known as a dramatist and poet, she has also published three novels, of which Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is her first and most innovative in form, combining a variety of genres including narrative, poetry, drama, letters, recipes, folklore, and magical spells. Mills and her only published novel, Francisco, are unknown to most readers and literary scholars, despite the auspicious debut of this ephemeral yet memorable work.

Both texts are remarkable for their spirited representation of black bohemian experience constituted through contentious influences of jazz musicians, Beat generation writers, black nationalists, black aestheticians, multiculturalists, and feminists. Mills and Shange, immersed in the gender politics and black cultural consciousness of the 1970s, offer critical insight into the social networks in which they emerged as authors.

Although at least three well-known black male poets, Bob Kaufman, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Ted Joans, are counted among writers of the Beat generation, no prominent black woman writer (possibly excepting poet Gloria Oden) has been acknowledged as an associate of the Beats. Oden might be considered along with Beat generation poets, given her relationship with Kenneth Rexroth, although her work is more in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Marilyn Nelson, and Michael Harper.2 Jack Kerouac's model for the fictional Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans and Irene May in Book of Dreams, Alene Lee died without leaving a memoir of her bohemian life or her brief affair with Kerouac.3 Typically, given their peripheral relationship to the Beat legacy, neither Lee nor Oden is a subject of histories or critical writing about Beat authors, such as the recent collection of essays edited by Ronna Johnson and...

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