Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women's Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text

5. She dreams a world: The Decolonized Text and the New World Order, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters

she d r eams a w or ld 185 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. —Zora Neale H urs t on, Their E yes Wer e Wat chin g God i used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these white folks how it should be done i used to dream radical dreams of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers of correct analysis i even used to think id be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace then i awoke and dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when shes [sic] natural i would have a revolution —Nikki Giovanni, “R evol utio nar y Dr eams” all revolutions are rooted in dreams —Gra ce Nicho ls, “Days That Fell” Zora Neale Hurston begins Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by reflecting on the ways women view the world differently than men. For she dreams a world The Decolonizing Text and the New World Order, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters Five 186 wr iting the bl a ck r evol utio nar y d iva men, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation , his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men” (1). Men, then, are governed by fate; destiny has ultimate control over wish fulfillment. According to Hurston, women function quite differently. At first glance, Hurston seems to negatively categorize female cognitive processes as selective, but she is actually suggesting that the ways women process memories can be interpreted as an act of survival; women discard memories that might prove damaging while they salvage memories that could be considered more life-affirming. Therefore, women shape their dreams, which they interpret as reality, to fit their own needs and agendas. Women not only have the power to make the dream the “truth,” but privilege their vision of the world above all others—a power that has traditionally been ascribed to men. I use Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Revolutionary Dreams” as my second epigraph because it demonstrates more specifically the inherent revolutionary potential of black female subjectivity to which Hurston’s quotation alludes. Giovanni’s poem elucidates revolution as an evolutionary process by depicting the female speaker’s metamorphosis from militant to radical to revolutionary. The transformation she undergoes is analogous to the process of decolonization that I put forth in the first chapter of this book. Her militant dreams are neither revolutionary nor decolonizing because they are grounded in the desire to “show these white folks how it should be done” and therefore do nothing to disrupt the doubleconsciousness paradox; her actions still demonstrate a prioritizing of a white audience and are motivated by her preoccupation with whiteness. Her radical dreams place the poem’s speaker a step closer to decolonization , but ultimately she misses the mark because she is vested in selfexaltation , the individualistic and prideful desire to be viewed as savior. She finally concludes that her natural dreams are what will catapult her into a revolution. Here, the speaker looks inward for transformation and becomes decolonized when she is centered within herself as a “natural” black woman. The third epigraph comes from Grace Nichols’s first collection of poetry, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), which deals with black female subjectivity in the context of the historic oppression of Caribbean women. Using a Guyanan-born poet to conclude my rumination on the potency of black female dreaming allows me to make a Diasporic link between Caribbean and African American women and our twin struggles toward decolonization. Additionally, this poem articulates for me a she d r eams a w or ld 187 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17...