Greeting the New Century with a Different Kind of Magic

Anyone reviewing African-American women’s writing in the last quarter of the 20th century will observe some striking patterns—characters who fly, daughters who return from the dead, healers who leave their bodies and traipse off to the woods with a ghost familiar, women who fall in love with spirits, shapeshifters who live for hundreds of years, and formerly enslaved persons who exist somewhere between purgatory and eternity. The literature is rich with women who claim their right to be in the world, who claim their right to be on southern American soil, and who defy all attempts to categorize them in any limiting way. The creators of the literature have found their voices and their audiences, and many of their works have been canonized within the annals of American literature. Far removed from the need to apologize for who they are and what they do, writers such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor implicitly insist that their readers go willingly where they lead them, and their fans prove durable in this rather pleasant task. Noting such unmatched achievement, acceptance, and success, an observer might reasonably ask where, if anyplace, black women’s writing could go if so many barriers have been broken? If subject matter is substantially expanded, if audience or financial success is no longer a problem, if worries over inclusion in traditional literature departments and classes is minimized, then what next? Where can the literature go? What obstacles are left to overcome? What territories uncharted?

The writers included in this special issue of Callaloo begin to answer these questions. Mostly under forty, and brilliantly creative, these African-American women writers exhibit their ties to the legacy and move beyond it. In carving out space for new voices, they signal clearly that African-American women’s writing for the 21st century will be healthy and well. It is to the credit of Editor Charles Rowell and the staff of Callaloo that we have been given this wonderful opportunity to read the works of these writers in their entirety or in part and to see them in implicit dialogue with each other as well as in direct dialogue with several interviewers. This special issue portends the same successes for these writers as Rita Dove and Brenda Marie Osbey experienced after having their work appear in Callaloo early in their careers.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these women and their works is that they consciously expand our notions of the concept of African Americanness into truly Diasporic dimensions. In geography as well as in racial identity and heritage, these writers speak to the expansiveness of a tradition that has been most often identified with United States soil and with persons who descended directly from or have close ties with slave culture or rural southern African-American experience. While those features might still be relevant in some cases, they are not exclusively so. The women included here are of Caribbean heritage as well as US American heritage. They are traditionally African-American or products of more recent mixed-race unions. They are northern as well as southern, middle class more so than struggling. They are frequently second or third generation college-educated, and their sensibilities are strikingly removed from the starting points of writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Walker. While I am not suggesting that these differences set them completely outside of what is customarily conceived as African-American cultural and literary experience, I do believe these differences in background have implications for the kinds of characters these women create and the circumstances about which they write. They are the descendants who have inherited a tradition, sifted through it for nourishment, and planted new seeds that will sprout new varieties of traditions; the quality of their transformations will assuredly be recognized with each new effort.

Geographically, Edwidge Danticat and Patricia Powell focus on Caribbean island experiences. In an excerpt from Danticat’s The Journals of Water Days1986, set in Haiti, we witness oppression as it shapes itself in the form of...