In Praise of Black Women, Volume 1: Ancient African Queens, and: In Praise of Black Women, Volume 2: Heroines of the Slavery Era, and: In Praise of Black Women, Volume 3: Modern African Women (review)

She is Black Eve, Aqualtune, Winnie Mandela, and so many between and beyond. She was created from the soil of Africa. She is the mother of nations, warrior for justice, and healer of the mind, body, and spirit. She has raised kings, ruled nations, fought to protect her people, and died in the process only to be reborn through the musician's praise song and the storyteller's tale. Her existence has been proven over and over through the eyes and hands of artists who have witnessed her beauty and shared their imagery with others. She has shown the way, passed down the truth, and seen the light. Even when forced to leave her homeland, the spirit of Africa traveled with her, never to leave her side. And once away she has never forgotten her home, for she and Africa are one.

Within the three volumes of In Praise of Black Women, Simone Schwarz-Bart, with André Schwarz-Bart, has gathered isolated stories, images, poems, and history to collectively celebrate the existence and contributions of black women throughout Africa and the diaspora. Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, stated in the foreword: "Anyone who has ever lived among women of African descent knows that it is inconceivable to even imagine invisible or voiceless black women. Wherever one looks in the black world, one finds in black women a living, working, struggling, nurturing presence—the primary source of life itself" (vii). This impressive collection details the significant role that black women have played in cultural, social, and economic development throughout the centuries.

Schwarz-Bart, also author of The Bridge of Beyond and Between Two Worlds,¹ is known for creating characters who have the ability to celebrate and to fight for their dual heritage, making sure both are recognized in their home outside of Africa. She writes about struggle while interweaving threads of the oral tradition that reflect the protagonist's African heritage. In Praise of Black Women is also a book that represents struggle. Schwarz-Bart spent many years of research to create these volumes, dedicated to the various roles that black women have played in past and present-day Africa, to assist in the removal of the Westerner's created archetype of the African woman. Mercy Amba Oduyoye examines this exact struggle in her book Daughters of Anowa: African Woman and Patriarchy: "Westerners often see the African woman as a beast of burden walking behind her husband, carrying his children, one inside, one on her back, and many more following in a long procession of children whom she brings forth from puberty to menopause. She is clearly an inferior creature to the Western woman, a person at the bottom of the human pecking order."²

Schwarz-Bart demonstrates how prolific the black woman is through a variety of words that deeply penetrate the stories of each woman and her contribution to humankind. The physical layout of the book varies from text that borders photographs, paintings, sculptures, and frescoes to wordless pages that express the artistic interpretations from around the world and throughout the ages. The more than four hundred images within each book alone give great homage to the black woman. Each chapter is a biography that combines folktales along with the history...