Scratching the Threshold: Textual Sound and Political Form in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters

1

In the course of independent filmmaker Louis Massiah’s 1995 interview with African American writer, cultural worker, and political activist Toni Cade Bambara, Massiah asks Bambara how and where she learned her first political lessons. She responds by sharing her memories of coming of age amid the cultural vibrancy of Harlem, before focusing her thoughts more precisely on the lasting impact of Speakers’ Corner:

Speakers’ Corner made it easy to raise critical questions, to be concerned about what’s happening locally and internationally. It shaped the political perceptions of at least three generations. It certainly shaped mine, and I miss it today. There is no Speakers’ Corner where I live. There is no outdoor forum where people can not only learn the word, hear information, hear perspective, but also learn how to present information, which is also what I learned on Speakers’ Corner: how to speak and leave spaces to let people in so that you get a call-and-response. You also learn how to speak outdoors, which is no small feat. You also have to learn how to not be on paper, to not have anything between you and the community that names you. So I learned a great many things and I am still grounded in orality, in call-and-response devices....

(215–16)

Bambara’s attunement to the sonic texture of Speakers’ Corner is compelling in its own right, but I would like to use her recollections to begin framing several interconnected formal innovations that mark the political possibilities pursued within her novelistic reflection on the post–civil rights era, The Salt Eaters. I am most interested in how Bambara’s response to Massiah’s question reveals her attention to sound as a hinge connecting aesthetics and politics. Her focus on the projection and communal circulation of speech on Speakers’ Corner, and on the complexities of both its past and present resonance, positions Bambara’s attunement to aurality as a framework through which notions of tradition and improvisation might be perpetually expanded.¹ Centered on deciphering the political complexities of the late 1970s, the novel uses the expansiveness of sound as an organizing principle. Revolving around the two-hour healing session of a black woman activist recovering from an attempted suicide, the narrative points toward echoes and soundscapes of the past, present, and future as it moves within a shifting web of personal and political histories. Bambara’s text defies linearity, both in the aesthetics of its narrative progression and in its thematic concern with transformation in a broader sociopolitical sphere.

Bambara’s commitment to using art as an instrument of political critique directs questions of form and innovation toward an understanding of the remapping of narrative as central to imagining alternate modes of political engagement. In an interview with Black Arts Movement writer and critic Kalamu ya Salaam, published shortly after the release of The Salt Eaters, Bambara explains how the creation of new narrative idioms is central to her understanding of historical struggle and transformation, in her response to a question regarding her search for an alternative language through writing:

I think there have been a lot of things going on in the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English, at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language....

. . . I do know that the English language that grew from the European languages has been systematically stripped of the kinds of structures and the kinds of vocabularies that allow people to plug into other kinds of intelligences. That’s no secret. That’s part of their whole history, wherein people cannot be a higher sovereign than the state....

I’m just trying to tell the truth, and I think in order to do that we will have to invent, in addition to new forms, new modes and new idioms. I think we will have to connect to language in...