Enter, the Tribe of Woman

There is a desperate need in our time for the Negro writer to assume a partisanship in . . . the war against the illusions of one’s time and culture. (131)

Lorraine Hansberry, “The Negro Writer, His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism”

We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. (91)

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

    DIVA 3 Once I was a girl like you who hid her booty from the world but then I learned a thing or two. I walk the earth propelled from behind, the power source.

Elizabeth Alexander, Diva Studies

The millennium approaches. Upon everyone’s lips is one question: how will we continue? We search for the meaning or possibility (or impossibility) of our continued existence in the arbitrary marker of an invented Time.

Sometimes I read magazines like Harper’s to find out what crimes white people are confessing. Recently, I came upon two essays by white men shaping their fear of an encroaching artistic irrelevance as a question: what is the future of the novel, of the book arts in an age where reading is in decline? A fair question. One of the essayists, bemoaning the fluidity of modern techno-culture, and bravely seeking a reason to continue his own habit of reading and writing, notes that “women and cultural minorities” are the only artists who have found “in the face of hyperkinetic televised reality” an artistic referential territory that does not shift and change every six months, i.e., before the book manuscript can be sold and published. This territory, he claims, is “the author’s membership in a tribe” (Franzen 47). I had been in sympathy with the writer’s analysis until this stunning conclusion made me realize that this white male writer had situated himself and his artistic world completely outside of the artistic strivings and concerns of “women and cultural minorities.” He seemed to be suggesting that “they” have exercised some kind of unfair advantage over “mainstream” (white male?) writers who, presumably, had no tribal territories of their own. (One has to ask, are gay and “queer” writers, some of whom are white, creating a post-modern (multi-ethnic) “tribal” territory upon which they may ground future fictions? Will it shift before their books can be made into movies?)

The writer’s selection of the word tribal as a way of describing the place, vision and art of contemporary “marginalized” writers was obviously deliberate and considered. I had not realized that Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple had garnered Pulitzers and worldwide audiences because they had managed to locate themselves within a tribal space, inside some sort of barricaded containment of identity that would not veer off or dislocate before the prizes could be awarded. If white men are in fear of their artistic obsolescence or their disaffection for reading the stories of their times, it may be due to their mental and emotional ghettoization, the refusal or inability to recognize the relevance to themselves, and to the world, of the writerly projects of women and cultural minorities.

One of these projects has been the disruption, rather than the erection (a deliberate word), of traditional notions of separation—the transgressing of artificial borders of race, class, gender, nation. Pain, Toni Morrison might observe, has no margin, no beginning or end, no country. If black women had merely been writing stories of (or out of) their tribal identity, what could explain the attraction for their culturally, sexually, racially, nationally diverse readership? Perhaps this is the accomplishment of black women and their sisters under the skin; perhaps it is the territory of the artist for the year 2000 and beyond: the creation of a story that references us all. Enter, the Tribe of Woman.

Way back yander. In dem times we ‘uz all un us black; we ‘uz all niggers tergedder, en ‘cordin’ ter all de ‘counts w’at I years fokes ‘uz gittin ‘long ‘bout ez well in dem days ez day is now.

“Why the Negro is Black” (Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus)

In the tale, the negro is black...