THE SEXUAL MOUNTAIN AND BLACK WOMEN WRITERS

by Calvin C. Hernton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 1987

A rap on race, politics and black feminist literature by the author of Sex and Racism in America (1965). It began in 1979 with Ntozake Shange's Colored Girls and Michelle Wallace's Black Macho; it climaxed in 1986 with Stephen Spielberg's popular calamity, The Color Purple: Now that the homeboys (James Baldwin, Claude Browne, Eldridge Cleaver, et al.) were no longer kings of the hill, the black feminist delegation was clamoring for its turn. In public, elder statesmen of the literary black caucus fumed; in private, aesthetical Young Turks, feeling that the principle casualty of this most recent skirmish in the battle of the sexes was not black manhood but Art, jumped. This is where and when Hernton enters, his thesis being black women's age-old oppression under a triple tyranny of classism, racism, and sexism, his literary-sociological critiques a timely primer of the ""womanist"" aesthetic. Hernton's politics are rooted in the reality that, for blacks, literature has historically been no luxury but, quite the contrary, a life-and-death undertaking: ""What motivated [them] to write was the condition of oppression, and what they desired of their writing was for it to ameliorate their condition."" But the danger inherent in this social-working spirit is that it accommodates any manner of mediocrity--so long as it provides apt occasion for special pleading. (Hernton's own essay-apologies in defense of yesterday's neglected ""negro problem novel"" and today's pampered militant verse are models of their kind.) And the result is a kind of literary slum, an ""ebony islet"" ghetto (within a ghetto) unvisited and unclaimed by the wider world elsewhere. The human spirit is ultimately unhyphenated, and any one-ism unequal to the expressive demands of its entirety--however righteous or talented the-ist. A family matter, finally, this sibling rivalry between the ""sisters"" and the ""brothers""--which is not so much to say it's unimportant as that its necessary limitations may make it of limited interest to those without the tribe.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Anchor/Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION