BLACKWILDGIRL

The latest work from scholar and activist Pratt is part autobiography, part allegory, and part guidebook for Black American women and girls navigating an oppressive world.

It would be natural to classify a book composed largely of the author’s diary entries and other reflections on her upbringing and family history as a memoir. However, Pratt, a professor of education at Virginia Tech, isn’t merely interested in only telling her own story. In fact, she specifically eschews a more conventional format that might separate her own experiences of Black girlhood and womanhood from those of her mother, her grandmother, and generations of other Black women in America. Instead, she’s created a multifaceted epic that aims to offer validation and encouragement to those who may be struggling under similar systems of oppression. For such a daunting task, Pratt ably manages to find structure and rhythm by way of a familiar form: She tells her story in four acts, as in a theatrical play. The writer offers an account of her journey to take back the power and self-knowledge she had as a child (a state she refers to as “Blackwildgirl”) that uses a recurring image of a growing tree: “the world didn’t know that she was a seed. Germinating underground in the bowels of the earth—almost suffocating—the seed miraculously survives, nourished by nutrients submerged in composting decay.” She further divides the work into 12 “initiation” stages, which she effectively bolsters with decades’ worth of journal entries, letters, and insights from other Black female writers and thinkers. One such kernel of wisdom that she offers her readers comes from poet Nikki Giovanni, whose well-known 1973 interview with author James Baldwin, discussed here, foregrounded the unique experience of Black American women in relation to Black male oppression. (Giovanni’s praise of Pratt’s book, included in the form of a poem, also refers to a seed—as Pratt does—becoming “a journey to girlhood.”)

An engaging remembrance and a useful study of race and gender in America.