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Shaking
the Tree
A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black
Women
Edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
Reviews
Black women writers such as Maya Angelou,
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gloria Naylor
rose to the forefront of American literature in the 1970s, the
first time Black women gained mainstream attention and
prominence for their writing. Now
Shaking the Tree: A
Collection of New Fiction by Black Women [W.W. Norton;
September 22, 2003; $24.95] highlights the next generation of
contemporary Black women writers whose voices are defining a new
era of American literature following up the legacy established.
From an upper crust prep school to a Haitian
refugee raft, from the newsroom to the New York Times to
the inside of a prison,
Shaking the Tree offers myriad
answers to the question of what it means to be a Black woman
today.
Weaned on the works of these legendary
literary writers who came before them, this new wave of black
woman writers are also, as Meri Danquah writes in the
introduction, "the children of Black power; Fat Albert and
the Cosby Kids; Roots, the Huxtables; the Carter, Reagan, Bush,
and Clinton years."
The twenty-three voices gathered here came of
age in the wake of the civil rights, black arts, gay rights, and
feminist movements. Their literature embodies the tragedies and
the triumphs of contemporary black women in their struggle to
negotiate a sense of individual identity beyond the limited
scope of gender and race. They are their mother's daughters, and
nothing at all like them. Today's black women authors write in
voices their literary forebears had to keep to a whisper.
Shaking the Tree offers a panorama of
both fiction and memoir, revealing perspectives as diverse as
they are dynamic: asha bandele recounts how she fell in love
with a prisoner charged with murder; Rebecca Walker explores a
childhood split between disparate racial and cultural
landscapes; ZZ Packer remembers her near-abduction from summer
camp at a time when local black children were being found
murdered; Lorene Cary remembers the isolation she felt as a
young Black teenager at a mostly-white, northeastern prep
school; Danzy Senna and Carolyn Ferrell tell tales about being
young and biracial in a society that sees only in black and
white.
Shaking the Tree is a vibrant and
moving book, one that holds promise, courage, ambivalence, and
despair in equal measure. This anthology is as urgent as it is
historical -- these voices are the future of American
literature.
--W.W. Norton Publisher
Ms. Danquah has indeed shaken a literary
tree. The fruit that fell down will nourish readers for a long
time, and probably the best thing I can say and I realize the
most selfish is, "At last, a number of older black writers
can stop holding their breath and exhale."
--Maya Angelou
Danquah's collection focuses on works
published after 1990, when black women were facing an explosion
of issues new to their generation and moving beyond the
constraints of the black community physically, mentally,
emotionally, and sexually. . . . The collection explores an
array of concerns of black women: sexual and racial politics,
tensions between the sexes and the races, and concepts of beauty
and sexuality that are influenced and reflected in American
racial mythology.
--Booklist
Danquah has a keen ear and eye for not just
the complexity but the sheer cacophony of expression that echoes
the experience of being black and female in America at the close
of the 20th century.
--Lynell George, Ms.
Magazine
Not since Breaking Ice has an anthology so
freed the spirits of African American women. The authors,
although of diverse backgrounds and experiences, all have one
glorious thing in common--they are absolutely fearless. the
stories and memoirs of these talented women are honest,
uncompromising, and inspiring because they tell it like it is.
--Ai, Winner of the
National Book award for Vice
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Shaking
the Tree
A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black
Women
Edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
Table of Contents
| The Incoming Wave: An Introduction |
|
xiii |
| asha bandele |
"Home" from The Prisoner's Wife |
5 |
|
|
|
| Lorene Cary |
From Black Ice |
13 |
|
|
|
| Veronica Chambers |
From Mama's Girl |
23 |
|
|
|
| Meri Nana-Ama Danquah |
From Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey |
|
|
Through Depression |
32 |
|
|
|
| Edwidge Danticat |
"Children of the Sea" from Krik? Krak! |
43 |
|
|
|
| Debra J. Dickerson |
"Beginning Again" from An American Story |
60 |
|
|
|
| Carolyn Ferrell |
"Wonderful Teen" from Don't Erase Me |
72 |
|
|
|
| Dana Johnson |
"Markers" from Break Any Woman Down |
85 |
|
|
|
| Lisa Jones |
"It's Racier in the Bahamas" from Bulletproof
Diva: Tales |
|
|
of Race, Sex, and Hair |
102 |
|
|
|
| Helen Elaine Lee |
From The Serpent's Gift |
111 |
|
|
|
| Catherine E. McKinley |
"July 1978" from The Book of Sarahs: A
Family in Parts |
122 |
|
|
|
| Itabari Njeri |
"What's Love Got to Do With It?" |
|
|
From Every Good-bye Ain't Gone |
131 |
|
|
|
| ZZ Packer |
"The Stranger" |
152 |
|
|
|
| Phyllis Alesia Perry |
"April 1974--Johnston Creek" from Stigmata |
162 |
|
|
|
| Patricia Powell |
From The Pagoda |
175 |
|
|
|
| Nelly Rosario |
"Leila, 1998" from Song of the Water
Saints |
187 |
|
|
|
| Danzy Senna |
"The Body of Luce Rivera" from Caucasia |
197 |
|
|
|
| Martha Southgate |
"The Wall of Pain" from The Fall of Rome |
206 |
|
|
|
| Natasha Tarpley |
From Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of |
|
|
Black Women in Motion |
218 |
|
|
|
| Lisa Teasley |
"Nepenthe" from Glow in the Dark |
230 |
|
|
|
| Rebecca Walker |
"Larchmont" from Black, White, and
Jewish: |
|
|
Autobiography of a Shifting Self |
238 |
|
|
|
| Yolanda Young |
"On Our Way to Beautiful" from On Our Way
to Beautiful |
252 |
|
|
|
| Shay Youngblood |
"Lover" from Black Girl in Paris |
263 |
|
|
|
| Contributors |
|
283 |
| Acknowledgments |
|
289 |
| Credits |
|
291 |
|
Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, born in Ghana,
emigrated to the United States at the age of six with her
family. Her first book, Willow
Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression,
was published in 1998 by W.W. Norton & Co. to great acclaim.
It was the first book published by an African-American to
address the topic of depression. The Washington Post
hailed the book as "a vividly textured flower of a memoir
that will surely stand as one of the finest to come along in
years."
Meri Danquah appeared on The
Today Show, Lifetime
Television for Women, ABC
World News Tonight, and she was the subject of two
documentaries on the topic of depression. |
 |
Meri Danquah was also chosen by the National
Mental Health Association to be the national spokesperson for
their "Campaign on Clinical Depression," an initiative
that specifically targeted African American women and was launch
in cooperation with organizations such as the National Council
of Negro, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the National
Association of Black Social Workers.
In this capacity, she toured the nation delivering
speeches and addressing audiences at conferences, workshops, in
churches and at book stores, with the aim of promoting awareness
of clinical depression in order to lessen the existing stigma in
African American communities surrounding the disorder. In 2000,
at the age of 32, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement
Award by the Welcome Back Awards organization, an alliance of
mental health advocacy groups.
A poet and journalist as well, her writing has
been featured in onthebus, storie, The
Washington Post, Village Voice, The Los Angeles
Times, Emerge, Allure, Essence, Los
Angeles Magazine, and other publications. During the 2000-01
academic year, Ms. Danquah held a Visiting Scholar appointment
at the University of Ghana's School of Communication Studies,
where she taught graduate level courses in Print Journalism.
Meri Danquah also edited the anthology Becoming
American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women,
published in 2000 by Hyperion.
She lives in Los Angeles, California
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance
Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It
By Les Leopold
How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it? In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance. He also asks some tough questions: Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large? Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes? Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy? How do we make sure we never give our wages away to gamblers again? And what can we do to get our money back? In this page-turning narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations, better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again. The Economy |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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