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

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