Mourning Vital Links to Our Culture

Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2004 by Priest, Myisha

When you read the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, you hold in your hands a dream of community - evidence of the spiraling chain of Black women intellectuals whose books, for many Black people, bear witness to our political strength and give voice to our spiritual power.

The links in the literary chain include Morrison, who was the Random House editor of Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman: An Anthology, which introduced many of us to Black women writers such as Alice Walker. In turn, Walker "rediscovered" the works of Hurston, leading to the republication of that Harlem Renaissance writer's work.

But the links in these chains are breaking. Over the past few years, a number of our visionary Black women writers and scholars have died of cancer and little attention has been paid to their passing. In 2002 alone, june Jordan, Virginia Hamilton, Beverly Robinson and Claudia Tate passed away.

Jordan, 65, died after a decades-long struggle with metastasized breast cancer. Known as the "people's poet," Jordan taught at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley.

Children's author and literary innovator Hamilton, 65, also died of breast cancer. Hamilton believed that the key to social and cultural change lay in learning to value our past, and her stories for children and adults restored the histories of African American people to modern literature.

Robinson, 56, film and theater artist and professor at UCLA, died of pancreatic cancer. And Tate, literary critic, scholar and professor at Princeton University, died of lung cancer at 55.

The list goes on and on. In 1992, the poet and feminist Audre Lorde, 58, lost her 14-year struggle with breast cancer. In 1993, Sylvia Boone, teacher, author, art scholar and the first Black woman tenured at Yale University, died of cancer at 54. In 1995, Bambara, the 56-year-old novelist, short story writer and filmmaker, died from colon cancer. Sherley Anne Williams, 54, poet, novelist and the first African American to receive tenure at UC San Diego, lost her battle with cancer in 1999. Then in 2000, Barbara Christian, 56, peerless teacher and writer, died of lung cancer.

Christian's scholarly contributions put Black literature on the cultural map. Regarded as a foremother of Black studies, she was instrumental in creating the "open admissions" policy - which is still in effect - that made New York's City College system accessible to people of color. She was also central to creating the African American studies program at UC Berkeley in 1971 and wrote the 1980 book Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, considered "the bible" of Black feminist criticism.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, Black women remain the lowest paid and least tenured members of academia across disciplines and geography, constituting only 2.5 percent of the professorate. They are more likely to be professional nomads, hopping from one short-term teaching appointment to the next. They advise and mentor more students than their colleagues, and do outreach and community service, when others don't. Many have a hard time finding mentors and getting tenure. Others report feeling isolated and exhausted.

The comments Princeton University historian Nell Irvin Painter once made to me illuminate the problem: "How many times have our names not appeared where they should in scholars' footnotes? How many times have our books been overlooked -not even considered - for prizes?" Black women "live with a strange kind of invisibility that minimizes us as scholars and allows others to neglect the content of our thought. Living with that kind of rnarginalization can do bad things to one's health."

None of these cultural workers even approached the average life expectancy for African American women, which is 75. With little acknowledgement, they are gone now. For many of us, the poetry, fiction, criticism and theater art these women produced helped to educate, as well as liberate and heal us emotionally and spiritually. How can a community achieve freedom if many who fought for it are not known or cherished and are prematurely taken from us?

Myisha Priest is a post-doctoral fellow in English and African American studies at UCLA.