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Listen to the Sisters!
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20603 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
3,675 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
WAITING TO EXHALE
Terry McMillan
New York: Viking, 1992
409 pp., $ 22.00
JAZZ
Toni Morrison
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
229 pp., $21.00
AND DO REMEMBER ME
Marita Golden
New York: Double Day, 1992
192 pp., $19.00
POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY
Alice Walker
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992
279 pp., $19.95
BLANCHE ON THE LAM
Barbara Neely
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992
180 pp., $16.95
Late in June 1992, anyone familiar with African American women's fiction and the national best-seller lists would have had to conclude that novels by these writers finally had reached peak visibility, having gained the acceptance of mainstream readers. Three of their novels were on the New York Times Book Review best-seller list for hardback fiction: Toni Morrison's Jazz, Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, and Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy. This extraordinary accomplishment may be greeted in one of two was: Why did it take this long? One might ask. Or, How did it happen so quickly? Given the fact that fiction by black American women (with one or two exceptions) was largely unknown until twenty years ago.
Fiction by black American women begins with Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig, published in 1859 and not reprinted until sporadically by other novels during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Not until the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the works of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen did black women's fiction become more than incidental. Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) placed her in the forefront of the Renaissance. Yet is Zora Neale Hurston, who though part of the Harlem Renaissance published her novels in the following
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