#BambaraOnTFW Day Six of The Feminist Wires forum on Toni Cade Bambara Unleashing the Power of the Soul: Spirit and Spirituality through Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and John Bolling’s The Spirit of the Soul (Part I) by Janice Liddell ...What Bambara wrote, we realize now, is nothing short of inspired genius. Even though it is still considered by many to be inaccessible, at worst, and difficult, at best, The Salt Eaters has to be ranked among the premier African American works of the twentieth century. Gloria Hull describes it as: a daringly brilliant work which accomplishes even better for the 1980s what Native Son did for the 1940s, Invisible Man for the 1950s or Song of Solomon for the 1970s; it fixes our present and challenges the way to the future. Reading it deeply should result in personal transformations; teaching it can be a political act. (213) The Salt Eaters was and remains a provocative work of mythic proportions. But even more importantly, both the novel and its process represent not just the embodiment of the power about which Bambara speaks, but, in both text and process, she signals the unleashing or this “colonized” power. During the same interview with Beverly Guy Sheftall, Bambara describes how The Salt Eaters was not the work that she sat down to write, but rather it was the story that came. This is not unusual for writers; many are inspired onto paths very different from those they start and the completed work inevitably looks little like the one that “got them to the desk in the first place.” But for Bambara the process was even more telling… thefeministwire/2014/11/power-of-the-soul/
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 14:07:50 +0000
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