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Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers, and: Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, and: Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (review)

1999; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nwsa.1999.0035

1527-1889

LaMonda Horton-Stallings,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers, and: Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, and: Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile LaMonda Horton-Stallings (bio) Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers by Valerie Lee. New York: Routledge, 1996, 202 pp., $16.95 paper. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 424 pp., $24.95 paper. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile by Myriam J.A. Chancy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997, 246 pp., $19.95 paper. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Portrait of an African American woman. Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, ca. 1937. Photo by Bayard Wootten. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.) Together, these three books show an evolving canon of feminist criticism dedicated to increasing the foundation of knowledge concerning African-descended women as writers and activists. The editors/authors of the [End Page 179] books under review show how oppressed women writers build a revolutionary force based on transforming their silence into language and action. 1 Each work possesses its own unique style and consideration for relaying its points about how language can be used to oppress or empower. Each author/editor seems to recognize the need to move beyond the claustrophobic boundaries of theoretical jargon and useless information to provide facts, suggestions, and innovative insights in a provocatively accessible manner. The books are high quality tools of transformation. All three publications reveal the way gender and race interact with social, historical, and cultural factors to influence political and individual identities and the struggle for empowerment, change, and revolution. Two of the books, Lee’s and Chancy’s, move beyond U.S. cultural and social perspectives of language and silence, while Perkins and Stephens’s anthology focuses its examination to address the way women’s voices impacted early U.S. theater and culture. Valerie Lee, author of Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers, is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Ohio State University. Lee’s book examines a dual culture performance in literature, which she aptly calls “double-dutched readings.” Reaching back into the cultural and literary heritage of African American women, Lee engages the reader in the act of turning the literary ropes of texts and contexts for black women writers and their growing voices. Lee’s study concerns itself with the literary recovery of granny midwives and their significance to history and black women writers. In the introductory chapter, Lee does an excellent job of defining her theory of double-dutched readings, which is based on the style of jumping rope. Lee points out that “only by listening to the sounds of both ropes and concentrating on the rope closest to them do the jumpers know when to enter the interlocking space that each rope provides. It is from that space that they chant their lore”(3). In Lee’s text, there are two ropes in literary analysis: the lives of the historical grannies and the writings of African American women writers. Double-dutched readings enable the reader to hear more readily the orality of the text. It also allows writers to include the politics of race, class, and gender; affirm a history of resistance; and debunk ideologies from Western medicine about black women’s bodies using concepts of healing and the body from African culture and heritage. The first three chapters lay the groundwork for Lee’s study linking ethnic literature with indigenous medical systems. Chapter one deftly summarizes the history of midwifery in a greater historical context. Lee moves from European to American midwifery history to lay the foundation for specific racial, class, and gender analysis in the following four chapters. Chapter two argues against Western notions about hygiene, the body, science and medicine, socio-relational politics, and material culture. [End Page 180] Chapter three develops the idea of the grannies as women committed to a spiritual tradition as well as a medical one. Acknowledging the spiritual framework used by black critics such as Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” and bell hook...