Struggle for Visibility of African American Women's Literature

Students in my African American women's literature classes are often concerned about not having heard of most of the writers and works read in our classes in their high school or college experiences. Although the students may have read, or have at least heard of works by some of the more popular writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, they are quite surprised that they have no familiarity with some of the other writers to whom they are bing introduced. They are also surprised by the various subjects, themes, and issues the authors raise. They enter the class with a monolithic idea of what African American women and African American women's literature entail. Even though these students identify themselves as open-minded, educated and aware, they are quite surprised to find their own stereotypes of African American women shattered. Students are somehow comforted when they read that many scholars of African Americna women's literature had similar concerns when they first discovered African American women's literature. Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, Mary Helen Washington, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker all speak of having discovered the works of African American women writers on their own. Many stumbled upon writers like Zora Neale Hurston during independent research, and pursued their own scholarship in the field without the support from or assistance of their academic institutions. These scholars subsequently made enormous contributions to the genre by unveiling, by writing about, and by re-publishing works of African American women within the past few decades. These women took it upon themselves to bring the work of many African American women writers whose works were out of print back to the reading public, back to our educational institutions, back to our communities. Barbara Smith asserts that the ones who can restore visibility to the lives of African American women are African American women ourselves. According to Smith, Black feminist criticism can "...reveal for the first time the profound sublteties of this particular body of literature." (Smith, 1977) Alice Walker writes in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (1983) of the significance of models in the lives ofAfrican American women. She quotes Toni Morrison who in an interview is asked why she writes about what she writes. Morrison states that she writes what she would like to read. Walker uses this as an example of the need for African American women to be both the model and the artist. Smith writes that "both my waking and sleeping hours would be easier, if there were one book in existence that would tell me something specific about my live." (Smith,1977) These writers express the need for literature or art to reflect the lives of African American women. These

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