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Toni Cade Bambara II

© Dorothy Harris

In the last article (Toni Cade Bambara: Empowering the community which empowers her) I began to discuss some of the ways in which Toni Cade Bambara empowers her community which reciprocally empowers her. I discussed the community's role in informing Bambara's work, to the point at which Bambara, when talking about her work, indicates that the wisdom which informs her work is a wisdom whose lessons she was still learning well after the work was finished. Bambara's role in empowering her community through her work, then, is in giving it the voice and authorization through her work to both inform the writer and the readers.

I have been thinking about this concept of Bambara's empowering the community which empowers her.These words..."I empower the community that names me" have been resonating in my head all week, as if the same wisdom that informed Bambara wants to continue this discussion in this weeks article. What does it really mean to empower one's community? What does it mean to have been named by a community and to therefore empower it? How is Bambara named by her community? How does this one sentence help us to understand how she perceives her responsibility, as a writer, to her community? If I were teaching Bambara this week, these are some of the questions that I'd raise for my class. These are some of the questions I carried around all week.

As Walker, Morrison, Hurston, Larsen, West and most other writers have looked to their own communities for models for their work, it is evident that drawing models from one's community is not a new device. Like other writers, then Bambara uses her community as the models for her writing. However, her community also becomes the artist. Her community is not just the artist in her writing, but her community is the artist who "names" her. To name someone is to give them definition, to shape them, to identify them. Her community, therefore, defines her, shapes her, creates her. Bambara, in turn, uses her community as the subjects for her work. She creates stories, essays, novels about her community, in her community, with the blessings of her community, while allowing it to continue its shaping and its creating in her writing. Her community, furthermore, takes on its own artists persona when it writes a text whose function is to teach Bambara how to fight an battle that she would not know about for years after the novel is written.

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