In Search of My Mother’s Garden

Abstract: Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written several best-selling novels and has had her works inspire popular movies. In the work “In Search of My Mother’s Garden”, Walker (1983) explores the lived experience of her own mother through the perspective of African-American women both in the past and present. The words of Walker include the excluded and give a voice to Black women. This article will analyze how Black women used their voices to express their creativity. The article will first explore how Walker used her unique writing style and methodology to shine light on the creative spirit of Black women and how it was expressed in the face of daily discrimination, abuse and violence. The article will explore the various ways Black women demonstrated their creativity. The article will also compare the lives of creative white women and Black women to illustrate the differences in the origin and expressions of creativity. The article will next talk about the idolization of Black women as “saints” and if that perspective is warranted. The article makes use of the words of Walker herself and the author’s personal narratives as examples of the resilient creativity of Black women in support of Walker’s perspective.

Introduction

My mother’s name was Ora Mai. “Ms. Reese,” as we affectionally called her, birthed and raised eight children, four boys, and four girls, and was a domestic abuse survivor. She supported herself and her children by working as a food service supervisor on the Fort Campbell Army Base in Kentucky for thirty years. My mother had a massive heart attack due to a life of imbalance and working much more than she played. Mom survived a myocardial infarction, but her life changed when she was declared disabled. Her medical condition forced Ora Mai to retire abruptly at the age of forty-nine. For the last twenty years of her life, she was active in her church and passed the time by planting a beautiful vegetable garden. My maternal grandmother Hattie raised fourteen children, nine girls, and five boys. “Mama” Hattie never worked outside of her home. Her husband Peter died early, and she never remarried. Mama Hattie also planted a beautiful garden, which helped to support her family. In the midst of unimaginable challenges they faced daily, both women chose to plant gardens, and I always wondered why.

In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens

Alice Walker’s famous work “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” enlightened me when she wrote about Black women like my mother and grandmother. Walker wrote about black mothers and grandmothers throughout the past hundred years or more and portrayed them as hidden artists. Walker explains, “For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not saints, but artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release” (230-231). The black woman was subject to the most humiliating and degrading existence possible. They were treated as sexual objects by the men in their lives, which included their owners, their lovers, or whoever took an interest at the moment. These women were not saints as Walker notes but were made into saints because of the pejorative treatment they received at the hands of others. Walker’s work also paraphrased Okot p’Bitek’s great poem when she wrote, “O, my clanswomen let us cry together!  Let us mourn the death of our mother, the death of a queen…the creator of our stool is lost! And all the young women have perished in the wilderness” (Walker 231). The tone of the poem is beyond melancholic; it is hopeless. The mothers and grandmothers of centuries past endured a midnight that never gave the promise of a new day.

Nevertheless, they found reasons to live where no reason existed. Alice Walker helped me see the gardens of Ora Mai and “Mama” Hattie in a new light. Walker helped me see that the gardens they worked on every day meant more than the food it produced.

The Garden Metaphor

The metaphor of a garden used by Alice Walker can take on different meanings for different persons in different settings. Walker chose to use the metaphor of a garden to represent the fact that every person lives life in search of a garden. In her work, Walker portrays the garden as a space of peace and “somebodiness” where the gardener’s life means something. In the African American experience, the search for a garden space requires a fight from the day they are born against racism and systemic disenfranchisement because of their skin color. The most current example of the fight African Americans are facing every day is the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It has again revealed the precariousness of the African American family in this nation. In the beginning, COVID-19 did not appear to discriminate as it spread. However, as collected data has revealed, COVID-19 disproportionately affects African Americans because of the health disparities between whites and people of color (Godoy). The data shows that African Americans become sicker at a higher rate, are hospitalized longer, and die more frequently than white persons. COVID-19 has proved the adage “when a white person catches a cold, a black person gets pneumonia.”

The Hidden Artist in the Garden

The “artist” in African American women cannot be easily identified. Walker identified artistry as expressed in their spirituality, which is defined as a deep belief in the unseen world independent of religious affiliation. African American women have drawn strength from attending and singing in the church (235). Their active participation in the church was a conflation of church and lived experience that gave rise to creativity that seemed to keep life’s madness and frustration under control.

Walker illustrated the hidden artistry of African American women when she juxtaposed author Virginia Woolf’s life with that of author Phyllis Wheatley. Walker points to the classic work of Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, and commends Woolf because, “in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, a room of her own and money to support herself” (232). Walker points this out to acknowledge the difficulty of all women to be taken seriously as artists and creators in the early 1900s. Walker affirms the difficulty of even white women to express their artistry. However, Walker does point out that because Woolf was white, she could write and use her earnings to rent her own room and make enough money to support herself. Woolf’s life ended when she committed suicide. Walker described the end of Woolf’s life by writing, “any woman born with a great gift would have ended her days… having been hindered or thwarted by contrary instincts that she would most certainly lose her health or sanity” (232). Walker acknowledged both that Woolf’s artistry contributed to her death and that she made a choice in the midst of mental illness to end her life and did not die at the hands of others who hated her.

In contrast, Phyllis Wheatley, a fellow author, battled poor health throughout her life yet managed to create meaning for her life when others saw her as meaningless. The “contrary instincts” Woolf experienced in her life was also the lived experience of Wheatley. She was captured as a slave at seven and forced to work for a cruel master. She lived the entirety of her life, wasting away in loveless relationships while raising children and writing poetry. Wheatley was still able to create great works of art in spite (or some would argue because of) the pain and anguish she experienced daily. The level of creativity she demonstrated was only limited by her circumstances. Unlike her white counterpart Woolf, Wheatley did not choose to die, but, like Woolf, she found a way to overcome her circumstances to express her creativity through her writing.

African American women artists like Phyllis Wheatley lived with two inhumane realities. The first reality was that they were forced to live life in a proverbial waiting room. They had to wait to see if their children would be sold away from their loving arms. They had to wait to see if the man who sired the child would play the role of a guest or a husband, or perhaps would be sold and not have any options. They would often wait a long time hoping for a good outcome for African American women, only to be perpetually disappointed. The other reality is that these artists were forced to live in anonymity. They were unknown and dismissed, except for the few people within their family circle. The gifts of poetry, singing, writing, politics, and architecture went unacknowledged and unexpressed because there was no public outlet for them, and their gifts died with them. Even when these artistic, talented women had the opportunity to make something beautiful out of nothing, their contributions would often be stolen and go unattributed. Walker described one example in the following story, “In the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C, there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world. In fanciful, inspired, and yet simple and identifiable figures. It is made of pieces of worthless rags that tell the story of the Crucifixion. The art is priceless. There is a note that says by an anonymous black woman in Alabama” (236).

How Artistry Survived in the Garden

Walker asks her readers to consider the following question: What has kept the artistry and genius within these mothers and grandmothers alive century after century despite their circumstances? Poet Jean Toomer took a tour of the Southern states and referred to the African American women he observed: “as mules of the world” (Walker 230). His description denied them of a title that may have afforded them any semblance of humanity. Walker characterized Toomer’s observations in the following way: “These crazy saints stared out at the world like lunatics, or quietly like suicides; and the ‘God that was in their gaze was as mute as a stone’’ (230). In his opinion, African American women lived lives of mundanity and dreamed dreams that no one knew, including themselves. Walker sought to answer several questions about how African American women were able to achieve the impossible. How did these mothers and grandmothers maintain their sanity? How did they not only survive but thrive? How did they continue to create as they performed demeaning tasks like cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children of people who hated them? The author’s own admission took her several years to come upon the answer, but she finally found it in her mother’s flower garden. Walker described her revelation in the following way: “She grew more than fifty varieties of flowers. People would stop by her house and ask permission to walk the sacred space. My mother adorned whatever shabby house we lived in with flowers. Before she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass and laid out new beds” (237).

Walker said that when her mother was in her garden, her face was radiant and there was a peacefulness in her soul. It seems that her mother’s garden was an outdoor cathedral whose members were this variety of flowers. The music was provided by the sounds of the wind. Whatever she planted grew as if by magic. Walker’s description shows that her mother found her connection with spirituality not in a Holy Book nor in a preacher spewing out platitudes that offered no real comfort for everyday struggles. Walker’s mother’s garden was her place of refuge and meaning that had been used by generations of women before her. 

African American women found their voices in their gardens. Their voices were muted by law, tradition, and kin, yet they found their creative expression in small plots of land that they did not own on paper but worked and cared for with their souls. These artists found in their gardens a homegrown hope. The lashes of an angry master could not kill their creativity when they were working in the garden. The mutilations carved into their flesh by men and childbirth would not diminish their inner joy. Walker mused over how African American women’s souls would have been robbed of amazing works of creativity if the world had successfully muted the artistic genius of artists like Phyllis Wheatley, Lucy Terry, Zora Hurston, Nella Larsen, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Catlett or Katherine Dunham (235).

Portraits of Artistry in the Gardens

This picture is of Rosa Dale, taken in 1925. “Mama” Rosa is the grandmother of Fred Dale, who married my oldest sister Margaret in 1966. The picture shows the land and home where she gardened and that she could own from “providential” means that were never fully known. “Mama” Rosa is the quintessential artist that Walker is celebrating. Rosa Dale had ten siblings and was born on a plantation that is now Camden, Alabama. During the slavery era, the land was owned by the Dale and McReynolds families. A split between the families occurred, and the land was divided between the two families. Their slaves were also divided, and their families retained either the McReynolds or Dale’s last name. “Mama” Rosa never learned to read or write, but she would use her garden’s harvest to provide for her family. Despite her circumstances and limitations, this artist motivated her children and grandchildren to become physicians, educators, engineers, attorneys, and business owners. None of that would have happened without the provisions of “Mama” Rosa’s garden.

In this picture is my Cousin Naomi. She is the widow of a pastor. Naomi planted a garden that produced the fruit and vegetables in the photograph. All of the produce was given away to persons in the community at no charge. After her husband died in 2012, she continued to grow the fruit and vegetables that supplements her meager pension. Cousin Naomi has received numerous commendations for her produce quality in local newspaper articles, and she shares her gift teaching gardening to other seniors. Naomi is well into her 80s and is still gardening.

“Mama” Rosa and Cousin Naomi are the epitomai of the “head ragged generals” that paved the way for their children and their children’s children (Walker 238). Despite being denied the opportunities to participate fully in society, they found outlets for their creativity in their gardens that provided for their families. They ended up making long-lasting contributions to their communities, even in the midst of their circumstances. These women prove Walker’s point that the artistry they expressed within their homes’ confines allowed them to find meaning for themselves despite the constraint society placed upon them.

Conclusion

Alice Walker’s work In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens is a literary masterpiece that provides a rare portrayal of African American women’s resilience as expressed by their gardens. She takes readers on a trip back through time to experience the struggles of African Americans during slavery with her detailed descriptions of the cotton fields, the harsh overseers, the auction blocks, and other atrocities. Walker’s discovery of the garden as the outlet for creativity and a space of refuge in her work provides a great insight into how common people could survive generation after generation of struggling while still maintaining their dignity and self-respect.  My mother, Ora Mai, grew a remarkable garden for the last twenty-two years of her life. Although she has been away from me physically for twenty-five years, I can still remember seeing the faraway look in her eyes that had nothing to do with seeds and weeds. It never dawned on me before reading Walker’s work that the plot of the ground meant so much to her. Alice Walker gave me a portrait of my mom that no camera can capture. I found peace and wept tears of gratitude for what the garden meant to her. There is a dire need for more gardens in America that can eventually grow seeds of peace for our black mothers and women, leading to the systemic change we need to see in our society.

Works Cited

Godoy, Maria. “What Do Coronavirus Racial Disparities Look Like State By State?”. NPR.com. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/865413079/what-do-coronavirus-racial-disparities-look-like-state-by-state. Accessed 30 May 2020.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harvest Harcourt, 1983.

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A Call Against the Dark

The world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfillment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness. However, this tendency is in flux, as one that has precisely the Novum in front of it. The Where To of the real only shows in the Novum its most basic Objective determinateness, and it appeals to man who is the arms of the Novum.

—Ernest Bloch, The Principle of Hope

In September of 2014, the Baltimore Sun revealed that the city had paid more than $5.7 million to more than 100 people who had won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. The city paid another $5.8 million in legal fees related to those claims. Seven months after the Sun published its report, 25-year-old Freddie Gray was arrested by Baltimore police for allegedly being in illegal possession of a switchblade. Gray fell into a coma while in police custody. He died five days later from injuries to his spinal cord.

News of his death resulted in protests and civil disorder in Baltimore. At least twenty police officers were injured, at least 250 people have been arrested, and thousands of police and Maryland Army National Guard troops were deployed to bring order to the city.

A medical examiner ruled Gray’s death a homicide, and the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office filed charges against six police officers.

“[P]eace has lost its credibility,” Baltimore resident Abdullah Moaney, an information technology worker from East Baltimore, told the New York Times. “If it wasn’t for the riot,” Moaney told the Times reporter, charges would not have been filed.

We could not have predicted Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of Baltimore police or the unrest that followed when we began planning for this issue last summer. We agreed then that our second issue of Penumbra would follow the theme of the January conference of the PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies program at the Union Institute & University: “Insurrection, Subversion, Rebellion.” The subject was very much inspired by the words of Fanon, who wrote in his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth that the liberation and re-awakening of a people after colonization “is always a violent event.”

We were interested in papers that addressed the role of insurrection, subversion and rebellion in the pursuit of social justice, work that examined physical confrontations as well as the tensions that drive social practice and the arts.

And then in July, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, New York, after a police officer put him in a choke-hold for 15 seconds. A month later a police officer shot and killed an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Freddie Gray died on April 15, 2015.

All of these cases resulted in protests and civil unrest that brought national and international attention and sparked debates about the tense relationship between law enforcement agencies and African Americans.

A day after a New York grand jury decided not to indict the officers responsible for Garner’s death, “[t]housands of demonstrators poured out in cities across the country … in a show of outrage,” the Boston Globe reported.

We saw outrage on the streets of Ferguson. A state of emergency was declared in Baltimore.

§§

In this issue of Penumbra, we publish scholars who live in the United States, China, and India. Some are well-established and others are newly published. Their critical perspectives are diverse, yet they are all equally concerned with what Bloch described as the “philosophy of the new,” that is the belief that the human condition can and should be improved, that as scholars our work is to wrestle against the psycho-intellectual violence that, according to Fanon, holds “people in its grip.”

Merry Renn Vaughan examines the ways in which the author known as Dr. Seuss uses techniques he learned in advertising, as well as through the creation of political cartoons and military propaganda, to critique consumerism and classism. David Pendery writes of “an American artist-moralist tradition,” a tradition that he describes as a coalescence of aesthetic and moral stimuli that has conditioned American arts for decades. Erin McCoy revisits the 1960s and 1970s anti-Vietnam protests and investigates the ways in which the anti-war movement intersects with the fight for an independent Puerto Rico. Also writing about the civil rights movement, Gregory Bailey chronicles Dr. Martin Luther King’s persistent endeavor to address the flaws inherent in capitalism. In his work, the historian Raffaele Florio uses the Virgin of Guadalupe to demonstrate a mediation between two colliding cultures, the Catholic friars and the Maya people. Regina Nelson shares a personal story in order to demystify cannabis use.

The creative work in this issue moves from the whimsical (the poetry of Christopher Mulrooney) to the existential (Prakash Kona’s short fiction). Jjenna Hupp Andrews’s visual series “Nomadic Borderlands” explores “the relationships between our bodies and our exterior world, focusing of the shifting edges of where our body (interior) ends and the outside (exterior) world begins.”

In her review of Koala Boof’s The Sexy Part of the Bible, Aiesha Turman writes that the novel “begins with the individual Black woman, allows her to be at the center of herself, but then pushes against barriers of gender and race to create a new world.”

§§

The violence that spilled onto the streets of Baltimore following Gray’s death has many antecedents. There were the draft riots in New York City in 1863; the December 1915 public rape and lynching Cordella Stevenson; the Memphis 1866 riots in which  white rioters—law enforcement among them—killed 46 black people, raped five black women, and burned hundreds of black-owned homes, schools, and churches. What I mean to suggest here is there was nothing new in the violence that took the lives of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott.

Victims, all of them, of centuries-old systems of violence. The authors in this issue, like Bloch, write toward “the Novum in front.” Their work considers that, perhaps, our societies can be remade, that they can be made better than they are presently. None of the authors published in this issue provide simple solutions. What they provide are possibilities—for interrogating our assumptions (see Florio), for finding in literature lessons on doing good and making a good life (see Pendery, Turman, and Vaughan), and the power of art to say what cannot be said otherwise (Mulrooney, Bonecek, Andrews).

An Afrofuturist Africana Womanist Affair

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The Sexy Part of the Bible
Kola Boof
Akashic Books, 2011

It’s easy to assume that Kola Boof’s 2011 novel The Sexy Part of the Bible contains long-lost messages from ancient sages, and perhaps it does, but not in the way one would think. The title, according to an audio recording of Boof discussing the book, comes from seventeenth century sermons delivered by priests of the Church of England and other churches to remind sailors and traders who were taking African women as wives that “white women are the virtue in the bible, her hand is fair; but the black man’s mother is the sex in the bible, her hand was wicked” (Boof).  The title serves as an assertive reclamation of African women’s bodies against the backdrop of colonial history. Reclaiming oneself, or a group of people, pushing back on the dominant cultural hegemonic narrative and reappropriating discourse as a way to not only name yourself, but place yourself in a space that upends the dominant narrative is powerful. What Boof does, in titling her novel, is confront the historicized devaluing of Black women and their bodies. She also challenges the notion of the binary construction of Black womanhood versus white womanhood. In The Sexy Part of the Bible, Boof uses an Afrofuturist and womanists metaphorical constructs to contest and up-end the notion that Black women, and thus their bodies, are wicked.

Afrofuturism engages in a “critique [of] not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also… interrogates and re-examines the historical events of the past” (“Afrofuturism,” 2011). I contend that Boof’s novel is an Afrofuturistic vision of west Africa that is a warning to readers about what can happen when colonialism, racism, sexism, classism, colorism, homophobia, patriarchy, and misogyny go unchecked and unchallenged. Academically, Afrofuturism has roots in the black American experience. However, with the spread of the American brand of blackness across the diaspora, its definition—“[s]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (Dery 182)—is also not only applicable to Africa, but wherever Africans have been dispersed across the globe. Afrofuturism both in the academy and in the arts utilizes speculative fiction as a framework, and the end goals are also political in that they seek to “recover lost black histories,” “think about how those histories inform a whole range of black cultures today,” and “think about how these histories and cultures might inspire new visions of tomorrow” (Yaszek 2). In Sexy Part, Boof pursues the routes of Afrofuturism and Africana womanism to reclaim a space for black women, position them in a location of power, and envisions a tomorrow where black women are not objectified, or externally constructed as the other.

Womanism positions black women at the center, the norm. It allows her to engage in the process of individuation, which positions her as a full human, worthy of all the rights that come with humanity. Womanism respects her as an individual and by centering black women, womanism also removes the white gaze, the lens through which much of the Western world is viewed (Phillips, 2006). While womanism is a space to begin to explore Boof’s work, Africana womanism, which was coined by University of Missouri professor Clenora Hudson-Weems in the late 1980’s. Hudson-Weems writes:

The first part of the coinage, Africana, identifies the ethnicity of the woman being considered, and this reference to her ethnicity, establishing her cultural identity, relates directly to her ancestry and land base—Africa. The second part of the term Womanism, recalls Sojourner Truth’s powerful impromptu speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, one in which she battles with the dominant alienating forces in her life as a struggling Africana Woman, questioning the accepted idea of womanhood. Without question she is the flip side of the coin, the co-partner in the struggle for her people, one who, unlike the white woman, has received no special privileges in American society. (22-23)

Kola Boof, herself, is an Afrofuturistic womanist and this is reflected in Sexy Part. Born in 1969 as Naima Bint Harith in Omdurman, Sudan, Boof’s parents “were murdered in her presence for speaking out against atrocities in Sudan” (Boof). After being taken to London, she was eventually adopted by an African American family in Washington, DC. Boof’s renaming allowed her to claim a space for herself in a world where she became alien. In a foreign land, amongst foreign people, she was able to create a black womanhood for herself that was pieced from past histories—Sudanese, Egyptian, and African American.

As Afrofuturism is grounded in speculative fiction, so is Sexy Part. The novel is set in a fictional country called West Cassavaland (then later the U.S. and Europe) and is centered around a female character named Eternity Frankenheimer, a pure black girl, whose name is an obvious ode to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We later find out that she is a clone of a woman named Mother Orisha, who was beaten to death in the streets by a mob because she was an outspoken critic against skin bleaching. Here, Boof is reclaiming and re-examing events of the past—the murder of Eternity’s parents. As Boof was displaced, so is Eternity who has no history to call her own and only knows what she has been taught by the couple who raised her—the white scientists who created her. Eventually, Eternity becomes a supermodel, actress and activist who opposes skin bleaching and later she becomes the partner of a wildly successful rapper turned politician, Sea Horse Twee, who becomes ruler of West Cassavaland.

The novel is strongly Afrofuturistic on several fronts. First, its location, racial makeup, and historical placement: the novel is set in “West Cassavaland,” where the “white ruling colonialists moved out, and the tiny mulatto elite … braced in horror at the thought of being ruled by the very blacks they’d been bread to look down upon” (106). Boof confronts what seems to be the constantly recurring postcolonial conflicts on the continent, particularly in West African and Sub-Saharan nations. The novel is grounded in a realism that causes the reader to critically engage what they know about Africa, specifically in places that have had ongoing deadly clashes within its borders such as the genocide in Rwanda where the German government in 1884, then Belgian government in 1919 created a divide by favoring the lighter-skinned, more European-featured Tutsi peoples, thus eventually instigating a war that would ravage Rwanda and surrounding nations (Prunier 23-6). Boof’s ruling class of West Cassavaland, a light-skinned group who are of mixed European and African heritage initially called themselves the “Bastars Elite” then “renamed themselves the Pogo Metis Signare in 1720 and proclaimed their allegiance to some unforeseen Fatherland in lieu of the Motherland (Africa) they felt ashamed of” (112).

Both the Pogo Metis Signare and Eternity speak to a central theme of Afrofuturism—alienation. Eternity’s alienation is derived from the fact that she is a clone, created in the laboratory of western scientists. The Pogo Metis Signare, though elite, are alienated as they are not fully African, nor are they European. In fact, West Cassavaland is a site of alienation as it is populated with distinct groups who are alien, detached, and inhabit a liminal space—the Ajowan who are killing themselves via the use of toxic chemicals and the “Michael Jackson pill” to bleach their skin, western scientists whose primary duties are HIV/AIDS research, foreign dignitaries, and the Pogo Metis Signare.

Eternity is not only the primary character, she is the narrator and the embodiment of Africana womanism in that she, in keeping with Weems’ definition, “battles with the dominant alienating forces in her life as a struggling Africana Woman, questioning the accepted idea of womanhood.” As a clone who presents as a woman, Eternity grapples with her identity as woman, African and human. As a dark-skinned, world-famous actress/supermodel, she also wrestles with the notion of being regarded as beautiful when the women who are prized in her country are either mixed raced or “boiled orange-colored” from bleaching (108).

In speaking of and for herself and the community that she belongs to, Eternity is practicing Africana womanism—having her say about herself as a Black woman, as well as the collective history of her people. While the language is simple, it evokes immediately recognizable imagery. In referring to herself after being passed up for a role about an African woman which was eventually filled by a lighter-skinned, more ethnically ambiguous actress, Eternity says, “My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell—it is pitch black shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds” (41).

Boof told interviewer Jason Page that a white female reader contacted her because the reader identified with the pressure of trying to fit in and being something other than who you are. And that is what womanism does; it begins with the individual Black woman, allows her to be at the center of herself, but then pushes against barriers of gender and race to create a new world.

Once Eternity is free from the constraints of a world mired in racism, sexism, colorism, and corruption, what happens? How does the world work for her and her descendants? Easily, Sexy Part could be a trilogy or longer, however, in the end, I am satisfied, but like a gourmand, prepared and willing to overeat.

Works cited

“Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and Democracy Online. 2011.

Boof, Kola. The Sexy Part of the Bible. New York: Akashik Books, 2011. Print.

Page, Jason. “Kola Boof Interviewed on Her Book The Sexy Part of the Bible.” Internet Archive. n.d.

Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Black to the Future Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Ed. Mark Dery. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994. 179-222.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.2 (2003): 287-302.

Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. New York: Bedford Publishing, 1998.

Phillips, Layli. “Womanism: On its Own.” The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century of Womanist Thought. Ed. Layli Phillips. New York: Routledge., 2006. xix-lv.

Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (2nd ed.). Kampala: Fountain Publishers Limited, 1999.

Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013.

Yaszek, Lisa. “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood.” A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction. Ed. Lars Schmeink, 2013.