‘Writing the Body’: Reading Joan Riley, Grace Nichols and Ntozake Shange

Abstract

Despite the fact that there exists by now a large, established body of writing by Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and others, one becomes — when teaching their writing on a ‘Women’s Writing’ course in a higher education institution in the home counties where one rarely sees more than one black face in any group of students — aware very quickly of otherness, the unknown, traversing foreign territory when reading Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging, Grace Nichols’s I Is a Long Memoried Woman (hereafter: I Is), and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf (hereafter: For Colored Girls). From the questionnaire that I handed out to the third-year students on the 1988–9 ‘Women’s Writing’ course it transpired that more than half of them had never read any writing by Black people. Of those who had, most had encountered Black people’s writing on the American Studies course at the same college. As one student, Ann Young, said about how the reading of these texts had affected her attitudes towards Black people: ‘I have more respect for them now. Previously, my attitude was limited. I didn’t think they could use language to express themselves, I didn’t know how they felt.’ Another student, Lisa Wares, wrote: ‘Texts [by Black women] should be more widely available. I tried to buy The Unbelonging in a large bookshop in Birmingham and was told that I would have to order it. The area put aside for books by Blackwomen writers was minimal. I also feel that it would be helpful to publicise their work to a wider audience’.