Blood Ties
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER
SOME SING, SOME CRY
By Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
568 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99
For roughly the last half-century, nearly every black female writer of any consequence in America seems to have had one very particular story to tell — or, rather, one particular question she’s tried to answer: Just how in heaven (or hell) have black women managed to survive? How, that is, were great-grandmothers not completely destroyed by enslavement, grandmothers not irreparably broken by bigotry, mothers not wholly defeated by loneliness? How have black women in this country kept on doing battle with everything, for what seems like forever, without falling apart? And what toll has this taken on their daughters? From Margaret Walker to Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones, to name only a few, America’s black female authors have tried to make sense of a difficult present by writing bridges to the traumas of the past.
Book Review - Some Sing, Some Cry - By Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza - NYTimes.com.
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