Literary Birthday – 25 March – Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

1. Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
2. All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It’s the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.
3. Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.
4. Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn’t keep up with what’s out there ain’t gonna be out there.
5. The purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible.
6. Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.
7. The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.
8. I’ve never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.
9. Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.

Toni Cade Bambara was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist, and college professor. Bambara was active in the 1960s Black Arts Movement and the emergence of black feminism. She is the author of The Salt Eaters and Gorilla, My Love. Her novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child was published posthumously. The Salt Eaters won the prestigious American Book Award in 1981, as well as the Langston Hughes Society Award. Bambara’s fiction is set in the rural South as well as the urban North. It is written in black street dialect and presents sharply drawn characters that she described with affection. According to Wikipedia: ‘Bambara’s work was explicitly political, concerned with injustice and oppression in general and with the fate of African-American communities and grassroots political organizations in particular. Female protagonists and narrators dominate her writing, which was informed by radical feminism and firmly placed inside African-American culture, with its dialect, oral traditions and jazz techniques.’

Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Cade_Bambara

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar