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Feb. 26--Not that English professor Valerie Lee had an ulterior motive or anything when she began to edit The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women's Literature, but her new book does serve in part to legitimize her life's work.
"It's almost as if you don't have a field (of study) if you don't have an anthology," Lee said recently in her fourth-floor office in Denney Hall at Ohio State University. She chuckled at the thought, but her point was welltaken.
Although the landmark Norton Anthology of African American Literature was published in 1996, there hasn't been an anthology of black women's literature -- until now.
"Try teaching African-American women's literature without an anthology like this one," Lee said. "You have to . . . (photocopy) all the poems. The course packets are ridiculous."
Lee recently discussed her work on the 426-page volume.
Q: In the preface, you argue that the writings in the anthology are "informed and inflected by the distinctive voice of African-American women." How so?
A: In so many cases you can see the writers building upon African folklore. In other cases, you can see them borrowing from musical forms associated with the African-American experience, such as the blues and jazz. And, if you pay attention, you can hear the women writers talking to one another across time, commenting on a passage from an earlier writer.
Q: You include in your collection not only poets and writers of fiction but also playwrights, memoirists and even an essayist. Why?
A: I wanted to show the historical range of African-American women's writing. The anthology begins with the first poem written by an African-American woman (Lucy Terry Prince's Bars Fight) and takes readers all the way through hip-hop.
(Bars Fight, a ballad, was recited for more than a century before being formally published in 1895.)
Q: In your essay "Expansion, Experimentation and Excellence," you quote Paule Marshall's Poets in the Kitchen, whose brash women agree that "In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!"
A: These women understood the power of the word, the power of language -- that and the notion that silences will not protect us. It is through the use of language that one comes to be. These women all wrote against great odds. Many were never taught to read. So many are Renaissance women. Frances Harper wrote in almost every genre: essays, plays, poetry, fiction.
Q: But the writings aren't exclusively angry, are they?
A: Oh, no. I would describe many of the pieces as celebratory. Lucille Clifton's poems Homage to My Hips and Homage to My Hair, for instance, challenge Anglo or mainstream notions of beauty by celebrating a different standard of beauty.
Q: Your anthology features 80 writers, but no doubt you had to leave out writers. Which one did you most hate to omit?
A: Angela Davis. But every last cut was devastating. It hurt my heart. When you take on a project like this one, you quickly become aware that you are making canon, which has its challenges as well as being an opportunity.
Q: And which author did you most enjoy discovering while compiling the anthology?
A: Probably (poet and scholar) Harryette Mullen. She writes memoirs that resonate with everyday happenings in our own lives, and she is able to talk about her experience in a way that foregrounds the importance of all African-American history.
Bill Eichenberger is Dispatch book critic .
beichenberger@dispatch.com
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