Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism

Writings on Black Women 1st Edition

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 Contents

Notes on contributors vii

Editor’s introduction ix
Acknowledgements xvi

Part I
Introduction 3
1 From sexual denigration to self-respect: 5
resisting images of Black female sexuality
Annecka Marshall
2 Exemplary women 37
Delia Jarrett-Macauley
3 Those whom the immigration law has kept 59
apart—let no-one join together: a view on
immigration incantation
Deborah Cheney
4 ‘A mouse in a jungle’: the Black Christian 87
woman’s experience in the church and society
in Britain
Valentina Alexander
5 Naming and identity 111
Felly Nkweto Simmonds

Part II

Introduction 119
6 Creative space?: the experience of Black 121
women in British art schools
Juliette Jarrett
vi

7 ‘White’ skins, straight masks: masquerading 137

identities
Helen (charles)
8 Literature, feminism and the African woman 157
today
Ama Ata Aidoo
9 The rough side of the mountain: Black women 177
and representation in film
Lola Young

Index 203
 Contributors

Ama Ata Aidoo was a lecturer at the University of Cape

Coast, 1970–83, and Minister for Education (Ghana), 1982–83.
Her numerous novels and anthologies have been widely
published and translated, including No Sweetness Here
(1970, Longman) and Changes—A Love Story (1991, The
Women’s Press). Ama is currently a full-time writer, living in
Harare.
Valentina Alexander is completing a PhD on the response to
oppression within the Black Led Churches in Britain at
Warwick University. She has carried out freelance training in
Black studies, Black women’s literature, creative writing and
Black theology and history, and has also coordinated and
taught on Saturday schools and other Africentric child
development programmes.
Helen (charles) is an activist and writer, giving lectures and
facilitating workshops at a variety of organizations, groups
and educational institutions. Her recent publications include
chapters in S.Wilkinson and C.Kitzinger (eds)
Heterosexuality: Feminism and Psychology Reader (1993,
Sage) and in J.Bristow and A. Wilson Activating Theory:
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics. The shape of her name
reflects the origin of many Black family names in the
nomenclature of European slave-owners.
Deborah Cheney is a lecturer in criminal law at the
University of Kent. She is the author of Into the Dark Tunnel—
Foreign Prisoners in the British Prison System (1993, Prison
Reform Trust) and The Foreign Prisoner Resource Pack (Prison
Reform Trust and HM Prison Service). Deborah is the
Executive Committee member of the Association of Members
of Boards of Visitors, and Editor of the journal AMBoV
Quarterly.
viii

Juliette Jarrett was educated at St Martin’s School of Art

and at the Institute of Education, London University. She is
currently programme manager for Science and Technological
courses at Lambeth College, South London.
Delia Jarrett-Macauley is a writer and has researched and
taught Black women’s history and feminist politics in Britain
and the Caribbean. She was a lecturer in Women’s Studies
at the University of Kent from 1989–94. Since the 1980s she
has worked in cultural management—on which she now
lectures in Europe.
Annecka Marshall is completing a doctorate in sociology at
the University of Warwick where she is also a part-time
tutor. She has taught feminism and anti-racist courses for
both the University of North London and for Birkbeck
College, London University.
Felly Nkweto Simmonds is a senior lecturer in sociology at
the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. Her recent
publications include chapters in H.Hinds et al. (eds) Working
Out: New Directions for Women’s Studies (1992, Falmer
Press) and in T. Lovell (ed.) British Feminist Thought (1990,
Basil Blackwell).
Lola Young is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
at Middlesex University and has written extensively on issues
of ‘race’, gender and representation in films. Her book Fear of
the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema was
published by Routledge in late 1995.
 Editor’s introduction

There is a picture in my room,

It is a picture
Of a beautiful white lady
I used to think her sweet
But now I think
She lacks something.
I was so ugly
Because I am black
But now I am glad I am black
There is something about me
That has a dash in it
Especially when I put on
My bandanna.

(Marson, ‘Black is fancy’, 1937)

Of all the poems I know about Black women’s ability to find
beauty in themselves, in the face of negative stereotypes, this
one is particularly important to me. Written long before the
slogan, ‘Black is Beautiful’ became the vogue, it evokes a
transforming moment in which the poet recognizes the need to
abandon anything which would impede her sensitive
development and fulfilment. More than half a century later,
this poem affirmed my desire to encourage other Black women
to put their dash into British scholarship. This book is, in part,
the fruit of that desire. It is about the need to reject obsolete
images and instead enjoy the enormous flexibility of self-
definition.
The denial of freedom of self-expression which began with
chattel slavery in the sixteenth century has taken many forms.
African people, whether living on the continent or as part of
the growing African Diaspora, have been recast in colonial and
racist images as sexual, deviant, bestial, ‘Other’. The
x

stereotypes persisted, multiplied like lice, and found their way

into every form of contemporary media. As the Trinidad-born
activist Claudia Jones wrote in 1949:

In the film, radio and press, the Negro woman is not

pictured in her real role as breadwinner, mother and
protector of the family, but as a traditional ‘mammy’ who
puts the care of children and families of others above her
own. This traditional stereotype of the Negro slave mother,
which to this day appears in commercial advertisements,
must be combatted and rejected as a device of the
imperialist to perpetuate the white chauvinist ideology
that Negro women are ‘backward’, ‘inferior’ and the
‘natural slaves of others’.
(quoted in Johnson 1984)

Black women in Britain today represent a permanent and

talented part of the community, and yet Britain has responded
to them in only the most grudging way. Still, for all the hype
and the hyperbole which surrounds ‘Black womanhood’, we are
still under-produced, under-explored, under-researched. We
are a long way from the dynamic cultural and literary activities
of African-Americans and in any event, our specific histories
are quite different, as are the political practices and ideologies
that have developed out of these.
But we have not been silent. From the early 1950s when
significant numbers of West African and West Indian people
arrived in Britain, we have learnt how to negotiate the island’s
selective welcome in both public and private spheres. This
hands-on education has ranged from dealing with hostile
neighbours, understanding the possible strains of ethnically
mixed intimate relationships, to challenging the lack of
accountability enjoyed by immigration officials, headteachers
or doctors. The lesssons of the 1950s and 1960s sunk in deep,
and we have long since graduated to new schools. Since the
early 1980s there have been a number of published works by
and about Black women in Britain. The majority of these are
creative works, some of which are implicitly critical of Euro-
American feminist theory.1 A handful of non-fiction works
published during the last decade have raised awareness of the
position of Black women in this society; (Amos and Parmar
1984; Bryan et al. 1985; Mama 1984; Ngcobo 1988). Two of
these deserve special mention. In 1984 the West African
 xi

psychologist Amina Mama, in calling for more theoretical work

on Black women in Britain, wrote that:

a major objective of such work must be to develop

appropriate conceptual tools and well-grounded theory. By
this I mean grounded in the experiences and realities of the
specific Black women concerned, and which incorporates
the contingency of action on experience.
(Mama 1984:22)

This anthology has taken these words to heart.

Heart of the Race (Bryan et al. 1985), a Black female chorale,
documented the forms and extent of sexual/racial
discrimination in education, employment and the health
service, as well as illuminating Black women’s cultural work
and political practice. On a theoretical level this work
demonstrated that the different versions of the theory of
capitalist patriarchy, which presupposed a unified female
subject, did not adequately explain Black women’s experience.
In spite of such writings and the increasing political activism
of Black women’s groups during the early 1980s, academic
curricula, in line with much social policy and much feminist
theory, failed to take account of our experiences or our words.
Rarely has space been ceded to Black women’s studies as an
autonomous area in Britain because, it is generally claimed, no
appropriate texts or experts existed. The problem is seen as
one of invisibility.
The women’s movement and the structures which have
grown out of it are struggling with the politics of ‘difference’.
Today in the 1990s, any taken-for-granted notion of ‘woman’ is
up for scrutiny and subject to change:
We are not all sisters under the same moon
and the moon is never the same two nights
running into different shapes choosing
to light up a certain crescent or to be
full and almost round or to slide into
a slither tilted backwards looking up to the stars.
Before this night is over and before
this new dawn rises we have to see
these particular changes speak to
our guarded uncertain before singing
xii

Sisterhood is Powerful. Once we see

that light reflect our various colours;
when we feel complexity clear as an orange sun
moving into the morning maybe we can sit
here in the shade and talk
meeting each other’s eyes with a sparkle
that is not afraid to see the lone bright poppy
nor afraid to question the dent
in the dream or the words missing
from the story.
When you see my tone
changes with the sun or ill health
when you realise
I am Not a Definition
perhaps we can move on.
For I am not only a strong woman
with a Scorpio rising I am
not about to dance with daffodils
everyday making putty out of my wishes
to shape my future needs. I have no
definite tomorrow only a longing that
I will write to pick out lights
that cast curious shadows in the dark.
And yes it would be easy to pat
the back of my confidence
smacking out my fears with assurance
saying strong women never hesitate:
looking inward into this particular
Black woman helps me look outward;
only by questioning the light
in my eyes can I refuse to be
dazzled by the lie in yours—
we are not all sisters
under the same moon.
(Kay, A Dangerous Knowing n.d.)
Most of the contributors to this collection are women living in
Britain whose research subjects and methods are shaped by the
specifics of the Black British experience and context. They
draw on the recent writings of other Black women here: (Carby
1982; Grewal et al. 1988) and of African-American feminist
theorists (Davis, 1981; Collins 1990 etc.; hooks 1981; Hull et
al. 1982; Walker 1984) as well as diverse writers and theorists
 xiii

whose texts have formed Black consciousness worldwide, in

particular Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall.
However, their conceptual frameworks have emerged
organically from their research rather than following the
dictates of either fashion or alternative places.
The chapters in this book make new information accessible,
add fresh nuances to well-explored areas, reexamine old
ideologies and uncover previously concealed ones. All are
informed, in a general sense, by a historical perspective and
are concerned with reinterpreting the world in a way which
includes Black women or specific groups of Black women. They
vary in the extent to which some are highly specific, while
others present more general theoretical analyses of the relation
between ethnicity and gender.
The essays do not pretend at comprehensiveness, nor does
this collection constitute a Black woman’s charter. While the
authors draw on biographical and autobiographical works,
they are not arguing a personal case against discrimination.
We are concerned with the difference between image and
reality, policy and practice. Their words exist in the zones
between exclusion/independence, imposition/resistance. They
are concerned with the relationship between image and
identity, representation and power, politics and culture.
The collection has grown out of my teaching courses on the
MA in Women’s Studies at the University of Kent from 1989 to
1994. The course—‘Historical and Contemporary Issues of
Black Women in Britain’—was an inter-disciplinary exploration
balanced towards history from chattel slavery in the British
West Indies to present-day life in Britain. It employed a
patchwork of texts ranging from W.E.B.Dubois’ early twentieth-
century classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1969) to Alice Walker’s
In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1984); ‘white’2 feminist
analyses such as Lynne Segal’s Is the Future Female? (1987)
and works generally unheralded in England such as Jamaica
Woman: An Anthology of Poems (1980). The course—my
introduction to university teaching—was both a serious
academic undertaking and a very good game.
Some of the fun arose from the effort of replacing ourselves
—Black women in Britain and ‘white’ women studying Black
British women for the first time—in texts which had not
necessarily seen us coming. The success of the enterprise
depended to a significant degree on our imaginative
reconstructing of ideas; for example, how to insert a discussion
around the politics of difference in women’s creativity without
xiv

denying the individuality of the artist. Or, how to ‘hear’ the

voices of African-Caribbean slave women against the
cacophony of those who abused, oppressed and exploited
them. After a two-year run, I altered and renamed the course.
It became Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing
Feminism, in recognition of the fact that identity and
revisioning were now sitting jointly at its fulcrum—with history
on one side.
In my complementary roles of writer/editor, teacher, I had
two distinct, but related, aims. The first was to research Black
women’s lives in contemporary and historical fields and to
increase the body of knowledge of that lived experience. The
second was to look at the construction of images of the Black
woman, whose status as ‘Other’ in literature, film and art has
supported a system of domination and subordination in Euro-
American thought and life. Accordingly, this anthology, which
falls into two parts, reflects those interests.

NOTES

1 See for example the novels of Joan Riley, Vernella Fuller and Buchi
Emecheta.
2 As ‘whiteness’ is generally not seen in terms of recognized ethnicity,
and has not yet been widely researched, it is appropriate to
highlight it as such. See Richard Dyer (1988) ‘White’, Screen 29(4):
44–64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amos, V. and Parmar, P. (1984) ‘Challenging imperial feminism’ Feminist

Review 17:3–19.
Bryan, B., Dadzie, S. and Scafe, S. (1985) Heart of the Race, London:
Virago.
Carby, H. (1982) ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the
boundaries of sisterhood’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (ed.) The Empire Strikes Back. Race and Racism in ’70s
Britain, London: Hutchinson pp. 212–35.
Collins, P.H. (1990) Black Feminist Thought, London: HarperCollins.
Davis, A. (1981) Women Race and Class, London: Women’s Press.
Dubois, W.E.B. (1969) The Souls of Black Folk, New York: NAL Penguin.
Dyer, R. (1988) ‘White’, Screen 29, 4:44–64.
Grewal, S. (ed.) (1988) Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third
World Women, Inland Womensource.
 xv

hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism, London:

Pluto Press.
Hull, G., Scott, P.B. and Smith, B. (eds) (1982) All the Women are White, All
the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, New York: The
Feminist Press.
Johnson, B. (1984) ‘I think of My Mother’: the Life of Claudia Jones,
London: Karia Press.
Kay, J. (n.d.) A Dangerous Knowing. Four Black Women Poets, London:
Sheba Feminist Publishers.
Mama, A. (1984) ‘Black women, the economic crisis and the British state’
Feminist Review 17:21–35.
Marson, U. (1937) ‘Black is fancy’ in The Moth and the Star, Kingston,
Jamaica.
Mordecai, P. and Morris, M. (eds) (1980) Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of
Poems, London and Kingston: Heinemann.
Ngcobo, L. (ed.) (1988) Let It Be Told. Black Women Writers in Britain,
London: Virago.
Segal, L. (1987) Is the Future Female?, London: Virago.
Walker, A. (1984) In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Feminist Prose,
London: Women’s Press.
 Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Lyn Innes and Tina Papoulias for their
welcome advice on some of the essays, and to Louisa John-
Baptiste at Women’s Training Link for invaluable
administrative assistance and support.
I am grateful to Heather Gibson at Routledge for her
encouragement and to Fiona Bailey and Christina Tebbit for
their kindness and diligence.
Many teachers and family members have helped me over the
years. Not least, I thank my friends for their love and support
and for having faith in me. Some to whom I owe more than a
nod of gratitude are Beverley Duguid, Susan Pennybacker,
Nigel Pollitt, Beverley Randall, Juliette Verhoeven, Sheila
Rowbotham and Jacqueline Young.
Part I
2
 Introduction

These five essays are all grounded in the experiences of

particular women—be they individual activists and writers or
representatives of a wider contingent. But this is not a
catalogue of personal life stories, nor a rhetorical burst on
sexism and racism. The authors in this section use biography
and autobiography, oral testimonies and interview material as
a means of providing a panoramic description of the ‘realities’ of
Black women’s lives within the theoretical frameworks
constructed through their research. In the main, they are
concerned with external barriers to Black women’s equality in
Britain. Social and political structures which undermine Black
women’s lives—in education, employment and social services—
are rarely subject to detailed scrutiny. Without such analysis
the development of Black British feminist thought, and related
feminist activism, is inevitably hindered.
Explicitly or implicitly, these pieces refer to the historical
continuum which began with chattel slavery, led to colonialism
and finally to the migration of African and African-Caribbean
peoples to Britain after the Second World War. Indeed, many of
the contemporary experiences of Black British women are
explained by that specific history. For example, African-
Caribbean women are the most economically active group of
women in this society and yet they have very low economic
status: these linked precedents date back to the period of
slavery itself. However, although this historical continuum
must be constantly borne in mind, the task of unwrapping our
knowledge of Black women’s lives is not the province of
historians alone. Black feminism provides a method of working
which enables these writers to come up with new answers to
old questions and even new subjects for enquiry, and to make
the experiences of Black women distinct from those of their
‘white’ female and/or Black male counterparts. From their
4 RECONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD, RECONSTRUCTING FEMINISM

various academic disciplines—art, literature, history, law and

sociology, they imply that many textbooks need to be reviewed
from a standpoint which is sensitive to the situation of Black
women as a social group.
The subject-matter covered here is, of course, diverse. It
ranges from considering religious participation within both
‘white’-led and Black-led churches, to discussing the ideologies
that support racist/sexist discrimination within the
immigration service. There is an analysis of how ‘external’
images of Black womanhood corrupt personal relationships
and how anxieties about Black female sexuality feed into those
relationships. In addition, two essays approach questions of
identity by exploring how effacement, exclusion and denial
have shaped Black women’s lives both historically and today.