Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  You have traveled extensively around the world. You have been to Cuba, Sweden, Vietnam, Laos, India, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados. You have often traveled as a delegate. What is that experience like, and why is that important to you?

  When you are member of a delegation, you have responsibility before you go, while you are there, and when you come back. Before you go, you want to contact your constituency and find out what they want to know about that country. Also, what kind of solidarity they wish to express with the people of that country, and what sort of materials they would like to send. For example, when we went to Cuba, we took diaphragms, blood plasma, and penicillin. When folks went to Guinea-Bissau, building materials. To Brazil, mops, because none of the maids have mops. In the spring of 1975 I was part of a delegation called the North American Academic Marxist-Leninist Anti-Imperialist Feminist Women. It used to take us ten minutes to introduce ourselves. We were invited by the Women’s Union of North Vietnam to come as a delegation and to do what delegates do, like raising critical questions such as: What was the infant mortality rate before the Revolution? What is it now? What was the rate of literacy before the Revolution? What is it now? Who were the people on the bottom strata, and what position do they hold now? What are their prospects for the next ten years? I was always interested in the personal stories and I would ask, “Who were you then and who are you now?” We were invited in the spring to go to Vietnam, but they had the victory in the spring, which was unexpected, so the Women’s Union needed to go around and visit the socialist camp and thank people for their solidarity during the struggle. So we were put on hold. Many of us had already quit our jobs, sublet our apartments, turned off our phones, etc. I sat down and wrote, and that became The Sea Birds. Most of those stories had not been published; been hanging around the house, and they were completed during that spring and summer.

  In Vietnam we were also interested in bringing back things for our constituency; we would have to give a debriefing and a report of some kind and had to shape it in some palatable way. Children gave us cards to give to the children here expressing solidarity. When I got back, one of the tasks I had was to deliver this information to my constituency. I decided to do it the way I knew how to do. I wrote a short story in seven sections. I would read a section, then we would have music, somebody would get up and read the greeting cards that the children had made. Then I would read another section based on stories I had been told, then someone would show some slides and posters, then I would read another section. It went on like that. That story line became the title story in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Very oddly the first time I ever heard it on radio, the person read it, and then had music, then read it, etc I thought it must really lend itself to that kind of orchestration.

  You were in Atlanta when you were writing The Salt Eaters—could you talk about that?

  The Salt Eaters, like many works, started as entries in my journal. I was trying to figure out as a community worker why political folk were so distant from the spiritual community—clairvoyants, mediums, those kind of folks, whom I was always studying with. I wondered what would happen if we could bring them together as Bookman brought them together under Toussaint, as Nan brought them together in Jamaica. Why is there that gap? Why don’t we have a bridge language so that clairvoyants can talk to revolutionaries? So I began thinking about it and jotting things down in my journal. Then the entries got very long; then they threatened to turn into a story. I had hoped that the story would be a short story since I don’t have staying power. It was going to be about either a Mardi Gras society or a samba school. This society, for some kind of festival, would elect to reenact an old slave insurrection. They do so, and all hell breaks loose because of the objective conditions in that area. I thought I could pull that off in seventeen pages. I began working on it and it got to be a novel. It was very difficult sledding because I was writing quite beyond myself in a number of ways. I was writing that book in 1981 so I could kick cancer’s ass in 1993. That book taught me how to get well. If I hadn’t written it, I’m not quite sure I’d be sitting here. I was writing beyond myself in that sense.

  Also in the sense that I was stretching, reaching, trying to do justice to that realm of reality that we all live in but do not acknowledge, because the English language is for mercantile business and not for the interior life. The only time you see that realm rendered is in science fiction. I was trying to find another way to do it, and I think I did. So I was writing beyond myself in that sense. When I look at that book now, I realize I’m not there yet. I don’t understand it yet. It resonates, it chimes in my bones, but I don’t understand it yet. It was very hard work. It is a breathless book. When Morrison got ahold of it, I thought that she would take care of it. “Ahh, she’ll fix it.” She didn’t touch it. She said, “This is fine.” I said, “Really?” She said, “Yes.” I waited for her to whisper at me, I waited for her to drift some stuff across my brainpan, but she didn’t, she left the book alone. Or, rather, she whispered so softly I didn’t know what was prompting the rewrites.

  When the book came out, there was a weird reaction to it. Some reviews were very favorable but totally uninformed. Some reviews were not favorable but informed. I got wonderful mail from people who said, “Thank you for breaking this ground because I want to write like this, but I don’t want to write science fiction. I like this alternative reality. Thank you.” Other people wrote, “The Yellow Wallpaper’ room taught me that I needed to get well. The Salt Eaters taught me how.” I got letters from various people who are now friends, from the Asian community, the Chicana community, who picked up on the Seven Sisters—Women of the Rice, Women of the Plantation, Women of the Corn, who said, “We must all get together and create a Seven Sisters collective. We must do an opera.” I am continually haunted by the Seven Sisters. In the late fifties I wrote a story called “The Talking Stick.” It was about a study group called the Seven Sisters. In The Salt Eaters the Seven Sisters are a performing troupe. In a bunch of things I am doing now, called Goddess Sightings, the Seven Sisters are a network of people in North America, South America, and Central America, and they get together to do things like reimagine America. The Salt Eaters was usable, apparently; I kept finding quotes from it everywhere. People started quoting sections of it in their speeches. I would find quotes on greeting cards—which nobody paid me for. Carole Parks, with permission, used it to create a conference calendar with quotes for each month. Other people drew maps of the landscapes and the worlds in it and turned them into T-shirts for which I was not paid. Then folks started teaching it. Charles Frye taught a course in ethics in the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke and this was the required text. He called me up and asked me to come speak. I am not a silly woman, so I said, “If you want to conduct an intelligent discussion, you call Eleanor Traylor. I don’t know nothing about the book. I’m still reading it.” I am still catching up with the wisdom of that book.

  In particular, and in general, how has motherhood and how has Karma, your daughter, affected your work?

  It is very hard to answer. One of the things that Karma did very early in life when people would call me was to say, “She’s busy. She’s out of it. She is staring out the window. But she’s working.” They must have said, “Well, this is important.” She would say, “Is it important to you or important to her?” I said, “I like this kid. I’m keeping this kid. This kid understands.” Then they would probably say something she didn’t like, and she would hang up and say, “Some people are so rude to children.” Karma gave me permission to write, in the sense that she would not disturb me if I was in my particular chair, at my particular table. She would move around me and take care of things.

  There was a period too when I went utterly mad in the eighties in response to the Atlanta missing and murdered children’s case. That manuscript too started as journal entries and then developed into pieces that I did for the newspapers, and then I finally realized that I had a novel on my hands, and I didn’t want it
. One of the reasons I didn’t want it was because I knew too much, and I thought if I could reconstruct the real case, and know the difference between this and that highly selective media-police-city-hall-fiction on which someone got convicted, how safe am I? Everybody in the world was doing research for me. People from Newsweek and 60 Minutes would call me up and ask me, “Do you have another angle on this?” I would look in my notes, I would look at something I hadn’t researched yet, and I would say, “Yeah, why don’t you check out this and get back to me.” I didn’t have to leave my house. As a result, I stopped going out, I stopped bathing, I stopped washing my hair, I became this lunatic. My daughter would tap me every now and then and say, “Ma, you look like hell.” Then it was “Mother, get it together.” She was thirteen at the time, and she took what little money was left and enrolled in the Barbizon Modeling School; the idea was to make money as a runway model, pay the bills, and keep us going until I found myself again. She has been a tremendous support in writing. If your children give you permission to write, that’s heavy. I am now in a period of recovery, and so is she, so our talk is very interesting. She was remarking the other day that she had no idea that all the skills that she had developed taking care of my sorry ass, that these were marketable skills.

  It was Cheryl Chisholm down in Atlanta who hired her to do some work for the film festival that called on many of those homemade skills. She is very good at cleaning off desks, booking your trips, getting people off the phone, blocking people at the door. She is really a good caretaker. When Julie Dash sent out an SOS, Karma went in there and took care of Julie and helped her get the book out. People praise her and she looks at me and shrugs, “Well, it’s just what I did with you.”

  What’s the present phase, particularly in light of your bout with cancer in 1993?

  For several years I had been stuck—spiritually, financially, psychically, physically. Finally my intestines were blocked. I knew I had been blocked because I couldn’t feel my spirit guides around me. I would meditate and get rocked by earthquakes and thunderstorms and all kinds of stuff that never happened before. I was not growing as a creative person. I was putting that kind of sacred practice on the back burners, wrenching my way away from a path I knew I was supposed to take. I knew that I had cancer. So when the doctor told me I had cancer, I already knew.

  Now I am in the process of recovery, physically, financially, psychically, spiritually. I am coming through it slowly, mainly by trying to get down to those chambers where I work when I am at my best. No matter what the work is, there is a place I can go to when I am in touch with the best of myself, and I am connected with the most powerful something or others—spirit guides—let’s call them angels, if you like. I also have a tremendous feeling of attachment to friends all over who are the people who got me out of that bed and got me well. I was talking to my surgeon the other day, who was, as usual, praising himself about his scalpel. I pointed out, once again, “Your scalpel is only a physical manifestation of the love and affection of my friends. They got me off the table.” When I was in bed, just whipped, but I had something to do, I would reach everywhere for energy and nothing would happen. But all of a sudden I would get this surge of energy, and I would be up, walking down the ward, giving away my flowers, talking to people, giving orders. Then someone would call, and I would find out that they had been at a prayer group at that moment, or two or three people had lit some candles at that moment to send me some energy. So I am in the period of recovery, and please do light candles for me because I need some help. I am trying to write things I have never written before, again writing beyond myself. I am doing a series of things called Goddess Sightings. Some of them are stories, some of them are obviously scripts for video or film, and one of them will be an installation and performance piece as part of Miss Morrison’s Atelier project at Princeton. I am going to do a garden of goddesses and film it.

  Can you talk about your voice lessons?

  One of the aspects of my recovery is that I am taking vocal lessons, which have enabled me to free my voice on many levels. I always thought I lived out loud, but I didn’t. It also is helping me breathe on many levels. My teacher is a yoga teacher as well. I decided to take lessons after I came back from the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. I had the best time down there. I went down there for a gig, and I just stayed on. When I came home, I felt, Why can’t we all feel like that all the time? I was told that when I stopped chemo I might go into depression; it shapes your week, getting ready for it, recovering from chemo, defending the immune system, etc. So I needed to be into something before I started. Well, I was always threatening to take singing lessons. So I have been taking singing lessons. We do drills, breathing exercises, I sing, I do yoga, I do German lieder and Italian arias and Cole Porter. It is very much a part of my recovery.

  Are there any questions?

  Q: What does the expression you use, “Sam Browne belt,” mean?

  It is a thick, ugly, Texas ranger belt. It is mean and fascist, and it hurts bad. Michael’s mother was a severe little woman who wore severe clothes, and she would beat that boy with that belt.

  Q: I wanted to ask about your expression in dance and movement.

  In reclaiming the body from the biomedical syndicate as well as from the naturopathic types I have been dealing with, the best way I know of recovering the body is movement. It is only when I am dancing that I inhabit all of my body. When I was in academia, that life would drive me up into my mouth, and all of me would be huddled behind my teeth, and I would have to remind myself that I have this space to stretch out in. When I am totally in my body, I know it, because when I run into people, all of me remembers them. My thigh remembers them, my mind is everywhere, and also I feel gigantic. When I walk down the street, I feel very large, physically as well as spiritually. I feel like everybody is a friend of mine and everybody is just wonderful: “God, it’s going to be great when we finally take over and be in charge of this yard. Kente cloth in the Oval Office, deviled eggs on the menu, peach cobbler on the lawn.” I have no idea what movement I will get into because my girlfriend Arlene said to me, “So-and-so, the African drummer, is going to be at the Center.” I said, “So what?” She said, “I’ll pick you up at ten o’clock and we’ll go.” I thought we were going to watch. Around nine-thirty she called and said, “What are you wearing?” I said, “I’ve got my pajamas on.” She said, “We’re going to the dance class.” I said, “Are you serious? I am lucky I can walk.” Anyway, I got into my tights, the leg warmers, and I went to the dance class.

  Now, even when I had been in the best of shape and thought I was a dancer, I never could get through a class. I am flashy and have a lot of presence and style, but no technique. People put me in the front line in the beginning because I am a’ quick study, but after about fifteen minutes I begin to flag so they put me in the back and I start falling apart. This class was fast; they had some serious drummers. They were reaching that tempo when you get scared—the horses are coming! The drummers kept coming up to that threshold rhythm and I kept getting nervous. Do you know what I mean? Trance drumming to summon the loa. I am trying to dance and it was awful. It was just pitiful. Miss Dunham would’ve shot me. I am not sure what movement I will go into now. I have done Alexander technique, I’ve done Nikolai technique, I’ve done gymnastics. My daughter has done tae kwan do and the like. I’m thinking maybe I’ll go that route. In Philadelphia there are any number of us who are doing movement, such as Sandy Clark Smith and Denise Sneed, so I will check with them.

  Q: Political concerns have always been a big part of your life. Have you felt any personal disorientation from what has happened in the world in the last few years in terms of the collapse of some of the models we looked up to? Do you still feel in terms of your own sense of what struggle has to be for us here in this country, do you feel that sense of struggle is still very much intact and has not been destabilized by any of these developments?

  Yes, I’m disoriented and yes
, I do think it has been destabilized, and what I have done in response to it is to close in. I don’t do nearly the kind of work I used to do. My arena is very limited. I am still doing draft counseling; I work with women from the Persian Gulf thing. What I am always telling them is that they have to do a video and get their stories out. If I can’t do it in video, I don’t want to do it. If there is any work that people call me for, if it doesn’t involve video I won’t do it, because I need to focus and not get too scattered. I think it is because of a lack of courage; there is nothing noble about it, so don’t clap. When I go to places or meet people I assume are still struggling and find out they are not, it is very depressing, so I just stay where I am with like-minded people. I can affect and create some value where I am.

  Q; I have noticed that none of the African-American films that I have seen have been taken from great American literature. How you do feel about films made by Whites about Blacks?

  They are ugly; we don’t need them, we have our own genius. Nothing but a Man, despite the stupid title, is an exception.

  Q: How do you feel about Hollywood films in general?

  I don’t feel anything about them. I don’t have to because I am very deeply steeped in the independent sector. I don’t have to go get mugged all the time. I go to movies constantly because I am a film nut. But I go to see them to train myself in film, to look at what are the conventional practices, and what do they mean ideologically or politically, and how to avoid them. When I go to movies to enjoy and to blossom, I’m going to independent films, in particular independent Black films, but also independent Asian films, the independent films that are being conducted in that sector away from the industry, that do not take the Hollyweird model as the protocol, but rather are striking out for something else, for a socially responsible cinema. That’s where I am. I don’t have many expectations from Hollywood. They can tolerate certain kinds of criticism, but they do not tolerate another vision. If you have a different vision, you need to be moving in the independent sector.