Womanism

Dinah Birch

• The Temple of my Familiar by Alice Walker
  Women’s Press, 405 pp, £12.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 7043 5041 6
• The Fog Line by Carol Birch
  Bloomsbury, 248 pp, £13.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 7475 0453 9
• Home Life Four by Alice Thomas Ellis
  Duckworth, 169 pp, £9.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 7156 2297 8
• The Fly in the Ointment by Alice Thomas Ellis
  Duckworth, 132 pp, £10.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 7156 2296 X
• Words of Love by Philip Norman
  Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp, £11.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 241 12586 3

American black people describe their wildest girls as ‘womanish’. Alice Walker recalls that traditional usage in defining her own work: she is interested in ‘womanist’ rather than ‘feminist’ writing. ‘Womanist’ texts proclaim a double rebellion, fusing the long-suppressed anger of women with that of blacks. Alice Walker’s most forceful books to date (the novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, followed by a collection of essays, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, in 1983) locates the identity of black women in the troubled perspectives of the past. In this she shares in a wider movement. The growing body of black literature in America asserts a need to make good what has come to seem one of the most damaging depredations imposed by slavery and exploitation: the loss of a known place in history.