Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

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.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

Not all speed is movement.

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.

For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush... Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.

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. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.

We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It’s about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don’t practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.

Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.

If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than in here.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. —TONI CADE BAMBARA

I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,' he told himself. 'Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master's Mind,' he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player--that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.

{Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude. -Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara p.42

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.” ― Toni Cade Bambara, born #OTD in 1939

So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.

Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear

Two hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there’s you. What’s your story?

So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.” Excerpt From: Toni Cade Bambara. “The Salt Eaters.

Cause love won’t let you let’m go.” “But they want to go, that’s the hurting part.” “Like you tole the lap sitter this morning, Min, when you hurt, hurt. But when you see the chirren calling down thunder and going up in flames, Min. Why then you snatch you a blanket

But she would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.

I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality. There is no American literature; there are American literatures.

There is no American cinema; there are American cinemas.

there is an alternative wing in this country that is devoted to the notion of socially responsible cinema, that is interested in exploring the potential of cinema for social transformation, and these practitioners continue to struggle to tell the American story. That involves assuming the enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing usable traditions of cultural practices, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items—such as music, language style, posture—by the industry that then attempts to suppress the roots of it—where it came from—in order to sustain its ideological hegemony. And so, there is no single American reality. There are versions, perspectives, that are specific to the historical experiences and cultural heritages of various communities in this country.

Now, I stood beside him ticking through the past few months of success and failure. Toni Cade Bambara and Ishiguro, yes, all of Murakami, yes, Philip Roth, James Baldwin and Colson Whitehead (Get out. Read these a hundred times). Yaa Gyasi, yes, Rachel Kushner, yes, and W. G. Sebald, but no more mysteries because he complains that he becomes compulsive. A month ago, I gave him Denis Johnson’s Angels, which he liked well enough. He tried Tree of Smoke and excoriated Johnson for enervating him with the evidence of hard research, although, he said, he could see where in fact the book was pretty good. I had then pressed Train Dreams into his hands. He came back and faced me, teeth gritted. ‘What else you got by this guy?’ Which told me he’d been extremely moved. This lasted a week. He has now finished all of Johnson. We are in trouble. If I sell him a book he dislikes, my favorite customer will return with an injured air, his voice cheated and tattered. What shall it be? I pull The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald, off the shelf. He grumpily buys it. Much later that day, just before the store closes, Dissatisfaction returns. The Beginning of Spring is a short book, after all. He shuts his hands violently on a copy of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Blue Flower, and bears it away.

As a result, suggests Audre Lorde, “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us”. Or as Toni Cade Bambara succinctly states, “Revolution begins with the self, in the self”.

Anywhere at all in the universe, but I choose to be here with this growler scowler. And good ain’t the key. It’s just that I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.

No one remarked on any of this or on any of the other remarkable things each sensed but had no habit of language for, though felt often and deeply, privately.

The cars pulling up alongside a woman or a kid ready to sell the self for a Twinkie. Bringing down a bird or a woman or a man stalked at a dance. Taking over a life. That was not hunting as the sisters explained it, sang it, acted it out. To have dominion was not to knock out, downpress, bruise, but to understand, to love, make at home. The keeping in the sights the animal, or child, man or woman, tracking it in order to learn their way of being in the world. To be at home in the knowing. The hunt for balance and kinship was the thing. A mutual courtesy.

Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level.

He headed in the general direction of the treatment room, feeling that familiar wave of energy surge through him. In another minute, he sensed, he would generate enough energy to found a dynasty, lift a truck, start a war, light up the whole of Clayborne for a week. “I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,” he told himself. “Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant. I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master’s Mind,” he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player—that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.

Learning still, Old Wife, learning still.” “But ain’t learned to quit casting a voluptuous eye on the young mens, I notice,” chirping her teeth. “When you gonna learn, you ole stick in the mud, that ‘good’ ain’t got nothing to do with it? They packed me off to seminary thinking helping and healing and nosing around was about being good. It was only that I was … available.

Maybe … an old story passed down on Mai’s maternal side huddled together in the internment camps of ’42, keeping themselves alive with the stories. But keeping separate even then, even there, the threads of the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino elders. Stories keeping the people in the camps alive while the bill in Congress to sterilize the women of the camps got voted down by one vote, one vote. And then the silence. A whole generation silent

And she wanted to answer Ruby, wanted to say something intelligible and calm and hip and funny so the work could take precedence again. But the words got caught in the grind of her back teeth as she shred silk and canvas and paper and hair. The rip and shriek of silk prying her teeth apart. And it all came out a growling.

It is a noble thing, the rearing of warriors for the revolution. I can find no fault with the idea. I do, however, find fault with the notion that dumping pills is the way to do it. You don't prepare yourself for the raising of super-people by making yourself vulnerable - chance fertilization, chance support, chance tomorrow - nor by being celibate until you stumble across the right stock to breed with. You prepare yourself by being healthy and confident, by having options that give you confidence, by getting yourself together, by being together enough to attract a together cat whose notions of fatherhood rise above the Disney caliber of man-in-the-world-and-woman-in-the-home, by being committed to the new consciousness, by being intellectually and spiritually and financially self-sufficient to do the thing right. You prepare yourself by being in control of yourself. The pill gives the woman, as well as the man, some control. Simple as that.

The limits of binary thinking are spooky enough

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.

Telling the truth in a country where there are no truth-speaking traditions that are respected is extremely hard.

...got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full." - The Salt Eaters

The reliability of stools? Solids, liquids, gases, the dance of atoms, the bounce and race of molecules, ethers, electrical charges. The eyes and habits of illusion. Retinal images, bogus images, traveling to the brain. The pupils trying to tell the truth to the inner eye. The eye of the heart. The eye of the head. The eye of the mind. All seeing differently.

She wasn’t meant for these scenes, wasn’t meant to be sitting up there in the Southwest Community Infirmary with her ass out, in the middle of the day, and strangers cluttering up the treatment room, ogling her in her misery. She wasn’t meant for any of it. But then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.

Larry's dog's named Earl P. Jessup Bowers, if you can get ready for that. And I should mention straightaway that I do not like dogs one bit, which is why I was glad when Larry said somebody had to go. Cats are bad enough. Horses are a total drag. By the age of nine I was fed up with all that noble horse this and noble horse that. They got good PR, horses. But I really can't use em. Was a fire once when I was little and some dumb horse almost burnt my daddy up messin around, twisting, snorting, broncing, rearing up, doing everything but comin on out the barn like even the chickens had sense enough to do. I told my daddy to let that horse's ass burn. Horses be as dumb as cows. Cows just don't have good press agents is all. I used to like cows when I was real little and needed to hug me something bigger than a goldfish. But don't let it rain, the dumbbells'll fall right in a ditch and you break a plow and shout yourself hoarse trying to get them fools to come up out the ditch. Chipmunks I don't mind when I'm at the breakfast counter with my tea and they're on their side of the glass doing Disney things in the yard. Blue jays are law-and-order birds, thoroughly despicable. And there's one prize fool in my Aunt Merriam's yard I will one day surely kill. He tries to "whip whip whippoorwill" like the Indians do in the Fort This or That movies when they're signaling to each other closing in on George Montgomery but don't never get around to wiping that sucker out. But dogs are one of my favorite hatreds. All the time woofing, bolting down their food, slopping water on the newly waxed linoleum, messin with you when you trying to read, chewin on the slippers.

Like I use to tell my daughter's daddy, the key to getting along and living with other folks is to keep clear whose weight is whose.

That's the problem with friends sometimes, they invest in who you were or seem to have been, capture you and you're through. Forget what you had in mind about changing, growing, developing. Got you typecasted.

From back of the houses, we hear some mother calling her son, the voice edgy on the last syllable, getting frantic. Probably Miz Baker, whose six-foot twelve-year-old got a way of scooting up and down that resembles too much the actions of a runaway bandit to the pigs around here. Mainly, he got the outlaw hue, and running too? Shit, Miz Baker stay frantic.

You don't logic, man. You sheer don't logic.

She also loved beautiful things, and seems to have embraced early a philosophy penned by the writer Toni Cade Bambara: "Beauty is care, just as ugly is carelessness.