Literary Aesthetics and the Black Woman Writer

Abstract

There is a need to establish how the aesthetics of the Black woman writer adds to the universal pool of African aesthetics. The cohesiveness of African-American culture, in all of its dimensions, is established by many streams of thought. This article elaborates on this unity by demonstrating how the aesthetic concerns of AfricanAmericans are reflected in the writing of Black women. In the course of a general discussion of the literary aesthetics of the African-American woman writer, this article introduces the characteristics of African culture as they relate to the American situation. In Janheinz Jahn's Muntu (1961: 133, 135), the concept of Nommo, the productive power of the word is introduced. It is important to see that Africans took the European languages and made them African in their interpretation. Therefore, a major aspect of the Black writer's style is a response to Nommo. Black male writers such as Larry Neal often use Nommo as an energetic force in their own works. There is a sense of metamorphosis in the words of Larry Neal's poem, For Our Women (1968: 310):