Reviewed by: Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara by Thabiti Lewis Pauline Baird (bio) Lewis, Thabiti. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. “Without a doubt her work from her screenplays to her short stories and essays are infused with an uncompromising determination to tell us the truth about ourselves” says Thabiti Lewis in his edited collection of interviews called Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (xx). The life of Toni Cade Bambara, who as a child changed her name when she learned that she was named after her father’s employer in plantation tradition (112), can be read as intuitive, rebellious, and candid. Thabiti Lewis, a scholar in African American literature, Multi-Ethnic literature, and American Studies, pens a compelling synopsis of the interviews that showcase contexts—the streets and small towns, national and international—for this work that is a cultural expose of the woman behind her works such as The Salt Eaters, The Black Woman, and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is a book that complicates discourses on community literacy, ethnic studies, decolonial work, and the writerly self. The book draws from genres similar in form to interviews found in The Paris Review except that in 143 pages of print, Lewis offers eight interviews of Bambara by as many interviewers. Many of the interviews are previously unpublished (Interview with Akasha (Gloria) Hull) or are reprints of individual audio interviews published elsewhere (Kay Bonetti). Lewis’s personal reasons for editing this book include his desire “to learn one more thing from her” and to thank her, posthumously, for giving him an understanding of feminism, the black arts movement, vernacular culture, and the self (xxii). Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is a compilation of interviews conducted with Toni Cade Bambara at different stages of her career over a thirteen year period (1979–1994) by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Kalamau ya Salaam, Kay Bonetti, Claudia Tate, Justine Tally Zala Chandler, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Louis Massiah, and presents Bambara as a consistent, deliberate craftswoman of stories and film. The book is most successful in its arrangement by themes rather than by chronology. As such, readers can begin reading any chapter. Nonetheless, readers can find five pages dedicated to the chronology of her life and work (xxvii–xxxi) if needed. Unless readers are familiar with Bambara’s seven books and two films, references to them in the interviews themselves will be challenging. Thus, it is useful to read the introduction as a reference. Roughly eighteen pages long, the introduction offers notes, synopses, or brief blurbs on Bambara’s works that are mentioned in the interviews. That said, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara is an easy read, but readers may need to stop often to digest her stories and theories. One such theory is that the writing life is purposeful and informed by the community and is for the community. She sees the benefits to this theory in Vietnam, Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, and America where ordinary women and men engage in community projects that defy their social conditions. When pressed to speak about racism and race relations in feminism, as well as relations between men and women, she is frank in her thoughts about “net social effect” (Interview [End Page 202] with Sheftall 15). After Sheftall’s interview, readers can come away with the understanding that in her writing life she chooses to engage what is “usable” (Interview with Kay Bonetti 37; Interview with Louis Massiah 133), a term she uses in several interviews. Lewis succeeds in showing Bambara the woman, activist, spiritualist, and mother, who appears dedicated to the use of herself and her resources to social change. She notes, “I am concerned primarily with usable lessons . . . I can offer a usable something for someone else.” She says, “it is not for me to make comparisons . . . I am simply more interested in the caring network that exists between men and women, men and men, women and women, children and elders” (15–16). Although she is known for her work in fiction, Bambara writes as an observer and transformer of life. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara complements her body of work on community, culture, and...