Marita Golden: On Writer Fragility and Health, Communal Memoir, and the Multigenerational Project of Freeing ‘Strong’ Black Women'
Marita Golden’s The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women arrived in 2021 to ongoing public adoration and critical acclaim.
Golden’s decades-long career is the stuff of literary dreams. The multigenre writer, journalist, and novelist is a Co-Founder of the historic Hurston/Wright Foundation for Black Literature. Her nonfiction books Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World and Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex are classic texts in Black studies. Her last novel, The Wide Circumference of Love, continued Golden’s authorial project: to provoke readers to enter the mental and social fabrics of Black America, this time through a deep but joyful look at an East Coast family struggling with dementia.
Golden took time recently to answer questions about The Strong Black Woman and add to the abundant gifts of enlightenment this book continues to provide.
Kalisha Buckhanon: The book opens and moves like a funnel cloud through your past, psychological research, statistics, history and other women’s testimonies to chart this tornado of ‘strong black womanhood.’ What shape did the book first take for you? Was the hybridization a process of writing your own memories then weaving in all the other elements? Or, did you know the versatility you’d lend early on?
Marita Golden: I did feel early in the writing a bit unsure of the structure of the book. Because I am not a therapist or doctor, sociologist or psychologist, but I wanted to include their input. Also because I did not want the book to be dominated by scary statistics about Black women’s health, but wanted to sound a necessary alarm, and because I am essentially a storyteller and wanted to inspire Black women. All of these competing desires weighed on me for a while.
But gradually I remembered or realized that in earlier books like Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World and Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex that I had utilized structures that were perfect for this book. I call it ‘Communal Memoir,’ which is a mix of memoir, journalism, essay, interviews, commentary that works like a quilt, with the different and varying facets of the overarching story being told in different voices and genres.
KB: You wrote imaginary monologues from women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Harriette Tubman and more to lament how they also fell prey to holding the world on their shoulders. How did you get into character, so to speak, to share these women’s first-person voices?
MG: Well, once I had read widely about the strong tentacles of the Strong Black Woman complex in our mythology and cultural mindset, I began thinking about the role it played in the creation of our sheroes. I enjoyed writing from the perspective of these women because it allowed me to create a narrative that I felt readers would find surprising and enlightening. Because this is a book of voices, I wanted those voices to be surprising and even unsettling, to provoke consideration and reconsideration of the Strong Black Woman syndrome.
KB: If a white man or any person of another ethnic group picks up The Strong Black Woman, what do you hope their biggest takeaway is?
MG: I think this is a book for anyone who cares about physical and mental health in general. I have urged readers to buy it for themselves and anyone who wants to understand the lives of Black women. For non-Black readers, I think the biggest takeaways would be the complexity of Black women’s lives, and how much it costs to be a Black woman in America, psychologically.
KB: You were aware of your parents’ struggles, your genealogy and your medical genetics before writing this book and had written some of that into other books and essays. However, what did writing this book make you want to know more about your parents or family in general?
MG: Like many Black families, my family was not truly forthcoming about a lot of family history. My parents, like many of their generation, were too busy striving and making a living to feel that they had a lot of time to tell family stories. Much of what I learned about my mother I learned after her death, from friends. I think so many of our family stories are connected often to trauma that parents may be hesitant to share them, but I think we live in a world now where there should be no fear of personal history being too heavy to bear.
KB: I was shocked to discover you had health concerns because I’ve always admired how energetic, slender and ageless you are. How did people react to the health problems you shared and have conversations or changes sparked among people you know as a result of you putting yourself out there?
MG: People were surprised that I had suffered two silent strokes, as was I, but was glad that I shared the experience and my health journey.
KB: If black women battle stereotypes as lazy, hypersexualized, angry and more, how do we square the reversal of such stereotypes with the enormous energy and time required to go beyond them – a pressure you cite as unrealistic and a danger to black women?
MG: The redefinition of strength for Black women is a generational project, one that younger Black women will have to learn from their mothers and teach their daughters. Black women are beginning to see that a belief in their invincibility, being the person with all the answers, and sacrificing their mental and physical health to care for others is unsustainable. The response to the book has informed me that Black women are passionately interested in ways to extend their lives and their overall health. Thankfully my book is part of a growing movement to support this shift.
KB: You obviously don’t write a book like this unless you have hopes it will change the world and people’s lives. What has it been like for you to observe responses and reactions of your audience and readers on this book?
MG: It has been enormously satisfying. I have been invited to speak at colleges and universities and have started offering well-attended mental health workshops, so the book struck a nerve and is having a positive impact.
KB: As a Black woman who feels I was probably born with Strong Black Woman syndrome, I want to thank you for your candor and honesty I needed. This book is so layered one can’t help but return to it over and over again. What do you hope the next generations of Black women, and others, who find this book will be able to add to it or revise about it?
MG: Well, I think each generation of Black women will revise and extend this conversation. I am completing a workbook that outlines practices that have helped me in my life to keep journeying to health and wellbeing.
Marita Golden is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include After, Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Don’t Play in the Sun. She is the founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, an organization that supports African American writers. She lives in Mitchellville, Maryland.
About the Interviewer
Kalisha Buckhanon's novels are Speaking of Summer, Solemn, Conception and Upstate. Her novels have been honored by the American Library Association, Hurston/Wright Foundation, National Book Foundation and more. Her stories have appeared in Fiction, Kweli, Fiction International, pluck!, Oxford American, Michigan Quarterly Review and many more. Her next novel, Running to Fall, arrives in September. Visit her at Kalisha.com.