
Description
Womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "you acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior... Acting grown up. Being grown up... ―From Alice Walker's Definition of a "Womanist" from In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Born in 1964, the last year of the Boomers or the first year of Generation X, depending upon who's counting, Kim McLarin came of age as part of the first real "Brown vs. Board" generation, and that experience, of America first embracing and then rejecting a real and meaningful beloved racial community, has shaped everything in her life.
Searing in its emotional honesty, Womanish is an essay collection that explores what it means to be a black woman in today's turbulent times. Writing with candor, wit and vulnerability on topics including dating after divorce, depression, parenting older children, the Obama's, and the often fraught relations between white and black women, McLarin unveils herself at the crossroads of being black, female and middle-aged, and, ultimately, American. Powerful and timely, Womanish draws upon a lifetime of experiences to paint a portrait of a black woman trying to come to terms with the world around her, and of a society trying to come to terms with black women.
Product Details
Publisher | Ig Publishing |
Publish Date | January 22, 2019 |
Pages | 252 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781632460790 |
Dimensions | 8.2 X 5.5 X 0.7 inches | 0.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Courage and outrage inform 13 essays about black womanhood.
Novelist, memoirist, and essayist McLarin (Writing, Literature, and Publishing/Emerson Col..; Divorce Dog: Men, Motherhood and Midlife, 2015, etc.) gathers forthright essays reflecting on love, friendship, motherhood, and, above all, overt and "thinly-veiled" expressions of racism. At 15, McLarin left home to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, where she felt a growing anger at "an omnipresent cultural representation of Blackness as ugliness" and at an elite white community that deemed her an outsider. "This place, this world, these people do not mean for you to live," she believed. "You can go along and die. Or you can get pissed." Her anger "was safe and energizing and life-saving" but also isolating. Anger abated a bit at Duke only to surface again when she began to work as a journalist, where "resentful white reporters" whispered that she had gotten her job only because she was black and where she covered the effects of poverty, prejudice, and injustice. "I've been labeled angry, aloof, and even uppity," she writes, by people who could not "understand the origins of such projections." McLarin praises the Obamas for their "calm, centered, not-taking-it-personally response" to the endemic racism that "is as American as apple pie." Not as serene, after being "mistreated, disrespected, or generally screwed-over or wronged" 359 times (a "guesstimate") in her life, she twice resorted to revenge. And beginning when she was 17, she suffered recurrences of debilitating depression, a malady she had thought affected only whites: "Mental illness, mental disorder of any possible stripe, was definitely white folks' mess." In her candid title essay, she considers her transition from girlhood to womanhood, the female body, and her experiences of midlife online dating, where misogyny was apparent--misogyny, like racism, rooted in fear. "What white America fears," she writes, "is not Black people but the loss of white identity, privilege and position the Black presence demands and also the spiritual and culture power Black survival has produced."
Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.
-―Kirkus ReviewsEarn by promoting books