Black Women Writers Want Larger Forum

In her 1992 novel “Possessing the Secret Joy,” Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Color Purple,” helped expose to the Western world the practice of female genital mutilation in Africa.

Walker’s disturbing tale of the tribal initiation touched off an international debate on the issue.

Yet 10 years before Walker’s novel appeared on the market, Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian doctor, novelist and feminist, challenged her nation and continent about this practice in “The Hidden Face of Eve,” a book exploring the lives of women in contemporary Egypt and throughout Arab history.

Few outside select literary and academic circles are familiar with Saadawi’s work, which has been translated into English. Some say this oversight is part of a neglect experienced by many African-American women writing in this country, and even more so by black women writing in Africa and in the African diaspora outside the United States.

This week, black women from around the world have gathered at New York University to focus attention on women of African descent who are writers. The three-day conference, which began Wednesday is, its sponsors say, the first major international conference devoted to the evaluation and celebration of literature from around the world by women of African descent.

“It is a shame they we don’t know these women,” said Jane Cortez, a co-founder and president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, a New-York based network that sponsored the event with the university’s Africana Studies Program.

“The point of the conference is to expose the public to writers other than those they know and to promote the works of African writers.”

The conference has attracted a range of 120 artists and writers whose disciplines go far beyond literature for what might best be described as a global networking session. Among the participants are poet Maya Angelou and novelists Gloria Naylor, Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana and Maryse Conde of Guadeloupe; poets Maria de Lourdes Teodoro of Brazil and Jean (Binta) Breeze of Jamaica; filmmakers Julie Dash, Alanis Obomsain of Canada and Sarah Maldoror of France; and journalist-authors Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Jill Nelson and Margaret Busby.

“I’m just going to meet everybody I can,” said Busby, a Ghanaian who lives in London. Founder of a small publishing company, Allison & Busby in London, Busby edited an international anthology titled “Daughters of Africa.”

“It will be one of those occasions where too much is going on,” she said. “I especially want to meet some of the writers I edited for the anthology. Many I only spoke with but have never met face to face.”

The conference’s title, “Yari Yari,” means the future in the Kuranko language of Sierra Leone. In keeping with the theme, organizers devised a series of workshops, panel discussions and entertainment pointed toward a future in which black women carve out a greater place for themselves in the literary world.

A panel called “Forced Entries,” examined literary efforts to deal with violence against women. Another, titled “The Critic, the Media and the People,” explored, among other things, how criticism affects the reception of black women’s writing.

Whenever black writers gather, inevitably the issue of black male-black female creative tension arises.

For years, black men across the African diaspora have objected to the often derogatory, sometimes stereotypical portrayals of black men in literature by black women. The topic is not on the agenda.

But Tricia Rose, professor of history at NYU and conference coordinator, said, “If those issues come up, we will deal with them as creative women.”