The Kin of Ata - An Interview with Dorothy Bryant

RECENTLY WHEN THE EDITORS of Esquire magazine asked the men honored in "Esquire Register" to select a required reading list for President Bush, one of the books chosen was [Dorothy Bryant]'s feminist novel, The Kin of Ata Are Watching You, Bryant's utopian fantasy has had an unde...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hurricane Alice 1992, Vol.9 (3), p.19
Main Author: Webster, Brenda
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Black literature
Bush, George W
Business community
Drugs
Feminism
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880)
Industry
Literature
Mailer, Norman
Novels
Publishing industry
Sand, George (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) (1804-1876)
Stereotypes
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Summary:RECENTLY WHEN THE EDITORS of Esquire magazine asked the men honored in "Esquire Register" to select a required reading list for President Bush, one of the books chosen was [Dorothy Bryant]'s feminist novel, The Kin of Ata Are Watching You, Bryant's utopian fantasy has had an underground following in the Bay Area since its publication in 1971. Such high praise for her book in an exclusive men's magazine is ironically apt, since Bryant's narrator is a sensationalist white male writer, whose obsession with drugs and sex has led him to murder his girlfriend before discovering relationship to one another as well as to the earth. They live a simple agricultural existence, value dreams rather than possessions, and communicate intuitively resistant narrator is brought around to ata's values through the agency of a black woman whom he first comes to recognize for her extraordinary human and visionary qualities and finally to live in a way he has been incapable of before. She feels hat self-publishing frees her as a writer and makes her work harder. "I have to keep higher standards because if my work is shoddy, people will just say, `Oh, that's why she self-publishes, she's no good.' But if Random House puts out a novel by Norman Mailer and it's no good, they'll say `Oh, he's not up to form this time,' and they'll wait for the next one." Another reason Bryant publishes herself is "that the commercial house can't tolerate very much reality or ambiguity in a work. They tend to be more comfortable with stereotypes. They also consider it bad for a writer to have a broad range. If you do one mystery, they want you to do another. But I can't write like that."
ISSN:0882-7907