What I'm Pretending Not to Know

Toni Cade Bambara, SZA, and what's revealed when we resist

“What are you pretending not to know today?” - Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller”

Toni Cade Bambara in her New York apartment | ca. 1963 from Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara (2009) courtesy of Harry Keyishian

The things that we resist are often far more revealing than the things we welcome. When truths that we unconsciously know, truths that we’ve hidden from ourselves, are prodded, resistance is the body’s way of keeping us “safe” from unsettling realities. 

What are you pretending not to know? What don’t you want to see? What are you resisting?

–

I picked up Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters a million times in a million bookstores before I decided to buy it. And once I owned it, I picked it up and put it back on my bookshelf a million more times before I dared to begin reading. I restarted the novel three times before I was able to make it through the first chapter. 

My procrastination surprised me. I couldn’t pin down what was making reading The Salt Eaters so difficult. It wasn’t Bambara’s prose; of the forty pages I’d read, there was at least one sentence on each page that I’d highlighted for its stunning imagery or lyrical turn of phrase. And it wasn’t an issue of focus, I zoomed through about three other books in the time it was taking me to read a few chapters of The Salt Eaters. 

No, it was something else. 

There was something about the novel that rattled me. From the very first line, “[a]re you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” the book was shaking something loose inside of me that I’d rather keep tucked away. So I focused my energies on trying to control the book, rather than letting it lead me somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. 

TSE is known for being a weighty, complex novel. It’s non-linear, has a large cast of characters, and subplots / parallel plots abound. Bambara presents speaking to the dead as a quotidian occurrence and the ability to heal others as a certitude whose validity does not need to be proven. These intricacies are what make TSE brilliant, what make it impactful, and on my first read they are the very things I pushed back against. 

Diagram of the The Salt Eaters characters and settings from Akasha (Gloria) Hull’s essay “What It Is I Think She’s Doing Anyhow: A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (2000)

I wanted to write down all the characters and whether they were dead or alive. I wanted to map out all the plots and order them “properly”. I wanted differentiation between what was “really” happening and what may have just been imagined. 

My first reading of the novel was spent resisting and I had no idea why.

–

The beginnings of an answer (and the beginnings of this post) started to unfold when SZA released SOS in December. 

Criticism is inevitable when a much-anticipated album is dropped, especially one following a debut as lauded as CTRL. The critiques that caught me by surprise were the ones that deemed SOS “too insecure”, “too self-deprecating”, or “too embarrassing” to be listened to. As I puzzled over this pushback (primarily from fans on Twitter), I realized that listeners’ resistance to SOS had less to do with SZA and more to do with themselves. 

Still from SZA’s music video “Shirt”

In an interview with Rolling Stone SZA described her writing process for her sophomore album and said,

“I just try to think of what haven’t I said, and what am I hiding. I usually can tell what I’m hiding from myself or in general. And then I try to then say that…”

SZA’s writing process is reminiscent of Bambara’s line of questioning, “what are you pretending not to know”. The artist refuses to pretend and writes songs that reveal her good, her bad, and her ugly in catchy choruses and heartfelt pleas for some approximation of love. It’s SZA’s unabashed honesty that repelled listeners and sent them running, not just from the album but from themselves. I don’t think people were as embarrassed for SZA as much as they were reminded of their own embarrassment in similar situations. SOS pressed on a hidden bruise of hurt and shame.

James Baldwin so concisely summed up the root of much of our resistance when he wrote “[o]ne can only face in others what one can face in oneself”. SZA is wide open on SOS, and her vulnerability bears too much of a resemblance to an abyss for those of us not ready to face our own hidden depths. 

–

With these realizations in tow, I returned to The Salt Eaters at the top of this year. I had a new willingness to embrace my initial resistance as a sign that there was something I needed to face, questions the novel was asking that I wasn’t ready to answer but needed to hear.

The particular truths that TSE dug up for me are not as interesting (for y’all lol) as the experience of reading it was. During my second read, I was able to appreciate how my journey with the novel as a reader paralleled that of the protagonist within the novel. Velma, a mother, wife, and community activist, spends the majority of the book running from things she intuitively knows to be true. She resists what she unconsciously knows until it demands to be seen, to be heard, to be felt. As a reader, you stumble alongside Velma. Eventually you realize that refusing to face what is already facing you is a task more arduous than making the decision to stop running and let whatever is chasing you finally catch up. 

Toni Cade Bambara at the Southern Collective of African American Writers (SCAAW) | 1988 © Susan J. Ross

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We have so much art at our fingertips these days, you don’t have to do much to watch a movie or listen to an album. Yet I think the accessibility of these things results in us viewing art as media that exists only to be consumed and provide entertainment. There is as much to be gleaned from the works that unsettle us as there is from the pieces that immediately appeal to our tastes. Art should be engaged with, actively reached towards, and not just passively absorbed. 

Earl Sweatshirt (Thebe Kgositsile) and Ta-Nehisi Coates had a conversation in Interview Magazine last year where they talked about just that:

COATES:...But you know what, the song [Billy Woods’ “Western Education is Forbidden, where Woods calls out Coates in a lyric] is actually a statement about art, Thebe, and I have learned to be more generous with artists. Like, the fact that you ain’t get it the first time you heard it—

KGOSITSILE: It’s like coffee. The first time I tried coffee I said, “Get this the fuck outta here.” But you get older, and you need it.

COATES: And you gotta give art time! I’m like that with Co Flow. Probably the most influential song for me as a kid was “It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back” [by Public Enemy], and the first time I heard it I was like, “What is this?” The production was so chaotic and discordant. But I listened to it, listened to it, listened to it.

KGOSITSILE: And then you fit in with it. People try to make art fit around them, but you’re supposed to bend yourself to the art. 

COATES: That’s right, there’s an active extension that has to happen.

KGOSITSILE: You have to reach out, for sure. Art is not like candy, it hurts.

So perhaps lurking under our resistance to that song, that book, that painting, is a truth demanding to be acknowledged. We can know it so long as we reach out for it, bend towards it, as Earl Sweatshirt described.

And I don’t think that’s easy, but I do think it’s worth it. 

What are you pretending not to know today friends? And when will you be ready to face it?

Thanks for reading and talk soon, 

- Yeaye

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Marginalia

1. The opening TCB quote is from her essay “The Education of a Storyteller” featured in the book Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essays, and Conversations (1996)

2. The James Baldwin quote is from his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

3. Harmony Holiday, one my favorite writers (and fellow Golden Bear!!), penned a short piece on SZA’s SOS that I loved! You can read it here

4. You can buy a copy of The Salt Eaters from the It’s Lit storefront on bookshop.org and a portion of your purchase will support the publication!

5. I really hope y’all liked this piece! It was a bit different for me and focused more on the reading / listening experience rather than content but I enjoyed the challenge and would love to hear your thoughts :)