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Our communities have suffered many losses. ["They are all falling around me," sings Bernice Reagan of freedom fighters who have died.] I never thought I would be so imposed upon by death as I was in 1989 when my fourteen-year-old nephew, Najeeb Harb, fell to his horrific death in New York City. My family counts his loss every day--and so do I. And will. Absence is a muthafucka--truly. Nineteen-ninety-five will mark me forever as surely as 1989 and as surely as 1992, when [my teacher and sister-] poet Audre Lorde, passed on over the Caribbean to some other blood-anointed place.
Toni Cade Bambara: 1939-1995
Bambara was a name Toni Cade gave herself around 1970, after the publication of the groundbreaking anthology, The Black Woman. In fact, it seems she named herself all her life. Born Miltona Mirken Cade in 1939, at age five she is said to have announced to her mother that she had renamed herself "Toni"--not short for anything. [And for me, who encountered her all-too-briefly at several crucial points in my life, the name] Toni will always be held to the standard set by Toni Cade Bambara. "Any dude who wants to hang with me can take my name [Bambara]," I remember hearing her say sometime around 1972.
[In the words of Ella Baker, another formidable black woman], Toni Cade Bambara was a "facilitator." She inspired a whole generation of people from all kinds of diasporas to do something, to take leadership, to, [as poet Nikki Finney said at Toni's memorial service] get a "plan." As a groping young writer, my experience of [this teacher, mentor, and beautiful star] Toni Cade Bambara, validates Finney's reminiscence. Around 1970 or '71, I attended a reading Toni did from the soon to be published Gorilla, My Love, when she was teaching at Livingston College (Rutgers University, 1969-'72). (Toni's article, "On the Issue of Roles" in The Black Woman had already moved me to feminism.) I was so taken by her performativeness, her fabulous ear for black urban East Coast language, her seriousness, and her side-splitting humor that I went up to her to ask her how she did it. But, of course, I couldn't appear so naive and needy. So, I asked a question...