Many of Bambara’s most quoted—and often misunderstood—lines deal with the topic of revolution. Another highly decontextualized quote comes from Bambara’s introduction to the 1970 anthology The Black Woman, where she wrote that “revolution begins with the self, in the self.” This has been used to defang revolution, presenting it as individual wellness rather than as collective action. But Bambara also said: “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Taken together, these two quotes show revolution as a dialectic between self and the “oppressed people” to which one belongs. Revolution cannot be dependent on a single body. Making revolution irresistible means showing others what it might feel like to live in a postrevolutionary society where basic needs are met and no single person is sacrificed to the needs of their family or community.
For Bambara, this process began with the self—though, crucially, it didn’t end there. Nikky Finney recalls that Bambara gave the writers at Pamoja this advice: “Y’all spending too much time cleaning your house when you should be sitting at your desk.” Zoe Bambara and her mother have inherited her grandmother’s priorities. Zoe sleeps with pens and notepads, as well as pots and pans from eating hurried meals in bed. “The work comes first. […] There’s a lot of stuff that could be done,” she says. She views “community care as self-care.” These words and actions made me think of a scene in The Salt Eaters in which Bambara describes the role of community in healing an individual:
[S]ometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folk to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself.
For Black women trained in self-sacrifice, it is often easy to forget that your neighbors want you to be whole and will help you. Revolution and care, as conceived by Bambara, are a mutual font of energy flowing into and out of an individual.
