The Threshing Floor
Barbara Burford
These stories, including the novella, examine the lives of British Black women – young, middle-aged and elderly, middle and underclass. Although the language and structure of the stories are non-experimental, Burford provides variety within the context of the conventional short story. T wo of the stories evoke the magical realism of Toni Morrison, and one story, ‘A Time for Every Purpose,’ is feminist science fiction. Rarely in the stories does Burford state the specific African or Caribbean background of the individual women; rather, she places them firmly as Black Londoners and rightful citizens of that grey European capitol. In the first story of the volume, ‘Dreaming the Sky Down,’ Donna, a young Black girl having trouble with her racist teacher Miss Howe, escapes the inequalities of her life by flying – first around her room and later out into the London night. The structure of the story compels us to reject disbelief and accept Donna’s flying as real.
Certainly, the act of flying as a means of escaping oppression is well documented in African diaspora folklore and literature; yet, although Donna may in fact be informed by these ancestors who escaped slavery by flying on their own wings, she clearly sees herself solely within the context of her British environment. When Miss Howe asks Donna her country, she answers, ‘Battersea,’ and later while she is flying over London, she responds more vehemently to the wind: ‘Not from some strange foreign place, Miss Howe! Battersea, Miss Howe!’ (12).
In only one story, ‘Miss Jessie,’ is the protagonist identified as of specific African descent; she is a Jamaican who sacrifices young European men in the manner of African women warriors who dispensed with the colonizers. In another story, ‘Coming of Age,’ an elderly woman museum attendant relates to her broad African heritage while looking at a sculpture of a ‘Queen Mother.’ As she reads the sign of the donated artifacts, she thinks: ‘They have no shame, these people. They build cathedrals to display the things they have stolen. . . . Stolen out of Africa. As her ancestors had been’ (56-57). If the ironical title of this old woman’s political comprehension of the colonizers’ arrogance also illustrates growth in her identification as a person of African descent, the term ‘coming of age’ can be used for a different kind of growth in this collection- that of a lesbian consciousness and woman-identified bonding. Two stories and the novella directly and indirectly reflect this lesbian perspective.
The story ‘He Said’ concerns a young woman impregnated by an irresponsible man. She is befriended by another woman who gets her through the desertion and the birth of the child. A more pointed story about women’s friendship, ‘The Pinstripe Summer,’ examines a timid, middle-aged woman who learns to appreciate beauty in life and to gain courage through her friendship with a younger, possibly lesbian woman. Although neither of these two works on first reading would be considered lesbian, in light of the novella and strong woman-identified focus of the stories, I think that a lesbian perspective adds to their understanding.
The only work in the collection which is overtly lesbian is, in fact, the most fully developed of the stories – the novella, ‘The Threshing Floor.’ The two stories mentioned above may serve to reinforce the lesbian consciousness so evident in the novella. This title story is about the end of an interracial relationship between two women artists – ending because the white writer, the poet Jenny, has just died of cancer.
The voice in the novella is Hannah’s, a glass sculptor and Black woman who tries to center herself through her memories, her work, and her new relationship with a Black woman artist, Marah. The question of whether one should be lesbian or have interracial relationships is never raised, although the implicit racism and homophobia in the society are acknowledged and then ignored. Rather, the novella focuses on interpersonal relations, the human suffering of having a lover die of a disease as debilitating as cancer, and the role of women as artists. The ‘threshing floor’ refers to the place of work – where one beats out the creative object whether through fingers on a typewriter or fire on glass. As Hannah returns to the studio after months of grieving, she is afraid her grief may have taken away her power to create:
[She was] most of all in real fear that when she,
Hannah, stood on her Threshing Floor later this
morning she would not able to tap the deep grief-
silted wellspring of her creativity. Oh, she would
make something, some object, even a beautiful
one, she was after all an extremely skilled glass-
worker. But today, she needed to touch that
almost sexual, certainly erotic, huge welling
strongness at her core. (142)
In this passage, we can see the relationship of one’s sexuality to one’s art as well as the strength of Burford’s writing. When writing about the special act of creativity or the unique bonding between women who love each other, Burford stretches her words to enclose us in the moment. The novella is informed by woman-identified bonding, by having ‘woman’ at its center.
Burford may do for readers not comfortable with or unknowledgeable about same-sex love what Jenny does for Hannah when they first meet: ‘Jenny had been able … to show her that the expression of love between two women could encompass not just passion, but compassion and comfort’ (162). The strength of women’s love and friendship, in spite of the cattiness exhibited by some of the women in the studio, adds to the depth of the novella, yet these relationships may in fact be almost too perfect. The lack of conflict in Hannah’s relationship both with Jenny and then with Marah- and how quickly and easily she finds Marah – contributes to a feeling that the plot is somehow contrived. The novella, for all its powerful overflow of feelings, lacks the crispness of a story like ‘The Pinstripe Summer.’
There is an unevenness about the collection as a whole which reflects some of the problems in the novella. The science fiction story, ‘A Time for Every Purpose,’ which is intriguing with its use of ‘motherstories’ (66), seems out of place in the volume. And readers involved with diaspora studies may find the lack of cultural identity of the Black characters dismaying. Certainly there will be differences as well as similarities in the way an African or Afro-Caribbean woman deals with her life in the colonial capitol. Still, these are minor complaints with a first volume of such eloquently written stories. In 1929, Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, spoke about the climate in which women writers had to function within patriarchal British existence. Even in 1987, how many more restrictions are placed on a writer who is excluded not only by race and sex but also by sexual preference! Within that framework, this volume is miraculous, even though, fortunately, this kind of miracle happens more and more. Barbara Burford is an important new writer. She places the strong voice of the Black woman within the context of British literature and adds to the growing canon of lesbian literature of the African diaspora. ~ Gay Wilentz, Obsidian II, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 105-108
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Details
| ISBN | 9780907179481 |
| Genre | Black Interest; Fiction; Short Story Collection (Single Author) |
| Publication Date | Jun-86 |
| Publisher | Sheba Feminist Press |
| Format | Trade Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 214 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Good |
| Subject | Fiction; Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Women, Black |
| BookID | 13261 |
