Bourgeois Cancer vs. Revolutionary Love: A Taste of Power

Abstract

Now, while Nobel’s Toni Morrison writes famously on the opening lines of her novels, I’m not sure that hers can compare with the first words of Elaine Brown in A Taste of Power: “‘I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?’” (Brown 1992, 3). We’re told that eight years went into the composition of this book, a seriously well-written one on a “[B]lack woman-child in America” (ix). We hear Brown chant, “We are rough! We are tough! We are the girls who don’t take no stuff!,” in her early years on York Street, Philadelphia. We follow her on out to southern California, then Oakland, to hear her chant “Power to the People!,” in due course.