| Title | : | The Salt Eaters |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0704338823 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780704338821 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 295 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1980 |
| Awards | : | American Book Award (1981) |
The Salt Eaters Reviews
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When I was younger, my mother’s bookshelf was my library. It was home to many novels that are central to Black woman’s literature. I could grasp plots that featured grown-up experiences, but much of the subtext and external references escaped me. This didn’t stop me from voraciously consuming everything I could get my hands on for I was too young to know the limits of my comprehension. There was one novel, though, that even the obtuseness of youth failed to carry me through.
There was not much of Toni Cade Bambara’s impenetrable novel The Salt Eaters that I could comprehend. After I graduated from my mother’s bookshelf, I went to Spelman College, where I was assigned other books central to Black woman’s literature. The Salt Eaters was referenced in my classes, but never assigned. Years later, Bambara’s American Book Award-winning work was selected for my book club. I was threatened by the mere mention of it, but deep down, I relished the idea of grappling with this enigmatic and illusive narrative.
When I started to read, I recognized the book’s merits: intriguing and engaging language; colorful, humorous, and perceptive characterization; a widely ranging fountain of references, which romp through Afrosyncretic religions, scientific concepts, Greek gods, activist culture, Southern life, and more, leaving no stone unturned. But within twenty pages, I was reacquainted with The Salt Eaters’challenges.
The story structure is completely nontraditional. It is a whirlwind of memory, stream of consciousness, internal reflections, flashbacks and social commentary. The front story is supremely simple: over the course of the novel’s entire arc, a woman who has tried to commit suicide sits on a stool in an infirmary while a nontraditional healer tries to heal her. From there the narrative accepts no limits. We journey through the main character’s life (both past and present). Through the healer’s internal conversation, we meet a spirit woman who resides in the healer’s head. The main character’s husband gives us new perspective on the main character and introduces us to a local arts center along with its characters and coalitions. We bounce along with the thoughts and reflections of travellers, pausing to jump into their bus driver’s head where the spirit of his dead friend resides. The point of view is omnivorous, featuring many, many more characters than can be absorbed with ease.
Here is a novel that demonstrates complete disdain for the temporal. This is not due to an inability on Bambara’s part to frame a narrative—none of her other works follow this nontraditional structure. She insists on communicating one of the core tenants of the novel—that everything is linked to the larger whole and nothing exists without everything else—through the reader’s experience. There is no time or space that enjoys primacy; there is no privileging of the “now.” In the world of The Salt Eaters,nothing and no one can be understood without unraveling several strands of history and memory—strands that, when touched, further unravel, splicing into numerous directions so that you are left scrambling to keep pace with the vastly diverging and multiplying points of view that emerge from the fleet imaginings of Bambara’s pen.
Read the rest here:
http://kiiniibura.com/2013/06/07/vol-... -
i learned what it really means to be whole, spiritually and emotionally. it helped me transition to a place beyond survival, the choice to live as a (r)evolutionary in full command of my path and purpose.
if you're interested, be forewarned, it reads like a poem in that the story is multi-dimensional, metaphysical and symbolically complex.
i intend to re-read. -
"Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
This novel is, at the same time, a very easy and a very challenging read. The stream-of-consciousness style of writing means that you can sort of meander along with the author as she dips in and out of different characters' heads, and ideally you'll be able to just sit back and sink into the prose like it's a bath. But the writing style also means that if you're looking for the usual hallmarks of a novel, like a protagonist/antagonist, or even a beginning-middle-end plotline, you're going to be frustrated.
Bambara gives us the closest thing we have to a protagonist in Velma, who is in the hospital of a small Southern town after attempting suicide. Spiritual healer Minnie (who is, herself, guided by her own deceased teacher) is brought in to heal Velma. Bambara takes us into the minds of not only Velma and Minnie and their immediate circle, but a wide range of characters whose lives are all closely orbiting around each other. The stream-of-consciousness style is done so well that as I read, I could almost imagine that all of the action of this book takes place during Velma's healing - that in terms of linear time, the story only lasts thirty minutes.
This is one of those novels where you're not going to get everything on the first read, and you'll either be okay with this, or not. I was mostly in the former camp, although I'll admit that the ending of this story remains frustratingly out of my grasp. I get the sense that something really important happened, but it feels almost like it occurred between the lines of actual text, and I missed it.
This one definitely goes on the "to re-read sooner rather than later" pile.
(After my book club finished this book, one of the members recommended
this Medium article for additional reading, because it discusses the book specifically through the lens of pandemic reading. It's worth the read, especially if my meandering review didn't really sell you on Bambara's novel as well as I'd like it to!) -
Rating: 3.75* of five
Wonderful prose, not so much on the storytelling.
I haven't changed my mind on that one, either.
The Book Report: Velma is a healer's worst nightmare: a failed suicide depressed by life and Life. Minnie and Old Wife, who is Minnie's spirit guide, work to heal Velma's wounds both inner and outer, in the course of this novel.
And that, mes amis, is it.
My Review: Which is kinda the problem. It makes this gorgeous incantation of a tale into a pretty tough swallow. Interiority can be overdone. Bambara's enraged response to the world of 1980 (when this wa first published) was perfectly justified, as she saw coming the horrors we presently live through in the never subtle, never hidden class warfare counterattack begun after Nixon's crash and burn. Velma is a computer programmer, a telling detail that Bambara clearly wants to remain a detail, who can't cope with the workload...prescient much?...and whose entire world centers around *yawn* an unworthy man *cue 21st-century Serious Lady Lit music* so she loses her inner Old Wife just like Minnie did.
Minnie is a daughter of privilege, a former Bible college attendee, and now a root woman who talks to haints. I love Minnie and Old Wife with a passion! They are the kind of ladies I want to live next door to, so I can go over with a plate of blondies and a bottle of bourbon and talk about Life to them.
But loving them, and loving the loooooooooooooong internal monologues that Minnie and Old Wife share as they work to heal dull little Velma, does not make this book a novel. In French, it would be called a récit: a simple internal narrative, usually in past tense, with one PoV. It's an excellent récit, and a ~meh~ novel.
Recommended for language lovers, Southerners, and white people wondering what the fuss about African American literature is. -
Very good indeed. Belongs on a shelf with other similar complex, ambitious authors: Gayl Jones, Ishmael Reed, Leon Forrest etc
Good overview from Oxford reference copied below, which tells you all you need to know:
"Toni Cade Bambara's important multilayered novel The Salt Eaters (1980) is set in the community of Claybourne, Georgia, during the late 1970s. The novel centers on the attempted suicide and healing of the main character, Velma Henry, as she comes to grips with the fragmentation, rage, and self-will that have driven her in the past. In the Southwest Community Infirmary, after her wounds are bandaged, Velma sits with the fabled healer, Minnie Ransom, surrounded by a circle of twelve spiritual adepts (The Master's Mind); a group of nervous medical students; the clinic physician, Dr. Julius Meadows; and an assortment of casually interested clinic patients. Also surrounding Velma and Minnie, beyond the clinic itself, are a dazzling constellation of characters, institutions, and situations: Fred Holt, the bus driver nearing retirement and grieving the death of his friend, Porter; Velma's husband, Obie, who heads the also fragmented Academy of the Seven Arts; the Seven Sisters performing arts group who travel toward Claybourne for the annual Mardi Gras festival.
Boundaries of time and space, imagination and reality are frequently blurred, as when Minnie Ransom and her spirit guide, Old Wife, freely commune throughout Velma's healing and even “travel” to a chapel for prayer. Jazz-inflected rhythms, lyrical language, flashbacks, digressions, and a panoply of characters and subplots create a novel that many reviewers initially found difficult—but ultimately worthwhile— to read. Gloria Hull, calling the novel “daringly brilliant,” describes its structure as one of widening circles, and provides a diagram of how those many circles and characters connect. While the novel was enthusiastically received, some felt that its strength—its panoramic sweeps and encompassing themes— eclipsed character development, leaving readers little connection with individual characters.
All of the main characters are related in some way to Velma, whose fractured psyche serves as a trope for the splinterings and fractures of the community, where fundamental values (like connections with the best of people's traditions and attention to spiritual well-being) have been left behind in the wake of the civil rights movement. Like other African American women's novels of the 1970s and 1980s, The Salt Eaters deals with the gender oppression that African American women experienced before, during, and after civil rights. Minnie Ransom repeatedly asks Velma if she is ready for the “weight” of being well, a question the novel implicitly directs to the entire community.
The Salt Eaters integrates African and Afro-Caribbean spiritual and healing traditions with those from Western religion and other spiritual practices. The novel includes references to prayer, tarot, cowrie shells, herbal and folk medicines, loa, rootwork, and obeah, among others. Under Minnie's guiding hand, Velma will move backward in time to relive her fear and rage, as well as to recover lost wisdom and rooted-ness. Illness, however, becomes a matter of community as well as individual healing; as Velma returns to health, she is also restored to a community badly in need of its own healing. The novel ends apocalyptically, with the culmination of preparations for a local Mardi Gras festival and a cataclysmic storm that signals changes in the characters who need them the most, including Velma, who rises from the stool as though from a “burst cocoon.” -
McElroy fan? Then this book is for you, chum - a BURIED classic that Uncle Joe would GoldStar in all of its Doppler shifting brilliance. Experimental Fiction to great success.
The last 30 pages or so, when I knew it was ending, I thought back to "Women and Men" and how excited I was when I still had 500 pages to go. I only wish this work was longer. -
This book was one of the first that extended its hand to me and said, see, you can map the real story on the page and - that mix of experience and ideas? It's true. One of the pivotal writers for me who acknowledges and applies her talent to the complexity of consciousness, being a woman and telling a good story.
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When I was assigned this book for one of my classes, the professor informed us that it was one of the most challenging books in contemporary Literature. She herself had to read it nine times to truly understand it.
With that said, this is the first book I ever read that as soon as I finished I immediately wanted to start over and experience it all over again. While the plot takes place over the course of 20 minutes, it takes the reader from this world to the next one through the eyes of many characters both spiritual and physical.
It centers around the spiritual healing of Velma Henry, who has attempted suicide. Through flashbacks to her earlier life, those of her fellow community member,s and conversations between spirits and people with tons of references to cosmology, mythology, and the Bible this story showcases the brokenness of the black community post-Civil Rights. Tiny threads of plot slowly weave themselves together under at the end you feel like you are completely entrenched in a whirlwind of magic and political frustration which ultimately culminates in Velma's spiritual transformation that brings together her fragmented community into a whole entity rooted in Afrocentric thought.
Not a book for everyone, and it's certainly hard to read without having the assistance of a classroom setting and academic criticism, but GOD DAMN was I moved. -
I hadn't read this book for something like twenty years and it still holds up. Among the novelists associated with the emergence of black women's fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, Bambara hasn't received the same attention as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker or Gloria Naylor, but The Salt Eaters is just flat a better book than all but the best of Morrison. Bambara engages the tension between the political and spiritual currents of resistance during the 1970s, taking a serious look at the legacy (for better and worse) of Black Power and its complicated transition into the less focused and less coherent countercultures that emerged from it. While some of the politics have dated, her vision of healing is compelling and profound, grounded in West African cultural traditions. (If you don't know anything about the West African notions of ancestors and elders, or the spiritual presnece of the "loa," it might be worth while to google them up before you plunge in.) The key question is posed on the first page: "Are you sure you want to be well?" That's the issue the holds this complicated, compelling book together.
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I struggled through this book. The duration of this book is about a healing. Velma has been running from a gift her whole life and the suicide attempt is her effort to avoid the inevitable. What I do not get is the entire book as a whole. It is disjointed. Some authors are good at writing books that are fractured but some how come together perfectly by the last line. When this novel ended I was dumbfounded and unreleived. Was Bambara tired of writing because she could not pull it together? or Perhaps I, the reader, did not bring enough context to the text. Who knows? I do know that I was not satisfied with having read this book.
My burning question--what is up with Doc Serge? Is he really contemplating pimping out Velma as she is trying to heal? I guess that is what I get for reading a book that includes the thoughts and doings of characters who do not necessarily help further the plot or subplots.
I don't know. This book was strange to me. -
I had to come back to this one because my first attempt to read it stalled in confusion over the opening scene of a healer attending to a patient while thinking about other things--made it confusing when you didn't know all these people she was talking about. Persevere, though, for the rest of the novel.
Set in a small southern town, this is about a community of black folks and their search for faith healing through salt. Seemingly, but I think the whole story, culminating in a parade/celebration gone crazy, is allegory for the sixties and early seventies when radical change was a seeming inevitability. Many of the townspeople are like the artist/activists of that period with their hope up and expectations high. The novel, I think, tells us how it all failed, ultimately, but maybe I'm reading it too cynically. -
Whew, where to start?
I learned the meaning or true healing when I read this book (the damn second time). Reading this text is like walking through mud, it's so difficult but it's worth it. Take the plunge into The Salt Eaters.
The book addresses the "language barrier" between healers and revolutionaries (essential for Black organizing) as well as the backwardness of the medical arts and its corruption. Western medicine has colonized spaces of spiritual health and further disrupted what we see as healthy versus unhealthy. We don't see wellness and holistic health as nothing more than biological (and sometimes mental). Even worse, we don't frame in the context of an occupied people. This book was the basis of a whole mode of sight for me.
"Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living" -
So like...I see I am not the only one who will have to dance with this book a second time to get the rhythm down. I read this book because it has been mentioned by so many black authors I've read and I very much wanted to get even some semblance out of it that aligned with their magnificent descriptions. DID NOT HAPPEN. And I mean...a sista TRIED. Wasn't meant to be this time around. It is powerful, but is told in a way that I took a breath and attempted to approach as a jigsaw puzzle. Turned out to be a Rubik's cube and I was not ready. I'ma have to let this one go and re-read all the way through at another time. I do not concede defeat, but cannot claim victory.
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7/8/12: OK, I'ma have to put this one back on the shelf for a while. It's too complex for my bar prepping brain to handle right now. *sigh*
6/27/12: "...wholeness is no trifling matter."
(Ten pages in and I'm happy I started reading this book just for that line.) -
I largely blame myself for this but I have very little clue what was going on with this book. So many characters and twisting storylines and I was just so lost.
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I was about twenty pages in and still had no idea what was going on. I feel like this really isn't for me, even though I want to know Bambara's work, and it would probably be best if I read it in a class.
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This disorienting but vivid novel deserves another read before I write this review. The book's non-linear, poetic style is a deliberate (and clever) way to reflect the protagonist's own healing, which itself involves a meandering backtracking in time before she can deal with the present (and future).
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Really difficult to follow at times, but some beautiful prose.
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Absolutely love this author's lyrical use of language and her powerful voice. A must read.
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A story about healing the spirit, the soul, and the mind.
The writing as fluid and elusive as faith.
Elements of Faulkner
"Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so's you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you're well.” -
Major Field Prep: 79/133
"Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" This opening line, in the voice of healer Minnie Ransom, spoken to the protagonist Velma, sets up the major themes of the novel. The questions of wellness, as an individual, a community, a nation, a world, drives the intersecting plotlines ever towards the center of Minnie and Velma on a healing journey. Wellness, then, is not a randomly acquired state but rather requires work and attention. It is easier to dwell in unwellness, to play in the mud. This experimental novel told from multiple points of view and in multiple dimensions does not resolve itself. In the end, Velma rises as though from a cocoon, marking a beginning to a new world order that is never fully articulated. Stepping back from character narrations, an omniscient third person distanced narrator begins to comment from the future to tell us how the characters will remember this day, this moment, this beginning. Where they are now is unclear. These veterans of the golden age of social protest and activism are spread thin in the age of late capitalism and postmodernism. The fragmentation of identity and the concern with modern technology (nuclear, primarily) make this one of the most recognizably postmodern texts I've read thus far. However, the potential depth of spirit, interpersonal connections, and drive toward a community fostered on oral and verbal interactions questions whether the postmodern framework is suitable for AfAm lit. -
Awfully good book and quite troubling. 1980.
In intro to Those Bones, she mentions finishing up The Salt Eaters while she was researching for Those Bones.
The two books are similar in one sense at least, that I find I can't quite follow. Happenings follow each other without clear boundaries so I am often not sure whether it is supposed to have happened the same day or weeks or years later. It's OK, real life isn't clear either.
In both books I struggle to understand what people are saying, or at least I very often have the suspicion that I am missing indirect references or phrases that probably have a deeper meaning unknown to me. Well, why should this not be the case, after all I have never been in Georgia, hardly know anyone who comes from the South at all, have very little experience in any African American setting, don't know much about the political and social movements the main characters in these books are active in.
Bambara intersperses heavy talk with everyday chit-chat, just like it would be in real life; this also keeps the story from becoming overly burdensome. Because the emotions and happenings are really quite intense, even overwhelming.
The book is certainly outside my usual range and opens a window on a lot of stuff new to me. -
I don't even know where to start...
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I think Toni Cade Bambara is a wonderfully evocative writer, but her rich, elaborate, and highly visual free-flowing passages are most easily digested as short stories. The length makes it a significantly more involved read. Over the course of a novel like the epic "Those Bones Are Not My Child" (which the opinions of this review essentially apply to as well) or this significantly shorter one, there are moments of intense pathos and beauty, but it's often hard to follow the connections between them. The character number is also important: in short stories focusing usually around a person or a tight knit group, it's not too hard to follow who's being talked about even when the person is only attached to their name once, whereas in a novel with a town's worth of people, especially when the reading is broken up over a few days, it's not so easy to remember who's who and the names just keeping getting thrown out there. Basically, I don't hate her novels, it just takes a lot of effort to process them and I feel like I reading through them once makes it impossible to grasp everything.
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I stan for her non-fiction writing but this novel was H-A-R-D HARD to get through. I don't even know which character was which. Damn, Toni.
Two stars because I did like all the mentions of African spirituality. -
After two tries, I'm abandoning this book. Perhaps if I'd gotten farther along I'd enjoy the nonlinear storytelling.
