SOURCE: An interview with Toni Cade Bambara, in Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, Continuum, 1983, pp. 12-38.

In the following interview, Bambara discusses her writing philosophy and the ways in which being an African-American woman influences her work.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self. The individual, the basic revolutionary unit, must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard the next larger unit—the couple or pair, that jeopardize the still larger unit—the family or cell, that put the entire movement in peril.

—"On the Issue of Roles," from The Black Woman p. 109.

[claudia Tate]: What Has Happened to the Revolutionary Fervor of the Sixties?

[TONI CADE BAMBARA]: The energy of the seventies is very different from that of the previous decade. There's a different agenda and a different mode of...