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The Kin of Ata - An Interview with Dorothy Bryant
RECENTLY WHEN THE EDITORS of Esquire magazine asked the men honored in "Esquire Register" to select a required reading list for President Bush, one of the books chosen was Dorothy Bryant's feminist novel, The Kin of Ata Are Watching You, Bryant's utopian fantasy has had an underground following in the Bay Area since its publication in 1971. Such high praise for her book in an exclusive men's magazine is ironically apt, since Bryant's narrator is a sensationalist white male writer, whose obsession with drugs and sex has led him to murder his girlfriend before discovering relationship to one another as well as to the earth. They live a simple agricultural existence, value dreams rather than possessions, and communicate intuitively resistant narrator is brought around to ata's values through the agency of a black woman whom he first comes to recognize for her extraordinary human and visionary qualities and finally to live in a way he has been incapable of before.
Dorothy Bryant has always believed strongly in the necessity to communicating her vision. In 1971, after an agent refused to show Ata to a publisher, Bryant published it herself. She gave the first four hundred copies, away, mostly to high schools, where it became a favorite in the classrooms. Eventually, in 1976, a copy came to the attention of Anne Rush at Moonbooks, a local house co-publishing with Random House, and Random House took the book on.
In 1979, I interviewed Bryant for the Oakland Tribune, after the publication of her novel Prisoners, and I was fascinated by her skill in depicting the complicated relations between a white housewife and a black prisoner. Since then I'd become a fiction writer myself and was having trouble...