Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women's Voices - Hardcover

Bagby, Rachel L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062514261 ISBN 13: 9780062514264

Publisher: Harper San Francisco, 1999

Synopsis

The author relates her life experiences to explore the connection between self-expression and personal power and calls on women to reclaim their voices and respect their passions

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Bagby is a writer, composer, attorney, ecofeminist, and vocal artist. She has toured with Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra and has released two recordings of original compositions: Reach Across the Lines and Full. She has collaborated with many poets and artists, including Ysaye Barnwell, Robert Bly, and Jane Hirshfield, and is featured in the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Dialogues with Madwomen. She runs her own production company, Outta the Box.

Reviews

The traumas at the heart of vocalist and performing artist Bagby's narrative of her spiritual journey in search of her true voice are real enough: race and gender discrimination, family alcoholism and drug addiction, rape, homelessness, miscarriage and spiritual bankruptcy. However, Bagby's elliptical style and the lack of specific details will leave readers wondering what exactly happened to her. In 1977, she entered Stanford Law School, "one of fifteen women and five Blacks in a class of 139" who were told they were "destined to rule the country if not the world." Shifting precipitously (using a technique she calls "fast-forward") to New Year's Eve 1981, Bagby tells of taking refuge in her parents' house. Even in a deliberately unconventional memoir like this one, the failure to make clear what happened between these two events is a major flaw. Society's gender conventions and her father's "sexism/chauvinism" become conflated with references to a rape and her dependencies on a white man and marijuana, which may or may not have led to her homelessness, which isn't clearly explained either. Along the way, Bagby married, but only in the last pages does she reveal that the partnership has lasted 15 years. Bagby devotes a significant portion of the book to the healing properties of music, singing and nature, as well as to passages of social commentary and lyrics, but her free-form prose lacks the logic of jazz. She characterizes her first attempt at improvisational singing in a master class with musician Bobby McFerrin as "lack[ing] an audible center... too fragmented to be satisfying"; the same can be said of this memoir. Author tour.-- an audible center... too fragmented to be satisfying"; the same can be said of this memoir. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A pain-filled autobiography by vocal artist, and composer Bagby. A former Stanford Law student, the author left school shortly before graduation to find herself. She met singer Bobby McFerrin at one of his concerts and then auditioned for his master class, recording her audition tape on an answering machine because she had no studio access or equipment. Through McFerrin, Bagby began singing with a women's group called Voicestra, which continues to sustain her both professionally and personally. She interweaves her autobiographical text with lyrics and music from her own compositions, adding flavor to an intensely personal story. Her music emerges from the childhood traumas of dealing with an alcoholic and heroin-addicted father, charming one moment and violent the next; of always playing second fiddle to her musically gifted brother, Nelson; of feeling second-best because she was a daughter and not a son; and of facing racism in educational institutions. As an adult, Bagby has also experienced her share of difficulties. At 25, after leaving law school, she lived on the streets for a month, smoking marijuana every day. When she pulled herself together enough to enroll in an ``intentional community,'' she was raped on her first night there by a white man. Recovering from that rape has been a difficult process, with more recent heartaches (such as the miscarriage of a longed-for child and her husband's affair with a white woman) reopening old wounds. Through it all, Bagby tries affirm the female worth, especially the power of daughters, seeking out old stories which show daughters to be of divine lineage. She encourages other women to sing and scream out their own stories, and she offers a clear role model for the refusal to be silent. Raw and very moving, though its terminology (``the red times of my menstrual cycle,'' etc.) can be a bit trendy. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper San Francisco
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062514261
• ISBN 13: 9780062514264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288