'Respect' Due to Sister Baring Her Soul

BOOK No Disrespect

by Sister Souljah

Times Books, 360 page, $23.00

Sister Souljah's voice is loud, vibrant and swaggering in its self-confidence. In her autobiographical first book, No Disrespect, she declares, instructs and makes no excuses for where she has been and who she is. Beginning with her childhood in the projects, she sketches her life, keeping the "essence as true as human memory will permit."

Souljah's story is told through her interactions with seven people: Mother, Nathan, Nikki, Joseph, Mona, Chance and Derek.

No Disrespect complicates the public perception painted by then-Presidential-nominee Bill Clinton and the media of the woman who suggested that "Blacks take a day off from killing each other and kill whites." Souljah uses the book to reclaim and define her context, one we rarely see up close--what life looks and feels and smells like from inside the concrete buildings of public housing projects, even once those buildings have been physically left behind.

She dedicates the book to the ghetto girl, "learning as she goes through each experience, her life a collage of mistakes, scars, and smiles...She puts a Band-Aid over the broken pieces of her heart, puts Revlon on everything else, and faces the world like perfume on shit with a fake smile and a false sense of security." Souljah envisions herself as a big sister, offering the guidance she asserts is so lacking for today's inner-city youth. Although occasionally didactic--most notably in the book's conclusion "Listen Up! (Straighten It Out)"--Souljah's passionate delivery and obvious identification with her stated audience save her from condescension.

In keeping with an African-American literary tradition of "writing oneself into being," Souljah articulates her individual experience in opposition to and as part of a collective Black experience. Branded by the culture of distrust and mental devastation of the projects, Souljah takes us with her to an integrated suburb, on to college, into public service, and to the eventual production of her album, 360 Degrees of Power.

Each of the characters in No Disrespect is featured in a chapter. They are all functional in their roles as exemplars of the problems facing the black community. Souljah's mother's strength and spirit are sapped by a demeaning welfare system. Her roommate, Mona, is revealed to be a lesbian, opening up a veiled political discussion of female homosexuality in the Black community. While each of these character types is familiar, included in the story for political reasons, Souljah reveals just enough of their thoughts and actions to make them human.

But her real story is not in the morals these sketches imply, but in how Souljah's interactions with her characters complete and complicate image she seeks to project. Souljah reveals herself in the standards she holds them to, how she confronts their failings, and what her attitudes towards them say about her.

As in her politicized music, there is little room in No Disrespect for human frailty and indecision in her vision of herself. Souljah touches self-consciously on many of the social, political and psychological issues that keep Oprah and Ricky on top in the ratings. She is brutal and exacting in her account of man-sharing; forgiving and indulgent of the friend who collects abortion money from her stable of men to fund a shopping spree; passionate in her love of Nathan, her "strong Black man," but callous in her dismissal of him when imperfection challenges his masculinity. Souljah is overly political, impassioned, and tends to shout.

Yet, amidst the noise, there are moments of quiet. In sharp contrast to this head-strong, full-lipped, thick-thighed woman, Souljah is at times detached and even clinical. Her father is divorced from her life in a few sentences. Disappointments are mentioned and dismissed. Intentional or not, these silences give full expression to the distrust, pain and frustration behind her attitude and hand-on-hip stance.

Souljah's prose is simple and straight-forward, deceptively so. Her staunch and unchanging opinions, particularly regarding her singular and romanticized vision of race, read like the ghetto girl's "perfume" and "fake smiles." The book's most severe limitation is that it admits no evolution of thought, and never confesses to any wrong answers.

Though we have met each of her characters before, Sister Souljah's No Disrespect offers a lens to the rhythms and realities of young Black urban life, making her characters believable and impossible to dismiss, even when they aren't pretty to look at.