When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost---My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist
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by Joan Morgan

Format: Hardcover, 240pp.
ISBN: 0684822628
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade
Pub. Date: February  1999

Morgan, a contributing writer at Essence and former contributor to the Village Voice, brings iconoclastic, often vituperative gusto to 10 previously unpublished essays on feminism, motherhood and the "endangered black male." Morgan's lingua franca is hip-hop music, which she calls "one of few forums in which young black men are allowed to express their pain," and is also the cultural arena in which she undertakes to carve a place for herself as a feminist. In her take-no-prisoners redefinition of "the f-word" (feminism), she reviles black female intellectuals who "had little to do with everyday life" and "butch-cut anti-babes... who use made-up words," and admits there are "things [she] kinda digs about patriarchy." In the essay "babymother," Morgan considers the feminist dilemma of career versus motherhood, ending with a defense of male "abortion" through which men "abdicate" parental rights when pregnant women refuse to have abortions or put children up for adoption. The title refers to women who "effectively work their erotic power," in a play on Malcolm X's "chickens come home to roost" speech (which signaled his break with the Nation of Islam and the creation of his Muslim mission in the U.S.) that simultaneously fractures the meaning of Audre Lorde's essay on women's rightful claim to "erotic power." Morgan concludes that "trickin'" (rendered as a kind of lighthearted prostitution) is "prevalent across class lines" and shows how "deeply wedded money, sex, and power are to our notions of male and female identity." Though she claims to "explore the world of the modern black woman from a variety of viewpoints," Morgan comes off as a self-consciously styled hip-hop provocateuse.
~Publishers Weekly

When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost is a decidedly intimate look into the life of the modern black woman: a complex world where feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men; where women who treasure their independence often prefer men who pick up the tab; where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds black women, who long for marriage, that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than 40 percent of the African-American population; and where black women are forced to make sense of a world where "truth is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of gray." Morgan ushers in a voice that, like hiphop - the cultural movement that defines her generation - samples and layers many voices, and injects its sensibilities into the old and flips it into something new, provocative, and powerful.
~Simon & Schuster