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

Rachel L. Bagby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

An extraordinary vocal artist, storyteller, and performer, Rachel Bagby has something to say. She calls on mothers, daughters, and sisters everywhere to reclaim their own voices by living "an out-loud devotion to freedom"--singing, whispering, speaking--and to respect their essential passions along the way. Deeply rooted in her own life story, Divine Daughters is about the power of speech, the power of silence, the power of sound, and the power of storytelling.

In this unique and refreshing narrative, Rachel Bagby offers a powerful testament to the connection between self-expression, personal power, and restorative community. Divine Daughters reveals the relationship between the discovery and recovery of one's peerless voice and the experience of daughters as divine. Drawing on the experiences of her own tumultuous life-including creative fervor, rape, homelessness, and then critical success-Bagby chronicles the reclamation of both her voice and her passion and challenges us to do the same. With poetic lyricism and a great gift for storytelling, Bagby urges us to reap the empowering benefits that come from tapping into life's wellspring of sound and song.

Lyrically told, Bagby's story is at times painfully honest about her own struggles to find her true voice in relationship with "Life Itself." She reveals the power of voice with stories about courage and shame, forgiveness, infidelity, equality, and ecology. She asks us to articulate compassion every day and to amplify the daughterly divinity found in spiritual texts, legend, folktale, custom, and creation stories. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of nurturing our daughters's voices and charges women everywhere to create restorative communities that "consistently give voice to Life."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Kirkus Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper San Francisco; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062514261
• ISBN-13: 978-0062514264
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,429,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Divine Daughters - So Much More than Bagby's Story, June 9, 2000

By 

cynthia sedgwick (Charlottesville, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women's Voices (Hardcover)

I understand Rachel's larger message about the divinity of daughters, all daughters, and the plight of all daughters. To tell her story, she both had to and chose to use her self--and all the life experiences of her self--as empirical evidence.

Her empirical evidence is compelling, profound, and sort of "fetching"; it's wrapped in intimacy, truth, and simplicity. There is something so genuine about it, and even now. . .so amazingly innocent. These things make it impossible not to be drawn deeply to her, to her story. Perhaps my greater truth is that her writing makes me reflect first on my own life in a deeply penetrating way, but soon after, I find I am filled with empathic connections to her life.

The lucky ones will be able to move beyond this place (her memoirs), and embrace the essence of her empirical data to be brought to a new place of understanding about the divinity of women. This is a place larger than her academic accomplishments, childhood family dynamics, sexual assault, life on the streets, or her husband's infidelity.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, not every woman (or man) is going to get that, and it is truly bittersweet because to present her empirical evidence any differently would be to take away from the significance of the data that supports her thesis.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Collecting Our Ancestral Anthems, April 28, 2000

By 

a. briddell (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women's Voices (Hardcover)

It may be called Divine Daughters, but divine sons will also find themselves relating to the meat of what Rachel Bagby has to sing and this book does read like a song. Each chapter is preluded with a musical notation of the author's original music; each chapter peppered with lyrics and poems, pertinent and practical. It doesn't stop there, the poetry leaps into the prose and you only wonder - where's the live music? After reading Divine Daughters, I feel compelled to take advantage of Mother's and Father's Day, heck even phone calls home as opportunities to collect the family stories, the bone and marrow of my upbringing. As a baby boomer with aging parents, I am motivated by this book to get my act in gear, to fast forward the healing of the human species. And that starts right here with myself. And my family. This book is a compassionate guide to that wholing process.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mountain Speaks, January 20, 2000

By 

Rebecca S. Blanton (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women's Voices (Hardcover)

In a woman's life different things speak to her, her mother, her own daughter, a book or an experience. But sometimes nature speaks. I liked the way Rachel describes how her mountain called her home, called her out of her pain and into the bossom of the mountain and its wisdom. Women journey painful journeys and often focus on the pain and not the process. Rachel does both. Rachel sings her journey, journals and whispers and laughs and cries her journey. She recognizes the path to soul in the eyes of other women, in the eyes of a young girl dancing to the call of her own mountain mother. Rachel shows us we can leave and come home again, but only as different women. It is not the typical biography. She writes in song and poetry. She writes and sings herself and her personality in telling her story. You can't stay in your head to understand this book. The reader has to be willing to let go and listen to the voices of their own past and possibly their own pains. Good enough for a second and third read and for a reference. Quotable. I'm a writer and I really liked this book!