Former professor, activist speaks at PSU

Cherry Muhanji, writer, teacher and speaker, stood at the entrance of the Multicultural Center Thursday afternoon, gathering boisterous hugs from passing students and professors as they streamed in to listen to her talk about the pioneering blues women of the 1920s.

Muhanji’s appearance was as much about students reconnecting with a beloved teacher as her topic at hand.

Students and fellow professors packed the room to hear her perspective and insights about famous blues women, who have transcended many of the barriers of their time, by speaking out against racial disparities and supporting themselves financially. Blues men, on the other hand, did not achieve similar notoriety until the ’30s.

Among the students in the audience was sophomore student Tiffany Bigham, 20, who took Muhanji’s Freshman Inquiry class last year. Muhanji returned to Iowa City in June 2006, after five years as an assistant professor, to work on a novel.

“Cherry can touch people in a way that is really special,” Bigham said of Muhanji’s teaching style and personality.

“If it wasn’t for Cherry, I wouldn’t still be in school,” added Deidra McDowell, another sophomore, who was in the same class.

Students agreed that under Muhanji’s guidance, they were able to discuss sex, race and gender in ways that changed their lives.

“Portland doesn’t want to talk about race,” Muhanji said in an interview on Wednesday. Muhanji, who identifies as a lesbian, said teaching a University Studies class allowed her to bring up race, sex and gender–subjects that students might have felt uncomfortable discussing–because of the interdisciplinary approach to the curriculum.

“I’m a facilitator,” she said. “I tried to teach students at PSU the way that I wanted to be taught.”

Muhanji did not begin her undergraduate studies until she was 46, after her three sons were grown. Growing up in segregated Detroit in the ’60s, before the civil rights movement, she said that college was the last thing that was expected of her.

“I wasn’t supposed to go to college,” Muhanji said. “But I always wanted to be a writer, so that’s what I did. I did what my background said I couldn’t do, and I had fun doing it.”

In her talk on Thursday, Muhanji referred to her upbringing, crediting the strong, opinionated women in the black community who were her role models. These women, she said, were successors of the same tradition that brought the blues women in the ’20s to fame.

These women were leaders in their communities, Muhanji said, because black men were often unemployed and women were the primary earners in families.

“These women were nurtured by their communities,” Muhanji said. “Even in church there were women pastors. The deacons were men.”

“I was used to women like this,” she said. “I didn’t know any different.”

Muhanji left PSU to work on a memoir about her father, who worked at Ford Motors. She has not finished it, citing an intense case of writer’s block.

Muhanji’s books include Her, published by Aunt Lute Book Company, which won two 1991 Lambda Literary Awards: the Lesbian Debut category and the Ferro-Grumley Award for outstanding works of fiction on lesbian and gay life. Her first book, Tight Spaces, from the University of Iowa Press, she co-authored with a niece and friend.

Muhanji spoke at local bookstore In Other Words Thursday evening.