attended Rutgers University, where she became a
prominent campus activist and writer and came
to the attention of members of the rap group PUB-
LIC ENEMY, who encouraged her musical aspira-
tions. This association led to her debut rap album,
360 Degrees of Power (1992), which featured guest
appearances by such prominent hip-hop figures
as Chuck D. and Ice Cube.
Upon the release of this record, Souljah came
to widespread public prominence when, on June
13, 1992, then presidential candidate Bill Clinton
criticized Jesse Jackson for including Souljah on a
Rainbow Coalition panel. Clinton was responding
to Souljah’s Washington Post interview in which
she had stated, “If black people kill black people
every day, why not have a week and kill white peo-
ple.” Although Souljah later claimed she was sim-
ply paraphrasing the mindset of a gang member,
she did not significantly distance herself from the
remarks. This controversy failed to ignite sales of
her album, but it did gain her popular recognition
that she has sustained with the publication of her
autobiography No Disrespect (1995) and her best-
selling novel The Coldest Winter Ever (1999).
No Disrespect uses accounts of Souljah’s
turbulent romantic history to document her
transformation from apolitical ghetto girl to self-
conscious social activist. Each chapter is devoted
to a particularly significant figure in her life, and
Souljah offers both castigation and advice to black
women about how to negotiate the shoals of black
male-female relationships and achieve emotional
stability. The novel is characterized by and has
been criticized for the almost egoistical self-regard
that is one of the most commented-on aspects of
Souljah’s public persona.
This self-regard is given an even more complex
deployment in Souljah’s first novel. The Coldest
Winter Ever tells the story of Winter Santiago, the
beautiful and amoral daughter of a Brooklyn drug
dealer, as she falls from the heights of privilege to
the depths of the prison system. This breathlessly
fast-paced novel, which mixes Souljah’s hectoring
seriousness, by way of strategic cameo appearances
by the author herself, with an essentially soap
opera–like narrative of sex and deceit among the
bad and the beautiful of the New York City drug
underworld, has become one of the best-selling
works of African-American popular fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
De Lancey, Frenzella Elaine. “Sonia Sanchez’s Blues
Book for Blue Black Magical Women and Sister
Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever: Progressive
Phases amid Modernist Shadows and Postmod-
ernist Acts.” BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Re-
view 6, no. 1 (Fall 2000) 147–179.
Terry Rowden
Soul on Ice Eldridge Cleaver (1968)
When ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, a major figure in the
BLACK POWER movement of the 1960s and one of
the founders of the Black Panther Party and its
minister of information, wrote this critically ac-
claimed collection of biographical essays, he was
in prison for rape. With this volume, he joined a
well-established tradition of black male writers
who embark on a personal, spiritual, cultural, so-
cial, and political quest for identity and specifically
for a sense of manhood. Such writers include W.
E. B. DUBOIS (The SOULS OF BLACK FOLK [1903]),
RICHARD WRIGHT (12 Million Black Voices [1941]),
JAMES BALDWIN (The Fire Next Time [1963]),
and JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN (BROTHERS AND KEEP-
ERS [1984]). Cleaver divides his collection into
four general subject areas—“Letters from Prison,”
“Blood of the Beast,” “Prelude to Love,” and “White
Woman, Black Man”—and he includes 15 essays
on a variety of subjects, from race and gender is-
sues to religion and the war in Vietnam, with such
titles as “ ‘The Christ’ and His Teachings,” “A Day in
Folsom Prison,” “The White Race and Its Heroes,”
“The Black Man’s Take in Vietnam,” and “To All
Black Women, from All Black Men.”
In each essay he speaks ferociously, unabashedly,
and militantly to white America, in the tradition of
James Baldwin, whose anger critics often noted.
For example, in “The White Race and Its Heroes,”
Cleaver, a former follower, like MALCOLM X, of the
teaching of Elijah Muhammad and member of the
Nation of Islam (NOI), examines what he claims
to be the psychological behavior of young whites
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