Marita Bonner

Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 – 1971), also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. On December 29, 1921, along with 15 other women, she chartered the Iota Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner. Marita was one of four children and was brought up in a middle-class community in Massachusetts. She attended Brookline High School, where she contributed to the school magazine, The Sagamore. She excelled in German and Music, and was a very talented pianist. In 1917, she graduated from Brookline High School and in 1918 enrolled in Radcliffe College, commuting to campus because many African-American students were denied dormitory accommodation. In college, she majored in English and Comparative Literature, while continuing to study German and musical composition. In addition to her studies, she was a charter member of a chapter of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and taught at a high school in Cambridge.

After finishing her schooling in 1922, she continued to teach at Bluefield Colored Institute in West Virginia. Two years later, she took on a position at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C., until 1930, during which time her mother and father both died suddenly. While in Washington, Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright and composer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson's "S" street salon was an important meeting place for many of the writers and artists involved in the New Negro Renaissance.

While living in Washington D.C., Bonner met William Almy Occomy. They married and moved to Chicago, where Bonner's writing career took off. After marrying Occomy, she began to write under her married name. After 1941, Bonner gave up publishing her works and devoted her time to her family, including three children. She began teaching again in the 1940s and finally retired in 1963.

Bonner died in 1971 from smoke-inhalation complications at a hospital after her apartment caught fire. She was 73.

Throughout her life, Bonner wrote many short stories, essays and plays, and was a frequent contributor to The Crisis (the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and Opportunity (official publication of the National Urban League) between 1925 and 1940. After her parents' death, she wrote her first essay, "On Being Young–A Woman–And Colored" (December 1925), which highlights the limits put on black Americans, especially black women, in New York (during this time), who lacked "the full-range of New Negro mobility." The speaker in this essay also addresses the residential segregation and social constraints she faced as a woman living in the "Black Ghetto," a community where black Americans were "shoved aside in a bundle because of color." Winner of the inaugural essay contest sponsored by The Crisis (whose literary editor at the time was Jessie Redmon Fauset), this essay encouraged black women not to dwell on their problems but to outsmart negative situations.

Bonner also wrote many short stories from 1925 to 1927, including "The Prison-Bound", "Nothing New", "One Boy's Story" and "Drab Rambles". Her short stories explored a multicultural universe filled with people drawn by the promises of urban life.

She wrote three plays — The Pot Maker (1927), The Purple Flower - A Play (1928) and Exit, an Illusion (1929) — the most famous being The Purple Flower, which portrays black liberation. Many of Bonner's later works, such as Light in Dark Places, dealt with poverty, poor housing, and color discrimination in the black communities, and shows the influence that the urban environment has on black communities. Bonner is one of the many frequently unrecognized black female writers of the Harlem Renaissance who resisted the universalizing, essentialist tendencies by focusing on atypical women rather than on an archetypal man, such as the New Negro," which can be seen in her earliest works.

Bonner contributed a variety of things to the Harlem Renaissance. Her writings addressed the struggles of people who lived outside of Harlem. Her greatest involvement was her emphasis on claiming a strong racial and gender identity. She argued against sexism and racism and advised other black women to remain silent in order to gain understanding, knowledge, and truth to fight the oppression of race and gender. She also encouraged African Americans to use the weapons of knowledge, teaching, and writing to overcome inequalities. Unlike most Renaissance writers, she focused her writings on issues in and around Chicago. Several of Bonner's short stories addressed the barriers that African-American women faced when they attempted to follow the Harlem Renaissance's call for self-improvement through education and issues surrounding discrimination, religion, family, and poverty.

Although she was not often appreciated during her time and even today, perhaps one of Bonner's greatest contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her emphasis on claiming not only a racial identity, but a gendered one as well. Bonner's works focused on the historical specificity of her time and place rather than the universality of an idealized African past.

In more recent years, critical exploration of Marita Bonner has noticeably diminished, having been at its peak in the late 1980s. Since her readership has declined, so has the importance of her message of intersectionality, specifically the black female experience in the early 20th century.

Xoregos Performing Company premiered Exit: An Illusion in its 2015 program "Harlem Remembered", repeating the play with a different cast in its "Songs of the Harlem River" program in NYC's Dream Up Festival, August 30–September 6, 2015. Songs of the Harlem River opened the Langston Hughes Festival in Queens, NY, on February 13, 2016.