19 Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 11.1 (2019) Abstract: In “Gorilla, My Love,” Toni Cade Bambara’s Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon’s utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel’s unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present. Keywords: Black girlhood; child; storying; Sylvia Wynter; Toni Cade Bambara; utopia What does a free child look like, and what could she say to us and teach us? Can we only imagine her displaced in time and space—in the past or future, in a clearing in the forest playing with wooden blocks with other hemp-dressed vegan children, whispering sentimental otherworldly wisdom in riddle-like form that child ethnographers would have to decode? 1 Or can we imagine that she is fully in this world with us, her fiercely straightforward truth telling ultimately flipping us, and our pieties about children and childhood, upside-down? The “facto-fictive world” (Traylor ix) of Black womanist filmmaker, author, and radical activist Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) is filled with the latter type of child “agents of revolutionary thought” (ix), young Black girls navigating everyday life in the city. Indeed, she crafted worlds with emancipated subjects of multiple generations, including children and teens. In her remapping of utopian thinking from the margins, sociologist Avery Gordon includes Bambara as one of the most generative thinkers “for making “Agent of Revolutionary Thought:” Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human —Maria Kromidas