The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs.

  Before I discuss this novel, I want to describe what preceded my reading of African literature and compelled my excursion into what troubles contemporary definitions of the foreign.

  Velvet-lined offering plates were passed down the pews on Sunday. The last one was the smallest and the one most likely to be empty. Its position and size signaled the dutiful but limited expectations that characterized most everything in the thirties. The coins, never bills, sprinkled there were mostly from children encouraged to give up their pennies and nickels for the charitable work so necessary for the redemption of Africa. Although the sound of the name, “Africa,” was beautiful it was riven by the complicated emotions with which it was associated. Unlike starving China, Africa was both ours and theirs; intimately connected to us and profoundly foreign. A huge needy homeland to which we were said to belong but that none of us had seen or cared to see, inhabited by people with whom we maintained a delicate relationship of mutual ignorance and disdain, and with whom we shared a mythology of passive, traumatized otherness cultivated by textbooks, film, cartoons, and the hostile name-calling children learn to love.

  Later, when I began to read fiction set in Africa, I found that, with no exceptions that I knew of, each narrative elaborated on and enhanced the very mythology that accompanied those velvet plates floating between the pews. For Joyce Cary, Elspeth Huxley, H. Rider Haggard, Africa was precisely what the missionary collection implied: a dark continent in desperate need of light. The light of Christianity, of civilization, of development. The light of charity switched on by simple goodheartedness. It was an idea of Africa fraught with the assumptions of a complex intimacy coupled with an acknowledgment of unmediated estrangement. This conundrum of foreign ownership alienating the local population, of the dispossession of native speakers from their home, the exile of indigenous peoples within their home contributed a surreal glow to these narratives, enticing the writers to project a metaphysically void Africa ripe for invention. With one or two exceptions, literary Africa was an inexhaustible playground for tourists and foreigners. In the work of Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent to be as empty as that collection plate—a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there. As grist for Western mills, accommodatingly mute, conveniently blank, Africa could be made to support a wide variety of literary and/or ideological requirements. It could stand back as scenery for any exploit or leap forward and obsess itself with the woes of any foreigner; it could contort itself into frightening malignant shapes upon which Westerners could contemplate evil; or it could kneel and accept elementary lessons from its betters. For those who made that literal or imaginative voyage, contact with Africa offered thrilling opportunities to experience life in its primitive, formative, inchoate state, the consequence of which experience was self-enlightenment—a wisdom that confirmed the benefits of European proprietorship free of the responsibility of gathering overly much actual intelligence about the African culture that stimulated the enlightenment. So bighearted was this literary Africa, only a little geography, lots of climate, a few customs and anecdotes sufficed as the canvas upon which a portrait of a wiser or sadder or fully reconciled self could be painted. In Western novels published up to and throughout the fifties, Africa was itself Camus’s l’étranger, offering the occasion for knowledge but keeping its own unknowableness intact. Like Marlow’s “white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over, mapped since his boyhood with “rivers and lakes and names, [it] had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery….It had become a place of darkness.” What little could be known was enigmatic, repugnant, or hopelessly contradictory. Imaginary Africa was a cornucopia of imponderables that like the monstrous Grendel in Beowulf resisted explanation. Thus, a plethora of incompatible metaphors can be gleaned from the literature. As the original locus of the human race, Africa is ancient, yet, being under colonial control, it is also infantile. A kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding all midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa is simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational and wise.

  In that racially charged literary context, coming upon Camara Laye’s Le Regard du Roi, known in English as The Radiance of the King, was shocking. Suddenly the clichéd journey into storybook African darkness either to bring light or find it is reimagined. The novel not only summons a sophisticated, wholly African imagistic vocabulary from which to launch a discursive negotiation with the West, it exploits the images of homelessness that the conqueror imposes on the native population: the disorder of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson; the obsession with smells in Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika; the European fixation on the meaning of nakedness as in H. Rider Haggard, or Joseph Conrad, or virtually all travel writing.

  Camara Laye’s narrative is, briefly, this: Clarence, a European, has come to Africa for reasons he cannot articulate. There, he has gambled, lost, and heavily in debt to his white compatriots, is hiding among the indigenous population in a dirty inn. Already evicted from the colonists’ hotel, about to be evicted by the African innkeeper, Clarence decides the solution to his pennilessness is to be taken into the service of the king. He is prevented by a solid crowd of villagers from approaching the king, and his mission is greeted with scorn. He meets a pair of mischief-loving teenagers and a cunning beggar who agree to help him. Under their guidance he travels south, where the king is expected to appear next. By way of his journey, not wholly unlike a pilgrim’s progress, the author is able to trace and parody the parallel sensibilities of Europe and Africa.

  The literary tropes of Africa are exact replicas of perceptions of foreignness: (1) threatening, (2) depraved, (3) incomprehensible. And it is fascinating to observe Camara Laye’s adroit handling of those perceptions.

  1. Threatening. Clarence, his protagonist, is stupefied with fear. In spite of noting that the “forests [are] devoted to the wine industry”; that the landscape is “cultivated”; that the people living there give him a “cordial welcome,” he sees only inaccessibility, “common hostility.” The order and clarity of the landscape are at odds with the menacing jungle in his head.

  2. Depraved. It is Clarence who descends into depravity, enacting the full horror of what Westerners imagine as “going native”: the “unclean and cloying weakness” that imperils masculinity. Clarence’s blatant enjoyment of and feminine submission to continuous cohabitation reflect his own appetites and his own willful ignorance. As mulatto children crowd the village, Clarence, the only white in the region, continues to wonder where they came from. He refuses to believe the obvious—that he has been sold as stud for the harem.

  3. Incomprehensible. Camara Laye’s Africa is not dark; it is suffused with light: the watery green light of the forest; the ruby-red tints of the houses and soil; the sky’s “unbearable…azure brilliance”; even the scales of the fish women “glimmered like robes of dying moonlight.” Understanding the motives, the sensibilities of the Africans—both wicked and benign—require only a suspension of belief in an unbreachable difference between humans.

  Unpacking the hobbled idioms of the foreigner usurping one’s home, of delegitimizing the native, of reversing claims of belonging, the novel allows us to experience a white man emigrating to Africa, alone, without a job, without authority, without resources or even a family name. But he has one asset that always works, can only work, in third-world countries. He is white, he says, and therefore suited in some ineffable way to be advisor to the king whom he has never seen, in a country he does not know, among people he neither understands nor wishes t
o. What begins as a quest for a position of authority, for escape from the contempt of his own countrymen becomes a searing process of reeducation. What counts as intelligence among these Africans is not prejudice, but nuance and the ability and willingness to see, to surmise. The European’s refusal to meditate cogently on any event except the ones that concern his comfort or survival dooms him. When insight finally seeps through, he feels annihilated by it. This fictional investigation allows us to see the deracing of a Westerner experiencing Africa without European support, protection, or command. Allows us to rediscover or imagine anew what it feels like to be marginal, ignored, superfluous; to have one’s name never uttered; to be stripped of history or representation; to be sold or exploited labor for the benefit of a presiding family, a shrewd entrepreneur, a local regime.

  It is a disturbing encounter that may help us deal with the destabilizing pressures of the transglobal tread of peoples. Pressure that can make us cling or discredit other cultures, other languages; make us rank evil according to the fashion of the day; make us legislate, expel, conform, purge, and pledge allegiance to ghosts and fantasy. Most of all this pressure can make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.

  After many trials, enlightenment slowly surfaces in Camara Laye’s Westerner: Clarence gets his wish to meet the king. But by then he and his purpose have altered. Against the advice of the local people, Clarence crawls naked to the throne. When he finally sees the king, who is a mere boy laden with gold, the “terrifying void that is within [him],” the void that he has been protecting from disclosure, opens to receive the royal gaze. It is this openness, this crumbling of cultural armor maintained out of fear, this act of unprecedented courage that is the beginning of Clarence’s salvation, his bliss and his freedom. Wrapped in the boy king’s embrace, feeling the beat of his young heart, Clarence hears him murmur these exquisite words of authentic belonging, words welcoming him to the human race: “Did you not know that I was waiting for you?”

  Racism and Fascism

  LET US BE REMINDED that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

  Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.

  Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.

  Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.

  Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.

  Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.

  Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.

  Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.

  Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.

  Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

  Maintain, at all costs, silence.

  In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.

  The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.

  It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).

  When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas “marketplaced,” our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

  Home

  LAST YEAR a colleague of mine asked me where I had gone to school when a child. I told her, Lorain, Ohio. Then she questioned me: Were your schools desegregated then? I said, What? They were never segregated in the thirties and forties—so why would they be desegregated. Besides, we had one high school and four junior high schools. Then I recalled that she herself was around forty years old when that term “desegregated” was alive everywhere. Obviously I was in a time warp and obviously the early diverse population of the town I grew up in was not the way of the country. Before I left Lorain for Washington, D.C., then Texas, then Ithaca, then New York City, I thought every place was more or less like it, except in size. Nothing could be further from the truth. In any case her questions made me think anew about this area of Ohio and my recollections of home. This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say “home”?

  It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery, and the reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization—a process that can infect the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s xenophobia? By welcoming immigrants, or importing slaves into their midst for economic reasons and relegating their children to a modern version of the “undead.” Or by reducing an entire native population, some with a history
hundreds, even thousands of years long, into despised foreigners in their own country. Or by the privileged indifference of a government watching an almost biblical flood destroy a city because its citizens were surplus black or poor people without transportation, water, food, help and left to their own devices to swim, slog, or die in fetid water, attics, hospitals, jails, boulevards, and holding pens. Such are the consequences of persistent demonization; such is the harvest of shame.

  Clearly, the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and across borders is not new. Forced or eager exodus into strange territory (psychological or geographical) is indelible in the history of every quadrant of the known world, from the trek of Africans into China and Australia; to military interventions by Romans, Ottomans, Europeans; to merchant forays fulfilling the desires of a plethora of regimes, monarchies, and republics. From Venice to Virginia, from Liverpool to Hong Kong. All these and more have transferred the riches and art they found into other realms. And all these left that foreign soil stained with their blood and/or transplanted into the veins of the conquered. While in their wake the languages of conquered and conqueror swell with condemnation of the other.

  The reconfiguration of political and economic alliances and the almost instant reparsing of nation-states encourage and repel the relocation of large numbers of peoples. Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has ever been. It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame. There is little doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of people. This slide of people has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space—public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity. In press descriptions, place of origin has become more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as “a German citizen of such and such origin” or “a British citizen of such and such origin.” All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit and heightened threat within “difference.” We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort with one’s own sense of belonging (Am I the foreigner in my own home?); of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance. It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution. Walls, ammunition—they do work. For a while. But they are major failures over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave sites haunt the entire history of civilization.