I decided that it didn’t. I decided that there was another word that could do the same thing with less mystification. That word was “kiss.”
Well, the discussion with my friend made me realize that I’m still unhappy about it, because “kiss” works at a level a bit too shallow. “Kiss” works at a level that searches for and locates a quality or element of the novel that was not, and is not, its primary feature. The primary feature is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The feature was necessity, something that precedes love, follows love, informs love, shapes love, and to which love is subservient. In this case the necessity was for a kind of connection, an acknowledgment, a paying out of homage still due.
I was inclined to believe that there were poorly lit passages leading up to that original word if indeed it was so very misunderstood and so strongly and wrongly unsettling. I have been reading some analyses of revisions of texts out of copyright and thinking about the ways in which books get not only reread but also rewritten not only in one’s own language with the ambivalence of the writer and the back-and-forth between editor and writer, but also what happens in translation. The liberties taken that enhance; the liberties taken that diminish. And for me the alarm. There is always the threat of not being taken seriously, of having the work reduced to a primer, of having the politics of language, the politics of another language imposed on the writer’s own politics.
My effort to manipulate American English was not to take standard English and use vernacular to decorate or to paint over it, but to carve away its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions were not only available but were inevitable. That is what I thought my original last word accomplished, then I became convinced that it did not, and now am sorry I made the change. The trouble it takes to find just one word and know that it is that note and no other that would do is an extraordinary battle. To have found it and lost it is in retrospect infuriating. On the one hand, what could it matter? Can a book really fall apart because of one word, even if it’s in a critical position? Probably not. On the other hand, maybe so, if the writing of it tries for racial specificity and figurative coherence. In this instance, I settled for the latter. I gave up a word that was racially resonant and figuratively logical for one that was only the latter, because my original last word was so clearly disjunctive, a sore thumb, a jarring note combining as it did two functions linguistically incompatible except when signaling racial exoticism.
Actually I think my editor was right. The original word was the “wrong” word. But I also know that my friend was right: the “wrong” word, in this case, was the only word. As you can see, my assertion of agency outside the raced house turned into a genuflection in its familiar (more comfortable) yard.
That experience of regret highlights for me the need to rethink the subtle yet pervasive attachments we may all have to the architecture of race. The need to think about what it means and what it takes to live in a redesigned racial house and to defiantly, if erroneously, call it diversity or multiculturalism—to call it home. To think about how invested some of the best theoretical work may be in clinging to its simulacra. To think about what new dangers present themselves when escape or chosen exile from that house is achieved.
I risk charges here of escapism and of encouraging futile efforts to transcend race or pernicious ones to trivialize it, and it would worry me a great deal if my remarks and the project I am working on were to be so completely misunderstood. What I am determined to do is to take what is articulated as the elusive future and domesticate it; to concretize what is, outside of science fiction, rendered in political language and thought as permanently unrealizable dream. My confrontation is piecemeal and very slow, of course, because unlike the successful advancement of an argument, narration requires the complicity of a reader in discovery. And there are no pictures to ease the difficulty.
In various novels the adventure for me has been explorations of seemingly impenetrable, race-inflected, race-clotted topics. From the first book, where I was interested in racism as a cause, consequence, and manifestation of individual and social psychosis; to the next one, in which I was preoccupied with the culture of gender, the invention of identity, both of which acquired astonishing meaning when placed in a racial context. On to Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, where I was interested in the impact of race on the romance of community and individuality; in Beloved the revelatory possibilities of historical narration when the body-mind, subject-object, past-present oppositions, viewed through the lens of race, collapse and become seamless. In Jazz I tried to locate modernity as a response to the race house, in an effort to blow up its all-encompassing shelter, its all-knowingness, and its assumptions of control. And currently to first enunciate and then destabilize the racial gaze altogether in Paradise.
In Jazz the dynamite fuse was lit under narrative voice. The voice that could begin with claims of knowledge, inside knowledge, and indisputable authority—“I know that woman …”—and end with the blissful epiphany of its humanity and its own needs.
In my current project I want to see whether or not race-specific, race-free language is both possible and meaningful in narration. And I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus; a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place “already made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain. Where moonlight can be counted on if the sky is clear and stars no matter what. And below, just yonder, a river called Treason to rely on.” I want to imagine not the threat of freedom, or its tentative, gasping fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness—a kind of out-of-doors safety where “a sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because whatever it was that made the sound, it wasn’t something creeping up on her. Nothing for ninety miles around thought she was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, think of food preparations, war, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and think of nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way. And if a light shone from a house up a ways and the cry of a colicky baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house and call out softly to the woman inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of them might take turns massaging the infant stomach, rocking, or trying to get a little soda water down. When the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so as not to wake anybody else.
“The woman could decide to go back to her own house then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might keep her direction and walk further down the road …. On out, beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.”
The overweening event of the modern world is not its technology; it is the mass movement of populations. Beginning with the largest forcible transfer of people in the history of the world: slavery. The consequences of which transfer have determined all the wars following it as well as the current ones being waged on every continent. The contemporary world’s work has become policing, forming policy regarding, and trying to administrate the perpetual movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citizenship—is marked by exile, refugees, guest arbiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the under siege. Hunger for home is entombed among the central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the breakup of nations, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these dreams of home are frequently as raced themselves as the originating racial house that has defined them. When they are not raced, they are, as I suggested earlier, landscape, never inscape; utopia, never home.
I applaud and am indebted to scholars here and elsewhere who are clearing (theoretical) space where racial constructs are being forced to
reveal their struts and bolts; their technology and their carapace, so that political action, intellectual thought, and cultural production can be generated.
The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and have already described, defined, and named the possibility of imagining race without dominance, without hierarchy as “barbarism”; as destroying the four-gated city; as the end of history—all of which can be read as garbage, rubbish, an already damaged experience, a valueless future. If, once again, the political consequence of theoretical work is already named catastrophe, it is more urgent than ever to develop nonmessianic language to refigure the raced community, to decipher the deracing of the world. More urgent than ever to develop an epistemology that is neither intellectual slumming nor self-serving reification. You are marking out space for critical work that neither bleeds the race house for the gains it provides in authenticity and insiderism nor abandons it to its signifying gestureism. If the world-as-home that we are working for is already described in the race house as waste, the work this scholarship draws our attention to is not just interesting—it may save our lives.
These campuses where we mostly work and frequently assemble will not remain alien terrain within whose fixed borders we travel from one kind of race-inflected community to another as interpreters, native guides; or campuses resigned to the status of segregated castles from whose balustrades we view—even invite—the homeless; or markets where we permit ourselves to be auctioned, bought, silenced, and vastly compromised depending on the whim of the master and the going rate.
The distrust that race studies receive from the authenticating off-campus community is legitimate only when the scholars themselves have not imaged their own homes; have not unapologetically realized and recognized that the valuable work they do can be done in no other place; have not envisioned academic life as neither straddling opposing worlds nor as a flight from any. W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation is a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure. Beyond the outside/inside double consciousness, this new space postulates the inwardness of the outside; imagines safety without walls where we can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the expression, world, “already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”
Home.
Black Matter(s)
I have been thinking for some time now about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This “knowledge” holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, it assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are removed from and without relationship to the presence of black people in the United States—a population that antedated every American writer of renown and was perhaps the most furtively radical, impinging force on the country’s literature.
The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated to the margins of the literary imagination. It may be that American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in reference to this unsettled and unsettling population. I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation—are not acute and ambiguous moral problematics, but in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence. The coded language and purposeful restriction by which the newly formed nation dealt with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart are maintained in its literature, even through the twentieth century. A real or fabricated Africanistic presence has been crucial to writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.
My curiosity has developed into a still-informal study of what I am calling American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanistic presence was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using “Africanism” as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes. It is important to recognize the lack of restraint attached to the uses of this trope. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition favored by American education, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, the formation and the exercise of power, and ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.
What Africanism became and how it functioned in the literary imagination are of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature and even the source of literary “whiteness.” What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of “whiteness” play in the construction of what is described as an “American”? If this inquiry of mine ever comes to maturity, it may provide me access to a coherent reading of American literature, a reading that is not completely available to me now—not least, I suspect, because of the studied indifference of literary criticism to these matters.
One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded and made unavailable for open debate. The situation is aggravated by the anxiety that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, liberal, even generous habit. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference; to maintain its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. Following this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to the remarkable insights some of their works contain.
Another reason for this ornamental vacuum in literary discourse is the pattern of thinking about racialism asymmetrically, in terms of its consequences on its victims alone. A good deal of time and intelligence have been invested in exposing racialism and its horrific effects on its objects. The result has been constant, if erratic, efforts to legislate preventive regulations. There have also been powerful and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin of racialism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable and permanent part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries in any way. It is precisely because of them that any progress has been accomplished in matters of racial discourse. But I do want to see that well-established s
tudy joined by another, equally important: the effect of racialism on those who perpetuate it. It seems to me both poignant and striking how the effect of racialism on the subject has been avoided and unanalyzed. The scholarship that looks into the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of slaves is valuable; equally so is a serious intellectual examination of what racial ideology did and does to the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of the master.
National literatures, like writers, get along as best they can and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind. For the most part, literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man. If I am disenchanted with the indifference of literary criticism toward examining the nature of that concern, I do have a last resort: the writers themselves.
Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, and to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. The languages she or he uses (imagistic, structural, narrative) and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations. So it is to them, the creators of American literature, that I look for some clarification about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States.
How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanistic Other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? In short, what happens? What does the inclusion of Africans and African Americans do to and for the text? As a reader, I had always assumed that nothing “happens.” That Africans and their descendants are there in no sense that matters; that when they are there, they are decorative, displays of the facile writer’s technical expertise. I assumed that since the author was not Africanistic, the appearance of Africanistic characters, narrative, or idiom in his or her work could never be about anything other than the “normal,” unracialized, illusory white world that provides the backdrop for the work. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people, any more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I realized the obvious: that the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanistic persona was reflexive; it was an extraordinary meditation on the self, a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness (as well as in others), an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.
Mouth Full of Blood Page 15
