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One Nation Under Gods: Interfaith Symbolism and the “American” Race in the Works of Jean Toomer

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One Nation Under Gods: Interfaith Symbolism and the “American” Race in the Works of Jean Toomer ONE NATION UNDER GODS: INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM AND THE “AMERICAN” RACE IN THE WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER by Laura Gayle Fallon A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2009 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee – Dr. Dagbovie, Dr. Machado, and Dr. Berlatsky – for their wisdom and guidance throughout the development of this paper and many others. I would also like to express my gratitude to Joshua E. Fallon for his unparalleled patience and encouragement in all of my academic endeavors. iii ABSTRACT Author: Laura Gayle Fallon Title: One Nation Under Gods: Interfaith Symbolism and the “American” Race in the Works of Jean Toomer Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Sika Dagbovie Degree: Master of the Arts Year: 2009 This study argues that the interfaith symbolism present in the works of American author Jean Toomer undermines dominant Christian justifications for racism in the United States. It also discusses the ways in which Toomer’s interfaith symbolism promotes the establishment of a race Toomer called the “American” race, a group of interracial, interreligious people whom Toomer hoped would change the way race was viewed in the United States. The multireligious references in Toomer’s works challenge constricted definitions of both religion and race by highlighting interchangeable religious ideals from several world religions. iv ONE NATION UNDER GODS: INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM AND THE “AMERICAN” RACE IN THE WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER Chapter I: An Introduction to Multireligious Symbolism in the Works of Jean Toomer Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1 Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance……………………………………………..5 Toomer’s Spiritual Search………………………………………………………7 Responses to Toomer……………………………………………………………..9 Chapter II: Christ and Karma : Rejecting Reductive Labels through Interfaith Symbolism in Cane Cane as Rejection of Racial and Religious Simplicity…………………………15 “Becky”: Rebelling against Religious Norms……………………………………18 “Carma”: Complicating Racial Understanding through Religion………………21 “Bona and Paul” and “Kabnis”: Finding Peace through Interfaith Reconciliation……………………………………………………………………25 Chapter III: Fostering Unity through Interfaith Symbolism: A Look at Toomer’s Post-Gurdjieff Short Stories Toomer and G.I. Gurdjieff……………………………………………………….33 v “Winter on Earth” and the Gurdjieffian Utopia………………………………….39 “York Beach”: Americans Committing Economics……………………………..44 Chapter IV: Toomer’s Interfaith Symbolism in Poetry: Embracing Diversity by Destablizing the White-Washed Deity Toomer and Poetic Religious Reimaging………………………….…………….52 Criticizing the Christian Army………………………………………..………….58 The Poetry of Cane : A Portrait of Colonial Faith………….………….…………60 PostScript………………………………………………………………………..……….69 Notes…………………………………………………...…………………….………73 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...…78 vi I. AN INTRODUCTION TO MULTIRELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM IN THE WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER The American author Jean Toomer (1894-1967) struggled throughout his life to promote a more complicated understanding of race in America. Within his own works, Toomer often associated this more complex perception of race with religious symbols, references, and ideas from several different spiritual traditions. The intense connection between racial understanding and multiple religions in Toomer’s writings not only highlights historical religious rationalizations of racial prejudice but also serves to challenge established organized religions in the United States by revealing similarities between faith practices which appear in other cultures and the dominant Christian tradition in North America. Toomer strives to simultaneously destabilize narrow views of race and religion in the hopes that toppling the definition of either abstract notion will lead to a nation which embraces both a global faith and an egalitarian treatment of all races. Due to Toomer’s own struggles with complicated personal racial and religious identification, the multireligious symbolism that appears in his works often references his own frustrations with a country in which he was reductively labeled as belonging to only one part of his mixed ethnic heritage or to only one religious tradition. These frustrations intensified after the publication and advertisement of his first major work, Cane , and continued to haunt him as he fought a life-long battle for the establishment of an America that would disregard racial and religious labels in favor of a cosmopolitan society. 1 When Boni and Liveright, Inc., first published Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923, the publishing house advertised the book by printing portraits of a pensive Toomer in literary magazines and reviews. These photos of a languid author, half obscured by a dusky shadow, were accompanied by snippets which played up the supposedly exotic nature of Cane . Book reviews discussed the “primitive blackness” of the work’s characters, ignoring everything but the “primitivist release” of Toomer’s prose poetry, insinuating to Toomer’s readers that to read Cane was to immerse oneself in the “permanent surrender of the higher faculties,” to enjoy the arcane darkness of African jungles transplanted in the American South (Soto 173). The mysterious, dark photographs of Toomer were meant to accentuate the authenticity of Cane as an emotional account of the Negro experience in America. Though Toomer was phenotypically white, his publishing house capitalized upon on his public acknowledgement of the seven known races in his family lineage, intently focusing upon Toomer’s African American heritage in order to appeal to white readers who were fascinated by the emerging Harlem Renaissance movement. The endorsement of Toomer as a Negro writer was primarily based upon the pervasive (though not uniformly mandated) one-drop rule adopted nationwide by white communities in an effort to keep whites and blacks legally segregated. Despite the fact that Toomer claimed French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Native American blood, he was consistently labeled as a black author. This oversimplified label frustrated Toomer’s attempts to publicize and celebrate racial mixedness in his work, and his rebellion against the label cost him some popularity among famous literary contemporaries. In a 1923 letter to Waldo Frank -- who, incidentally, would also insist upon oversimplifying Toomer’s racial background in his 2 own reviews of Toomer’s work -- Toomer vents about the narrow-mindedness of fellow writer Sherwood Anderson: “I dont [ sic ] think we will go very far. He limits me to Negro. As an approach, as a constant element (part of a larger whole) of interest, Negro is good. But to try to tie me to one of my parts is surely to loose [ sic ] me” (Letters 113). Toomer battled this racial limitation his entire life. Though at times proud of his black heritage, Toomer felt his mission in America was to propagate an atmosphere inclusive of racial mixedness, an environment in which all races could intermarry and produce what he would later call the enlightened “American” race. After Cane was published, Toomer dedicated much of his time and effort protesting against America’s tendency to reduce his complicated racial history, and he argued for national acknowledgement of a new racial label, called simply the “American” race (Weaks-Baxter 59). Toomer believed that a wide acceptance of this label would provide a much-needed space for all people who could not easily classify themselves as “white” at the beginning of the 1900s. In the late 1920s, Toomer penned several short stories and essays that deal with this issue of cultural and racial mixedness. One of his unpublished essays, “The Americans,” explains that Toomer’s proposed race would emphasize the common humanity of man instead of cultural and racial differences in the United States: This new race is neither white nor black nor red nor brown. These are the old terms for old races, and they must be discarded. This is a new race; and though to some extent, to be sure, white and black and red and brown strains have entered into its formation, we should not view it as part white, part black, and so on…. Water, though composed of two parts of hydrogen and one 3 part of oxygen, is not hydrogen and oxygen; it is water . (qtd. in “Modernism and Race 29) The desire to bind races into a cohesive humanity is evident in Toomer’s work even before Cane was published in its entirety. Chunks of Cane were sent to diverse literary publications – Broom , The Crisis , Liberator , Modern Review , S4N , and others – in an effort to reach a diverse readership (Bontemps 186). The variety of publications which Toomer courted is itself proof that Cane is, as Mark Whalan says, “a text structurally and thematically committed to hybridity” (Race, Manhood, and Modernism 209). Toomer mixed and matched and twisted the stories in Cane before settling upon the final form for the book, and some of the stories and poems were themselves pieces of other unpublished works which Toomer had previously authored. For example, the story “Karintha” was originally a poem recited to an urban, interracial New York audience in the play Natalie Mann . Though “Karintha” has only Georgia as its immediate context, the story’s position within its original urban context indicates that the stories of Cane possess universal appeal. Critic Mark Whalan writes extensively
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