Reading Africa Into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge American Literature American Studies 2004 Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Keith Cartwright Roanoke College Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Cartwright, Keith, "Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales" (2004). American Literature. 7. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/7 Reading Africa into American Literature Reading Africa into American Literature Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Keith Cartwright THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2002 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback edition 2004 The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 04 05 06 07 08 5 4 3 2 1 The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Cartwright, Keith, 1960- Reading Africa into American literature : ethics, fables, and gothic tales / Keith Cartwright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-2220-1 (cloth: acid-free paper) 1. American literature—African influences. 2. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. 3. African literature—Appreciation—United States. 4. American literature—History and criticism. 5. Gothic revival (Literature)—United States. 6. Fables, American—History and criticism. 7. African Americans in literature. 8. Africa-—In literature. 9. Slavery in literature. 10. Ethics in literature. I. Title. PS159.A35 C37 2002 810.9'896073—dc21 2001002582 ISBN 0-8131-9089-4 (pbk.: acid-free paper) Member of the Association of American University Presses For my path-openers— my parents and grandparents, and for Eileen Julien, John Locke, and the family of Moustapha Diaw Contents Introduction. Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics 1 Part I. Epic Impulses/Narratives of Ancestry 1. Imperial Mother Wit, Gumbo Erotics: From Sunjata to The Souls of Black Folk 25 2. Of Root Figures and Buggy Jiving: Toomer, Hurston, and Ellison 48 3. Myth-making, Mother-child-ness, and Epic Renamings: Malcolm X, Kunta Kinte, and Milkman Dead 68 Part II. Bound Cultures/The Creolization of Dixie 4. "Two Heads Fighting": African Roots, Geechee/Gombo Tales 93 5. Creole Self-Fashioning: Joel Chandler Harris's "Other Fellow" 114 6. Searching for Spiritual Soil: Milk Bonds and the "Maumer Tongue" 130 Part III. Shadows of Africans/Gothic Representations 7. The Spears of the Party of the Merciful: Senegambian Muslims, Scriptural Mercy, and Plantation Slavery 157 8. Babo and Bras Coupe: Malign Machinations, Gothic Plots 181 9. "Never Once but Like Ripples": On Boomeranging Trumps, Rememory, and the Novel as Medium 203 Notes 231 Works Cited 241 Index 259 Introduction Tropical Trees: Towards a Hippikat Poetics Here, root yourselves beside me. I am that Tree planted by the River, which will not be moved. Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of Morning," read at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton, 1993 If I am child of the foundation tree, the origin of all things, I am child of the dead child. All things awaken, under the tree, to be finished; even the dead gnarl up to the tree for breath. Jay Wright, The Double Invention ofKomo I A strong body of scholarship from Melville Herskovits (1940) to Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992) has shown that enslaved Africans were among the pri- mary shapers of emergent American cultures. But as Eric Sundquist argues in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), "it remains difficult for many readers to overcome their fundamental concep- tion of 'American' literature as solely Anglo-European in inspiration and authorship, to which may then be added an appropriate number of valuable 'ethnic' or 'minority' texts, those that closely correspond to familiar or se- mantic paradigms" (7).1 Even contemporary multiculturalism often works to keep the unhyphenated American, understood as white and Anglo, still fixed at the unreconstructed center. What I hope to trace here is something of the historical routes and semiotic systems by which Africa may by recog- 2 Reading Africa into American Literature nized as a foundational source of the American mainstream. The African presence runs deep, as does the Anglo-American response to the call (real and imagined) of that presence. When we remind ourselves, for example, that Thomas Jefferson's first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a black servant, we can be certain that the presence of Africans and their American-born children played a significant role in shaping the emergent Virginian/American identity of the man who would give compelling voice to our nation's yearnings for freedom.2 By reading Africa into American literature, I hope to render greater visibility to some previously invisible or misread African American cultural currents that have long shaped American language and consciousness. Along with Albert Murray, I recognize America's black presence as its "Omni-Ameri- can" presence. The very first Americans were those who were most fully forced to navigate the chaos of New World changes: the Africans of many nations who responded to situations imposed upon them by European set- tlers to become a New World people. The collective memory and reinven- tions of Afro-Creole cultures serve par excellence as channels for navigating the tragedies and transitions of our shared national and hemispheric ex- perience. As Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic (1993), it is no real irony that Afro-Atlantic music "produced out of the racialized slavery that made modern civilisation possible, now dominate[s] its popular cultures" (80). A strong African presence was indeed one of the factors that most clearly differentiated America from Europe, and transatlantic slavery was a major force in shaping a New World central to any understanding of modernism. My reading of America's Africanity follows critical pathways bush- whacked and charted by Joel Chandler Harris, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. And while following the signposts and going into the territory of scholarly works like Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, and Henry Louis Gates's Figures in Black (1987), my study departs from these groundbreaking predecessors in looking to one specific region of Africa (Senegambia) for African models—and to the American South's core Creole regions (Louisi- ana and the Sea Islands) for the clearest crossroads whereby one identifiable group of African nations entered American life. Gates's The Signifying Mon- key (1988) provides valuable precedent in its modeling of the Yoruba Ifa corpus as a possible source and analogue of the signifying traditions opera- tive within African American vernacular culture. But Gates's powerful comparativist reading is grounded in poststructuralist readings of the Afri- can American tradition's self-conscious intertextuality, through which he lays claim to equivalent modes of discourse from the Yoruba Ifa corpus. My aims and methods benefit immeasurably from his Eshu/Derrida-inspired Introduction 3 refigurations but operate a bit differently. I am interested in calling readers to reconsider the age-old paradigms through which the roots of American literature and identity are seen to be solidly British, while African sources— when recognized at all—find location in what is perceived to be the "ideo- logical," ever-separate and ghettoized domain of black studies. I would move us to recognize that the study of all American literature demands deep, his- torically conscious reassembly. Perhaps because I am a Southerner whose true education began with the eye-opening experience of spending some of the formative years of my young adulthood in Senegal (where having one's inner eyes open makes one—in Wolof—the "hippikat" familiar to American musical/countercultural longings), I find texts like the Mandinka Sunjata epic or the Senegalese animal fables of Birago Diop to be a bit less "otherly" than the Beowulf epic or the plays of Samuel Beckett.3 Having been forced to develop a new set of eyes in Senegal to see through some of the limiting assumptions and moral pathologies of my Southern upbringing and undergraduate education, I began to develop the means to trace routes by which an African presence has been an active and ever-repressed agency at the foundation of American culture. This study is the result of my effort to read traces, re-creations, and shadows of Africa into American texts that have always been fully inhabited by Afri- cans—both real and imagined. So with the Senegambian region as my Afri- can reference point and the American South as primary crossroads of study, I will examine three Africa-informed currents in American literature: 1) epic-like narratives of African ancestry by Americans of African descent; 2) folk-infused, fabulous narratives by white Americans revealing Afro-Creole cultural descent; and 3) Africanist, gothic-historicist narratives by Ameri- cans responding to the literacy and scriptural religion of Senegambian Mus- lims, revealing what Toni Morrison has called "the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty" at the heart of the American design (Playing in the Dark 6).