The Postmodern Self in Audre Lorde´S Zami: a New Spelling of My Name(1982)…………………………………………………………………………..….……..70-107 3.1

Home , Itabari Njeri

THE POSTMODERN SELF IN 21ST CENTURY WOMEN OF COLOR WRITINGS

Dissertation

zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

eingereicht von

Tidita Abdurrahmani

am 10.11.2010

Institut für Amerikanistik

Erstbegutachter/in: Mag.Dr.phil.Ao.Univ.-Prof.Roberta Maierhofer

Zweitbegutachter/in: Mag.Dr.phil.Ao.Univ.-Prof.Walter Hoelbling

November 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 1-2

INTRODUCTION………………………...... 3-15

1. POSTMODERN SELVES, BLACK IDENTITIES, FEMALE BODIES……...………………..16-46 1.1. Subjectivity, Past and Present……………………………………………………….....16-18 1.2. Periodization of the “Self” Concept……………………………………………………18-22

1.2.1. The Self Concept. Classicism To Modernism………………………...... ….18-20

1.2.2. The Postmodern Conceptions of the Self.....…………………………………20-22

1.3. Self under the Scientific and Religious Lenses………………………………………...23-26 1.4. The Autobiographical Self…………………………………………………………..…26-28 1.5. The Multidimensional Self…………………………………………..…………...…….28-44 1.5.1. The Female Self... …………………………………...…………………...... 28-32 1.5.2. Black Selves Ethnic Identities…………………………………………….....33-34 1.5.3. Self and the Sense of the Other…….……………………………………………..34-38 1.5.4. Bodily Dimensions of the Self……...……….…………………………………….38-39 1.5.5. Self and Language……...…………………………………..………………..39-41 1.5.6. Self and Memory………………………………………………...………...... 42-43 1.5.7. Self and History…………...………………………………………………....43-44

1.6. Chapter Conclusions…………………………………………………………………...44–46

2.THE TEXTURE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY: DEFINITIONS, TRAITS, CONTROVERSIES……………………………………………………………………………....47-69 2.1. Tentative Definitions, Autobiographical Forms and Practices………………………...47-49 2.2. The Autobiography Critique: Periodization, Tenets and Criticism…………………....50-56 2.3. Finding a Niche of One´s Own: Autobiography and The Female Dimension……...….56-60 2.3.1. The Female Autograph: Differences Between the Male and Female Discourse in Autobiographical Writings………………………………………………………59-60 2.4. Shattered Mirrors in the “Promised Land”: Representation in the Black Autobiography………………………………………………………………………....60-64 2.4.1. White and Black Female Autobiography Compared……………………………63–64 2.5. Literary Experimentation and Cultural Strangulation: Autobiography as a Collage of Postmodern Life………………………………………………………………...……..64-68 2.5.1. Postmodernism and the Status of Autobiography…………………………....64-65 2.5.2. A Woman’s Autobiography and Postmodernism………………………………...67-69

3.TRIANGULAR LINKAGES AND “THE HOUSE OF DIFFERENCE”. THE POSTMODERN SELF IN AUDRE LORDE´S ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME(1982)…………………………………………………………………………..….……..70-107 3.1. Affirming Critical Difference: Self and Other in Audre Lorde´s Zami:A New Spelling of my Name………………………………………………………………...71-94 3.1.1. Otherness and the Color Complex…………………………………………...74-77 3.1.2. Border Crossings and Initiation Rites. Naming in Audre Lorde´s Zami:A New Spelling of My Name…………………………………………………….78 3.1.3. Queering and Lesbianism in Zami…………………………………………...79-82 3.1.4. Re-Writing Home: Audre Lorde and the Matrilineal Diaspora……………….82-88

3.1.5. The “House”of the “Self”. Displacement and the “Journey Woman” in Zami ………………………………………………………...88-94 3.2. Corporeal Materiality and Lesbian Eroticism in Audre Lorde Zami:A New Spelling of My Name(1982)……………………………………………………….94-101 3.3. Ancestral Origins, Memory and the Multigenre in Audre Lorde´s Autobiography…………………………………………………...101-105 3.4.Chapter Conclusions…………………………………………………………………105–107

4. POSTMODERN BLACKNESS AND SELF-RECOVERY in bell hooks´ BONE

BLACK:MEMORIES OF GIRLHOOD(1996)…………………………………………………….110–130

4.1. Unfathomable Depths and “Blackened” Alterity. “Self ”and “Other” in hooks´ Bone Black……………………………………………………………………………...110-124 4.1.1. Quiltwork “Patches” of Identity. Otherness in hooks´Autobiography……111-118 4.1.2. Weaving the Matrilineal Tapestry. Daughterly Daydreams and Motherly

Nightmares in Bone Black……………………………………………….118-123 4.1.3.Homeplace and “Belonging” in bell hooks´ Bone Black…………………..123-124

4.2. The “Cave” Within. Body Geography and Spiritual Spatiality in bell hooks……....124-125 4.3. The “Hope Chest” and Childhood Memories in Bone Black……………………….125-128 4.4. Chapter Conclusions……...………………………………………………………...129–130

5.POSTMODERN “BRUSHWORK” and POINTILLISTIC SELF EFFECTS IN VERONICA CHAMBER´S MAMA´S GIRL.(1996)……………………………………………………...…130-156 5.1.Pontillism and the Fragmented, Postmodern Self in Veronica Chambers´Mama´s Girl…………………………………………………………….132-134 5.2. Dimensions of Self and Otherness in Veronica Chamber´s Memoir……………….134–152 5.2.1. Divergent Replicas and “Mothering” Daughters. Self and Matrilinealism in Veronica Chambers´Mama´s Girl…………………………………………134-142 5.2.2. Remapping Family Relationships. Self & the Others in Veronica Chamber´s Mama´s Girl……………………………………………………………...142-145 5.2.3. Genderism, Colorism and Multiculturalism in Veronica Chamber´s Narrative…………………………………………..145-148 5.2.4. Hardened Lives: Latino-American Dislocations in Veronica Chambers´Autobiography………………………………………………...148-150 5.2.5. Anchoring the Postmodern Self. Body Modification in Veronica Chambers´Mama´s Girl…………………………………………………..150-152 5.3. Writing a New Story of Oneself. The Fictionalization of Life and Narrative in Veronica Chamber´s Mama´s Girl………………………………………………...153-155 5.4. Chapter Conclusions………………………………………………………………...155–156

6.POSTMODERN HYBRIDITY AND PATCHWORK SELF IN REBECCA WALKER´S BLACK,WHITE AND JEWISH.(2000)……………………………………………………...... 157–183

6.1. Familiar Outsiderhood. Otherness in Rebecca Walker´s Black, White and

Jewish(2000)………………………………………………………………………..158–169

6.1.1. “Mestiza Daughters”and “Cultural Electras”: Transborder Matrilienage in

Rebecca Walker´s Black, White and Jewish (2000)………………………..158-165 6.1.2. Making Peace with the “In-Between”: Displacement and the Politics of Location

in Rebecca Walker´s Autobiography……………………………………...165-169

6.2. Hybrid Spaces and Borderland Corporeality. The Postmodernn Self and Body in Rebecca Walker……………………………………………………….169–172

6.3. Memory and Cultural Politics in Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish……. 172–182

6.4.Chapter Conclusions………………………………………………………………....182–183

7. NAVIGATING THROUGH THE COLOR COMPLEX. THE POSTMODERN SELF IN MARITA GOLDEN´S DON´T PLAY IN THE SUN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE COLOR COMPLEX (2004)……………………………………………………………………………184–213

7.1. Transplanted Identities: The Multiple Dimensions of Marita Golden´s Don´t Play in The Sun: A Journey Through the Color Complex(2004)…………….185–202 7.1.1. Motherly “Walking Shoes” : Self and Matrilinealism in Don´t Play in the Sun…………………………………………………………………….188–189

7.1.2. Alterity and Conditioned Transcendence. Self and Other in Marita Golden΄s Autobiography…………………………………...………..….190–195 7.1.3. Convex lenses. Colorism and Intra- Racial Discrimination in Marita Golden´s Narrative………………………………...……………..195–200 7.1.4. “Journeying Selves” and Diverging Cultures . Self and Location in Marita Golden´s Autobiography………………..…..……………..200–202

7.2. Skin Fetishism and Body Objectification in Marita Golden´s Autobiography…………...... 202–209

7.3. Postcard Reminscences and Permeable Narrative Borders. Self and Memory in Rebecca Walker´s Black,White and Jewish(2004)………………………………………………...209–212

7.4. Chapter Conclusions………………………………………………………………………...212–213

CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………………...224–219

APPENDIX 1: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY FROM SLAVES TO PRESIDENTS...... 220–223

APPENDIX 2: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE. BETWEEN MAINSTREAM AND MARGINALIZATION………………...224–228

APPENDIX 3: MUFFLED VOICES, STRIDENT FEATS. FEMINISM IN THE UNITED STATES...... 229–234 3.1. The “Black” Face of Feminism in The United States………………………230–233 3.2. Feminism and Lesbianism...... 233–234

ENDNOTES...... 235–237

WORKS CITED...... 238–253

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this dissertation paper owes to the support, encouragement and assistance of a network of academics, family members and friends. I feel thus it is both my responsibility and my pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to them.

First of all I owe much acknowledgement and gratitude to my academic advisor, Univ- Prof. Mag. Dr. Roberta Maierhofer, whose unyielding assistance exhorted and challenged me to see this thesis finished, and whose meticulousness and insightful suggestions provided me with valuable feedback for revision and rethinking parts of the argument. It was her persistence, commitment and support that paved the way for the initiation of the cooperation between the two universities and the successive pursuit and completion of the doctoral studies for all the department’s faculty members.

It is with a debt of gratitude that I also acknowledge the help of Univ-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter Hoelbling for having graciously provided me with efficient thoughts, suggestions and comments about the thesis organization and writing, for kindly making me trust in my capacities when I least did, and for shaping and furthering my academic prowess by having me participate in his cultivated and useful lectures and seminars. Special thanks go to Prof. Elisabeth Kraus and her family for the valuable advice, encouragement and friendship they offered during all these years, and for always making us feel at home in Graz. I also gratefully acknowledge the support and the encouragement of the professors and staff at the Department of American Studies at Karl Franzens University of Graz, for constantly creating an atmosphere of encouragement and help and for considering us as colleagues with whom they had much experience to share.

With loving gratitude I acknowledge the emotional support and care of my parents Shyqyri and Hatije Ahmetaga, for unsparingly being by my side all through my studies, for selflessly investing in my rearing and education, for going beyond age boundaries to

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. meet every demand and request of mine. This thesis is the harvesting of the crop you have been carefully cultivating for years, mum and dad.

With heartfelt indebtedness I acknowledge the contribution of my better half, my husband Bledar Abdurrahmani, whose presence in the long hours of intensive work, and whose emotional support in the periods of absence from home made me realize that I was not alone, and that life is a struggle you can win once you have the right person by your side. His unyielding support and encouragement have left their imprint on every single page of this paper.

My uttermost thanks and pardons also go to my two year-old daughter Mirka, for the conditioned distraction, the missed cuddles, the unheeded cries and the lonesome childish nightmares: Sorry for all the times I was not the perfect mum every child would wish to have! Her coming into my life in a period of scholarly challenges and intensive work completed me and taught me the infiniteness of myself. Wholehearted thanks also go to my in-laws and to my friends for having facilitated and stimulated in different ways the progress of the writing of my dissertation thesis.

Last but not least, I am also most grateful to my colleagues at the Department of English and American Studies at Luigj Gurakuqi University of Shkodra, for their willingness to be of assistance and for helping with sources.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

INTRODUCTION

My interest in the writings of women of color late 20th century and early 21st century women–of–color writings originated from my participation in the postmodern American literature classes of prof. Justine Tally in Albania, back in 2002. Advancing my understanding of American literature in general and the African American literary canon in particular, and inviting me into a completely new and attractive methodology and didactic of teaching, this course made me realize the polyvocality embedded in the Ethnic American discourse.

In the society of the 1980s, early 21st century American literature had developed into such a multifaceted phenomenon that belief in a possible sharp break between mainstream and marginal, native and ethnic was the most absurd pretension one could have. Recognizing that every ethnicity–oriented writing provides a new outlook to the American patchwork and adds one more stitch to the sewing of the mainstream writing, I grew curious of getting to know how the muted voices of the slave narrative female protagonists had paved their way through the 21st century postmodern discourse. The contemporary discussion of women fighting for integration and self-assertion more than just against racial discrimination kindled in my mind a series of questions to which this study is meant to be a response. Conceiving the challenged truthfulness of subjectivity in postmodern times led me on the chase of the status of autobiography as an embodiment of these turn-of the-century women of color concerns.

Thus becoming ever more absorbed in my research work, I started coming to grips with a series of puzzling but response-inciting questions such as: Which are the tenets of the postmodern Self and how does its unstable, impermanent condition accommodate instances of the African American sense of Self and identity?/ Is the concept of Self a multiple construct or rather a chaotic absorption of such variables as Otherness and alterity, embodiment and materiality, ancestry and matrilinearity, location and memory?/ Which are the commonalities that undergird late 20th century, early 21st century women-

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. of-color autobiographies and the differences creating a rupture in the canon?/ What kind of voice does the ethnic daughter develop while writing about girlhood on the verge of the 21st century?

The aim of this dissertation paper is to identify and highlight the position women-of-color occupy in the American literary canon of the 1980´s early 21st century, the status enjoyed by autobiography in such a society, and the degree to which writing one’s Self really means revealing one’s innermost subjectivity rather than living a lie to oneself and to others. Arranged into seven chapters, two theoretical and five practical, the thesis is meant to be an informative rather than an exhaustive analysis of the female autobiographical production of the time.

The five other chapters, respectively the ones dealing with the personal accounts of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Veronica Chambers, Rebecca Walker and Marita Golden are organized as a textual analysis of the personal accounts, an application of the arguments presented in the theoretical part. The practical chapters have intentionally been arranged in chronological order so as to provide the reader with a bird’s-eye-view of the way black women’s autobiographical voice developed along these personal accounts. The focus of the study are girlhood accounts of female autobiographers of the late 1980s early 21st century African American literary canon. The scarcity of resources about these practical chapters converted the endeavor into a challenging and interesting experience for me.

Entitled after Shapiro’s essay, Chapter One considers autobiography as a mode of expression representative of the African American literary creation and a subtle continent worth exploring. It then proceeds to unfold the development of the genre from the puritan autobiography to its secular relative and then the slave narrative, the memoir and the fictionalized autobiography. Tracing the periodization of the genre from the time of the explorer journals and the captivity narratives of Cabeza de Vassa to the 1980s quest for identity as a reconstruction of the past, the chapter considers the flourishing of autobiography parallel to the emergence of the Self concept in the Western culture. In terms of autobiography criticism, the first surge of critical interest in autobiography, is

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. marked by Wilhelm Dilthey´s call for autobiographical documents grounded on history, the second wave is concerned with self-representation and the consideration of the critic as a psychoanalyst of sorts, while the third wave of criticism challenges the autobiographical notion of referentiality and regards the text as a narrative artifice that does not exist outside language. In stylistic terms, the chapter regards autobiography as a world made out of words, a domain of the intransitive that shifts from reality to fiction and vice versa.

Considering the female quest for a voice in the mainstream autobiographical canon as a claiming for at least a niche of one’s own, this chapter correlates the peak periods of autobiographical productivity for women to the 1890 WWI era and the late 1960s and 1970s, as time frames characterized by an ever increasing participation of women in the public service. In Sidonie Smith´s words, the genre is characterized by a double voice in which the Self comes wrapped in gender. Delving deep into the differing texture of the male and the female discourse, the chapter regards that while male writing held a privileged place in the canon, female writing held a marginalized devalued position in the outskirts of society. While, even after the postmodern decision that the author is dead, males feel free to express the truth in the corpus of their writing, women’s autobiographies posit their Selves as a way of establishing their own Selves. Though the majority of critics still persist in either erasing the woman’s story by relegating it to the margins of the critical discourse or uncritically conflating the dynamics of male and female selfhood, they agree that female autobiographies share the use of understatement and fragmentation, and tend to be more truthful while writing outside the guise of fiction.

Viewing America just as a shattered mirror mistakenly reflecting the sense of oppression, discrimination and alienation that the blacks go through, this chapter considers the need for handling black autobiographical texts by developing culturally specific ways. While the early black autobiographies were mainly conversion narratives focusing on the spiritual development and emancipation of the individual, the black autobiographies of the 1980s started to regard the genre as a site of formal revisionism and free play of signification, adopting a new agenda of exploring the genre and developing new ways of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. dealing with texts and traditions. While the slave narratives articulated the ideals of selfhood, and the emancipation autobiographies celebrated the personal triumphs, the post-WWII autobiographies assisted the task of full definition by adding denominators such as race, sexuality, class and religion.

Revisiting the tenets of postmodernism for establishing a bond between the genre of autobiography and the postmodern condition. Chapter One regards the postmodern autobiography as the one challenging the traditional concepts of a completeness of the Self and revolutionizing the narrative practice, by offering new patterns of meaning which reject completeness, linearity and order in the name of randomness and chance. The status of the female autobiography in the postmodern times takes spur from Simone de Beauvoir’s pondering that woman has historically functioned as the culturally constructed and conditioned Other of the man. This kind of autobiography regards the largest departure from mainstream feminism: the argument that sex is constructed through language. Feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics become inextricably linked, abandoning the presence of a single, reliable narrative voice in favor of the postmodern blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and myth.

The chapter on “Postmodern Selves, Black Identities and Female Bodies”, traces the development of the postmodern Self along the dimensions of femaleness, memory, embodiment, matrilinealism, location and historicity by also driving a wedge between the isolated and the relational Self, the theoretical and the empirical part of this dissertation thesis. Starting with the Cartesian formulation of subjectivity, proceeding with the Lacanian concept of the three orders and concluding with the postmodernist conceptions of subjectivity, the chapter contemplates that the more we progress in the contemporary society, the more complicated it becomes to define the nature of Self and subjectivity.

A periodization of the genre of autobiography should run parallel with the depiction of the development of the Self concept from classicism, to modernism and then to postmodernism. The resurgence of the interest in the Self, referred to by Tom Wolfe as the “me-decade”, also brought forth the recognition of the Self as a conscious process of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. individuation. If in traditional societies the Self was considered as stable and illustratable through language, in Impressionism the idea grew of a fluid, impalpable Self, and in Romanticism the stress was laid on the innermost depths of the Self which laid there subtle and mysterious for us to discover.

As a result of the World Wars, the modernist concern with the fragmentation of the Self was enhanced, and the individual came to be regarded as a fixed extra-linguistic entity consciously pursuing its own destiny. Though the modern and the postmodern conceptions of the Self may sound fairly similar to one-another, the demise of the postmodern Self is fairly more nihilistic because it appears characterized by skepticism and fragmentation. Modernism, on the other hand, features the order–out– of–chaos motto. and shunning the “order out of chaos” motto of modernism. The fragmentation of the Self and the state of continual dissolution lay the grounds for the pessimistic assessments of Eagleton, Baudrillard and Haraway, who regard the Self as always dispersed, void and lost in the jungle of the plurality of the postmodern life.

Bringing forth the ponderings of philosophers as Plato, Freud and Lacan and the Buddhist negation of the Self the chapter on the science-related Self brings the autobiographical I through the focus of three different camps of critics: the ones regarding it as unique and irreproducible, the ones viewing it as a cultural creation and, ultimately the pessimistic ones viewing it only as worthy of deconstruction. The first view is nested by critics such as Gusdorf, Montaigne and Rousseau who regard the “gaze inward” as the most solemn and reliable of quests, the second view is advocated by critics such as Olney who profess that the concept of the Self, far from being linear, consistent and conscious throughout the ages, is historically and culturally determined. The third view is backed up by critics as Hassan and Gunn who regard autobiographies as hosts of the episteme of the unmaking and refuse the tyranny of the wholes. Thus as the conditions impose it, one’s identity in the postmodern world is continuously emergent, revisited and reformed as one moves through ever changing relationships and constantly merging boundaries.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The last part of Chapter Two deals with the way how the postmodern Self learns to accept its multiplicity and to cohabit in harmony with the multidimensional facets of its existence. Under the heading of Self and gender unfold the boiling debates on whether feminism had been an unclaimed predecessor of postmodernism, or the latter had spelled the death knell of the former. The Irigaray-ian assumptions of women being conferred meaning and representation only on biological bases are set side by side by the Kristevean explorations of the dualism of the female subjectivity, and Jelinek’s assumptions of women being precluded from authenticity of Self. What all scholars agree on, is that the woman undertaking autobiographical writing is doubly or triply the subject of other people’s representations, turned again and again in the stories that promote separate forms of selfhood.

The dilemmas of the ethnic identity start with the early Du-Boisinian attempts of trying to reconcile two warring spirits within the same body and proceed with the era of feeling an ever–increasing gulf between oneself and the people. Self and Other, the former standing for agency and fully inhabited subjectivity, the latter standing for the feeling of being dispossessed and incapable of self-actualization, seem also to develop in the framework of the sociological theories brought forth by Kenneth Gergen. The more saturated one becomes with relationships, the more one accommodates fragments of the Self, harboring a multitude of potentials and hovering on the brim of complete annihilation. In terms of body as home for the autobiographical subject, skin seems to be the literal and metaphorical borderland between the autobiographical I and the surrounding world. Although in postmodern criticism, the body is always depicted in a state of fragmentation and quest for intactness, its dynamic instability makes it a crucial component in opening the way to self-knowledge, social melding and communal integration. Conferring the Derridean threats of truth in a state of erasure , the section of Self and Language also embraces the Foucaultian consideration of people as breeders and trainers of themselves, inhabited by language and challenged by the provisionality of such a false cornerstone.

The mnemonic impress upon the Self concept comes out through the unfolding of Locke’s professed interconnectedness between identity and memory rather than identity

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. and body. The reliability of memory, together with the accuracy of life writing determines the classification of a narrative as memoir, autobiography or fictional autobiography. The autobiography criticism corpora are the ones to question the mnemonic truth and the reconciliation of the forces of signification. The chapter on the multidimensionality of the postmodern Self comes to an end with a section on the influence of the sense of history on the metaphysical problematics of being. As Heidegger will suggest, there is no originary presence with which to begin; it is the simulacrum of the presence that claims that we always exist as the already gone things of the past and the expectant things of the future.

The five subsequent chapters of my dissertation thesis comprise the empirical part of it, with the notion of the multidimensionality of the postmodern Self being tracked along the works of five authors who wrote after the 1980s. Chapter Three deals with the postmodern Self in bell hook’s autobiography Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996). Passing through a childhood of estrangement and loneliness, and equipped with an eternal yearning for belonging, hooks sets on her search for the way home through the complex paths of memory. Providing us with snapshots of adulthood and girlhood confusions, and blurred photographs of the world seen through the eyes of a young girl, the memoir has been converted into an elliptical narrative that bridges the gap between prose and poetry.

The postmodern facet of the Self will unfold through a recurrent emphasis on alienation and a constant craving for a feeling of belonging. The quilt-like pattern of hooks΄ narrative will show the reader that only through exploration within the hidden dark cave of each of us will we be able to recognize our identity as distinct and yet inclusive of the world around us. Involved in a problematic mother-daughter dyad, and torn between loving identification with the mother and conditioned separation from the cultural legacy she represents, hooks will bring into focus the motherly internalized misconceptions and the painful daughter individuation process. The hollow between the two bridges and widens as the mother fails to be the proud strong woman her daughter would want her to

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. be, and the daughter, fails to be the conventional submissive girl. Daughterly daydreams and motherly community shaped nightmares cannot coexist.

In hooks΄ work the memoir appears as a sub-genre of autobiography which underscores the agency of the author and frees it of the constraints of the conventional chronological structure. Finding a belonging in the ancestral memory and her subconscious hooks challenges the reliability of memory, and keeps endlessly hovering between the fictional and non-fictional character of the memoir. The dreamscape form of her memoir also bridges the gap between the dialectics of past and present, reality and myth.

Beginning in the earliest school days and concluding toward the end of the high school career, hooks´ narrative meanders around these two points with a feeling of forward motion and dislocatedness. Failing to empathize with the motherly construction of a home-place, hooks will find home in writing rather than in a specific place or culture. Refusing to employ the white yardsticks as societal measuring meters hooks gets involved in the ritual of having her hair pressed and enjoys touching the deepest and most secret niches of her body. Otherness in hooks´ terms is associated with the black color trope and the ancestral heritage. Blackness is a fluid, open category that becomes synonymous with the experience of exile, pain and struggle. The grandmother and the grandfather are quite important revelation figures in terms of the spiritual and mnemonic heritage they represent.

Through a narrative that crosses the boundary of various genres including poetry, fictionalized autobiography and mythology. Audre Lorde΄s Zami gives a vivid picture of what it is like to grow up immigrant, black and outsider in the New York of the late 1950s. Lorde΄s narrative develops along the perspectives of the matrilineal Diaspora and the matrifocal family structure. Considering her mother, her Caribbean foremothers and the African orishas, as cultural pathways in the journey to the discovery of her selves, Lorde dismantles the construction of women as nurturing servants of their husbands and children and sets on a quest for self–assertion through separation from the mother figure and bonding.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Addressing all the muted voices of women and immersed in the dilemma of setting equilibrium between collective responsibility and personal gratification, Lorde΄s Zami regards matrilineal heritage as a life masked and encrypted in well-coded phrases waiting for her to be discovered. The new cultural identity constructed through memory, fantasy and narrative myth enables the writer to develop a multitude of voices, thereby accommodating multiple truths, identities and locations. Lorde adopts three diverse narrative strategies to establish her dualities and enable her factual and spiritual dislocations: the first strategy consists in shifting between dream and reality, the second one consists in renegotiating the past and the present, and the third one consists in moving from personal voicing into collective and plural textual Selves, from a dry prosaic voice, to a rhythmic and poetic one.

In Zami Lorde departs from the conventional concept of home, to an abstract and spiritual one, that of her cultural heritage and her writing. Instead of providing Lorde with a sense of desolateness and alienation at each move, the trips to other cities and states seem to consolidate her identities and merge them into well-fused amalgams, making her feel like a bird without feet. Growing up between Grenada, New York and Mexico, Lorde experiences the whole situation as a cultural triangle of disruption and continuum, identity and difference, splitness and wholeness.

Learning from early on that her body is not only different, but is wrong; Lorde expresses the desire to have a hybrid subjectivity, to incorporate the strongest part of her father and her mother. The famous episodes of the skilful braiding and plaiting of hair and the pounding of the souse on the day of her first menstruation provide illustrations of a growing awareness of one’s body and sexuality and of a successful initiation into the world of adults. The act of the abortion and the physical injury experienced while working at Key Electronics provide instances of a Self under erosion, an illustration of the way how the geography of the body can become an arena of struggles between personal and collective forces, homosexual and heterosexual inclinations. Nevertheless Lorde refrains herself from being nihilistic, asserting that the best gift we can give to our body is set it free to map by itself the infinity of its geography.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Lorde invites us to claim and assert the Other within ourselves. As far as the litany of the Selves dwelling within every one of us cannot fall into clearly cut categorizations or merge into a coherent whole, only by acknowledging and reaffirming the Other within every one of us will we be able to reconcile our warring Selves. Acknowledging that almost every woman she met has left emotional and spiritual “tattoos” on her identity, Lorde asserts that difference rather than sameness is the principle of her identity.

The Anzalduan recognition of permeable, ever-shifting borders teaches her to avoid exclusive categories and embrace “mestiza-like” states. There is fluidity even in the shifting between Audre, Sister Outsider, Zami, and Gamba Adisa; and this is the one to reflect the protagonist’s border crossings and spiritual journeys from one city to another or from one state to another. Lorde even goes that far as to accept lesbianism as an inherent part of her uniqueness rather than as an incompatible presence.

In Chapter Four, Rebecca Walker is revealed transforming herself from a rebellious black adolescent living with her mother in the bohemia of San Francisco to an upper middle class Jewish girl living with her father and her stepmother in the suburbs of Manhattan. Shuttling between coasts and cultures makes Walker feel a “movement child” psychologically , physically and politically. Both insider and outsider to the world she is provided with, she has to come to terms with her multiple ethnic identities in order to adopt the role of the cultural ambassador. At times feeling completely at home in her mother’s world, other times going through disruption from the mother as a way of waging war on her search for identity, Rebecca maps up her identity through the “Mestiza Daughter” and the “Cultural Electra” trope.

Literally traveling between two or more worlds and developing a tolerance for contradictions and plurality, the “Mestiza” is involved in self-negotiations and mediations that make her side with the dominant culture instead of identifying with the matrilineal heritage or becoming a cultural replica of the Electra complex. Typical of the matrilineal relationship in Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish is the matrophobic rejection of the mother’s peculiarities and the desire to become purged once and for all from the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. remnants of her culture. Considering her mother as the inner scapegoat and the inherent blemish, Rebecca recognizes failure to live up to the societal standards of good mothering and turns to her father as a point of reference for her life. Nevertheless, there seems to be no place for a biracial, multiethnic daughter in the xenophobic society of the father, and this makes Rebecca decide to discharge the father’s surname and highlight the mother’s one as a sign of privileging blackness and downplaying whiteness. Walker’s perpetually shifting locations create a narrative that partakes of fact and fiction, fantasy and experience, storytelling and collective unconscious, and present the protagonist as a compulsory amnesiac absorbed in the shapelessness of identity, time and location.

Absorbed in an existence which is void of daily routines, and finding permanence only in the transitional accommodation of airports, Rebecca will claim and disclaim separate parts of her character in every new location periodically moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the white Jewish suburbia to the black artist bohemia, from the white outsiderhood to the black insiderhood. Stylistically speaking the author has intentionally capitalized Home because no conventionality of space or attitude can deserve that name. She feels content with an off the map position and as a mediator between two cultural worlds she can enjoy the “ether–like” rhythm of her life. Rebecca΄s fragmentation and impermanence lead her into believing that her skin color is not black enough, her thighs not well-toned enough and her lips not sensual enough to clearly fall into one group or another.

Rejecting the existence of a stabilized and unified identity and considering herself the tragic mulatta caught between both worlds like a proverbial deer in the headlights, Walker grows aware of her binary marginality and asserts that identity emerges not when identification is made, but when it fails to be made. The sense of multiplicity conferred by Jewishness refers to the potential to transcend dichotomies such as black and white and leave other facets unarticulated.

In Chapter Six, Veronica Chamber tells the story of a young woman’s coming of age both through and despite the relationship with her mother. Refusing to be hardened and

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. embittered by the adult disillusionments and nightmares, she evolves and grows into a fulfilled person who can see things from another point of view. Depicting her existence like a post-impressionist painting, incomplete, incongruous and disconnected while seen from near; but complete and whole when seen from the gaze of the Other, Veronica Chambers regards the postmodern Self as one wavering between fragmentation and wholeness, hybridity and uniqueness. In terms of Self and matrilineal relationship Veronica weaves her existence along the tapestry of her mother’s heritage. Laden throughout with episodes of a distanced mother-daughter relationship, Veronica Chamber’s autobiography depicts an attempt to “mother” the mother, instead of Othering her. Based on the trope of the magician in the mesmerizing trick, Chambers regards black women as masters of emotional sleight of hand, becoming increasingly mysterious and intricate as you try to approach and get to know them.

Chambers teaches us that in every encounter with the Self we learn a new technique of exploring the innermost depths of the Self. As a daughter she realizes that nothing can convert her father into the ideal paternal image, while as a sister she realizes that the same societal expectations have alienated her and her brother. Chambers’ awareness of genderism and colorism comes out through the commercial choice of having more black prototypes of she-dolls and almost no prototypes of he-dolls.

Locationally and psychologically shifting between Ocean Avenue, the South and California, will leave such an imprint on Veronica’s identity formation process that she will start to seek familiarity in otherwise unfamiliar things like Miss Blake or the woman who prepares hamburgers for her. The body is no longer the traditional battleground for the confrontation between acceptance and denial, prejudice and open-mindedness; rather, it is a vessel for aspiring to look better and highlight one’s femininity. Dissecting external beauty messages from white society and depicting the way how these messages wreak havoc with the black’s sense of self–esteem, permits black women to let go of the past and regard the future as fallible human beings.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In her personal account of growing up as a dark-skinned black woman in the heterogeneous society of the United States foisted by the European beauty standards, Marita Golden intermingles patches of history, media script and interviews to come to the conclusion that the American society is more affected by colorism than racism. Told since early childhood not to stay for too long in the sun, Marita recognizes that stepping back in the world and retrieving from one’s dreams and fantasies marks one’s ultimate defeat.

In application of Alice Walker´s concept of womanism, Marita Golden asserts that mothers are like dolls put inside Russian boxes: suppressed and always succeeding in getting beyond the suffocating constrictions of their cases. In terms of the relationship between Self and Other Golden regards women of all races as the same under their skin: entrapped in the cross-boundary situations of either listening to the blatant emancipatory call of one culture or to the underdeveloped cries of the other. This is metaphorically depicted through Marita simultaneously attempting to tune the radio on the American melodies and the African vernacular. She will eventually find another in the racial conceptions and the cultural diversity of Nigeria, Cuba, and the United States; and in a person: Zora Neale Hurston.

Concluding, I can state that dealing with this topic proved interesting and challenging at the same time . The deeper I delved into the study, the less I seemed to know, but I hope it will modestly contribute to the filling of the critical and scholarly gap of criticism revolving around these authors.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

1. POSTMODERN SELVES, BLACK IDENTITIES, FEMALE BODIES

1.1. Subjectivity Past and Presentiii

The concept of subjectivity can be traced back to the Aristotelian school of thinking, the Cartesian formulations and the Freudian psychoanalysis. While the ancient Aristotelian school thinks of humans as rational beings and shuns attention to the way in which the subject relates to the contents of his own mind, the Cartesian tradition regards the human mind as always aware of its inner representations and infers the existence of a thinking subject from such awareness. In Metaphysical Meditations(1932) subjectivity appears as an inner scenario of the thinking subject. Subjective identity is, then, a direct result of the mind's capacity to be constantly aware of its own representations. While the Cartesian statement begins with doubt, being is affirmed at its end: “cogito ergo sum”(qtd in The Philosophical Quarterly 47 /188 1997:365).

Whereas Descartes drives a parallel between subjective experience and objective reality, Kant argues that there could be no “such thing as experience at all, if reality were not it Self structured in just the way our thought about it is structured.”(qtd. in The Philosophical Quarterly 47/188 1997:365). Kant's argument is a thoroughgoing critique of Descartes' subjectivism. Sigmund Freud(1856-1939), Austrian physicist who pioneered the study of “the unconscious” and developed the method of free association and interpretation of dreams, brings forth the concepts of the id, the ego and the superego as the grounds for the dynamic structure of the human psyche. The id describes the drive to satisfy needs, the ego involves awareness of one’s own subjectivity, and the superego is the regulatory mechanism for mediations with the outer society. The point of resemblance between the two scholars is that while both accept the division between the functions of mind and body: the former bases the functioning of the body over the ability of the individual to ponder and to doubt, while the latter develops his theory on the groundworks of the unconscious. Lacan revisits Freud’s theory of the unconscious and

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. makes to it the relevant alterations arguing that “the unconscious is structured like a language, it is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself.”(Wikipedia Jan.29 : 2010).

The proposal that the consideration of an “unconscious” structured like language would deprive the Self of any point of reference, seems to be endorsed even by Lacan who brings forth the concept of the three orders (the imaginary, the real and the symbolic) and the concept of the two Others(the little Other--one’s ego, and the big Other--the radical alterity).

In contemporary discourse, subjectivity is a term used to describe a human being constituted and altered by historical, social and linguistic structures. Some of the most influential figures in the post-modern formulation of subjectivity have been: Ferdinand de Saussure and Michelle Foucault in structuralism; Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis; Jacques Derrida in deconstruction; Roland Barthes in semiotics; Michel Foucault in the historical analysis of discourse and Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in feminism. I will try to intertwine these theories through my separate considerations of Self and language, Self and memory, Self and body, Self and historicity etc.

The most pressing concerns of contemporary scholars–genre and gender as culturally inscribed, the construction of the Self within language systems, the nature of subjectivity, authority and agency, the problematics of making meaning and making history, theories of time, memory and narrative–all absorb critics of autobiography as well. When talking about the other people frequently tend to be divided into two roughly opposite camps which can be loosely labeled the pessimistic and the optimistic camp. The pessimistic side portrays the state of the modern man as having declined relative to some Golden age or as having deteriorated to a current state of confusion and disarray. Placing the society above the individual, this camp reduces the Self conceptions to minimal dimensions and powers. The optimistic discourse, on the other hand, considers the Self as capable of achieving full potential and triumphing over society’s attempted domination. Those who

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. are optimistic about the Self and the culture of individualism; those who are pessimistic regard it as undermining social stability. In conclusion, no matter the controversial claims set forth by the different camps one basic truth seems hold: the more we progress in the contemporary society, the more complicated it becomes to define Self and subjectivity, and the more challenging it becomes to accept the exclusionary verity of one claim as opposed to the other.

1.2. Periodization of the Self Concept

1.2.1 The Self Concept. Classicism To Modernism.

Human beings have always been interested in the interpretation of themselves. The concept of the Self is of major interest to philosophers, religious thinkers, politicians and, more recently, psychologists. The West’s romance with the Self starts in the dawn of the Renaissance during which time the notion of the individual asa universal human subject emerges. In the 1970s, in a period known by Tom Wolfe as the “me-decade” (New York Magazine 1976:8), there was a resurgence of interest in evaluating and polishing one’s very Self and studying it. Etzioni (qtd.in Taylor 2003:410) claimed that this consuming preoccupation with the Self runs parallel to the age of abundance and dynamism and inadvertently contributed to the sharp rise and expansion of government influence, the deterioration of American institutions such as schools, and the decline of the quality of life. Karl Popper (1962-1968) seemed to minimalize the whole while undermining the accuracy of science and overscoring the falsifiability of its conjectures. According to him, “people conceive the concept of the Self just like a hill, the claim that we begin from observations is absurd, as absurd as believing that everyone viewing a hill will have a similar view.”(qtd. in Taylor 2003:420).

As far as book documentations reveal, it was not until 1674 that the word Self took on its more contemporary meaning of “conscious individuation rather than unconscious fusion with the world.”(Abbs qtd.in Hattie 1992:4). In terms of dictionary registrations, there is no entry in the OED until the 1985 for the Self concept, but this does not mean that there was no such term up to that time. The word identity as it is appears on the OED, revealed

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. several images such as continuity of the Self in the face of external change, wholeness, full integration etc. If in plain words we would attempt to make a differentiation between the two, the Self is basically linked to the innermost psychological and philosophical depths of a person, while identity is linked to the placing of this interior framework within the landscape of such social dimensions as ethnicity, culture, gender, class etc.

The way how the Self concept developed along history mirrors the economical, political, social and scientific developments of the period. While in traditional societies one’s identity was fixed, solid and stable and the sense of being was measured in terms of a greater power than itself; in the Enlightenment, there was believed to exist a stable and knowable Self whose transparency and rationality could be reflected only through language; and in Impressionism, the Self was considered as fluid and unreachable, worthy of being defined in terms of its impersonality and impalpability.

The flourishing of Romanticism brings about the questioning of the grounds of the Self and the foreshadowing of its figurative death. The romantic view laid central stress on the unseen even sacred forces dwelling within the person. Lying beneath the veneer of conscious reason for Wordsworth stands the “deep interior”(Waugh 2006:540), for Shelley an “unseen power”(Waugh 2006:447), and for Baudelaire a “luminous hollow” (Waugh 2006:449). The essence of the romantic individual comes out more clearly in Schiller´s lines to Laura: “who and what gave me the wish to woo thee, still lip to lip, to cling for aye unto thee?/ who made thy glances to my soul the link?/ who bade me burn thy very breath to drink, my life in thine to sink?”(Schiller 2004:24). Besides being an expression of the powerful love of the author for his beloved, these lines also suggest that the inner drive, the moving power, is something beyond consciousness, a mysterious depth. The romantic Self is also reflected in art in what might be termed a presence of the absent. In England, J.M.W. Turner’s canvasses placed the viewer in the midst of turbulence and vapors. The beyond is thus the central subject matter and the most difficult instance to articulate.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The profound Romantic Self provided the grounds for the modernist concern with the fragmentation of the Self, largely as a result of the World Wars. Scholars such as Charles Taylor (1989) and Anthony Giddens(1991) treat the modern Self as a reflexive entity: each act of self-exploration thereby believed to enhance self-awareness and activate the forces of internal change. Stating that “We burn with desire to find solid ground and ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the infinite, but our groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”(qtd.in Giddens 1991:200), Blasé Pascal seems to approach deconstruction and the skeptic attitude of the postmodernists, by also sounding a little bit nihilistic when considering our very existence on unsteady groundworks likely to collapse at any time, therefore a kind of degraded building likely to turn into dust and debris at any time.

The multidimensionality of the autobiographical Self according to the modernists is such that one has to decide not what he was, or who he was, but rather to which of the multifarious beings could he be committed. Being a modernist meant finding one’s world and oneself in perpetual construction and destruction, disintegration and renewal. In late modernity, psychologists like Sarbin and Gergen propose an understanding of the Self as a narrative identity, “the unity of a person’s life being articulated in stories that express this experience.”(Gergen 1993:36).

1.2.2. The Postmodern Conceptions of the Self

The way they come in front of our eyes, the modern and the postmodern conceptions of the Self may sound quite similar to one another. But differences are meant to be clarifying, as much as similarities are meant to be confounding. Modernism, is fundamentally about creating order out of chaos, postmodernism on the other hand, is mainly about skepticism and fragmentation. While many modernist works try to compensate for the lost unity, coherence, and meaning; many postmodernists avoid fake assumptions about the reaching of a possible stable essence, and celebrate the meaninglessness of the world.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The definition of postmodernismiv has become the basis of ardent debates for many years. To some scholars postmodernism represents a new historical period that people are entering, while to others it stands as an extension of some of the basic concepts undergirding modernism itself. Postmodern literature is marked by the presence of uncertainty, discontinuity and inconsistency, an empowerment of the audience, an information sickness and a fluctuation between binaries. Referring to the tenets of postmodernism, Jameson argues that the “advent of post-modernity marks a new depthlessness, a consequent weakening of historicity, and a schizophrenic subjectivity”. (Jameson 1991:16). So in postmodernism we should give up searching for a sense of history and coherent identity, because everything is multidimensional, split and chaotic.

Postmodernist approaches to the concept of the Self include emphasizing the fragmented, discontinuous, migratory nature of existence on the one hand, and adopting the Marxist economic perspective on the other hand. In terms of theories, the evolutionary path of the Self concept starts with George Knight’s consideration of identities as “pastiche”, is continued by Kenneth’s awareness of a state of “contingency” and “fragmentation”, and is finalized with Walter Truett Anderson´s recognition of a “plurality of identities”. It is George Knight, with his philosophy of the postmodern Self, who considers our identities as ersatz or pastiche, “our whole entity conceived as made up of a collage or patchwork of ideas or views.”(qtd. in Waugh 2006:28). Kenneth Gergen, on the other hand, states that, “the notions of continuity, unity and authenticity that previously had defined the Self, have been replaced by contingency, fragmentation and artfulness.”(Gergen 1993:181). Attempting to make matters simpler, the writer Walter Truett Anderson gives four terms postmodernists use to speak of the Self while addressing the issues of change and multiplicity. (Anderson 1996: 28). These terms include: multiphrenia,v protean Self vi, decentered Self vii and Self in relationviii.

The postmodern conception that the subject is a fragmented being, with no essential core of identity, and in a continual state of dissolution, is expanded by Baudrillard and Eagleton. Jean Baudrillard(1988) states that, in postmodern society, copies, or what he calls simulacra, have taken the place of the originals, and the postmodern individual

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. should be seen in terms of its multiplicity. Terry Eagleton(1983), on the other hand, describes the postmodern Self as a network of identification seeking attachments, a “dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical inferiority .”(qtd.in Lovlie 1992:56). The only absolute truth not yet denied by the critics of the postmodern condition is the sub-conscious chaos lying beneath everyone’s veneer. Donna Haraway uses the term cyborg to refer to a kind of “dissembled, reassembled, postmodern, collective and personal Self. (Haraway 1990:70). The very definition of the word cyborg, unfolds in front of us a series of paradoxes and illusions that, more than illuminating our path to the finding of a stable Self, seems to try its best in making us lose our way in the jungle of plurality and collectiveness. More explicitly, in Donna Haraway’s view, the flow of everyday situations provides a succession of Me´s–that taken together produce the illusion of a continuous and integrated Self.

A world where we once knew ourselves in terms of values, has given way to one of uninterrupted intensities of emotion and grief, triumph and trauma, loss and achievement, birth and death. Alienated intellectuals, culture wars, volatile markets, and endless challenges target our sense of selfhood and dim its perspective. The internal fragmentation and the inherent chaos still remains the target of 21st century theorists. The sense of selfhood in the postmodern era is belittled to the point of annihilation, even by the founding fathers of this movement. Frederic Jameson does not in turn refrain himself from being pessimistic enough to claim that “the subject is dead and this is the end of the bourgeois monad ego or individual.” (Jameson 1991:15).

Finally, the concept of the relational Self is meant to be a rescue to the postmodern condition of the subject, but seems to end up suffocating the subject while pretending to fit him into the ever changing frames set by the society and the community. As Lacan asserts, “the Self is the locus of the relationships.”(Lacan 1988:77), and is constructed through the incorporation of the responses of other people, but what he fails to recognize is that in this way the Self becomes everybody and everything but an individuality.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

1.3. Self under the Scientific and Religious Lenses ix

The image of the Self, and how it came to develop, or degrade into the postmodern times is completed even through a view of the place this concept holds in several sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as in some of the major religious beliefs and sects.

Self and the Social sciences. In psychology, the Self is considered as a “collection of cognitively held beliefs that a person possesses about himself.”(qtd.in Strozier 1985:100). Similarly to identity, it includes self-images and self-esteem, but differently from identity, it also includes cognitions, attitudes and emotions. The Ericksonian framework makes clear this distinction by differentiating among the ego identity, personal identity, and the social identity or the cultural identity (Erickson 1968). From the vantage point of psychology, there are two processes by which a Self is formed:(The I formation and the Me formation). The I, is the subjective knower, and the Me the known object.

Sociologically speaking, from the late 19th century to the present day, the concept of the Self is regarded as the way individuals label themselves as members of particular groups. Among the most well-known sociologists, George Herbert Mead, lays the emphasis on the process of identity negotiation: “the individual interacting with others in order to create an identity.”(qtd.in Leary, Tangney 2003:52). The Self for Mead is at once individuality and generality, agent and recipient, sameness and difference. To further his argument, he regards the I as an unsocialized Self comprising of personal desires, needs and dispositions, and the Me as a socialized Self internalizing the attitude of the others. Foreshadowing the postmodernist emergence of the relational Self, Erving Goffman, (1922-82) emphasizes how each individuality is comprised of the anterior aspect of screening off what would sound inappropriate to others, and the posterior aspect of maintaining an immutable, unique essence. Thus, through Goffman’s ponderings the postmodern Self appears as strictly relational “a construction of the movement true only for a given time and within certain relationships.”(Goffman 1959:44).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In the framework of the social psychology theory, Kenneth Gergen (1993) brings forth 3 samples of personality which seem to provide a picture of the modern and postmodern condition of the Self: the “strategic manipulator”, the “pastiche personality”, and the “relational self”. The ‘strategic manipulator’ is the one who regards all senses of identity merely as role-playing exercises, the “pastiche personality” abandons all aspirations toward a true or essential identity, and finally, the “relational self” abandons all senses of exclusive Self, and views all identity in terms of social engagement with others.

In social anthropology identity is of primary importance as compared to the sense of the Self. The modern concerns on ethnicity and the social movements of the 1970s were the ones to pave the ground for the developments of the two streams of anthropological considerations. While the first stream favors, “a primordialist approach which takes the sense of Self and belonging to a collective group as a fixed thing, defined by objective criteria such as common ancestry and common biological characteristics.”(Stryker, Burke 2000:290), the other stream of anthropologists, by contrast, seeks to introduce alternative concepts in an attempt to capture the dynamic and fluid qualities of human social self- expression.

The philosophical theories revolving around the Self concept date back to the spiritual and meditative traditions and the ponderings of early philosophers like Socrates and Plato and reach up to the psychoanalytic criticism of Freud and Lacan. In mystical and eastern meditative traditions, the human being is often conceived as a being in the illusion of individual existence, and separateness from the others. Avicenna is one of the many to lay the ground for the recognition of the Self as a separate entity unto itself. While imprisoned in a castle, he writes his famous “Floating Man” thought experiment telling its readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air: “Isolated from all sensations, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness.”(Mead qtd.in Leary, Tangney 2003:5). He thus concludes that the Self should not be viewed in relational terms and as linked to some physical substance, but rather as a primary essence in itself. Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato, on the other hand, equate the Self with the soul. While to the former soul is “the true Self, the real essence, the spiritual unity” (Hattie

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

1992:300), to the latter, the Self or soul “exist and possess wisdom independent of the human form.”(Hattie 1992:299), and our whole life is involved in the perpetual striving to find this wisdom lost at the moment of birth.

Psychoanalytic criticism traces the development of the Self specifically in the moments when the defenses of our organism momentarily break down and we experience anxiety. It is exactly when we experience anxiety that we reveal such core issues as insecurity and instability of the sense of Self, and it is exactly in these moments that we become more vulnerable to the external experiences of other people. Psychoanalytic criticism today also sees a close connection between our sexuality and our identity, because the origin of our sexual being is “in the nature of the affirmation or the disruption of our sense of Self that occurs in childhood.”(Leary, Tangney 2003:174). A new relationship between Self and “the Unconscious” was brought into light by the Freudian philosophy and subsequently the Lacanian interpretation of them. Despite the differences arising, what the two of them share is a consideration of childhood as the most important stage for the development of the sense of Self, and the awareness that the deeper we delve into ourselves the more conscious we become of the infinity of its abysses.

Self and religion: Almost all religious doctrines agree on the individual being enabled to find his real Self through the close connection to God, the divine authority or the divine script, but there are also more extremist doctrines which lay the emphasis on the existence of no Self. In Christian Anthropology, the Self is constituted by a separable body and soul. Although there have appeared hundreds of religious fractions voicing alternative interpretations to this belief, the dominant creed is that “the immaterial soul separates from the physical body at the moment of death.”(Encyclopedia Britannica Self Christianity 19/194: 35), and as most assume the soul goes immediately to its eternal reward or punishment. Islam, on the other hand, calls itself a religion of the Book, Qur’an being the book through devotion to which Muslims are given sense and a sense of selfhood. In the Nikayas, famous Buddhist texts, the agglomeration of constantly changing physical and mental constituents ‘skandhas’ comprising a human being is thoroughly analyzed and stated not to comprise an eternal, unchanging Self. This idea

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. leads to the acceptance of the absence of a limiting self-identity, thus to the assertion of the anattā (non-self state).

Among the Indian religions Buddhism teaches that there can be no permanent Self and the notion of an abiding Self is one of the main causes of human conflict. Only by ceasing to materialize our perceived Selves, can we come to a state of perfect peace. In the Hindu doctrine the ground of all things lies in a Cosmic Self and all life participates in that of the Puruca, the supreme soul or the spirit of the universe.

1.4. The Autobiographical Self

The vital relationship between Self and autobiography can be traced in the different theories developing around the concept of the Self as well as in the practical approaches that several critics have made to this concept. Critics dealing with the relationship between Self and autobiography can be divided into three different camps: those who consider it as a separate entity unto himself, unique and irreproducible; those who consider it as a cultural creation; and ultimately those who regard it as decentered and fragmented, unlikely to ever be constructed and only worthy of deconstruction.

In the multitude of critics dealing with the autobiographical Self, the names of Gusdorf, Montaigne and Rousseau seem to set the cornerstones concerning the status of the Self in the autobiographical account. Gusdorf relies on the premise of autobiography as an isolated being, a discrete, finite unit of society: “Man must be an island unto himself Then, and only then, is autobiography possible.”(qtd.in Smith, Watson 1998:73). In the essay “Of Giving the Lie” (1603) Montaigne respectively writes of the reflexive process of Self creation and book creation. According to him, the basic challenge people are and should be faced with is that of getting to know themselves and depicting themselves in the most accurate way possible, without additional colors or nuances. Almost the same idea is also advocated in his other essay “Of Presumption” where he states: “the world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward. Others always go elsewhere; as for me, I roll about in myself.” (Montaigne 1998:67).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In his classic autobiography Confessions(1782), Rousseau confirms once again the authenticity of the Self, and tries to minimalize the pretensions of his colleagues for Self as a copy or simulacra. He modestly asserts that he is not the one to judge whether his Self is the best one or not, but at least he is able to make out the fact that bad or good be it, his Self is uniquely his and different from the others: “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”(Rousseau 1938:17).

The cultural approach to autobiography is carried along by James Olney in his collection of essays Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical(1980). As Olney professes the concept of selfhood far from being linear and consistent throughout the ages: “is historically and culturally determined, and as such should be subject to a discursive analysis to account for its vicissitudes over the ages.”(Olney 1980:74). A radically different perspective on the rhetorical representation of the Self in autobiography comes through his Metaphors of Self (1972). According to him we do not see or touch the Self, but we come to know about it through its metaphorizing and mutations. If all Selves are constantly evolving and transforming, how can we keep pace with their development, thereby being able to convey to the others a sense of it? Autobiography is not just history, not just culture; it is a metaphor of the Self at the moment of composition. The mediated reality that the metaphors of the Self provide us with, besides joining and uniting us, separate and refract from the seemingly tactile existence we are provided with. In terms of Olney´s theory, even autobiographical writing itself can be analyzed on the basis of three levels: the first one focusing on the bios-- the author’s life; the second one on the autos-- the autobiographer’s Self; and the third one the graphe-- referring to writing.

In contemporary society, critics such as Hassan and Gunn regard autobiography as the best place to nest the postmodern idea of the presence of no Self at all, or at least of the presence of a decentered, fragmented, indeterminate Self. According to Hassan, autobiographies stand as models of decentered subjectivity, host the episteme of the unmaking and refuse the trap and tyranny of the wholes. In “Postmodern Turn”, he elaborates: “By indeterminacy or better still indeterminacies, I mean a complex referent

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. that these diverse concepts help to delineate. Indetermanence both questions and quests the Self, both undermining and recreating the Self in a constant and consistent displacement and decenterment, initiating a postmodern Self perhaps.” (Hassan 1987 :88). As the idea of the incomplete and pluralistic universe inhabits our lives, we should avoid blindly identifying ourselves with the collective and the communal.

In “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity”, Hassan further acknowledges: “We need to cultivate a keener, livelier, more dialogical sense of ourselves in relation to diverse cultures and we need to discover modes of self-transcendence that avoid blind identification with collectives.” (Hassan 1925:10). For Gunn, the sense of Self, displaced and alienated as it feels, is the only one that can really identify with the marginalized condition of autobiography and try to re-inscribe autobiography within the constrictions of language: “The displaced Self who speaks and lives in time […] and it is her mission to formulate a ‘poetics of experience’ in order to rescue autobiography from its quarantine in some sterile corner outside of culture , restoring it to full participation in the life in time, that is the only life we know.”(Hattie 1992:288).

The most categorical of all critics sounds Mary McCarthy who belittles every desperate attempt in search of the Self by inviting us to make it up, to invent it, rather than waste time looking for an essence that does not exist: “It is absolutely useless to look for it; you won’t find it, but it is possible in some sense to make it.”(qtd.in Lifton Robert Jay 1999:2).

1.5. The Multidimensional Self

1.5.1. The Female Self x

Feminist criticism has historically focused on the biological and cultural construction of the “sexed” and “gendered” subject, relevantly addressing the possibilities for change in conceptualization, discourse representation, and self-assessment. Regardless the theoretical paradigms they have been working on, feminists generally agree that descriptions of subjectivity have been focused and modelled on the male subject, women

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. being denied subjectivity. The old dilemma “what is a woman”, has become a springboard inciting debates between different critics and different schools of thought. Historically, gender emerged as a category of analysis and cultural criticism in the second half of the 20th century with the beginnings of the second wave feminism. As a term and as an institution gender is quite debatable, some scholars use it to mean biological sex male/female, others insist upon making a distinction between biology and culture, while later ones speak of it as an entirely cultural construct. In the plethora of theorists handling the subject of Self and gender, there are those who combat the deterministic view and those who encourage women to celebrate difference from the male norm rather than to discount or denigrate it.

When viewed in the context of the larger problematics of identity and existentialism, gender becomes mainly the focus of study of the French feminists. Correspondingly, the French existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women’s social roles are culturally prescribed rather than biologically given, and women themselves are the source of stereotyping and discrimination if they come down to speak of themselves in terms of biological difference from the male counterparts. In this context the much quoted reference that one must become a woman rather than claim to have been born one is key in the struggle against biologically determined subjectivity. Proceeding toward the 1970s, feminist critics demonstrated how man erased woman and how the rigid male canon suffocates the helpless voices of women. The 1980 theories in turn regarded the radically decentered subject as one occupying different spectator positions, posing the stress on the fluidity of such a state. The poststructuralist era and the critical theory of the 1990s, on the other hand, paved the way for the development of a cluster of concepts now gathered under the umbrella term of postmodernism.

Ardent debates began to boil concerning whether feminism had been an unclaimed predecessor of postmodernism, or whether postmodernism, on the other hand, had spelled the death knell of feminism. Donna Haraway´s deliberately polemical essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) alerted critics to the dramatic advances of science and technology and gave a subtle taste of what the postmodern era would be like. In conformity with this

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. tendency, the Australian writer Meagan Morris argued in 1988 that “feminists and minorities had already been living and practicing postmodern modes that become essential only once articulated by male scholars like Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Jameson or Baudrillard.” (Taylor 2003:400). In 1987 in her Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldua formulated the concept of “borderlands” which then developed into a decentered, hybrid, female subject between Mexico and the USA in her La Conscienzia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness (1981). Marginalized and decentered as they were ethnic communities in general and African Americans in particular were to be considered already postmodern hovering in the remotest sites of the social and literary community, without ever being able to get a decent status in them.

Well aware of the marginal position of the “gendered Selves” and of their incapacity to approach mainstream literature, prominent postmodern feminists such as Luce Irigaray (1932), Helene Cixous (1937) and Julia Kristeva (1982) have articulated theories of feminine differénce informed to a great extent by the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and the post-Freudian psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. The problem of sexual difference lies at the heart of the concerns of Luce Irigaray. Attacking Freud’s theory of female sexuality based on a lack of the male penis, Irigaray contends that women have always been conferred meaning and representation only on a biological bases, thereby being “excluded from the symbolic order, and thus (escaping) cultural construction.”(Taylor 2003:245). The perspectives for the future seem even less promissory, because if males are driven for identity and uniqueness, females hopelessly attempt to become representable by reconciling every conflicting aspect of their Selves. As it comes out in This Sex Which is not One: “the woman is always two by virtue of her sexual organs.”(Irigaray 1985:26).

A related critique to the modern situation and the position of the female in society comes out in Helene Cixous´s essay “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays”(Cixous 1986: 89). Through a series of questions and binary oppositions, Cixous argues that the differentiation between men and women has accrued a whole range of cultural significations which set women’s positions in advance and deprive them of a voice. In the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. culture of Western societies: “women’s identity is bound up with the subordination of the feminine so that subject positions are mapped out in advance thereby preventing the assertion of female independence.”(Cixous 1975:88). Somehow more conformingly than Irigaray, Cixous thus proposes embracing a bisexual notion of identity and exploring the multiplicity inherent in all identities.

While Luce Irigaray associates the subject woman with the symbolic, Kristeva associates it with the semiotic. She explores the theory of female subjectivity in terms of dualisms and in terms of the relation between Self and Other and avoids the claims for an erasure of the female Self. In the essay “Women’s Time”(1986) she asserts that “the term woman can refer only to a structure observed in the socio-historical context and not to any essence.”(Kristeva 1981:199). What she really contends concerning the relationship of female representation and language is that the feminine dimension is a structural necessity usually located in the writing of men; it is a form of an Other without which men´s writing will not make any sense.

Slightly more pessimistic sound Estelle Jelinek, Anis Pratt, and François Lionett. They unanimously agree on the idea that women are precluded from authenticity of Self, be it because the female I is “enshrouded in the She and can be understood only by external definition”(Jelinek qtd.in Frye 1986:49), or because the woman is forever in a conflict “between being an authentic adult and an acceptable female.”(Pratt qtd.in Frye 1986:46), or lastly because the woman is involved in a méttisage “way of perceiving difference while emphasizing similarities in the process of cultural encoding.”(Lionnet 1989:248). As a simulacrum of feminist criticism, lesbian criticism is concerned with issues of personal identity and politics as well as female affirmation. Lesbian critics tend to argue that a writer’s literary output establishes her lesbian status even when emotional bonds tend to be kept hidden from view or camouflaged. Considering the way the female and “gendered Self” appears through the camera shot of these critics, women’s autobiographies are to be considered fragmented, formless and even chaotic, able to reveal puzzling facets of a missing Self. The permanent battle is that of determining

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. woman as either a purely cultural construction or a fluid Other of the masculine discourse.

In a diachronic analysis of how the female image developed along the American and African American history and literary canon, the sense of Self appeared as succeeding to be everything but conventional. Historically and socially speaking, the American woman has come in front of our eyes as a fully colored movie strip bearing the mark of the American past, present, and future. This sequence includes the devout Puritan female colonist of early settlements, the republican mother of the American revolution, the middle class woman of the cult of domesticity, the voluptuous all American Gibson girl, the smoking and the drinking flapper of the Jazz age, the factory worker of the Second World War, the pin up girl Bettie Grable of the US troops, the passive housewife of the postwar 1950s, the sexually promiscuous feminist activist of the 1960s, the yuppie materialistic professional woman of the 1980s, to end up with the cyborg woman of the New Era.

The African American female Self, on the other hand, has been conveyed through the looking glass of three images: the “cage” image, the “mirror” image, and the “cultural ventriloquism” image. The “cage” image has its origins in the statement of Elisabeth Fox Genovese that “more often than not, African American women’s autobiographies have been written from within the cage, and the word cage can be applied to the cage of gender as well as race.”(Genovese 1991:75). This is the touchstone of contemporary criticism, and it conceives that we cannot conceptualize anything except within heavily ideological and conceptual systems. Emerging from the identity theory of Lacan and invoked in the feminist theories of Beauvoir, the “mirror image” ponders that “no woman as we know, truly sees herself in a mirror, she sees herself through the imagined or real gaze of another.”(Culley 1992:9). The “cultural ventriloquism” presupposes that the woman is being seen within the paradigm of both Self and Other, both subject and object of desire. In synchrony with this claim, the author Monique Witting says that the word woman means slave: “We will not be free of slavery” she thinks “until we rid the language of the word woman that carries his history.”(Waugh 2003:108).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

1.5.2. Black Selves Ethnic Identities.

African American criticism, with representatives such as Delgado and Stefanic, identifies the basic tenets of the critical race theory and deals with the concept of Self, identity and race in terms of their inherent multiplicity, physical features and cultural attributions. In a world of multiculturalism and multiethnicity the speaker’s identity is under constant redefinition, and the quality of the multiple Selves parallels the postmodern density and verticality of texture. This trait of the post-modern condition is also confirmed by Lǿvlie (qtd.in Taylor 2003:203) who undermines every pretension in the name of uniformity and unilinearity in the name of polyvocality.

The concept of identity has come into widespread use since it was promoted in the 1950s by the work of Eric Erickson (1968) who laid the claim that we begin to consider matters of identity every time they become a problem. Though the career of the race concept is quite disputable, the first recorded use in English was in a poem by William Dunbar of 1508. However in African American literary practice, the myth of race as an “irreducible biological essence on the one hand, and as a culturally constructed trope on the other precariously coexists”.(Napier 2000:124).

The biological or social basis of the ethnic identity makes it a questionable category of the African American consciousness. The African American consciousness is marked by constant identity crisis. Negroes first lost contact with their land of birth by being captured and brought as slaves to the sugar islands of the Antilles; a second Diaspora and a second loss of the land took place in the 19th and 20th centuries when thousands of African Americans abandoned the southern states and went to the north, their aim being to escape the persecutions and lynchings. The great debate about race was introduced into the American consciousness by the late 19th century natural evolution, early 20th century social Darwinism, the new psychology of Freud, and was transformed by African American fictionists of the Harlem Renaissance into themes of racial uplift, cultural nationalism and black power. In the first period of black autobiography, the struggle the African American author had to be faced with was that of “trying to reconcile two

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. warring spirits within the same body.”(Du Bois 1903:65). The African American author took pride in being black but, as W.E.B Du Bois claimed, he had to strive to reconcile two contradictory identities, one as a black person and the other as an American. In the second period of black autobiography, a new dilemma crept into the old one of double identity: personal affirmation in the white world made the protagonist feel further removed from the black masses thereby increasing the gulf between himself and his own people.

Black criticism questioned the relevance of the contemporary literary discourse for the analysis of the status of the black Self. Gates’ “Preface to Blackness”(1979) argues for a consideration of literature as a system of signs in arbitrary relation to social reality. Black feminist literary theory proceeds from the assumption that black women produce art thrice removed from their originality because of the oppression of sexism, racism and classicism.

1.5.3. Self and the Sense of the Other.

The Self/Other should be considered as an ideological, linguistic, philosophical and social binary that posits a state of ideal existence against one of non-existence. Since the rise of postmodernity, it has come to represent the exclusionary relationship between subjects who occupy opposite positions on the center/margin models of race, gender and power relations. In this kind of opposition the Self is always characterized as all that is positive, significant and whole; while the Other has come to stand for the negative, insignificant and partial. The Self also represents possibilities for agency and fully inhabited subjectivity, while the Other is dispossessed and incapable of self-actualization. No matter how confounding the bond may sound, collectivity and reliance on the Otherness is seen as the solution to alienation and fragmentation. A clear example of the confrontation of the collective Self with the individual Self is given in Paul Auster´s New York Trilogy (1988). Quinn hopes to be able to recover this lost Self through his attachment to the communal identity: “remarkable as it seems, no one ever noticed

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Quinn. It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city. Only by becoming garbage can one hope to be recycled.”(qtd. in Bertl 1990:71).

Circumstances start to become even more aggravating when the quest for subjectivity involves members of society such as women, Selves forever on the go, always involved in the desperate quest for affirmation and recognition. So, be it in terms of race or in terms of gender, women need an Other for their internal definition. Patricia Meyer Spacks calls this situation one of “Selves in hiding” or of the denial of the individual Self in name of the collectivity.(Spacks 1980:213).

Proponents of the feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race theory view the relationship of the Self to the Other as one of domination and exclusion. As a representative of the second wave of feminism in general and the French feminism in particular, Simone de Beauvoir proposed that “in the Self \ Other relationship, women learn to occupy the position of the other object and therefore place themselves as the negative counterpart to the subject man.”(De Beauvoir 1973:280). This assertion leads to two further assumptions: firstly, the woman occupies the position of the object because of her awareness that she can not pretend for more; and secondly, the binary relationship between Self and Other suggests that the I cannot exist without the non I or the Other.

This argument is trenchantly conveyed by George Eliot according to whom women are important and essential in their own redundancy. In Variations on Sex and Gender (1986) he acknowledges that:

woman so defined cannot fully know or reflect upon herself. She harbours no unified, atomic, Adamic core to be discovered or represented. There are no masks to uncover because paradoxically there are only masks, only roles and communal expectations. By defining women as Other men are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies–a symbol of potentially human decay and transience, of limitation generally. (Butler in Praxis International 1986:507).

Hence women become the Other, they come to embody corporeality itself, thereby converting their redundancy and marginalization into their very sense of being, their essence.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Sometimes it is women themselves who rather realistically confess their inability to be self-defined without the presence of an Other. Such a confession is unsparingly done, apparently even by women as strong as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde. Angelou frequently imagines herself as an Other sucking in air to breathe out shame. Audre Lorde sums up her attitude toward women in the epilogue to Zami: A New Spelling of my Name(1983) as she states that “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-- so different that I had to stretch and go in order to recognize her.”(Lorde Zami:255). Lesbian as it may sound her autobiography shows that the connection between her and other women was achieved because she found in the female Other what she was supposed to find in men.

Several theories of Self and the body claim that the female’s attraction for the Otherness should be traced in the biological givens women are provided with: women are meant to be pregnant and to bring to light an Other whom they will love more than themselves, and through whom they will find the way to their real Selves. Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and co-existence of the Self and an Other. The arrival of the child leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that without the child she would rarely encounter: love for another, not for herself or for an identical being, love for a new life out of yours, for a new promissory joy out of the birth labor agony. This is a gentle and delightful way of forgetting oneself. It is a kind of camouflaged narcissism and natural self-denial.

It is worth noting how the subject of femininity and Otherness is approached in terms of the multiplicity of networks, complimentary inclusions, or alienating exclusions. For Zora Neale Hurston rather than speaking in terms of univocal identity and essence we should speak of “subjective plurality”: an “intersubjective engagement with the elements of the Self, a dialectic neither repressing difference nor for that matter privileging identity but rather expressing engagement with the social aspects of the Self.”(Hurston qtd. in Napier 2000:94). What Hurston does in her assertion is just pave the way to the acceptance of what will become an increasingly widely used term for referring to the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. status of the Self in the postmodern condition: the relational Self. There are some female writers who even go so far as to consider femaleness and the sense of being an Other as a privilege, or who call for the celebration of the multiplicity and subjective plurality. Elisabeth Spellman brings forth the theory of “race privilege”. Drawing from Aristotle and the broad patterns of Western thought, she argues that: “for women to have a gender identity is itself a race privilege.”(Spellman 1997:76). That is, for white women who need not think of themselves in racial terms, gender becomes the foundational category for self-organization.

While defending their experimentations in autobiographical writing and seeking to be provided with a “niche” in the man-made canon, several female writers have shown how they become validated through bonding to another. In Lillian Hellmann’s book “An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento”(1973), the reader is invited into a world of Others who, as they come together in her memory, become significant in the articulation of her Self. This kind of definition: “permits her to see the Self, not as a confining ego, but as the sum of all past experiences.”(Hellman 1969:45). Fanon considers women as Selves always “under construction”, be it as affected by the agents of family, community or even texts.(Fanon 1986). The continual rebuilding of the Self as the subject moves from text to text, from misidentification to misidentification, comes out even in Fanon’s influential essay “The Fact of Blackness” retrieved from the book Black Skin, White Masks. In it Fanon explores the effects of racism on the construction of the subject and the production of identity.

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world. Sealed into this crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others[…]. I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances, of the Other fixed me there. Nothing happened, I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another Self. (Fanon 1986:109).

Identity becomes a masquerade as one attempts to fit in. In this case, the black man uses a series of white masks to hide the black skin. Nikki Giovanni, on the other hand, is one of those women who refuse to resign to the so-called “privilege of being the Other .”and tries to trace the fault in the attitude of black men towards the members of their own race.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

She feels that part of the problem is: that black men, falsely perceive both black women and themselves. As a result they define black women in terms of white women because they frequently think of themselves in terms of white men. But if they ever would decide to define a black man in black terms I think they would have different expectations of us as women.(Napier 2000:145)

In postmodernism alterity is used as a substitute term for Otherness. Postmodern thinkers have almost unanimously rejected the understanding of alterity and Otherness which is found in the dialectic and logic of G.W.E Hegel. A recompensing term for the state of alterity in the postmodern condition is brought by the postmodern considerations of the relational Self. As Kenneth Gergen states in his Saturated Self (1993): “The more saturated we become with relationships, the more we become populated with fragments of the Other each of us harboring a multitude of potentials for relating and replacing the Other.”(Gergen 1993:65). Multidimensional as the relational Self is, it makes subjects waver on the brim of annihilation and on the verge of objectification.

The fear of the consideration of women as subjects/objects is also embodied in a piece called Hon, erected in a cathedral in Stockholm/Sweden in the mid sixties. One enters the huge, brightly colored steel and paper-made sculpture of a reclining woman through the vagina. Once inside one finds machines dispensing milk and coke in the area of the breasts, bottle crushers operate close by, a forged art exhibits her legs, and an altar in her tiny, tiny head. Meant to be revealing and multidisciplinary, each space reveals yet another negative way to objectify the womblike site.

1.5.4. Bodily Dimensions of the Self

The body seems to be the nearest home for the autobiographical subject, the very ground upon which a notion of a coherent, historically continuous stable identity can be founded. Traditional autobiography most often begins in the midst of flesh and blood; nevertheless, skin seems to be the literal and metaphorical borderland between the materiality of the autobiographical I and the contextual surroundings of the world. This skin simultaneously looks transparent and opaque, penetrable and impenetrable, a boundary and a catalyzing agent. This idea is even supported by Lynn Miller who

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. contends that, by the very way it is meant to discriminate, the body and the skin succeed in reconciling the physical and the cultural, the personal and the social. A much contested border of containment and transgression, the body sets the boundary in-between the meaning and the narratee. In Sidonie Smith’s words: “The body of the narratee, the cultural body and the body politic all merge in skins and skeins of meaning”.(Smith S. qtd. in Ashley, Gilmore, Peters eds. 1994:266).

While, in the Gothic criticism, the body was seen as continuously inhabited by the past memories and the future foreshadowing, in post-modern criticism it always appeared as fragmented and illusively intact. Denise Riley is the one to lay the focus on the dynamic instability of the concept of Self and the body to a point where she considers it an influencing agent rather than a beginning or an end in itself: “The body is not for all its corporeality an originating point, or yet a terminus, it is a result or an effect. And culturally only bodies are experienced as different.”(qtd.in Ashley, Gilmore, Peters 1994:289). Lastly, speaking about the female body, Adrienne Rich claims: “The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”(Rich 1979:40).

1.5.5. Self and Language.

Claiming that meaning arises from relations of difference within a sociolinguistic system, Ferdinand de Saussure is the one to pave the way to the emphasis on the subject’s reliance upon language and to the occurrence of the linguistic turn in 20th century Western philosophy. Jacque Lacan and Michel Foucault are the ones to focus on the processes of signification and subject formation and to overscore the treatment of subjectivity in terms of language.xi The argument is furthered by Roland Barthes who emphasizes in his Writing Degree Zero(1953) that from the middle of the 19th century on, Europe’s literary culture became absorbed in the problem of language, “No longer a vehicle of communication, but a situation fraught with conflict.”(Barthes 1968:83), language attained a social and subjective intensity in which the shifting possibilities of both political and interior life were somehow invested.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Worth studying is the way the relationship between Self and language is viewed by the postmodernist and the poststructuralist scholars. While postmodernists argue that “language can not be adequately related to truth because of the disjunction between our words and the realities that they claim to reflect.”(Taylor 2003:45), poststructuralists regard the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. They claim that the concept of the Self as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct, an individual is the shelter of conflicting tensions and knowledge claims. Therefore, every reader must attempt to relate the meaning of the text to his personal concept of the Self recognizing that: “the author’s intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives.”(Wikipedia Jan. 29: 2010).

These ideas are also supported by the introduction of Derrida’s concept of “sous rapture”. Confessing that we cannot stand outside of language as self-present Cartesian subjects, Derrida states that: “the truth is under erasure, and although crossed out, it does not disappear.”(Derrida 1978:45). Derrida is also the one to bring forth the idea of “différance” (1984), a coinage that combines the idea of difference and deferral. As a coining “différance” suggests a discursively constructed subject that never coheres to form a complete non-contradictory individual.

Furthering Derrida’s(1978) consideration of truth in a state of erasure comes the pretension that our social life is utterly dependent on the language game of the moment and, as such, fragmentation and indeterminacy turn into the organizing principles of the postmodern works. A famous episode illustrating the determination of truth and meaning by the language game of the moment is that of the communication between the parishioner and the priest. A parishioner asked his priest if it was all right for him to smoke while he prayed. The priest answered no, that smoking would reduce the significance and the beauty of the prayer. The parishioner then asked if it would be all right for him to pray while he smoked. The priest said that it would be since one should pray at all times. This episode reflects how we hopelessly expect to be defined by a linguistic world which is indefinable in itself.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Concerns about gender bias in language and representation took a postmodern turn early on in French female writing. Helene Cixous´s The Laugh of the Medusa(1981) is considered an example of the way postmodern aesthetics is affected by the destabilized categories of language and body. Julia Kristeva, in her essay “Powers of Horror”(1982), expresses an awareness of the permeability of the foundational structures by bringing along terms such as the “carnivalesque” and the “abject” and claims that woman can acquire sense only within a specific socio-cultural context and within an inherent essence. Perhaps more problematically then, she sees the feminine as a structural necessity located in the writing of men.

Much of the controversy about the ontological status of the Self in autobiography has tended to polarize into a Self- before language or language before-Self set of positions. The life–death paradigm of the writing crypt elaborated by Derrida regards autobiography as both narrowing of the space between subject and object, and the opening of a new space, a new scene of writing. Foucault has similarly “proclaimed the death both of the Cartesian subject and the traditional idea of the author giving no special prominence to the concept of discourse as the primary medium in the constitution of subjectivity, knowledge and power.”(qtd.in Taylor 2003:382). According to Foucault we are breeders and trainers of ourselves, occupying language and feeling occupied by it. In Fictions of Autobiography (1988), Paul John Eakin presents the two opposing views of the nature of the Self and questions the autonomous or transcendent status of autobiography in the recent years: “Is the Self autonomous and transcendent or should it be viewed as contingent and provisional, dependent on language and others for its very existence?” (Eakin 1988:25). In Jean Paul Sartre’s fable of the train, the ticketless condition exemplifies lack of initial selfhood. As the author states: the Self exists “someone is missing here, it is Sartre.” (Sartre 1964:154), and it creates the world through language.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

1.5.6. Self and Memory.xii

The relationship between Self and memory has initially been considered by John Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”(1698). In his view, a person’s identity comprises of whatever a person can remember from his or her past. Consequently, what the person does not remember is not part of his identity. Differing from the other critics, Locke believed that identity and selfhood have nothing to do with continuity of the body, they are rather an extension of memory: “A person who remembers nothing of his or her past literally has no identity. After all, even with no memory, there would still be the Cartesian Self of immediate experience.”(qtd. in Leary& Tangney eds. 2003:71). Thus, contrary to the Cartesian nativism, for Locke self-knowledge comes prior to the physical experiences of sensation and reflection.

In his “Treatise of Human Nature”(1739-1740) David Hume affirmed the complimentary role of memory, permitting us to extend our identity beyond those acts and experiences that we can personally remember and creating the grounds for the development of the relational memory as a parallel of the relational Self. Endel Tulving (qtd. In “The American Journal of Psychology” Vol.90/2:2005), on the other hand, discriminated between the episodic and semantic memory, the first one being strictly related to the sense of the autobiographical Self, and the second one related to the kind of knowledge we have about the world that surrounds us.

Memory is the key element in determining the production of an autobiographical work, it is the author’s memory and his sense of Self which determines how accurately he will transpose his life in front of us and correspondingly the one that decides whether autobiography will take the form of a memoir, a semi-fictional autobiography, or a completely fictionalized version of one’s life.

The question of Self and memory is inextricably linked to the question of the representation and representability as well as to the uniqueness or iterability of the sense of the Self. Criticisms through the times suggest thinking of the sense of Self in terms of one’s memory for it--not how faithfully you represent yourself, but rather how accurately

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. you remember your past Self and how much you know about your present Self. For Derrida, any singularity or uniqueness has its structural condition of possibility, what he calls “iterability”: “Any singularity is always at least double, even if it appears only once”.(qtd. in Taylor, Winquist 2003:338). Elaborating the iterability in terms of writing, Derrida brings forth the matter of the signature. Unique and authentic as it may be regarded, the functionality of signature depends on the fact that it could be reproduced in any time in any context. “Although it is meant ‘to seal’ or pinpoint a ‘pure event’, it is its sameness, iterability, which by corrupting its identity and its singularity divides its seal.”(ibid).

But the fundamental question to be raised about memory and representation is: “Is not each thing or event a singularity in its time and place in history?” While modernism deconstructed traditional forms of representation, postmodernism emphasized estrangement from representational truth. When regarded in philosophical terms autobiography seems to threaten the borderline between truth and simulacrum, while contemporary writing offers a reality distorted by memory, one in which the distinction between truth and fiction, false memoir and true novel is almost completely blurred.

1.5.7. Self And History.

As far as the importance of historicity is concerned, Derrida and Heidegger deal with the metaphysical problematics of Being in both the spatial and temporal sense. They agree on the notion that the present always slips away, it always exists as the no longer of the past and the not yet of the future. In Being and Time (1989) Heidegger comes close to a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. As suggested in Taylor and Winquist (2003), Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise addresses what is forgotten and concealed in the history of metaphysics and the fact that the primary concept under erasure is being itself, a presence that is now absent. While Heidegger wishes to recover the presence of the absence, Derrida questions the existence of a past presence, suggesting that there is no originary presence with which to begin. In conclusion, we can state that all that exists for Derrida is the absence of a presence or a simulacrum of a presence that alienates, dislocates and displaces itself.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known.(Braxton 1989:63).

I have resolved an enterprise which has no precedent, and which once complete will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself. I know my heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different”.(Rousseau 1938: 17)

1.6. Chapter Conclusions

As a conclusion to this chapter we may state that the solidity of the Self concept started to be undermined as it journeyed all along its way from classicism to postmodernism. The robust, intact existence of the early times, was replaced by the fragmentary, questionable presence/absence of the modern and postmodern times. As the concept of identity paved its way through the 21st century, a relational networking quality stood in place of the unilaterality of the classic times.

There are several reasons for the obsession with the Self: the rise of capitalist individuality, the development of a burgeoning free-market economy, and lastly the forced migration, urbanization and exploitation. What seems to reconcile the divergent arguments of the plethora of the postmodern critics dealing with the concept of the Self is the conclusion that in the fragmented postmodern experience everybody wishes to be nothing else but himself and the only verifiable place where one exists is inside one’s thoughts.

The scientific considerations of the Self concept waver between pessimistic and nihilistic ones; you are not to find a contemporary theoretician who claims that the actual condition of the Self is a crystal bright one. The majority of scientists and religious scholars confess that the postmodern Self is running through hard times of fragmentation, confusing multiplicity or even erasure, but it is this state which has kept the fire of interest in the Self burning.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In terms of religion, the concept of selfhood has changed over the past centuries from being a stable entity determined by God in the Middle Ages, to personal identity based on one’s own experience, to a cultural and linguistic construct. In contrast to some 19th century autobiographers who told a story of self-development and did not see any external determinacy of significant concern, some late 19th and early 20th century autobiographers began to consider the effect of society upon the Self. In the postmodern world there is no individual essence to which one remains true or committed. One’s identity is continuously emergent, reformed and redirected as one moves through ever- changing relationships. This blurring of boundaries and constant melding makes the autobiographical Self worthy of scrutiny and a subject of interest for contemporary critics.

Female autobiography consider has in turn functioned as one of those forms that sustain sexual difference, the woman who writes an autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical act. Feeling doubly or triply the subject of other people’s representations the protagonist is involved in stories that reflect and promote certain forms of selfhood identified with class, race and nationality as well as with the sex. On the other hand, what critics seem to agree on, no matter the tenets of each school of thought, is that the Self should never be considered as a separate entity, divested of ethnic and cultural meanings, but rather as an embodiment of the responses to the conflicting requirements of racial and sexist oppression. Whether named under the denomination Otherness or Alterity, the binding nature of the relational Self makes the subject never feel complete and saturated and converts the quest for intactness into wholeness more integral than unity and coherence itself.

Important to the Self in terms of its multidimensionality is its relation to the body, to language and to memory. Partially considered in the form of the skin and partially negated in the form of perpetual quest or even completely denied in the form of disembodiment, the relation between the Self and the body remains a crucial one, opening the way to self-knowledge, social melding and communal integration. The relationship between Self and language dates back to the structuralist considerations of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. acquiring sense through the linguistic system we are part of. Nevertheless, what we agree on, even in postmodern times, is that language is becoming more chaotic than ever and, as such, it cannot serve as a cornerstone for building an individual’s sense of selfhood. Rather than the nature of the Self, the basic concern of the autobiography criticism corpora seems to be the questioning of the mnemonic truth and the reconciliation of the warring forces of signification within the text itself.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

2. THE TEXTURE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY: DEFINITIONS, TRAITS, CONTROVERSIES

2.1.Tentative Definitions, Autobiographical Forms and Practices

I named the chapter after Stephen Shapiro’s essay because it seems to intertwine several considerations of mine regarding the actual status of autobiography in America. Firstly, as Shapiro himself asserts: “literary cartographers have long been precisely mapping the continents of fiction, drama, and poetry, all the while pretending that autobiography was not there, or simply coloring it a toneless black.”(Shapiro 1968:425). The second reason why I entitled the chapter in this way is because it is considered a mode of expression characteristic of African Americans and because it uses subtlety to express the most intimate thoughts. Nevertheless, no matter the understatement of many critics, autobiography is a continent worth exploring.

I started this chapter with a citation from Joanne Braxton’s Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition(1989), because I conceive that it is in this quote better than anywhere else that an African American autobiographer and scholar highlights the way the dimension of blackness, femaleness, modern discourse and cultural heritage intermingle to shape the unique individuality of an African American autobiographer. Faced with more challenges than any person is should be, the female African American autobiographer becomes the best expression of individuality and sharedness, authenticity and artificiality, disarray and regularity, independence and subjugation, traditionalism and innovatory vision. Strictly speaking, autobiography is not a genre at all in the sense of poetry, fiction and drama are. It is just a subcategory of the confusing variety of writing we place under the heading of nonfictional prose. To begin with, autobiography in the West is itself hardly value-neutral since the Self, its principal referent, is in fundamental ways a construct of culture. Thus, its division into several periods was necessarily rough and heuristic.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The word autobiography was first used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, by Robert Southey in the English Periodical Quarterly Review of Portuguese Literature in 1809. Before the emergence of the term there were two categories of people’s lives written by themselves: the confession and the memoir. Philippe Lejeune is the one to be considered as punctilious in providing us with an effective definition of autobiography. His definition runs as follows: “Retrospective prose story that a real person relates about his or her own experience in which he or she gives emphasis to his or her individual life and to the history of his or her personality in particular.”(qtd. in Gudmundsdottir 1998:10).According to Olney: “The term autobiography is a post–enlightenment coinage. It was fabricated toward the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century out of three Greek words auto combining from autos-- Self, bio combining from bios-- life, and the graphe substantive derived from the verb graphein-- to write”(Olney 1978:114). Jean Starobinski more sparingly defines it as a biography of a person written by himself. Rewriting Starobinski, Blanchard schematizes: “Autobiography is an act where the writing , the graphein on either side of the life, the bios it encloses, is itself the life and death, the presence and absence which it seeks, but only gives us as through a mirror: an image.”(Blanchard qtd. in Smith, Robert. 1995:54).

As will be treated later in greater detail, the kinds of autobiography most widespread in American literature are: the puritan autobiography, the secular autobiography, the slave narrative, the memoir, the diary and the fictionalized autobiography. The beginning of the American autobiography dates back to the Puritan colonization because Early New England churches required candidates for membership to recite their spiritual histories before the congregations they hoped to join. Sometimes called Revelations, Evidences, Narrations or Experiences, these Self histories align an individual’s life with the divine doctrine and imperatives.

Another heated debate nowadays is that of the hybrid character of autobiography. Is it like a memoir, like a diary, a biography or is it a fictionalized product? A memoir is slightly different in character from autobiography. It has a narrower, more intimate focus on the writer’s own memories, feelings and emotions and has often been written by

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. The English Civil War (1642-1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including the works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Diaries were originally written for personal reference, but the successful publication of the diaries of the English 17th century civil servant Samuel Pepys in 1825 drew attention to the possibilities of the diary as a form of autobiography in its own right. As may be quite clear, a diary is marked by daily entries revealing the most intimate thoughts of the author. From the 20th century onwards, diary publication became a popular vehicle for politicians seeking vindication. Pondering on how the word autobiography encompasses the word biography, Olney regards the former as inevitably tied to and encompassing the latter.

There are marked differences between what we consider traditional autobiography and the contemporary fictional autobiography. Firstly, instead of trying to present the author’s real life and providing the reader with access to his or her past Self in autobiography, the fictional format allows the reader to disregard the real person of the author. Secondly, as Regine Hampel states in her I Write Therefore I am: Fictional Autobiography and the Idea of Selfhood in the Postmodern Age (2004) in “traditional autobiography the gap between the time and the place of the discourse and the story is the only one. In contrast fictional autobiography is characterized by a gap between the writer, narrator and character, a gap which is not just temporal and spatial but also personal.”(Hampel 2004:113). Thirdly, in traditional autobiography the protagonist is usually equipped, at least retrospectively, with some sense of his/her identity which he/she is then able to commit to or construct on paper. Postmodern fictional autobiography, in contrast, is full of characters who want to narrate their lives, yet can no longer rely on traditional methods. In the traditional autobiography there is recognition of a split in-between the extradiegetic level of the narrating discourse and the intradiegetic level of the story. Fictional autobiography, in contrast, “challenges these traditions by undermining the traditional chronology on the intradiegetic level and by differently treating the notion of time.”(Cavalero 1985:168).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

2.2. The Autobiography Critique: Periodization, Tenets and Criticismxiii

Autobiography, as the Greek origin of the word suggests, is a “biography written by the predicate or composed conjointly with a collaborative writer styled as told to, or with.”(Wikipedia Feb. 20:2009). The term was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review, but the form goes back to antiquity. In antiquity autobiography took the form of an apology, oration or confession. Correspondingly, John Henry Newman’s autobiography, published in 1864, is entitled Apologia pro Vita Sua, the paghan rhetor Libanus (314-394) framed his life memoir Oration, as an oration of a literary rather than public kind; Augustine (354-430) applied the title Confessions and Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century.

Since Augustine’s Confessions (397 A.D.) we start to become aware of the conflicting nature of the Self. We encounter two contrasted senses of the Self rendered as the “Naked Self and the Self Same: the first referring to his unrepentant soul, while the second to the God’s qualities. In that which is considered one of the first autobiographies of the Renaissance written between (1500-1571), and entitled simply Vita(Italian-Life), Benvenuto Cellini declares since the very beginning that every person is important and distinguished in his own life and worth being described in an autobiography, but no one should attempt to do this before he comes to the age of forty, a time when he is mature enough to strive to reveal his real Self: “No matter what sort he is, everyone has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth or goodness, he ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand but no one should venture such a splendid undertaking before he is over forty.”(Cellini 1956:15), and this is the criteria of autobiography, that has persisted until recent times.

The earliest known autobiography in English in the 15th century was the Book of Margery Kempe (1490), and early autobiographies of the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1764) and that of John Bunyan: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). The traits of the Renaissance autobiography include: shifting the focus of concentration from Self to context, featuring typical aspects of Self and registering self- consciousness. The writing of the American Autobiography began in the 17th century

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. with the narratives of early European settlers by way of the explorer, travel, spiritual and Indian captivity narratives. According to Robert Sayre:

two periods precede and determine the emergence of the autobiographical mode in contemporary literature. The first one covers the range from puritan conversion narratives, through Franklin’s secularized version in his autobiography,to Melville’s early autobiographical novels which constitute the rise of a national American fiction. (qtd.in Hornung 1985 8/3:80).

Autobiography during the Colonial Period was marked by the development of such literary products as journals and notebooks on the frontiersman, as well as the emergence of the early fictionalized versions. The propensity towards fictionalization is accompanied by a parallel shift from autobiographical certitude to the growing metaphysical obsession. The turn of the century literary production is marked on the other hand by recognition of the harsh realities of life and the frailty of human existence. In Paul John Eakin’s words: “the rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop and it became the expectation that those in the public eye should write about themselves.” (Eakin 1991:79).

The contemporary autobiography status was defined even by John Hewitt who highlighted the immanence of misery-lit narrative versions. According to Hewitt in Autobiographical Tightropes (1990): “the trend of contemporary autobiography is such that increasingly fake autobiographies are encouraged, particularly those associated with ‘misery lit’ situations where the writer has allegedly suffered from dysfunctional family, social problems, or political oppression.”(Hewitt 1990:123).The present condition of autobiography reserves much more space for the fictional versions, protagonists voicing their ideas as though they were writing their own biography.

An alternative periodization of the American autobiography has been brought by Robert Sayre in American Lives: an Anthology of Autobiographical Writing(1994), who divides the American autobiography into different periods on the basis of the historical and social developments of the time. According to him, the first period, that of Explorers, Governors, Pilgrims and Captives, is represented by the explorer journals and histories and captivity narratives, and bears the name of such writers as Cabeza de Vaca with his

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America (1542). The second period, named as Great Awakenings, New Individuals (1700-1775), reveals the writing of some major full length autobiographical writings such as those of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), John Woolman (1720-72), and Hector St.John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813). Two short classics also come from this period: The Journal of Sarah Kemble(1704), Jonathan Edward’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760)- the first black autobiography in America.

According to Sayre the sixty years to come reveal autobiography becoming as closely identified with the new nation. That is the reason why this period was called National Identities: Patriots, Promoters and Pretenders (1776-1837).Autobiographies here include: Ethan Allen’s The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity(1775), John Adams’ Diary and Autobiography of John Adams and Discourses on Davilla(1790). In the period to come, Self Liberators (1836-1865), achievement of national identities did not necessarily mean personal and cultural independence. Approximately one ninth of the population was in fact enslaved and the native Indian population was not regarded as part of the nation at all. Personal accounts of this time include Lydia Sigourney’s Letters of Life(1866), Jarena Lee’s The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady(1836), Lewis Clarke’s Leaves from a Slave’s Journal of Life(1842).

The chapter Survivors and Self Teachers includes the literary production of civil war and post civil war America. In these autobiographies we see the emergence of a demonstrably different concept of Self. The dark evil Self was no longer within but outside, in the shape of the wartime enemy. Apologists from north and south continued to build up the evidence for heroism or horror, autobiographies of this period are William Dean Howells’ My Year in the Log Cabin (1893) and Boy´s Town (1904), Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie (1899).

The period beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending up to WWI, what historians call the Age of Reform, or the Progressive Era, would add even more to the richness and significance of American autobiography. Named as Lives in Progress

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

(1900-1935), it bore the experience of reform, immigration followed by a facing with the difficulties of acculturation and assimilation. Autobiographies of this time include: Jack London’s What Life Means To Me (1909), John Muir’s The World and the University (1913), Du Bois’ The Shadow of the Years (1920), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Love and Marriage and the Breakdown(1927).The modern experience to autobiography was brought by Anais Nin, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Day in a period named Experimental Lives (1920-1960). They were influenced by the modernist awareness and by experiments with the narrative point of view. Autobiographies of this period are: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up (1945), Gertrude Stein’s The Gradual Making of the Americans (1925), Richard Wright’s The God That Failed (1946), Dorothy Day’s Having a Baby and Love Overflows (1952), Anais Nin’s The Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1934).

All autobiography involves a quest for identity, a revisiting of the past, a reconstruction of the paths that led to the present, a definition of the Self, or an attempt to defend the Self. That is why the subsequent period in the American autobiography was named Quests for Identity (1960-onward). Finding one’s identity in the sense of what is unique and shared, what is permanent but also subject to change and what is real and in some ways an artifice has been the great goal of the best recent autobiographers. Autobiographies of this period include: James Baldwin’s The Discovery of What it Means To Be An American (1961), N. Scott Momaday’s The Way To The Rainy Mountain(1969), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior(1975), Annie Dillard’s American Childhood (1987), bell hooks’ Black is A Woman´s Color(1981).

There are several people who have been writing about the actual status of autobiography in America. James M. Cox describes autobiography as growing out of the political necessities and discoveries of the American and French revolution. According to him:

The Self is in fact a fallen prince, tracing its nobility back to the charging fruitful vale of a faraway kingdom, and although the kingdom will not literally come again, freedom is its essential condition, and the text prophesies and then celebrates a return to that royal status. (Cox 1971: 252-277).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Olney, one of the founding fathers of the theory of autobiography, claims that no matter how fictional autobiography may be, it is the truest of all books if you know to read between the lines:

It is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirking of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author–cat is racking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (Olney 1988:428-441).

While reviewing James Olney’s Metaphors of Self (1972) critics consider the Self a trope worth being explored and delved into. Louis Renza tracks the complexity of the autobiography and the Self concept in the chaotic connotation of the first person pronoun: “For some years now the first person pronoun has been in a disarray as a transparent signifier of an authorial signified. Instead of referring to the writing Self the I places this Self under erasure as a rhetoric-linguistic shifter, figure or trope.”(qtd. in Olney 1980:268-295). Karl Weintraub, on the other hand, assigns the growing importance of the autobiographic genre to the “historical understanding of its existence and to the emergence of the historical mindedness we call historicism.”(Weintraub 1975:822).

Tracing the emergence of the Self as a concept in Western culture we can say that it has only been since World War II, when the formal analysis of all branches of literature flourished, that autobiography began to receive attention as a literature. The bulk of autobiography criticism recognizes the development of Anglo-American criticism and Cultural Criticism and contains the considerations of different schools of criticism, and a multitude of critics. According to Sidonie Smith, the most fruitful approach to the subject of autobiography is to approach it neither in a formal, nor in a historical way, but rather to see its tendency to create order out of chaos.

Two bibliographical essays have recently advanced our understanding of the subject of autobiography: the essay appended to William C.Spengemann’s Forms of Autobiography (1982) and the introductory essay in Olney’s anthology Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980). Situating the first surge of critical interest in autobiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spengemann cites

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. three contributing phenomena: the increasing number of autobiographies, the increasing number of critical essays, and the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey’s call for history- grounded autobiographical documents. According to him, the factors leading to the development of such criticism were: “the romantic preoccupation with the industrial revolution, the myth of the self-made man, social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest, Freudianism and psychoanalysis and ultimately the outburst of the literary activity.” (Spengemann 1982:73).

By contrast the second generation of critics has concerned itself with matters of self- representation and has regarded the critic as a psychoanalyst of sorts, interpreting the truth in its psychological dimensions. A third generation of critics, the structuralists and poststructuralists, have challenged the notion of referentiality. By considering this personal account as a narrative artifice that does not exist outside language, they view the text as a web of meaning in which relations are spun. Gates writes: “Blackness is not a material object or an event but a metaphor; it does not have an essence as such but is defined by a network of relations.”(Gates 1990:83).

The criticism revolving around autobiography can also be discovered by dealing with the separate considerations and assumptions many autobiographers make about the art of autobiography writing. According to Gibbon, autobiography should be more markedly influenced by truth and historicity rather than show a propensity towards the fictional characteristic of the novel: “Truth-naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.”(qtd in Gibbon 1795:37) Yeat’s preface to the first of his series of autobiographies, on the other hand, emphasizes the unwilling fictionality of a non-fictional genre like autobiography. He notes: that he might have changed nothing to his knowledge, but many things without his knowledge. Du Bois seems to confirm the historical authenticity of African American autobiography while stating: “No Black American author has ever felt the need to invent a nightmare to make his point.” (qtd. in Stone 1960: 517).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Other autobiographers such as Spender, Olney, Pascal and Hegel deal with the importance of the construction of the Self in the act of autobiography: While Spender considers that the real challenge of every autobiographer is to depict as faithfully as possible his real present Self: I have written of many presences, ghosts from the past which surround me and my aim has been to describe what I am. I want to depict these omnipresent selves rather than a new and emergent Self of today.”(Spender 1951:39), Olney seems to set order to the various debates circumscribing autobiography by pointing out that each life reflects an “unrepeated and unrepeatable being.”(Olney 1972: 92).

Roy Pascal in his influential book Design And Truth in Autobiography (1960) argues that the true autobiography tells us not merely of remembered deeds and thoughts, but is for both author and reader “a spiritual experiment, a voyage of discovery.” (Pascal 1960:72). Past and language are regarded as patterns within which we create emotions and the moral character of the subject under consideration. Furthering the considerations about the postmodern condition of the Self, Hegel confirms the fragmentation, indeterminacy and hybridization by stating: “Since I can not say what is my opinion, because nothing can be said that it is not general, therefore I mean everybody when I say I.”(Hegel 1977:398).

2.3. Finding a Niche of One’s Own: Autobiography and The Female Dimensionxiv

The motivation for this title was given to me by Virgina Wolf´s A Room Of One´s Own (1929) where she speaks about women being reserved the right place in society. As far as the society is made to be shared by men and women, let women be assigned a room of their own without interfering in the so-called men’s world. While Virginia Wolf, a white woman, claims for a room of her own, black women would by rule, be asking for at least a “niche” of their own, but female autobiography mirrors pretentions much more challenging than that.

Under this topic I will deal with the tenets of the white female autobiography because attention to the tenets of black female autobiography will be reserved in the section on black autobiography. The history of America and the history of the autobiographical

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. practices are intimately connected. Autobiographical writing emerges as a compelling cultural activity in the west at approximately the same historical moment that the European colonists and enslaved Africans began settling in the New World. According to Herbert Leibotwitz: “America invited new opportunities for recreating Self and community and called for autobiographical subjects.”(Leibowitz 1991:28). The earliest first-person narratives were the accounts of travel and travail through which male Europeans mapped their encounters with the projections of new geographies, new peoples, new experiences and new identities. From the women’s point of view, it was a time when marriage was considered an economic necessity and public anonymity, the mark of God-given identity. Autobiographical forms like that of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (1630), the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson (1682), the diaries of Sarah Kemble Knight (1704), and the spiritual testimonies of Quakers like Elisabeth Ashbridge (1774), provide an intimate vehicle through which colonial women responded to the unsettling experiences and to the challenges to their sense of subjectivity.

By the late 18th – early 19th century, heterogeneous autobiographical forms circulated through the vast space of a now New Republic. “The Cult of True Womanhood” emerged as the prevailing ideology affecting white bourgeois women and the narrative testify to the cultural pressures of such femininity. Autobiographical writings of the period include Lydia Sigourney’s Letters of Life (1866), Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), etc. The post-bellum narratives of Anna Julia Cooper and Elisabeth Keckley, on the other hand, shift the emphasis to the representation of women as independent Selves desirous of participating in the Franklinian myth.

By the early decades of the 20th century, large numbers of immigrants swelled the population of the urban centers leading to the flourishing of autobiographies like Mary Antin’s The Promised Land(1915), and Lillian Wald’s The House on Henry Street(1915) which negotiate the multicultural identity and the ethnic assignments. The involvement of women in public activism, the migration and immigration processes, and the emergence of the Unites States as a world power led to the development of the autobiographical form. Included here are writers like Emma Goldman--Living my Life(1931), Ida B. Wells-

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

-Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells(1932), and Gertrude Stein--The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1937).

In the last half of the 20th century, the civil rights and feminist movements influenced contemporary autobiographical practice in developing multiple strands and helplessly getting involved in the discovery of a true Self. Contemporary autobiographical writers include Maxine Hong Kingston--The Woman Warrior (1977), Audre Lorde—Zami (1983), Gloria Anzaldua--Borderlands /La Frontera (1987), and Adrienne Rich--Of Woman Born(1976). Heading into the 21st century, America is still in turmoil and transition, a country in the making.

After having had a look at the historical and literary timeline of the development of female autobiography, it is worth delving into the controversial assessments regarding the status of female autobiography. The peak periods of autobiographical productivity for women have been during the Progressive Era (1890 to WWI), an era of unprecedented public service by women, and during the late 1960s and 1970s. In her introduction to The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Woman’s autobiographical writings(1988), Shari Benstock speaks of women situated in conflicting and constricting roles, women faced with the rigid distinctions between man’s world and women’s domain, and women seeking freedom from bourgeois definitions.

There is a growing body of critical material that argues that women have developed a separate tradition on the autobiographical genre, one in which selfhood comes out as a mediated entity influenced by the male discourse. In A Poetics of Woman’s Autobiography (1987), Sidonie Smith has explained “the autobiographical inscription as the result of the interaction of the women’s marginality with the self-authorization that comes in writing their life stories. As a result, the genre, she argues, “is characterized by a ‘double’ voice.”(qtd. in Culley 1992:65). Women’s unique perspective is a consciousness of alterity that enables them to recognize the importance of the Other in the creation of selfhood.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

As Shari Benstock emphasizes in The Private Self (1988),“for white American women, the Self comes wrapped in gender, or rather gender constitutes the invisible, seamless wrapping of the Self.”(Benstock 1989:73). So, in order for a woman to be an “I” at all, she has to be a Self, to belong to a gender.

2.3.1. The Female Autograph: Differences Between the Male and Female Discourse in Autobiographical Writings.

Besides the differentiation between the black and the white texture of the autobiographical discourse, there are also the distinctions between the male and the female texture. The criticism revolving around the differences between the male and the female autobiographical discourse includes theorists who consider that the two are interchangeable, others who believe that the differences between the two outnumber the similarities, and some who agree on some points of contact. There are several critics that, while analyzing the male and the female discourse, become aware of the interchangeability of the two and, thus, become less attracted by the respective differences. As Mary Mason states in “The Other Voice: Autobiographies by Women Writers” which can be found in James Olney’s Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical(1978), women’s autobiographies often involve the positing of the Other through which the female autobiographer establishes her own Self: “The tradition of autobiography and of autobiography criticism has been a masculine and andocentric one. It is a story of male selfhood rendered representative and representable.”(Mason 1980:146).

French theorists of writing and sexual difference–Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helene Cixous--interrogate the complacency with which Western discourse has described and valued sexual difference in male and female writing. Using the psychoanalytic theory as a basis for a deconstructionist reading of autobiography, Willis R. Buck, Jr., considers that the poetics of autobiography remains by and large an andocentric enterprise. Sidonie Smith, on the other hand, argues that until the twentieth century women could only represent themselves in scripts male discourse had constructed for them and female

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. writing enjoyed a marginalized, devalued position. This is the reason that leads her to further claim: “Therefore, women’s true autobiography has yet to be written, since women writers have, until recently, reinscribed male writing and thereby produced a text, which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women.” (Smith 1987:18). Thus, women’s Selves exist through merging with others rather than differentiating themselves from them.

A second stand is adopted by Smith and Miller while trying to highlight the differences between the two discourses without paying much attention to the points of contact. According to Smith, women are caught in a double subjectivity: “being at once protagonists and narrators of their own stories.”(Smith 1993:124). Considering the postmodern decision that the author is dead does not necessarily hold for women. Nancy Miller searches for the real truth of her life in the corpus of her writing rather than in her body: “the historical truth of a writer’s life lies in the readers grasp of her intratext, the body of her writing and not the writing of her body, and this makes it essentially different from the man’s autobiography.”(Miller 1994:69).

Nevertheless, critics and representatives of different schools of thought generally agree on the following: 1) women’s self-image is projected by a variety of forms of understatement; 2) irregularity rather than orderliness informs the Self portraits by women, the narratives of their lives are often not chronological and progressive but disconnected, fragmentary, or organized into self–sustained units rather than connecting chapters; and 3) whereas the male protagonist is inclined to be passive, sensitive and shy, the female protagonist tends to be stalwart, spirited and fearless. Such tenets of female discourse make women sound more truthful when presenting their lives under the guise of fiction than when offering them up as unembellished truth.

2.4. Shattered Mirrors in the “Promised Land”: Representation in the Black

Autobiographyxv

The reason why I have entitled the heading in this way is because America was supposed to be the land promised by Moses, the land of freedom, equality and opportunity, the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. country in which the beacon of liberty, democracy and unyielding hope would be burning brightly, but it turned into a shattered mirror for the African Americans who could see there just a distorted image of themselves: oppressed, alienated, discriminated and endlessly fighting for their rights.

As William Andrews states in his introduction to 20th Century Autobiography(1990), autobiography holds a position of priority among the narrative traditions of black America. African American autobiography has witnessed the attempts of people of color to actualize the promise of their American birthright, while articulating their achievements as individuals and as persons of African descent. Moreover, it has provided a“forum for addressing the socio-political and cultural obstacles to the black integration.”(Spengemann 1982:508). Debates have been rising concerning the appropriateness of evaluating black American autobiographies according to the standard frameworks of western autobiography. If, in the western discourse, the dominant myth is that of the individual forging a career, reputation, a business or a family out of the raw communal material; in black autobiography, the unity of the personal and the collective voice remains a dominant tradition.

The most influential African American autobiographies were the slave narratives, the secular autobiographies and the spiritual autobiographies. As personal accounts the slave narratives flourished from 1760 to 1865, focusing as much on the individuality of the slave as on the institution of slavery. At the time it was thought that the best way for the slave narrator “to cover his flank while firing his guns.”(Andrews ed. 1997:368), was to write those accounts in a simple, direct style and a calm, controlled voice. This would lead to little sense of the narrator’s individuality coming through the 19th century slave narratives. Classics of the slave narrative genre were in particular: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Female slave narratives revised the one-dimensional perceptions that black men held of them and reflected basic hints about the position they held in society. The woman’s slave narratives appeared either as amanuensisxvi or as fictionalized accounts.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The Africans who were brought to the Americas in slave ships viewed man, nature and God as distinct but inseparable aspects of a sacred whole. Thus, although the first African American autobiography “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man(1760), basically describes the physical perils of Briton Harmon’s thirteen year sojourn at sea, the narrative concludes on a distinctly religious note. The same also happens in The Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African(1789) where the author adopts religious posture and the moral language of a biblical prophet while analyzing chattel slavery as one of the basic problems of Western society.

The spiritual autobiography developed mainly in the 19th century. Its most classic form emerges in the work of George White as he chronicles his journey through the institution of the Methodist Church of the time. Nancy Prince’s Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince(1799), and Sojourner Truth´s Narrative of Sojourner Truth(1850) chronicle an American life of activism and spiritualism. The decline of the spiritual autobiography in the half century after the Reconstruction, the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Depression Era emphasized the development of the slave narrative in the form of the post-bellum narrative.

Since World War II, autobiography in the hands of persons as different as Malcolm X, Audre Lorde and Itabari Njeri has turned to exploring such dimensions as sexuality, religion, class and family in view of full self-assertion. Mary Burgher’s “Images of Self and Race in the Autobiographies of Black Women”(1979) and Regina Blackburn’s “In Search of the Black Female Self– African American Women’s Autobiographies and Ethnicity”(1980) outlined for the first time the thematic range of black women’s autobiography while they paved the way to the development of the idea of “black autobiography as a site of formal revisionism and the free play of signification.”(Eakin 1992:82), thereby leading to a fresh examination of texts and traditions. The reconsideration of the African American texts through the lenses of language, history and culture lead to the coining of the term autho-ethnography by Lionnet.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The contemporary black autobiography theory is voiced by hooks who overscores the importance of postmodernism to the shaping of the African American Self. In “Postmodern Blackness”(1990) hooks claims that, not only is postmodern theory relevant to African American experiences and culture, but “the overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.”(Hooks 1990:27). Her proposed alternative is that of incorporating the voices of the displaced, marginalized and oppressed in view of having a wider image of society.

2.4.1. White and Black Female Autobiography Compared.

Black women who write autobiography show their determination to take control of their lives without submitting either to the racism of the whites or to the sexism of the black and white men taken together. While the writings of the black autobiographers in general are renowned for their impersonal traits, the female black narratives take into consideration extra–textual conditions and inscribe their ideas into the culture. Their autobiographies constitute a running commentary on the collective experience of black women in the United States. Yet in the framework of what Sidonie Smith holds: “much of the autobiographical writing of black women eschews the confessional mode--the examinations of the personal motives, the searchings of the soul-- that white women autobiographers so frequently adopt.”(Smith 1993:63).

Thus, women seem torn between exhibitionism and secrecy, self-display and self- concealment. Domna Stanton in turn seems to surrender in this war of discourses and coins the term autogynography to refer to the black female autobiographical writings reflecting gender constrictions. In her “In Search of the Black Female Self” (1980), Regina Blackburn argues that “black women autobiographers use the genre to redefine the black female Self in black terms from a black perspective.”(Blackburn 1980:147). Even Bernice Johnson Reagan focuses on the construction of the black female Self while

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. identifying black women’s autobiographical writing as cultural autobiography, and regarding selfhood as inseparable from her sense of community.

No matter the fact that women, black or white be they, are motivated into surging for their own rights and against roughly the same forms of repression and discrimination, there are several differences to be outlined between the black and the white female autobiography. Firstly, the consideration of black women’s autobiography forces careful treatment of extra textual conditions. Secondly, while all autobiographers confront the problem of readers, black female autobiographers confront the problem in an especially acute form. Thirdly, as Sidonie Smith suggested, while for white American women the Self comes wrapped in gender; for the Afro-American women, differentiation between Self and Other is almost impossible. Fourthly and lastly, to write the account of one’s Self is to inscribe it in a culture and to stick to impersonation. This is also asserted by William Andrews in his African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993) where he states that: the “Afro American autobiographical statement is bereft of excessive subjectivism and mindless egotism and presents the Afro American as reflecting a much more impersonal condition.”(Andrews 1993:25).

2.5. Literary Experimentation and Cultural Strangulation: Autobiography as a

Collage of Postmodern Life

2.5.1. Postmodernism and the Status of Autobiography.

The origin of the term postmodernism remains uncertain, though we know that Frederico de Onis used the word “postmodernism” in his Antologia de la Poesia Espanola Hispano-Americana, published in Madrid in 1934, and Dudley Fitts picked it up again in his Antology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry (1942). As suggested in Autobiography and Postmodernism(1994), edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, “postmodernism results from a second wave of loss of belief in the twentieth century, prompted especially by the Cold War, the McCarthy hearings, the Vietnam War, and other events of the 1950s and 1960s which suggested the breakdown of traditional systems of meaning.”(Ashley, Gilmore, Peters, eds.1994:59). More

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. profound and pervasive than the first loss, the second claimed that everything was dead to this generation: traditional values, social institutions, and even the novel and the author were proclaimed dead. On the other hand, while attempting to make a picture of the traits characterizing postmodernism as a movement and as a discourse, Warhol and Hendel state that postmodernism lacks a disciplinary or scientific stability and engages two divinities at once: sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiations and revolt.” (Warhol, Hendel eds.1993:66).

A glance at the history of autobiography studies reveals that at the end of the 1970s the study of autobiography was being remade. Two collections of essays published in 1980 inaugurated a new wave of interest: Women’s autobiography: Essays in Criticism by Estelle C. Jelinek, and Autobiography: Essays Critical and Theoretical by James Olney. Jelinek’s collection situated feminist criticism in relation to autobiography, and Olney’s collection examined autobiography through a range of merging post–structuralisms.

According to Leigh Gilmore in his “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography and Genre”(1994), postmodernism runs counter everything that is conventional and the concepts of Self and identity bear this influence more than anything else. In his own words: “Postmodern autobiography challenges the concepts of Self and identity underlying conventional autobiography, offers new patterns of meaning which oppose traditional concepts of completeness of Self, and queries its narrative practice and revolutionizes it.”(Gilmore 1994:39). If autobiography traditionally features a first-person autodiegetic narrator who retrospectively recounts the story of his/her life using a two narrative level (that of the narrator, and that of the character), in the postmodern autobiography the narrator can use different verbal persons for him/herself, can employ another person to act as a focalizer, or invite several narrators with their own stories. In postmodern autobiography identity is never given a priori, it is never complete. According to Mike Featherstone in his Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity(1993): “The shifting boundaries of identification, involve an illusory image of presence, a sign of absence and loss.”(Featherstone 1993:69).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

2.5.2. A Woman´s Autobiography and Postmodernism.

Postmodern feminism is anteceded by the publication in 1949 in post war France of Simone De Beauvoir´s Le Deuxieme Sex (The Second Sex). Asserting that the woman is made and not born, De Beauvoir investigated how woman has historically functioned as the culturally constructed and conditioned Other of the man. To follow the feminism development trend, a second generation response titled the New French Feminism furthered the concerns raised by De Beauvoir. In contemporary times, postmodern feminism has relevantly developed to refer to the second generation of French Feminists. Recognized in North America as the postmodernists, these feminists: “aimed to expose the internal contradictions of metaphysical discourse privileging the subject of certainty, the cogito, a disembodied and male-identified consciousness.”(Taylor ed. 2003:142).

A prominent voice of postmodern feminism is that of Helene Cixous. In appropriating Derrida’s concept of différance, she coined the term l`écriture feminine (feminine writing) and analyzed its difference from canonized masculine writing (literatur). The largest departure from mainstream feminism is the argument that sex itself is constructed through language. The most notable proponent of the argument being Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble whereby she criticizes the approaches of Beauvoir, Foucault and Lacan and the distinction drawn between biological sex and socially constructed gender. The same orientation is advocated by Mary Joe Frug who regards human experience as located inescapably and as helplessly entrapped within a system of meaning produced by language: “cultural mechanisms encode the female body with meanings.”(Frug 1992:1047). While privileging the autonomous or metaphysical Self, the autobiography valorizes individual integrity and separateness and devalues personal and communal interdependency.

Another way of looking at postmodern feminism is by having a look at the intertwining of the dimensions of feminism and postmodernism. As asserted in Women´s Lives into Print: The Theory, Practice and Writing of Feminist Auto/Biography,(1999) edited by

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Pauline Polkey, postmodernism wavers between integrity and annihilation, wholeness and separatism:

While postmodernism’s usefulness for feminism is debated in conference rooms and scholarly journals, the term postmodernism itself has become a catchphrase for any discourse that questions and subverts accepted notions of reality. Postmodernism’s varying impulses range from the playful to the nihilistic to the polyphonic to the inarticulable. (Polkey ed.1999:103).

This is the reason why postmodern writing experiments with such formal elements and textual practices as genre closure, narrative shift, and unlinearity. This experimentation sometimes called meta-fiction or deconstructive fiction was primarily associated with white male writers from the 60s and lead to the assumption that there are no postmodern women writers.

The disruption of postmodernism by 20th century realism placed writers such as Virgina Wolf, Gertrude Stein, Djurna Barnes in the background. This problem was referred to by Betty Friedman in her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) as the problem that has no name. Resultingly, novels such as the Diary of a Mad Housewife(1970) by Sue Kaufman; The Bell Jar(1963) by Sylvia Plath; and Fear of Flying(1973) by Erica Jong; and successively autobiographies of writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Audrey Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua exemplify a postmodernism more thematically and stylistically innovative than that of male writers.

What seems to reconcile feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics is the abandoning of a single reliable narrative voice in favor of multiple narrators and shifting points of view for stable entities. The connection between the genre and the cultural ideology is brought forth by many postmodernist ethnic writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Audre Lorde. While the former blurs the boundary between fiction, art, and history by revisiting Chinese myth and talk story to connect the dead ghosts of the cultural and familiar past with the live ghosts of the present world; the latter blurs the boundaries of biography, autobiography, and mythology to express in a daring way her activism, individuality, and even her lesbian inclinations. Reformulated in Smith’s words, postmodernist female

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. writers “refuse the univocal, fixed subjectivity in the name of the multiplicitous, polyvocal, fragmentary and contradictory.”(Smith, S. 1987:184).

There are many points of contact between feminism and postmodernism, but there are some differences between them as well. The main issue, according to Jessica Dallow, is: “the bridging of feminist activism and postmodernism’s deconstructionism.”(Dallow 2007:170). Postmodernists attempt to deconstruct many of the categories that feminists have placed at the centre of their theories and deny the presence of any essential core in any of the subjects. In Eileen Schlee’s words: “there is no essential core natural to us, and so there is no repression in the humanist sense.”(Schlee 1993 13/2). Feminists are pointed towards their oppressive categories and forced not only to answer for them but to destroy them.

2.6. Chapter Conclusions

In conclusion, we may state that autobiography is a form of communication that unites inner and outer worlds, past and present, individuality and collectivity. Autobiography does not communicate raw experience; it presents rather a metaphor for the raw experience. As an author translates his life into language he creates for himself a symbolic identity and sees himself through the mirror of language. In a world of Others, the subject who claims to be himself is just lying while trying to present a false image in front of the community. Autobiography lies in the domain of the intransitive, shifting from reality to fiction and vice versa.

In the mobile, multicultural environment of the contemporary United States, autobiographical storytelling becomes a means of simultaneously unfolding convergences and divergences. The majority of autobiography critics still persist in either erasing the woman’s story, relegating it to the margins of the critical discourse, or uncritically conflating the dynamics of male and female selfhood and sexuality. But women and mostly female autobiographers are never easy to be challenged, denied, or-- even worse-- erased. The female autobiography is to be regarded as a matrix where gender and identity meet, a site where subject positions converge to produce what we call the female Self.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The truth is that women are there, part and parcel of society, and will continue to fight to get a say in the rumorous, multicultural and multiracial reality of the United States.

While African American female autobiographies are formally written self-reports that intertwine objective fact and subjective awareness, their agenda develops from the ideals of selfhood at the time of slave narratives, to the personal triumphs after emancipation, and to the task of full definition in the time of WWII. Black female autobiography forces are such that they impose careful treatment of extra textual conditions, bring the Self as wrapped in gender, and inscribe culture by sticking to impersonation

One of the beliefs rejected in postmodern autobiography is the concept of identity characterized by completeness, causality, linearity and order. Instead it is shown that we are subjected to randomness and chance. Unlike many other theories that tend toward a definitive closure, postmodernism develops toward openness flexible enough to allow diverse, heterogeneous and contradictory elements to cohabit, emerge and merge without final resolutions. So the postmodern approaches merge in the face of the modernist search for authority, progress, universalization and rationalization and involve a radical questioning of the grounds upon which knowledge claims are made.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

3.TRIANGULAR LINKAGES AND THE “HOUSE OF DIFFERENCE”: THE POSTMODERN SELF IN AUDRE LORDE´S ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME (1982)

***

Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants, Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde who settled in Harlem after coming as immigrants from the West Indies, nearsighted to the point of being legally blind; Lorde grew up hearing her mother's stories about the country of her origin. As a girl, Audre Lorde “learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade.”(Wikipedia: Mar.10, 2010).

After graduating from Hunter College High School and while studying library science, Lorde worked various odd-jobs such as factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor, and decided to move out of Harlem to Stamford, Connecticut, where she began to explore her homosexuality. The period spent at the National University of Mexico is described as a time of affirmation and renewal which confirmed her identity as a lesbian and a poet on personal and artistic levels. Lorde was involved in several much debated homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and was an activist of Third Wave Feminism. She died on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer. xvii

In Zami (1982), she gives us a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up immigrant, black and outsider in the New York of the late 1950s. By stylistically crossing the boundary of various genres including poetry, fictionalized autobiography, political essays and personal journals, Lorde emphasizes the need of a speaking voice for women. Fighting against racial injustice, gender inequality, urban plight, and global exploitation; she denies the white measuring standards and reclaims the sense of Self as a way of reaching a conflictual and even fragmentary identity. From early childhood through her

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. adult quest for self-assertion, Lorde emphasizes the strong bond to the female characters of her life, and strives to break away from the social and personal restrictions in a quest to find a voice of her own. Focusing primarily on the theme of longing, loneliness, and alienation, Zami is also dedicated to the African past and to the mythical and legendary positioning of women as centers of the life cycle. In the long run, as the subtitle itself suggests, Zami is a crystallization of the persistent theme of the Afro-American need to define their totality, rather than remain indifferent and let themselves be defined by others.

In terms of style, Zami is considered to be a cross-border genre, a hybrid created out of the co-existence of autobiography, history, mythology, slave narrative, coming out-story and Bildung’s Roman and picaresquexviii. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty states in her book on third world women and feminism: “It is essentially an autobiographical work, but the poet’s eye, ear and tongue give the work stylistic richness that is often considered typical of well-crafted fiction.”(Mohanty 1996:212). The skill through which the author combines multiculturalism with multigenre often makes critics consider it a méttisagexix apt at incorporating the collective experience into the particularities of the individual stories. Re-envisioning images, symbols, and narrative patterns from European and African mythology through the character of Afrekete, Lorde shows the inadequacy of the images of women that have come to us from Western tradition.

3.1. Affirming Critical Difference: Self and Other in Audre Lorde’s Zami:

A New Spelling of my Name

Feminist studies recognize identity as weaved along the fluidity of the boundaries in- between Self and Other. In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies(1986) Teresa de Laurentis, specifies the paradigm of contemporary feminist discourse by claiming that the:

identity is not the goal but rather the point of departure of the process by which one begins to know that and how the personal is political, that and how the subject is specifically and materially engendered in its social conditions and possibilities of existence.(De Laurentis 1986:9).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Parallel to this definition, the border school defines ethnic identities as the ones accepting the contrast between the two polarities and confessing the ambiguity of the speaker’s subject positions. The concept of a single unitary Self, is being replaced day by day by the concept of multiple identities and a relational Self made up of conflictual ingredients.

These theoretical assumptions are also supported by Audre Lorde who claims that “denying any of the different people within one’s identity.”(102) would mean living a lie to oneself and to the others. Only by accepting the different facets of oneself, can one achieve wholeness and live a fulfilled life. Thus, the litany of Selves dwelling within one person, cannot fall into clear-cut categorizations: “I am not one piece of myself. I cannot be simply a Black person and not be a woman too, nor can I be a woman without being a lesbian.”(Lorde 1984:59). It is the weaving of the various Selves into a quilt-like tapestry that gives uniqueness to every woman, and grants authenticity to her words:

If we don’t name ourselves, we are nothing. As a black woman I have to deal with identity or I don’t exist at all. I can’t depend on the world to name me kindly, because it never will. If the world defines you, it will define you to your disadvantage.(Lorde qtd. in Georgoudaki 1991:71).

Several critics have released statements about the bonding of Self and Otherness in Audre Lorde’s works and especially in her hybrid genre work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name(1982). Barbara Christian acclaims Lorde’s eloquent voice as a black, lesbian and feminist and praises the attention dedicated to the concept of difference. According to her, Lorde’s ability does not only consist in tuning the differences, but also in emphasizing the need to acknowledge the Otherness within ourselves. Thus, she maintains that: “we are all children of Eshu/god of chance and unpredictable/and we each wear many changes/inside our skin.”(Christian 1987:114).

Zami shapes a multifaceted cultural and corporeal Otherness into a coherent subjectivity to the point that what would otherwise be named as Other becomes Self. It is this absorption of the Self that challenges the Western subject-object dichotomy leading to the conclusion that by redefining the Other in ourselves, we can recognize our own Otherness. In accordance with what James Olney states about the absence of a unilinear,

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. consistent Self; Lorde assumes that social change, as well as the affirmation of difference and sameness should start from the individual for then being projected into the others that judge him: “We should use difference as a dialogue, the same way we deal with symbol and image in literary study: We need to use these differences in constructive ways rather than in ways to justify.”(Olney qtd. in Smith, Watson eds.1998:78). What Lorde herself articulates in essays like “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, is that “racism, sexism, classism, homophobia all stem from the same source--an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined Self.”(Lorde 1980 rep. in Lorde 1984:83).

The extent to which Otherness is important for the shaping of Lorde’s and specifically Zami’s life, can be deduced since the very beginning where we are faced with a dilemmatic question, “to whom do I owe?”(Lorde Zami:3), which receives as an answer a dedication to all those who have helped shape the power behind the narrator’s voice: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel that lead me home.”(3). The author’s debt dates back to the double-sided image of Afrekette/Kitty and stretches to include the Belmar women of Carriacou, the trickster divinities of West Africa, Ma-Liz, de Lois, Louise Briscoe, Aunt Annie, Linda and Genevieve, etc. The best answer to this rhetorical question is given in the epilogue where the author expresses gratitude for what she has become to every woman who has left emotional and spiritual tattoos on her identity. So, if every meeting and reconciliation adds something different to her heterogeneity, every separation teaches her how to cohabit with the warring facets of her character. Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me--so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.(255 Epilogue).

Calling herself “lesbian, fat, black, nearly blind and ambidexterous.”(240), Lorde simultaneously asserts and denies the identity transformations and lays the grounds for the development of the concept of “border permeability”. Similarly to Anzaldua she insists on borders that are open, permeable and shifting, reflective of the societal

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. dualisms and expressive of one’s assertion as community members. Thus, considering that an important part of the bonding between Self and Otherness lies in the relation between stereotyping and scapegoating, we can regard the misogyny of the 1960s as one having its origins in the black male stereotyping of the partners of the opposite sex with epithets like ‘matriarch’, ‘monster’ and ‘beast of burden’. The way it is represented by Lorde, outsiderhood is a complex feat of balancing racial and sexual overtones. Mostly a victim of colorism rather than of racism, she is labeled a “brownie”(29) in grade one, one of the “branded”(81) in high school, and one living a “triple life”(85) in adulthood and this is the stereotypization to chase her all along.

3.1.1. Otherness and the Color Complex.

The color complex dimension accompanies Lorde’s growing self-awareness throughout. The narrative comprises of scenes of disdain felt by the lighter-skinned sisters, goes on with the expression of disgust by the white woman in the train, and concludes with the segregation episodes in which she became the marked one “black, lesbian and female”, triply removed from the mainstream society. While a little girl asking to her sisters about the meaning of being colored, Lorde is amazed to receive no response and be deprived of the “white same as mommy”(59) pretension. Confused more than ever, she recognizes this episode as the only one in which the reality of race is discussed in her family, and experiences the whole with a feeling of envy for her light-skinned sisters.

In another episode, the whole family makes a trip to Washington D.C. on the 4th of July. When pretending to eat in the dining car, she is told that it is all too expensive and held back the truth that blacks were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947. She is clever enough to realize that it is something that has to do with black and white complexion:

The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington D.C. that summer I left, childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of the trip.(71).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

An episode which surely leaves remarkable imprints on Lorde’s character and her considerations of the impact of blackness and colorism on character formation is the one in which, while a five year old commuting by train and standing next to a white woman, she hardly but painfully recognizes that the source of all the white woman’s disgust and distancing is the color of her skin:

She [the woman] jerks her coat closer to her. I look; I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing in the seat between us– probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. It must be something very bad from the way she is looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me, away from it too. And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us, it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch. (165).

Strong as she is, Lorde is capable of arising above stereotypes and racial discrimination, and foregrounding issues of looks. A witness to this attitude is her love affair with white Eudora, the one who makes her discover the multidimensionality of her sexuality and makes her stop feeling invisible:

It was in Mexico that I stopped feeling invisible. In the streets, in the buses, in the markets, in the Plaza, in the particular attention within Eudora’s eyes. Sometimes, half- smiling, she would scan my face without speaking. It made me feel like she was the first person who had ever looked at me, ever seen who I was. And not only did she see me, she loved me, she thought me beautiful. This was no accidental collision.(173).

Here visibility involves a complex seeing of skin, color, and sexuality; queering and challenging gender stereotypes; and interrogating appropriate performances of femininity. An important dimension of the postmodern Self is the incessant quest for wholeness and reconciliation of the fragmentary state. As Judith Butler suggests, the key to the complex dynamics of claiming identities is avoiding exclusive categories and taking into consideration the multitude of people that live at border crossings. This theory applies to every category of person who feels alienated while subject to oppression and discrimination: “Making life livable, taking lesbian lives out of the shackles of shame and developing a vocabulary that is rich enough to sustain such lives in language, may sometimes entail entering into radical uncertainty over what the borders of the lesbian are.”(Lorde qtd. Hall 2000:405). The only way to make one’s multiplicity accepted and welcomed by the others goes through voicing one’s concerns and worries and fight back: “I am not going to be vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’ hands. Being a lesbian in the black community or even being woman-identified is difficult and

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. dangerous.”(Lorde qtd.Hall 2000:62). Aware of the presence of unmatching Selves dwelling within one’s subjectivity, and recognizing the hidden existence of split identities and unexplored realities willing to emerge at any time, Audre Lorde fails to reconcile being female, black and lesbian.

While fleeing with Kitty in her car, these warring Selves seem to call out at Zami more loudly than ever: “Part of me felt like a raging lioness, inflamed in desire. But that part of me was drunk on the thighed nearness of this exciting unknown dark woman […]. Another piece of me felt bumbling, inept and about four years old.”(Lorde Zami:246). Even the gay bars of Manhattan, do not seem to be the resting place for her troubled spirits.

When I moved through the bunches of women cruising each other in the front room […], it was hard for me to believe that my being an outsider had anything to do with being a lesbian. […] But, when I, a black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces there week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being black.(192).

Lorde’s description of the complex subject locations and fluid identities challenges the Western tradition of believing in a singular, unified subject. As the author shifts from a state of fragmentation to one of complementariness and integrity questing, she often experiences social isolation and rejection due to her many differences and notes: “I grew black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love for sharing.”(58). Confessing the plurality of the Selves, Lorde’s struggle is one of bringing the journeywoman pieces of herself together: “not in a single unitary Self, but into a community and to become Afrekete.”(Ball 1994:5). The conglomerate nature of the Self seems to be the most positive light under which one may regard oneself. In Gilmore’s terms--while not acknowledging our different Selves and repressing their oddities into our shadow: “we end up projecting the oddities onto others. We then feel broken, incomplete and we are, for we are unable to access the strengths that these denied and rejected Selves possess.”(Gilmore 1995:329).

The image of Afrekete is essential in acknowledging one’s contradictory Selves and in healing one’s sense of brokenness. As the dedication makes clear, this sense of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. collectivity and multiplicity is to be found in those who supported her, but even in those who demeaned her and by so doing made her discover new aspects of herself: “To the battalion of arms where I often retreated for shelter and sometimes found it. To the Others who helped, pushing me into the merciless sun--I, coming out blackened and whole.”(Lorde Zami:5-Dedication).

Lorde’s realization of a state of difference wavers between questioning her real Self and, desperately seeking complementation while blurring Self and Other boundaries and bridging the gaps between societal misapprehensions. In one of the episodes in High School, Lorde comes to understand that she is different just because she claims to be herself: “it was in High School that I came to believe that I was different from my white classmates not because I was Black, but because I was me.”(82). In another episode, in the hospital, she wonders what happens to two people who transfer blood to one another through blood transfusion, and thus regards the whole process as a natural fusion of two disparate Selves. While in Muriel’s presence, on the other hand, she feels a desperate need for being complemented by having another by her side:

Snail-sped an up-hill day, but evening comes: I dream of you. This shepherd is a leper learning to make lovely things while waiting out my time of despair. I feel a new kind of sickness now, which I know is the fever of wanting to be whole.(190).

Zami accepts the suicide of Gennie, the breakup of her first long-term relationship, and the loss of friends to alcoholism; and, like the snake shedding its skin, takes on the identity of a survivor who pledges to never forget the losses. The same life philosophy applies even as she separates from Afrekete. She simultaneously lets her go and keeps her close: “We had come together like elements erupting in an electric storm exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted shaping ourselves the better for the exchange.”(53). So, despite the losses and disappointments of her life the protagonist chooses to survive.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

3.1.2. Border Crossings and Initiation Rites. Naming in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

As naming in African cultural traditions is pivotal to one’s identity, Lorde’s different names: Audre, Sister Outsider, Zami, Gamba Adisa, reflect her geographical border crossings and her spiritual journeys from Harlem, New York City to the Caribbean, where her parents came from, back to West Africa. Considered as an act of initiation into society and a sign of personal and cultural identity, naming is an illustration of the disruption and the continuum of the African culture and the African American experience. In Women Reading, Women Writing(1994), Anne Louise Keating analyses Lorde’s dynamic formation of gendered and ethnic identities in terms of the ongoing process of self-naming. According to her, “silence–the absence of language, and the refusal to name–plays a significant role in Lorde’s interactional self-naming.” (Keating 1994:49).

According to Audre Lorde, it is necessary for each of us to claim all parts of our ancestry by at the same time recognizing the nourishment and the great power of our blackness. This is the reason why she grounds her narrative in the matrilineal history and takes root to form her identity from the African mythology. The precocious awareness of self- renaming at the age of four, “I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the name of Audrey. I used to love the evenness of Audre Lorde.”(Lorde Zami:24), is evidence of her non-conformism since the early days. The name Zami, on the other hand, derives from the Caribbean French word “les amies” used to address lesbians in a pejorative way and a Carriacou denomination for “women who work together as friends and lovers.”(255). Later in life, Lorde is given the African name Gamba Adisa which means warrior, thereby celebrating her struggles against oppression. Afrekete is another Africana name that describes her identities. It is likely that Lorde created Afrekete from a combination of mythic names and characters: A Dahomean name given to Legba (the version of Esu/Elegbara) is Aflakete. There is also a Dahomean deity of the sea called Aflekete.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

3.1.3. Queering and Lesbianism in Zami.

Zami is a woman-identified work thoroughly suffused with female eroticism. It is part of the 1980s tradition of overtly exploring sexual relationship as an important aspect of black womanhood. The word ‘lesbian’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time in 1908 while, before that time, a woman’s passion for another woman was often referred to through terms such as masturbation or the secret sin.

By presenting a variety of lesbian characters in terms of their physical appearance and personality and background, Audre Lorde’s Zami refutes the falseness of the one- dimensional stereotypes and offers lesbian love as an alternative to the failure of heterosexual relationships to make the protagonists of the narratives feel fulfilled. In a 1980 interview with Karla Hammond, Audre Lorde says: “black women are lesbian because we were raised in the remnants of a basically matriarchal society, no matter how oppressed we may have been by patriarchy.”(Hammond 1980:19). Thus, according to her, lesbianism just like heterosexism and blackness just like whiteness, are given facts of life which one has neither to justify nor to explain.

In terms of style, by moving beyond heterosexual frames that are constituted by male/female, active/passive binaries based on the sex/gender polarities, Lorde imbues her texts with unbridled eroticism and explicitly dismantles the rigid limitations through the indecency of the love-making scenes.

Kneeling, I pass my hands over her body, along the now familiar place between her left shoulder, down along her ribs. A part of her. The mark of the Amazon. For a woman who seems spare, almost lean in her clothing, her body is ripe and smooth to the touch. Beloved. Warm to my coolness, cool to my heat. I bend, moving my lips over her flat gentle stomach to the firm rising mound beneath.[lovemaking to Eudora],(Lorde Zami:169).

Ginger moved in love like she laughed, openly and easily, I moved with her, against her, within her, an ocean of brown warmth. Her sounds of delight and the deep shudders of relief that rolled through her body in the wake of my stroking fingers filled me with delight, and a hunger for more of her. The sweetness of her body meeting and filling my mouth, my hands wherever I touched felt right and completing, as if I had been born to make love to this woman.[lovemaking to Gennie](139).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Sometimes, it is particularly the naturalness through which Lorde faces each single act of lesbian love-making that threatens to bring down taboos and rigid frameworks by making the whole appear as a conventional pattern of life.

Lorde starts by tracing the lesbian roots behind her mother΄s identity, proceeds with her early childhood interest in having a female companion of her own, goes on with the impact of Gennie, Eudora and Kitty on her life, and then concludes with a description of the differences between lesbians in terms of clothing and activism. The scope of the matrilineal expands so as to include the connection of the protagonist to the tradition of Black dykes, the ancestral place of origin and the Grenadian island of Carriacou: “To this day I believe that there are and always have been black dykes around, in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women–who would rather have died than use that name for themselves. And that includes my momma.”(Lorde qtd. in Warhol 1993:615). It is her mother, Linda, who will make Zami see herself reflected in the persistent strength and transitory sensuality that stands beyond the harsh veneer of her personality.

Emphasizing the origination of her lesbian propensity from the mother and the respective Carriacouan heritage, Lorde considers the dyke impact as one having left the most long- lasting imprints on her formation: “Images of women, flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that leads me home.”(Lorde Zami:3). Attributing to the early childhood days the merit of influencing on her lesbian inclinations, Lorde reveals to us how one of her childhood fantasies was to “acquire a little female person for her companion.”(34). At Hunt High School, in New York, Lorde befriends a girl named Gennie, who becomes the first true friend that she was ever conscious of loving, and whose loss opens her eyes to the realization of the importance of having a female companion in life: “I lost my sister Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty.”(251).

Only when she falls in love with Eudora, a radical white newspaper woman, does Lorde acknowledge that she is lesbian with all the societal implications that the word implies.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Appearing equally in the homosexual and the heterosexual community, racism sharpens the author’s perceptions of the colored world and molds her life experience as she gets absorbed in an infatuation for Muriel, a white woman: Being women together was not enough. We were different Being gay girls together was not enough. We were different Being black together was not enough. We were different Being black dykes together was not enough. We were different.(226).

In an immediately recognizable community of the late 1980s: “alive and pulsing with loud music, good food and beautiful Black women.”(241), Lorde meets Kitty– “a high cheeked, dark young woman, with a silky voice and appraising eyes.”(242). According to Charlene Ball “she is a cat, she is a joker, she is a flirty femme who stares at Audre with her large eyes until Audre is embarrassed.”(Ball 2001:2). The details of Kitty’s appearance make her a complex character fully expressive of the variety of life experiences. Critics consider that the references to gold evoke the “golden Aphrodite”(242), Greek goddess of love and sexuality; the “comfortable smell associated with large women” evokes her mother’s appearance; while “the well-pressed khaki skirt topped by a black belt”(243) link her to Zami herself, making her (Afrekete) appear different and similar, unique and ordinary at the same time.

Looking at Kitty as she is wearing “a lot less make-up, her chocolate skin and deep, sculptured mouth.”(244), Audre considers her as looking more androgynous and less dissuaded by roles. Kitty’s new look suits Audre just fine. Zami’s sense of Self becomes as Lynda Hall suggests: “luminal, crossing boundaries, new and whole, yet unfinished and incomplete.”(Hall 2000:23). Besides being an important complimentary personage contributing to the formation of Lorde’s complex Self, Afrekete has implications for all feminists. Her image shows that a woman can be an acting subject of her own sexuality as well as an object of reciprocity; a passive component of culture, as well as an active protagonist in its establishment.

Lorde’s picture of the 1950s also demonstrates a significant historical reality in terms of the “visibility and courage it took to seek lesbian connections in an even more homophobic environment.”(Hall 2000:410). While in her first sexual experiences, she

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. assumes the role of butch, initiator, active lover; in her relationship with Eudora, her Mexican lover, she switches to culturally stereotyped bitch/femme roles and allows herself to be the one physically approached. Lorde abhors the idea of clothes used for signaling the sexual role that a woman is playing: Femmes wore their hair in tightly curled pageboy bobs, or piled high on their heads in sculptured bunches or curls, or in feather cuts framing their faces […]. Butches wore their hair cut shorter, in a D.A. shaped to a point in the back, or a short pageboy, or sometimes in a tightly curled poodle that predated the natural Afro.(242).

So the ongoing process of self-identity formation is also accompanied by a differentiation in the way lesbians clothe and behave in the respective environments.

3.1.4. Re-Writing Home: Audre Lorde and the Matrilineal Diaspora.

In Audre Lorde’s Zami the dimension of matrilinealism develops along the perspective of matrilineal Diaspora and that of the matrifocal family structure. The opening pages contain a succinct definition of the matrilineal Diaspora as: “the elegantly strong triad of grandmother, mother and daughter with the I moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed.”(Echeruo 2002:138). To Lorde, matrilinealism means the mythical connection to African women, the historical connection to the women in the Caribbean, and the autobiographical connection to her mother and the Black women she grew up with in her community.(Ball 2000:65). Strong emotional ties among women are supported by a matrifocal family structure, a type of household in the Caribbean in which the woman is dominant.

When we say that the protagonist in Zami develops a configuration of selves based on matrilineal Diaspora, we mean that all her female forerunners are cultural pathways in the journey to the discovery of her Selves. The Diaspora enables its members to survive and to be self-affirming across continents and generations as one resists cultural changes and becomes empowered through differences. According to Marlene C. Ball, the attempt to embrace a non-western lesbian experience leads Lorde to Africa and urges her to re-enact the role of the black woman conjurer as she “borrows images of female goddesses (Seboulisa, Yemanja, Oshun, Oya, etc.) queens, warriors, amazons, witches and other

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. women to reconstitute her image of the black female Self and to project her vision of a future woman-centered world.”(68).

Focusing on female experiences, Lorde’s Zami thwarts the social dynamics that situate the male as hero and dismantle the constructions limiting the mother΄s role to that of serving men and nurturing children. In her autobiography, Lorde challenges the Lacanian notions that require the loss and abandonment of the territory of first love and desire connected with the mother, and relies upon the theories of mother-child bonding. A genetic replication of the mother, the daughter also claims to assert herself through separation from the mother figure. A life-hardened adult, the mother regards her children as socially measuring “looking glasses” and attempts to refrain them from experiencing social injustices similar to her own. It is the split in-between the personal and the social, body and mind, uniqueness and social networking that Audre Lorde tries to solve and bridge at the same time.

Since the beginning of Lorde’s biomythography, we feel puzzled by the position matrilineal relations occupy in her life. An extended dedication page addressing exclusively female figures sets up a movie strip presentation of the images that seem to bear more weight in her life: mother, lesbian lovers, ancestresses and female mythological figures. The opening of the biomythography echoes the need for both a matrilineal and patrilineal continuum. Such is the episode in which Lorde dreams of accumulating the best of a man and of a woman (father and mother) in her.

Zami is dedicated to all those women who granted the voice to the implied author, and who molded the difference and likeness, the strength and weakness, the forgery and the verity of her narrative: “to the Others who helped, pushing me into the merciless sun--I am coming out blackened and whole.” (Lorde Zami:5). Among these characters we can mention: De Lois whom the child persona in Zami loved because she was “big and black and special and seemed to laugh all over.”(4); Louis Briscoe, a tenant in her mother΄s house, who mocks her fate and when dying refuses to have the doctor called, unless he is a real cute; a “pale white girl beaten and pursued by her husband”(5) who refuses the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Black woman to help her; the woman lover whom she left, because she taught her that “women who need without wanting are dangerous.”(5). All these images taken together make a patchwork of cruel and kind women.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name(1982) projects the mother-daughter relationship in a climate of conflict wavering between closeness and distancing, divergence and convergence, acceptance and denial. Nevertheless, what holds true is that a daughter’s claiming of a sense of belonging is always based upon the identification with the mother or on the Othering of the mother΄s existence and culture. It is my personal choice as a mother to start handling the episodes by first dealing with the scenes in which the mother and daughter seem the closest. The portrayal of Lorde’s mother bears some similarities to the white stereotype of the mammy. Like the traditional mammy, she works hard nurturing her children, caring for her husband and for the other black people. She also has an imposing physical appearance: a large, ample and graceful body, and a full bosom:

My mother was a private woman, and actually quite shy, but with a very imposing, no- nonsense exterior. Full–bosomed, proud, of no mean size, she would launch herself down the street like a ship under full sail, usually pulling me stumbling behind her. Not too many hardy souls dared cross her prow too closely.(Lorde Zami:17).

One of the earliest experiences of closeness is when the narrative voice in Zami boasts about her mother’s power and pride while at the same time feeling longing for the tenderness and warmth shown by her:

Her glycerin–flannel smell. The warmth. She reclines upon her back and side, one arm extended, the Other flung across her forehead. The large soft breast beneath the buttoned flannel of her nightgown. Below the rounded swell of her stomach silent and inviting touch.(17).

When regarded from a personal and psychological point of view, another crucial scene comes through the narrator’s absorption in the ritual of the mother combing the daughter’s hair. As Anne Louise Keating suggests in her “Myth Smashers, Myth Makers:

Revisionary Techniques in the Works of Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua and Audre Lorde”: “hair has always been an important aspect in the specialization and initiation of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. girls into different societies. Hair and hairstyles in many different cultures have been a means of social distinction, from Old Egypt to the 20th century.”(Keating 1993:77). As reflected in Zami, hair doing is also an expression of personal and cultural identity:

Sitting between my mother’s spread legs, her strong knees gripping my shoulders tightly like some well-attended rum, my head in her lap, while she brushed and combed and oiled and braided. I feel my mother’s strong, rough hands all up in my unruly hair, while I am squirming around on a low stool or on a folded towel on the floor […]. After each springy portion is combed and braided, she pasts it tenderly to proceed to the next.(Lorde Zami:18).

The mortar and pestle scene not only marks Lorde’s transition from girlhood into adolescence and subsequently womanhood, but it is also a symbol of the commonalities shared by mother and daughter, a representation of their female bonding and mutual acceptance.

I remember the warm mother smell caught her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching, nestled inside its covering of mace. The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of the petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees, and my stinging scalp, all fall into the rhythms of a litany, the rituals of Black women combing their daughter’s hair.(33).

And directly following this episode, there is a touching scene of sharing a Saturday morning in bed with the mother where “warm, milky smells of morning surround us.”(34). Similarly to the mortar and pestle episode, this one also shows the importance of the mother΄s physical and spiritual presence to Lorde’s development. Audre Lorde portrays the contemporary black mother as a symbol of earth’s creative forces, and as a person in whom the “physical, emotional and spiritual power is a natural quality, an inherited communal right, and not an aberrant individual, psychological need.” (Neubauer, Ryan eds. 2000:77).

Wavering between considerations of the mother as matriarchal and conventional on the one hand and non-conventional and lesbian-prone on the other hand, Lorde, not randomly, expresses her dream of having a different mother. Her dualism sometimes appears in the form of anger at the biological mother, while viewing her as compared to the idealized goddess images she was brought up with. The split comes out sometimes as one arising in-between the ideal womanhood models imposed by mainstream mass media and the actual female model of her mother. 85

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when the word combination of woman and powerful was inexpressible in the white American common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind or hunchback or crazy or black. My mother was different from other women, and sometimes it gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. If my mother were like everybody else’s, may be they would like me better.(Lorde Zami:15-16).

She was the only mother in my class who watched for airplanes and was also involved with the mysterious process of giving out information books from an official looking table set up in the back of the school auditorium. And she was the only mother, I knew who sat behind anotolher table every election day in the lobby of the infamous public school, hiking off voters in huge magic books. I was very proud of her, but sometimes just sometimes I wished she would be like all other mother΄s, one waiting for me at home with milk and home-baked cookies and a frilly-apron like the blond smiling mother in Dik and Jane (55).

In the episodes to follow, Audre Lorde realizes that she learned to define herself not only through the mother΄s lessons of absorption of the white prejudices, but also through her acts of denial, instances of imposing a stern approach while trying to suppress the insolent daughter’s acts of self–assertion. Lorde describes her mother as an “agent of the patriarchal status quo”(Chinosole 1986:13) who disapproves of her daughter’s independence and creativity and in whose presence “a request for privacy was treated like an outright act of insolence for which punishment was swift and painful.”(Lorde, Zami:83).

Aware that her mother had a strange way of dealing with words, coining new ones when needed, and taking out of the circulation the old unnecessary ones; Audre deepens the breach between the two while emphasizing that no mistake was allowable in their house, everything needed to fit perfectly to the requirements of the white society: “In my mother΄s house there was no room in which to make errors, no room to be wrong. I grew black as my need for life, for affirmation, for love, for sharing--copying from my mother what was in her unfulfilled.”(84). Giving priority to the external survival of the daughter, while at the same time trying to force her into opting the white standards the way she did, the mother remains blind to her internal split, and states:“Yet when I was a child / whatever my mother thought would mean survival / made her try to beat me whiter every day / and even now the color of her bleached ambition / still forks through my words / but I survived.”(75).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The dilemma black women (especially black lesbian women) are faced with is one of setting a kind of equilibrium between collective responsibility and personal gratification. While collective responsibility is a survival tool inherited all the way through matrilineage, personal gratification can be achieved only through individuation and separation from the mother΄s house. This is the point where the mother–daughter relationship becomes characterized by a willingness to accept the mother the way she is. As Chinosole states: “she clears an important part from the closet of decadence and tries to attain psychological reconciliation with the mother, despite the conflicting emotions that memory still generates.”(Chinosole 2001:15). Lorde has learned to suffocate anger, and retrieve love and admiration out of it: “But I have peeled away your anger/down to the core of love and look mother/I learned from you to define myself through your denials.”(Lorde Zami:75).

Carving out a path along the conflictual interaction with her mother΄s problematic existence, and raising her voice as a spokesperson of the silenced, Zami seems to be a book of reconciliation with the mother, the culture and the poetic inclinations as well as the lesbian propensity. The daughterly feelings of alienation overcome by female bonding and matrilineal heritage is consequently regarded as a “sensual content of life masked and encrypted but attended in well-coded phrases.”(32). Accepting the psychological and cultural “Othering” of the mother, Audre returns to Grenada at the end of the biomythography, and recognizes her lesbian origins, the Carriacou, remarking: “there is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother΄s blood.”(256).

After becoming a mother herself, Audre Lorde starts confessing in interviews what made her similar and different from her mother. Like her mother, she was brought up in anger and suppression. Unlike her mother, she did not condition her children to accept oppression passively; instead she invited them to react under a new light of liberation. The symbolism of the pestle and mortar scene is a foreshadowing of her subsequent separation from home:

The catalogue of dire menstruation warnings from my mother, passed out of my head. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

the rich smells filling the kitchen and the fullness of the younger summer heat […]. I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen, thinking with relief about how simple my life would be now that I had become a woman.(79-80).

Lorde tries to “use difference constructively, to bridge gaps and divisions.”(Lorde 1984:45), and thus achieve continuity, wholeness and harmony, and her work is the best witness of this.

3.1.5. The “House” of the Self. Displacement and the “Journey Woman” in Zami.

In Zami we travel with Lorde from a more conventional concept of home, namely the parental and geographical home, to an abstract and spiritual one. Just as Audre’s sense of Self and identity is multiple, her sense of place and home is open-ended; just like her genre is a border crosser, her notion of home and location crosses boundaries of conventionality with each single site becoming a different aspect of her character. As Lynda Hall will state in her “Passion(ate) Plays ‘Wherever we Found Place”: “Movement and change challenge notions of a fixed stable Self, and open channels for the transformation of the individual and the larger community through fluid and dynamic workings.”(Hall 2000:405). That is why Audre speaks of “the journey to this house of myself.” (31).

All the homes are places of refuge and rest, varying according to the “needs and the pursuits of different alliances”(226). Audre Lorde tells us there was “a piece of the real her bound in each place and growing”(226), and she could sometimes profit and evolve as a person because of the marginalization she is subject to. The experience of displacement, dislocation, and character maturation is conveyed even by Gillan, who explains that “out of the experience of loss, Lorde formulates a portable concept of ‘home’ as a temporary stopover.”(qtd. in Lassenberger 2004:210). Feeling displaced is both a negative and a positive experience for her. The ancestral history places Lorde in a line of decent that can be traced through her mother, an immigrant in Harlem, to her mother΄s birthplace, the West Indian island of Carriacou, and back to Africa, from where her mother΄s ancestors were sold as slaves.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The trips to other cities and states seem to consolidate Lorde’s identities and merge them into an unfragmentable amalgam. Nevertheless, the “journeywoman pieces of herself”(5), make her feel a craving for a sense of belonging and give her a sensation of being tied to a certain collectivity or location. To begin with, the name Zami itself, places us in the realm of international politics. As Giroux states in his article “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building: Reworking the Landscape in Audre Lorde's Zami”: “A creolization of the French noun phrase les amies, the main title situates readers literally and figuratively within the realm of the Other.”(Giroux 2009:286). Secondly, the image of the bird with no feet is expressive of the text’s primary concern with home. The bird with no feet is a symbol of those who come from somewhere and do not find a comfortable resting place, only trees with no limbs. “Wherever the bird with no feet flew she found trees with no limbs.”(Lorde Zami:31). In a telephone interview, Audre Lorde herself asserts that the image of the bird without feet was one of the most hated images of her childhood. This gives us a free hand to speculate that this trope might stand for the mobility of Lorde’s life, the uncertainty of its grounds, and the trans-border experience of being in many places at the same time and finding oneself in none of them. Abandoning traditional notions of home and location, Lorde admits that “it was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference, rather than the security of any particular difference.”(Lorde 1984:226). It is by this way of dealing with difference that Lorde queers the female dynamics of gendered norms and challenges the reliance on spatial referentiality.

Although the narrative of Zami is constituted by a search for home– home when it is found, is not the final destination, neither the final resting place; it is rather finding oneself in a category-lesbianism, in a person--Afrekete or in a mode of expression--her mother΄s language: “Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I was meant for, and I wondered silently, how I had not always known that it would be so.”(Lorde, Zami:118). So as Monica B. Pearl asserts, Lorde finds home in lesbianism, and the act of lesbian sex is presented as a return to an original knowledge that the protagonist had temporarily forgotten.(Pearl 2009:301).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Near the end of the text, Lorde relinquishes the Caribbean as her home for the place she grew up in Harlem, but more specifically, for a love affair with another black woman, Afrekete. After making love on the rooftop of Afrekete´s apartment building, Lorde narrates:

It was not onto the pale sands of Whydah, nor the beaches of Winneba or Annamabu with cocopalms softly applauding and crickets keeping time with the pounding of a tar-laden treacherous, beautiful sea: it was onto 113th Street that we descended after our meeting under the Midsummer Eve’s Moon, but the mothers and fathers smiled at us greeting as we strolled down to the Eighth Avenue, hand in hand.(222).

The home that Lorde ultimately finds is not geographical, but rather textual, her mother΄s language, her own language. That is why it is a biomythography; myths provide language for what is unknown, frightening or threatening, or otherwise inarticulable and unexplainable. “How I became a Poet” is the only subtitle of the book which describes the legacy of language she receives from her mother and her West Indian Inheritance. While accepting that her mother had a special relationship with words, Lorde represents home by the language coming out of her mother΄s mouth: “We were never dressed too lightly, but rather in ‘next kin to nothing’[…]. Impassable and impossible distances were measured by the distance ‘from Hog to Kick´m Jenny’.”(21). Nevertheless, it seems most likely that, for Lorde, home as an image means the place of her most private Self, but also the sacred place of worship of the Orishas. As Lorde speaks of the “house of the Self ” (36), she regards house as linked to her Caribbean heritage of identifying a person by the name of the female-headed household.

Locationally speaking, in her autobiography, Audre Lorde moves from Greenville, Grenada, to Harlem, to Stamford, Connecticut, then Mexico, Cuernavaca and back to New York, with each single site adding a patch to the patchwork of her personality, by making it more split and integral at the same time. Growing up in Harlem, a child of Black West-Indian parents, she lives all the time with the memories of her ancestral home, a site she had visited and experienced through the nostalgic narrations of her mother. Arriving in New York from the West Indies in 1924, her mother and her father fashioned a home from the practices, memories and rituals they brought with them.

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Growing up in Harlem and becoming aware of the ancestral home through the nostalgic narrations, Lorde attempts to figuratively visit and reinvent the island shelter. This cultural triangle of disruption and continuum, identity and difference, is represented through simple every day experiences like: preparing the souse, handling the mortar and the pestle, looking for tropical fruits in the market under the bridge, and longing for the sea and the fish.

Monica B. Pearl regards Lorde’s journey to the house of the Self as a remote example of the Mateo slave narrative, an account in which the protagonist is practically ‘shaped’ through the experience of displacement and dislocation. Lorde recalls: “Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to, but I knew out of my mother΄s mouth.”(13). Though it is with this phrase that Audre Lorde starts her biomythography, and closes her epilogue, we come to realize that Lorde’s real home was not Grenada, neither Carriacou, neither New York, it was poetry in which she found full expression and dimension: “Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but I knew out of my mother΄s mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home.”(256).

In Lorde’s remembrances of her mother, Linda Belmar Lorde appears alienated and absentminded while telling Carriacou stories to her daughters and conveying elements of the African spirituality to them. The tropical fruits and the sight of water were Linda Belmar Lorde’s links to home, a way of relating to earth, its scents, and a mode of compensating for the feeling of loss: “She [the mother] breathed, exuded, hummed the fruit smell of Noel’s Hill morning fresh and noon hot, and I spun visions of Sapodilla and Mango as a net over my Harlem tenement cot in the snoring darkness rank with nightmare sweat.”(13). The reminiscence of the ancestral home is so vivid in Lorde’s imagination that it becomes the primary myth of her biomythography and enlivens her fantasy: We would walk the hills of Greenville, Grenada, and when the wind blew right smell the limetrees of Carriacou, spice Island off the coast. Listen to the sea drum Kick´em Jenny, the reef whose loud voice split the night, when the sea-waves beat upon her side.(5).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Listening to the mother΄s stories equipped Lorde with knowledge she was not supposed to acquire in school and made her spin a fairy tale version of Catholic and African spirituality and mythology. Carriacou first enters Lorde’s consciousness as part of the ancestral heritage and then as a legend providing her with a vision of lesbianism:

Here Aunt Annie lived among the other women who saw their men off on the sailing vessels, then tended goats and groundnuts, planted grain and poured rum on the earth to strengthen the corn’s growing. Women who survived the absence of their sea-faring men easily, because they came to love each other, past the men’s returning.(14).

In a footnote to a discussion of the sights and meanings of Carriacou, Lorde accepts that her country of origin might not even have existed in the geography of the world; it might have been part of the African mythology.

Years later, as a partial requirement for a degree in library science I did a detailed comparison of atlases, their merits and particular strengths. I used as one of the foci of my project, the isle of Carriacou. It appeared only once, in the Atlas of the Encyclopedia Britannica which has always prided itself upon the curate cartology of is colonies, I was twenty six years old before I found Carriacou upon a map.(14).

The second stop, Harlem, is the beginning of Lorde’s quest for multiple identities and a starting point that initiates her into the search for a motherland. As a heterosexual community of diverse inhabitants, it makes her fully aware of the racial differences, but will not give full expression to her sexual identity. The home that Lorde conjures at the beginning of her story is not the one she came from, but the one her parents came from, while Harlem on the other hand, is her temporary abode.

This nowhere, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever, or totally binding or defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, then some day we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home (4-5).

After having been in a white area for a long time, Lorde is eager to see people whose skin color is like hers, so she decides to leave Harlem for Mexico, happy at finding a community full of dark-skinned people where she could be provided with a sense of belonging. Lorde’s life in Mexico involves two places: Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Mexico City appears as a city full of color and light, one that grants sense to her life and makes her view her existence under a new light. In Cuernavaca, after meeting Eudora, a

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. lesbian woman, she seems to be enlightened in sexuality, and affirms her lesbian consciousness:

As I walked through the fragrant morning quiet in the Alameda, the nearby sounds of traffic increasing yet dimming, I felt myself unfolding like some large flower, as if the statues of the kneeling girl had come alive, raising her head to look full-faced into the sun.(55).

As Mexico is neither her motherland, nor her birthplace after all, she moves to Greenwich Village where many gays and lesbians gather and reside. The gay milieu of Greenwich plays a crucial role in her development as black, female and lesbian. She commits herself to a long-term relationship with Muriel, a white woman with whom she builds a home, and who furthers the sexual awakening that she began with Eudora. As Zami forges an identity that integrates her sensual, intellectual, and artistic sides by entering the college; Muriel moves out of the Greenwich Village apartment, allowing Zami to move forward toward her new-found life.

According to Monica B. Pearl, however, Zami is less about finding home than about leaving home. In describing a childhood family holiday, Lorde narrates that “the first time she slept away from home was a milestone in the journey toward the “house of her Self.”(31). Leaving home as an adult, Lorde makes claim to the territory her parents were unable to provide her with. As Wiley suggests, “the contradictions in the parental home and the need to leave it behind, signify that home is not an endpoint but a constant movement towards the reconfiguration of the Self in a place.”(qtd.in Geourgoudaki 1991:29). Having a home can sound as securing and comforting as it may sound repressive and suffocating. Realizing that in the house of her childhood she is no longer at home, she plunges herself into a new adventure with Afrekete, an actress who stands for the African American heritage and her longing of Grenada.

When I moved out of my mother΄s house, shaky and determined, I began to fashion some different relationships to this country of our sojourn. I began to seek a more fruitful return than simple bitterness from this place of my mother΄s exile, whose streets I came to learn better than my mother ever had learned them. (Lorde, Zami: 86).

The end of Zami is also constituted not by arriving but by leaving. Her escape is a fruitful one, she is taking her mother΄s tradition with her: “We carry our traditions with us,

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. buying boxes of Red Cross Salt and a fresh corn straw broom for my new apartment in Westchester: new job, new house, new living the old in a new way.”( 223).

3.2. Corporeal Materiality and Lesbian Eroticism in Audre Lorde Zami: A New

Spelling of My Name(1982)

Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami a New Spelling of My Name(1982), places the woman and her body claims at its very center,by in this way making her the narrator of the story. According to Margaret Kissam Morris: “from the pages of Ebony, to the wasting expression of whites, to the favoring of light skin in her family, to the special classroom for children with various serious deficiencies, Lorde learns that her body is not only different but wrong.”(Kissam 2002:410). Zami thus begins with the premise: the lived and felt experience is at odds with the normative categories of identity. She speaks of herself as “growing up fat, black, nearly blind, and ambidextrous in a West Indian household.”(Lorde Zami:240).

The destabilization of her identity formation is furthered in the prologue, a half-paged italicized speculation on family, sexuality and identity, where she undermines everybody’s expectations and emphasizes her irreconcilable duality by stating: “I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and my father within/into me--to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.”(7). Through these two lines, Lorde denaturalizes gender, remaps the geography of the body and denies any prescribed development of sex, gender and desire.

By drawing a parallelism in-between nature and what sounds unnatural in it, Lorde embodies the very stereotypings addressed to her. The subjectivity of her entity is so daring, that she even posits herself in the sexual attitude of a man dreaming of penetrating the innermost sites of a woman, the way only a man can: “I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered--to leave and to be left, to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.”(Lorde Zami:7). Placed in the role of the amusing masturbator, the autobiographer experiences pleasure at the penetration of

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. the bath water in the innermost sites of her body and enacts the role of the penetrating male. As Kissam suggests, “Such a revised embodiment reorients the meaning of identity from ontology through epistemology imagination and desire all of which have become politicized in the cause of love.”(Kissam 2002:316).

For African Americans, straightened hair, Afro looks, braids and deadlocks have often been an indication of the adoption of different identities and as signs of either assimilation or rebellion. The skillful braiding and plaiting of hair is an artistic skill and a cultural tradition passed on from generation to generation. This instance of passing down ancestral knowledge from one generation to the next also increases the intimacy and closeness between mothers and daughters. Nevertheless, Lorde experiences mingled feelings of personal gratification and societal assessment, motherly acceptance and communal denial.

I feel my mother΄s strong, rough hands all up in my unruly hair, while I am squirming around in a low stool or on a folded towel on the floor, my rebellious shoulders hunched and jerking against the inexorable sharp-toothed comb. I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside of the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace. The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into the rhythms of a litany, the rituals of black women combing their daughter’s hair.( Lorde Zami :33).

As Lorde makes clear in her autobiography, when the bodies can no longer be distinguished by color of skin, they are distinguished by the structure of their hair.

Whuh tuh do bout colored folks? Got bees fuh dem too? Nope. They can’t find enough of ém tuh go round. Ju’s sprinkle plenty quicklime over ém and cover ém up. Shucks? Nobody can’t tell nothing ‘bout some uh ded bodies, de shape dey’s in. Can’t tell whether dey’s white or black.(36).

Another important element of the body dimension in Zami is the scene of the first coming of the menses and that of the illustration of the way this experience is conveyed by both mother and daughter. In one of her books on psychoanalysis and its relation to the body, Pouvoirs de Horreurs(1980), Julia Kristeva observes that the menstrual blood is one of the primary forms associated with the abject, which is “that which perturbs an identity, a system, an order. That which does not respect limits, paces and rules.”(Kristeva 1980:12).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

According to her, the experience of the menstruations poses for the subject a menace of total absorption in the dual relationship with the mother, thereby running the risk of losing its own identity in the mother.

Rather than being distanced by the fear of the abject, Lorde embraces it in her text, and regards menstruations as a channel of identification with the pre-Oedipal mother. The revelation of the secret of the menstruations is quite a silent one, and Lorde resists the fear and shame that her mother tried to instill in her: “What then happened felt like a piece of an old and elaborate dance between my mother and me. She discovers finally through a stain on the toilet seat left there on purpose by me as a mute announcement and she scolds.”(Lorde Zami:76).

Contrary to what the rigid conventions of black motherhood would suggest, Lorde grounds the depiction of the menses coming episode in the womanist body and brings in front of the reader a scene of unusual intimacy:

There was something else coming from my mother that I could not define: it was the lurking of that amused/annoyed brow-furrowed half smile of hers that made me feel–all her nagging words to the contrary.--that something very good and satisfactory and pleasing to her had just happened.(77).

After having had the secret of the menstruations revealed, the mother decides to prepare the souse, Lorde’s favourite dish, for dinner; so the little girl takes down the mortar and pestle to begin helping her pound souse. As the mother leaves the house for a few moments Lorde begins to pound the pestle against the mortar, thereby converting the act into a powerful fantasy of female sexuality.

As I continued to pound the spice a vital connection seemed to establish itself between the muscles of my fingers curved tightly around the smooth pestle in its insistent downward motion, and the molten core of my body whose source emanated from a new ripe fullness just beneath the pit of my stomach. That invisible thread, taut and sensitive as a clitoris exposed […] ran over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing into a basin that was poised between my hips. And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength and information. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen and the fullness of the young summer heat.(78-79).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The mortar and the pestle are among the special things from home that her mother possesses and, besides conjuring up images of past and present feasts and rituals, they fill the young girl with intense and erotic joy. In the “Erotic as Power”, Lorde refers to the act of pounding souse as one making the body “stretch to music, and open to response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms.”(Lorde 1981:76). Some critics have been considering the rhythms of life conveyed by the pestle and mortar scene and viewing the motion of the mortar as one transporting the young girl from the world of girlhood into that of womanhood: “Thud, push, rub, rotate up into a world of scent and rhythm, and movement and sound.”(Lorde Zami:74). Other critics have gone even further, conceiving it as a scene of hidden lesbian attraction for the mother, a hidden sexual expression of incest. Nevertheless, what all seem to agree upon is that the episode marks the end of a cycle of life and the beginning of a new one, complete with new sexual orientations.

As Audre Lorde skillfully depicts the sensuous contours of her mother΄s West Indian mortar, “I loved to find the hard roundedness of the carved fruit, and the always uprising termination of the shapes as the carvings stopped at the rim and the bowl sloped abruptly downward, smoothly oval but abruptly businesslike.”(71), she subtly imagines manipulating the mother΄s body and exploring her entity in the way she handles the ancestral tool: “slowly and thoroughly our touching and caressing each other΄s most secret places.”(78). In the episodes to follow it is only through matrilineage that Lorde will find what she was seeking for and will come to an understanding of the connection between the spiritual and the sexual dimensions.

Critics such as Giroux(2009) emphasize the fact that “Audre Lorde’s Self appears as in erosion and in pain throughout or as marked by scenes of lesbian eroticism”(287). The scene in which the protagonist has an abortion offers quite clearly an instance of Self under erosion, and an illustration of the way the geography of the body can become are arena of struggle between motherhood and girlhood forces, homosexual and heterosexual inclinations. She graphically describes the process through which the uterine lining is worn away, the female body becoming the site of the political power struggle: “I watched one grayish mucous shape disappear in the bowl, wondering if that was the embryo. By

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. dawn, when I went to take some more aspirin, the catheter had worked its way out of my body. I was bleeding and heavily, very heavily.”(Lorde Zami:112).

The protagonist’s work for Keystone Electronics, on the other hand, captures another instance of the eroding Self. As Giroux proceeds to argue the darkening of the co- workers fingertips, while not setting the hood of the X-ray machine, and the narrator’s chewing and grinding down of the smuggled crystals into the bathroom, “exert wear and tear on the body.” (Giroux 2001:288).

By not taking the time to flip down the protective shield that kept the X-ray from hitting our fingers, we could increase that number to about eleven hundred. Some of the women who had been at Keystone for years had perfected the motions and moved so swiftly that they were able to make from five to ten dollars some weeks in bonus. For most of them, the tips of their fingers were permanently darkened from exposure to X-Ray. Before I finally left Keystone Electronics, there were dark marks on my fingers also, that only gradually faded.(Lorde Zami:145).

The relationship dissolution is measured by the impact that bonds have on a body in pain. When Audre discovers Muriel slept with Jill, she notes: “I rode up to Morris Avenue, my eyes filmed in red, my hands shaking. I could not separate the pain of betrayal from the pain of raw fury.”(232). A fragmented entity, Audre permits her body to go its own way toward self-mutilation, as she attempts to pull out all anger letting herself be covered by the boiling water of the kettle. She says:

I felt the tension rising in my right arm, and my right hand began to shake […]. The water cascaded down, bounced off the back of my hand and flowed down the drain. I watched the brown skin cloud with steam, then turn red and shiny, and the poison began to run out of me like water as I fumbled at the buttons of my shirt cuff and peeled back the wet cloth from my scalded wrist .The steamed flesh had started to blister.(233).

As studies of Audre Lorde’s literary creation will reveal, her body seems to speak its own history even in the other works like The Cancer Journal, where she chooses corporeal language to articulate what she could not previously put into words. The link between Self and the body is at its highest when Lorde gets to know about being afflicted by cancer. As Perrault shows, this link is so powerful that Lorde fears that “recreating the time in words may recreate it in her body.”(qtd. in Evans 1984:276).

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The shift in sexual orientation makes Audre puzzle over the materiality and the centrality of her body, but does not refrain her from enjoying every single act of lesbian intercourse. In the lovemaking with Eudora, the first to pave her way toward lesbian sexuality, Lorde tries to decipher the body language and the mutual enjoyment of the partner: “a slow smile mirroring my own softened her face […]. How beautiful and brown you are […]. I reside my eyes and found hers again, speaking of tenderness my mouth had yet no words for.”(Lorde Zami:167). The smiles and looks of both characters speak of the mutuality of the joy and echo the act of recognition. As Lynda Hall states in her article on the queering of the boundaries: “making the female sexualized body, exploring the lesbian territory and converting the homosexual into something visible that foregrounds race; Lorde declares a deliberate blindness to difference.”(Hall 2000:400). Muffled as her voice may sound, it articulates a cry of pain, a new determination to absorb difference by not losing herself, but rather by commemorating uniqueness:

It was not only a cry of pain, but a new determination to finish something I had begun, to stick with--what? A commitment my body had made? Or with the tenderness which flooded through me at the curve of her head over the back of the chair? To stick with something that had passed between us, and not lose myself. And not lose myself.(175).

Revealing women’s strong sexual desires, Lorde challenges the notions of women’s sexual passivity, and those of giving their Selves as a gift in response to male desire. As quoted in Lynda Hall’s article on the queering of the borderlands, De Laurentis states: “borderlands and embodied border crossings of sexuality, race and class and nationality echo through Lorde’s writings on bodies meeting within the writing and reading.”(Hall 2000:405). The experiences of these lesbian bodies are journeys towards self- understanding and sexual knowledge.

Refusing to subdue to the dichotomies of Self and Other, Audre Lorde joins Afrekete who will grant her a sense of fulfillment and realization based on the lesbian erotica. She meditates: “Afrekete, Afrekete ride me to the crossroads where we shall sleep, coated in a woman’s power. The sound of our bodies meeting is the prayer of all strangers and sisters.”(252). The sexually charged depiction of her mother pounding nutmeg with the

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. phallic pestle, also resonates in the erotic representation of Audre’s lovemaking with Afrekete.

I held you, lay between your brown legs, slowly playing my tongue through your familiar forests, slowly licking and swallowing as the deep undulations and the tidal motions of your strong body slowly mashed ripe banana into a beige cream that mixed with the juices of your electric flesh. Our bodies met again, each surface touched with each others flame, from the tips of our curled toes to our tongues, and locked into our own wild rhythms, we rode each other across the thundering space, dripped like light from the peak of each other’s tongue.(249).

The lovemaking scenes to follow are not only open celebrations of the lesbian identity and sexuality, but also skillful enmeshings of reality, mythology and natural landscape. As the autobiography smoothly proceeds toward the end, Lorde reaches the same climax of passion and identification she had started her work with. There is an apparent convergence of the Selves to the point of causing an electrical discharge, a burning flame, “blood yeasting up from under the bruised skin’s blister.”(3), fruits and flowers, tidal motions, mingling sexual presences. As the scene of the last lovemaking between Lorde and Afrekete lends eroticism and lyricism to the work, and recalls memories of West Indian fruits and landscapes, “I rose from a kiss in your mouth to nibble a hole in the fruit skin near the navel stalk, squeezed the pale yellow-green fruit juice in thin ritual lines back and forth and around your coconut-brown belly.”(Lorde Zami:251), the threat of parting arises providing the grounds for the reshaping of the selves. As the mythic narrative supplies us with some additional patches to the quilt-work of Audre’s integrity, Afrekete provides her with some important missing part of herself. Lorde piles image after image, sensory detail after sensory detail, trope after trope, to figuratively describe the meeting of the bodies and their melting into the real and mythical islands of the surrounding environment.

It was a 1 ½ room kitchenette apartment with tall narrow windows in the narrow high ceilinged front room. Across each window, there were built-in shelves at different levels. From these shelves tossed and frothed, hung and leaned, stood, pot after clay pot of green and tousled large and small leaved plants of all shapes and conditions. Leisurely and swiftly a translucent rain bowed fish darted back and forth through the light water, perusing the glass sides of the tank for morsels of food and swimming in and out of the marvelous world created by colored gravels and stone tunnels and bridges that lined the floor of the tank.(Lorde Zami:248).

100

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In conclusion, we might say that in Audre Lorde’s Zami, the body is the author’s most powerful means for expressing the claiming and disclaiming of one’s identity, its erosion, its ultimate disintegration and reintegration. The author’s uninhibited desire to express herself the way she really is makes her compose episodes that have frequently been considered as lesbian erotica classics and have not rarely ran counter much criticism for the openness and indiscreetness of representation.

3.3. Ancestral Origins, Memory and the Multigenre in Audre Lorde’s

Autobiography

The study of the nature of Lorde’s narrative has been the focus of the reviews of many scholars. What most critics seem to agree upon is that Audre Lorde’s Zami(1982) is a transgressor of boundaries, be they of Self or genre. Critics argue about the status of Audre Lorde’s sense of Self: conventional or non-conventional, fragmented or wholesome, fake or real. They also proceed to reflect their doubts about the nature of the genre: slave narrative or coming-out story, autobiography or biomythography.

Lorde consciously constructs a narrative Self that evades referentiality and supposedly challenges the idea of objectively chronicling one’s life, thereby showing the inadequacy of the term autobiography and the Western conventions of selfhood for rendering the lives of women-of-color.(Benstock 1989:iii). The adoption of the neologism ‘biomythography’ grants a number of glosses to the work itself: firstly, it “refuses to posit the Self as the single authoritative voice in the text.”(Keating 1996:175); secondly, it dispels autobiographical exactitude by introducing the dimension of mythology; and, thirdly, as Keating suggests, it “signals Zami’s thematic project of creating an embodied entity that transgresses all boundaries.”(Keating 1996:176). The “multi” of this hybrid genre includes a multitude of cultures: Caribbean, female and black lesbian.

Writing about her own work in Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work(1982), Lorde considers it as a new cultural identity constructed through “memory, fantasy and narrative myth” and as a means of “expanding our vision.”(qtd. in Tate 1982:85). While selectivity of memory is operative, and in Sidonie Smith’s terms “knowledge of the

101

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. multiple fictions influences on the distortion of a transparent, authentic Self.”(qtd. in Smith, Watson. eds.1998:435), the writer is enabled to be in different places, witness of different truths, and reflective of different voices and experiences. So, as Smith again suggests, the best way to consider her work is as a piece of patchwork in an enmeshed quilting pattern, part of a multiple reality, rather than as a dimension of a unilinear account: “than be seen as an inevitable moving into collision.”(qtd.in Wilson 2001:101). Audre Lorde’s idea of a multitude of voices that accommodate the multiple truths, identities, and locations is also supported by Andehmar who claims that it is the nature of the Black feminist writing itself which imposes the presence of “transcending boundaries of genre and mixing of various styles.”(qtd. in Warhol 1993:1202).

Though we already agree on the fact that Audre Lorde’s Zami enmeshes several genres, several narrative voices and several styles, there is a kind of regularity to be established while trying to determine the most widespread dualities present in her prose. The first duality consists of the blurring of the boundaries between dream and reality. Referring to the employment of this technique in Lorde’s writings, De Laurentis regards her writing as an experimental form that builds new correlations between signs and meanings, thereby inciting other discursive mediations between the symbolic and the real, language and flesh.”(De Laurentis 1988:157). The dream-reality duality is instilled in us early on in the autobiography, when Lorde depicts her first encounters with the color complex, faint school episodes including a teacher that taught her what colorism was:

And her voice. She smiled, a big smile. It is surprising to me that I can still hear her voice but I can not see her face, and I don’t know whether she was Black or White. I can remember the way she smelled, but not the color of her hand upon my desk(Lorde Zami:26).

Later on, Audre Lorde’s mother is depicted as having special knowledge carried from the Caribbean origin, knowledge learned from the women before her. She knows about “burning candles before All Soul’s Day to keep the soucouyants away, lest they suck the blood of their babies.”(9). In this episode, senses are re-arranged in such a way that sensual touch and exotic smells trigger memories and offer knowledge beyond the realms of sight and hearing. Even the approach and the intrusion of Afrekete within Audre’s life

102

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. is depicted through a hazy memory scene. As a character Afrekete will enter Audre’s life in a mysterious manner, and will leave it as mysteriously as she had come. Secondly, as an actor she is not a realistic one, but rather a mythological entity standing as a representation of the African goddesses: “And I remember Afrekete, who came out of a dream to me, always being hard and real as the fine hairs along under the edge of my navel.”(249). Ultimately, Lorde’s anger towards the stern attitude displayed by the mother comes out in the section “The Last of my Childhood Nightmares”, conceived as a journal entry that includes revelatory experiences through a dream sequence: “I realize that in this house of my childhood, I am no longer welcome. Everything is hostile to me, the doors refuse to open […]. I am suddenly free to go and take Rhea with me.“xx(199).

Zami moves back and forth in time allowing Lorde to describe childhood experiences through adult eyes and to revisit, reinvent and renegotiate the past while coming to terms with the present. The novel starts with an evocation of the past, and an address to women of the past: “To whom do I owe the symbol of my survival?”(3), while the answer lies in the rest of the book, composed in the form of a continuum or historical revision. In the vivid party scene where she meets with Kitty, Lorde mingles present and past to create a layering of sensory impressions and a blurring of time. After reading the passage, we discover that the party at which Zami met Kitty, took place in the chronological past: “that it had been in St.Alban’s Queens, nearly two years before, when Muriel had seemed to be the certainty in my [her] life.”(244).

According to Chinosole, the “displacement in time, is a way of moving from the realistic mode of autobiography to a mythic mode.”(Chinosole 2001:384). All through the work songs provide rhythm that aids memory and brings pieces of the past together, thereby forging the long-lasting quality of these memories. On the night Gennie dies, Audre recalls the words of Gennie’s favorite song, Sarah Vaughan’s voice repeating over and over: “I saw the harbor lights, they only told me we were parting […] I saw the harbor lights, how could I help the tears were starting.”(Lorde Zami:98). Eudora, on the other hand, serves as an important knot creating links between women and knowledge. She remarks: “I was hurt, but not lost. And in that moment, as in the first sight when I held

103

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever widening network of exchanging strengths.”(175).

Another narrative strategy that moves us from one kind of reality to another is the use of different voices. Lorde moves back and forth from “linear, realistic prose, to a heightened poetic voice in which dreams, legends and myths are told.”(Ball 2001:384). The second voice is frequently printed in italics. According to Claudine Reynaud, this particularly happens during the lovemaking scenes and serves to “expand beyond the individual moment into a mythic encounter.”(qtd.in Kumamoto 1998:231). The author also gives us the impression that she is moving from personal voicing into collective and plural textual Selves.

The effect of abandoning chronology and passing from a dry prosaic voice, to a rhythmic poetic one is especially evident as Marlene C. Ball professes “as the author mirrors the movements of Kitty in between two landscapes: one mythical and timeless, the other one realistic and contemporary, related to the narrative present of New York City.”(Ball 2001:78). The first italicized passage begins like a legend: “And I remember Afrekete, who came out of a dream to me […]. She brought me live things from the bush and from her farm, set out in cocoyams and cassava.”(Lorde Zami:249). Remembered like a figure in a dream, and set in the far distant past she appears bearing gifts, her body providing emotional, spiritual and physical nourishment. The shift into the actual present of buying fruits and sweets, on the other hand, adds to the enjoyment of their new experience:

We bought red delicious pippins, the size of French cashew apples. There were the green plantains which we half-peeled and then planted, fruit-deep, in each Other’s bodies until the petals of the skin lay like tendrils of broad green fire upon the curly darkness between our upspread thighs(249).

Ultimately, it is Monica B. Pearl in her “Sweet Home: Audre Lorde’s Zami and the Legacies of the American Writing”, that considers that Audre Lorde’s work has intentionally been called a biomythography, because the life of an African American Lesbian: “cannot be told in previously available generic forms of life-writing or self- expression, but it actually derives from two extant American literary traditions--The

104

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

African American slave narrative and the Lesbian coming out story.”(Pearl 2009:297). In coherence with what a coming-out story is, Zami expresses the tension in search of a desired community, the presence of split identities to be reconciled, and a desperate search for an accepting community. The slave narrative part of Zami, on the other hand, comes out through the reflection of themes such as journeying, freedom and naming, the abolitionist cause and the amalgam status of fiction and non-fiction. In conclusion, we might say that Lorde’s personal account is meant to cohere identities and challenge realities of time and location.

3.4.Chapter Conclusions

In conclusion, we might say that in its allusion to multiple cultures and ways of living, in its merging of reality and myth, actuality and dream, Zami is meant to be a hybrid genre, dwelling within several definitions but never fully determined by any of them, being in several places and in none of them, making reality seem like fiction and fiction fully reflective of reality.

In Zami, Otherness is an inherent element of claiming one’s Self and identity, only by recognizing the omniscient presence of the Other within every Self, will we be enabled to comprehend the polyvocality of every Self and the conflictual composure of every identity. The intertwining of Otherness and the color complex speaks of simultaneity of narrative voices and a merging of identities by at the same time preserving their separateness.

While Audre Lorde pays special attention to the multiplicity and nonlinearity of Selves dwelling within every person, naming is the most tangible reflection of the freedom to adopt different identities in different contexts or along different encounters with facets of the Self and the Other. From an early childhood self-awareness, naming turns into an act of commemoration of the plurality of the voices and realities one is faced with.

Lorde’s lesbianism is in turn characterized by the daringness and openness to declare sexual orientation, and the determination to make oneself accepted the way one is without

105

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. needing to wear the mask that fits the societal and communal frameworks and expectations. If lesbian women are to be granted access and acceptability in society, they are to be welcomed for all the multiplicity and perplexity of dimensions that being a black lesbian invokes.

Lorde’s self-portrait is patterned after the mammy image, a woman dissatisfied with her condition as a slave and doing her best to undermine and overthrow white rule instead of passively and silently submitting to her fate.The relationship to the mother, and the matrilineal heritage she represents, is a tense one wavering between closeness and distancing, anger and placidity, and is finalized with a silent acceptance of everything she represents. Her own experience as a mother, complete with the knowledge of the conventional role models and the acceptance of lesbian consciousness, enables her to reach a stage of understanding, inner exploration and external bonding.

Lorde’s personal account, is a narrative meant to cohere identities, genres, communities and locations. Though the book starts and ends with an unanswered quest for home and for belonging, the home she finds is in language, in her writing, in the talent of representing the silenced and the powerless. Although Lorde professes alienation from the identities that constitute her, she does actually fit in each patchwork of the quilt of herself, making it appear split and whole, converging and diverging at the same time.

Throughout Zami, Lorde questions the materiality of her body, its border crossing ability, and the capacity to resist distortions and fragmentations. She leads us to the conclusion that the human body should be set free to experience every passion, to trespass and transpose borders, thereby mapping its territory through the infinity of its geography. Linking her identities in a concatenation; respecting the variety of styles and realities, asserting the boundary-blurring status of the work and recognizing the never colliding presence of conflictual facets, Lorde΄s autobiography has received much recognition.

106

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

4. POSTMODERN BLACKNESS AND SELF-RECOVERY IN bell hooks´ BONE BLACK: MEMORIES OF GIRLHOOD (1996)

***

Born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25th, 1952, bell hooks was raised in Hopkinsville: a small, segregated town in rural Kentucky. Gloria was one of six siblings: five sisters and a brother. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother, Rosa Bell Oldham Watkins, worked as a maid in the homes of white families. She lived her childhood years in the ‘60s, a time marked by the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement. By the time she was ten, she had begun writing her own poetry and developed a reputation for reciting poetry. She first used her pseudonym, bell hooks--her maternal great-grandmother’s name, for a small book of poems. She decided not to capitalize her first and last names in an attempt to place the focus on her work rather than on her name, and to pay homage to the unheard voice of black women past and present.xxi

As Susana Vegas-Gonzales states in the “Dialectics of Belonging”, Bone Black “represents bell hooks’ life story of survival amidst a harsh racist and sexist environment in the South of the United States in the 1950s.”(Vegas-Gonzales 2001-02:239). Her childhood is clearly dominated by a feeling of estrangement and loneliness together with the pain of being the different one, the problematic child, the rebel. Well-known for her outspoken insightful feminist books and equipped with an eternal yearning for belonging, bell hooks delves into the inner darkness of her soul to search for her way home through the complex paths of memory that lead into the past.

Throughout bell hooks’ autobiography, black southern folk and culture are portrayed and reclaimed as the foundations from which her Selves stemmed. As hooks herself asserts, the power of words in storytelling, the stories in the quilting tradition, and the remedies prepared in the ancestral shelter all added to the magic of those childhood years that were “sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying.”(hooks Bone Black: xi). As an online review of Barnes and Noble states: “Hooks shares experiences of wash day, caring

107

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. for an elderly woman with palsy, rescuing discarded books, listening to jazz, and attending integrated schools for the first time.”(Bone Black rev. Barnes&Noble 2009). She is confronted with domestic violence between her parents, siblings’ disdain, spiritual upbringing, interracial dating and death, and rages over the lack of privacy, the one needed to write poems and explore her sexuality.

A moving story, written in a vivid, charming voice, hooks’ autobiography bridges the distance between poetry and prose, which takes us into the world of a young black girl. The awkward prose, trying for the qualities of fiction, keeps us trapped in an experimental style which discards the wealth of detail and the dramatism of incidents in favor of an elliptical narrative, a daydream organized into 61 vignettes of two-to-three pages in length. Resembling muted and blurred photographs that bring a vent of youthfulness in front of the reader, these snapshots of adulthood and girlhood incidents lay the grounds for the unfolding of the chapters. Sometimes told in the first person and sometimes indirectly by a third person to give them distance and objectivity, the episodes invite us to climb into the writer’s subjective space. As Sri Murilyani states “they resemble to a work in progress, ruminations from which to build a solid autobiography.” (Murilyani 2002:26), hooks herself defines the genre of her work by stating:

While readers from diverse backgrounds celebrated Bone Black, embracing both its experimental style and the absence of any kind of “tell all” tabloid-like revelations that folks often want from autobiographical narratives; individual reviewers were the most disappointed that they were not getting the scoop on bell hooks. They wanted traditional autobiography and as a consequence were unable to accept the book on its own terms (hooks Bone Black:xx)

If the traditional model of autobiography is almost always rooted in the slave narratives and charters a set of passages from slavery to freedom, from oppression to personal deliverance, Bone Black, as an instance of postmodern autobiography, is a departure from these models depicting mainly the recollections of a daring child caught up in a world that seems to accept everyone but her.

In conclusion, we can state that hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood(1996) contains the recollections of a too-bold child caught up in a world where race, gender,

108

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. class and sexual orientation are frequently addressed in an interconnected form. As Susana Vegas-Gonzales proceeds to argue in her “The Dialectics of Belonging”: “all throughout her autobiography, there is a recurrent emphasis on alienation and the ensuing yearning for a sense of belonging.”(Vegas-Gonzales 2001-02:242). Described through patches of stream–of–consciousness memories that irregularly shift from first person narration to third person narration, hooks’ life provides a hazy image of the act of claiming one’s authentic Self, the rejected, the irreconcilable, and the problematic of our sub-consciousness.

4.1. Unfathomable Depths and “Blackened” Alterity. Self and Other in

hooks’ Bone Black

When you say “I would die for you” to those you love The truth of those words may be not that you give your Physical life but that you are willing to die to the past And be born again in the present where you can live fully And freely--where you can give us the love you need. . (hooks Bone Black: dedication)

Through this dedication, hooks negates feelings of hatred or vengeance toward any character in her life, and invites people to comprehend her sublime moment. Since the opening pages of her memoir, the very first words of her dedication, she gives us a hint of the trope that will dominate all through her work: that of a hidden dark cave within every one of us in which, and solely through which, we can discover ourselves, reach a sense of belonging, and finally reconcile the warring inner Selves by making them fit into the discriminatory and alienating background of life.

It is in the epiphany that hooks comes to realize that only through erasure and burning of one’s constructed Self, and arousal out of the ashes like phoenix, can one really discover one’s home and find a sense of belonging. Where we belong it is just to the hidden parts of ourselves, those suffocated and repressed facets of one’s sub-consciousness that mercilessly confront what we want to be like with what we really are. In hooks’ terms, the black woman can never be thought capable of giving love as long as she does not learn to delve deep into and access the subtlest niches of her own Self.

109

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Proceeding with the foreword, the author clarifies that the time span her memoir covers is mainly the girlhood. The narrative’s unconventional organization along experiences, dreams and fantasies enables the depiction of the struggle to establish a Self and identity, distinct “and yet inclusive of the world around her.”(Foreword). Striving to make herself outspoken in ways that supersede the white researcher’s yardstick, hooks constructs her narrative in the form of a quilt, a patchwork of past and present daydreams and memories: “Mama has given me a quilt from her hope–chest: it is one of her mother’s made. It is a quilt of stars each piece taken from faded-cotton summer dresses--each piece stitched by hand.”(1).

The shift in the narrative point of view makes it difficult for us to follow the plot line, thereby granting secrecy and intrigue to the memoir. Correspondingly, while one of the fragmentary chapters of her memoir, specifically number three, ends with a first person narrator telling more about her childhood experience of making arrangements for the Tom Thumb wedding, (a school show); the next chapter starts with an unexpected “they” and “she”, a simultaneously puzzling and comforting introduction: “She liked to walk to a favorite tree up the hill and play with a bright green snake that lived there, a green tree snake. She knew how to talk to the snake and how to listen.” (11).

4.1.1. Quiltwork Patches of Identity. Otherness in hooks’Autobiography

The relational Self in hooks develops along the questioning of the personality, and the acceptance of the irreconcilable character traits. It proceeds then with the possibility for an erasure of the Self, and a possible death and resurrection, and shifts the focus of the attention to the complimentary dimensions of Otherness respectively--Self and the Color Trope, Self and Sexuality, Self and Ancestry, and Self and Nature.

As Dorotha Glowacka suggests in her “Anarchic Vision: Occular Constructions of Race and Challenge of Ethics”: “hooks’ work can be read as a necessary corrective to the proliferating theories of Otherness that have proven insufficiently attentive to the multiplicity and specificity of ethnic, racial, or sexual differences.”(Glowacka 2003:2). Considering race and gender as complex cultural constructs, hooks struggles to reclaim 110

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. the “black woman’s visibility in the realm of representation.”(hooks 1992:167), and refuses to accept the widely held recognition of having no substantial control over life.

According to hooks, nobody can recognize her better than she can, and nobody better than her can know where she belongs. This confidence in self-definition comes out quite clearly in the episode of her glancing at the childhood photo of a fat baby wearing a pink dress. She knows that she is not the one in the photo. The real hooks is the one hidden in the mysterious darkness of the cave, the subtle, unrevealed Self finding expression only when absorbed in the fumes and flames of the ancestral fire:

I know this is not me and has never been, for this baby has no hair. Her skull is smooth and shiny like polished silver with black jade for eyes -- this cannot be me. The grown- ups identify it as me, happy baby, smiling baby, baby with no hair. I know who I am, the one not seen in the photo, the one hiding under the bed, hiding in the dark, waiting for the camera monster to go away.(hooks Bone Black :146).

Absurd as early childhood recognitions may sound, hooks is never proud and self- confident, always willing to emerge rebellious and problematic. While refusing to do house chores and choosing to read books instead of ironing, hooks shares with us the pain of her difference, the willful sense of Self that drives her to rebel against the people she would like so much to please. Growing awareness about some inherently unacceptable facet of her character makes hooks consider herself as the problem child, the one likely to end up in a mental institution. The sense of estrangement and alienation is such that she starts to believe that she was born into that family and into that community by mistake, and she can never get rid of it unless she is released of self-hate. Most of the time, little hooks feels ignored and invisible, and when they finally notice her, she will be stigmatized as the scapegoat:

She is seeing that the man owns everything, that the woman has only her clothes, her shoes, and other personal belongings. She is seeing that the woman can be told to go, can be sent away in the silent, long hours of the night.(148-9).

Conscious of the connotations of the word scapegoat, she starts thinking of herself as in exile in her own land, and learns that striving to reconcile her warring Selves is no solution. She just has to accept the wilderness within her spirit, and the autumn colors of her existence:

111

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Even though she is young, she comes to understand the meaning of exile and loss […]. Their world is the only world there is. To be exiled is to be without life. She cries because she is in mourning. They will not let her wear the color black.(130-131).

Whenever she feels that the pieces of her life cannot be arranged into a liberating whole, she challenges death or even thinks of the phoenix metaphor of resurrection as the most successful way out. She makes this point when reflecting on the act of autobiographical writing:

In the end I did not feel as if I had killed the Gloria of my childhood. Instead I had rescued her. She was no longer the enemy within, the little girl who had to be annihilated for the woman to come into being. In writing about her, I reclaimed that part of myself I had long ago rejected left uncared for, just as she’d often felt alone and uncared for as a child.(159).

The childhood nightmare of coming and finding one’s house burned sets the scene for the development of the memoir, and anticipates the awakening of hooks’ sense of Self. The idea that the hope–chest has not been completely burned ignites the hope that after every destruction there can come a promising constructive experience. The ancestral spirit invites them not to cry, and to pay attention; while the grandfather makes it clear for the little hooks that once the fire is over, there will be a revival and transformation in the way she views life.

That night in my sleep I dream of going away. I am taking the bus. Mama is standing waving goodbye: later when I return from the journey, I come home only to find there has been a fire, nothing remains of our house and I can see no one. Suddenly they appear with candles, mamma and everyone. They give me a candle. Together we search the ashes for bits and pieces, any fragment of our lives that may have survived. We find that the hope chest has not burned through and through. We open it, taking out the charred remains (hooks Bone Black: 2-3).

At the time when she is desperate enough to long for jumping off the cliff, “the one inside herself.”(181), she experiences an encounter with the priest, the one to predict that her sufferings will come to an end, that her loneliness and outsiderness can be avoided by delving deep into the abysses of the spirit through poetry and writing. It is the priest who, for the first time, will make her realize that she is not alone to experience feelings of solitude and to think of drowning or committing suicide. In spite of his black robe, the priest is one of those people who attempt to view life with rosy spectacles: “For the first time in my life I hear someone say that there is nothing wrong with feeling alone, that he

112

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. too has been at the edge, has felt the fear of drowning, of being moved toward death, without consciously contemplating suicide.”(177).

An important element that lingers for a long time in hooks’ memory, and that conveys a clue about her world view and racism considerations, is the black color trope. As our eyes grow accustomed to images that reflect nothing of us, blackness is an open category that becomes synonymous with the experience of exile, pain and struggle. That is the reason why the critical look must:“confront and subvert the commodification of blackness and the seduction of simulacra visibility, in which unique, cultural and historical signification of black experience is compromised.”(Murilyani 2004:9).

Practically speaking, the memoir is punctuated throughout with a refrain viewing black as a woman’s color and transforming blackness into the color of everyday experience as well as into the feminine jouissance. While trying to arrange the occurrence of this nuance in the protagonist’s daily experiences, daydreams and nightmares; we would start with the blackness of the cave, the motherly scoldings not to wear black, the use of the tinge in Mr. Harold’s painting classes, and ultimately the encounter with the priest with the black robes. All summarized, black seems to stand for the Other, the unacceptable and the irreconcilable in everyone of us; something we would wish to alter, but without which the I is not whole.

Being forbidden by her mother to wear black clothes just because “black is a woman´s color” (hooks Bone Black:176), hooks hankers after this nuance as a part of her ethnic identity. She does not understand why she has to play with a blond and white Barbie doll instead of playing with a doll of her own color. Barbie dolls seem fake to her, nothing like her, so she destroys them: “I had begun to worry about all this loving care we gave to the pink and white flesh–colored girls. It all meant that somewhere left high on the shelves, were boxes of unwanted, unloved, brown dolls covered in the dust.”(24). Trying to sketch the landscape of her dream cave, hooks think of black as the starting velour, in particular “bone black”(24)--a black, carbonaceous substance obtained by burning bones.

113

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In her proceedings with the brushes, “bone black” is an inherent black remindful of the fire, the ashes, and the resurrection.

As Susana Vegas-Gonzales proceeds to argue in her “The Dialectics of Belonging”: “Bone Black is hooks’ own rebirth into maturation. By going inside her inner cave, by being burnt into the fire of redemption, she is reduced to the ashes only to be reborn out of them like the Phoenix.”(Vegas-Gonzales 2001:245). She is reborn to a world of potentiality and power, forgetful of the anguished search for a spiritual shelter. Growing up as a girl in rural Kentucky, on the other hand, increases young hooks’ awareness of the racial apartheid system of the South. She experiences racial discrimination in every instance: school, society, and even amongst her own relatives.

She and the other children want to understand Race but no one explains it. They learn without understanding that the world is more a home for the white folks than it is for anyone else, that black people who most resemble white folks will live better in that world [...]. Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies.(hooks Bone Black 31-32).

The passage from segregation to an apparently successful desegregation is depicted by hooks through bitter realizations of the color complex. Moving out of a segregated school in the neighborhood, into a desegregated high school in a neighboring community, hooks hates being pushed and herded into a mixed community for the sake of integration. Politics and socialization sound less efficient in her dating white boys. They seem all interested in either raping black girls, or treating them like laboratory rats used for testing their parents’ feelings of love and discrimination:

Already we feel like cattle, in the stockyard near our house, herded, prodded, and pushed. Already we prepare ourselves to go willingly to what will be a kind of slaughter, for parts of ourselves will be severed to make this integration of schools work.(157).

She can see that he has demanded that his parents prove they are not racist with actions, not just with words. She admires his parents that they love him enough to act. She tells him later that she will not be his little experiment that he uses to test his parents. Alone in his room, listening to records, she says no to his kiss.(165).

The inborn hatred and fear of whites, and the puzzling implications of the word ‘savage’, come out more clearly in Chapter 11, while hooks recognizes that they “learn without understanding that the world is more a home for white folks than it is for anyone else,

114

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. that black people who most resemble white folks will live better in that world.”(31). Intra-racial desegregation, rather than interracial one, seems the most difficult and painful to be achieved as hooks feels forced to obey all the social rules about being a decent black southern girl, and as she is reminded of her father refraining her from pursuing higher education in the name of subservience and domesticity. Feeling racially and culturally alienated, she feels more at home with friends from foreign countries who share the same experience and survive on the margins of the American society.

An important element of the relational Self is hooks´ frankness and discreteness in speaking about sexual orientation in her narrative. The reader is slowly exposed to the attraction the character shows for women and we get a hint of her starting to adopt a lesbian identity for herself. Similarly, as Audrey Lorde speaks about homophobia, she mentions the idea of black lesbians becoming a threat to the Black family and thus being converted into a source of conflict: “let anyone, particularly a Black man, accuse a straight Black woman of being a Black Lesbian, and right away that sister becomes immobilized, as if that is the most horrible thing she could be, and must at all costs be proven false.”(Lorde 1984:28).

After achieving reconciliation with one’s sense of Self, one is always inclined to attempt to reach a kind of compatibility with the external Others, be they family ancestry, or the community. hooks memories of her parent’s turbulent relationship have a great influence on the way she views male-female relations. While, on the one hand, she regards her mother as traditional in performing the role of a dependent housewife, and a full-time mother and homemaker; on the other hand, she views becoming a writer as an act of determination in breaking the hierarchical oppositions of man and woman. As Cixous suggests, the place held by this binary system in the canon of writing shows that: “the act of writing or écriture is associated with man while word, speaking, and parole are with woman.”(qtd. in Murilyani 2004:15).

As the grandmother and the grandfather develop as revelation figures, the relation to the ancestral roots and to the spiritual and mnemonic heritage permeate throughout hooks’ work. Seeking her origins in the roots of the beloved grandfather, hooks dreams of

115

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. existing in the form of smoke, a hybrid identity which is shapeless but moldable, unreachable but perceivable.

This story is about a magic woman who lives inside smoke. She hides in the smoke so no one can capture her. Smoke is to her what call is to the red bird god. She can take the smoke and make it become many things. Using the smoke she turns herself into a male. She must be male to be a warrior. There are no women warriors.(hooks Bone Black :50).

Central to hooks’ autobiography is the episode of the grandfather getting involved in a fire while trying to burn the trash in a white woman’s garden. He is virtually rescued by the grandson who sends him to hospital, and the doctors say he has survived because the heart hasn’t failed him: “He does not smell the burning clothes. He has lost all memory. He has entered the cave[…] the heart knows there is a secret in the flames that is ongoing and everlasting”.(90).

As it is psychoanalytically predicted, there is some consciousness in every subconscious act, there is some truth in every lie, and some reality in every dreamlike experience. The components of hooks’ dream are not unintentionally white women, ladies and trash. The author believes that the fire helped the grandfather recover the real Self, while the entire surrounding scene stands for the wickedness and evil of the white society, its oppression and atrocity.

In nature, hooks finds the understanding she is denied by her fellow humans, and the communion not only with the trees, but also with the animal world. In her book Myth Types: Signatures and Signs of African/Diaspora and Black Goddesses (2000), Alexis Borrows de Vita argues that trees play a crucial role in the life of women of African descent who have lost their mothers. For them, trees are spiritual mothers and signs of power: “beyond death and beyond social injustice, deprivation or personal assault. They represent a symbol of empowerment.”(qtd. in Vegas-Gonzales 2001:241).

The landscape of the cave and the nuances employed for its depiction demand thorough cross-examination. The red of the heart stands for her desire for a new life, a resurrection in a phoenix-like manner; the black of the ashes stands for the remnants of the past

116

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. memories, frustrations and denials; while the gray of the mist stands for the dreamlike and agonizing confusion that accompanies every step of her life.

I am trying to remember the pictures in the cave, the animals. If I can paint them all I am sure I can discover again the secret of living, what it was I left in the cave. I start with the color black […]. Bone black is a black carbonaceous substance obtained by calcifying bones in closed vessels. Burning bones, that’s what it makes me think about, flesh on fire, turning black, turning into ash […]. I begin with the mouth of the cave, add red to the black: the red is the heart of the seekers, the animals and human beings who come […]. At the bottom of the fire is the color black. This is the remains of all the animals who have given their life in sacrifice to keep the spirit moving, burning bright […]. I want to make the color gray to paint a world covered in mist. But this is what I see when I leave the cave.(hooks Bone Black:170).

After somehow building up a riddle-like landscape for us, hooks herself reveals the connotation of the childhood cave trope. The cave as an image stands for the wilderness of her rebellious spirit: “The picture I am painting is of the wilderness my spirit roams in. I tell him I left the cave and went into the wilderness [...]. All around are fading colors that contain bits of pieces of their earlier brightness. I call this painting Autumn in the Wilderness”(171). Trying to find a justification for the prejudice and injustice that revolves around her, hooks comes to believe that this is an adult’s world, and the belittling and persecution she has to go through originates from this very fact: “there is so much to celebrate about being old, I want to be old as soon as possible because I see the ways the old ones live--free. They are free to be different--unique, distinct from one another.”(188).

4.1.2. Weaving the Matrilineal Tapestry. Daughterly Daydreams and Motherly

Nightmares in Bone Black.

By dedicating to her mother all of her writings, bell hooks lays the grounds for the consideration of the importance of the matrilineal relationship. In the dedication of Ain´t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism(1981) hooks writes:

For Rosa Bell, my mother Who told me when I was a child That she had once written poems That I had inherited my love of reading And my longing to write from her (hooks 1981:vi)

117

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Aware that her mother pertained to a generation of silenced women unable to pursue their ideals and aspirations, hooks wants to break the tradition by becoming a critically outspoken feminist and a daring writer.

In ethnic American families in general, and in immigrant American families in particular, the mother-daughter relationship is often the only means by which the daughter can maintain a connection to the matrilineal and ancestral heritage. This sense of connection is important to the daughter’s identity development as a part of a larger collective. In many mother-daughter dyads, the daughter is torn between a loving identification with the mother and resentment at the closeness that binds her to the maternal image. As Marianne Hirsch claims in her Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism(1989): “It is the woman as daughter who occupies the center of the global reconstruction of subjectivity, and subject-object relation.”(Hirsch 1989:136). So, we are unable to perceive the mother beyond a set of internalized misconceptions that patriarchal society attributes generally to women, particularly to mothers.

Jeopardized by race, class and gender oppression, black mothers seek to maintain and manifest their personal and cultural legacies, while black daughters engage in the process of individual identity formation: one that goes along non-identification and distancing from the mother. This process is viewed by Hirsch as one of Othering the mother rather than as one of liberating her from the societal influences. Simultaneously with storytelling and nature closeness, quilting has traditionally been seen as a way of creating bonds between African American mothers and daughters. As the memoir progresses, we are told that Saru spends long hours making quilts from scraps of outgrown clothes from different family members. This art is considered to be an act of healing through which “a woman learns patience.”(hooks, Bone Black :54), but also as a mode of storytelling since each piece contains one or several stories.

Part of the alienation the protagonist experiences stems from the mother΄s lack of understanding of the daughter’s attitudes. As the relationship wavers between intimacy and estrangement, closeness and distancing, hooks fails to be the ideal daughter: rebellious, unconventional, ever complaining; and the mother inconsistently appears as

118

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. stern and critical of the daughter, and submissive and obedient to the husband. But perhaps none of the characters is to be judged and criticized for the way they approach one another. bell demands from her mother to love her the way she is, her mother, on the other hand, expects bell to force her sense of adaptation to the outer world.

These ideas are also supported by Patricia Hill Collins in her Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment(2000),where she claims that black mother΄s are conditionally stern and incomprehensive, while attempting to rear dignified and self-assertive daughters, capable of coping with the harshness of reality but also obedient enough to become subservient wives: Black mothers are often described as strong disciplinarians and overly protective parents, yet these same women manage to raise daughters who are self-reliant and assertive. Black mothers are suffocatingly protective and domineering precisely because they are determined to mold their daughters into whole and self-actualizing persons in a society that devalues black women.(Collins 2000:20).

Mothers push their daughters to avoid going through the same painful experiences as they had done, and rear them to have thick skin while confronting the merciless reality: I am warned that if I begin to cry, I will be given something to cry about. Already I have begun to feel the pain of burning flesh. Ma says it does not matter about the pain, I must finish the ironing and the clothes in the basket.(hooks Bone Black: 96).

Regardless of the fact that hiding in the refuge of the daydreams and nightmares and rummaging in the dark cave of the spirit provides bell with a sense of belonging and a sensation of being loved and admired; she can not avoid thinking of death as a way of negating her existence. When absorbed in such pessimistic thoughts, the mother image appears as the voiced presence of the incompatible Selves.

To me, telling the story of my growing up years, was intimately connected with the longing to kill the Self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill the Self in writing […]. It was clearly the Gloria Jean, of my tormented and anguished childhood that I wanted to be rid of, the girl who was always wrong, always punished, subjected to some humiliation or other, always crying, the girl who was to end up in a mental institution because she could not be anything but crazy, or sad, so they told her. By writing the autobiography, it was not just this Gloria I would be rid of, but the past that had a hold on me, that kept me from the present.(Smith, Watson eds.1998:329).

Instead of trying to other or alternate her mother, hooks takes control over her subjectivity and identity , and decides to rewrite herself, or as Audrey Lorde puts it: “to

119

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

'mother herself ' claiming some power over who she chooses to be.”(qtd. in Gonzales 1984:73).

While in the beginning of Chapter 47 hooks considers her relationship to mama as the most passionate in the world, it is only some chapters later with the intrusion of the father that the situation is strained, thereby undermining the motherly image in the eyes of the children. hooks is reminded of the times when the father would get back home angry, scream and yell at his wife and children, push and even beat her without the mother being able to react, call out or even fight back:

They are afraid of him when he is mad. They go upstairs to go out of his way. He does not come upstairs. Taking care of the children is not a man’s work. It does not concern him […]. She thinks of all the nights she lies awake in her bed hearing the woman’s voice, her mother’s voice, hearing his voice. She wonders whether it is then that he is telling her everything--warning her. Yelling, screaming, hitting, they stare at the red blood that trickles through the crying mouth. They can not believe this pleading, crying woman, this woman who does not fight back, is the same person they know. The person they know is strong, gets things done, is a woman of ways and means, a woman of action.(hooks Bone Black:146).

It is this situation that little hooks cannot tolerate. She cannot bear the sight of a seemingly strong woman, crying and pleading and lowering her head in front of the ostracism and brutality of the man supposed to back her up through difficulties and hard times. She would want her mother to voice her feelings, to show up, rebel, and fight back the merciless hand: “She wants her to hit him with the table light, the ashtray, the one near her hand.”(147). But mama won’t fight back, she has chosen, she will continue to be helpless and submissive, ready to manipulate and sacrifice every dream and aspiration, willing to tailor every desire to fit the needs of the man whom God assigned her as a husband. The rebellious spirit of bell becomes ignited once again. She is determined, she won’t be like her mother, she can’t make sense of her betrayal and identification with the maltreating monster, she will fight back, she will not obey.

I am always fighting with mama. Everything has come between us. She no longer stands between me and all that hurts me […]. She works hard to fulfill his needs, our needs. When they are not the same, she must maneuver, manipulate, and choose. She has chosen. She has decided in his favor. She is a religious woman. She has been told that a man should obey God, that a woman should obey man, that children should obey their fathers and mothers. I will not obey(emphasis mine)(151).

120

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

No matter how distanced the relationship between a mother and a daughter can be, love and empathy always linger in their minds and spirits. Every moment of revolt, unconventionality and irreconciliation is consequently followed by repentance, empathy and comprehensiveness. In one episode, after trying to help her battered mother and being reproached for the umpteenth time for the impertinent disobedience; it is the little hooks that attempts to fight her mother back by grabbing the switches. Nevertheless, it is still her who repents and passively waits for another punishment to follow. She would wish to give her mother the message the brutal husband never seemed to convey, that of loving and respecting herself more. Ashamed at attempting to fight back her mother, and torn between vengeance and empathy, conventionality and unconventionality, love and brutality; little hooks falls into a dilemmatic trance.

Before I can think clearly my hands reach out, grab the switches, are raised as if to hit her back. For a moment she is stunned, unbelieving. She is shocked. She tells me that I must never ever as long as I live raise my hand against my mother[…] this time I am still. This time I cry […]. My desire was to stop the pain, not to hurt. I am ashamed and torn. I do not want to stand still and be punished but I never want to hurt mama.(152).

There are two episodes in which mother and daughter seem to be widening the hollow that exists between them, rather than trying to bridge the gaps. One of these episodes focuses on the teenage years when hooks suffers at the impossibility of reaching a belonging and resultingly becomes anorexic and attempts suicide. Blind to the health problems of the daughter, the mother believes that everything is going properly; it is just bell who is wrongly looking for trouble and discontent everywhere.

They say she is too skinny […]. She has difficulty eating. Long after everyone has left the kitchen she stares into the cold food on her plate. They have warned her that if it is not all finished and soon she will be whipped. Her tears make the cold food stick in her throat. She runs to the bathroom choking, she is whipped.(167).

The distancing in the mother-daughter relationship is evident even in the episodes in which her mother has to spend some time in the hospital suffering from what seemed to be a ruinous ailment. While all the family members visit her, her disobedient daughter once again refuses to follow suit to her mother΄s despair. What nobody seems to know is that the motivation behind her daughter’s attitude is one of love and sadness:

121

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

They say she is near death, that we must go and see her because it may be the last time. I will not go [...]. I refuse to go. I cannot tell them why, that I do not want to have the last sight of her be there in the white not die. Hospital bed, surrounded by strangers and the smell of death.(130).

In conclusion, we might say that the mother-daughter relationship in bell hooks´ Bone Black oscillates in a climate of tenderness and hatred, closeness and intimacy, identification and distancing.

4.1.3. Homeplace and “Belonging” in bell hooks´ Bone Black

The creation of a homeplace, a place of emotional belonging as well as a site of political positioning is particularly topical in immigrant narratives. Whereas, outside home, the woman-of-color is limited to a voiceless existence, it is in her own home that she is able to preserve the voice of her ancestry in songs, talk stories and myths. In Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990), bell hooks describes homeplace as an important element of African American power, especially in its functions as a site of resistance. Historically, she argues: “the construction of a homeplace […] had a political dimension for African American people who, in times of slavery, were denied the autonomy over even their own bodies, much less materialistic property.” (hooks 1990:42). As Stephen Legg asserts in “Gendered Politics and Nationalised Homes” houses were the domain and the formative site for women: “Houses were conceived as belonging to women, being their special domain , places where all that truly mattered in life took place–the warmth and comfort of a shelter, the feeding of the bodies, the nurturing of the souls.”(Legg 2003:21). hooks´ narrative begins in the earliest school days and concludes toward the end of the high school career. It roams between these two points providing no clue regarding the dates and the time. The only hint about the spatial and temporal location comes in a chapter near the end of the book in which hooks describes the advent of school desegregation. To add to the narrative’s dislocatedness, hooks does not name the town, or even the state, in which she grew up. Very few people, with whom she interacts, are named, including her brother and sisters. In this climate of displacement, the isolation of her rural home and the tightly knit composition of her family circle shield her from the

122

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. knowledge that not everyone washed with “heavy, unsmelling, oddly shaped pieces of homemade lye soap.”(hooks Bone Black:69). Her mother΄s ethnic identity fails to offer workable solutions for the daughter’s own identity negotiation and results in an inability to empathize with the mother΄s construction of a homeplace. The daughterly claims for personal space become manifestations of her independence while the obtained individuality becomes a breach in the matrilineal bonds.

The grandfather, Daddy Gus, is an important figure in hooks’ young life, teaching her how to interpret dreams and telling her of African American heritage. It is from him that she learns of the ways to belong in this world, and through whom the final catharsis “creeps quietly into her body.”(181). In the end of the memoir, after a stream of conscious narration of her girlhood experiences, hooks reaches maturity and realizes that her real home, her real “belonging”, is writing and poetry: only there can she be fully herself, fully free and unrestricted by the conventions of the black society or by the white societal yardsticks. It is only within the comfort of poetry that she is happy to be herself, and not repentant and remorseful of being everybody’s trouble and pain. That is the ultimate bliss to be reached.

I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write[--].I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.(183).

As becomes clear in these concluding lines, the cave hooks speaks about is the inner cave of her subconscious, and it is only there where she is free to be herself without being judged and discriminated against.

4.2. The Cave Within. Body Geography and Spiritual Spatiality in bell

hooks

Although bell hooks’ memoir focuses mainly on her girlhood experiences, and the dimension of Self and body would not be expected to be found so widely as in the other autobiographies, preoccupation of the girl with bodily features, and personality features begins to give rise as we approach chapter 32 and 33 of the narrative. The ritual of having

123

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. one’s hair pressed-- a standard dictated by the white society but reluctantly accepted as such by hooks, is considered as a rite of passage from girlhood into womanhood. At first, hooks agrees to undergo the ritual, as a chance of claiming a belonging, an identity as a woman. Later, while a senior in high school, she decides that only wearing her hair its natural form, an Afro, is the right way to the discovering of ones true Self, the shortest path to self-assertion.

For each of us getting our hair pressed is an important ritual: it is not a sign of our longing to be white, it is a sign of our desire to be women. It is a gesture that says we are approaching womanhood, a rite of passage […]. Later, a senior in high school, I want to wear a natural, an Afro. I want never to get my hair pressed again. It is no longer a rite of passage. (hooks Bone Black:92-93).

As adolescence approaches, hooks’ body becomes a new experience and a vulnerable mystery which she herself does not dare to explore. Secrecy and mystery begin to unfold with the small discharges in the panties, the reluctance to have a douche naked in front of the mother, and are finalized with the growing of sexual awareness and the arousal of pleasure at the touch of the deepest and most secret niches of the body. She does not lust for males or sex. She longs to touch her real hidden Self, be it the subconscious, or the little sanctuary between her legs.

She is afraid, ashamed that she comes home from school wanting to lie in bed, touching the wet dark hidden parts of her body […] moving her hands, her fingers deeper and deeper inside, inside the place of the woman’s pain and misery, ashamed of pleasure […]. She does not touch herself thinking about their [the males’] penises moving inside her: it is her own wetness that the fingers seek. It is this bliss that the fingers guide to. Like the caves she dreamed about in childhood, it is a place of refuge, a sanctuary(119).

So, adolescence and the eventual sexual maturity increase the girl’s curiosity to get to know more about herself rather than lust for males and sexual encounters. to lay more hidden and mysterious for the others.

4.3. The “Hope–Chest” and Childhood Memories in Bone Black

Bone Black is presented as a set of memory sketches of things past and of things imagined, as an account not only of events, but also of the impressions they leave on the author’s mind. As hooks reveals it in the foreword: “[e]voking the mood and sensibility of moments, this is an autobiography of perceptions and ideas. The events described are

124

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. always less significant than the impressions they leave on the mind and heart.” (xv). Delighted at sharing the opening of the hope chest and witnessing her mother΄s tears from bittersweet memories, hooks provides us with a stream–of–consciousness pictures of her girlhood which begins in the earliest schooldays and concludes toward the end of her high school career. The importance of remembering, for these narratives, is conveyed by Terry de Hay who argues that the woman-of-color´s act of remembering determines her own identity as well as the continuity of her matrilineal ancestry: “The minority woman must look to her history, both to preserve it and to find out who she is. She needs to have a clear vision of her past in order to re-envision her present. This is the process of remembering.”(qtd.in Singh,1994:31).

While permeated in the magic of storytelling, quilting and the life-giving communion with the earth and affected by the winds of forgetfulness and intentional forgetting, the author’s cherished memories become blurred and hazed. Like quilts that enclose bits and pieces of stories from the past, hooks’ book encloses treasured childhood memories in the literary hope chest of the Self. This is also asserted by hooks in her Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990): “memory need not be a passive reflection, a nostalgic longing for things to be as they once were; it can function as a way of knowing and learning from the past and it serves to illuminate and transform the present.”(hooks 1990: 40,147).

It is clear from the very beginning that hooks’ memoir falls into both the category of fiction and non-fiction. As a sub-genre of autobiography that focuses on the selected events of a life, the memoir emphasizes the agency of the author freeing her work from the constraints of the conventional chronological structure and getting more control over the representation of life. In Shockley’s terms, Bone Black is “as much a dreamscape as a landscape, then, and we move through it on the wheels of hooks’ memory, obliged and permitted to linger only where it is arrested.”(Shockley rev. in African American Review 1997:552).

The autobiographical dialectics of fact and fiction is also accompanied by the occasional

125

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. uncertainty regarding the truth and the reality of some memories. Realizing that each autobiography is just “one of various possible versions of a life, the storing of events as the author remembers and invents them, rather than as they actually happened.”(hooks 1989:157), hooks acknowledges the mythical and imaginative components of her autobiography and finds her text reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s Zami:

I [she] was compelled to face the fiction that is part of all retelling, remembering. I began to think of the work I was doing as both fiction and autobiography. It seemed to fall into the category of the writing that Audre Lorde, in her autobiographical work-based Zami calls biomythography. (hooks Bone Black: xiv).

Speaking about autobiography as the narrative genre representative of the African American culture and as reflective of the quilting art, Margot Anne Kelly regards African American autobiographers as relying on:

[…] partial, local and fragmented knowledge to make a narrative. The writers acknowledge that the quilts and the narratives as well as the beings who are their makers are constructed. However they regard the need to piece and seam not as a reason for despair but as an opportunity to rework the out mode, whether it be in clothing, novel structures or conceptions of the Self. (qtd in Vegas-Gonzales 2001: 239).

So, even in hooks it is specifically those absent parts, those fragments and their possibilities of being worked and reworked, arranged, and rearranged that give grace and attractiveness to the text under discussion and to the unfolding of the memories.

The dimensions of Self and memory become especially evident in the memoir in the episodes where hooks goes hand in hand with the grandfather in an exploration of the “cave” of the ancestors, the “temple” of the real “belonging”. Taken as a whole, the episode serves as a sublime, new insight into the racist society, the one to convince the skeptical hooks of the real Self, distorted by the convex mirror of the racist and discriminatory society, always misshapes the individual. The cave is the site where no racial, ethnic, or age distinctions are made; the niche where the mind ceases and the heart falls into peace, the location where memory is written in ash and stored in secret notebooks.

Belonging is to be found in the ancestral memory, the subconscious depths, and only after a resurrection of the phoenix–like creature. The symbolic passage of the cave encloses 126

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. the rite of passage of the girl into the world of self-knowledge and self-creation. It is necessary to point out the various implications of the cave trope. According to Mircea Eliade, caves are places of rebirth for the protagonists, sites of self-knowledge and healing: “the settings of many initiation rites since they are symbols of the womb of mother earth, where the novice rivets the embryonic situation to be born again.”(Eliade 1994:58):

In my dream we run away together, hand in hand. We go to the cave. To enter we must first remove all our clothes, we must wash, and we must rub our body with a red mud. We cover ourselves so completely that we are no longer recognizable as grandfather and granddaughter. We enter without family ties or memory […]. As soon as they enter the mind ceases, they feel at peace. They feel they are no longer blind, that they see for the first time: it is too much for the heart to bear […]. In the fire all are lost spirits that show us the way to live in the world. I do not yet have a language with which to speak with them. He knows he speaks. I am the silent one.(hooks Bone Black:86).

The symbolism of the ashes and also their connotation in the African and Judeo-Christian tradition is also meaningful for the memoir. The ashes stand for extreme remorse, repentance and grief, for the possibility of revival, resurrection following the ancestral roots and their inherent bond to mother Nature. he [the grandfather] is always finding the treasures people have lost or abandoned. He hears their souls crying in the wilderness […]. He has many notebooks, little black notebooks filled with faded yellow paper, I understand from him that the notebooks are a place for the storage of memory. He writes with a secret pencil, the pages seem covered in ash, the ash left by the fire we have visited. The fire he says now burns inside us.(87).

While writing about how she had been dreaming of having a red wagon as a childhood toy, hooks challenges the reliability of her memory, and the fiction, non-fiction duality of her narrative. The red wagon turns out to be just a wheelbarrow causing her bruises and tearing her clothes everywhere. Speaking about the irretrievable memories seems to be a way of adding substance to the inadequate documentation of the lives of black girls.

She grew up not remembering why the red wagon had been so important. She grew up and found that the red wagon of her memory had never existed. [...]. Seeing that the toy of her memory was a wheelbarrow, she understood why there had always been bruises, dirty torn clothes.(145).

As hooks herself asserts, memory is not a passive construction especially when life is laden with sufferings and experiences of oppression and discrimination.

127

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

4.4.Chapter Conclusions

Concluding we may state that described through patches of stream–of–consciousness memories that irregularly shift from first person narration to third person narration, hooks’ life provides a hazy image of the act of claiming one’s authentic Self, the rejected, the irreconcilable, and the problematic of our sub-consciousness.The shift in narrative point of view grants secrecy and intrigue to the memoir and contributes to the depiction of the distortion of her character.

Regardless of the kind of game hooks plays with colors, “bone-black” remains the nuance she hankers after, an obsession that accompanies her in her dealings with the world, her approaches to class, and, moreover, her delvings within the innermost sites of herself. hooks herself will come to realize that this is a white man’s world, and African American women will be doubly if not multiply discriminated for as long as they live.

The mother–daughter relationship is characterized by the presence of clashes that originate primarily out of the daughter’s inability to subdue to the patriarchal reality as subserviently as her mother can, and out of the motherly pretensions that every child should fit into the societal frames provided by the parents. Young daughter-daydreams and mother-community-shaped-nightmares cannot co-exist. It is at this point that the daughter believes that only through a radical surgery from the mother, and the ancestral heritage she represents, will she be able to assert herself, and find her belonging in society. Although guilt–laden episodes of mutual incomprehension and personal perplexity outnumber in the narrative, the basis of the matrilineal relationship remains one of tenderness and love for the mother image

In terms of tropes hooks starts and ends her narrative with the daydream of a spiritual niche like a cave, one providing her with a sense of belonging, a safe shelter for her displaced, confused and tormented Self. Despite the endless wanderings, the aspiring young girl will not be provided with a home in the real sense of the word. She will just be taught to find comfort in the recesses of her own spirit, in the “niches” of her own subconscious, and in the charm of poetry.

128

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The memory landscape is such that while attempting to bring forth a clear picture of the past as a cornerstone for the building of a solid present, and a promising future; hooks shows us the importance of history and ancestral origins to the establishment of one’s Self and identity. The mixture of fiction and non-fiction provides us with a blurred snapshot version of how things happened. The dreamscape and the quilt-patchwork form of the memoir bridges the gap between truth and ficticity, making the work resemble Audre Lorde’s biomythography.

129

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

5. POSTMODERN “BRUSHWORK” and POINTILISTIC SELF EFFECTS IN VERONICA CHAMBER’S MAMA’S GIRL.(1996)

Daughter of a Panamanian secretary who had to try hard to rear her children in the harsh reality of Brooklyn, and an abusive and indifferent father who worked as a ventriloquist; Chambers had to shift back and forth between the life offered by her father and her stepmother and that offered by her mother. Since the early 1990s, Chambers had established a long list of credits, both in magazines and in book-length works, writing for an adult and young adult audience. At the age of sixteen she entered a new life when she enrolled in Simon's Rock College, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, on a scholarship. This opened for her the doors of success: editing for the campus literary magazine, being named as one of Glamour’s top ten college women, and gaining immediate access in the high class society and literary circles. In magazines from Essence to Vogue she has covered topics including social issues and fashion, while in books she has explored the Latino-black experience. Works such as Mama's Girl(1996), Double Dutch: A Celebration of Jump Rope, Rhyme and Sisterhood(2002), Marisol and Magdalena: The Sound of Our Sisterhood(1998), Amistad Rising: The Story of Freedom(1998) and Quinceanera Means Sweet 15(2000); all examine aspects of the “Mestiza”(Anzaldua 1987:100) daughter shifting between two or more cultures, ethnicities and realities.xxii

As a personal memoir, Mama’s Girl(1997) tells the story of a “young woman’s coming of age both through and despite the relationship with her mother.”(Quintana 2003:24). Chambers reveals to us what it means to grow up trying to gain the mother΄s attention in an environment that does the best to detach her more every day. Even when put in adult situations, she refuses to be hardened and embittered, thereby remaining a girl with her own crushes, friends, dreams and aspirations, disillusionments and nightmares. It is a narrative of self-assertion as an African American woman, as well as a story of fighting the odds and the limits set by society. The incomplete mother-daughter relationship evolves and matures as Veronica becomes a fulfilled person and as the mother learns to

130

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. see things from another point of view. Stylistically speaking, the memoir reads like a novel: the text’s language is clear and alive and, as Quintana asserts it, reflects the “youthful exuberance of the young protagonist as well as her playful precocity.”(Quintana 2003:25).

5.1. Pontillism and the Fragmented, Postmodern Self in Veronica Chambers’

Mama’s Girl.xxiii

Veronica Chambers’ postmodern Self in Mama’s Girl(1997) emerges mostly in a fragmented, split form; often taking the mould of the “mestiza” consciousness, a hybrid identity crossing borders and boundaries and not feeling at home in any of them. The most evident illustration of Veronica Chambers’ formless and discontinued existence comes out when she gets to learn at school about Georges Seurat and his pointillismxxiv and starts considering the paintings in a way that has nothing to do with art appreciation. She perceives that, like a post-impressionist painting, her existence is made of small dots, personality fragments and memory scraps that while looked at closely, as from her own perspective, seem quite incomplete disconnected and incongruous, but while seen from afar, from the gaze of the Other, become blended together to construct a full image. So, Veronica’s disillusion originates in trying to draw a balance between what she considers herself to be, what others regard her to be like, and what she really is in the innermost parts of herself.

A daughter torn between two people, two or more locations and two or more cultures and ethnicities, can be nothing else but an illusionary whole and intact Self that may crumble to pieces at the first sight of a challenge or problem. The message the author wanted to convey to us is that, when gazing from a distance, people and the community always regard the Other as unified and wholesome; while, on the other hand, approaching to delve deeper into the consciousness and sub-consciousness of each of us, we appear to be nothing more than a disconnected accumulation of dots, or in the best case a Picasso- esque picture: well-constructed but unpredictable and incomprehensible.

131

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

I felt like inside I was just so many dots. From a distance they blended together to make a picture, complete and whole. But up close, the dots were all disconnected, and I felt that at any moment, I would lose my composition. I would explode all over the place like a handful of confetti thrown in the air.(Chambers. Mama´s Girl :125).

Conflictual as the relationship with her brother may appear to be, Veronica realizes that personal intactness goes hand in hand with the acceptance of the facets one finds most disputable in others. The author conveys the message that black women were meant to be strong and they never had to let themselves become subject to depression. According to her mother, depression was demarcated as a “white girl’s domain”(71), and this is perhaps one of the main drives urging Veronica into becoming a self-imposed strong woman. Even the times when Veronica really felt like she had the blues and she was about to fail and be forsaken, she could not dare voice it aloud in the presence of her mother, who always emphasized how hard she had to work and how much she had to rack her brains to provide them with a decent life they were not even thankful for: “All my life I had gotten the message that black women were strong and that black women do not get depressed […]. But it remained throughout my childhood a popular falsehood that demarcated depression as white girl’s domain.”(72).

There is a point in Veronica Chambers’ narrative, in which the protagonist’s life seems to take a turn. She decides that self-denial or, in Chambers’ terms, “holding a part of the Self for oneself”(73), would be the best way of making one’s way through a merciless world which considers listening to sob stories as the last affectionate thing to be done. Similar to what her mother had been teaching her since childhood, if the world won’t mind about your problems and concerns, one would’d better invent a new story for the world and oneself.

As Loes Nas makes clear in her book, in autobiography we find: “cultural appropriations and political crossings constituting the site of borderlands, a physical and discursive place where cultures meet and collide.”(Nas 2003:126). As is the case with other ethnic women-of-color writers, the existence on the borderland does not allow Chambers to feel either on the inside or on the outside. The psychical space is one which negotiates the in- betweenness and tries to reconcile the cultural exchanges and collisions. This

132

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. insider/outsider status has also been emphasized by Trint Minh–ha, who claims that the inside and the outside shift positions constantly, and it is this blurring of boundaries that converts speaking of Self and of the Other into a risky business:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside, she’s no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out.(Minh-ha 1989:74).

In conclusion, we might say that Veronica Chambers’ depiction of the postmodern Self is a rather balanced one: she does not shift to the extremes of intactness or fragmentation, and even the sense of alienation is one beyond recuperation and reconciliation

5.2. Dimensions of Self and Otherness in Veronica Chamber’s Memoir

As in the other autobiographies under consideration, the sense of Otherness in Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl(1997) develops along the dimension of Self and colorism, Self and genderism, Self and multiculturalism, Self and matrilinealism, and Self and ancestral origins. The facet of Self and matrilinealism seems to be the most predominating, as well as the one around which all episodes in the narrative evolve.

5.2.1. Divergent Replicas and “Mothering” Daughters. Self and Matrilinealism in Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl

Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl(1997) promises, since its very beginnings, its dedication page, the revelation of a troubled relationship. By citing some verses from Audre Lorde’s Black Mother Woman(1958), she foreshadows the dilemma of her autobiography as one of identifying with the mother along with the contradictory features her image bears, or standing up for a breach in the line of matrilineal ancestry, thereby detaching herself from the enforced conformism and conventionality imposed by the white society. Similarly to what Lorde has stated, Chambers learns to love the core beneath the stern and conventional shell of the mother and begins to define herself through her mother’s denials and ignored reproaches. She makes a subtle promise to herself to “become a touch chestnut stanchion against (her) nightmare of weakness.” (Chambers Mama’s Girl: Dedication Page).

133

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Determined to win the struggle against the motherly depreciation and the favoritism toward her brother, the author sets the beginning of her narrative in the girl’s world, a world of games and double-dutch, where she feels more sheltered and protected.

Ten years before Air Jordans, I learned to fly. It’s like the way brother΄s pimp-walk to a basketball hoop with a pumped-up ball and throw a few shots, hitting each one effortlessly. Like a car idling before a drag race, there is an invitation, perhaps even a threat, in the way their sneakers soft shoe the pavement and the ball rounds around in their hands. […]. Like the guys going up for a lay-up, we started turning nice and slow. Before jumping in, we would rock back and forth, rocking our knees in order to propel ourselves forward, rocking our hips just to show how cute we were.(1-2).

The choice of the game (double-dutch with an improvised telephone wire) and the attention paid to every single loop and movement of the helix is a reflection of the poverty of the black community suburbs, a mirroring of the child’s dream of asserting herself.It is only within the encircling motion of the wire jump-rope that Veronica can really find herself, feel whole and unthreatened by the prejudices of the white society. She would wish to call it aloud, tell everybody what it feels like to be whole and intact, but perhaps she is the only witness of her girlhood narrative.

So much stuff she (the mother) doesn’t know. But it is always some other time with her […]. There is a space between the two ropes where nothing is better than being a black girl. The helix encircles you and protects you and there you are strong. I wish she’d let me show her. I could teach her how it feels.(7).

There are episodes in the autobiography, in which Chambers inadvertently confesses the importance of having a mother image to rely on and an ancestral line to follow. This is the case when Chambers starts to weave the tapestry of her mother’s heritage by narrating how her mother grew up a motherless child and how her grandmother came to know her grandfather. While daughters are frequently meant to be replicas of their own mothers, being named after them and attempting to resemble them physically, socially and psychologically, the act of naming itself is a mirroring of this intended replication and paves the way to the mother’s anger and resentment toward the non-conventional child.

Her mother’s name was Cecilia. My mother’s name is Cecilia too. There is only one picture of her mother, but I have stared at it a hundred times […]. They could be twins. They both have the same round face, the same nose, the same expression that’s a little tired and a little sad. And I wonder if that’s what happens: when a woman dies in childbirth, does she pass on her very same face since she will no longer use it?(11).

134

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Chambers plies her mother with questions regarding her grandmother. Glancing at her photographs time after time she has created the vision of a woman captured in the snapshot of a Polaroid picture and having coffee spilt over its surface. Absorbed in a reverie of unanswered questions about what her relationship to the ancestral origins is like, and which is the place she holds in the patchwork of her family life, Chambers considers black complexion as just some more added nuances in the picture of life: “If I die like my grandmother had died, would my mother talk about me in the same detached voice? Would she remember that my favorite color was pink and that I carried my lunch in a Miss Piggy lunchbox?”(12).

Veronica Chamber’s autobiography is laden throughout with episodes revealing the detached mother-daughter relationship and the mother-imposed depreciation. Once at Ocean Avenue, Veronica believes that entering school will make her mother feel proud of her, but all her dreams seem to crumble into pieces while enrollment in an Intelligent and Gifted Children class does not spring in the mother the reaction it was meant to. In a flat and lifeless voice, her mother lets her know in advance that scholarly success and career are not essential to a woman, there are other virtues a woman should possess:

I sputtered so excited I could barely get the words out of my mouth […]. That’s nice-my mother said, but her voice was flat, lifeless […]. As long as you pass, whether it’s with an A or C, that’s all that matters.(41).

There is a doppelganger in the betrayal of the mother-daughter relationship: if mothers would on one hand wish to teach their daughters to be independent and self-sufficient, they would also feel constrained to teach them to be self-willed for the sake of a man’s and society’s measuring standards. As Veronica and her mother start to socialize with other women and their children in the neighborhood, and while everybody else brags about their children, Cecilia decries every achievement of her girl, making her feel unloved and uncared for at every encounter with the Other. Praising Ernesto, the neighbor’s son sounded quite unfamiliar and strange to Veronica’s inconsiderate mother. “I wanted my mother to know that I was brave enough to hear her problems, courageous enough to face the severity that defined our day-to day lives.”(48). On the one hand Veronica feels guilty for feeling content with what satisfies her mother, on the other hand

135

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. she feels anger and resentment at her mother’s inability to recognize and blind denial of her achievements and struggles.

Whenever Veronica discovers an unbridgeable gap in the relationship between her and her mother she searches for the fault within herself, becoming so overwhelmed as to reach the conclusion that she was “a product of (her) mother’s lack of choice.”(41). Trying to envision what her mother’s life would have been like without the presence of hers and that of her father often led her into considering the mother’s lot as one of an aspiring lawyer, who found in marriage the only imposed alternative to an unpromising life. Perhaps this was the reason why Cecilia kept advising her daughter not to rely too much on ambition or dreams, because disappointment crumbled dreams and eroded life strength. On the other hand, it was that very Cecilia who would teach her to fight back while being attacked by other children for fun or for constraint.

The autobiography does not lack episodes of empathy for a mother who was breaking her backbone to provide for her children the kind of life she never had. Instead of othering the mother the way the other authors did, Veronica tries to “mother” her mother with pity and encouragement, while trying to keep her afloat in the flood of life’s challenges:

My mother worries me. I know I am not a grown up but I know what I see. Taking care of us is wearing my poor mommy to the bone. She is like a ship sinking under her own weight and I want to help.(60).

In a Signs Journal Forum of 2002, Sheila Radford-Hill tries to provide a justification for the detached way in which black mothers approach their daughters, and considers the lessons of an anti-strong woman as antidotes to the challenges and disillusionments of society.

As black mothers in the 1970s, we were keenly aware of what we had faced as young adults. Although we hoped that our daughters would be spared the effects of racism and sexism, we feared otherwise, so we raised our daughters with the capacity to build a self- concept that would withstand male rejection, economic deprivation, crushing family responsibilities, and countless forms of discrimination. In our view the most effective antidote to having our daughters’ lives destroyed by their experiences with racism and sexism was to build and maintain an intact Self. To develop such a self-concept required us to pass along a variation of Strong Black Woman absent.(Springer 2002:1085-1086).

136

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The relationship between Veronica and her mother does not seem to ameliorate even when her brother leaves with his father and his stepmother. Blinded by the childish selfishness and spirit of competition, she had considered her brother as a deteriorating ingredient to the kind of relationship she had built with her mother but, to her disappointment, her mother’s attitude remains the same even when her brother is away. It seems as if she becomes less friendly every day, and as if she has more things to keep for herself and becomes a recluse:

I thought when my brother moved in with my father, my mother and I would get closer. But it was like my brother΄s leaving made us less a family. I had hoped my mother would talk to me, treat me like her girlfriend, but if anything she kept more things to herself.(Chambers Mama´s Girl:68).

Pondering over the unbridgeable gap that exists between her and her mother, Veronica reaches the conclusion that, like the magician in the famous mesmerizing trick, “black women are like masters of emotional sleight of hand.”(76): the more you approach them, the less you will see; the more you attempt to get to know about their inner Selves, the more superficial knowledge you will have at hand.

The mother-daughter conflict seems to reach its climax, when, once in New Jersey, the mother feels so fed up with the daughter’s repetitive requirements and by the husbands’ denial to respond to any of them, that she decides to figuratively sacrifice her daughter for the newly-wed husband. Mentioning the way she had been sacrificing her matrimonial relationships for the children’s sake, she decides to nearly negate the daughter’s presence in her life: “Now I have a chance at happiness and you want to ruin it by being rude. Tono has been talking about leaving and let me tell you something, if he leaves, then pack your bags and go to your father’s.”(97).

It is unforgivable of a mother to lay all the guilt of a failed marriage and an unsuccessful relationship upon her own daughter. Only a black woman in discordance with her inner warring selves and wavering between patriarchalism and racial discrimination is capable of such a deed. Veronica’s denouement to the climax of the narrative is pitiful as it is altruistic: she considers moving to her father’s (aware of what the father image represents

137

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. to her, and ware of what the attitude of her stepmothers is like). She does this as a sign of love and daughterly sacrifice for her mother who never wanted to know what sacrificing life for one’s own children means: “I began to tell myself that my moving was a sacrifice I made for her. No one had loved me like my mother. If she wanted me to go, if she needed me to go, then I would leave.”(99).

A silent mode of the mother-daughter conflict continues even while at her father’s house. Wrongly believing that her daughter has been involved in sexual intercourse with a man, her father beats her repeatedly and madly, and the only solution Veronica’s mother can give to the helpless confessions of the girl on the phone is sadistically inviting her question to make it one more year. Finding herself entrapped between two warring decisions, two warring realities of which none seems to offer a clear path in life, Veronica decides to continue living with the father, claiming that she is grown up, endure sufferings and “learn how to take grown woman blows.”(122). This decision sounds to her as “cashing the check”(123) she had written the day she had decided to walk out of her mother’s house. As the narrative continues to unfold, Veronica defines the relationship to her mother as one lacking the touchy-feely, mother-daughter hallmark moments, and typical friendly communication.

In every autobiography there is an end to the conflict, as there is an end to a person’s attempts for self-assertion. While enjoying her new life in Simon’s Rock, Veronica gets to know through her aunt that her mother has fibroids (cancer) and she has been hospitalized for a long time without wanting to let her daughter know about it. Once more, Veronica cannot understand the complicated character of her mother, slowing her daughter down, telling her not to aim too high while at the same time encouraging her to face life by herself and avoiding exposure to the truth of the illness. The sight of her mother on the death bed, will change Veronica’s judgments and expectations of her completely, by in this way changing even the mother’s feedback: “After years of me shoving straight A´s in her face, of trying to show off my double dutch moves, after her being too tired, too busy, too wrapped up with my brother, she had finally focused on me and I made her proud.”(163). Aware of having in front of her an ambitious girl, winner of

138

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. one of the Top ten College Women Awards of 1990, Cecilia begins to regard her daughter with different eyes and to handle their relationship in a different way.

While, on the one hand, Veronica is suffering of insomnia and anorexia, her mother starts to worry and show care for her daughter. Veronica’s breakdown is a result of long years of withholding and shutting down every emotion, the effect of the physical and psychological strain of having to do two jobs at the same time, simultaneously striving to come up first in the class and to develop a career as a journalist. “I felt weighed down by a heavy sadness. I lost my appetite. I found it impossible to sleep […]. I was afraid of all the emotions that for the last three years of college I’d tried to keep in check.”(124).

Opening up to her mother about her exhaustion and depression, Veronica learns that her mother always assumed that everything was fine. Worrying about a son who was not doing well in school and would later deal drugs and end up in jail made her just feel happy at being blind about Veronica’s state and not having to worry about her. According to Springer: “Chambers’ coming out to her mother as not always strong, begins her process of letting go of the strong--black woman image.” (Springer 2002:1071). The episode depicting such a moment is laden with feelings of repression and relief, a need for recognizing the Other as next to oneself. Mixed feelings meet in that hospital scene: welcome and goodbye, repentance and forgiveness, pride and shame.

Frightened at the unusualness of this feeling and experience, Veronica recognizes having had next to her all she had been missing and searching for: “She hugged me and did not let go. This was not how we hugged. Our hugs were quick, an addendum to saying goodbye. It felt so strange, so strange it didn’t really feel good.”(Chambers Mama´s Girl:167). Her mother turns out to be the shoulder she could have cried upon, the person willing to give her shelter and protection, a complimentary part of herself rather than a remote Other completely discordant with her. If other African American women of color, find their own moment of epiphany in some mythological place or figure, or in some ancestral image, Chambers confesses having found it in her mother. Despite the increasing number

139

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. of questions she would wish to pose to her mother, Veronica closes her narrative with a loving recognition of the mother as the most important person in her life, her beloved.

All my life I had hoped to meet someone upon whom I could unload everything. The best friend who would take my side completely. The boyfriend who would shelter and protect me. It never occurred to me that my mother was the person I wished for. I thought she was lost to me. I thought we were by now too different, that too much time had passed and that it was too late to make those requests, too late to lean on her […]. She is my beloved, I thought, watching my mother walk down the street, her form retreating into the coming darkness.(169).

Chambers believes herself to be old enough to give her mother just one lesson about life: that, in the postmodern chaotic reality, no two identities can ever claim to be the same, rather it is difference that lies at the heart of circumstance and choice. The racist reality equally provided mother and daughter with a variegate circumstances in life, but they grew to be different while “making different choices along the way”(182). Circumstance is a constricting framework life provides you with, while choice is what you decide to make of that framework, how you yourself decide to fit into the grid.

As the narrative approaches its end, the protagonist goes through a flashback of the moments when the relationship to her mother seemed to be the tensest and when she really did not seem to share much with her. She is reminded of how her mother would call her an Oreo, thereby increasing her alienation and estrangement.

When I was in college, my mother once called me an Oreo--black on the outside, white one the inside. The word, so cruel when it came from my black peers, was like a punch in the face coming from my mother--as if I were a total stranger and not her own child.(186).

Only after having received a magazine award as one of the college’s most successful women, and becoming renowned and well-acclaimed in the critical and editorial circles of Essence does Veronica confess feeling proud of what she has achieved and reads between the lines of the subtle motherly approval of what her daughter has really become. The daughter’s riches, access to upper class literary circles and Elisabeth Arden boutiques, make the mother feel a subtle pride for her daughter, and urge her to go through an implicit confession of the wrongness of her predictions and the inappropriateness of her detachment. Cecilia herself gets to learn that there is no clear

140

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. boundary between blackness and whiteness, African or Latina identities: the success hovers between the two in successfully recognizing the Other that dwells within everyone of us.

While I was thrilled she went, I wondered just what my mother saw when she looked at me. I wondered if everything that my mother saw as being white about me--education, my friends, my career--obscured everything that was black about me--my family, my community, my mother […]. What it changed was me, and I wasn’t some bright young black woman that my mother saw on TV. I was her daughter. My success brought the benefits of integration through her front door. It was what I had always dreamed of, but it scared my mother […]. But the things I bought her, the restaurants I took her to, forced her to consider life differently. Maybe it wouldn’t take a winning lottery ticket for her to be able to lead a better life.(190-191).

Chambers concludes her narrative by saying that taken as a whole her life and that of her mother was one of survival and solidarity, making it through despite the impact of the others and their forced racial and patriarchal prejudices.

When we laugh now, it is a symbol of our survival, a pat on the back that we give each other for having made it this far. The scars do not go away, we know where they are. The hurt does not go away either. There are bruises that linger underneath the skin that casual acquaintances and even good friends will never see. We have secrets that we have kept from each other, and that is good too.(194).

Laughter is the most natural reaction they can have at the realization that they will never be able to control the future the way they always thought they would, but they have shown themselves capable of floating in the flood of the present, by the latter being considered as the greatest of human achievements.

5.2.2. Remapping Family Relationships. Self & the Others in Veronica Chambes’ Mama’s Girl

While in the preceding autobiographies the Other was mostly represented by the ancestral line and the community, in Veronica Chambers this presence is primarily conveyed through the dynamics of the father-daughter and brother-sister relationships. As Nwankwo suggests in Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature(2002), although Mama’s Girl is basically bound in the search for a mother’s love, young Veronica also desperately wants the father’s love, and it is this unfulfilled

141

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. desire that has the most profound impact on her life: “She wants the father’s love first, then when she realizes that she is not going to get it, she expects that her mother will give enough love for both parents.”(qtd.in Quintana 2001:29). This is perhaps the reason why Veronica never feels full of motherly love and always regards it with skepticism and jealousy.

In feminist terms, black women continuously contend over precedence in black male/female relationships. As Springer suggests, “Many times, Black Feminists in the 1970s spent so much time reaffirming their commitment to Black men and the Black community that their gender critiques and actions to end sexism fell by the wayside.”(Springer 2002:1074). While trying to avoid feeling overwhelmed and while dismissing the father’s brief appearances, Veronica starts to regard her mother under a new light, for then coming to the bitter realization that in the African American- Panamanian reality she was born and grown into, boys were at the center of the attention and of primary concern, while girls were always considered as an afterthought. Even the kinder fatherly approaches are full of lies and obscenity, and void of the paternal love and care. It is in the eye of such atrocity and sadism that being insolent sounds as the right answer to a lousy father: “In his kinder moments, he would promise us allowances that would never materialize. When I would ask him for the money, he would smile and say: ‘You should do it for love. But I didn’t know if I loved him anymore.’.”(Chambers Mama’s Girl :20).

As the narrative progresses, the relationship between Chamber’s parents deteriorates to the point that violence and misogyny in the form of extemporaneous replicas, offense and blows, become the most habitual component of the little girl’s daily routine. The protagonist questions her integrity as a Self and continues to seek care and protection from the injured arms of her alienated mother. Involved in a Sunday morning episode of the mother attempting to hammer the husband’s beeper and the father subsequently striking her back, unmoved at the sight of the gauging blood; Veronica gets to know the real face of atrocity. The only response she can give to the sight of such obscenity, is ask

142

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. to be sent along to the hospital together with her mother, thereby avoiding confrontation with the familiar monster.

I think I am dead. I must be dead and I must be in hell […]. When the hammer connects, my mother doesn’t scream. Her head is gouged. My father sits in the burgundy reclining chair as if he is about to watch his favorite television show […]. My mother sees me watching and tells me to go to my room, she is going to the hospital(25).

Despite the breach that exists in-between her and her father, there is an underlying sense of self-identification that leads her into hating the reflection in her of the worst facets of the father’s character. In every encounter with the Other we learn a new technique of delving into the innermost depths of the Self. When these encounters are characterized by the presence of evil, misogyny and alienation, we end up feeling a little more alienated, atrocious and wicked ourselves:

Just after my mother leaves, my father becomes affectionate […]. By showing to me his very worst side, my father introduces me to the worst in myself […]. Now I want to kill him and though I know I can’t do it, the desire to hurt him makes me feel stronger.(26).

While starting to hate that part of her father that runs through her veins, Veronica learns how to retrieve force out of weakness, strength out of vulnerability, and the desire to live out of hatred. After the parental separation, rules and conventions change in the Chambers household, as her mother “mops the father right out of the house.”(31) and erases his presence from the memory and her daily family life. The conflict precipitates as the brother gets away from home and the landlord catches them out of the house, regardless of their regular payment of the rent. This breach in the parental relationship leads to a break in the way Veronica approaches her brother and lays the grounds for the formation of a shifting Self conscientious of the importance of the location dimension. As the unwritten statement of society goes, boys identify with fathers while girls identify with mothers. Contrary to what would have been expected, mothers look into the petted pretenses of the husbands and the sons, and ethnic American daughters feel completely thrown out of the equation. “But my brother idolized my father and no matter how violent my father became, my brother forgave him.”(34).

143

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The atrocity of the father does not end in the days when he used to beat his wife in the presence of the children, neither does it conclude with the moments when he fakingly used to console his children by addressing them in an affable way. A new chapter is opened in her life as she sets out to live with her father and her stepmother. After having been accepted in the college of Simon’s Rock and while waiting for the summer holidays to pass before the school enrollment, a quarrel starts off between Veronica and her stepmother, who mercilessly beats her in the presence of her father without the latter even intervening to calm the situation or protect his daughter: “but the steady stream of blows was so confident, I feared she had no intention of stopping. I glimpsed my father’s face and I knew he already had chosen a side. Not mine.”(133). The father’s sadism amounts as he packs up Veronica’s clothes and tells her to spend the summer at her aunt’s up to the moment that college begins.

As the narrative unfolds, Veronica provides for a bridging in the relationship with her brother, but continues to act the same with regard to her father. As a sister, she realizes that the societal expectations that have distorted her physicality and personality to the point of reducing her to an anorexic and depressive state are the same as those that debase her brother to the point of converting him into a constrained criminal and a compulsive drug addict.

Now that my brother is a big strong black man, with big strapping black man problems, I long for our secret language. I imagine that I could whisper those words into his ears, and I would become more powerful than his homeboys, that the call of our secret language would be more powerful than the call of our streets. But he is no longer three and I am no longer six, and the words we made up are lost forever.(184).

So life and memory have already left their imprint on the personality of the two children and the damages are irreversable.

5.2.3. Genderism, Colorism and Multiculturalism in Veronica Chambers’ Narrative One of the instances of the author’s consideration of the interweaving of Self and Other, by Other in this case standing for blackness and racial differentiation, comes through the author focusing the attention on the frequency of occurrence of black female dolls and

144

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. black male dolls as a reflection of the way black households were built at the time; fewer fathers being present, and more mothers feeling frustrated:

When I was a kid, there was a black Barbie, but not yet a black Ken. It was not something that I questioned; it was in a way a mirror of our homes. Black mommies but so few black daddies […]. Was black Barbie a test of doll integration, a girl alone like Linda Brown in 1954 wading into a white classroom? Was the idea of a Black Ken too menacing? Was there a prototype and did it look like Richard Roundtree in Shaft?(152).

The question Veronica is quite naturally posing, is whether there were in the commercial world of dolls only black prototypes of she-dolls and almost no prototypes of he-dolls. Was it because black households were majorly considered to be matrifocal, with the female counterpart considered as the major force in running the house, or was it because blackness was associated with minority cultures, and black women were completely denied access to the mainstream? Another instance of colorism comes through Veronica’s encounters with other black girls, and her realization of the way African American women try to hold one-another back, by using terms such as “sellout”, or accusing one-another of “talking white”.

Veronica Chambers pertains to the 1970s and 1990s group of feminists who kept refuting the idea that working against gender oppression is, counter to antiracist efforts, an attempted to strike a balance between theorizing gender and voicing racial injustice the way they occur in the United States. Third Wave Feminism, to which Veronica Chambers was believed to pertain, succeeded in intertwining writing and activism and credited “previous generations for women-centered social and political advances.”(Springer 2002:1063). Born after the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Chambers paid tribute to the Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist movements, and voiced contentment and self-satisfaction at watching hero-abounding documentaries about black history:

It seemed that all the big black battles were over by the time I was born [...]. Watching footage of the bus boycotts, the sit-ins, and the marches […]. I would wander if I would have been brave. My brother and I used to say,“No way were we sitting on the back of the bus !” but the look my mother would give us told me that we had no idea what we would or wouldn’t have done.(Chambers Mama’s Girl :52).

In terms of genderism, Chambers addresses the question of generation gap, and tackles with the myth of the “strong black woman” and the way we are meant to relate to 145

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. ourselves, our mothers and our community. Chambers’ autobiography faithfully depicts the tensions arising between old generation feminists claiming to further the social movement and new generation feminists striving to “reinvent the wheels of social change.”(Springer 2002:1064).

In her Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy of the Strong Black Woman(2008), Patricia Hill Collins makes a deconstructive work on black gender stereotypes and the strong black woman role by showing what it means to live up to the female standards, and combines the “gendering” process with the technique of cultural representation. In Jean Wyatt’s terms, the “internalization of gender roles, serves the larger political function of maintaining unequal power relations.”(Wyatt 2008:53). While primarily regarding their mothers, and the gender expectations revealed by them, as a compulsive pattern to be followed, daughters actively strive to win their favoritism by enacting the imposed genderisms.

The multiculturalism and multiethnicity of Veronica’s reality, comes out mainly through her being both Latina, and African American; Panamanian and American. As Nwankwo suggests “The cultural referents of the text reflect these multiple cultures.”(qtd. in Quintana 2002:32). Experiencing colorism even within the Latino community, Veronica’s mother preferred going shopping in the communities with which she identified. “May I help you”--the woman said in English with a heavy accent. “Estoy buscando algo para limpiar la casa”--my mother replied. Immediately the woman relaxed. It was a scene I had witnessed many times before. Latinos would look at my mother’s black skin and brush her off. Then when she began speaking Spanish their attitude would change. I know from my little Spanish that “limpiar la casa” meant “clean the house” but why had my mother come to a card store for a Mop and Glo?(Chambers Mama´s Girl :29-30)

Veronica’s identification with the African American culture on the other hand becomes more evident as she speaks about the Black History Month, completing assignments of having to write about Martin Luther King, Chirley Chisolm and Rosa Parks. As there is no excuse and no hiding from race and cultural heritage, she cannot leave apart that side of her character that tells her that she is a Latina too.

146

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Another revelation of the way Veronica considers cultural identification to be an inseparable part of life, comes even through her agent confessing of Veronica faced with much resistance from the publishers because none of them felt like marketing a both African American and Latina author, and posed her in an either or position of choosing. What Veronica herself sees with promissory and optimistic notes, is the fact that when read by youngsters, her book would be fully digested and considered as an ideal reconciliation of multiculturalism and hybrid existences. In “Something to Declare” (1998), while trying to respond to the continuous criticism about deciding to write in English rather than in Spanish, Julia Alvarez that she doesn’t hear “the same rhythms in English as a native speaker of English. I am mapping a country that is not on the map, and that’s why I am trying to put it down on paper.”(Alvarez 1998:173). The transnational focus of the Latina writings on dual identity has often diminished their value and relegated them to the margins of both American and Latin American canons.

5.2.4 .Hardened Lives: Latino-American Dislocations in Veronica Chambers´ Autobiography.

The dimension of Self and location will develop out of Veronica’s constant displacement from one house to another, from one parent or relative to another. Being sent out of the apartment they had been renting for a long time throws Veronica and her family in an endless pilgrimage in search of a decent apartment for rent:“My mother would bundle my brother and me up in sweater on top of sweater, coats and scarves and hats. We would walk up and down different streets looking for signs that said, 'Apartement for rent'.”(Chambers Mama’s Girl:35). Moving to Ocean Avenue develops Veronica’s shifting Selves and provides her with an epiphany about the way the relationship with her mother is built, only to helplessly confess that she never knew her mother, she never got her right: “After we moved into the apartment on Ocean Avenue, I began to realize how many things there were that I never knew about my mother […]. For that matter, I didn’t really know myself or my brother apart from my father.”(36).

147

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

It was typical at the time to send children down South to spend the summer with their grandparents or their relatives. The south represents the unknown but also the shifting, the displaced, the dislocated and the new in Veronica’s life. It is made of scary bicycles, of fried chicken and temporary alliances. The summer arrangements foresee that Veronica is going to spend the time with the grandparents of her mother’s friend, while Malcolm will be treated by the father’s side, the stepmother’s family. Differently from that of the protagonists of the other autobiographies, Veronica’s life is a more stable one, but she nevertheless craves for more stability and solid ground in her life. Even when Janey, her friend, takes her along to spend the summer with her grandparents, she feels dislocated and out of place and will find a sense of belonging only in the friendship with Frederica, her adopted summer friend:

I envied these girls, their extended families only a bus ride away. I missed the girls that I was tight with. We girls from the islands would make temporary alliances, choose temporary best friends and temporary hang-out spots until the other girls and things were normal again.(67).

Another physical and psychological dislocation and displacement, happens when over thanksgiving Veronica helplessly seeks an alliance with her brother, as more familiar and likeable as compared to the strange Panamanian man. She eventually learns to consider life the way her brother does, with every neighborhood, vicinity or school regarded as revelatory and complementary of another aspect of herself: “I had begun to look at each new school as a chance to reinvent myself, to decide whether I wanted to be called Veronica or Victoria or Vicki, to try out new hairstyles and new after-school activities.”(84).

Once in Los Angeles, she finds in the stepfather the paternal figure she had been missing. The military coldness and the gang rumors seem to kindle the girl’s successful acculturation process. Confused at having to set in her mind an idea of what home is like, Veronica jumps with happiness at the probability of moving back home, while at the same time feeling skeptical of the permanence of the latter abode. Despite arrangements being made, and summer nights passed dreaming about moving to New York, they end up in Northern New Jersey--a place where they would continue staying for the

148

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. stepfather’s sake, but also the site of increasing divergences between mother and daughter.

Moving to live with her father and her stepmother, results in being as disappointing and as devastating as the other moves in the last 5 years of her life. Sharing the house with a stern father and a stepmother who yells all day at having to rear two children of another wife proves challenging to the fragile personality of little Veronica. Though the mother’s lesson in life is one of submissal and subservience, she still needs her shoulder to cry on. Moving through different schools and different places had converted her into a “mestiza- like” hybrid entity that shifts between cultures, locations and ethnicities, by feeling at home in none of them. Veronica becomes aware of this radical dislocation of herself after eavesdropping on the conversation of a black couple who considers as trying to act like white people, and adopting a white accent just to look different. Instead of accepting the falsity of her looks, she confirms the falsity of her life as a whole. “All the moving, all the different schools had left me without a distinct accent of my own. In L.A., I picked up little California-isms, in New York and New Jersey, too, I absorbed the local vernacular.”(Chambers Mama’s Girl: 104).

Estranged daughters end up finding comfort and familiarity in otherwise unfamiliar things. Veronica finds shelter in Miss Blake’s (the suburban school teacher’s) house and in her sympathy for the girl. Before setting off for Simon’s Rock College, whose premises promise to be Veronica’s first footholds on a life of her own, Veronica is cast once again into another estrangement, moving to live with her aunt Diana until college time approaches. The devastating rhythm of dislocations has left loglasting imprints on her identitz formation.

5.2.5. Anchoring the Postmodern Self. Body Comodification in Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl

While in Veronica Chambers’ autobiography, the dimension of Self and body, and the search for a unified gestalt is not to be found so frequently, threats to the sense of bodily

149

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. wholeness come from within black women themselves while competing to reach the white standards of beauty. Sunday church time always seems to Veronica like a great exhibition, of women helplessly trying to match to contemporary standards of beauty. Feeling depressed for not having been to the beauty salon for some time, or for having gained more weight than usual, is counter to Veronica’s applications of the mother’s statement of unallowable depression in black American women. Black women go through the same worries and concerns as white women, the only truth her mother does not seem to absorb is that, with their concern for beauty, plastic surgery and attractiveness, they were growing more like the white ladies. The body, no longer the traditional battleground for the confrontation between acceptance and denial, prejudice and open-mindedness, passing for white and passing for black, is now the site of an ever increasing aspiration to look better, be more attractive, and look more feminine.

In church, on Sunday, I saw women dressed impeccably, singing and winging and getting merry like Christmas. Maybe some of these women were depressed, maybe they secretly hated their bodies […]. At the hair salon, I would catch snippets of conversation about women who weren’t feeling so good about life. These women were “sick” because they were “letting themselves go.” The beauticians always knew whose man had left, who had been laid off from her job, and who had the blues.(Chambers, Mama’s Girl:72-73).

Dissecting white society messages and depicting the way they wreak havoc with the black self-esteem helps Veronica gain more insight into the layers of self-hatred that torment black women. She invites women to let go of the past and look toward the future as fallible human beings.

Veronica’s bodily awareness grows as her stepmother refuses to have Veronica΄s hair done, and lets her hair come out in clumps. Absorbing the “gaze of the Other”, and feeling the alienation and estrangement that the others reflect upon her, make Veronica despise her, and feel uneasy at accepting her physical traits:

A light–skinned woman from Guyana, proud of her fair skin and straight hair, she berated me for being ugly. Day after day, she came down on me about how I looked. It didn’t take long for me to believe that it must be true; why else would she be making such a big deal of it.(106).

Chambers is noticeably silent on issues of heterosexism, homophobia or black women’s sexuality in general. Her only mention of sexuality comes when she discusses the way an 150

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. unwanted pregnancy may interfere with her educational and professional career. This deprioritizing of sexuality may in fact originate in her mother’s understated reaction to Veronica’s first menstrual cycle. Cecilia’s first reaction at her daughter’s revelation of the coming menses was to warn her not to get pregnant and informing her of the way children are conceived. It is in the discussions on sex to follow that Chambers is reminded of the experiences of friends who were single mothers, and starts to anticipate the potential intimate involvements with words like: “No guy ever said a word to me that didn’t sound like a lie. The answer was always no.”(70-71).

As Hammonds suggests, “the challenge that comes from analyzing their works, is the disruption of stereotypes but also the frank discussion of Black women’s relationship to their sexual lives through consciousness-raising at all age levels.”(Hammonds 1997:175). The missing sexuality discussions, and the elided black identity information, make us assume that black societal stereotypes are so debilitating and destructive that women could do better without mentioning their bodies and their sexualities.

No longer considered worthy of fitting in the perfect family portrait of her father, the girl has to go through another series of dislocations in her life: being removed out of her father’s luxurious car, displaced from the kitchen table, and even moved out of the common rooms of the house. If we try to visualize the way the image of the protagonist evolves along the narrative, we would see Veronica as an ambitious girl, full of life, always boasting about aiming high, and a constricted vagrant despised for being ugly and disgusting. The final portrait that we get of Veronica is that of the completely estranged daughter.

By summer my stepmother had decided that I was “too ugly and disgusting” to eat at her kitchen table, to eat off her dishes, or to eat her groceries […]. My father was put in charge of feeding me, which was the same as putting me on a starvation diet because he was never home.(Chambers Mama´s Girl :108).

Veronica has ended up internalizing what the Other has projected onto her: black skin, unkempt hair and ragged clothes:

151

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

5.3. Writing a New Story of Oneself. The Fictionalization of Life and Narrative

in Veronica Chambers’ Mama’s Girl

The scars and wounds of Veronica’s childhood become more evident as she fragmentarily shifts from one episode to the next, which thereby make the narrative challenge the chronological ordering of events. The shift in the narrative perspective leads to a resulting perplexity in the narrative perspective as well as in the actor’s identification in the narrative. After chronologically recounting life with her parents, Chambers shifts back in time in Chapter 4, to the days when they were a united family and spent time attending elementary school, celebrating the black history month and were engaged for days in a row in writing about prominent black figures.

Though memory is always considered as reality revisited, edited and recounted; Veronica’s mother always tried to open her daughter’s eyes into realizing that what one could have done in the past and believing what one could have done in the past, is quite far away from having acted within that very past. Contemplating the possible past actions was just the “luxury of a generation that benefited from that particular struggle.”(Springer 2002:1066). Perhaps it is the memory of the past, days of discrimination, segregation and atrocity, that made Cecilia act cold and distant, inducing her daughter not to “be pushing herself ahead.”(Chambers Mama’s Girl:53).

As the narrative progresses, Veronica makes it clear that life can be nothing but a fictional narration, which is why autobiographies should never be regarded as completely authentic and non-fictional. Trying to suffocate the bitter words and add up lively nuances to her life, Veronica decides to write a new story about herself: “I let the words commit suicide before they were given breath. My words are meaningless. My father watched as I begged for help. My words are powerless. The little I had is gone. What I have left are new words, so I will try again to write a new story.”(136). An alternative to the blaming of the past is for black women to forgo atonement for the past and take responsibility for the male affirmation in the present.

152

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Chambers’ text is an intertwining of historical patches of African American, West-Indian and U.S. Latina realities. As Veronica Chambers had already asserted in the speech held on the occasion of the National Endowment for Arts, she could not separate her African American origin from her Panamanian heritage: “Although I am identified as African American, both of my parents are black Latinos from Panama.”(qtd. in Quintana 2003:27). As Quintana emphasizes in her article in Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature, the autobiography speaks implicitly of the Panamanian, West-Indian experience in the United States today, of the thousands of people being brought form the British Caribbean to Panama to build the canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans: “The canal builders worked under torturous conditions with death always hovering over their heads in the form of yellow fever, malaria and dangerous conditions.”(qtd. in Quintana 2003:27).

The segregation of the employees was also named under the Gold Roll for whites and the Silver Roll for blacks, thereby perpetrating a contemporaneous Jim Crowe Law in the United States. A hybrid Panamanian community that embraced and exemplified the cultures and the traditions of both ethnicities came into existence, thereby making her narrative also a kind of hybrid genre. The difference in cultural discourse and Memory– line is also another factor that separates Veronica from her mother and breaks up the bonds to the ancestral line.

Both my parents were born in the Caribbean--my mother in Panama, my father in the Dominican Republic--but my father moved to the States with his family in 1962 when he was twelve years old. My mother’s grandmother, Flora, worked in the laundry in the Canal Zone, ironing the American soldiers’ pants […]. My father joined in the U.S. Army after high School and was stationed in Panama. He met my mother and they started dating and soon got married. I was born in the American military base, which made me a United States citizen. (Chambers Mama’s Girl :12).

References to the cultural and linguistic features of grandchildren of ethnic Americans, are encountered frequently as Chambers absorbs her grandmother΄s stories about polluas and the Panamanian commonplaces, and at the same time feels angry and distanced at not being able to understand the conversations that her mother has with her Latina friends. It is not that Chambers does not want to get integrated into the matrilineal language and culture; it is just that they are not providing enough space for her to feel at home. While

153

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. teenagers of her time find it difficult to obtain a sense of belonging in a country where they have to deny the “Mestiza” consciousness in the name of the native, uni-cultural identifications, Chambers feels entrapped in the borderline between two or more cultures without her relatives welcoming her in any of them. The fashion parades and the language shows of her mother’s friends provide the girl with a clue about the complexity of society. In the beginning, she considers the parade of the mother’s friends as an interesting spectacle through which she gets to know more about Panamanian history and tradition.

They would come through the front door wearing the “home clothes” that my mother wore on weekends –house dresses in splashy tropical prints shorts and T-shirts and other casual wear in loud colors. Their hair would be dutifully curled in rollers and covered with big silk scarves--never the cloth bandannas that American women wore (44-45).

When her mother tells her how much she has suffered for her and the way she was compelled to endure a miserable life and marriage for her sake and for the sake of her brother, Veronica immediately turns to language as a means for processing information.

I went into my room and cried all night, I was stunned. I knew then that as good as my Spanish was, there were things I had been missing. For the first time, I felt as separate from my mother as I once had from my father. I hated my father for hitting my mother, my brother and me. But now my mother had beat the shit out of me in just a few words.(97).

In Veronica Chambers we find ourselves unwillingly absorbed into the tapestry of the American past and present, uni-cultural and multicultural.

5.4. Chapter Conclusions

In her memoir Veronica Chambers experiences the same duplicity and hybridism that “Mestiza” daughters of ethnic American origins go through, and her solution to the incomprehensibility of the postmodern times is to hold things for oneself and to try not to question matters that are beyond response.

The Others of Veronica Chambers are represented by the motherly figure and by the father and the brother portrait.The matrilineal relationship in Veronica Chambers memoir appears as a tapestry woven of scars and bruises, but it nevertheless remains their private

154

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. story of survival.Chambers writes about Black men as fathers, sons, biological and spiritual brothers and lifetime partners. The slavery embedded stereotypes and the society engendered patriarchal notions distort the black man image in Mama’s Girl and even dilute the kind of love and affection Veronica may feel for the male figures in her life. What is more black women unconsciously other themselves and their bodies by artificially trying to make their bodies match the white standards. As a result they commodify their bodies in the desperate attempt to anchor their postmodern Selves.

As a feminist Veronica Chambers does not try to reinvent the feminist course; rather she tries to build upon the legacy of her forerunners, and insert herself within the ongoing movement, thereby shifting the focus of the attention onto the gender issues.

Locationally speaking, Veronica’s mad rhythm of dislocations does not have an utterly devastating influence on her identity formation, it rather shapes her into a tough girl, a strong black woman, determined to create a stable Self, due to and in spite of the cultural and locational influences.

In terms of memory,while offering competing versions of events for the readers to make sense of, Chambers’ autobiography creates uncertainty and mixes narrative perspectives, thereby placing the author, the protagonist of the story, in a hybrid stance.

155

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

6. POSTMODERN HYBRIDITY AND PATCHWORK SELF IN REBECCA WALKER´S BLACK, WHITE AND JEWISH: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SHIFTING SELF (2000)

***

Born Rebecca Leventhal in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Alice Walker, and Mel Leventhal, a Jewish American lawyer, Rebecca spent her childhood alternating every two years between her father's largely Jewish area in New York City and her mother's largely African American environment in San Francisco where she attended The Urban School of San Francisco and decided to change her surname from Leventhal to Walker as a sign of identification with the mother culture, ethnicity and origins.

Considered one of the founding leaders of third-wave feminism, Walker was a contributing editor to Ms. magazine for many years and received several awards for her work. She holds speeches about multicultural identity and third-wave feminism, teaches writing workshops and consults on non-fiction manuscripts. Bisexual, and mother to a son, Tenzin, Walker is currently estranged from her mother because of her considerations as dispassionate and neglectful. After an affair with the neo-soul musician Mischel Ndegeocello, she is actually living in Hawaii with her husband Glenxxv.

Subtitling her book Autobiography of a Shifting Self, Walker describes how she developed from a rebellious black adolescent living with her mother in the bohemia of San Francisco, to an upper middle class Jewish girl living with her father and her stepmother in the suburbs of Manhattan. The unusual custody arrangement, the daughter having to spend two years with each parent, poses her shuttling between coasts and cultures and made her feel a movement child psychologically as well as politically. Placed on the mainstream’s margins, and born biracial, comes to her as a conditioned invitation to view the world from the perspective of both an insider and an outsider. Adding a third dimension to the typically black and white dyad of U.S. race relations, her book deploys Jewishness to unfold the plurality of whiteness and challenge the

156

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. dichotomies of race and identity. Nevertheless, Walker’s ultimate conclusion is that we must strive to come to terms with our ethnic identities in order to be able to assume the role of cultural ambassadors.

As Funderburg emphasizes in her online article in Time΄s Magazine, in terms of subject matter, Walker’s book:

teems with childhood wreckage, premature sex, reckless drug experimentation, and interracial marriage. Interwoven are heartrending but barbed recollections of absent, distracted parents--a self-absorbed mother, writer Alice Walker who hires someone to take her daughter clothes shopping because she is too busy to do it, “too tired”, and a “checked out and sagging father”, civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal (Funderburg 2001:1).

Besides reflecting the experience of growing up biracial, Walker’s narrative is also about the way parental neglect forced her to become prematurely independent, and extravagantly indulging in drug and sex attitudes. The author’s depiction of a tangled upbringing comes out as frank to the point of lacking insight. Along the memoir Rebecca absorbs the very stereotypes she claims to recycle. The memory selectivity questions the reliability of every statement she makes, and the ancestral origins and matrilineal relationship serve as guidelines and route digressers at the same time, letting the work hover between the status of memoir and fiction. When asked about her writing style, her life and activism, Walker considers her work as one fighting against the media distorted characterizations of feminism, trying to remove the rigid societal frameworks, and voicing the needs of the oppressed and the afflicted.

6.1. Familiar Outsiderhood. Otherness in Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and

Jewish

6.1.1.“Mestiza” Daughters and Cultural Electra’s: Transborder Matrilienage in

Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish (2000).

Just as autobiographical writing rises up beyond the individual accounts of a specific person, woman-of-color mother-daughter writing raises beyond the constraints of double

157

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. marginality, promoting gender and ethnic consciousness and turning mothers into the political fronts against racism and sexism. As Wendy Ho observes: As much as there were intense conflicts with mothers, many women writers of color emphasized the mother’s powerful social and emotional presence in nurturing their creativity and in establishing the home place as a political space for survival and resistance for their subordinated racial-ethnic families.(qtd. in Schultermandl 2005:7).

The mother-daughter relationship in Rebecca Walker’s autobiography wavers from closeness and association to disruption and separation as a way of seeking identification, and at the same time waging war on one’s search for identity. In her Of Woman Born(1986), Adrienne Rich considers the mother-daughter relationship as one of inherent symbiosis and reciprocal identification, life shaping since its pre-natal existence. It is likely that there is nothing in nature more resonant and more tuned than the flow of appreciation and mutual recognition between a mother and her daughter. In Rich’s words, “this cathexis between mother and daughter-essential, distorted, misused--is the great unwritten story.”(Rich 1986:226), but like every intense feeling and relationship it may sound threatening to men and this leads the daughter into a disruption from her mother, as a form of claiming acceptance in the white framework. The emotional and spiritual attachment is described even through a scene of bodily symbiosis:

Night after night Mama and I are tucked into our king-size bed on the warm side of the blood-red velvet curtains, and night after night I fall asleep with my pudgy copper arms wrapped around her neck. As we drift out of consciousness, I feel the ether of my spirit meet the ether of hers and become all tangled up. As I fall asleep I do not know where she starts and I begin.(Walker Black, White and Jewish :56).

Another episode in which Walker feels completely at home in her mother’s world is the one in which her mother takes her along to the Library of Congress, thereby opening up a new world of writing and escapism in verse, and making Rebecca feel proud of being identified as Alice’s daughter. The Library of Congress is a niche where neither her father, nor her stepmother, nor anybody else may dare to stamp on:

At the Library of Congress I become the daughter of my mother. That is how people know me. This is the speaker’s daughter. You know the woman who read the poetry? […]. It is easy to be my mama’s daughter, all I have to do is stand next to her and smile at all the people who come over to talk and shake her hand.(102).

158

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Nevertheless, as the rest of the work will reveal, this easy ready-made identification will not be long-lasting and the mother-daughter relationship will end up oscillating between reconciliations and separations. As feminist criticism reads it, Rebecca Walker’s autobiography orients the protagonist’s struggle for self-assertion and identity-mapping toward two tropes: the trope of Anzaldua’s, “The Mestiza Daughter”; and of Jung’s “Cultural Electra”. The new “Mestiza”, a hybrid identity, a cross-border, a mediator of different realities or cultures, literally travels between two worlds, developing a tolerance for contradictions and plurality and feeling, overwhelmed by a sensation of belonging to two localities and to neither of them at the same time. Finding herself immersed in a quest that opens up further ambivalences and ambiguities about her mixed ethnic identity and heritage, the “Mestiza” needs to claim her matrilineal relations rather than let herself be claimed by them and this entails self–negotiations and mediations of her multiple ethnic heritages. It is this dilemma which leads to question ,“which collectivity does the daughter of a dark-skinned mother listen to?”(Anzaldua 1987:100), and it is the same dilemma that leads Walker into wondering whether she is possible, whether there exists anybody able to reconcile cultures and ethnicities without suffocating or misrepresenting one or the other.

Nowadays, the concept of the “Cultural Electra” reaches as an extension of the impact the Jungian psychoanalytical feminism has on the readings of contemporary ethnic texts. The sexually charged distortion of the mother-son relationship, coined as the “Oedipus Complex” by Sigmund Freud, has got as its counterpart the “Electra Complex” xxvi, the identification of the daughter with the father figure, as an act of individuation. As Silvia Schultermandl states in her dissertation Unlinear Matrilineage, Mother-Daughter Conflicts and the Politics of Location in Contemporary Asian American and Caribbean American Women Writers(2004), when a daughter “sides with the dominant culture instead of identifying with the matrilineal heritage her mother embodies, she replicates the dynamics of the ‘Electra Complex’ on a cultural level.”(Schultermandl 2004:50). Feeling that the matrilineal heritage is not strong enough to speak up for her in the world, the “Cultural Electra” targets and blames her non-American mother for the oppression and frustration she experiences and sticks to her father’s supremacy for identification:

159

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

“But when I see them in my mind’s eye, gray-haired Grandma Jennie, staring squarely into the lens and Grandmother Poole looking out, exhausted, over the hill, I can not help but wonder if either of them ever would have fully claimed and embraced me.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:151).

Adaptation to the father’s cultural world and absorption of his suburban supremacy requires jeopardizing her African American heritage and her matrilineal bond. The context-boundedness of the “Cultural Electra”, suggests a cultural and emotional alienation from the mother as a mode of societal affirmation. The process of disassociation from one’s mother also takes up other different names: to Adrienne Rich it is a “radical surgery” from the mother (Rich 1986:78), to Hirsch it is an illustration of the daughter’s Othering (Hirsch 1989:136-137). In Chodorow’s terms, on the other hand, girls always have more flexible ego boundaries and need for the presence of an “Other” to succeed in their self-assertion, while boys have more rigid ego boundaries and come to define themselves as separate: “From the retention of the Oedipal attachments to their mothers, growing girls come to define themselves as continuous with others.”(Chodorow 1978:169). The motherly consideration of daughters as extensions of themselves lays the grounds for identification with the father as a foil for her separation from the mother.

In Walker’s autobiography, as well as in many autobiographies of second generation women of color, the collective matrilineal heritage also inadvertently absorbs the patriarchal societal expectations that it attempts to eliminate. In postmodern society, as Adrienne Rich claims, woman is principally viewed through the lens of motherhood, and the complexity of her being is dismantled by the absorption of such generalizations and stereotypes as “childbearer, and the center of life’s creation.”(Rich 1986:11). The disconnection with the mother, and the attempted assimilation with the father, is rooted in what Adrienne Rich calls “matrophobia”--“a womanly splitting of the Self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mother’s bondage, to become individuated and free.”(Rich 1986:236). The matrophobic rejection in Black, White and Jewish primarily originates in Rebecca’s awareness that what she hates most are remnants of the mother’s culture that make her unacceptable in the eyes of the society.

160

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

To Rebecca, the mother stands for the victim, the scapegoat inside of her, the convex mirror of her innermost reality, a blemish which she would wish to hide or to ignore at every exposure to the critical eye of the white society. It is the rejection of her pre- teenage crush in the third grade that makes her aware of the fact that white well-to-do guys would never date a black girl, and leads her to think that she will have to show off in the company of not black people like her stepmother and her paternal grandmother, thereby considering her mother as a “clandestine Other.”(Schultermandl 2005:9). Her Othering of the mother continues with her feeling reluctant to be seen accompanied by her in school plays, and her consideration of blackness as an uncherished dimension of her multiple identities and Selves.

Bryan Katon, her teenage crush, voices his dislike for black girls and immerses Rebecca into the existential dilemma of trying to uncover the innermost depths of her being: “Bryan Katon tells me that he doesn’t like black girls […]. And that is when all the trouble starts, because suddenly I don’t know how to be not what he thinks I am. I don’t know how to be a not black girl.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:69). It is this episode with Bryan that will deepen the breach between her and her mother and cause in her mixed feelings of longing and relief, frustration and contentment.

I don’t tell my mother too much about the play, and she doesn’t ask. It isn’t a big deal I say, hoping she won’t see through my mask of nonchalance; I don’t want to hurt her but I don’t want to lie either, but how else am I going to convince her not to come to see me on play night […]. Even though everyone says I was good, my mamma, the one with the most important voice, can never say this to me. Shame sticks to me like sweat.(71-72).

Rebecca’s alienation from her mother also stems from her recognition of the mother’s failure to live up to the standards of good mothering. An eight year old cannot understand that a mother has to neglect her children in order to be devoted to public engagement and activism, she cannot comprehend how a mother can chose books, poetry and writing to having walks and going shopping with her daughter. In the episodes to follow, Rebecca reveals of her mother being too busy working on a screenplay and so hiring someone to do the paperwork and act as a liaison between her and the school. The whole situation is awaited with confusion and revolt by the daughter, but it does not cause any kind of

161

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. reaction or empathy in the mother who quite cynically complies with Rebecca’s hidden agreement not to rely on her mother anymore, and not to ask for her assistance:

I miss my mother walking up the speckled smooth cement stairs with me on the first days of school, but I am so excited about being an Urban student. I don’t dwell on it until the school has an open house for new students and their parents and my mother sends the woman she hired […]. And then on a meaningful, comic but cynical postcard with a mother gorilla and her child on the front she writes to her daughter that ,“She is proud of me for being independent and being able to do well without her. She writes that I will have to continue to do what I always say I can: take care of myself.”(263-264).

Alice even sometimes seems to Rebecca like a nasty sister with whom she will have to quarrel over many possessions, but who will never provide her with the care and tenderness typical of a mother. Tired of life and of the many challenges being a single mother poses to her, Alice becomes blind to the behavior of Rebecca. Whenever her daughter acts in a vicious way, slamming doors, talking back and shouting, she thinks it is all part of her being spoilt in the urban environment of the father. Whenever she plays the perfect child, doing the household chores and toiling to look ideal, her mother declares that she finds a sister in Rebecca and makes her just part of the plot of looking good in front of the others.

In interviews my mother talks about how she and I are more like sisters than mother and daughter. I am game, letting her sit in my lap for a photo for the New York Times, playing the grown-up to my mother’s child for the camera. I feel strong when she says those things, like I am much older and wiser than I really am. It is just that the strength does not allow for weakness. Being my mother’s sister doesn’t allow me to be her daughter(231).

Nevertheless, the mothers always remain reference points for daughters. In the case of Black, White and Jewish, Rebecca turns to another female figure, the stepmother, for support. The stepmother seems to be there even when her mother is absent and teaches her things about life. This middle class suburban housewife, her father prefers to his artist ex-wife, becomes the norm of motherhood Rebecca measures her mother with:

While my father is upstairs sleeping and she is sewing name tags for summer camp on all of my jeans, hooded red sweatshirts, and underwear, it is she, my stepmother, who tells me about penises and vaginas and about how babies are made […]. One day I have some kind of rash and I itch. I call out to her. She is downstairs in the kitchen. Before I can stop myself, I yell out ,“Mom, where is the calamine lotion? And then I stop, resting my hand

162

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

on the wooden banister, waiting to see if she will answer me, if she will accept this new name.”(91).

But mid-way through the memoir, the meanwhile teenaged narrator gives a more critical account of her attempted assimilation and views even the stepmother under a new light. Once her father and stepmother move to Larchmont, the Jewish dream in the suburbs, Rebecca becomes more aware of the race tensions and the class discrimination:

The move is some kind of plot my stepmother has concocted to kill me, to wipe away all traces of my blackness or to make me so uncomfortable with it that I myself will it away […]. I think that she and I are doing battle for my father’s soul, me with my brown body pulling him down memory lane to a past more sensual and righteous, she scratching the dirt off place Jewish roots I didn’t know she had.(206-207).

By the end of her orientationlessness, Walker comes to the conclusion that she feels more closely connected with the African American heritage and entertains the notion that her black collective past and present are more representative of her personal experiences within the dominant white society. While feeling disparate from her father’s extravagant, xenophobic attitudes and lifestyle and compelled to abide to the rules of the white suburban city, Rebecca chooses ethnic marginalization to being scapegoated as her father’s au pair or baby-sitter. Her awareness grows as she realizes that the white culture is leaving no room for her multiple, fragmentary Selves, and that in a seemingly perfect urban landscape she is just an aberration of her father’s life, just a “dark spot in an otherwise picture-perfect suburban family.”(230). Rebecca engages in a quest for self- creation and self-assertion based on her mother’s black culture and heritage. Feeling at the peak of her achievements and excelling in everything makes her draw closer to her mother by having something undeniable like naming run between them. As Schultermandl states in her book Transnational Matrilineage(2009), what can be more “undeniable than discharging oneself of the father’s surname and highlighting the mother’s one as a sign of privileging blackness and downplaying whiteness.” (Schultermandl 2009:56).

Why should that line, that clan of people who have been so resistant to my birth, claim the woman I have become? [...]. I want to be closer to my mother, to have something run between us that cannot be denied. I want a marker that links us tangibly and forever as mother and daughter(Walker, Black , White and Jewish:312).

163

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

By moving Leventhal to a more obscure middle position and placing Walker at the end, she emphasizes her link to the minority culture and claims her identity as a non-white woman rather than as a merciless Semitic. Faced with identity mapping problems and having secured a stable position of outstanding existence in the dominant culture, Rebecca comes to realize that articulating empathy for the marginalized and paying respect to one’s roots is the best way to finding a belonging. After some remarks her father had said on the trial scene she begins to react defensively and bringing out all the buried hatred toward the Jewish inheritance:

I react defensively, asking why I should want the name of the man who disowned my father when he was only eight years old. Why I should carry the name of the man who beat my grandmother and has refused to this day to see me or any other of his son’s children.(313).

The answer to all the whys lies in the realization that she mostly identifies with the underdog rather than with the supremacy of the white Jewish society. She finds herself in the legacy of slavery and the black struggle against brutality and prejudice:

Do I feel I have to choose one of these allegiances in order to know who I am or in order to pay proper respect to my ancestors? No. Do I hope that what my ancestors love in me is my ability to master compassion for those who suffer, including myself? Yes.(307).

Walker’s new home is in tolerance and in human compassion, and her new role is that of a cross-borderer, an ambassador of two or more cultures. This ambassador role of hers provides her with an epiphany about what is more important to one’s identification and she concludes that identity goes beyond genetic make-up. It is only the liberal transnational and trans-cultural consciousness which provides the individual with the utmost freedom for the expression of one’s true Self.

6.1.2. Making Peace with the “In-Between”: Displacement and the Politics of

Location in Rebecca Walker’s Autobiography.

One of the most influential and widely recognized formulations of the women-of-color politics of location is Gloria Anzaldua’s “borderland concept”. In her experimental autobiography Borderlands La Frontera: the New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldua challenges

164

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. the displacement of the “mestiza”, whose multiple, cultural and gender placements go beyond conventional boundaries of identity. According to her, searching for home also means searching for one’s real Self but, as far as quest for one’s Self faces recognition of an inherent Other, women come to see the alien within them, internalize the sense of exile and end up split up within themselves and between one another. This is the criteria upon which Rebecca Walker has built the multivocal account of growing from childhood into adulthood:

We return in widening spirals and never to the same childhood place where it happened; first in our families; with our mothers; our fathers. The writing is a tool for piercing that mystery, but it also shields us, gives a margin of distance, helps us survive.(Anzaldua 1987:25).

A self-described movement child, Walker moves literally and metaphorically. She alternates every two years between her parent’s homes, thus growing up in Jackson Mississippi, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and the suburbs of the New York City. Shuttling back and forth across the country, Walker moves among binary identifications such as white or black, Puerto Rican or Jew, heterosexual or bisexual, suburb child or an inner-city girl, middle class or radical bohemian artist.

The racial and ethnic duality becomes even more difficult to manage as she shifts between cultures and worlds. This is regarded by Rebecca as coming of age and journeying “from planet to planet between universes that never overlap.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish: 117). Rebecca’s dislocation and subsequent victimization starts with her parent’s divorce and their joint custody agreement. As Rebecca periodically moves from the East Coast to the West Coast, from her “father’s white Jewish suburbia to her mother’s black artist bohemia, from being an outsider among the white people, to being an outsider among the black community.”(Schultermandl 2004:60), the divorce decision is the one to open up new required spaces for both her parents and eventually set her on a mobile transitional existence that distorts her character, and urges her to claim and disclaim separate facets of her character in every new location.

What their decision means is that every year of my life, I have to move, change schools, shift. My father returns to the life that was expected of him, marrying a nice Jewish girl he met as a kid in a summer camp, and my mother falls for a Morehouse man, an old

165

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

sweetheart from her Spellman days. For them there is a return to what is familiar, safe and expected. For me there is a turning away from all of those things.(Walker Black, White and Jewish :117).

Moving from household to household sounds to Rebecca like switching between radio stations and listening to a music whose beat she finds it difficult to follow: “Doing the switching is easy, its figuring out how one relates to the Other (dancer) that is hard.”(39). Absorption in the spiritual, character and cultural displacement sounds home-like to Rebecca to the point that no other ritual of life sounds as natural. Her existence is void of the daily routines that may sound trite to any other girl of her age like waking to an alarm clock, thumbing magazines, drifting off to slumber according to some pre-set schedule, or finding oneself in some unchanging workplace. Her body seems to be made up of ether, there is an internal mercurial drive of forever being in motion rather than recognizing one’s origins as deeply rooted in ancestry.

I can never release myself from the mercurial aspects, can’t allow myself to stand on some kind of ground. Instead I tend toward that which destabilizes and feels most like home: change, impermanence, a pattern of in and out, here and there, city to city, place to place […]. I unpack and pack my belongings, shedding some and picking up others with ease and economy.(167).

The ether-like quality of her life, is reflected even in the fragmentary and shifting multiplicity of her selves and identities, and determines the flow of her narrative. As the entitling of the subchapter Self and Memory reveals, she has to make thousands of choices a day, and is never completely free to opt for any of them, her life always seeming to have a direction, but never reaching a dead end(228).

The locations she memorizes best are airports, opened doors that never take much time to close behind her, windows whose landscapes she never takes the time to enjoy, an exteriority that never remains such because of her willingly or reluctantly melting into the borders and the frontiers of her existence. Her appearance adopts the form of a chameleon, a malleable substance to be molded after every encounter, a missing core never to be found. The other reason why she prefers airports is because they are neutral spaces, not demanding much identity mapping, and disclaiming the luxury of stability and coherence in the name of fragmentation and bordering. In the passages to follow the author has intentionally capitalized Home, because no conventionality of space or of 166

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. attitude can deserve that name. Refusing to stay somewhere long enough to develop a ritual of familiarity, coziness or safety, Walker prefers lingering in the in-betweenness rather than on the act of performance:

I remember airports […]. I am more comfortable in airports than I am in either of the houses I call, with undeserved nostalgia, Home […]. Airports are limbo spaces–blank, undemanding, neutral. Expectations are clear. I am the passenger. I am coming or going […]. I do not have to belong to one camp, school, or race, one fixed set of qualifiers, adjectives based on someone else’s experience […]. I am a transitional space, form- shifting space, place of a thousand hellos and a million goodbyes(4).

Regardless of the tragicalness with which she asserts the already imposed life pattern, Rebecca considers moving as an “alchemical reaction that happens when the seasons change.”(63). Rebecca’s recognition of her off-map position and her outings into each parent’s world constitute a challenge to her cultural and ethnic adaptation. When her mother picks her up for poetry reading, she is happy about being initiated into a world of “poetry, Indian restaurants and curvy brown women”(101), for after some time going back to the rituality of having lunches prepared by the stepmother, “going to ballet classes, and walking with Marc home from school.”(103).

Rebecca nevertheless somehow seems to crave for some sense of belonging, either in Bali or Jamaica, or to the Jewish heritage of her father or the black ancestral wealth of her mother. This creates in us an illusion of stability, a fake sense of permanence and belonging, which will be undermined within a few lines. On her journey to Bali she states: “In these places where many of the people have skin the same color as mine, and where I am not embroiled in the indigenous racial politics of the day, I get a glimpse of a kind of freedom I have not experienced at home.”(304). Considering food as a manifestation of cultural heritage as much as homeplace is, Walker’s description of Riverdale and other Jewish lieu sharpens her dislike for the bourgeois lifestyle of her father and highlights her sense of displacement.

My father and stepmother live just in Riverdale, but I live in Riverdale and Bronx. Riverdale to me means Nanny and the Liebermans and shopping down on Johnson Avenue for challah for Friday-night dinner […]. It means a little store that sells Oshkosh overalls for my stepmother […]. It means walking around with my stepmother, this Sephardic looking Jew who calls me her daughter around people who never question(199).

167

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Ultimately she confesses feeling more at home in the modest household of Theresa, among the uneven set of concrete chairs, the mess and the dramatic darkness of her house. She feels most welcome by the lower class modesty and simplicity rather than by the luxurious premises of her father’s house which seem to provide room for everybody and everything but her: “there [in Theresa’s house], I find a corner to fit into, walls that contain me.”(205).

Rebecca is not alone, she is not the only one required to act as a bridge, a mediator of two cultures. Jessie, a gay man, is also a human bridge that “seems to do all this moving up and down and in and out more seamlessly than she herself can.”(244). This is an open invitation of hers to probe within ourselves only to recognize that within every Self there is an exiled Other, in every seemingly well-situated identity, there is a Rebecca-like shifter that stitches and unstitches the patchwork of our identity.

6.2. Hybrid Spaces and Borderland Corporeality. The Postmodern Self and

Body in Rebecca Walker.

The fragmentary existence of Rebecca’s identity and the difficulties she encounters in identity mapping are also fully reflected in the way bodily dimensions are depicted throughout her autobiography. Starting and ending her autobiography with a sense of bewilderment, awkwardness and alienation, Walker borrows from the fluidity, fragmentation and impermanence of her life experiences to depict her positioning on the borderland. Being told by her parents that she can do anything, she puts her mind to do and be anything she wants, Rebecca becomes conscious of her clumsy performance. She confesses, “I am too clunky, too big, not graceful”, and complains “There is an awkwardness to my body, a lack of grace.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:255).

Imagining her skates to be an extension of her bodily ego, Rebecca regards them as clunky, cheap and awkward. There are episodes in which she tries hard to “will her body into some kind of normal posture, into some semblance of ease and comfort to disguise her feeling of not belonging.”(178). Practically speaking, when involved in a game of football, she takes a snapshot of the kind of attitude and bodily bearing that each of her

168

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. friends takes up. Making herself a protagonist in this spontaneous brief documentary, she realizes that if everyone feels concerned about the kind of game they are making, absorbed in laughing and taunting, she is by contrast involved in a kind of fight for self- assertion. She recalls watching herelf perform, shift, contort, and sweat.

The problem with Rebecca’s looks is that her passing does not allow for her to clearly fall into one category or another, thereby making her feel more constrained to internalize the very stereotypes and expectations she attempts to fight against. It is blackness that Rebecca wants to adopt in most of the cases but, at the same time, it is that very blackness that threatens to alienate and detach her from the people. She feels even more estranged when the context-bound societal standards repeatedly blur and merge in front of her eyes. So, when in the presence of black girls, she regards her skin color as not black enough, her thighs not well-toned enough, her breasts not big enough, and her lips not sensual enough to fall into the group of real blacks. Such is the case with Colleen, whose bodily curves, way of dressing and putting on make-up provide her with a sense of allegiance to the black standards: “Colleen can stick up for herself. She’s a real black girl. I am not […]. They say I am more like a white girl.”(126) (but she can’t successfully pass for that either--my emphasis).

In the other episodes taking place in the white suburban community of her father, she has to go to great lengths to learn the Jewish ways and the Jewish clothing so as to reach a successful identification with the white heritage of her father. Nevertheless, as she almost never takes it quite right, she fails to wipe herself free of the black traits and to mold the white contours of her body. While at Fire Lake, a predominantly Jewish summer camp, she hopes to be labeled according to the labels she wears:

I wear Capezios and Guess jeans and Lacoste shirts and I assume the appropriate air of petular entitlement. And I never quite get it quite right, never get the voice to match up with the clothes, never can completely shake free of my blackness […]. At Fire lake, I am a Jap, but not one. I know baruch atah adonaih Elohainu and love Color War, but I don’t own fifty le Sport sacs or spend the week before the camp starts on a Teen Tour in Israel. I move my body like I belong but I also hold it back.(177-178, 182-183).

169

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

It is in this very camp, that she gets denied the Sing Captain Honors, because of being considered as intimidating. The warp and weave of her shifting Self hasn’t provided her with the provisional peace of the in-between. Another hybrid space that Walker’s body occupies is that in-between homosexuality and heterosexuality. In her ambiguous approaches to Malaika, she considers her as a sister; she likes to feel her warmth and twist with her this way and that, and subtly confesses to have found a sense of completeness she can not find in boys:

In the dark there, we twist this way and that, sometimes sweating from all the rubbing […]. When I look at her I feel the deep brown of her skin pour into me through my eyes and fill me up in a place that feels cold and empty, a place that I forget I have until I look at her naked body(96).

There are two episodes in Rebecca Walker’s memoir when the body is mentioned in terms of its importance to a person’s integrity and representation in society. Rebecca considers the motherly body as an extension of hers and exalts the incapacity of making the differentiation between the two:

As I fall asleep I do not know where she starts and I begin. I do know that my mama is hurting and that what I have to give to stop that hurting is myself: my arms, my warmth, my little hands on the side of her face. I no longer am only for myself, but now I am for her, too.(56).

In another scene Rebecca is reminded of the last time body contact and sight was sufficient to build up harmony and comprehensiveness with her father. While daddy is in the bathtub, having a bath, and she is standing at the sink, they face one another in a scene where only the drip of the water seems to break the silence. Rebecca realizes that this will be the last time they share life without the need of culture negotiation or mediation, and that only through the power of fatherly love: “the last time we both will be quiet and exposed in the same room together, when we will not have to speak to be connected. When just being in his presence is all I need.”(51). While involved in a heterosexual intercourse with Michael, Rebecca makes a gloomy depiction of the condition of her body. She considers herself as never at home in her body, a mushy substance waiting to be shaped by society, community, lovers or ethnical expectations. If this is the cost she has to pay for being a trans-ethnic mediator and ambassador, she will pay it.

170

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

I have never been at home in my body. Not in its color, not in its size or shape. Not in its strange, unique conglomeration of organic forms and wavy lines. In the mirror I am always too pale, too pasty, too honey-colored, not the glamorous sounding café –au lait. My breasts are always too small, my thighs too fat, my gait inelegant, my neck too long.(255).

Rebecca Walker concludes her memoir by revealing the failure of the parental expectations concerning her upbringing. They brought her into light believing that a merging of black and white features and Jewish and African American cultures would provide their child with the right mix for surviving as a hybrid. But, as Rebecca professes, they could not know that her little copper–colored body, not chocolate enough to be considered black, and not bleached enough to pass for white, held so much promise and broke so many rules.

6.3. Memory and Cultural Politics in Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish

Ethnicity and autobiography are inherently linked in their emphasis on memory. The ethnic narratives’ emphasis on ancestry, memory, and history is shared by the literary genre of autobiography-- the difference being that autobiography traditionally focuses on the autos, on documenting the development of the individual identity and life, whereas ethnic groups use memory to trace their collective development as people. As Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez states in her: “The Plural Self: The Politicization of memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies”, “In ethnic autobiographies, the very form of autobiography is already ‘shot through with intentions’.”(Hernandez in Singh. Memory and Cultural Politics 1996:41).

Writing about cultural memory in Multi-Ethnic American literature Amritjit Singh argues that what we study whenever we deal with a text are just imprints of the collective memory in language, memory in its own right is a dark shadow: forgetful, reconsidered, erased and revisited, lost and recovered at the same time. “What we study are the traces of memory in language and narrative, and the ways individual writers challenge it.”(Singh et.al.1994:17). Terry de Hay on the other hand emphasizes in her essay “Narrating Memory” that the minority woman must always turn back her head on the past, in the name of having a clearer vision of herself, and of her history. While feeling

171

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. multiply marginalized by the contemporary society, ethnic minority daughters, link to the lives of their foremothers through their collective and personal histories and memories and as Silvia Schultermandl overscores in her “Transnational Memory in the Joy Luck Club”: “the literature of the matrilineage recognizes the cultural collective as a continuum whose continuity depends on the individual woman and her interaction with her culture.”(Schultermandl 2009:82).

The unreliable memory of women of color writings is rooted in and overshadowed by the mother-daughter conflict and raises debates about the preservation of cultural memory of the diasporic home. After all, as hooks urges us to consider, the woman of color’s struggle for emancipation “is a struggle of memory against forgetting”(hooks 1990:147). The reclaiming of the existence of their own history, their collective memories, and the minority cultures preserved by their mothers facilitates minority women’s self- affirmation in a society that double marginalizes them. As Estelle C. Jelinek states in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism(1980), in their autobiographies ethnic women writers address issues of ethnicity and of gender as multifaceted fronts that create visibility at the intersection of double oppression, and they are more chronical, episodic and fragmentary than men’s.(Jelinek 1980:xx). As far as the daughter’s attempt to distinguish from her mother culturally and emotionally is an endless maze, narratives depicting this kind of quest and struggle also are built in a maze-like fragmentary manner. If the African American daughter’s hybridity implies constant re-negotiation of “conflicting, cultural heritages and acceptance of ethnically-hybrid personae of their rootedness within this ambivalence.”(Schultermandl 2004:103), even their discourse and cultural product, in this case their narrative, blurs the traditional boundaries of ethnic writings of autobiographies by becoming a hybrid of the two.

In support of these arguments, Gloria Anzaldua’s (a product of the repeated mixing of the Natives with the Spanish, and of the resulting Mexicans with the Northern Anglos) response to living in the borderlands between cultures is one of synthesis rather than division, she demands the right to draw on all of her cultural roots for sustenance rather than being forced to choose between them.

172

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me, then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture-una cultura mestiza-with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture(Anzaldua 1987:22).

The memory in Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish unfolds as a vehicle for the second generation immigrant daughter to explore the cultural heritage of her family’s country of origin. Agnieszka Bedingfield in her “Trans-memory and Diaspora” argues that ethnic memory between generations of immigrant families relies on transference, translation and transcription: three components of Diasporic memory which lead us into calling it trans-memory or in Marianne Hirsch terms “the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”(Hirsch 1997:22). If we consider memory as a symbolic recovery of the past into the present, its diachronicity removes the Other in time, enforcing the process of the Othering of the mother’s memories and re-negotiating the truth and the credibility of the narrative itself. If we speak of credibility of narrative being challenged and menaced, in Walker’s terms this happens because of her constant displacement and her perpetual shifting locations rather than because of a removal in time between the mother’s stories and her own stories. Alice, does not seem too keen on having the daughter preserve and inherit her ancestral narratives, she seems more keen on developing her career as a writer and as an activist. Her account of the cultural no- woman’s land that she sees herself placed in revolves around childhood memories of “coming and going, going and coming.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:5).

In terms of style, by incorporating even the unspeakable into the text, Walker has transcended one or more boundary and created a narrative that partakes of fact and fiction, fantasy and experience, storytelling and the collective unconscious. Different cycles of stories, locations and realities of African, Jewish and American origin are woven into the description of the historical events, present day politics and theories and the lives of individuals in search of themselves and their ancestral past. Geographical and spiritual journeys, as well as journeys in time, connect different people in an epos that

173

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. aims to re-write, or rather retell history, to reconstruct the untold and to deconstruct dominant notions of truth. The absence of a chronological plot development foregrounds the episodic and flash-back like emergence of different memories of specific life situations. The interconnectedness typical of the matrilineal heritage, when missing as in the case of Rebecca Walker’s memoir can not ensure a successful conveying of history and memory from the ancestors to the coevals of Rebecca Walker.

In her autobiography, Rebecca Walker detaches from her cultural roots, and converts the cultural home-place into an irreconcilable Other rather than into a cornerstone for the building up of one’s identity. Considering herself an outcast both to the familiar realm of the white society, as well as to that of the black society, Walker is conscious of falling into two or more categories of societal expectations, and being fully welcomed by none of them, and this weighs down her childhood memories with feelings of rejection and helplessness and contributes to triggering the same effect even in the present:

This is how memory works: I am a woman who lives in fear of being denied. There is a mask I wear, a mask of unfazable calm. With it firmly in place, my features express serene indifference[…].This is how memory works. Beneath the mask, behind the cool, unperturbed exterior there is rage. There is pure liquid fire threatening to annihilate. And I am afraid.(Walker Black, White and Jewish 2002:186,189).

Walker’s repeated use of analogies and synonyms to the word fear causes in us a sensation of real fear, fear of groping within one’s memories unaware of what may lie beneath its apparently hard shell. Memory is like a well of scenes, episodes, feelings and sensations, whose flow may come up once uncovered and deluge the present by covering it with a veil of optimism or a veil of pessimism to the point of feeling scared of one’s life revelation. Only by becoming aware of one’s dichotomized position in the cultural heritage and by accepting one’s binary marginality to them, will the “mestiza” daughter really be able to find room for herself in society and unfold her narrative in the way it is experienced fragmentary, non-linear, unconventional:“I find my map without a traditional trajectory, too fragmented for a linear narrative.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:228). Later on, in an episode in which she is packing up her suitcases for the umpteenth time, she confesses that being an amnesiac is the best solution God could have

174

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. provided her with when involved in the chaotic mobility and fluidity of identity, time and location.

I am leaving so much and I have no idea what I’m getting in return, only that moving is already the thing I’m used to […]. It’s a process of forgetting that happens, an erasure that starts gradually, as things are winging down, and picks up speed so that by the time I´m on the plane or bus I have forgotten almost all of what I’ve come from […]. I’m an amnesiac because If I weren’t I’d be feeling all that loss, all that tearing away, and who wants to feel that.(Walker Black, White and Jewish:164).

Rebecca considers her life as always living in the present, without ever turning one’s head toward the past and racking one’s brains for getting involved in the grid of the future, it is just as if she is always on an escalator, which leads her to airport hallways and doors, never looking back at the doors closed behind or the people showing her the way through them, always advancing believing that dislocatedness is the best niche one can occupy where all the other recesses clash and conflict with one another.

The daughter’s identity negotiation within the cultural borderlands of her mother affects her re-memory of her matrilineal heritage, and this failure on identity-mapping on the other hand result in a failure to re-visit the past through memory. To the “Cultural Electra”, the process of faithfully recollecting and bringing back the mother’s memories is considered as a shift away from the integration in the American lifestyle, as a marginalization from the mainstream culture, thus she intentionally breaks up the ties, and gets involved in a wishful forgetting so as to leave free space to the American successful acculturation process. As Joan Liddof overscores in her “Autobiography in a Different Voice”, “A woman’s fiction of identity will shape the identity of her fiction.”(Lidoff qtd.in Jenkins 1994:67), a woman of color’s identity, is itself a fiction of being transposed across localities, ethnicities, cultures and lifestyles, and her autobiography itself, can never be supposed to be a faithful narration of one’s auto, but a fiction based on what memory chooses to track back, and to transfer. Gazing at one’s past is to women-of-color writers also recognizing the continuum of the cultural interconnectedness and perhaps this is the reason why Rebecca Walker challenges every expectation of ours since the very beginning when she says that she does not remember even the most memorable moments of her life: “I don’t remember things. Like the names

175

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. of streets and avenues I have driven down a hundred times, like the stories behind Jewish holidays I have celebrated since I was eleven, like the date of my father’s birthday […]. Who am I and why I am here? I cannot remember how we all are related.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish:1).

The author then proceeds with making a kind of brain scan, a scintigram of her brain and its storing and retention capacities. Taking a snapshot of the way the apparently normal life of ordinary people goes, Walker considers herself as out of the conventional, provided with little mnemonic storing capacities, a forgetfulness especially for meaningless events and places, an unbound life that never seems to fit into the grid, but that just shifts and dislocates her in time, space and remembrance without allowing her to store and recollect, or even set up ties to the people and places around her. This makes Rebecca feel off balance, amorphous and mushy-like, an image without contour, a fluid life always on the go and never reaching a set destination, a cozy niche for rest, reflection and decision making.

Like her own life, Rebecca’s memory is a blurred image of things past and present, a postmodern collage of distorted pieces of reminiscences and bitter experiences, an existence on the border, without ever being provided with the privilege of setting down in one territory or another. Even when she intentionally tries to memorize things, and make a compare and contrast between them and their past presence in the storehouse of her mind, she fails to reach the conclusion that it is her psyche and her heart that can not be pieced together, and memory basically lies in our heart, in the imprints every episode or person has left on our soul and spirit.

I feel oddly off balance, like the whole world had figured out how to cope, how to master life on the grid, but me. Without a memory that invests in information detention, without a memory that can remind me at all times of who I definitively am, I feel amorphous, missing the unbroken black outline around my body that everyone else seems to have.(Walker Black, White and Jewish:2).

The lack of memory has not been randomly inserted by the author just as a marginal symptom of physical and psychical deficiency, it has rather been integrated into the memoir as a token of one’s sense of being displaced and alienated, an awareness of

176

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. falling into the categorization of one or more cultures and being welcomed by none of them, a witness of the missing presence in one’s life of either the matrilineal heritage or the patrilineal American culture. The unbroken black outline the author is seeking for is an act of claiming by the myths and heritage of the ancestral African Americans, that she is young, frail and without the shelter of one culture or the other she is just chameleon devoid of any core substantial existence, and pulled along helplessly along boundaries, frontiers, interculturalisms and cultural clashes. The fact that Walker delights over finding a single, inerasable component of her life, airports (sites of movement, a hundred hellos and a thousand goodbyes), lets us comprehend that every hope of reaching a unified gestalt, or a stable Self is challenged and overthrown in her life and in her memoir as well. She did not ever feel contained; she never felt the luxury of being encircled by the same walls, the same culture, the same environment ever in her life, movement and fluidity being her single illusionary permanent homes.

Nevertheless, the instances in which Rebecca sounds ambiguous or self-contradictory are not few. If in one episode she justifies her amnesiac state in the eyes of her friend, by contemplating that one memorizes and recollects by a direct intervention of the heart, she later contradicts herself by considering the act of abortion as a natural painless act as far as it does not leave imprints in the memory of the child-to-be whose coming into life is negated since its existence in the womb. How can one so easily erase from one’s memory the ripping of an embryo, future son or daughter, and consider it just a physical removal with no impact on the psychology of the perspective mother?

It seems eerie to me only later on, the way the whole thing goes by without me having any strong feelings about it, no ritual of mourning, not one serious thought about ending something that could have been. I am twenty-eight and co-parenting my partner’s biological child. He’s eight years old and looking up at me I swear I see his mother’s face and that’s when I wonder what my baby would have been like. Does she remember in her cellular memory being ripped from my womb.(Walker Black, White and Jewish:251).

Rebecca Walker’s approach to the ancestral memory, different from what one would expect from ethnic women of color writers, is quite a detached one to the point of denial. According to her, the African American tradition, with its myths, customs and story telling, can prove nothing good to her as far as it can just displace her even further and

177

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. make her feel even more alienated in an exile where she is posited in the function of a cultural ambassador deprived of the protection and support of either side. Contrary to her mother, who celebrates the existence of an unspoiled line of matrilineage that connects her to her African ancestors and African American literary precursors, Rebecca remains rather unimpressed by the photograph of her seven-times-great-grandmother. Discovering the face of her oldest known matrilineal relative, and unaware of the chain of matrilineage she belongs to: “As I look (my mother) slides her arm underneath mine and lets it rest at my waist so that we are connected like a chain, our flesh hooked at various places, our bodies connected.”(Walker, Black, White and Jewish 2002:149-50).

There are several episodes along the memoir in which the author questions and at the same time mocks the credibility and reliability of memory. In one of them, situated in the starting pages of Rebecca Walker’s work, after having confessed that her psychical state may be of an amnesiac, and after having emphasized the way she feels about having every episode of her life, even the most important ones, uncontrollably erased from her memory, Rebecca, all of a sudden, starts depicting in the minimal details of what her first birthday was like (the chitterlings, the chocolate cake, the number one candle, etc.). How much can we rely on an amnesiac, who is not reminded of her adulthood episodes where she has played the role of an actor, to give a faithful description of a ceremony in the first year of life (an episode that is conventionally erased from the memory of all normal people)? :“On my first birthday I am given my favorite foods: chitterlings and chocolate cake[…].Mama puts me in my wooden high chair with the smooth curved piping, and then feeds me one slimy pale gray glob after another while Daddy sits at the table grinning.”(Walker Black, White and Jewish 2002:9).The accuracy and the meticulousness with which she describes this episode make it everything but real and credible, and paves the way to our consideration of her memoir as intentionally fictionalized autobiography. After some pages, the author turns back in a non-chronological, non-linear stream-of- consciousness fashion and depicts her birth episode, inviting us to become active participants in the reconstruction of the past, thereby constructing a witness to the feminist theories that consider the past as a recess site to be revisited and re-constructed based on the fictional approaches of the autobiographer and of the reader as well.

178

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

You may want to ask about the story of your birth, and I mean down to the tiniest details[…].Some sinewy thread of meaning is in there somewhere, putting a new spin on the now utterly simplistic nature-nurture debate. Your job is to listen carefully and let your imagination reconstruct the narrative, pausing on hot spots like hands over a Ouija board.(Walker Black, White and Jewish 2002:11).

Somewhere mid-way through the memoir, entitling the chapter Movement Child and laying the focus on the physical, spiritual and cultural mobility of her life, Walker considers herself as an agent helplessly trying to build a bridge between the memories of her father and those of her mother, for then reaching to the conclusion that the two cultures cannot be reconciled and any narrative pretending to bring a unilinear reflection of the two, is deemed to fail since the very beginning. “As they sit, leaden and stiff in their respective corners, I cannot. Instead I flit around the living room trying to build a bridge of memory between them. I ask question after question, hoping to jog their collective memory of the time I was born and we lived our life together as a family.”(315) Rebecca is literally rummaging through the debris of the ruined construction of their life as a family to pick up and collect pieces of herself that might fit into the maze of her life and make the whole picture more comprehensible to her and to the others.

While trying to test her hand in writing poetry and autobiography, Rebecca Walker speaks about the kind of relationship set up between writing and the act of recollection, considering writing in Anzaldua´s words as an “act of making the soul, an alchemy.”(Anzaldua et.al This Bridge Called my Back ,1981:169), an act by which we internalize our exile, only to recognize the alien and the split within us. Only after having received this kind of distancing from our childhood through writing are we able to return in “widening spirals”(169) by piercing into the mystery of our past, and at the same time feeling shielded from the bitter scraps laying beneath its cover.

Attempting to recollect one’s past without the instrumentality of writing is painful and useless at the same time, recollecting means forcefully imposing the scattered particles of our past to come together by forming an imperfect image of what our life has been like. Remembering through writing, on the other hand, means letting your mind go blank of all

179

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. cultural and societal impositions and constrictions, letting words flow by themselves, setting up a distance between the writer and you, in an attempt to wipe every bitter particle and shard of the sketch of the past which when forced into the present causes pain and distortion of character. As far as life is never a genuine mirroring of your place and contribution in the society, why should we look for a faithful way of depicting it? If reality itself is distorted, the convex mirror of fiction is the best tool to reflect it.

I start to remember in shards pieces of glass that rip my skin and leave marks[…].These are memories like a broken bottle, memories I can’t speak because the glass gets caught in my throat ripping it, too. I circle these glinty flashes from above for days, weeks, before I can find a way to sit. From my lofty perch they appear minor, mere scratches, it is only when I look closely that I see them for what they are: self-mutilations and battle scars. In this process of remembering, I am surprised to find a clear trail of words lodged somewhere in the back of my brain, embedded in the tissue surrounding my heart, waiting to surface[…]. As they speak I let my mind go blank, it is so much easier to be an empty screen for their projections[…]. Pushing the corners of memory far back into the recesses, I say to myself again and again. They remember it better.(Walker Black, White and Jewish 2002:74).

All her life she has been defined by the others, trying to keep on with the prevailing view. Having to remember her own life means creating a link between memory and the heart, that is the best interconnectedness one can claim to reach, recalling one’s life means telling one’s own version of the past mindful of the unsettling emotions that float in there and the bitter memories that erupt all of a sudden ,but its also means recognizing that the way you narrate your story is always yours, other people may be regarding it from different perspectives , and viewing that through other spectacles.

I want to summarize the way how the dimension of Self and memory develops along Rebecca Walker’s memoir by using her own views and words regarding the way memory works. In a chapter entitled “How Memory Works”(186-189) Rebecca brings along an episode in which she is denied entrance in an expensive hotel ,just because the guard is the usual white racist who hardly believes that a black can afford (financially and in terms of segregation) to enter such luxurious premises, and in this way rooting in the poor Rebecca a sense of fear of being prejudiced that will accompany her all through her life. Rebecca was raised to believe that she was entitled to whatever was available, and this would normally have reared in her a sense of pride for her legacy, but memory is stronger

180

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. than legacies, principles or societal imperatives, it works over the heart by corroding every part of it and by penetrating in its subtlest recesses.

Walker’s response to the guard telling her that she does not have an appointment and the doors cannot lay open for her, is one of rebellion and innermost rage :“I flash into a momentary rage. I demand, bomb, maim with my eyes. My gestures are sharp and contemptuous. My words strike again and again, hitting their mark like some kind of wild beast, a stallion bucking his break.”(Walker, Black, White and Jewish 2002:188), The truth lies in what memory and life experience secretly whispered in her ear, that “this is how memory works. Beneath the mask, behind the cool unperturbed exterior, there is rage. There is pure liquid fire threatening to annihilate. And I am afraid.”(189). This is perhaps the reason why, even stylistically speaking, Walker has organized her autobiography in small sketch-like chapters, doubtful to ever fit in to an integral whole.

6.4. Chapter Conclusions

Concluding we may state that Rebecca Walker΄s autobiography builds up on the consideration that deconstruction is the best response to the relativism and multidimensionality of the American experience.

In the mother–daughter relationship the focus shifts from the features of the bond in itself to the bond of mothers to society as a whole. The conflict between a mother and her culturally alienated daughter arises due to the daughter’s recognition of a need for a break in the matrilineal legacy and the mother’s growing awareness of her failure in social reproduction. While waging a war in her search for identity, considering herself as disparate from the mother and avoiding standing on the borderland, the ethnic daughter negates even an integral part of herself without which she can never be whole.

In conclusion, we might say that in her Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2002), Rebecca Walker challenges the notion of a home-place as a site of belonging. Acting as a catalyst of the difference between white and women-of-color feminism, and making the protagonist intentionally disassociate from the ancestral and matrilineal culture, she converts the supposedly self-asserting homecomings into geo-

181

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. politically and socio-culturally insecure locations. The ether-like rhythm of her life breaks any possibility for a uni–linear traditional narrative and contributes to the sketch- like organization of chapters. Involved in the mad wandering through a multitude of spaces, locations and identities, Rebecca reaches the conclusion that the best way out is attempting to become mediators rather than claim for clear-cut identities never to be reached. Lacking the black contours, and the permanence of a unified gestalt, the body ends up being just a remnant of the past, a painful reminder of the happy days.

Whenever Rebecca chooses not to remember, memory is converted into some sort of parasite that creeps into the tissues of her body, and makes itself evident in any confrontation with different people, cultures or realities. but then she is reminded that the truth does not lie in what her parents told her about the infinite opportunities. She must once again wear a mask of calmness and tranquility and alignment with the reality.

182

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

7. NAVIGATING THROUGH THE COLOR COMPLEX. THE POSTMODERN SELF IN MARITA GOLDEN´S DON´T PLAY IN THE SUN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE COLOR COMPLEX(2004).

*** Born on April 28th, 1950, in Washington D.C., Marita Golden was the daughter of Francis Sherman (a taxi driver) and Beatrice Lee (a property owner). She won renown not only for her African American centered novels, but also for the nonfiction works revealing her experiences of coming of age in the post-civil rights era and her sojourn in Africa. Golden grew up in the District of Columbia, a remarkably black community. Her mother had left a life of investments in the South. Her literary production includes Migrations of the Heart(1983), a well-received memoir begun when she was just 29, and a Woman’s Place(1986), a novel chronicling a fifteen-year period in the lives of three African American women who meet and become lifelong friends at an elite Boston college during the 1970s. Long Distance Life(1989), on the other hand, chronicles the lives of four generations of an upwardly mobile African American family in Golden’s hometown of Washington D.C. As a whole, her novels preserve the tradition of contemporary African American women’s fiction in terms of the heroine’s quests for self-definition and self-fulfillment.

In her autobiography, Golden offers a personal account of growing up as a dark-skinned black woman in the heterogeneous society of the United States. She does not speak out about the rightness or the wrongness of the people’s choices in society, rather, she casts a glance at the way these choices are determined by the European beauty standards that have been forced upon us. Talking to teenaged girls, boys, mothers and fathers, therapists and hairdressers, screenwriters and television producers, Golden addresses the importance skin complexion, self-identity and self-worth bear in American society. This is also conveyed by Maria Frias in her article in the Atlantis Journal who states: “Part memoir, part meditation, her autobiography ponders on the ongoing obsession with skin

183

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. color considering beauty like our power to have always been colored, compromised, or contingent on the notion of skin shading.”(Frias Atlantis xx(1) 1998:200). After Du Bois’s proclamation that the “the 20th century problem is that of the color line.”(Du Bois 1903:19). Golden maintains that the media plays an incredible role in our thinking, feeling always bombarded by the white images that rule the world.

7.1. Transplanted Identities: The Multiple Dimensions of Marita Golden’s

Don’t Play in The Sun: A Journey Through the Color Complex (2004).

The postmodern Self in Marita Golden’s autobiography is depicted as alienated, negated or even erased, but nevertheless always a Self on the way to actualization and assertion, one always regarding revolution as one’s worth occurring within oneself for then stretching its impact unto the others and their views. The multiple facets of Marita Golden’s postmodern Self start unfolding in her autobiography since her treatment of the complex relationship to her mother and of the way approaches to the color issue shape her whole life. Marita is first faced with fragmentation, alienation and ultimate denial when told since early childhood not to stay for too long in the sun because she will have to marry a black man and thus irrecoverably determine the gloomy future of her life.

Unaware of the message conveyed by black classics like Ellison’s Invisible Man(1952) and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye(1970), Marita comes to discover by herself the sense of being invisible, and the idea of feeling persecuted by centuries of racial self-suicide. An admonition filled with dread as well as with anger, “don’t play in the sun!”(9) raises awareness of what her mother wanted to be but could not become, and foreshadows what her subtle existence in life is destined to be like.

Don’t play in the sun .You’re going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is. Say the words silently. Listen to them and hear the anguished reverberation of the voice of three hundred years of mental suicide […]. The sun which is a symbol of life, growth, and power, in my mother’s warning becomes a threat, a harbinger of danger.(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:9).

The definite route from self-fragmentation to alienation and denial goes through the awareness of having to step back in the world, retrieving from one’s daring dreams and unbridled fantasies, and recognizing the shadow within oneself: 184

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

It made no sense that just because of my color I would have to, as the ditty, even I has chanted warned me to do, “step back” because I was black. It made no sense but step back I did. I stepped back in my dreams at night to make way for the light-skinned girls. I stepped back in my fantasies, imagining the amazing and the unpredictable but fearing always that may be half of the fantasy would come true for me.(25).

Another facet of the postmodern Self and its complex interiority comes out as the author ponders about the impossibility of the black woman to be heard and to attain self- realization either through muted passivity, or through voiced-out activism. As Golden herself asserts it, if the black woman attempts to hide herself, others will negate her even further; if she tries to mute herself, others will convert her into a mute existence; if she tries to evade from society, the community will shun and expel her completely. Thus, the only solution is to transform weakness into strength, silence into voice, and parasitism into imminent activism. The worst of all is built-in prejudice and self-constructed discrimination.

Darker-skinned women can sometimes turn rejection into a elf-fulfilling prophecy. If a woman assumes she won’t be heard, she will shout when she perhaps could whisper. If she fears she won’t be loved, love will become impossible. If she fears she is not beautiful, she can never see her own worth in her eyes, or the vision of anyone else.(60).

The conflictual character of one’s Self and the warring coexistence of polarly different personalities within one subject becomes more evident in Marita Golden as she challenges to become part of the Black Power without in fact being able to start with a radical purification of her inner Self first and foremost. Purging society from the remnants of racial and social discrimination means recognizing what one’s Self is like and attempting to eradicate the built-in sense of self-hatred that dictates the world’s approach to the blacks, and specifically the black’s approach to one another. Denying the silenced, beaten down Self that felt that the world’s judgment mattered was no easy way out; recognizing presence, and loving it as embedded in another radical, rebellious Self, was the best way of muting discordance and attempting reconciliation.

But I marched to my own drummer and buried the little girl inside of me that had always stood hunched or folded in on herelf […]. I buried her. I let her go with love. I decided that because she was me I had to love her […]. I then turned on the lights in my soul and invited the Other little girl who had been waiting in the shadows to step forth and stand up straight, to stand up tall, where everybody could see her and where I would never lose sight of her. She was a bad little sister, and I reached out and held her hand and I decided I would never let it go.(39). 185

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

As it will come out through studies of the late thirties and the early forties, the concept of self-hatred among black children comes out in their choice to play with white dolls instead of black ones as well as in the junior high school students’ decision to employ 145 different terms to refer to varying skin color nuances. An important instance of claiming one’s real Self, affirming it, and ultimately feeling comfortable with it comes out even through the episode of Marita deciding to wear dreadlocks. The protagonist of the memoir attempts to make herself feel more authentic and less magazine-like; more hunted for what she really is inside, rather than trophy-like competed for; more liberated rather than suppressed and frustrated.

I got tired of playing games with men, of them telling me I looked like someone in the magazines, of them not being able to see “me” for my light skin and straight hair […]. The locks force brothers to look at me, to try to see who I really am. The locks made me less a sex object. Fewer men come to me now, but I feel I have gained a more liberated sense of myself and an easier way of living in the world.(115).

As is the case with other coeval writers of hers, Marita emphasizes the importance of naming in the process of self-assertion and self-actualization by stating that only when she began using the middle name Marita as her first name instead of Bernette did she feel as if she were adopting a new existence, shedding the old skin of conventionalism and color-blindness to adopt a new approach to people and to herself: “The name Marita fairly glowed in the dark. It sounded unique, memorable. It was a name that danced the samba, and it was a perfect name for a writer/woman shedding the dead skin of a life that had begun to suffocate rather than shelter.”(130).

In terms of TV Protagonism and black and white standards, Golden mentions the case of Halle Berry and Lena Horne and emphasizes the fact that, instead of separatingly trying to view the world in black or white terms, we should consider that mixture and hybridity, be it of cultures, ethnicities, tongues, or skin pigments, always looks and sounds better. So instead of welcoming separatism, we should invite reconciliation, harmony and multiplicity: “the mixture of ethnicities, tongues and tribes that a biracial woman symbolizes, with its hints of sex and domination, submission and the fusing of White and Black or White and Brown, provides just enough color to be interesting but not enough to be offensive.”(96). Nevertheless, the African Americans remain unwilling to hold on to a

186

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. notion of black beauty that is not an extension of White standards that makes room for black women by stretching them over the spectrum. Blacks fail to claim full lips, black skin and full nose as African features and standards.

7.1.1. Motherly “Walking Shoes”: Self and Matrilinealism in Don’t Play in the Sun.

As it comes out through an interview by Tavis Smiley(2004), Marita Golden claims to have inherited from her father the conditional sense of independence and autonomy, while it was her mother that taught her that these states never had to be conditional, one had to be consistent all the way through. Although it is the mother who tells to her daughter that she should not stay for too long in the sun because it will color her black; it is still her who, in Zora Neale Hurston’s terms, invites both of them to “Jump to the sun.”(qtd.in Fries 1993:201). In application of Alice Walker’s concept of “womanism”xxvii, Golden claims that mothers are like dolls, put inside Russian boxes by men, and no matter how despised and diminished they may feel, they always succeed to imagine themselves flourishing beyond the box isolation. As Marita Golden confesses herself, “it is from her mother that (she) got her walking shoes.”(qtd.in Jordan 1993:22), and it was through witnessing the mother’s process of life creation that she also learned to create herself.

Although history rescued Marita from the self and culture-imposed oblivion, and made her fall free of the prison of her mother’s judgments, she could find no way out of feeling influenced by her mother’s assessment. Every single word, every single remark would resonate in her ears all through her life, thereby shaping her life experience and approach. Sacred as the Ten Commandments, scientifically accurate and precise as the laws of gravity, and determining like an inescapable life destiny; the mother’s words remain always the mirror upon which she sees herself reflected and the yardstick by which she measures success and failure in her life.

Why do we remember the words of our mother more than any other? Why does a mother’s assessment of her daughter resonate in the chambers of that daughter’s heart

187

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

like the Ten Commandments? Like the laws of gravity? Like a destiny that you simply cannot escape.(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun :12).

The scope of the matrilineal lines becomes clear in Marita Golden even as the narratee depicts the little girl’s consideration of the evolving relationship between her mother and her sister. In the early childhood, her sister enjoyed the privilege of being the only light- skinned child in a family of four children. Her mother always boasted about her, clothing her in frilly and lacy dresses, carefully combing her straight hair, for then outing her on display for all her family and the people to see. As her sister grew into adolescence, the relationship between the two started to become more tense and critical. The worth- fawning-over light complexion of the sister turned into a threatening combination in the eyes of the mother, and the pride of the early years was substituted by the mother’s jealousy at her looks:

What I am saying is that my mother was actually jealous of her daughter’s looks. She envied her skin and her features. And she couldn’t decide whether to put my sister on a pedestal or punish her for how my sister reminded her that she wasn’t light and bright.(73).

While speaking of her own relationship to her son and eventually shifting from the role of a daughter to that of a mother, Marita asserts in Broken Silences(1993) that her personal motherhood experience has not been an impediment to her. Being a mother has granted her unfathomed energies and endless time that she would not manage to claim otherwise. Ultimately we can say that the matrilineal relationship in Marita Golden is sketched by the life-long impact of the mother’s dire warnings on the author’s character formation, her desperate attempts of self-assertion, and her realizations of living in a world where the impact of colorism is far more outreaching and immense than that of racism. Neither tense, nor completely harmonious, this relationship teaches Marita the right way to come to terms with the warring aspects of one’s Self, by learning to respect one’s diversity and give a voice to the muted feelings and emotions contributing to a shadowed existence.

188

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

7.1.2. Alterity and Conditioned Transcendence: Otherness in Marita Golden’s Don’t Play in the Sun.

In her consideration of the interconnectedness between Self and Otherness, Marita Golden calls for the building up of a sisterhood of identification and solidarity among women of different races and nationalities. No matter what the skin pigmentocracy seems to suggest, women of all races are the same under their skin: going through the same societal and communal frustrations, playing the same roles in life, and claiming for similar self-assertions. Quoting the words of her therapist, Audrey Chapman, Marita ponders that gender bonds and ties should surpass race and colorism boundaries, and make women feel the same in front of the male gaze because of having to experience the same objectification and hypersexualization and because of having to go through the same belittling and invisibility.

It doesn´t matter if we’re light or if we’re dark, We all feel like we’re not enough of who we are Because we are always being pursued, attacked or Rejected because of what we look like (Therapist Audrey Chapman qtd. in Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:108).

Marita Golden’s passage from childhood to adolescence is accompanied by a rejection to be defined by the others, and by the development of a political awakening and cultural arousal. Golden’s consideration of the importance of Otherness in the determination of one’s sense of selfhood comes out more clearly as she articulates her perception of racism in the American society. Golden brings forth evidence of the way how famous black protagonists: (artists, politicians, models and sportsmen), are continually denied appearance on the screen, and are constantly debased and depreciated because of their skin color. The darker components of the black society always find themselves standing at the end of the line, marginalized and unable to integrate themselves in the flow of the mainstream society. They are discriminated in many ways, from not being selected as beauty queens, to being passed over for jobs and promotions. TV channels are blanketed with images of European-looking, lighter-skinned blacks who turn down the stereotypes of mammy, Beulah, or the Sapphire.

189

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The 2002 Grammy Awards Episode confronts the biracial beauty of Alicia Keys and the black ethnic beauty of India.Arie, with a resulting defeat of the latter under the subtle pretense of threatening and challenging the conventional White-supremacist wisdom: “At the Grammy awards India.Arie heard her name read seven times, and each time someone else won, and five times it was Alicia Keys.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:107). Television remains one of the most powerful tools of trumpeting the white supremacy, young black girls always turning on the set and looking for a vaguely resembling variant of themselves on films and TV shows. Most of the time they disappointingly come to realize that the only way to succeed in the American society is by absorbing the white standards:

And I am always looking for me, brown skinned, coarse-haired me, on the screen (as the sexy strong-willed yet vulnerable female doctor; as the love interest of the handsome Black or White Lawyer; even as the woman in distress the hero risks all to save). I look for me every time I turn on my set.(84).

In her fight against racism and colorism, Marita discovers her Otherness in the fictional and real stereotypes of black women who seem to provide her with a transcendent vision of herself and assist her into uncovering the innermost depths of her being. Fictionally speaking, even when she attempts to suit and conform, she is haunted by the Sapphirexxviii anger and the Beulahxxix nurturing Self. Realistically speaking, she is influenced by the spectrum of human emotion conveyed by the performance of the actress Cicely Tyson. As Alice Walker later on states, when quoted by Marita Golden:

Even black leaders, who claim to be fighting for the affirmation of the blacks in society, have themselves chosen as wives lighter-complexioned ladies, who most probably keep nearer to the yardsticks of the white American society. Because it is apparent that though they may have consciously affirmed blackness in the abstract and for the others, for themselves light remained right:(qtd. in Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:103).

A facet of the interconnectedness between Self and Other starts to unfold as Marita starts to deal with the concept of cultural hybridity and her status as a “mestiza” negotiating the borderline between two cultures, while at the same time tramping over that borderline only to realize that she is a participant of both and neither of them. It is the 1970s, and the American culture forcibly penetrates into the public tastes and consciousness of the African youth culture. America still remains a territory where outdated practices of genital mutilation and polygamy are still widely practiced. It is this cross-boundary

190

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. situation that makes Marita feel helpless in deciding whether to listen to the blatant emancipatory call of her own culture or to the underdeveloped cries of the savage Africa.

The cultural discordance is also metaphorically represented in the episode in which Marita unsuccessfully tries to tune her radio into the American frequencies, by at the same time recognizing the presence of the African vernacular in the background: “Stuck in the interminable go-slow, I can turn on the radio in my Subaru and hear Stevie Wonder’s ‘I wish’ or Bill Withers ‘Lovely Day’. The deejay will hold forth in a mix of Nigerian vernacular and Black-American-influenced slang.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:48). As Marita emphasizes in the passages to follow, Africans themselves fail to view the best of the cultural hybridity, and always cast themselves in the robes of an uncivilized, worthless community to whom civilization has been transferred by the Europeans and who consider physical and mental enslavement as the best practice for straight-jacketing otherwise barbarian tribes. Shaped in the form of an ongoing cultural narrative, this view has been passed down from generation to generation, interacting with the African minds: “poisoned by generations of psychological colonialism and shame among some at many things African.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:151).

The institution of marriage and the way how the African tribal successors deal with it is another dimension along which the African culture differs from the American culture. In Africa, specifically in Nigeria, no woman is conceived free in any way. A woman’s role is fulfilled once married and child-bearing, which is why African girls will go to great lengths to be provided with a husband. The social dependency of women upon men is also influenced by the economical subordination of the former. As it comes out in Marita Golden’s words: “Women need men in their lives to survive […]. They are not just buying cream. They are buying a dream of a better life.” (Lacey The Saturday Profile 2002:8). For Golden, we should not attempt to criticize people for artificially trying to alter their physical features, as long as we do not ourselves contribute to create an ideal, spotless world where they feel free to be what they want to.

191

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Besides finding an Other in the racial conceptions and the cultural diversity of Nigeria, Marita also succeeds specifically in finding an Other in a person, Zora Neale Hurston. Her psychological and physical portrait represents what lay hidden and suffocated in the innermost feelings of Marita, confidence in being able to “get a toehold of the world”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun :183), no matter one’s skin color or hair texture. Able to claim the right place in the grid of life, away from the societal coercions and the Jim Crowe evocations, Zora represents everything a brown woman would wish to be in life.

Zora Neale Hurston seems to be the peace her dislocated, restless Self had been searching for. Cast in periods of fatherly reconciliation and recrimination, hovering between persistent divergences and momentous differences, journeying from Africa to the States, to Europe and back to America, she seemed to find home in a person rather than in a path, a boulevard or a stray way of her life. Catching a glimpse of Zora in the sanctuary of the church: “uncustomarily silent, her spirit completely at ease in the midst of her brown-skinned sisters.”(189), Marita is provided with the answers to all the dilemmatic questions arising in her mind. Considered attractive and aristocratically seductive, “Zora dramatized, satirized and ridiculed the color complex and its effects.”(185).

The best lesson Zora Neale Hurston taught to Marita was becoming a woman of letters, opening oneself to the muse and never trying to suffocate what seemed to dwell within one’s heart. A brown-skinned woman who had caught the world’s attention and made the world kneel in front of her talent and her beauty, Zora Neale Hurston made it inevitable for Marita to think of starting to write free of the hold of the racist and colorist assumptions, liberated from the shackles of such black stereotypes as the Sapphire or the Beulah.

It is only towards the end, while trying her free hand in writing, and while addressing an open letter to all the skeptical and frustrated black girls, that Marita celebrates black complexion considering every trait of the African American girl’s body as a feast on its own, a muse worth of having poetry and verses dedicated. Written in the resolved tone of an activist woman who has learned to really believe that black is beautiful, Golden´s

192

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. autobiography imperatively asks black girls to get rid of skin complexes and hair texture fixations for embracing even the most irreconcilable and unmatching traits of their body.

I am writing this letter to tell you a very simple and yet elemental thing that as a young dark-hued Black girl must know and always cherish. You are black and you are beautiful […]. Really look at your skin. It is deep dark. It is deep dark, it is almost black. Do you know how many wondrous, amazing, beautiful things in the world are the color of you? […]. See the beauty of your face. But you can not see your face, really see it until you clear your mind […]. Get rid of the hair fixation. Pack it up and seal the box and throw it away […]. Strong. Tight. Coiled. It is the kind of hair that you are supposed to have.(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:191).

The mirror that up to those moments served as a sad confessor of the acceptance of the protagonist’s inferiority turns into the commemoration of her beauty, the celebration of the natural way in which the African physical traits have been assembled into a whole.

Marita renders it clear that whenever one is wearing European–looking hair, or applying Western bleaching creams, one does not reach the absolute sense of content and satisfaction one is meant to. The physically manipulated black girl will always feel naked, exposed and ashamed of the artificial beauty she celebrates to have obtained. Although we attempt to face life in groups, getting to accept the black Self dwelling within each of us is a task to be handled exclusively alone: “The day I stood in front of the mirror and saw and loved my face and my hair for the first time in my life, I was alone-- completely, utterly alone.”(193). Aware that we cannot change anyone’s attitudes as forcibly and as decisively as we can change ours, Marita invites her readers to respect the black within them by in this way exalting the whole universe of women who provide us with an idea of ancestry and cultural heritage indispensable for claiming one’s integrity. No I won’t make it a test (smile), and I promise I won’t judge your responses. I want you to know that there is a universe of Black women, past and present, that you are related to, and many of them reflect your specific black beauty […]. Even if you don’t always feel valuable and proud, and there will be days like that, assert it anyway. That assertion, honored regularly, will turn the words into reality.(194).

The gaze of the Other is determinant in claiming our standing in the society but, before learning to respect what the Other voices, we should learn to listen to the internal voices of the Self. It is these internal voices that invite us to celebrate what we are rather than

193

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. rage at it; commemorate uniqueness rather than strive for reconciliation; and exalt blackness instead of attempting to manipulate it.

7.1.3 Convex Lense. Colorism and Intra- Racial Discrimination in Marita

Golden’s narrative.

Marita Golden’s treatment of the color complex is complex in it Self: at times it is a powerful call against the presence of inter- and intra-racial discrimination in the United States; Other times it takes the form of a continuous cry too offensive to those who have learned to accept themselves the way they are. Ultimately, encouraging everyone to enjoy their skin complexion, Golden brings forth several episodes of clashes with the color complex. In one of them, she refuses to enter a distinguished black university because she does not want to feel concerned about the opacity or darkness of her skin complexion. In another episode, she witnesses friends being teased for having black girlfriends and brings forth examples of important personages from Nigeria to Cuba to reveal the effects of colorism on the American culture.

Accepting the definition of the color complex as a “belief system that maintains that white is better than black or light is more desirable than darkness in an individual’s skin tone.”(Heather The Commonwealth Times 2/14/05), Marita uses friends’ live clips, media images and stereotypes to explore the effects of skin color discrimination on the consciousness of people of African descent. As Elisabeth Donis states in her review: “The stories are painful reminders of the pervasive, persistent effect of racism and oppression in the psyche of the African people around the world and the extent to which we have internalized the beliefs of our oppressors that we are unattractive, unworthy and undesirable.”(Donis 2004:2). Golden considers color neither as an exclusively black thing, nor as a solely American phenomenon; it is rather a global obsession with the legacy of colonialism, as a source of alienation from family and society. This is perhaps why she chooses to marry a Nigerian, thereby rejecting home and her mother’s considerations of colorism together with it.

194

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Empirically speaking, since the beginning of her autobiography, Marita ponders over the subjectivity of color and the way we regard skin color and racial features as produced by our built-in knowledge and expectations. Whenever we realize that a trait does not fit into our considerations of the Self, we immediately categorize it by exclusion as an Other and attribute to it all the external, unfamiliar qualities. Color may be regarded as an illusion, with much the same power as it may be regarded as a reality-perceiving lens. Involved in a kind of maze game, we ourselves fall victims to the same prejudices and stereotyping we are meant to fight against: “Color is in many ways an illusion. It is a game we play. It is subjective. We judge color not with our eyes but with our emotions. Our prejudices. Our longings. Our fears. Our hearts.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:13).

The subjectivity in the treatment of the color concept becomes even more evident while Marita etymologically deals with the definition of black and white by emphasizing that, as dictionary entries, these two colors appear as absences of a particular nuance rather than as presences of a definite tinge. While black is, on the one hand, defined as lacking light hue and brightness, white comes out as multiple and void, transparently reflecting all rays of light. As far as body equations are concerned, light skin and straight hair triumph over dark pigmentation and coarse Afro hair.

The childhood experiences astoundingly also make Marita come to comprehend and blindly accept the place the color complex occupies in her society. As even she herself asserts it , the sun, a symbol of life, light and regeneration, turns into a threatening presence in her life when considered as an accentuation of her physical drawbacks and a materialization of her lifelong damnation. The mother’s warning sets Marita on the dark alley of the color complex and becomes a reverberation of her motto along the way. The only recognition to lighten her path will be that racial discrimination, more than culturally-built, is personally-built and we should never expect others to love us unless we start loving and appreciating ourselves more: “Come on in the house-- it’s too hot to be playing out here. I’ve told you don’t play in the sun. You are going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:4).

195

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Marita is aware of her mother fighting against a world she had not herself constructed and which she herself did not know how to dismantle, a world full of traps and pitfalls where the only way out was defense rather than attack. Since the fifth grade, Marita experiences the first teenage love disappointments, awareness of being avoided by boys lighter skinned than her, and bitter recognitions of appearing in front of them as an object of disgust, an un-cleanliness one cannot easily remove: “When he touches my fingers, Gregory jumps back and ostentatiously wipes his hands on the side of his jeans, as though now his hand will never be clean again, and walks back to his desk and sits down”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:5).

There is a point in the autobiography in which Marita makes clear what she means by racism and colorism and states that the problem of passing and differentiating, though muted up to now, should be viewed as the most critical one feeding the hatred and the competition between the members of the black society, making them appear less unified in the eyes of the white community, and resultingly providing this community with an additional excuse for the exercise of oppression and discrimination. One thing is asserting one Self as black, and an Other thing is asserting the black Self one really wants to be.

I knew that colorist attitudes were a reality in many historically Black colleges. I felt that I could handle racism at a White school more effectively than colorism at a Black school. Because the color complex is a form of intra-racial genocide, because it positions Blacks versus Blacks, the emotional toll it imposes and the lack of trust and acceptance of others that it breeds are exhausting and demoralizing.(47).

Marita Golden’s road along the color complex is paved all the way to include the black sororities and the mulatto follies, the black shunning from the society, and the India.Arie anthems. This road is also made up of attempts to infiltrate the popular crowds of lighter complexioned kids in school, experiences of coming into one’s own in a white American university and scenes of marrying a Nigerian as a reminder of the dark-stringed father. To start with, writing of the participation of blacks in films, Marita Golden brings forth the phenomenon of the Mulatto follies, a situation where dark actresses, disappointed by racism and colorism, reject showing up in response to a casting call. Victims to a series of belittling experiences and episodes, the black actresses are unable to believe in their attractiveness and do not have even the thick skin to appear on the casting auditions and 196

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. claim their roles in the films. “Who knows what a darker-skinned actress has gone through to get to a point where she gets cast in a major role?”(88). The most traditional roles black women find themselves thrown into are those of subservient domestics, manic-depressive teachers, and diligent defense attorneys. It is unlikely that they will ever be regarded as attractive or graceful epithets conserved exclusively for their remarkably white counterparts.

While Sarah is cleaning the bathroom or mopping the kitchen floor, on TV, her light- skinned sister who may be ethnically ambiguous, is romping it up with her White pals, on the beach, drinking upscale coffee in a chic café, making dinner with her White buddies while comparing the benefits of a particular brand of Pill, or grooving in the backseat of a Mazda to jar or rap while snuggled up beside a young White boy.(86-87).

Nevertheless, even black men do not fall short of this kind of media stereotyping. Mutely submitting to the media enforced marginalization, they appear as dark-skinned gangster thugs in music videos, or “illustrious” antagonistsin murder or mayhem news.

While considering the degree to which darker-skinned artists and singers have succeeded and at the same time failed in the television and media world, the author regards the case of Michael Jackson as a parody of the “Black folks’ love affair with whiteness.”(101). Rather than representing the black pride, Michael Jackson represents the black shame. He is the one to have infiltrated deeper and deeper into the hearts and the skins of blacks to the notion of the color neurosis, to have subtly produced a video promoting colorism, for then succeeding with applying colorism in his own body and artificially attempting to remove any remaining vestige of his blackness. Changing his own Self into a distorted hybrid existence, Jackson has come up loudly for the supremacy of the White standards of beauty. Nevertheless, the case of Michael Jackson is neither more desperate, nor more fortunate than that of many other blacks that remain obsessed about the issue of color to the point that colorism turns to be more threatening than interracial discrimination itself: “No doubt we remain brain damaged on the issue of color.”(101).

The extent of the impact of colorism on the black community comes out in the autobiography even through the episode of the autobiographer Patricia Warley being beaten by her father for socializing with darker-skinned children in the neighborhood. Him Self an activist of the Black Power Movement, Patricia’s father hated of his 197

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. daughter her wanting to look darker than she was, and attempted to sharpen the few white features that the daughter’s complexion bore. Having gone through a childhood of unbearable contradictions, Patricia is reminded of her fondness for black music and dance at a time when her parents tried to imbibe in her the idea that she was different from the Other darker-skinned girls “the jigaboos”, she had “high genes” and “blond hair”(113). Fake activists behind the closed doors, deep under their skin her parents were vowed colorists.

The irony was that on the surface, my father was really what you would call a “race man” in terms of his activism to bring about equality for Blacks and social change. But whenever he caught me playing with the darker-skinned children in our neighborhood, he’d beat me and tell me “I don’t want to see you going home with those niggers again.”(113).

The worst discrimination of all, Marita Golden states, originates from within the black community: black husbands and brothers never appreciating their wives and their sisters for what they are and always searching in whiteness for the ideal standards of measuring beauty. If we attempt to walk down the streets, peep into the luxurious American skyscrapers, or delve deep into the black people’s dreams and nightmares, we will come to realize that beneath the apparent homogeneity and congruence of black life there exists heterogeneity, internal discrimination and disruption: “We are shouting. Screaming. Yelling for our psychic lives. Darker-skinned Black women know in their hearts and live with a terrible secret. Our men, (our psychic twins, our alter egos) often don’t value us as we are.”(59). As the author confesses, things will never run the proper way for blacks as long as intra-racial discrimination is stronger and more outreaching than the interracial one.

The impact of colorism is so outreaching that Marita ends up hating her Self for having internalized the very prejudices she aims to fight against. On one hand, she condemns the colorism of Patricia Warley’s father and Michael Jackson’s early youth experiences; on the Other hand, while in the company of darker-skinned friends, she subtly starts to question the role pigmentocracy plays in determining her approach to people. Marita ultimately reaches the conclusion that we are complex beings who “build the same walls I (we) try to tear down. And some part of my friend will always be “little black me.”(70).

198

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Regardless of the fact whether we are dealing with a bleached-white or tar-black body, coloring is less a biological given and more a sociologically built-in conception used as a yardstick for measuring one’s performance in society.

7.1.4. “Journeying Selves” and Diverging Cultures. Self and Location in Marita Golden´s Autobiography.

Marita Golden’s autobiography should be appraised for “the intimacy and the intensity with which she deals with the question of identity vis-à-vis that of the African present and the African past.”(Frias Atlantis xx(1) 1998:206). Traveling to the remotest parts of Africa is not just visiting, it is journeying, getting married to an African man, trying to find a cultural identity and obtain an artistic identity as a writer.

Marita Golden’s shifting selves start to unfold as she moves from Washington D.C., a chocolate city with an entrenched history of colorism, to Nigeria, and back to the United States. While deciding to move to Nigeria after her marriage to a black man, Golden recognizes a shift in cultures and education that is accompanied with an eventual shift in her black Self. Americanized on the one hand and tribe loyal on the Other hand, Marita becomes the most attractive mixture:

By marriage I am part of a prosperous Yoruba clan. My husband’s father, who died the year before, had twelve wives and had sired nearly sixty children. The status of the members of Femi’s family ranges from PH.D.’s to the illiterate, from business tycoons to the wretchedly poor.(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:147).

Speaking of what had made her feel infatuated to Femi, Golden regards color genuiness and authenticity of skin as the most important phenotypes.Golden’s divorce from Femi in 1984 and the eventual dislocation back home all the way through to Senegal, and then her setting on a passionate loving adventure with Marc, a Belgian painter, sets up the scene for the creation of a dislocated, postmodern Self that feels at home in all the places and in none of them at the same time. If from Nigeria Marita received the agility to absorb and accommodate different cultures; from Belgium and Paris she learned to love the “man of the world” side of her character and to adore even its most irreconcilable traits. Be it

199

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. because of the European attraction with the African exotic call, or be it because of the public attention received, Marita starts to feel right in her skin and love the international formation of her character. Subsequently, dating Murray in the 1990s completes her vision of the world and adds to her interculturality and “mestiza” state. Getting to know different people and different communities broadens her worldly knowledge and furthers her acceptance of difference.

While Brazil appears to be the country in which racism hardly seems to exist, Cuba brings a different image. Together with Joe, Marita decides to visit Cuba in the spring of 2002. In Cuba it is usually the case that white fathers deny the black mother of their children in a helpless attempt to purge the mulatto child’s blood and provide them with the same privileges as those of the children of white men. Cuba is the country where Assata Shakur finds grounds for the development of her activism, and Manuel, a tour guide hopes of one day opening a travel agency of his own. Cuba is also a racial cornupia, the place where descendants of Africans and Spanish colonial settlers hurry past the narrow streets and in the meagerly supplied shops. In this country the mulatto denomination is the most favorite of the racial designations, going beyond the rigid racial classification of the United States, and considering the female counterpart as the “island’s ultimate symbol of beauty.”(177).

While coldly contemplating about the “black and brown socialist nation”(179) that is Cuba, she also learns to know herself better. Experience makes her realize that, as far as colorism is something learned worldwide, we have to unlearn it in a similar multidimensional level if we do not want its blossoms to flourish in every country and in every experience. As Frias also asserts in her article in the Atlantis Journal, “colorism penetrates like a virus the hard-disk of every country, compromising and manipulating the memory of its people and the vision of its youth”( Frias 1998:199), and depriving them of the capacity to limit if not shun its impact: “More than any other recent experience, this week in Cuba has dramatized for me that colorism is a global phenomenon, a truly international virus. Its cruelest impact is in the stifled opportunities and wretched lives of its victims.”(179).The tribal authenticity of Nigeria, the tumultuous reality of Washington D.C. and the cultivating historicity of Paris and Belgium teach

200

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Marita to love herself for what she is and highlight her differences instead of attempting to suffocate the existent divergences.

7.2. Skin Fetishism and Body Objectification in Marita Golden´s Autobiography

In the opening pages of Marita Golden’s autobiography, the author delights at thinking of herself in the robes of an adorable white girl with light skin and straight hair, venerating her projected mirror image and enjoying self-confidence and self-assertion. Nevertheless, as we will come to realize in the pages to follow, the white kaleidoscope is not efficient enough to grant the girl a sense of stability and unification. The little Marita will be enabled to discover her real Self only through acceptance of every single physical and spiritual feature.

It is pitiful to witness the dreamlike state the little girl falls in while thinking of her Self as Snow White. As all the protagonists of the fairy tale narratives she was brought up with were white, Marita can only hope to enter the dream world as a light-skinned black with predominantly white features.

Standing before that mirror I am Snow White. I am Cinderella. My short, has-to-be– straightened-with-a-hot-comb hair has disappeared. My hands, like hungry butterflies, are lost in the soft, imaginary tendrils that I see with a contented, dangerous, stranger’s eyes. With those eyes I convince myself that I can actually see the metamorphosis of the scarves into shoulder-length and even sometimes blond hair that frames my chubby brown face, and that at last, makes me real. (Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:4).

In the intertextually distorted version of Snow White, differentiation is made between white beauty and black ugliness, rather than between the young kind looks of Snow White and the black old wickedness of the witch. The mirror, Marita finds herself in front of, is not the mirror of reality, it is rather the convex mirror of societal built-in prejudice and discrimination. The mirror of the American society is no longer the loyal reflection of equality and opportunity, rather it is a distorted depiction of racism and colorism in the United States. Mirror, Mirror on The Wall Who´s the Finest of them All? Snow White, you black bitch, And Don’t You Forget it (“Mirror,Mirror” From the Ain’t Jokin’ Series,1987-88 Artist: Carrie Weems qtd.in Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:92) 201

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The solution to this mystery comes by Marita herself. A mirror is always a projection of what we feed into it. When we try to bring to the mirror every expectation and dream that rages within our mind, the mirror will in turn subtly reflect our fears and anguishes. A discriminatory assessment of her body comes out as Marita reads her missing value in the depreciation of her father and the negligence of the people surrounding her.

The mirror was not neutral, because I brought to the mirror all the various constructions of beauty that raged in my mind. I looked into the mirror and saw not what was there, but what I believed was there […]. Today young Black girls, influenced by a relentless and steady diet of music videos, find themselves gazing into a cruel, pitiless mirror that like all mass media packages sexuality and beauty in the most homogenized way and that invalidates any expressions of beauty that deviate from the established “norm” (Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:99).

In Marita Golden’s words, the worst discrimination to be is that of blacks toward members of their own society. Classifying them as brown, copper brown, mulatto light- black, etc. is a mute contribution to the furthering of injustice and inequality in society, and a silent acceptance of the standards that the white society imposes on blacks.

And there are the more specific descriptive terms that separate Blacks and create castes, and cliques, and that are ultimately definitions not of color but of culturally defined beauty and ugliness, and that can end up distributing everything from power to wealth to love. High yellow, high yalla, saffron, octoroon, quadroon, redbone, light brown, black as tar, coal, blue-veined, café aux lait, pinkie, blue-black.(7).

The internal fissure of the black society becomes even more evident in the episodes where Marita speaks of her teenage years in Washington D.C., her coming to know about cotillion parties (lavish coming-out parties for upper class black daughters), and about the Gold Coast (the 16th street, center of the black community bordering the white community).

Episodes of the negation of the black body are respectively followed by scenes of Self- assertion. Such is the case of the episode in which, as a twelve year old, Marita is preparing for bed, after having had a bath. The mother calls her husband inviting him to admire the shapeful nudity of their black daughter. She manages to convert every single self-despised component of her daughter’s body into an adorable physical feature: round and full hips, sensuous breast and a lovely chest. Shivering in the nudity of the scene, and

202

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. warmed by her mother’s gaze and utterances, Marita is happy to discover that there is pride and affirmation in her father’s glance as well.

My mother stood near the closet beaming with pride. I avoid my father’s gaze for much of this extraordinary event […]. My father looked at my body with a loving father’s eyes, seeing him Self, his genes, his cells his blood, his skin in me. […] That was one of the most vulnerable and sacred moments I ever shared with my parents, a moment in which they gazed upon my brown body, exposed, fragile, still forming and blessed it. Together they turned my Black girl’s body into a temple(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:32).

As time goes by and the Black Power movement gives a great contribution for the assertion of the black Self with the “black is beautiful”(34) motto removing the lethal “white is beautiful”, the late sixties already find Marita, a girl proud of the colorism of her body, comfortable in her own skin, and boasting about the increasing presence of darker-skinned girls in the pages of Ebony or the beauty pageants of America. The Black Power calls of the late 60´s also invite her to reconcile her warring selves and embrace and accept her new “Me”(37). Involvement in the Black Power movement and radicalism would teach her that physical phenotypes and racist prototypes are just a distorted anatomy backed up by the black self-hatred and colorism. Struggle for the uprooting of the racial and social prejudices has to start from the striving to eradicate the internalized misconceptions:

They are not water melon or banana lips or any of the racist stereotypes propagated and encouraged by the larger culture and even by black people. They are just lips! And that a broad nose is a nose. A nose that fits our phenotype. White people’s lips don´t speak pearls of wisdom because they are thin. They are body parts. Anatomy.(38).

It is only far forward in the book that Marita invites us to change the lenses through which we gaze at the members of our own society. Unable to evict the enemy of colorism from our own minds and look at black skin unmitigated and unapologetically, we should let an invisible screen descend so as to separate us from the negativeness of society, and permit ourselves to gaze with new eyes: “Asserting that ‘Black is Beautiful’ is but a first step on a journey that will require that we gaze at ourselves with new eyes. Eyes created by a new mind.”(94).

All through her autobiography, Marita questions the societal standards for measuring whites and blacks. By placing one in front of the Other, the black and white societal

203

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. yardsticks, she calls our attention to the absurd subjectivity of these parameters. On one hand there are young black girls attempting to lighten their skin and straighten their hair; on the other hand there are white women perming their straight hair or wearing dreadlocks and getting collagen injections in their lips to obtain more sensual looking mouths. The ridiculous side of the situation develops even more as we realize that black women are always attempting to bleach their skins white, and white women to tan their skins black.

Marita’s awareness of the situation grows even as she catches a glimpse of the ever changing trends of evaluation in the heterogeneous community of the United States. Whenever straight hair is in, she feels outlandish and has to go to great lengths to have her Afro style straightened into European looking hair texture; when on the other hand the Afro comes into fashion, she will feel equally a stranger in her own world:

The funny thing is that the next year, the Afro was in style and I couldn’t get one because my hair was too straight. Then the same girls who had been fawning over me, rejected me because I literally looked like Marlow Thomas. Nothing I did would change my hair. (110).

The erratic matching of Serena Williams’ black body with blond hair makes Marita ponder about the hybrid looks of the tennis player and the biased gaze of the protagonist: “I admit that while I applaud what Serena is saying with her body, there is a part of me that wants to censor the statement I read into her hair.”(142).

In Marita Golden’s autobiography hair texture and hair styling stand as measuring yardsticks for whiteness or blackness as well as reflections on the idea of inherent beauty or artificially acquired attractiveness. As Marita states it herself, hair is the question posed to the heterogeneous community and the very answer to it: “Hair is history. Hair is religion. Hair is politics. And blondness is many things for a Black woman. It is whimsy. It is a fashion statement. It is fad. It is a puzzle.”(141). The author confesses that black women turn out to be the social group that spends more money than any other group on hair doing, feeling more obsessed by such parameters and having less success with them. Puzzlement and bewilderment arises in Marita as she fails to differentiate between the black and white phenotypes.

204

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

I reach for the magazine, a near tumult of emotions fomenting inside me. Her body is buff and beautiful, but the sight of the blond tresses, the weave so deftly done that it completely obscures her own hair, fill me with ambivalence […]. But black women are fired, demoted, reprimanded and ostracized for wearing locks, twists or braids in some workplaces because the look is “too ethnic”.(138-139).

A mixture of several strains, coarse and straight, her European looking hairstyle never made her feel comfortable or self-confident, but just increased her uncertainty of the adolescent years. The Afro, the natural would set her free of the mania of “bone-straight, pressed, ironed hair that beat back the genetic influence of our West African Ancestors.”(33).

Blacks are so uneasy about skin complexion and hair texture that being “black as tar” means signing in for one’s utter alienation and exclusion from society; and being light- skinned or ultimately blonde means being a target of conquest and sexual exploitation. It is only being neither too light nor too dark that enables them to be appraised by society as beautiful and graceful. While speaking to the beautician as a brown-skinned woman, she frustratingly confesses having had to grope her way through the dilemma of skin pigmentation: Women come to me and want to discuss their desire to have their lips made thinner and their noses made smaller […]. Light-skinned women can become very insecure because they have depended on men to tell them they are beautiful […]. Light women can be victims of tremendous sexual exploitation. Men will just run through them because they see them as a conquest.(119).

Racial stereotypes remain as ambiguous as the American reality itself. Being tar black culturally threatens to make you look like a “mammy”-- overweight, preposterous and a sex object. Being blonde, on the other hand, risks letting you hover between denominations such as “Platinum blonde. Golden blonde. Trophy blonde. Beautiful Blonde. Dumb blonde.”(136).

While dealing with the African beauty pageants, Golden conveys the idea that neither dark African-like beauty, nor white European-like charm are successful. Rather a mixture of the two seems to construct an ideal body likely to be appreciated by the media, the surrounding community and the selection committees of the beauty pageants. It is only when the selection committee finally decided in 2001 to choose as Nigeria’s most

205

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. beautiful girl a physical and “cultural mestiza”, a hybrid of copper-pigmented, stately, skinny girl, did Nigeria really get to have a voice in the International beauty contest. It is this same year that Nigeria won the Miss World Title in Sun City, South Africa. It had taken years of defeat and disillusionment and a complete overthrow of the black measuring standards to come to realize that what the world needed to see was not voluptuous black beauties with “ample backsides and bosoms”(159), but rather European-like beauties covered in a black African skin.

This mixture of parameters, ideals, stereotypes and phenotypes is once again asserted when, after having been divorced from Femi in 1984, Marita goes to Senegal embarking on a love affair with Marc, a Belgian painter who sets her on the discovery of black beauty and self-appreciation. Coming from a community of irrecoverably pale people, Marc comes to love the coloring of Marita´s body, considering every trait and feature of her black existence as a gift from God, and as a peculiarity worth appreciating: “Marc tells me early in our relationship that I am beautiful, and that he is attracted to women of color because of the beauty of our skin, because we have color […] he finds all the shades that Black people possess, from café au lait to ebony ‘a gift from God’.”(160).

Racial preferentiality goes hand in hand with class favoritism, with the gentlemen going for lighter skinned blondes, and lower class blacks going for mammy-like young girls. No matter where you regard yourself pertaining to, being authentically black and authentically white was never enough in American society: “Guys always cheated on me with women who were European looking. You know, the long hair type […]. Being a regular Black girl wasn’t good enough.(Lil´Kim Newsweek Magazine qtd.in Golden Don´t Play in the Sun :137)

Marita turns her eyes to the place artificial beauty occupies in contemporary society including people’s obsession with plastic surgery, the frenzy of lightening and whitening products, and the craze of modifying one’s hair texture. According to her, there should be no fixed beauty standards, everything should be considered beautiful in its own right and for its own sake. European standards of beauty, Marita confers, should be held just as fake norms, made to be broken and disrespected time after time. The subjectivity of

206

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. beauty should give each of us a good lesson in respecting ourselves and others, and harmoniously fitting into the world without trying to force one’s place in it:

Beauty is subjective, personal and culturally determined. Venus and Serena are not beautiful by European standards. They are too dark, their features too clearly, absolutely non-White. But if I were to establish a “Black” standard of beauty, Venus and Serena Williams would symbolize it.(Golden Don’t Play in the Sun:132).

Much attention is paid in the autobiography to Yinka’s story, the narrative of the helpless attempts of a twenty-year-old student, a Math major in the University of Ibadan, cousin of Femi who has completely distorted her appearance and misshaped her identity by applying incredible amounts of cancerous bleaching creams on her body to make her complexion seem lighter. Instead of being converted into an attractive light-skinned girl, she has turned into a helpless creature completely ravaged with pockmarks who have taken the place of what used to be her natural tissue. Funnily enough, the bleaching creams, a forcible denial of the African heritage, have been exported from the U.S. and are displayed by retail and wholesale dealers in the same shelves with African food and clothing. Marita becomes very critical at the sight of such an ostentatious way of artificializing black beauty, and begins to consider the convivial of the two cultures as an odd transference of customs and beliefs into a false environment: “Another romantic illusion of Africa shot down.”(149). The composing substance of the cream, the hydroquinone, erodes the skin’s melamine, thereby making the skin vulnerable to cancer or other diseases.

The African male community has unintentionally been involved in a race for courting bleachers. Although the black males fakingly claim to love “natural”, “un-manipulated women”; they instinctively and unintentionally fall for bleachers, a symbol of triumphing whiteness. Thus the fetishizing of light skin is related to the broader racial climate of the United States in which if you are light, you will look more likeable and be courted by more men; if you are dark, you will look more unattractive and fall into the margins of society.

207

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

7.3. Postcard Reminscences and Permeable Narrative Borders. Self and Memory in

Marita Golden's Don't Play in the Sun

In her autobiography Marita Golden expresses the dualism that exists in her home through the dual interweaving of fiction and non-fiction. On the one hand she is daughter of an ebony-hued father who cherishes her and teaches her to be black and proud and a lighter-skinned mother who admonishes her not to play too long in the sun; on the other hand she peppers her narrative with “Postcards from the Color Complex”, reminiscences of her most powerful experiences, newspaper reports, interviews to black people including a psychotherapist, a cultural historian, a biracial writer, a TV Producer and her friends. As it comes out in Broken Silences(1993), “the autobiographer uses and needs fiction to come to terms with the internal world of her own particular fears, fantasies and dreams, and to weave the whole into the texture of the outer world.”(Jordan 1993:76). Writing thus is a way of giving to oneself a vision and significance that the world generally seeks to deny.

In view of what writing poetry means for a person, Marita Golden confirms that writing about the color complex requires an indispensable distortion of the truth, either in the form of encryption or in the form of surrendering to the caprices of memory. Writing about memory, on the other hand, entails being brave enough to witness and to hide, to remember and to disremember, chronologically and chaotically: “Writing this book, I surrender to memory. Writing this book I inevitably seek out and find others brave enough to witness, question and remember.”(Golden Don´t Play in the Sun:53). Marita challenges even more the reliability of autobiography in general and of memory in particular when she considers memory a reality and a fiction at the same time, words building a nest in one’s ear and coming out of there in manipulated, adorned or distorted ways: “I don’t remember my response to my mothers admonition. Memory is at best a mere suggestion, at worst a fiction we would bet our lives on.”(6).

All through her autobiography, Marita depicts the impact of her people’s memory on her poetry writing. She gets so absorbed in the book that it seems as if it is the book writing down her life, rather than Golden deciding what to put down in it. The autobiography

208

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. absorbs her to the point that she cannot hide or escape from it, but just has to surrender to the flow of events. “I have wanted to write this book for a very long time, and now that I am writing it, there is nowhere for me to run. Nowhere for me to hide.”(11).

Important touchstones in Marita Golden’s revelation of the relationship between Self and memory are the visits at the psychotherapist, the poetry writing experiences, the postcard and interview meta-texts, and the black woman’s anger episodes. While visiting the psychotherapist, Golden gets involved in a double interview, questioning her art and the veracity of her statements on the one hand, and cross-examining the psychotherapist and her views about the color complex on the other hand. While at the psychotherapist’s, she is reminded of the same scene of 12 years ago when she intentionally kept bits and pieces of her life hidden and secret, mutely resolved to fit into what the society considers the ideal girl pattern. The mother’s admonition is never considered as something interfering with her dreams, never something holding her back, it was always considered as a patchwork of memory worth forgetting and disremembering, rather than having it distort and manipulate reality.

I sat in this same room twelve years ago, and I never told you about my mother’s admonition. For if I told you I would have to reveal the anger I had borne so long. Anger at my mother […] .I told you everything except my color complex. Why should I? Surely it hadn’t held me back. It hadn’t kept me down. It didn’t derail my dreams. But I wonder how much higher I would have soared without it.(117).

Poetry writing helps young Marita voice the unspeakable parts of herelf, but it is not healing enough to stop the incurable wounds from bleeding. Her mother is the most precious of her recollections, the one to encourage her to write poetry and to boastingly post her poems for the Washington Post.

All the postcards, the newspaper reports, the interviews and conversations make, according to Marita Golden, a psychological quilt, stitched by the coded messages of colorism and racial discrimination, and colored by the commonality and peculiarity of each informant. Gathering information provides her with an emotional baggage that will open up only along the lines of her autobiography:

209

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

The colors are muted and vivid, the quilt is made of lace and cotton, velvet and denim, the design is intentional and accidental, the stuffing is all our emotional baggage, and as in quilts our grandmothers made, in this quilt there are coded messages hidden inside every stitch […]. After each conversation I feel bonded to my informants in ways that are deep and abiding.(125).

Every single postcard conveys an unexpressed message of Marita and a different facet of the rainbow-like quality of the color complex. Random as they are, the quoted expressions stretch over a wide scope starting from ordinary people and ending with protagonists as famous as Serena Williams or Oprah Winfrey. Trying to track back the reasons that led her into writing autobiography, Golden attributes to anger and ferocity the privilege of feeding in the lines of her memoir. It is anger that urges her to embrace sisterhood and that very same sensation that enables differentiation between members of the community. “I love this anger that has driven me to write this book as a prayer and a scream and a poem to my sisters dark and light.”(118).

In terms of style and narrative flow, the author chaotically fluctuates between childhood years and marriage experience, and he accompanies every move with the relevant clarification. The shift in characters, narrative mode, and subject matter makes the whole autobiography a fictionalized non-chronological account, a puzzle-like narrative whose pieces can be brought together only by Marita Golden’s sub-consciousness. The chaotic quality of Marita Golden´s reality comes out as she brings together whites searching for some color in their life, and blacks feeling discriminated because of the excess of the black pigment.

All my brother΄s and I married dark-skinned women. We feel like, coming from our family, which was so pale, we needed the color. I guess you could say we took the color complex in the other direction. I just found brown-skinned women really pretty(Lonnie).

Of course when a girl is dark and lacks much of her fashion sense because most of her time is spent on the tennis court, ridicule is never far away. I was constantly harassed because of my black skin by a boy who was even darker than I was(Serena Williams). (qtd. in Golden Don´t Play in the Sun :122)

Inspired by the song titled “Video” of the singer India.Arie, Marita includes in her narrative the life experiences of the 1960s, the struggle of black women, the analysis of the Hollywood casting system, and the mullatto Follies of Bet and MTV. Summarizing

210

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. her ponderings about the importance of memory, remembering and disremembering in times of slavery, she claims that behind every black man stands the slave’s memory and wounds and behind every white man stands the recollection of the slaveholder days.

7.4. Chapter Conclusions

Concluding we can say that intermingling patches of history, media script and interviews in a patchwork of personal and collective reactions and experiences Golden brings forth a memorable memoir which focuses on her mother’s concern with the complex notion of beauty and skin color to proceed with her own journey to identify beauty and worth despite society’s views and expectations. Golden΄s credo is that the reality of American society is mostly one of a community affected by intra-racial discrimination, rather than one of pure interracial discrimination to be found in other countries.

Alienated or negated be it, self-actualized or self-assertive, Marita Golden’s postmodern Self is rooted on the consideration that definition is by no way external. It always comes from inside and determines the way we regard ourselves and others. Conflictual and warring as the co-existence of the different facets may sound, in every postmodern Self there is an inherent capacity for divergence and convergence, separatism and reconciliation that makes every postmodern subject sound chaotic and clearly decipherable at the same time. Likewise the interrelatedness between the Self and the Other unfolds either through Golden’s considerations of racism and the impact it has on society, or through her depictions of the sharedness and the uniqueness of the African American culture, or alternatively through her call for acceptance of one’s Self. Similarly, racism and the color complex appear as intricate concoctions of internalized stereotypes threatening to distort the conceptions of the people who fight against it, and leading us into setting up the very walls we have been fighting against.

Locationally speaking, Marita Golden’s displacement from one country into another, from one racial reality into another, and from one community expectation into another, reveals to us more about the subtlest parts of her character, and her accommodation of otherwise conflictual and unmatching traits.

211

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Stereotyping in the American society, be it in the form of skin fetishizing or hair texture phenotypes, has converted blacks into objectified components, victims of discrimination and debasement. Considering themselves as representatives of an artificialized, hideously manipulated simulacra; the African Americans go through identity distortion and self- defacement to the point that bringing their parts into a whole sounds as if it would be the ultimate challenge.

As far as the mnemonic truth is concerned the fragmentary and fluid character of Marita Golden´s sense of Self is reflected in the fragmentary quality of her autobiographical narrative characterized by challenges to truthfulness, remarkable emergences of fictionality, and patchwork-like assemblage of memories. As she registers reactions and interactions, poetic figurativeness is transposed into prose plainness. The very questioning of the status of memory makes it waver in the borderlands of instability, fluidity and permeability.

212

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

CONCLUSIONS

Structurally organized into seven chapters, two theoretical and five of critical analysis, this dissertation paper aims to shed light on women-of-color turn-of-the-century autobiographies.The protagonists of the autobiographies evolve from the collective blatant activists in a fight against social injustice to the personal self-assertive combatants in the struggle of coming to terms with their own bodies, the multivocality of their own existence, the fluidity and impermanence of memory and the sense of Otherness and dislocation. Providing answers to a series of questions revolving around the postmodern conceptions of the Self, Otherness and alterity, matrilinealism and queering, displacement and dislocation and ultimately memory and narrative fictionalization, this paper is not conceived to be exhaustive; it simply claims to contribute to the cataloguing of the impacts of the postmodern condition on the Self of these writers.

Although the theoretical chapter on autobiography professes that the word autobiography did not enter written sources until Robert Southey’s English Periodical Quarterly Review of 1809, and did not start to be employed until the 17th century period of European explorer and travel narratives; its emergence as a genre dates back to the early slave narratives. Conceived as the focus of study by two schools of criticism (the Anglo– American and the Cultural Criticism), and classified into three remarkable periods, each of them focusing on some separate facet of autobiography remains a plain and subtle quest for identity.

Consideration of the two theoretical chapters of the thesis leads to the conclusion that the resurgence of interest in the evaluation and the study of the Self during the Me decade resulted in the production of a proliferating number of autobiographies. In the shift from the conventional to the non-conventional, the traditional autobiography rose up against the agency of the author, the time and the order to provide space for the development of the postmodern fictional autobiography and particularly its subgroups like: black autobiography, female autobiography and women-of-color autobiography. While black

213

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. autobiography dates back to the 1760-1865 narratives of former slaves.The genre emerged in the 1980s as a site of formal re-envisioning and a free play of signification. The female autobiography marks its peak in the 1960s –1970s: time of emancipation and involvement of women in the public service. The female autobiography differs from the male literary canon in that it uses understatement and fiction instead of direct narrative as a way of depicting reality. The second theoretical chapter, that on subjectivity and the postmodern dimensions of the Self, reveals how interest in the Self dates back to the Cartesian conceptions of the subjective experience, and the Lacanian organization into the imaginary, the real and the symbolic order.

While the Self concept evolves from the solid stable entity of the traditional societies, to the subtle depth of the romantic era, the fragmentation of modernism and ultimately the plurality, contingency and migratory nature of the postmodern times; identity appears as multidimensional and inseparable from its facets. The multivocality of identity recognizes female subjectivity as explored in terms of dualisms. The body wavers between the materiality of the I and its contextual surroundings, the sense of location celebrates transition and fluidity and ultimately memory goes hand in hand with the negation of historicity, and makes language appear as a dysfunctional bond between words and realities. Nevertheless as the claims of three camps of critics reveal the postmodern Self remains worthy of consideration and shelters the most perplex dimensions of postmodern society.

I have intentionally arranged the autobiographies target of the empirical part of my thesis in chronological order so as to be able to highlight the conceptual and contextual evolution which took place on women-of-color autobiography writers as they were immersed in the literary canon of the 1980s and early 21st century.Going through these works one may realize a light shift from the community-centeredness of the early works to the self-centeredness of the later works.

Thus, in terms of subject matter, while Audre Lorde attempts to provide a speaking voice for all the muted women, bell hooks focuses on the need for personal assessment,

214

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. affirmation and transformation. From the rest of the authors, Chambers brings forth the experience of coming of age through and despite her mother, Walker depicts her transformation from a rebellious black adolescent in San Francisco to an upper middle class Jew in Manhattan, and lastly Golden unfolds the experience of growing up a black woman in the heterogeneous society of the United States.

In terms of style, the linearity and conventionality of the traditional narrative is disrupted and fragmentation, ellipticity, pastiche and intertextuality become the most adequate means for conveying the “mestiza” condition of the ethnic American daughters at odds with the mainstream American society and the tribal heritage of their mothers. What the five autobiographies share is focus on the girlhood experinces, the accommodation of difference and hybridity in postmodern society; and where they differ is in their focus on the personal and the collective, Self and Other, the unique and the communal.

While scanning the way the postmodern condition is mirrored in the texture of these five autobiographies, we can easily perceive that if in the early autobiographies of Lorde and hooks appear even minimal attempts towards self-assertion and reconciliation of the warring selves, in the latter autobiographies the sense of alienation, disconnectedness and fragmentation becomes overpowering. So, while to Lorde difference is the cornerstone to self-affirmation;and to hooks the dark cave is the recess to accommodate her hidden, conflictual Selves, Walker΄s, Chamber΄s and Golden΄s autobiographies speak of negative, almost nihilistic confessions of rupture. Correspondingly, Chambers compares herself to the postmodern pointillism of Serrat´s paintings, Walker considers fluidity as the best rest for her dislocatedness, and Golden views fragmentation and denial in the motherly warnings and calls for a comprehensive definition.

The dimension of Otherness unfolds through the protagonist’s relationship to matrilineal heritage, the ancestral line as well as through the genderism and colorism preconceptions. Common to all five autobiographies is the recognition of the matrilineal Diaspora and matrilineal family structure as important elements of the ethnic daughter’s individuation process.The mother-daughter dyad appears as hovering between mainstream and

215

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. marginalization, identification and separation, empathy and resentment. Daughters learn that they can never truly pretend to dismantle the cultural and societal constructions (Lorde), or break the hard shell of their mothers for discovering their human side (Chambers). They can at least avoid blaming their mothers for the oppression American society poses on them(Walker), and start to define themselves through the motherly acts of self-denial(Lorde, Chambers), or come to praise the power that stands within these tiny Russian boxes(Golden). The “mestiza” and “Cultural Electra” notions open our eyes to the presence of difference and invite us to reconcile the conflictual categories inherent within every one of us. Situated on the borderlands ,we should attempt to hide part of ourselves and develop a cross–border identity.

The postmodern relational Self in all five autobiographies under consideration appears as reflective of the border of fluidity and permeability, aware of its shapeless and undefined state. While Lorde conceives our lives as a lie of ignoring the conglomerate Otherness within everyone of us, and hooks emphasizes the moldable part of every character; the other three autobiographers acknowledge the impact of genderism and colorism on the individual’s identification in the society. Otherness for Lorde is to be found in queering, for hooks in the ancestry, for Chambers in her mother, for Walker in her shifting locations, and ultimately for Golden in colorism. All autobiographers seem to unanimously agree on the accommodation of Otherness as a way of getting to know more about oneself.

The feelings of alienation and dislocatedness are so present in postmodern subjects that they consider themselves unfulfilled and truncated whenever the fluid, transitional ingredient is missing from their lives. Correspondingly, while the reality of all 5 writers is one of young girls shuttling back and forth into houses, cities or even continents (Golden), few of them would regard such displacements as alienating. They instead seem to celebrate the complementary effect that the act of moving to and fro has on the development of their multiple Selves. The difference lies in that while the two former autobiographers,Lorde and hooks try to find a sense of belonging in everythingxxx ,the

216

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. other autobiographers consider dislocation as a way of fitting into the societal grid: Jewish suburbia and black artist bohemia for Chambers, and Nigeria for Golden

While the two first autobiographers view home as a political location and a place of emotional belonging, the three successive ones will regard dislocatedness as the best recess one can claim.What all of them seem to agree upon, though, is that the best way to approach the politics of location and the sense of home is to view it not as an endpoint, but rather as a constant movement, an internalization of the sense of exile.

As far as the relationship between Self and body is concerned, preoccupation with body phenotypes, pigmentocracy and sexual orientation in the first autobiographies is substituted by concern for matching the universal ideals of beauty in the autobiographies to follow. Thus, if Lorde regards her body as not only different but wrong and dreams of adopting a hybrid male-female stance enabling her to enter the innermost sites of a woman; hooks shows preoccupation with her body failing to meet the white standards and craves for an intimate touch of her innermost Self. In Chambers’ autobiography, on the other hand, the body and human beings are regarded as fallible and as accurate decodings and dissemination of societal messages.According to Marita Golden respecting oneself is the best way of fitting into the society and hybrid mixtures of black and white sound artificial and ridiculous in their transculturality.Rebecca Walker in turn considers fluidity and impermanence as more important than any other trait which makes one feel restless under one’s own skin. The common denominator for all five autobiographies remains the realization that pigmentocracy and queering remain important yardsticks of measuring an individual’s integration in society.

As far as the conceptual intertwining of the dimension of Self and memory is concerned, the autobiographies in this study share the arrangement of events in the form of quilts made of accidentally stitched patches, the presentation of life as a fictional narrative and the treatment of the forgotten past as a remembrance and a revisiting. While Audre Lorde’s and bell hook’s accounts bring an emphasis on myth,(hooks on the construction of a dreamscape and Lorde on the arrangement of the psychological quilt of life), the rest

217

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. of the autobiographers focus on the individual’s need for a wishful forgetting in view of the construction of a better future. That is the reason why Veronica Chambers sharpens her determination to open a new page in her life and start viewing it in lively tones. Marita Golden,on the other hand, considers words as building a nest in her ear and coming out of there manipulated and distorted.

None of the personal accounts under consideration can be faithfully categorized into the genre of memoir, autobiography or fiction. What all of them seem to share is the pastiche character of the narrativexxxi, and the reversal of the chronological order of events. The competing versions of events(Chambers) and the presence of a concert of voices in the form of multiple truths(Lorde), adds to the hybridity of the genre and mocks every attempt of ours to clearly define the form of the narrative. In the author’s own words, Lorde´s narrative is a biomythography, hooks´ and Golden´s accounts are memoirs, while Walker’s and Chambers´ are autobiographies. To highlight the skepticism through which the capacity to delineate the contours of one genre is viewed, Rebecca Walker asserts that wishful forgetting and the conditioned amnesiac status contribute to the preservation of the fluid character of memory, its organization into dualities and the increased impermanence of the autobiographical account.

In conclusion, we may state that it is the unique and common, unifold and manifold intertwining of the dimension of postmodern Self, Otherness, matrilinealism, genderism, colorism and finally memory and location that comprises the basis of this study. It is the simplicity of realizations and the inherent complicacy of reality that adds to the attractiveness of the thesis and makes it worthy of further study and research.

218

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

APPENDIX 1

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY: FROM SLAVES TO PRESIDENTSxxxii

Most African Americans are the descendants of captive Africans held in the United States from 1619 to 1865. The majority of them descend from slaves who were either sold as prisoners of war by African states or kidnapped directly by Europeans or Americans. The American slave population was made up of various ethnic groups from western and central Africa, including the Bakongo, Igbo, Mandé, Wolof, Akan, Fon and Makua amongst Others. Studies of contemporary documents reveal seven regions from which Africans were sold or taken during the Atlantic slave trade: Senegambia, Sierra Leone, The Bight of Benin, The Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Madagascar. The first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The English settlers treated these captives as indentured servants. Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery in 1641. The apparent hypocrisy of the freedom demanding slave holders comes out even through the fact that The Declaration of Independence, a document that would become a manifesto for human rights and personal freedom, was written by Thomas Jefferson, who owned over 200 slaves.

Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil and that should eventually be abolished. In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance and barred slavery from the large Northwest Territory. As the United States grew, the institution of slavery became more entrenched in the southern states while northern states began to abolish it. The changing agricultural practices of the north led to slaves being sold to traders for the developing Deep South. On the other hand, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed any Black person to be claimed as a runaway unless a White person testified on their behalf. Blacks organized to help strengthen the Black community and continue the fight against slavery with the black church growing to be the focal point of their community. One of these organizations was the American Society of Free Persons of Color, founded in 1830. In the 1840s, the Dred Scott decisionxxxiii had the effect of widening the political and social gap between North and South and took the nation closer to the brink of Civil War.

219

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

During the period known as the Emancipation and the Reconstruction several reforms were taken against the institution of slavery.

In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the southern states at war with the North. The 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States while in 1868, the 14th amendment granted full U.S. citizenship to African Americans. The much expected 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, extended the right to vote to only black males.

Seeking to return blacks to their subordinate status under slavery, white supremacists resurrected de facto barriers and enacted new laws to further marginalize blacks in Southern society, limiting, among other things, black access to transportation, schools, restaurants and other public facilities. These barriers were known under the name of the Jim Crowe Lawxxxiv. Racial discrimination escalated to take the form of racial terrorism with the Ku Klux Clan Group or the paramilitary organizations. After its founding in 1867, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy, became a power for a few years in the South and beyond, eventually establishing headquarters in Greenfield, Indiana. Its members hid behind masks and robes and employed lynching, cross burnings and other forms of terrorism, physical violence, house burnings, and intimidation.

In response to these and other setbacks, in the summer of 1905, W.E.B. Du Bois and 28 other prominent, African American men met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ontario, producing a manifesto which called for an end to racial discrimination, full civil liberties for African Americans and recognition of human brotherhood. The organization came to be called the Niagara Movement and later developed into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

During the first half of the 20th century, the largest internal population shift in U.S. history took place, over five million African Americans moved from the South to

220

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. northern cities, the West and Midwest in hopes of escaping violence, finding better jobs, voting and enjoying greater equality. In the 1920s, the concentration of blacks in New York led to the cultural movement known as the Renaissance. In the framework of the Civil Rights Movement the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, but it occurred slowly and only after concerted activism including boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and sit-ins.

Aiming to put pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson into banning factual discrimination in all fields of life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washingtonxxxv. The whole culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions. The passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965xxxvi was considered as the act that struck down barriers to black bondage and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation.

Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides in the post-civil rights era. In 1989, Virginia elected Douglas Wilder, the first African American governor in U.S. history. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. Politics is marked by the flourishing of black figures such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Ron Brown, Clarence Thomas and ultimately in the election of the first black presidential nominee, the Illinois senator Barack Obama on November 4th, 2008, as the 44th President of the United States. Economically speaking, Oprah Winfrey has been the world's only black billionaire in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and blacks currently comprise 0.25% of America's economic elite and comprise 13% of the U.S. population.

In conclusion, we may state that though the title of the chapter itself seems to suggest that the African American history is one of predetermined fate, they are likely to continue

221

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. fighting; and why not continue achieving great feats in the American social, political, economic and cultural life? The African Americans entered the New World as slaves without identity, except that granted by their masters, but they succeeded in even becoming the leaders of America, the First World Power. Comparing the 1963 speech of Martin Luther King, and the 2008 Victory speech of Barack Obama, you can be impressed by the way how blacks and whites cry together in view of a new nation that partially “realized the dream that they had and now they know ‘they can’.” Nevertheless, despite Obama’s attempts to divest his speech of any racial nuance and to consider the fight of America, the fight of all races, the verb chosen remains still within the framework of a promissory note “we can” and not “we are”. What is more, while he starts his speech with “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”(BBC News 2008). He confesses that racial prejudice still exists and states “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston” (BBC News 2008).

222

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

APPENDIX 2

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: BETWEEN MAINSTREAM AND MARGINALIZATIONxxxvii

The development of the African American Literary discourse has been treated by Valerie Smith. In her “Self –Discovery and Authority in African American Narrative”, she states that “Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history.”(Smith,V.1987:77). This literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.

Antebellum Literature: African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century seeking to demonstrate that the equality proposition of the Declaration of Independence required that black Americans be granted the same human rights as white Americans. Phillis Wheatley´s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was the first African American book, to proving that “Negros, black as Cain, were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could join th’ angelic train as spiritual equals to whites”.(Wheatley, 1773:28). In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself(1789)

From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself”(1845.) Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. In 1853 William Wells Brown, an internationally known fugitive slave narrator, authored the first black American novel,

223

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter(1853) telling the story of the beautiful light-skinned African American daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, Clotel. Five years later Brown also published the first African American play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom(1858). In 1859 the first African American women’s fiction appeared: “The Two Offers,” a short story by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper dealing with middle-class women whose race is not specified, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), an autobiographical novel about the life of a working-class black woman in the North. During the antislavery era also lies the communal consciousness of millions of slaves, whose oral tradition in song and story has given form and substance to much subsequent literature by black Americans. This oral tradition was in the form of the plantation spiritual, the beast fable, trickster figures, and the skilful adoption of deceptive masks.

The Civil War and Reconstruction: With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their voices to convince President Abraham Lincoln that in the war against slavery black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight. When the Civil War ended on April 9th, 1865, African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity. The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77), was reflected in Elizabeth Keckley´s autobiography Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) and William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home (1880).

Late 19th Century, Early 20th Century:As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone to a real-world socio-political agenda that depicted the status of African American writers after the Reconstruction. In the mid-1880s Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that highlighted the centrality of educated black women in the reform movements of the post-Reconstruction era. Paul Laurence Dunbar published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy(1893), including a handful of lyrics, such as “We

224

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Wear the Mask”, “Sympathy”, and “The Haunted Oak”, that testify candidly and movingly to his frustrated aspirations as a black poet in a white supremacist era.

On the other side, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, and stereotypes. As segregation regimes took hold in the South, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guidebook to improved fortunes. Unlike Washington who emphasized economic self-sufficiency, Du Bois prophesied in the Souls of Black Folk(1903): “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”(Du Bois in The Atlantic Monthly,1903:354-365).The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 in New York City put Du Bois in charge of its organ, The Crisis from 1910 to 1934. By the time the United States entered WWI in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming the greatest Negro city in the world, attracting key intellectual leaders and artists.

Harlem Renaissance: -The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke, featuring the works of the Harlem Renaissance, includes the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership. A lasting achievement in autobiography was also Hughes’ The Big Sea (1940). Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer, Fisher, Wallace, Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. The vogue of black writing, black art, and black culture waned markedly in the early 1930s as the Great Depression took hold in the United States. African American so-called experts in the 1930s and ’40s tended to depreciate the achievements of the New Negroes, calling instead for a more politically engaged, socially critical realism in literature. The chief proponent of this position was Richard Wright with his Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son, Black Boy (1945).

225

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Chicago was being considered as an economic Mecca for black migrants fleeing the South.

The 1940s was a decade of creative experimentation in autobiography, led by Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), which considered autobiography and the Self concept; and Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), a venture in autoethnography. In the 1950s Ralph Ellison in the Invisible Man (1950) and James Baldwin “Everybody’s Protest Novel”(1949) called for a new act of creation, a new kind of black hero and a new way of picturing that hero’s participation in post-Depression, post-World War II American reality. During the decade following World War II, professional African American dramatists found greater access to the white American theatre than any previous generation of black playwrights had known. But no one in African American theatre could have predicted the huge critical and popular success that came to Lorraine Hansberry after her first play, A Raisin in the Sun(1995) opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March, 1959. A portrayal of an African American family confronting the problems of upward mobility and integration, the play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959.

The Literature of Civil Rights:Hansberry, Baldwin and Alice Walker took an active part in the civil rights movement and got energized by the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the ’60s. A black-identified poetry in the 1960s, written deliberately to inspire black pride and to inflame black revolution, is epitomized in the evolution of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka. The assassination of Malcolm X, eloquent exponent of Black Nationalism, in 1965 in New York and the espousal of “Black Power” by previously integrationist civil rights organizations helped to galvanize a generation of young black writers into rethinking the purpose of African American art. Rejecting any notion of the artist that separated him or her from the African American community, the Black Arts movement engaged in cultural nation building by sponsoring poetry readings, founding community theatres, creating literary magazines, and setting up small presses. Important poets of this mode were Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Etheridge Knight, Haki R. Madhubuti, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Nikki Giovanni. Among the leading Black Arts

226

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. playwrights were Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. The “tell it like it is” temper of the 1960s placed great emphasis on authentic self-expression in African American autobiography. This comes out in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970), and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), etc.

The 1970s Renaissance: A variety of literary, cultural, and political developments during the 1950s and ’60s, including the popularity of Hansberry, Kennedy, Walker, and Brooks, the expanding presence of the experience of black women in African American writing, and the impact of the women’s movement, fostered what has been termed “the black women’s literary renaissance” of the 1970s. Its founding text is generally considered The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison. It treated themes such as scapegoating and endorsed the slogan “the black is beautiful”. Other works include Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977); Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980); Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). In the 1970s and 1980s, Alice Walker also punctuated the decade with a series of controversial books: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), an epic novel; and The Color Purple(1982), an epistolary novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Although women’s writing claimed centre stage in the eyes of many critics and a large number of readers of African American literature from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, a number of African American male writers continued to receive important recognition, for example: Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water(1988) and John Wideman, Brother”s and Keepers (1984). The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century was August Wilson with his Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom(1984) and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone(1986). Thus, as the title it Self may suggest, African American writing has been endlessly hovering between marginality and canonization, but nevertheless, attractive as it is in its secondary or primary status, bears the sign of people who have been fighting for their rights orally, socially and literarily and have taught to even the so-called “real Americans” what fighting for one’s rights and achieving them means.

227

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

APPENDIX 3

MUFFLED VOICES, STRIDENT FEATS: FEMINISM IN THE UNITED STATESxxxviii

Feminism, a discourse involving various movements, theories and philosophies concerned with the issue of gender difference and equality for women, has altered predominant perspectives in a wide range of areas within western society. This discourse is known for campaigning for legal rights: the right to bodily integrity and autonomy, abortion rights, reproductive rights, the right for protection from domestic violence and for protection in the workplace. Feminists and scholars have divided the movement’s history into 3 waves: the first wave referring to the women’s suffrage movements of the 19th century and the early 20th century; the second wave referring to the woman’s liberation movement of the 1960s; and the 3rd wave of the 1990s, referring to a reaction to the perceived failures of the 2nd wave. During the first wave, the suffragettes in Britain campaigned for the right to vote and this led to the passing of the Representation of People Act in 1918 and then its extension in 1928 (granting the right to vote to women over 30 who own houses).

In the U.S., leaders like Elisabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B.Anthony campaigned for the abolition of slavery prior to campaigning for the right to vote. The first wave in the U.S. ended with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1919 granting the women the right to vote in all states. Second wave feminism began in the 1960s and lasted through the late 1980s. Carolyn Hanish’s slogan the personal is political became synonymous with the 2nd wave, thereby encouraging women to understand aspects of their personal lives as deeply politicized and as reflecting sexist power structures. It is in the framework of the 2nd wave that Betty Friedman writes The Feminine Mystique(1963) in which she hypothesizes that women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning through their husbands and children. The second wave includes writers like Bell Hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, etc. The third wave feminism began in the early 1990s, as a “response to the backlash against initiatives and movements created by the 2nd wave.”(Roth,2004:29). This wave

228

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. also contains heated debates between the sexes and comprises the period which gave birth to French Feminism, a branch of feminist thinking led by a group of feminists in France like Simone de Beauvoir, Lucy Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Some movements developing along feminist ideology are liberal feminism, radical feminism, black feminism, postcolonial feminism, socialist and Marxist feminism, libertarian feminism, post-structural feminism, postmodern feminism and ultimately eco-feminism. Liberal feminists consider change possible to happen without altering society, radical feminists find the liberation of women only after having done away with an inherently oppressive and dominating system, postcolonial feminists consider marginalization as a result of the colonial experience, while socialist Marxists ones find their roots in the Marxist ideas about exploitation, oppression and labor.

3.1. The “Black” Face of Feminism in The United States

As long as my thesis entails the reflection and embodiment of the black, postmodern and female traits of feminism in the autobiographies of African American writers of the late 20th century, I will focus on these three dimensions to bring along as complete of a vision as possible of the way these three interact to form the unique Self of these writers. Black feminism, although there is really no movement named in such a way, contends that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together, so that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all people since it would require the end of racism, sexism and class oppression. In the anthology Black Women in America(1993), Hine divides black feminism into 3 major periods: 1) laying the foundations 1890-1920, black women getting involved into organizing their movement on a national level; 2) working for a change 1920-1960, black women committed to working for the advancement of their communities; and 3) contemporary black feminism, the development of the social and political aspects. According to Bell Hooks in her Black Women and Feminism(1999) “The black woman in America can justly be described as a slave of a slave.”(Hooks 1999:198). Reducing the black man in America to such abject oppression degrades the black woman even more and converts her into the scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system has perpetrated on black men. In the 1990s interest

229

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. in the study of gendered intertextualities that focus exclusively on representations of males seemed to bear some relationship to a swell in contemporary writings by African American men.

With the increase of the interest in the study of gendered intertextualities in the 1990s, scholars have identified racism from without and sexism from within as destructive to the black community. Thus it is specifically in this period that the black feminist theory would come of age and move from the margin to the center of the mainstream feminist discourse. The same idea has also been asserted by Benita Roth who claims: “black feminism with an intersectional vanguard centre vision of liberating politics, emerged into a space created by the inability of both the Black liberation and white women’s liberation to incorporate black feminists as activists.” (Roth 2004:119).

Much of the feminist scholarship of the time has thus focused disproportionately on the question of why African American women were not eager to identify as feminists and join white feminist organizations. There are two general kinds of explanations for black women’s supposed distaste for feminism: the first structurally oriented and the second ideological. Some scholars accounted for black women’s lack of interest in feminism and emphasize black women’s relative equality vis-à-vis black men, and their lack of feeling of deprivation by gender issues. On the other hand, ideological barriers were erected by white feminists who privileged gender oppression over racial oppression. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s gave black women a chance to work alongside men in non-traditional ways.

The earliest theoretical statement on Black Feminist Criticism is Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”. In justifying the need for a black feminist aesthetic, Smith argues that: “A black feminist approach to literature that recognizes that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class as crucially interlocking factors in the works of black women writers is an absolute necessity”(Smith 1980:132). For the first time Smith guides us into what we should consider lesbian literature. According to her “if in a woman’s writer’s work there are strong images of women and if there is a

230

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T. refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature”(140). The lesbian literature and its relationship to feminism will be discussed in more detail in the closing lines of this chapter.

The idea of interlocking and intertwining character facets and dimensions is supported by Mary Ann Weathers in her An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as A Revolutionary Force(1983) according to whom women’s liberation should be considered as a strategy for an eventual tie-up with the entire revolutionary movement: “All women suffer oppression even white, Indian American, Puerto Rican and Black American. This means that we can begin to talk to ther women with this common factor and start building links with them and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we are now beginning to amass” (Weathers, in a Journal of Female Liberation,1969:59).

Deborah E. McDowell in “New Directions for Black Feminist Theory”, acknowledges that black feminist criticism must do more than merely focus on “how men have treated black women in literature.”(Mc.Dowell 1995:57). She touches upon one of the most disturbing aspects of current black feminist criticism: its separatism– its tendency to consider that the black female culture has more in common with the white female experience than with the facticity of Afro-American life. She also calls for black feminist critics to turn their attention to the works of black male writers, and to the thematic, stylistic and imagistic parallels among Afro-American writers, male and female.

One of the most passionate defenders of feminist ideology to emerge was bell hooks, whose pioneering monograph Ain´t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) delineated the impact of sexism, analyzed the devaluation of black womanhood, and discussed the persistence of racism in the women’s movement and the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve gender equality. Since her first book, she set up a challenge for all women “We black women who advocate feminist ideology are pioneers: We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as long as they see us reach our goal –no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid –they will take courage and follow.” (Hooks 1999:202).

231

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

In “Black Feminist Thought”(1990) Patricia Hill Collins identifies the fusion of activism and highlights the core themes of black feminism: the interlocking nature of race, class and gender oppression; and the necessity to internalize positive self-definitions and rejecting stereotypical images, both within and without the black community. Despite their commitment to ending sexism, however, some black women continued to be alienated by the term feminist. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983) provides the alternative term “womanist” as a more culturally appropriate label for black feminists or feminists of color.

In conclusion, we may say that Black feminism arose as an organizationally distinct movement in response to the changes that had occurred in the Civil Rights /Black Liberation movement and to the problems black women activists were running through because of those changes. Black feminists articulation of intersectional oppressions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; and that of a political need to coordinate the struggle against those oppressions –came to have a profound impact on black feminism as a whole, and on other branches of feminism.

3.2. Feminism and Lesbianism

It was in the context of the second wave contemporary feminist movement, influenced by the simultaneous development of an autonomous gay liberation movement, that the political content of Lesbian oppression began to be analyzed and defined. According to Barbara Smith :naccuracy and distortion seem to be particularly frequent pitfalls when non -lesbians address Black Lesbian experience because of generalized homophobia and because of the very nature of our oppression.”(Smith 1991:66). In 1977 in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”, the latter had to rely upon Tony Morrison’s Sula in order to analyze a black women’s novel with a woman identified theme: “I sought to demonstrate –she says-that because of the emotional primacy of Sula and Nel´s love for each other, Sula´s fierce independence and the author’s critical portrayal of heterosexuality, the novel could be illuminated by Lesbian feminist reading.”(Smith 1977:139).

232

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1983),on the other hand, is a novel composed of seven connecting stories that expresses loving and supporting bonds between black women as central to her character’s survival.However, Naylor’s portrayal of the black lesbian relationship in the sixth story, runs counter to the positive framework of women bonding that she had previously established. Alice Walker’s portrayal of a Lesbian relationship in The Color Purple (1982) is as optimistic as Naylor’s is despairing. Celia and Shug’s love set in a rural southern community between the World Wars is unique and made the novel receive critical acclaim and become a bestseller. To complete the list of female writings to be read under a lesbian light, Lorde chooses a Carricou word for women who work together as friends and lovers to provide a woman- identified environment thoroughly suffused with eroticism since its very outset.

In conclusion, I may say that while involved in postmodernist feminism, black writers feel free to challenge the conventions of the narrative and social relations, and they are always faced with a multidimensional oppression: being black and voicing it aloud, being female and showing it daringly to the males, and being experimentalist writers and revealing it to the ones who find comfort in traditional writings. Despite the homophobic exclusion and the silencing of Black Lesbian Writers, the creation of complex, accurate, and artistically compelling depictions of Black lesbians in literature has been and will continue to be a part of the development of African American women’s literature as a whole.

233

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

ENDNOTES iii Background information for this section has been retrieved from Subjectivity in Descartes and Kant Schwyzer H. The Philosophical Quarterly, 47: 188, July 1997, pp. 342-357(16) iv Victor C. Taylor´s The Encyclopedia of Postmodenism makes use of the term “postmodernity” to refer to a series of movements that emerged in different countries in Europe in art, architecture, literature, music, the social sciences and the humanities after the Second World War and considers the denomination “postmodernism” a confounding period label ascribed to cultural products that manifest or display reflexivity, irony, and sometimes playful mixture of high and low elements. Nevertheless I will use the term “postmodernism” throughout because, to me, the concept of the Self in itself is a cultural product and in this way it flows naturally with the stream of -isms that revolve around the concept of Self, feminism, post colonialism and post-structuralism. v The presence of many different voices in our culture, telling us who we are and what we are, splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of Self-investments vi The existence of a Self capable of changing constantly to suit the present circumstances. vii The absence of a sense of Self. The Self is constantly redefined, constantly undergoing change. viii Found in feminist studies, this concept means that we live our lives not as islands unto ourselves, but in relation to people and to certain cultural contexts. ix Background information for this chapter was retrieved online from Identity (social science).In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Jan. 27: 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Identity_(social_science)&oldid=338633496 x Background information for this section has been retrieved from Taylor,V. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism(2003) xi Information for this section has been retrieved from Eagleton, T. Literary\Theory: an Introduction 1983. xii Background information for this section has been taken from Leary and Tangney Handbook of Self and Identity (2003) xiii Information for this chapter was retrieved from Wapedia- Wiki. Autobiography http://wapedia.mobi/en/Autobiography, Paul John Eakin’s Autobiography Retrospect and Prospect(1992) and Robert Sayre’s American lives –An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing(1994) xiv Background information for this section has been retrieved from Margo Culley Madison’s American Women's Autobiography:Fea(s)ts of Memory(1992) xv The background information for this section is taken from Eakin, Paul John.(1992) Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect.Princeton NY:Princeton University Press. xvi Oral accounts transcribed or altered xvii Information for this section has been retrieved online from Wikipedia contributors. “Audre Lorde.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 20 Feb. 2010. Web. 10 Mar. 2010.

234

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

xviii Picaresque-is a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society xix Metissage- a word of French origin means a mixture of cultural influences in different musical pieces, painting, sculpture, dress, and language. xx The dreamlike quality of the revelation is also depicted through the presentation of the ideas in an italicized form. xxi The biographical material made use of in this chapter has been retrieved from “Bell Hooks.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 10 Mar. 2010 . xxii The biographical material made use of in this chapter has been retrieved from: “BookRags Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Veronica Chambers”. On 1 March 2010. http://www.bookrags.com/biography/veronica-chambers-aya/ xxiii Mama´s Girl was first published in 1996, but the edition from which quotations have been retrieved is that of 1997. xxiv Pointillism-the technique of painting elaborated from impressionism, in which dots of unmixed color are juxtaposed on a white ground so that from a distance they fuse in the viewer's eye into appropriate intermediate tones xxv The biographical material made use of in this chapter has been retrieved from: Rebecca Walker. (2010, January 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:16, March 1, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rebecca_Walker&oldid=339805005

xxvi The Electra complex goes back to the Greek tragedy of Electra, the daughter whose lack of compassion for the mother who had previously murdered her husband, leads the daughter to plot the ultimate crime of matricide. xxvii An explanation of the term womanism and of the history of the coining of this term has been given in the Appendix in the section of the historical background of feminism in the United States. xxviii Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), known professionally as Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet. xxix Beulah was an Indie Rock band from San Francisco, CA, often associated with The Elephant 6 Recording Company.

xxx Audre Lorde celebrates the journeywoman pieces of herself while at the same time finding home in different things: lesbianism, Afrekete, her mother tongue etc. hooks on the other hand feels unable to delve within the inner cave of herself and ends up finding a belonging in her writing. xxxi In Marita Golden´s autobiography there is an intertextual weaving of events and impressions, be they in the form of postcards, newspaper reports or interviews.

235

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

xxxii Background information for this section has been retrieved online from Wikipedia contributors. "African-American history." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. xxxiii Dred Scott, an African American slave, was taken by his master, an officer in the U.S. Army, from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois and that of Wisconsin. When the Army ordered his master to go back to Missouri, he took Scott with him back to that slave state, where his master died. In 1846, Scott sued for his freedom in court, claiming he should be free since he had lived on free soil for a long time. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In March of 1857, Scott lost the case as the Supreme Court declared no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen and as such he had no rights and could not sue in a Federal Court and must remain a slave. xxxiv The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a “separate but equal” status for black Americans and members of # non-white racial groups. Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms and restaurants for whites and blacks .Jim Crow laws. (2008, November 13). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:59, Nov. 16: 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jim_Crow_laws&oldid=251522190

xxxvHeld in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 and attended by some 250,000 people, the march was organized by the “Big Seven” of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin, Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, and Dorothy Height. xxxvi The passing of the Voting Rights Act was done after the Mississippi Freedom Summer which came to be known as the Mississippi Blood after the murdering of three youths two whites and a black, protesting for freedom schools and voter drives. xxxvii Background information for this section was retrieved from African American Literature Summary at Bookrags.com. Web. Bookrags.com 16.Sept.2010 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boo krags.com%2Feb%2Fafrican-american-literature- eb%2F&ei=6Iy9TO7LHIbJswaQ3v2pDQ&usg=AFQjCNGgJcCQvpzHn0KBda4CIRqrUa7UBA xxxviii Background information for this section was retrieved by Wikipedia contributors. "Feminism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 Oct. 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010.

236

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

WORKS CITED

“African American Literature: Marita Golden” in Answers.Com Oct.2007, Web.

http://www.answers.com/.

Alvarez, Julia.(1998). Something to Declare. New York: Plume Books.

American Journal of Psychology.90/2:2005 Hopkins University Press: Baltimore

Anderson, Walter Truett.(1996). The Fontana Postmodernism Reader. U.S.A: George

Woodcock Books

th Andrews, William L.(1990). “20 Century Autobiography” Black American Literature

Forum, Vol. 24, No. 2, 20th-Century Autobiography pp. 197-201

Andrews, William L. ed.(1993). “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-

American Literary Realism, 1865-1920.” African American Autobiography: A

Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice.

Andrews, William L.ed.(1997).The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Anzalduá, Gloria.(1987). Borderlands/La Frontera. 2nd. ed. introd. Sonia Saldívar. Hull

San Francisco, Calif: Aunt Lute Books.

Ashley, Katherine., Gilmore, Peters. Eds.(1994).Autobiography & Postmodernism.

Amherst, Massachussets: The Univ. of Massachusetts Press.

237

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

“Audre Lorde”. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia.Web. Mar.10: 2010

“Autobiography” .Wapedia- Wiki. Wapedia http://wapedia.mobi/en/Autobiography,

Web.Feb.20, 2009

Ball, M. Charlene. Old Magic and New Fury: The Theaphany of Afrekete in Audre

Lorde's "Tar Beach". NWSA Journal. Indiana University Press. 13/161(2001):85.

Barthes, Roland.(1968).Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang.

BBC. News Full Text(November 2008). “Obama Victory Speech”(online)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/7434843.stm

“Bell Hooks.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 11 Mar. 2010

Benstock, Shari.ed.(1989).The Private Self : Theory and Practice of Women's

Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill:Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Blackburn, Regina.(1980). “In Search of the Black Female Self: African-American

Women's Autobiographies and Ethnicity”.Women's Autobiography: Essays in

Criticism. ed. Estelle C. Jelinek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Braxton,.

“Bone Black Memories of Girlhood”. In Search Barnes and Noble Ret. 20

Apr.2008,Web.http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Bone-Black/bell-

hooks/e/9780805055122.

Braxton, Joanne M.(1989).Black Women Writing Autobiography. Philadelphia: Temple

of Universe Press.

Butler, Judith. “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and Foucault.” Praxis

International. (5 January 1986): 505-5.

238

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Butterfield, Stephen. (1974). Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press.

Cavalero, Glen. “Autobiography and Fiction”. Prose Studies 8/2 (Sept. 1985):156-171.

Cellini, Benvenuto.(1956).The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Harmondsworth,

Middlesex [u.a.]:Penguin Books.

Chambers, Veronica.(1997). Mama's Girl. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

Chinosole.(1986). Black Autobiographical Writing: A Comparative Approach. Diss.

University of Oregon: Ann Arbor.

Chodorow, Nancy.(1978). The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the

Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Calif: Univ. of California Press.

Christian, Barbara.(1987). Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women

Writers. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Cixous, Helene.(1975). “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” The Newly

Born Woman. 24. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Cox, James M.(1971). Literature's Lost Ground: Essays in American Autobiography.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Culley, Margo. ed.(1992).American Women's Autobiography:Fea(s)ts of

Memory. Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Dallow, Jessica.(2007). “Bridging Feminist Art, Activism, and Theory: A Review of

Three Contemporary Texts”. NWSA Journal. 19/1(2007):166.

De Beauvoir, Simone.(1973). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Press.

Dehay, Terry.(1994). “Narrating Memory”. Memory, Narrative, and Identity. Eds. Singh,

Amriitjit., Skerrett, Joseph J. Jr., and Hogan, Robert E. Boston: Northeastern UP.

239

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

De Lauretis, Teresa.(1988) Feminist Studies / Critical Studies. London: Macmillan, 1988.

De Montaigne,Michel. (1998)Of presumption. Oregon:University of Oregon Press.

Derrida, Jacque.(1978).Of grammatology. U.S.A: John Hopkins University Press.

------.(1984). “Violence and Metaphysics”.Writing and Difference. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Differences:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies(1994), North Carolina, US: Duke

University Press Durham.

Donis, Elisabeth Allen. “Don’t play in the Sun Marita Golden's Journey through the

Color Complex.”Black Issues Book Review May-July 2004

Du Bois, W.E.B.(1903). The Souls of Black Folks. Boston & New York: Bedford Books.

Eagleton, Terry.(1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Eakin, Paul John.(1988). Fictions in Autobiography:Studies in the Art of ‘Self’-Invention.

Princeton, NJ:Princeton Univ. Press.

------(1991). Autobiography:Retrospect and Prospect.Princeton

NY:Princeton University Press.

Echeruo, Michael J. C. “The African Diaspora & Autobiographics: Skeins of Self and

Skin” rev. of Chinosole The African Diaspora & Autobiographics: Skeins of Self

and Skin. Africa Today 49/4 (2002): 137-139.

240

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Eliade, Mircea.(1994).Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mystery of Birth and Rebirth.

Dallas: Dallas Spring Publications.

Erikson, Erik.H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.

Etzioni, Amitai.(1993).The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the

Communitarian Agenda. New York: Crown Publishers.

Evans, Mary. Ed.(1984).Black Women Writers:(1950–1980):A Critical Evaluation. 1st

ed.New York, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Fanon, Frantz.(1986). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Featherstone, Mike.(1993). Undoing Culture.Globalization, Postmodernism and

Identity. London:Sage Publications.

Frias, Maria.“Migrating Hearts and Travelling Shoes:An Interview with Marita

Golden.”.Atlantis xx/1 (1998):195-213.

Friedman, Betty.(1963).The Feminine Mystique .London:W.W,Norton & Co.

Frug, Mary Joe.(1992).Postmodern Legal Feminism. London:Routledge.

Frye, Joanne S.(1986). Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in

Contemporary Experience .Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Funderburg, Lise.(1991).Black, White,Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and

Identity. New York: William Morrow & Company.

------.“Books:Identity Gap” in Search Time Jan.15:2001

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998986,00.html

241

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Gates, Henry Louis.(1990).Reading Black, Reading Feminist –A critical Anthology,

U.S.A: Meridian Book.

------(1979).“Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext.” Afro-American Literature: the

Reconstruction of Instruction. Ed. Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher. New York:

Modern Language Association.

Genovese, Elisabeth Fox.(1991). Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of

Individualism. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

Georgoudaki, Ekaterini.(1991). Race, Gender, and Class Perspectives in the Works of

Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre

Lorde .Diss. Thessaloniki: Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki.

Gergen, Kenneth J.(1993).The Saturated Self:Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life

New York, NY:Basic Books

Gibbon, Edward.(1795).Last Illness and Death of Gibbon.London: Dent.

Giddens, Anthony.(1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late

Modern Age, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gilmore, Leigh.(1995). Autobiographics:a Feminist Theory of Women's

Self-Representation. Ithaca, NY :Cornell Univ. Press.

Giroux, Christopher. “Eroding and Eliding, Breaking and Building: Reworking the

Landscape in Audre Lorde's Zami”. The Explicator .Sagina Valley

University.67/4 (2009).

242

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Glowacka, Dorotha.(2003) “Anarchic Vision: Ocular Constructions of Race and the

Challenge of Ethics” , Upperside Culture Machine Inter Zone. Web.

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/237/218

Goffman, Erving.(1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York:

Doubleday Garden City.Golden, Marita.(2004). Don´t Play in the Sun: a Black

Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex. New York,

NY:Doubleday.Gudmundsdottir,

Gunnthorunn.(1998). Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life

Writing.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, Lynda. “Passion(ate) Plays ‘Wherever We Found Space’: Lorde and Gomez

Queer(y)ing Boundaries and Acting in”. Callaloo 23/1(2000): 394-421.

Hampel, Regine.(2000).“I write therefore I am?”:Fictional Autobiography and the Idea

of Selfhood in the Postmodern Age.Wien :Lang.

Hammond, Karla. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” American Poetry

Review(March/April 1980): 18-21.

Haraway, Donna.(1990). “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist

Feminism in the 1980's”. Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New

York: Routledge

------(1925). From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context in

Philosophy and Literature - 25∕1 (2001), pp. 1-13

243

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Hattie, John(1992).Self-Concept. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Heather “The Commonwealth Times” Richmond Virginia:Virginia Commonwealth

University Press:2/14/05

Hegel,George.Wielhelm.Friedrich.(1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V.

Miller.Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Hellman, Lillian.(1969). An Unfinished Womani: A Memoir. Boston: Little Brown.

Hewitt, Leah D.(1990). Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie

Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé. Lincoln,

Nebraska:Univ. of Nebraska Press.

Hill Collins, Patricia. (2000)Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the

Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge.

Hirsch, Marianne.(1997). The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis,

Feminism Indiana University Press: Bloomington. hooks, bell.(1981). Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. Boston Books

------(1989). Talking Back, Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston Massachussets:

South End Press. Massachussets: South End Press

------.(1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.Boston Massachussets:

South End Press.

------.(1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Toronto: Between the Lines

------.(1997). Bone Black : Memories of Girlhood. London: Women's Press Ltd.

Hornung, Alfred. “The Autobiographical Mode in Contemporary American Fiction”.

Prose Studies 8/3 (1985): 69-83

244

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

“Identity (Social Science)”. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.Wikipedia Jan 27:2010

Web.http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Identity_(social_science)&oldid=

33863

Irigaray, Luce.(1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell

Univ. Press.

Jameson, Frederick.(1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

U.S.A: Duke UP.

Jelinek, Estelle C. ed.(1980).Women's Autobiography : Essays in Criticism. Bloomington,

Ind: Indiana Univ. Press.

Jenkins, Ruth. “Authorizing the Female Voice and Experience: Ghosts and Spirits in

Kingston’s the Woman Warrior and Allende’s the House of the Spirits”. Melus.

19/3 (1994):61-73.

Jordan, Shirley M.ed.(1993).Broken Silences:Interviews with Black and White Women

Writers. New Brunswick, NJ,:Rutgers Univ. Press.

“Kant & Descartes” in The Philosophical Quarterly, 47:188. Scotland : Blackwell

Publishing

Keating, AnnLouise. “Myth Smashers, Myth Makers: (Re) Visionary Techniques in the

Works of Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, and Audre Lorde.” Journal of

Homosexuality. 26 (1993): 73-88.

Kristeva, Julia.(1981). “Women’s Time”.Revolutions of the Word. New York: Columbia

University Press.

245

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Kristeva, Julia.(1982). Powers of Horror : an Essay on Abjection. Transl. Leon S.

Roudiez. New York, NY [u.a.]: Columbia Univ. Press.

Kumamoto, Sandra.ed.(1998).Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U. S. Women of

Color. Illinois:University of Illinois Press.

Lacan, Jacque.(1988)Freud's Papers on Technique.Jacque-Alain Miller ed. New York

Norton.

Lacey,Marc. “Fighting Light Skin as a Standard of Beauty”.The Saturday Profile.June

15:2002

Lassenberger, Margit. Identity and Home in the Work of Audre Lorde. Diss .University of

Graz, 2004.

Leary, Mark. R.ed.(2003).Handbook of Self and Identity.New York:Guilford Press.

------.(2003). Handbook of Self and Identity. New York: Guilford Press

Legg, Stephen.(2003). “Gendered Politics and Nationalised Homes: Women and the

Anti-Colonial Struggle in Delhi, 1930-47.” Gender, Place and Culture. 10/1

(2003): 7-27.

Leibowitz, Herbert.(1991).Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography.

New York, NY:New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Lifton, Robert Jay.(1999).The Protean Self:Human Resilience in an Age of

Fragmentation. IIIrd ed. Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press. 246

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Lionnet, Francoise.(1989). Autobiographical. Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture.

Cornell: Cornell University Press.

Lorde, Audre.(1980).The Cancer Journals. Iowa: Aunt Lute Books.

------.(1981).Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Arizona: Kore Books

------.(1982). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: The Crossing Press

------.(1984). Sister Outsider:Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing

Press.

Løvlie, Lars.(1992). “Postmodernism and Subjectivity”. in Kvale, S. (ed). Psychology

and Postmodernism, London:Sage.Guilford Press.

Miller, Nancy K. “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography”

Differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies 6.1 1994:1-27.

Minh-ha, Trint.(1989).Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.

Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade., Russo, Anne. ed.,Torres, Lourde. ed.,(1996).Third World

Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Morris, Margaret Kissam. “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 23/1 (2002): 168-188.

Murilyani, Sri. “Form and Content in bell hooks’s Autobiographies, Bone Black :

Memories of Girlhood and Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (A Gender

Perspective). Web 7/3:2004.www.usd.ac.id/06/publ_dosen/phenomena/73/sri.pdf

247

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Napier, Winston.(2000).Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics and Dialectics and The Black

Woman Writer's Literary Tradition. New York: New York University Press.

Nas, Loes. “Border Crossings in Latina Narrative: Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls

Lost Their Accents”. Journal of Literary Studies. 19/2(June 2003):125.

Neubauer, John.,Geyer Ryan, Helga. Eds.(2000). “Gendered Memories”. Proceedings of

the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association

“Literature as Cultural Memory”, Leiden 16-22 August 1997.Amsterdam/Atlanta:

GA. 2000.Print.

Olney, James.(1972).Metaphors of Self: the Meaning of Autobiography.Princeton,

NJ :Princeton Univ. Press.

------(1978).Metaphors of Self: the Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

------(1980). Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton

University Press

------“(Auto)Biography”. The Southern Review. 22/2 (1986): 428-441.

------ed.(1988) Studies in Autobiography. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP.

------“I Was Born: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as

Literature”. Callaloo 20(Winter 1984):46-73.

Pearl, Monica B. “ ‘Sweet Home’: Audre Lorde's Zami and the Legacies of American

Writing”.Journal of American Studies. 43(2009):297-317.

doi:10.1017/S0021875809990041.

248

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Pascal, Roy.(1960). Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambrige: Harvard University

Press.

Pearl, Monica B.(2009). “Sweet Home: Audre Lorde's Zami and the Legacies of

American Writing”. Journal of American Studies, 43: 297-317.

doi:10.1017/S0021875809990041

Polkey, Pauline.ed.(1999).Women's Lives Into Print: The Theory, Practice and Writing

of Feminist Auto/Biography. Basingstoke:Macmillan.

“Post-structuralism”.in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.Wikipedia Jan 29:2010

Web.http://en.wikipedia.org/index.php?titlePost-structuralism&oldid=339798368

Quintana, Alvina. Ed.(2005).Reading U.S.Latina Writer:Remapping American

Literature. 2nd ed.New York:NY Palgrave Macmillan.

Rich, Adrienne.(1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: Norton.

------(1986).Of Woman Born:Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

Toronto: Bantam Books.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques.(1938).Confessions. Paris: Librairie Larousse.

Sartre,Jean.Paul.(1964).The Words. 2nd ed.transl. Bernard Frechtman. New York: NY

Braziller.

Schiller J.C.,Friedrich Von. (2004).The Poems of Schiller.New York:Routledge.

Schlee, Eileen. “The Subject is dead, long live the female subject”. Feminist Issues.

13/2 (1993): 69-80.

249

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Schultermandl, Silvia.(2005).“What am I anyhow”.Close Encounters of Another Kind:

New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American studies.ed. Roy Goldblatt.

Joensuu: Joensuun Yliopisto Humanistinen Tiedekunta.

------(2004).Unlinear Matrilineage: Mother-Daughter Conflicts and the Politics of

Location in Contemporary Asian American and Caribbean American Women.

Diss.Uni-Graz.

------(2009). “Transnational Memory in the Joy Luck Club”. Transnational

Matrilineage: Mother-Daughter Conflicts in Asian American literature. Münster,

Wien :LIT-Verl.

Shapiro, Stephen A. “The Dark Continent of Literature”. Comparative

Literature Studies 5/4(1968): 421-454.

Shockley, Evelyn E. “Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood” rev.of Bone Black by bell

hooks. African American Review 31/3 (1997):552-554.

“Self: Christianity”:Encyclopedia Britannica 19/1947:35

Smith,R.,Cascardi. A.,ed., Macksey, R.ed.(1995). Derrida and

Autobiography (Literature, Culture, Theory). Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Smith, Sidonie.(1987).A Poetics of Women's Autobiography:Marginality and the

Fictions of Self Representation. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana Univ. Press.

------(1993). Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical

Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press.

250

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Smith, Sidonie., Watson, Julia.(1998).Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader.

Wisconsin:Univ of Wisconsin Press.

Spacks, Catherine.(1980). Selves in Hiding in Women's Autobiography: Essays in

Criticism. Bloomington, Indiana :Indiana Univ. Press.

Spellman, Elisabeth.(1997). Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering.

Boston: Beacon Press.

Spengemann, William C.(1982). The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History

of a Literary Genre. Yale:Yale University Press.

Spender, Stephen.(1951).World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender

in Rosen, Stone, Albert E.(1978).After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in

Recent Black Autobiography. Atlanta: Clark Atlanta University.

Springer, Kimberly. “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society 27.4. (2002):1085-1113.Print.

Stone, Albert.(1960). “After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in Recent Black

Autobiography”.Phylon 39/1:18-34.03.Septermber 2008. Web.

http://www.jstor.org/stable.274430.

Strozier, C.B. (1985). “Glimpses of a Life: Heinz Kohut (1913-1981)”. Progress in Self

Psychology. 1:3:12

Stryker, S., & Burke, P. J., (2000). “The Past, Present and Future of Identity Theory”.

Social Psychology Quarterly. 63:284-297

251

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Tate, Claudia.ed.(1983).Black Women Writers at Work. New York:Continuum.

Taylor, Victor E.(2003). Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. Abingdon : Routledge.

Taylor V., Winquist C.E.(2003). Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. Abingdon:Routledge

“Unconscious Mind” in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Ret. Jan. 29:

2010,http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unconscious_mind&oldid=34060

1921

Vegas Gonzales, Suzana. “The dialectics of Belonging”.Journal of English studies.3

(2001-2002):237-24807.11.2009.Web.dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/

fichero_articulo_articulo=720788&orden...

Walker, Rebecca.(2002). Black, White and Jewish:Autobiography of a Shifting Self. New

York, N.Y:Riverhead books.

“Walker, Rebecca.” in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.Wikipedia. Mar 1:2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rebecca_Walker&oldid=339805005

Warhol, Robyn.,Herndl, Diane Price.,eds.(1993) Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary

Theory and Criticism.New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Warhol, Robyn R. Eds.(1997).Feminisms:an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism.

Rev. ed., 2nd.ed.New Brunswick, NJ,:Rutgers Univ. Press.

Waugh, Patricia.(2006). Literary Theory and Criticism:An Oxford Guide.Oxford:Oxford

Univ. Press.

Weintraub, Karl J.(1975). Autobiography and Historical Consciousness. Chicago:

University of Chicago.

252

The Postmodern Self in 21st Century Women of Color Writings Abdurrahmani T.

Wilson, Anna.(2001) “Audre Lorde and the African American Literary Tradition:When

the Family is not Enough” in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural

Readings’. Sally Munt. Bucknell: Bucknell UP.

Wyatt, Jean.(2008). “Patricia Hill Collins's Black Sexual Politics and the Genealogy...

Studies in Gender and Sexuality”, 9:52-67. Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing

Web. 03 March 2010.

253