Sauling Around: The Trouble with Conversion in African American and Mexican American Autobiography 1965-2002

By

Madeline Ruth Walker B.A. University of Toronto, 1981 M.A., University of Victoria, 2003

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Madeline Ruth Walker, 2008 University of Victoria

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Sauling Around: The Trouble with Conversion in African American and Mexican American Autobiography 1965-2002

By Madeline Ruth Walker B.A. University of Toronto, 1981 M.A., University of Victoria, 2003

Supervisory Committee

Dr. Christopher D. Douglas, Supervisor (Department of English)

Dr. Stephen A. Ross, Departmental Member (Department of English)

Dr. Lincoln Shlensky, Departmental Member (Department of English)

Dr. Jason M. Colby, Outside Member (Department of History)

Dr. Susan Harding, Additional Member iii

Supervisory Committee

Dr. Christopher D. Douglas, Supervisor (Department of English)

Dr. Stephen A. Ross, Departmental Member (Department of English)

Dr. Lincoln Shlensky, Departmental Member (Department of English)

Dr. Jason M. Colby, Outside Member (Department of History)

Dr. Susan Harding, Additional Member

ABSTRACT

While the social sciences have interrogated religious conversions as intensely social, historically situated phenomena, literary studies has not focused the same scrutiny on these textually rendered events and the forces that shape them. This dissertation explores religious conversion and resistance to conversion in African American and Mexican American autobiography from 1965 to 2002, with attention to conversion's social context and its potential for harm. Constant change and the negotiation of resistance and assimilation to the dominant culture are seminal topics for ethnic Americans; the conversion narrative is therefore often seen as a normative genre in ethnic writing, particularly ethnic autobiography. For the most part, religious conversion in African American and Mexican American autobiography has either been ignored or misread as normal and beneficial, even though the binaries of black Christianity versus Nation of Islam, and Catholicism versus Protestantism are sites of religious and racial ambivalence in these two ethnic traditions. The autobiographical texts of Malcolm X, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Rodriguez call into question rosy views of conversion and suggest that we need to examine how conversion stories sometimes erase difference and cover over discourses of power. The American multicultural ideal of religious pluralism has meant that critics are too ready to praise religious conversion in America as advantageous or beyond the ken of criticism because religious belief is seen as belonging to the untouchable arena of cultural identity. IV

Table of Contents

Supervisory Committee ii

Abstract iii

Table of Contents iv

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Trouble with Conversion

Chapter One: The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Conversion and the Return of the Repressed 40

Chapter Two: Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autofictions 85

Chapter Three: Amiri Baraka's The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones, Blue- Black Marxism, Authenticity, and American Puritanism 127

Chapter Four: The Limits of Conversion: Richard Rodriguez and Gay Catholicism 175

Conclusion: The Trouble with Conversion is the Trouble with Religion 218

Endnotes 229

Works Cited 261 V

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my two superlative supervisors, Dr. Christopher Douglas and Dr. Stephen Ross. Chris, you provided unflagging support, insight, and evenhandedness throughout this process. I particularly appreciate the respect you accorded my ideas and writing, making me feel I was your peer rather than your student. Your feedback consistently motivated me to improve my work, which speaks to your extraordinary gifts as a mentor and editor. Stephen, you were instrumental not only in supporting the dissertation-writing process, but during my entire graduate student career at the University of Victoria. Thank you for being there at pivotal moments: encouraging me to apply to the Ph.D. program, assisting with my S.S.H.R.C. proposal, stepping in without hesitation as interim supervisor, and providing expert guidance during times of need. Finally, you taught me much about rhetoric and scholarship, and I thank you for encouraging me to get mad and get an argument. I am very grateful to S.S.H.R.C. for generously granting me the Canada Graduate Scholarship, allowing me to pursue my degree free of financial worry. Additionally, the University of Victoria's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society awarded me with the Vanderkerkhove graduate student fellowship that assisted me in my final year of writing. I appreciate not only the financial support, but also the opportunity to share ideas with scholars of religion and religious scholars. Conversations during coffee mornings added nuance to my final chapters, and granted me insights into Catholicism, Puritanism, Protestantism, election, grace, faith, and my own atheism. I would also like to thank Leslie Kenny for graciously agreeing to copy edit this manuscript and for her exemplary job in doing so. On a more personal note, I wish to thank Stephen Eaton Hume for his love, friendship, understanding, and unwavering belief in my intellectual ability. Thank you to Lheisa Dustin for our satisfying friendship, which included daily conversations that kept me sane during the sometime harrowing writing and revising process. Thank you to my three wonderful sons—Evan, Sam, and Nat Churchill—for supporting my ambition to get an M.A. and then a Ph.D. over seven long years, even when it meant less time and less money for them. Last, but not least, thank you to my wonderful parents, step­ parents, and sisters for never doubting me: Ken, Virginia, Marion, Petros, Kathryn, and Judy. Introduction - The Trouble with Conversion

There is an almost irresistible impulse toward at least a casual functionalism in the way most people think about religion, an insistence that in religion the contradictions of social and domestic life, the tensions of history and psychology, find resolution. This is why religion is so often imagined entropically, a phenomenon of closure and stasis. This is also the politics of religious representation in the United States. In a nation in which religion has been so wildly creative and innovative, where there seems to be no end to the fecundity of religious imaginings or to their violent and disruptive consequences, the public discourse of "the religious" instead presents faith and practice in ameliorative and consensual terms. Nothing happens in the space of the sacred, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing ever spins out of control, no one is ever destroyed there. - Robert Orsi, "Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion," 1997(11-12)

"You start Saul, and end up Paul," my grandfather had often said. "When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side." - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952 (381)

While attending a literature and culture conference in Kentucky in February

2007,1 shared a lunch table with a South Texan college professor. As my panel was scheduled just after lunch, she encouraged me to read my paper to her, a "dry run" for an audience of one. My topic was Chicano writer Oscar Zeta Acosta's autobiography, particularly his traumatic experience of failed conversion to the Baptist Church in the

1950s, an early draft of chapter 2 of this dissertation. In my paper, I linked the sentiment, "Jesus is my homeboy" to Acosta's disappointed desire, through conversion, to be not only closer to Jesus, but to be more like his white "Okie" friends. After I delivered the final line, "for Acosta, then, Jesus was emphatically not his homeboy," my listener's hand burrowed under her sweater and pulled out a crucifix on a chain. (She explained that she was a late convert from Judaism to the Episcopal Church, the result of her "miraculous" recovery from blindness.) "You can't say that," she told me, referring to my closing sentence. "You just have to change that last bit." Her objection was that 2 my closing sentence made it sound as though Acosta was "lost" from Jesus forever, and she wanted me to qualify it, make it sound less absolute, so as not to alienate my presumably largely religious audience. When I replied that I was willing to take any fair criticism coming my way, she become slightly aggressive, almost hostile. "Now you just have to have some audience awareness," she chided. I was exasperated by this response to a paper that was not even critical of religion per se, but simply pointed out the difficulties that arise when conversion is the result of the pressure to assimilate or

"Americanize." Were we not both members of an inquiring, intellectual community, tolerant of a variety of ideas? And what about her lack of sensitivity to my atheist sensibility? I am constantly bombarded in everyday life by the assumption that I, too, must believe in some "higher power," yet I do not continually take offence. That experience at a small formica table in the cafeteria of the University of Louisville convinced me of the significance of my project: I want to push against that censoring voice that tells me "you can't say that" about religion in America.

I will make two distinct but related claims in my work. First, while other disciplines have acknowledged the social aspect of religious conversion, American literary studies have not always paid careful attention to social phenomena in conversion narratives. Second, the deleterious potential of religious conversion, told both through conversion experiences and the resistance to conversion, is an aspect of American ethnic autobiography that has been largely misread or ignored.1 The reason that ethnic experience in particular intrigues me is that ethnicity shapes religion in tenacious ways, determining who is allowed to believe what (or if "allow" is too strong a term, religious institutions determine who will feel comfortable espousing their faith). American religion is ethnically prescriptive; while in the last several decades cultural critics have charted a distinct trend toward shopping-market religion (freedom of the consumer, mix and match, pick what you like), there is nonetheless a strong undercurrent of essentialism at work in matters of religion and religious conversion. Despite our language of choice and consent, we are tightly circumscribed in matters of faith. Acosta would have been barred from converting to the Nation of Islam; Malcolm X could not have participated fully in the Church of the Latter Day Saints; Amiri Baraka should not practice Mexican American forms of Catholicism; and Richard Rodriguez would not be welcome at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ—Barack Obama's former church that follows the "Black Value System" (Obama 284). These are rather extreme examples, and my chapters will often deal with much more subtle forms that cultural/racial/ethnic coercion can take in matters of religion. Nonetheless, I claim a slippage between putative freedom in religion and the actual lived experience of ethnic

Americans.

Conversion manifests as an intensely personal experience: think of the child's voice telling St. Augustine to "take up and read" {Confessions 126) and Saul's vision of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9.3-9). St. Augustine of Hippo's conversion, recorded in his Confessions, is an example of the iconic Christian conversion narrative, and provides a good illustration of the sudden, dramatic, private turn to God. After an iniquitous early life and struggles with various philosophies, particularly Manicheism, Augustine was visiting a small village near Milan in 386 and heard a child's voice, which lead indirectly to his conversion. Following is a description of that scene from the Confessions:

I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a

neighboring house, chanting, and oft repeating, "Take up and read; take up and read." Immediately my countenance was changed, and I began

most earnestly to consider whether it was usual for children in any kind of

game to sing such words; nor could I remember ever to have heard the

like. So, restraining the torrent of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it no

other way than as a command to me from Heaven to open the book, and

to read the first chapter I should light upon. [...] I grasped, opened, and

in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell—"Not in rioting

and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and

envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for

the flesh, to fulfil the lusts therof." No further would I read, nor did I

need; for instantly, as the sentence ended—by a light, as it were, of

serenity infused into my heart—all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

(126)

However, this prototypically asocial conversion narrative, like the equally iconic and similarly private experience of Saul on the road to Damascus, belies the fact that religious conversion calls into play a wide range of social, cultural, economic, racial, political, and psychological components. Furthermore, conversion often promises a movement from fragmentation and distress to wholeness and harmony,2 but American ethnic autobiography does not always bear this out.

I contend that an overly romanticized view of religions in general, seen either as cultural jewels or empowering systems, has contributed to these misreadings and aporias. I read texts of late-twentieth-century African American and Mexican American autobiographers in order to challenge the assumption that religious conversion is often personal and chiefly beneficial. I argue that we need to examine how conversion stories 5 sometimes erase difference and cover over discourses of power. What is at stake? The

American multicultural ideal of religious pluralism has meant that critics are too ready to praise religion in America as healthy or beyond the ken of criticism, because religious belief is seen as belonging to the untouchable arena of personal culture or cultural identity. Steven Pinker writes that there is "a sense that religion deserves special respect" and thus debates about religion seem to have evaluative standards different from other academic arguments: you are a "meanie" if you criticize religion (qtd. in

Lindsay). Richard Dawkins concurs, writing that there is a "widespread assumption" that religious faith "should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other" (20). This means that the troubling aspects to religious conversion tend to be glossed over or unexplored.

Thus, to speak of the trouble with conversion is to intervene in some small way in the disturbing normative hegemony of American religiosity.

The general consensus—that conversion is a private, mystical experience that leads to positive transformation—ignores much of the literary evidence. Kimberly Rae

Connor's Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women (1994), for example, instantiates a trend in the scholarly intersection of black religion and autobiography where religion is seen as a homogenous and beneficent force. Connor explores the conversion theme in nineteenth-century autobiography and twentieth- century fiction, examining the work of Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Cox

Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Alice Walker. Zora

Neale Hurston has pride of place as the pivotal mid-century convert, from whom Connor borrows the ideas of voluntary and involuntary conversion. A year after the publication of Connor's book, David Palumbo-Liu warned us that critical work on the ethnic canon 6 should not celebrate multiple cultures without a counterbalancing criticism: he called for

"[a] critical multiculturalism [that] explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively" (5). Connor's monograph, it seems to me, fails singularly in the way that Palumbo-Liu warned of; her celebration of African

American women's spirituality and their remaking through religion lacks a critical edge that I believe is required in any contemporary examination of religion, ethnic/racial identity, and autobiography.

In the following example, Connor reveres a monolithic African American religion and culture while subscribing to the "myth of cultural holism" (Benhabib 404):

African-American women recognize themselves not solely in isolation

but in relationship to other women, to culture, and to creation. They

develop individual identities by embracing the collective religious

consciousness of black culture. For what is found in most cultures

(African-American culture being one of many formidable examples) is

that it is by way of the religious life that one is best able to discern human

modes of being. (Connor 5)

There is little evidence to support the claim that there exists a "collective religious consciousness of black culture." What exactly comprises that consciousness? If one attempts to claim a collective religious consciousness of "white" culture or "Asian" culture the hollowness of the claim is revealed: racial "cultures," if such things exist at all, are far too multifaceted and heterogeneous to support a collective consciousness of almost any component of that culture. Connor's omission of Nation of Islam and Sunni

Islam in an examination of the development of such a consciousness for African 7

Americans indicates the shaky grounds for her conception of "black culture." The fact that Nation of Islam and Sunni Islam have been perceived as male dominated and misogynistic may seem justification for Connor to exclude them from African American female "consciousness," while privileging Christianity, amorphous African-based religions, and "spirituality." However, the Nation and Sunni Islam have had enormous impact—both positive and negative—on African American women.3

But it is Connor's general celebration of an amorphous religion and spirituality that most requires a corrective. To assume that religion and conversion usually play an ameliorative or benign role for the ethnic subject elides a significant area of experience.

Connor writes that "[conversions serve as a personal way to bring into focus the communal vision of what is sacred in life. In the direct experience of spiritual power articulated by black women as a conversion, the vision is transmitted and transformed so that traditional elements give way to and participate in a perpetual turning of the soul to what is sacred" (15). In contrast to Connor, I do not see religious conversion as an always-empowering step in the creation of the whole self and "a perpetual turning of the soul to what is sacred." Rather, conversion can be a step toward the negative dissolution of personality, a traumatic denial of self, or a cul-de-sac, diverting the autobiographical subject from more fruitful political or other work.

A principle example of Connor's misreading of conversion experiences is her employment of Zora Neale Hurston as a model "convert" (112,137). Not only was

Hurston not a convert, she retained a detached and slightly scornful view of religious converts in her writings. Connor, however, uses various of Hurston's texts— anthropological, fictional, and autobiographical—as proof of her overall spirituality and connection to God, placing special reliance on portions of the chapter titled "Religion" in Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). She minimizes and ignores other sections of the same chapter where Hurston mockingly describes the "lyin"' aspect of conversions and visions (essentially retellings of the same few tales with

"adornments") in the black church, and expresses aspects of her own agnosticism.

Connor writes that "[t]he data Hurston gathers in her anthropological writings support the affirmative aspects of African-American religion and the experience of conversion"

(117). She goes on to say that Dust Tracks "reveals a spiritual motivation not dissimilar from that which inspired the lives and writings of nineteenth-century black women"

(117). And yet Hurston describes feeling religious doubt from an early age, and acknowledges the profoundly social and obligatory aspect to religious belief: "When I was asked if I loved God, I always said yes because I knew that that was the thing I was supposed to say. It was a guilty secret with me for a long time" {Dust Tracks 217). As the daughter of a preacher, Hurston was witness to manipulative conversion scenes, and while she loved the "high drama" (218, 221) of these events, she was suspicious of the authenticity of the results, wondering why converts "looked and acted like everybody else" (216). She describes a long period of searching and doubt, eventually rejecting religion: "It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me" (226).4 Furthermore,

Hurston writes that "[p]rayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down" (226). Hurston is unequivocal here in her public avowal of religion as a crutch suitable for others, but not necessary for herself. It is difficult, with this evidence, to understand how Connor can read Hurston as a pivotal 9 figure of conversion in her study and Dust Tracks as revelatory of "a spiritual motivation" (117).

Moreover, Connor does not acknowledge Hurston's highly ironic view of religious conversion in her fantasy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "vision" of Father

Divine: "Maybe Franklin Delano Roosevelt will fall on his head tomorrow and arise with a vision of Father Divine in the sky and the motto, 'Peace! It's wonderful!' glowing like a rainbow above it" (Dust Tracks 223). Hurston precedes that long sketch with the ironic observation that "[m]ilitary power" forced the "gospel of peace" and mass religious conversions throughout history (223). She then, through the idea of a converted

Roosevelt renamed "Sincere Determination" and wife Eleanor renamed "Divine Eternal

Commutation," pokes fun at the hollowness of the promise of dramatic change that religious conversion holds, and gestures toward the impossibility of conversion performing any material work in the world (223-5).

Finally, Connor chooses to overlook the important following passage in Dust

Tracks that firmly seals Hurston's agnosticism:

People need religion because the great masses fear life and its

consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the

face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up

their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is

a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security. Strong,

self-determining men are notorious for their lack of reverence. (225)

Hurston might have added that strong, self-determining women, such as she, are also notorious for their lack of reverence. Even bringing to bear every argument for the unreliability of autobiography's truth in general,5 and the many arguments about 10

Hurston's unreliability as a narrator in Dust Tracks in particular,6 there is nonetheless strong textual evidence for Hurston's agnosticism and her suspicion of religion and conversion, in contrast to Connor's reverse view of the same. Thus Connor's treatment of Hurston as model convert ignores Hurston's contextualizing of conversion as propelled by social expectation, as well as Hurston's observation that conversion leads to posturing and inauthentic behaviour of converts—hardly the beneficial results Connor argues for.

Connor is, to some degree, representative of a larger consensus on the positive benefits of conversion; this consensus is built around a careful blindness when it comes to fake conversions, deconversions, problematic conversions, and resistance to conversion in ethnic American literature. The assumption that conversion is private and beneficial speaks to a broader fantasy that religion is a static, benign force that brings harmony to people's lives. Orsi, a proponent of "lived religion," argues that

"[historians" have represented people "within religious contexts in which everyone does what he or she is supposed to do, in which authority is obeyed and ritual rubrics carefully followed" ("Everyday" 12). The problem, he writes, is that "no one has ever seen anything like this in the real world" (12). In fact, "[r]eligion, commonly seen as the binding element of American society, turns out to be one of its solvents; religious practices and imaginings constitute one of the primary sites of transgression in American history and culture" (13). Ethnic narratives of conversion and resistance to conversion are rich sites of the transgression that Orsi describes.

Hurston is not the only, or most famous, African American writer to experience such troubles with conversion. The following three key examples of fake conversions, appearing in early autobiographies by African American men, attest to the specious 11 underpinnings of the consensus about conversion.7 Not only do they again illustrate that conversion is sometimes undertaken as a result of social and familial obligation; these examples also show that such attempts to please can lead to misery and guilt (one of the negative consequences of conversion).

The motif of the fake conversion repeats in African American autobiography in the first half of the twentieth century, and the following three autobiographical incidents demonstrate the enormous pressure to be saved exerted by some African American communities on their young members. While parents and grandparents prized the spirituality, communality, safety (and sometimes the oppositional politics) of the black

Christian (often fundamentalist) church, their intellectual and artistic offspring were skeptical. These experiences, traced in the autobiographies of James Weldon Johnson,

Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, remind us that conversion is always already a socially framed process where the autobiographical persona balances the expectations of usually female relatives or community with his own feelings and intellect. The narratives of Johnson, Hughes, and Wright exemplify female spirituality as a coercive, negative force—the underside and contrast to Connor's sense of conversion as empowering and community building. The familial-social context of conversion or resistance to conversion figures importantly for all four of the autobiographers that I examine in this study: Malcolm X, Oscar Acosta, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Rodriguez.

James Weldon Johnson (1878-1938), writer, musician, and NAACP (National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People) leader, is perhaps most renowned for his 1912 mock autobiography, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In his

1933 autobiography, Along this Way, Johnson writes of his grandmother's aspirations for him to become a preacher, and describes his own consummate acting job at a 12 revivalist meeting at the age of nine. When he falls asleep at the mourners' bench and somebody shakes his shoulder to wake him, he pretends to have "gone off in a spiritual trance:

Whence sprang the whim, as cunning as could have occurred to one of

the devil's own imps? The shaking continued, but I neither opened my

eyes nor stirred. They gathered round me. I heard, "Glory to God, the

child's gone off!" But I did not open my eyes or stir. My grandmother got

a big, strong fellow who took me on his back and toted me that long mile

home. Several people going our way accompanied us, and the

conversation reverted to me, with some rather far-fetched allusions to the

conversion of Saul of Tarsus. (26)

Johnson decides that when he pretends to awake from his feigned religious trance, he will recount a vision of heaven remembered from some illustration in Home Life in the

Bible. He is then pressed by his grandmother into church membership as a child convert, but this childhood experience of acting the part of a Christian only makes his final severance from the church more emphatic. While Johnson claims the King James Bible to be the "greatest book in the world" (31), he is a confirmed agnostic by his freshman year at Atlanta University (30), his early fervour tempered by reason and the skepticism of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll.

Langston Hughes (1902-1965) writes in Volume I of his autobiography, The Big

Sea (1940), of being saved from sin when he was almost thirteen, "[b]ut not really saved" (41). Like Johnson, Hughes pretends to have a religious experience partly to please a close female, in Hughes's case, a friend of his grandmother whom he calls

"Auntie Reed," and with whom he lived for a period of his childhood. During a special 13 religious meeting '"to bring the young lambs to the fold'" (41), Hughes is the last child left sitting on a bench, waiting for the call of Jesus, even after Westley, another boy, has deceitfully gone up to join the saved children without feeling Jesus. Hughes writes,

"Now it was really getting late. I began to be ashamed of myself, holding everything up so long. [...] God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved" (42). Later that night, the twelve-year-old

Hughes cries himself to sleep, his tears the product of his guilt at deception, and also his realization that there could not be a Jesus, because Jesus would have come to him in his hour of need: "I couldn't bear to tell her [Auntie Reed] that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn't come to help me" (43).

Richard Wright (1908-60) relates two similar incidents in his canonical autobiography, Black Boy (1945). While these incidents are not, technically, fake conversions, they nonetheless illustrate the desire of a relative for a young man's salvation and his oppositional pull toward atheism. Wishing to placate his Seventh-day

Adventist grandmother who wishes for some sort of sign or miracle from her wayward grandson, Richard tells her "if I ever saw an angel like Jacob did, then I'd believe"

(117). Unfortunately, his hard-of-hearing granny thinks that he has just told him he has seen an angel, and she tells the congregation of this miracle, causing dismay and embarrassment for both Richard and his grandmother when he tries to clarify his words.

Later in the autobiography, he describes his mother's attempts to convert him to the

Methodist Church. In another embarrassing scene, his mother is one of many, pleading with their sons to be saved. Richard is pressured into agreeing to baptism, although he 14 feels nothing: "This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters" (154).

The point about women's role as coercers of conversion, and my choice of four male autobiographers, is sure to raise some important questions in readers about the gendering of conversion. Before proceeding, it will be useful to for me to briefly give consideration to women's role in ethnic conversion narratives, and to provide an explanation for my selection of writers. First, my just-cited examples of women as coercive and negative forces of spirituality are not meant as representative of ethnic religious women; they merely provide counter-examples to Connor's valorization of

African American women as model converts. Examples abound of ethnic women as positive religious role models in autobiographical texts, including the primary texts of this study: for example, Amiri Baraka paints a loving portrait of his religious grandmother in his autobiography, while Richard Rodriguez admires and adores the

Irish Catholic nuns that educate him during his childhood, depicted in Hunger of

Memory. I counter Connor's portrait of women as always favorably spiritual—against the evidence—in order to emphasize the heterogeneity of religious experience regardless of gender.

My choice of four male writers as objects of study cannot be merely waved away as coincidence without some explanation. While there are many autobiographical texts by African American and Mexican American women written during the period in question (1965-2002), none of them intrigued me so completely as those by my chosen

(male) writers, nor did they provide similarly fruitful instances of conversion or resistance to conversion. Hurston's Dust Tracks and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands provide interesting and appropriate material for my introduction and conclusion, but none of the many other autobiographical texts that I read by authors Cherrie Moraga,

Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou provided the fecund combination of examples that I required to make my argument. I find that I cannot make any generalizations about the gendering of conversion. Even while my research shows that ethnic women tend to be more religious than their male counterparts, this can work both for and against conversion. For example, the Mexican

American mother is seen as the "high priest of [...] domestic religion" (Dolan, In

Search 143). At the same time, Mexican American women are often the instigators of conversion to fundamentalist Protestantism both because of its directive for a clean, frugal, and sober life, and because it offers more female agency than Catholicism (see

Leon, "Metaphor"). Thus, while I acknowledge that my exclusion of female authors and experience in my four central chapters may seem to argue for a pattern of gendered conversion, I cannot pretend to be making any such argument.

The strong pull exerted by close relatives to be "saved" is resisted by these young male African American autobiographers, signalling a turning away first from the historical religion of the slave owner, a religion that "counsels them to be content with their social position" (S. Smith 62). While Christianity brought solace to parents and grandparents, it symbolized further oppression for the next generation. New generations of African American writers and intellectuals were eschewing the palliative Christian offering of an afterlife. Johnson, Hughes, and Wright represent a new intellectual freedom inspired by John Dewey's pragmatism and European existentialism, their fake conversions signalling a form of social nicety that conceals a firm unwillingness to be 16 placated by the idea of an afterlife and insistence on ameliorating life here and now.

Like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man, these writers will declare, after Lucifer, "I will not serve" (260) to the God assigned to them via African American culture, preferring to follow their own intellectual paths. These experiences of childhood coercion in the autobiographies of

Johnson, Hughes, and Wright illustrate not only the fierce sociality of conversion, but also its negative potential for creating fear, guilt, and emotional confusion in young children commanded to disobey their intuition. In saying no to conversion, these autobiographers counter Connor's set of positive African American conversion stories, and serve as precursors to later ethnic autobiographers, particularly Oscar Zeta Acosta,

Amiri Baraka, and Richard Rodriguez.8

I provide these literary counter-examples in order to provide a corrective to the overweening optimism about conversion. I am suspicious of promises of dramatic change, and thus interested in investigating rebirth stories that just do not work, and conversions that do not take or are resisted. In a culture saturated with rebirth success stories, there are many hidden pockets of failure, disgruntlement, and resistance. As Orsi implies in my opening epigraph, there exists a productive gap, in America's religions, between the popular conception of benign faith and the messiness, chaos, and even destructiveness of lived experience. I see in particular a homologous relationship between the morphology of conversion and the trajectory of the mythical "American

Dream": the sinner-to-saved story is iterated in the rags-to-riches narrative. Sometimes those narratives are conflated and religious conversion is integrated into the story of the self-made man; for example, some critics read Malcolm Little's conversion to the Nation 17 of Islam in The Autobiography of Malcolm X as the Algeresque launch of a black Ben

Franklin figure.9

The idea of "Saul[ing] around" represents for me conversion's ambivalent position in Mexican American and African American autobiography. To assume an unproblematic, consensual shift from a fragmented to a whole identity (religious or otherwise) in life stories of minority figures is to conceal political, emotional, and economic fissures. Ralph Ellison, quoted in epigraph one of this chapter, has the invisible man's wily grandfather complicate the Saul-Paul binary by calling into question the authenticity and seamlessness of the postconversion self: '"When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul— though you still Sauls around on the side'" (381). Moreover, Ellison was evoking generations of African American ambivalence about Paul's dual role: a hero of

Christianity who sanctioned slavery, particularly in the Epistle to Philemon.10 (Paul's pied role reiterates the problem of religious sociality—his authorization of slavery was necessary to the mechanism of his society, regardless of divine will.) Saul of Tarsus' s dramatic conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus "remain[s] front and centre in Christian thinking about conversion" (Bryant 180), and yet the iconic status of that conversion narrative belies the complexity of Paul's ambiguous role for oppressed peoples. Ellison's canny line, then, alludes to the crooked, circuitous, even false route that conversion may take, while it gestures toward this knotty theological problem for

African American Christians. While I do not deal with Ellison in my study, these lines from his novel provide a context. "Sauling around" suggests the complex and subversive aspects of conversion, signifying the potential for double-voicing, falsity, and coercion in conversion experiences for both Mexican American and African American 18 autobiographers. "Sauling around" also signifies the continuity of a "Saul" or core self throughout the conversion process—a continuity we see in the persistence of Malcolm's attachment to dancing, in Acosta's desire for ethnic group acceptance, in Baraka's deployment of religious language, and in Rodriguez's sense of religion as biology.

"Sauling around" thus provides a useful analytical tool with which to explore the vagaries of conversion and resistance to conversion in my chosen texts. I will deploy

"Sauling around" (and its obverse "Pauling around," where religiosity persists after deconversion) in two central ways: first, to capture the permeability of the Saul/Paul identity border; second, to point to the problems that arise from conversion, a task which includes noting contradictions and fissures in autobiographical descriptions of both conversion and religious experience.

My argument locates the conversion narrative as a subversive and subverted genre within the narrow intersection of race, ethnicity, and American autobiography in the latter part of the twentieth century (1965-2002), in the following texts: The

Autobiography of Malcolm X(\965), by Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley; The

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and its sequel, Revolt of the Cockroach

People (1973), by Oscar Zeta Acosta; The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones (1984), by

Amiri Baraka; and Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982),

Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last

Discovery of America (2002), by Richard Rodriguez. My examination of these texts is built on three related premises: that ethnic American autobiography in the latter part of the century instantiates the conflict and serial changes experienced by subjects in a society that marginalizes them; that, for the ethnic American subject, religious conversion offered "salvation" through cultural assimilation or cultural nationalism that 19 was frequently not fulfilled or came at the price of subordination to a "higher power"; and, finally, that the conversion narratives, anti-conversion narratives, or subverted conversion narratives within ethnic American autobiography of this period can tell us much about the socially motivated, deleterious effects of religion.

In the past several decades, academics have been midwives to the rebirth of the conversion narrative from a purely religious genre—one that narrates the move from sinner to saved—to a genre that could be read into a variety of modern, sometimes secular, texts. This religious autobiographical genre was seen to be productively applicable to non-religious and fictional texts; additionally, conversion was no longer limited to religious change, but could be applied broadly to political, cultural, and secular psychological transformation. Virginia Lieson Brereton (1991) considers late- twentieth-century women's "conversions" to feminism and lesbianism as part of the continuum of American female conversion narratives from 1800 on. Gerald Peters

(1993), in an attempt to understand why the conversion narrative genre persists despite the deconstruction of the idea of the "unified self," uses Vico's theory of the history of writing (hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic phases) to examine the conversion narratives in or implicit in Paul, Augustine, Rilke, Joyce, and Orwell. Thus, the conversion narrative has been seen as applicable to many life transformations—in the

"real" subjects of autobiographies and novel characters alike—and while it has potential for fiction studies, its most obvious application remains autobiographical writing.

Gerald Peters notes that the conversion pattern is "prevalent in secular autobiographies and may well be an integral part of the structure and goals of the genre itself. [... ] The evidence that the structures of many modern secular autobiographies follow a similar pattern of loss and compensatory gain found in earlier religious confessions suggests in itself grounds for a comparison and for tentatively carrying over the language of religion into the secularized quest for identity and justification" (4-5).

One can claim, just as convincingly, that religious conversion narratives borrow their language and pattern from pagan myth, which in turn is based on a common life experience of darkness/doubt followed by light/assurance. "Just as the language of religion can provide an analogue for secular experience, so Christianity borrows from classical sources the metaphors that most effectively describe common experiences," writes Susanna Egan (137-8). The autobiographer, in other words, either makes life's arc rhetorically fit that of the conversion narrative, or, life's arc—reflecting common experience—follows the pattern of a conversion narrative. Autobiographies thus often delineate a previous wrong, distressed, fragmented life followed by some epiphany or a series of transformations that lead to a final, whole, happy (or happier) self. However, the problem with conflating religious conversion with normal identity development is that this conflation not only allows religious conversion to be read as a natural or predictable event, but also encourages positive readings of those accounts of conversion because they seem merely part of a master narrative of transformation. I will return to this problem, which is central to my argument, after an overview of conversion research.

Recent scholarship on conversion stresses its vast heterogeneity, conversion as a process rather than an event, and the necessity for scholarship to be multidisciplinary, involving religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychology (see Gauri Viswanathan,

Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier, Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Rinehart,

James Muldoon, Karl Morrison, Susan Harding, Lewis Rambo, Darrol Bryant and

Christopher Lamb).11 While all conversions involve some form of change, conversion differs according to religions, historical period, geography, age and gender of subject, 21 intensity, duration, and community. Conversion, for example, can apply to widely divergent situations, from the Jewish conversos of Inquisitorial Spain who had

Christianity forced upon them, to "Moonie" converts to the Unification Church in the

1970s, to the born-again Christian followers of Jerry Falwell in twenty-first century

America. A difficulty faced by scholars is the multivalence of the word conversion;

Lewis Rambo partially solves this problem by deciding that "conversion is what a group or person says it is" (Understanding 7), thus legitimizing subjective experience in the conversion process.

Landmark conversion studies include those by Edwin Diller Starbuck (1899),

William James (1902), A.D. Nock (1933), John Lofland and Norman Skonovd (1981),

C. Daniel Batson and W. Larry Ventis (1982), and Rambo (1993). Each of these studies provides insight into the conversion experience: Lofland and Skonovd's set of six

"conversion motifs" and Rambo's seven-stage conversion sequence are especially helpful in the work of classifying conversion. However, for my purpose in a study on autobiography, it is more useful to look at the history, patterns, and content of conversion narratives. In other words, my interest is specifically in how experiences of conversion, resistance to conversion, and the subversion of the conversion narrative are rendered in the language of autobiography.

The earliest significant extant American conversion narratives belong to a

"collection of fifty-one 'Confessions' given at the First Church of Cambridge,

Massachusetts, between 1637 and 1645, and recorded in a small private notebook by the minister of the church, Thomas Shepard" (Caldwell ix). These highly formulaic testimonies were written for one purpose: to prove that the subject was one of the

"elect," and to thus meet the requirements for membership in the gathered Puritan 22

Church. These early narratives, like their British cousins, were patterned on a

"morphology of conversion," established to verify a conversion's authenticity by "a set of temporal and recognizable signs" (Morgan, Visible 66). The stages comprise a journey from sin and humiliation to sanctification, with the middle stages of combat, despair, and doubt fraught with significance: to be overly assured of one's faith meant that such assurance was false. Later versions of the conversion narrative were variations on this theme, but invariably required a sinful past, a moment or longer period of change or "turning toward" the religion or God, and a postconversion or "saved" existence.

My reason for outlining the pattern of these earliest American conversion narratives is to point out their inherent quality of paradox: the ineffable (the conversion experience) is expressed through a prescribed, sequential, literary form (the conversion narrative).12 Patricia Caldwell encourages our aesthetic appreciation of these seventeenth-century writings, pointing out their variety and beauty; furthermore, she documents the many moments that writers burst the bounds of prescription and express deep emotion in their narratives (163-86). It is nonetheless true that, in the main, these early narratives follow the expected pattern of "knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance" (Morgan, Visible 72). But the unasked, if obvious, question remains: how can a formulaic narrative prove authenticity? The answer, of course, is that narration cannot prove or even reflect the authenticity of an event, nor is authenticity really at stake: attempting to ascertain whether a conversion is authentic or not is a slippery, irrelevant enterprise. The significance of this early model is that the conversion narrative itself has little relation to the larger arc of experience; while Puritan narrators must follow the required narrative pattern to gain entry to the church, the narration of the event bears only slim relation to their wider, varied religious experience. 23

In the case of Acosta and Malcolm X, their conversions take scant space in their texts, and are told in rather flat prose, especially Acosta's. Malcolm uses the well-worn

Pauline symbol of the blinding light to represent his turn toward the Nation of Islam. As we will see, it is not so much the language used in the conversion event that is of interest

(though some of it is very interesting), but how that narrated event is the result of earlier influences, and how it has an impact on later parts of the autobiography. In other words, the "trouble" with conversion lies not in the language of telling—because conversion narratives all share that rhetorical problem of how to express the inexpressible—but rather in the reasons for converting (sometimes opaque), the consequences of conversion, and the performative power of the act of conversion.

With the exception of overwhelming research on the canonical Autobiography of

Malcolm X since its publication in 1965, critical interest in the ethnic conversion narrative has been sketchy and slight. James Holte's article in MELUS in the summer of

1982 marked a new intersection in American letters: that of mainline religious studies and mainstream autobiography studies with multiculturalism. When Holte analyzed three ethnic autobiographies as conversion narratives, he was both confirming a long trend in American autobiography (the adaptation of the conversion narrative for a variety of purposes) and showing us how this genre might have a special role to play for

American minorities. Because constant change and the negotiation of resistance and assimilation to the dominant culture are seminal topics for ethnic Americans, the conversion narrative (both in its traditional and more secular forms) is a central genre in ethnic writing, and particularly ethnic autobiography. Holte alerted us in his early article to the following prevalent motif in ethnic autobiography: sin or dislocated identity is followed by a "conversion" experience—religious or otherwise—and concludes with either a state of grace or the integration of a new identity. Holte tends to conflate religious and social experience as merely different forms of "conversion," a conflation

(as I have already noted) that I see as somewhat problematic; while social change for ethnic groups in America is expected and almost inevitable, religious conversion is not.

His conflation tends (incorrectly) to naturalize religious conversion as merely another aspect of either assimilation or cultural change in America. Dividing ethnic American conversion narratives between whether the autobiographer's transformation is from outsider to insider position (i.e. assimilation into dominant culture) or resistant outsider to celebratory outsider position (i.e. transformation to race or cultural leader of the marginalized group), Holte summarizes:

While particular circumstances differ, ethnic autobiographers have

consistently written about conversions. Not all are as explicitly religious

as Malcolm's and [Piri] Thomas', but because of the pressures of race,

class, generational conflict, poverty, and discrimination, ethnic writers in

general and ethnic autobiographers in particular have written about the

giving-up and taking-on of languages, traditions, and beliefs. Some have

written about the opportunities, while others have written about the

losses. (45)

While, like Holte, I examine both religious and secular conversions, I am careful in my chapter on Baraka to show how the conflation of religious and secular conversion is problematic. Baraka's religious language when describing his "conversion" to Marxism reveals a "Pauling around"—evidence for the lingering harmful effects of religion in his life. I also differ from Holte in my particular interest in the "trouble with conversion"; while Holte gestures at the underbelly of conversion—"the losses"—his work is not 25 meant to indict conversion as a negative force, nor is he interested, as I am, in teasing out the problems and issues surrounding and arising from conversion and anti- conversion experiences.

Werner Sollors (1986) affirmed this idea that the conversion narrative, as a broadly conceived literary form, was characteristic of much American writing, particularly ethnic autobiography. Sollors marks the evolution of the form from late nineteenth-century "shallow assimilationist" to "reborn ethnic," beginning in the 1960s

(31-2). Furthermore, while Sollors notes the variety of vehicles these conversions could take (political, cultural, educational), he anchors his observation in the classic Saul/Paul turn, characterizing many of these life narratives as showing "strong polarization, characteristic of the many Sauls who became Pauls in their Damascus of America" (32).

Raymund Paredes echoes Sollors with the observation that the conversion narrative "has especially thrived in a country that prides itself on opportunity, mobility, and individualism." He goes on to recognize that the conversion narrative "proved flexible as well as enduring and was eventually taken up with great success by a number of immigrant autobiographers toward the end of the nineteenth century" (281).

In the quarter-century since Holte's 1982 article, one body of work has accumulated on ethnic autobiography from a literary standpoint,14 and another on conversion narratives from a religious standpoint,15 but the intervention that Holte first made in linking the two has only rarely been repeated.16 While Sollors and Paredes reiterate Holte's observation that conversion is a theme that saturates ethnic autobiography, there has been scant work that homes in on religious conversion in ethnic autobiography. Connor's book, Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-

American Women (1994), explored earlier in this chapter, and Elizabeth J. West's 26

"Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig" (1999) are two exceptions. West's contribution to the field is a rare critical intervention on which I build to make my own argument. In contrast to Connor's work, West views Harriet Wilson's

1859 novel, Our Nig, as an anti-conversion conversion narrative, and her work is an important intervention in the study of ethnic conversion narrative. West sees Wilson's protagonist Frado's failed conversion as a way of critiquing the hypocritical "white"

Christianity available to her as a black woman, and further suggests that Wilson may have been "signifyin(g)" on the conversion narrative genre. My own project builds on

West's critical reworking of the nineteenth-century conversion narrative by examining parallel reworkings in late-twentieth-century autobiography, particularly my chapter 3 where I consider Amiri Baraka's amusing deployment of the conversion narrative in the service of Marxism. My work, then, is in radical opposition to Connor's and to the consensus on conversion in scholarly work on ethnic literature and religion. In aligning my work with West and in opposition to Connor, I am in no way denying religion's cultural or personal significance, or the potential for positive outcome in the conversion process. My aim, rather, is to provide a balance to what I perceive as two tendencies in the study of ethnic autobiography: either to whitewash or homogenize the role of religious conversion, or simply to pass over it as insignificant or undeserving of attention.

Lewis Rambo offers a good example of the benevolent school of conversion studies: "Autobiography, perhaps better than any other genre, engages people on a very personal level. Conversion autobiographies stimulate imitation and provide reinforcement. Conversion stories touch the lives of people in ways that theological reflection rarely does. [...] Every story of a conversion calls for a conversion, confirms the validity of conversion, and shapes a person's experience of conversion (159).

Rambo, as a prominent scholar on conversion, here makes conversion normative, celebratory, and infectious. When Rambo writes that every conversion "calls for a conversion," he may be alluding to Augustine's Confessions, the gold standard of the mimetic conversion narrative that is patterned on imitative conversions and a reading of which was supposed to produce further conversions.17 In other words, a good conversion autobiography or narrative is a variety of sales pitch that induces the reader to convert.

According to Daniel Shea, "Christians had evangelized in the first person" since Paul and Augustine (88). For Rambo and other scholars of faith, then, stories of failed or troubled conversions are not exemplary or prime candidates for study; not only will they not induce further conversions, but they may have the opposite effect. They deserve mention, as anomalies, only when they are the product of coercion.

There is a marked tendency for religious scholars (that is, both scholars who are religious and scholars of religion—two distinct groups that not infrequently overlap) to regard conversion as a salutary force, and—even while claiming great strides in multi- disciplinary research on conversion—to fall back on William James's 1902 psychological account of conversion as the unification of a divided self (Varieties).

While we think of James as a religious skeptic, cementing the modern turn away from organized religion at the beginning of the century in his Varieties of Religious

Experience, his views are remarkably conservative. For example, in his first of two chapters on conversion, he paints a pathological portrait of the non-believer, suggesting that if one does not—at some point in his or her life—undergo conversion, then one is

"barren," "bloodless," not fully human: 28

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any

circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the

centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants

of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They

are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language of

devotion, they are life-long subjects of'barrenness' and 'dryness.' [...]

In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anaesthetic on

the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a

bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the

reckless 'animal spirits' enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; so

the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others,

but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are

temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. (204-5)

James is the writer that many American writers turn to when establishing foundational terms for explaining psychological aspects of conversion. His pity for non-believers, his view of conversion as a gift, and of "sanctification" as creating a "heroic level" of

"spiritual vitality" set the tone for future generations of religious scholars.

There is a propensity for religious apologists to condemn as reductionist those who might criticize conversion. We naysayers must be missing the fact that conversion is "amazingly complex" (Flinn 56). French philosopher and radical atheist Michel

Onfray recently had his knuckles rapped by a reviewer for his description of Saul's conversion as the result of hysteria brought on by self-hatred and sexual impotence; Kurt

Kleiner called Onfray's speculations "simplistic" and "frivolous provocations." And

Rambo cautions us that conversion is "essentially theological and spiritual," and that 29 scholars who look purely at the psychological or social processes and "deny the religious dimension" are "reductionist" (10-11). Rambo asks that scholars studying conversion take religion seriously: "Taking religion seriously does not require belief, but it does imply respect for the fact that conversion is a religious process involving an elaborate array of forces, ideas, institutions, rituals, myths, and symbols" (emphasis in original,

11). Flinn and Rambo's assumption that a researcher's atheism will reduce the complexity of argument is not completely without merit; Onfray's polemical prose does little to advance respectful understanding of comparative religion. Batson and Ventis, on the other hand, were able to make an elegant argument in their 1982 monograph, from the social-psychological perspective, that religious (conversion) experience is analogical to the cognitive restructuring that takes place during high-level creative thinking. They did this without recourse to religious arguments about supernatural experience, and I believe not only that their argument is convincing, but also that it makes a valuable contribution to the literature on conversion. As for my own work, by examining the social and psychological forces surrounding conversion for American ethnic writers

(oppression, pressures to assimilate, issues of split identity) without an obfuscating belief in God, my research provides different answers from those investigations that blithely assume the presence of a "higher power." Scholars of faith sometimes hide an agenda of hope for happy endings, ignore the social and psychological dimensions to conversion, and consequently may misread signs of trouble in tales of conversion; in other words, reductionism can work both ways.19

While my intervention in conversion studies is distinguished by my position as

an atheist scholar, my intervention in current autobiographical studies is less

contentious. In 2001, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson nicely summarized developments of the last twenty-five years in "life narrative" studies (their umbrella term) into three

"modes of consideration": performativity, positionality, and heteroglossic dialogism, modes indebted, respectively, to theoretical advances by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin (142-146). The performative mode considers autobiographies as

"dynamic sites for the performance of identities constitutive of subjectivity" (143).

Positionality considers "how subjects are situated at particular axes through the relations of power," and heteroglossic dialogism explores the "multiplicity of

'tongues'" (145). These modes reflect the growing emphases on discourse rather than genre (and the tiresome arguments about the instability of the genre), and on the representation and performativity of identity in language rather than contests over the

authenticity of identity. Julie Rak recently summarized a central change in the field,

from a "shift from considerations of autobiography and biography as genres with

definable properties to an understanding of auto/biography as a discourse about identity

and representation" (17), and Smith and Watson similarly define autobiography as a

"historically situated practice of self-representation" (14). The modes presented by

Smith and Watson, with their emphases on representation and performance of identity

in discourse and dialogic language are especially welcome in the study of ethnic

autobiography, where such emphases dovetail with the theoretical proposal, developed

over the last twenty-five years, that "authentic identity," both inside and outside the

text, is a constructed phenomenon. This proposal is not, of course, uncontested; many

critics continue to insist that ethnic autobiography potentially charts the revelation of

essential, authentic (if often split or multiple) identity/identities. My own critical

attitude is on the fence: even while I approach ethnic constructions of selfhood in

autobiography as always somewhat illusory, I balance this with respect for some 31 scholars' belief in the authentic ethnic self. My intervention in this field is to examine an author's construction of identity or selfhood (this sometimes complicated by a ghostwriter, as with Malcolm X and Alex Haley); to compare, contrast, and synthesize this with biographical constructions of that same identity; and to speculate about the performative work of such self constructions.

My own interest, then, is in the discourse of identity construction in my chosen texts, with an eye to how textual selves are affected by or react to religious conversion.

When I discuss what I call "core identities" of autobiographical selves, I am referring to the identities which autobiographers are most comfortable with, their psychic home spaces, if you will. For example, I cannot make any claim about Malcolm X or Oscar

Acosta's authentic identities as men, but I note in their respective biotexts that their autobiographical personas revert to old "Saul" identities that exist residually during or after conversion, thus calling into question the efficacy of conversion's clean break.

I contextualize the marginalized American ethnic subject as particularly vulnerable to promises of "salvation" through cultural assimilation (as in the case of

Acosta and Rodriguez), or surrender to a "higher power," (whether that "higher power" be God or a human "messenger" like Elijah Muhammad or Ron Karenga as in the narratives of Malcolm X and Baraka, respectively). None of these narratives precisely follows the expected three-part structure of the typical conversion narrative: life before the conversion, the conversion experience, and life after conversion (Holte, Conversion xii), and only one of them (The Autobiography of Malcolm X) is concerned prima facie with religious conversion. The dearth of material on ethnic autobiographical conversion narratives, in fact, may be an inverse relation to the surplus of material on the canonical

Autobiography of Malcolm X; Manning Marable counted 1,640 published works on 32

Malcolm X by 2002.20 What I am suggesting is that the large amount of work done on this one conversion narrative has meant that the scholarship potential for other, less obvious ethnic conversion narratives has been overlooked. The three autobiographies I examine in addition to that of Malcolm X (those of Acosta, Baraka, Rodriguez) each bear meaningful traces of the negative significance of religious conversion in ethnic autobiography, traces that I will delineate in the chapter breakdown.

While there has been substantial work on each of these autobiographers and most of these autobiographies (Brown is the exception), scholars have not generally cast a critical eye at the theme of conversion or interrogated the resistance to conversion in each narrative. In Acosta's autofictions (to use A. Robert Lee's term), for example, his briefly described Baptist conversion and deconversion are passed over as detour on the way to his integrated "Brown Buffalo" self. There is little regard as to how that experience may have coloured the narrative as a whole, nor has any critic considered in detail the traumatic implications of such an experience. Malcolm X's conversion to the

Nation of Islam and his later switch to Sunni Islam provide the substance to his autobiography. However, few writers acknowledge the negative aspects of Malcolm's conversion; most accounts assume that the beneficial aspects to joining the Nation of

Islam for Malcolm (physical health, self esteem, empowerment) outweigh any negative aspects (fantastical doctrine, sexual repression). Work on Baraka's autobiography has privileged Baraka as an artist and political leader, with scant attention to how his forays into various religions are depicted as leading up to his final "authentic" conversion to scientific socialism in 1974. When critics look at the work of Richard Rodriguez, especially The Hunger of Memory (1984), they tend to focus on his assimilation through education and language, while marginalizing the importance of religion in his 33 autobiographies. In an interview, Rodriguez referred to Hunger as his Protestant book and its sequel, Days of Obligation (1992) as his Catholic book ("New, New World"), and he spends pages on his oscillating flirtation with Protestantism and loyalty to the

Catholic Church. And yet commentators have preferred to focus on Rodriguez's contentious views about affirmative action and language, shoving his complex and ambivalent religious beliefs to a back burner. I believe that all of the above issues deserve and demand attention.

In chapter 1, "Conversion and the Return of the Repressed," I argue that

Malcolm X's conversion, as described in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), led to an unfortunate denial of much of his "self: his body, aesthetic pleasure, sensuality, sexuality, and intellect. While most religions have an ascetic component because disciplining of the body and purity are thought to contribute to spiritual enlightenment, I argue that Nation of Islam's rigid doctrine results, for Malcolm X, in autobiographical

"Sauling around." The text is a site of discrepancy between the ostensible purity of the postconversion Malcolm, and the register of deep nostalgia for pre-conversion activities.

I examine two such sites of "Sauling" in the autobiography: dancing and sexuality.

Furthermore, Malcolm X felt such a strong social compulsion to belong to the Nation of

Islam that he effectively muted his sensitivity to hype and illogic. First rejecting the

NOI's fantastic doctrine as a scam, Malcolm later succumbed to the tremendous social force of black nationalization when he converted. The Autobiography of Malcolm Xis a conversion narrative deserving a nuanced reading that homes in on the trouble with conversion, rather than only celebrating conversion as emancipatory.

In chapter 2, "Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious

Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autofictions," I focus on Oscar Zeta Acosta's 34 conversion to the Baptist Church at age nineteen, his deconversion two years later, both described in his Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), and his return to a nominal

Catholicism during his involvement with the politico-religious group, Catolicos Por La

Raza, described in The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). My claim in this chapter is that Acosta's desire for assimilation into mainstream American society and for relationships with white Protestant girls propelled his conversion to the Baptist Church.

His later deconversion, return to Catholicism, and embrace of Chicanas and his own

"brown" sexuality, charts his evolution into "Brown Buffalo" and Chicano activist ("I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice" [Autobiography 199]).

Religious conversion, deconversion, and reversion, in Acosta's texts, are the products of intense social and ethnic pressures, and are further complicated by sexual desire. The religious narrative in these autofictions is underplayed and has thus attracted scant critical attention; my second chapter addresses this gap in scholarship by performing close readings of the religious vagaries in Acosta's work.

In chapter 3, "Amiri Baraka's The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Blue-Black

Marxism, Authenticity, and American Puritanism," I turn to Baraka's 1984 autobiography to argue that Baraka's Marxist autobiographical persona is deeply committed to an essentialist conception of racial authenticity that swallows any pretense at his "fairly objective class analysis" {Autobiography 53). Baraka's autobiography is loosely structured as a "conversion" narrative, with all of his life's experiences preparing him for the final turn to Marxism. Yet, even as Marxist narrator, he persists in romanticizing the black proletarian as the most authentic African American, a glorification that places him closer to Puritanism than Marxism. I claim that Baraka's division of Newark blacks into authentic (blue-black proletariat) and inauthentic (yellow 35 petty bourgeoisie) is akin to the American Puritan separation of seventeenth-century pilgrims into God's elect (saved) and the non-elect (damned). Baraka achieves this curious homology through his naming of Newark (a city founded by Puritans) as the

"New Ark," first for black nationalism, and then for the black proletariat. I argue that

Baraka's "Pauling around" in his autotext reveals a disturbing commitment to identity that celebrates authentic race, essence, and election over performance, action, existence, and real change.

In chapter 4, "The Limits of Conversion: Richard Rodriguez and Gay

Catholicism," I examine Richard Rodriguez's series of three autobiographical narratives.

These cannot be considered conversion narratives, but may, in fact, be representative of the opposite impulse: a strong resistance to religious conversion. Surprisingly, while

Rodriguez embraces conversion, assimilation, and hybridity in all of its forms—racial, ethnic, and cultural—he refuses to abandon his culturally rooted Catholicism because he sees his faith as biologically hardwired. Rodriguez's resistance to any kind of religious transformation seems to be at odds with his magisterial and celebratory theory of racial and cultural "browning" that he claims has been operating in America since the first

European settlers arrived on her shores. Rodriguez's resistance to religious conversion is instantiated by his paradoxically reactionary insistence on Catholic traditions prior to the

Second Vatican Council, including a deep nostalgia for the Latin mass. When I asked

Rodriguez in May 2007 about why he remains loyal to a religion that has been disloyal to him, he replied (I paraphrase) that he is changing Catholicism from the inside out.

Using David Hall and Robert Orsi's concept of "lived religion," I argue that Rodriguez is attempting to convert American Catholicism through writing about his faith as a gay

Catholic. While Rodriguez's agency is laudatory, his rhetorical position as a homosexual martyr to love and his unswerving commitment to a homophobic church seem difficult to reconcile with his attitudes about conversion and change.

Chapters 1 and 2 involve two concrete conversion narratives—Acosta's and

Malcolm's—and I deal with what I view as the profound social pressures and negative concomitants of those conversions. Chapters 3 and 4 involve more subtle examinations of issues that background conversion.

African American and Mexican American autobiographical texts provide fertile ground for this study due to the conflicted and complicated relationships for these ethnic

American cultures to their lands of origin and source religions. This complexity compels me to focus on African American and Mexican American autobiography to the exclusion of Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American texts. There are late-twentieth-century Native American autobiographies that provide material appropriate to a study of the negative aspects of conversion—for example, the two life narratives of N. Scott Momaday (The Names and The Way to Rainy Mountain) and

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller. Late-twentieth-century Asian American autobiographies, on the other hand, offer scant religious conversion narratives. Meyer

Levin, Alfred Kazin, Herbert Gold, and Irving Howe's autobiographies (1950-82) explore the tension between "secular Americanism and Jewish consciousness" (Rubin

180), and thus offer the potential for a study in religious identity, if not necessarily conversion. I contend, however, that it is the contradictory pulls between the various religions in African American and Mexican American cultures that make the field of inquiry I have chosen so fecund, especially in terms of an examination of conversion in its social and racial context. Black Christianity can be set against its historic enemy, the fascinating oddity of the Nation of Islam; Catholicism, already compromised by its 37

21 colonial underpinnings, opposes the lure of white, often fundamentalist, Protestantism.

The significance of race in stories of African American and Mexican American conversion provides another opportunity for scholarship—if conversion to the Nation meant a confirmation of "blackness" and a rejection of white "devils" for African

Americans, conversion to "white" Protestantism meant an entre into American whiteness for brown Mexican Americans. Religion, then, becomes more than a set of beliefs about a supernatural power, but also a powerful social force that assimilates one into, or excludes one from, mainstream American life. It is around these poles of social and racial negotiation that the stories of my four autobiographers unfold.

For Mexican Americans, Catholicism has remained both a powerful force and— at the same time—a contentious one, because of its associations with Spanish colonizers who destroyed the original religions (Aztec, Mayan, and many others) in Mexico. Gloria

Anzaldua, in her autobiographical Borderlands/La Frontera illustrates the mixed feelings of the mestizo for Catholicism, and the abiding fascination/ repulsion with the

"authentic" religion of her forbears.22 Perhaps the two most compelling symbols of these

"hybrid" feelings are la Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche, whom Anzaldua refers to as Malintzin: the Virgin "is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered" (30), whereas Malintzin is the "fucked one," because—according to myth—she seduced

Cortes, and thus betrayed the Aztec people (22).

At the same time as this vexed relationship with Catholicism functions in

Mexican American culture, there is another trend operating which I will pay close attention to in this study, namely the attraction toward evangelical Protestantism, a kind of arch enemy of Catholicism, because of its cleanness, and the seemingly baggage- and guilt-free religious experience it offers. While Oscar Acosta briefly succumbs to this attraction (but, I will argue, more for assimilative than doctrinal reasons), Richard

Rodriguez, in his three-volume memoir cum extended essay, returns over and over again to the contrast between Protestantism and Catholicism, and his own divided loyalty.

Drawn to the ascetic features of Protestantism, yet loyal to the aesthetic attractions (and childhood associations) of Catholicism, Rodriguez will cast the battle between the two great religions as one between authenticity and inauthenticity in America (Brown). His own commitment to the "inauthentic" religion raises many interesting conundrums.

African American religion, too, has its complex heritage. Arguments divide fairly evenly over how much of African culture, including religion, was retained through the Middle Passage. African American religion during slavery was largely a matter of missionary preachers visiting the large plantations throughout the South with the Gospel

(usually Baptist and Methodist evangelical varieties), which was then transformed slowly into "black religion," with African Americans adding their own music, style, embellishments, and African retentions to "white religion." African Americans formed their own churches and congregations during and after emancipation, and soon a post-

Reconstruction generation began to reject the pieties of their parents and grandparents.

Garveyism, Millenialism, Voodoo/Hoodoo, Father Divine, the Church of God (Black

Jews), the United House of Prayer for All People (Bishop Grace): these were some of the movements and leaders in African American religion in the early part of the century.23 The emergence of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam in 1930 offered a sharply different alternative to black worshippers; this path would attract both Malcolm

X and—briefly—Amiri Baraka. Nation of Islam, Sunni Islam, and varieties of pan-

African spirituality (Maulana Karenga's Kawaida, for example) offered a broad array of 39 religious choices to African Americans. Mexican American and African American religious experience, then, offered multiple sites for conversion and, consequently, multiple sites for trouble with conversion.

In the first chapter, I will look at Malcolm X's 1965 autobiography, The

Autobiography of Malcolm Xas told to Alex Haley. While Malcolm describes his conversion to the Nation of Islam as eager and ameliorative in the autobiography, I will examine his ambivalence surrounding the conversion, and explore instances of "Sauling around" in the text. In particular, I see the Nation's doctrinal denial of the body and sensuality resulting in an autobiographical performance of the "return of the repressed" in Malcolm X's postconversion descriptions of pre-conversion experiences. The psychological distress arising from the convert's battle between desire and doctrine is one of the more intriguing troubles with conversion. 40

Chapter One - The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Conversion and the Return of the Repressed One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, "re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—" and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly grumpy. - Alex Haley, Epilogue to Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965 (391)

Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the publichouse of the common man. - Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904-5 (167-8)

Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. - Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927 (713-4)

In 1948, while in Norfolk Prison serving time for burglary, Malcolm X (then

Malcolm Little) converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI). The Nation, started by Wallace

Fard Muhammad in 1930 and taken over by Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975) in 1934, was a uniquely black American religion that borrowed from Sunni Islam, but also differed sharply from Sunni in philosophy and mythology. Sunni, according to Karen

Armstrong, is "the term used to describe the Muslim majority, who revere the four rashidun [Prophet Muhammad's four caliphs] and validate the existing political Islamic order" (174). Sunni Muslims' beliefs contrast with the beliefs of followers of the Nation of Islam, but also with minority Shii Muslim belief, which holds that "AH ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's closest male relative, should have ruled in place of the rashidun" 41

(Armstrong 174). The Nation of Islam—unlike Sunni and Shii—teaches that W. Fard

Muhammad is Allah, Elijah Muhammad his messenger, whites are devils, and

Christianity, the religion of the slavemaster, is anathema for American blacks. The NOI also espoused black dignity, economic autonomy, and separatism.1 The Nation of Islam provided to African Americans an empowering, black nationalist solution to racist oppression in its many forms, and a viable alternative to Christianity.

Despite these aspects to the Nation, I argue that Malcolm X's conversion to the

NOI created in him a serious psychological discrepancy between desire and duty. That discrepancy is instantiated by textual "Sauling around" in his canonical autobiography,

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, narrated to editor and writer Alex Haley, and published posthumously in 1965.1 read this textual "Sauling around" in terms of a loosely defined hydraulic Freudian theory: whatever excessive repression quashes emerges later in some form as the return of the repressed. Hydraulic theory, a common way of understanding Freud, "depicts the mind as operating like a fluid in a closed system" and is best illustrated by Freud's idea that "if a symptom is alleviated without curing the underlying causes, the pressures will surface in a new system" (Corsini 456).

I extend this idea to suggest that Malcolm's adult, conscious repression of desire in accordance with NOI doctrine results in the return of the repressed in the form of textual fissures. Thus, I use the word repression not to mean exclusion from the conscious mind

(as Freud means it), but rather to (consciously) hold back or control one's impulses (a secondary meaning listed in dictionaries). I maintain, however, that this kind of repression too can have its hydraulic output. In other words, emotions and impulses checked and curbed will out in some way or another (in this case, evidenced by textual traces). Furthermore, I make the related but discrete argument that preceding this 42 repression of desire, Malcolm X had to suppress his critical judgement in order to swallow the NOFs fantastical religious doctrine in the first place. Framing both of these arguments is the understanding that the NOI was and is a powerful social and political machine, as well as a religion. While I do not ignore that Malcolm's conversion to the

Nation had a spiritual aspect, I am interested in his conversion as the product of a strong social desire—to be part of a new black "nation."

However, belonging to the Nation had its price. In Civilization and Its

Discontents (1930), Freud argues that the effective repression or curbing of the instinctual drives is a prerequisite for the building and maintenance of civilization. The pleasure principle gives way to the reality principle: the individual's instincts toward love (Eros) and death/aggression (Thanatos) are sacrificed for the good of the community, and the repression of those impulses allows one to function as a member of society. While I acknowledge the Freudian truism that repression is a necessary component of civilization, I also agree with Freud's earlier argument, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), that religion's renunciation of instinct is excessive, rather than simply effective, and could be more proportionately and healthily achieved through "the rational operation of the intellect" (714). My argument turns on a criticism and expose of this excessive repression of pleasurable instincts that is required by many religions, and in particular, the Nation of Islam. Religion's quashing of impulse often results in the distorted expression of repressed sexuality. Christopher Hitchens claims "dangerous sexual repression" is one of the "four irreducible objections to religious faith" (4). While

I agree with Hitchens, my own aim in this project is not so sweeping as to condemn wholesale religion's repression of the body. I acknowledge that the point of view that I offer is a particular one; the dancing and sexuality that I regard in this chapter as healthy 43 and pleasurable are considered by many to be bestial qualities that threaten civilization itself. Thus, I wish to focus not on my own beliefs but on how the text speaks to us: in the case of Malcolm X, attention to the return of the repressed in his autobiography opens new ways of reading that text that are attuned to Malcolm's pre-conversion desires, which—despite the religious injunction to banish impulse—continue to percolate.

In the Autobiography, old bodily pleasures (sensuality and dancing) are repressed by Nation of Islam strictures, yet pop up as textual pleasures in Malcolm's retelling of

Saul days. While sexual license and dancing are coded by the converted, Pauline

Malcolm as forms of enslavement to white ways, those moments of sex and dancing convey the most intense, unfettered pleasure in the text. Thus, I probe what some other writers on the Autobiography have only touched briefly, that is, the note of nostalgia for

Saulian pleasure in Malcolm's X's Pauline prose. David Demerest, G. Thomas Couser, and Robin Kelly each note the desire for pre-conversion activities gleaming intermittently throughout the text, but to my knowledge only Kelly has focused his argument on the strong continuity between the pre-conversion and postconversion selves. He shows that Malcolm's involvement in the zoot-suit culture of World War

Two was part of a continuum of life-long political resistance, rather than an exhibition of

Saulian self-loathing (which is how Malcolm describes it). My own contribution builds on Kelly's observations, but focuses on a psychological, rather than a political, continuum, whereby Malcolm's sensual, sexual, dancing, and pleasure-loving self of pre-conversion days cannot be quashed by religious conversion, but continues to push against the ostensibly proselytizing tone of the conversion narrative. Furthermore,

Malcolm's concurrent suppression of what might be termed his scam-detector—the con- 44 man's ability to identify a con—means that certain doctrinal instabilities result: he needs to argue in some cases for what he does not in fact believe.

Before I proceed with my argument, it is necessary and helpful to lay out some caveats and qualifications, as well as some background material concerning critical context, Malcolm X's identity, Freudian terminology, history and doctrine of the NOI, the "Sauling around" context from Ellison's Invisible Man, and Malcolm's conversion scene. This material introduces my close reading of dance and sexuality that I claim constitute the textual "return of the repressed" in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

I offer one caveat about my employment of "Sauling around" in this chapter. I use this term in a purely metaphorical fashion, referring to the autobiographical text, rather than Malcolm's postconversion behaviour, whereas in the Acosta chapter,

"Sauling around" refers to—in part—his religious deconversion and return to pre- conversion behaviours. Malcolm X, however, appears not to have backslid from his position as a convert to the Nation, and faithfully followed its many strictures on sex, alcohol and drug use, food, and dancing. Here, "Sauling around" refers to textual performance rather than actual behaviour.

Since his death in 1965, Malcolm X has become an iconic figure. Arnold

Rampersad points out that, "there is no Malcolm untouched by doubt or fiction.

Malcolm's Malcolm is in itself a fabrication; the 'truth' about him is impossible to know" (120). Moreover, Manning Marable has shown in his recent "Malcolm X's Life-

After-Death," that the Malcolm we know is the combined product of myth, doubt, fiction, film, manipulation, and commodification. Malcolm has been used to suit various purposes, and depending on how you tilt the mirror, he is the "gangsta" of Detroit Red 45 days idolized by hip-hop artists, a violent revolutionary that will use "any means necessary," or a measured political leader working toward unification.

While there is a multiplicity of identities and truths circulating about Malcolm X, it is worth noting that it is "Malcolm X" of the Nation of Islam that became the icon: not

Malcolm Little, not Detroit Red, not El-Hajj Malik E-Shabazz (his post-NOI self; the name was given to him after he converted to Sunni Islam). Malcolm X was the ritual name given to Malcolm just after he converted to the Nation of Islam in 1948, the X representing "the surnames of unknown ancestors" (Clegg 27). Importantly, it is also the name used in the title of his autobiography, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I draw attention to this detail because the iconicity of Malcolm's Nation of Islam incarnation has been naturalized to the extent that his minister image has been lionized, and his actual conversion to the Nation rarely interrogated. Michael Eric Dyson has summarized

Malcolm's fragmented legacy by dividing critical response to his life and work into four categories: "Malcolm as hero or saint [hagiography], Malcolm as public moralist,

Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist" (24). While hagiography is just one of four views, Dyson shows that there has been a significant response to Malcolm that is reverential and even romantic about his life, including his tenure as a minister of the Nation of Islam.3 For example, John Henrik Clarke's anthology Malcolm X: The Man and His Times "suggests an exercise in hero worship and saint making, as cultural interpreters [from Albert Cleage to Gordon Parks] gather and preserve fragments of Malcolm's memory" (30).

There are, of course, writers critical of the Nation for a variety of reasons, from its anti-Semitism and distortion of Islam, to its oppression of women and mythology (Louis DeCaro, Alex Haley, C. Eric Lincoln, Nell Painter, Bruce Perry, Jerry Gafio

Watts). Malcolm himself soon recognized the Nation's flaws. Nevertheless, Malcolm's

NOI identity is integral to the autobiography—written for the most part through "the prism of the Nation of Islam" (Kelly 236)—and thus to undermine the conversion that

"saved" him from drug addiction and hustling seems a touch irreverent. I argue, however, that this conversion created a deep discomfort in Malcolm, resulting from the necessity of splitting his body off from his mind in accordance with puritanical Nation doctrine, and the necessity of splitting his intellect from his faith, in order to believe the

NOI's fantastical doctrine. This split ultimately created a context for the "return of the repressed," where Malcolm's repressed desires for old pleasures of the body re-emerge in the text. His intellectual split is resolved when he leaves the Nation and is able to again view the religion from a critical standpoint, but this standpoint is never fully integrated into the narrative because Alex Haley insisted that Malcolm tell the story without infusing it with his new, more objective outlook.

It will be useful to quote at length Freud's description of the circumstances surrounding repression. Rather than one commonly understood idea that repression is the debarring from consciousness of originary trauma, I make use of another notion of repression as pleasure impulses blocked by the super-ego and coded as "unpleasure."

First, Freud explains that sometimes an instinctual impulse undergoes a "vicissitude" that makes it inoperative, then passes into a state of repression:

Why should an instinctual impulse undergo a vicissitude like this? A

necessary condition of its happening must clearly be that the instinct's

attainment of its aim should produce unpleasure instead of pleasure. But

we cannot well imagine such a contingency. There are no such instincts: satisfaction of an instinct is always pleasurable. We should have to

assume certain peculiar circumstances, some sort of process by which the

pleasure of satisfaction is changed into unpleasure. [...] We then learn

that the satisfaction of an instinct which is under repression would be

quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction

would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other

claims and intentions. It would, therefore, cause pleasure in one place and

unpleasure in another. It has consequently become a condition for

repression that the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more

strength than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction. ("Repression" 569)

Thus, in the context of Malcolm's autobiography, Saulian pleasures turn to Pauline unpleasures because of the Nation's strictures, which may be viewed as a cultural super­ ego (see page 72). The defense mechanism that replaces instinctual pleasure with unpleasure is thus embedded into conversion narratives. (However, I suggest that

Malcolm was very much aware of his own impulses and the need to publicly "code" them as unpleasure.) In the case of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, curbed pleasures

(particularly dancing and sex) emerge as textual fissures and discrepancies that are at odds with the cultural super-ego and the didacticism of the conversion narrative.

My focus on sexuality and dancing is not meant to take away from the potentially positive outcomes of Malcolm's later denial of his body (i.e. physical health, freedom from addictions), but only to complicate our understanding of Malcolm X by pointing out the irrepressibility of desire, and the continuity of his bodily and sensual self. Because sexuality and dancing in the text are inextricably linked to race, however, my argument about repression of these desires is somewhat delicate. It is impossible to 48 make this a blanket argument that could apply to all conversion narratives because dance and sexuality, for Malcolm X, are intensely racial experiences. For example, he considers his dance ability to stem from his African forebears and the dance scene that he describes at the Roseland Ballroom is primarily a scene of African American culture.

In other words, my argument is a tricky enterprise, and it may seem to some readers that

I am suggesting that the harm in the repression of Malcolm's dance instinct (and later, sexual desire) resides in some sort of unhealthy eradication of what is "natural" to the black man (i.e., the argument may be seen to rely on traces of racist, essentialist beliefs about blacks' propensity for rhythm and overdetermined sexuality). The Nation's ban on dancing, extramarital sex, and provocative clothing can be historically contextualized as a reaction to a Jazz Age racist fascination with black sexuality and dancing. Thus, the textual instabilities that show Malcolm pushing against the Nation's puritanical doctrine can be read as attempts to redress the imbalance that NOI doctrine created, rather than a reification of those racist obsessions. My central claims—I hope—eclipse the concerns just outlined; namely, that the Nation of Islam was a neo-Puritan religion with excessive demands for repression; that Malcolm X's desires clash with the beliefs he must ascribe to; and consequently, a thread of ambivalence runs throughout the narrative, betraying this tension.

This first chapter of "Sauling Around" lays the foundation for further textual investigations into the trouble with conversion. I choose to launch this study with The

Autobiography of Malcolm X because it is a canonical ethnic conversion narrative and the ameliorative results of that conversion have been largely taken for granted. Most scholars of Malcolm X have recognized the flaws in Nation philosophy, but have considered that the gains that it made for African American Muslims in a period of intense racism and unrest outweighed any negative results. Edward Curtis IV argues that the NOI's strict rituals and codes "Islamized" the black body and made its followers

"free." Sherman Jackson shows that the Nation, while borrowing some tenets from

Sunni Islam, provided a unique opportunity for "Blackamericans" to take ownership of

Islam and to make it indigenously American. The Nation of Islam, he claims, has had a profound and positive influence over African American secular culture. Nell Painter points out that the Nation principles about health and cleanliness resemble Holiness

Pentecostal Church doctrine, and that both religions "have saved thousands of poor blacks from the snares of vice-ridden neighborhoods" (436).

Likewise, Malcolm's conversion to the Nation is seen as a positive move not only because it "saved" him from a life of crime and debauchery, but also because it mobilized his dormant political-racial awareness and energy. Dyson claims that the

NOI's mandate to resist white oppression "elicited in Malcolm the appropriate anger which wasn't available to him before his religious rebirth," and thus was a necessary training ground for his dynamic leadership (qtd. in Winkiel 92). Indeed, the Nation of

Islam must be taken seriously as a significant black nationalist movement in mid-century

America that accomplished many improvements in the mental, physical, and economic health of its followers.

Having acknowledged the Nation's importance, however, I wish to intervene in

Malcolm X criticism by examining fissures in the postconversion narration. Those fissures, I will show, spell out the trouble with conversion, but are rarely examined because of the aforementioned, almost hegemonic assumption that the ends achieved by the Nation (health, autonomy, dignity) justify any means (repressive doctrine and implausible myth). 50

The textual heart of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that had sold six million copies globally by 1977 (Marable 136), is Malcolm's conversion to the Nation of Islam, an event which splits the text into two stories: sinner and saved. While scholars have observed that certain anomalies complicate Malcolm's original conversion to the

Nation, such as his break from the Nation and turn to Sunni Islam near the end of the book, its posthumous publication, and its collaborative production with Alex Haley, these same scholars nonetheless view the conversion as cohering with the ameliorative pattern of the autobiographical conversion narrative.

The first chapters describe Malcolm X's (born Malcolm Little in 1925) childhood in Milwaukee and Lansing, Michigan and the decline of his family: the death of his father, institutionalization of his mother, and farming out of the eight children to foster families. The chapters following deal with Malcolm X's move first to Boston, and then to Harlem, and his downward spiral into drugs, "hustling," and debauchery. When

Malcolm is sentenced to ten years in prison for fourteen counts of criminal activity in

February 1946, he inserts into the narrative this warning, reminding the reader that the true purpose of the Autobiography is to not to entertain nor "titillate," but to instruct and educate about Allah and Islam:

Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one

hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps

titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours because the full

story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I

had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when—

soon now, in prison—I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it

completely transformed my life. (150) 51

Typical of conversion narrators, Malcolm X stresses the didacticism of his story. He acknowledges through his use of the word that his early chapters may, indeed, "titillate," but he insists that the book's role is to educate readers about his transformation through conversion.

The significance of this assertion is clear in relation to Malcolm's "Sauling around" in the autobiography: just as Freud alerted us that there is no such thing as "no" in the unconscious, we can—like him—"take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject-matter alone of the association" ("Negation" 667). To give a contemporary example of this phenomenon of the erasure of negation, the ostensible aim of the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is to moralize about the horrors of pedophilia and sex crimes. Yet the repetition of grisly and titillating subject matter effectively cancels the premise of deterrence. So, in conversion narratives—and Malcolm's in particular—the narrator's continual emphasis on his reprobate behaviour as Saul is erased by the vividness, juiciness, and excitement of the

Saul narrative, compared to the drabness of the Paul story. This is clearly what Spike

Lee picked up on by playing up the entertainment value of Malcolm's "Saul" or pre- conversion experiences in his 1992 movie. When Cineaste magazine devoted most of their March 1993 issue to commentary on the Spike Lee film, a recurring complaint of essayists was that Lee produced empty Hollywood spectacle instead of substantial or meaningful content, and many mentioned the pre-conversion scenes in Roxbury and

Harlem as most spectacular. Yet, I contend that in those scenes Lee was faithful to

Malcolm's deeper feelings; while those times are coded as sinful and Saulian, they nonetheless convey real pleasure and are spectacular, in the good sense of the word. 52

Malcolm's conversion takes place in late 1948 in the Norfolk, Massachusetts

Prison Colony, where he was transferred due to the efforts of his older sister, Ella. Prior to this, Malcolm's other family members had started to convert to the Nation of Islam, and his brother Philbert wrote a letter to Malcolm in 1948 telling him that he had discovered the "natural religion for the black man," to which Malcolm responds negatively (155). But when another brother, Reginald, wrote and instructed his brother:

"don't eat any more pork, and don't smoke any more cigarettes. I'll show you how to get out of prison," Malcolm is more receptive:

My automatic response was to think he had come upon some way I could

work a hype on the penal authorities. I went to sleep—and woke up—

trying to figure what kind of a hype it could be. Something psychological,

such as my act with the New York draft board? Could I, after going

without pork and smoking no cigarettes for a while, claim some physical

trouble that could bring about my release? (155)

Malcolm acknowledges that his brother knows how his street-hustler mind worked; by presenting the doctrine as a way to get out of prison, Reginald hooks Malcolm's interest.

Malcolm casts his Saulian street-sawy character as negative, yet it is that same street- hustler intelligence that Malcolm has to suppress in order to swallow the Nation doctrine, thus muting some of his shrewdness.

Reginald convinces Malcolm to turn to the Nation for salvation by emphasizing that the Lost-Found Nation of Islam could recuperate black people'sin history, identity, power, self-esteem, and culture that had been stolen by the "white devils" (158-63).

Reginald explains that God is a man named Allah, embodied in Master Wallace Fard

Muhammad (who appeared in Detroit July 1930), that Allah has "360 degrees of 53 knowledge," unlike the devil, who has only thirty-three degrees, "known as Masonry," and that Elijah Muhammad is Allah's messenger (158). Furthermore, Christianity is the

NOFs enemy, as it teaches blacks to worship an "alien God" with the Caucasian features of the slavemaster, and to put up with suffering on earth in hopes of going to heaven

(163).

Malcolm's conversion was not coercive or forced in the strict sense of the term

(see Lofland and Skonovd 381-2; they define coerced conversion as "brainwashing," sometimes involving torture, humiliation, and physical deprivation), but when three of his siblings applied continual firm pressure for him to take on a new faith while in prison, Malcolm—at first resistant—became receptive. Malcolm's situation can be contrasted with the experiences of Johnson, Hughes, and Wright—those anti-converts described in my introduction. Unlike that triumvirate who briefly fake or resist conversion after enormous pressure is exerted by family members, Malcolm finally succumbs to familial urging, partly as a result of his deprived condition. All of the Little siblings were fatherless after Earl Little's death in 1931 (Malcolm was six years old) and effectively motherless after Louise Little's institutionalization in 1939; imagine the attractiveness to them of a religion headed by a fatherly yet dynamic black man who preached black self esteem and autonomy. Chana Ullman has shown that many religious converts lost fathers in childhood or adolescence; they perform the quest for the "perfect father" (30) in their conversions to religions with strong male authority figures. This combination of factors in Malcolm X's life—imprisonment, intellectual curiosity, pressure from family members, longing for a father figure—produced the perfect context for religious conversion. Moreover, the Nation was a religion borne of deprivation, and many of its converts were materially and psychologically deprived by racism, though Curtis emphasizes that there were also many converts from the middle and professional classes

(see chapter 1, Black Muslims). The Nation was a religious movement historically contingent upon American racism; it provided an oasis of self-determination and self- worth in a largely hostile white society. Sociology has long recognized that new religions (or "sects") develop in reaction to and in tension with mainstream society, are built on a sense of deprivation, and often depend upon disenfranchised subjects for converts. Max Weber and Ernest Troeltsch developed "sect-church" theory in 1931

(later adapted by H. Richard Niebuhr) to explain the differences between new religions, or sects, and established churches. New religions or sects characteristically offer a means of "transcend[ing]" feelings of deprivation "by replacing them with feelings of religious privilege" (Glock 25). Such sects are typically built on "a puritanical ethic which stresses self-discipline" (Glock 25). The Nation of Islam is a textbook example of sociology's "sect"; ministers and members go "fishing" from the poor, drug addicted margins of black society and promise converts a clean, self-disciplined life that will not only lift them above the deprivations caused by systemic racism, but also bestow a certain feeling of privilege.

After Reginald's visit, Malcolm's sister Hilda visits and describes "Yacub's

History," the Nation's myth of origins, which seals Malcolm's conversion. The NOI teaches that the original man was black, but Mr. Yacub, a "big-head scientist," became embittered at Allah for exiling him, and decided to create a "bleached-out, white race of people" as revenge (165). Over an eight-hundred-year period, Yacub used the laws of eugenics to create the white race, destined to rule the world for six thousand years. "It 55 was written" that after that long tenure of white power, a wise, powerful black messenger, W.D. Fard, would preach Allah's message and pass it along to Elijah

Muhammad. Muhammad would then "save the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, [and] the so-called Negroes, here in 'this wilderness of North America'" (167).5

Malcolm's retelling of this myth and other portions of text describing Nation teachings are some of the most bewildering passages in the book. The articulate, intelligent voice of the narrator suddenly veers into a story so incredible that it puts most science fiction tales to shame. Nell Painter called it a "mystery" that someone of

Malcolm's intelligence would remain for twelve long years with such a "narrow- minded" movement (436), and indeed there is something bizarre about the mismatch between Malcolm X's intelligence and the clumsiness of the Nation's founding myths.

Malcolm, after leaving the Nation, said in a late speech, "[w]e believed [... ] in some of the most fantastic things that you could ever imagine" (February 1965 208-9).

Malcolm warns that when "fishing" for converts to the Nation, it is crucial to proceed carefully, because the "black brother is so brainwashed that he may even be repelled when he first hears the truth" (182). He goes on to caution "the truth had to be dropped only a little bit at a time," and "you had to wait a while to let it sink in before advancing the next step" (182). In other words, Malcolm turns the brainwashing paradigm on its head: it is neither he nor other followers of the Nation who are brainwashed, but the rest of the unbelieving black population. In making this rhetorical turn, Malcolm justifies his own conversion; after all, he was originally brainwashed by the white devils and now the truth about the black man in America takes the place of that fantasy. This ploy results in textual instability because Malcolm's readers know, from

Alex Haley's epilogue, that Malcolm does not in fact believe the Nation doctrine; his 56 claims about brainwashing and truth come to have a very different meaning in this light.

The repulsion that black Americans may feel when first hearing about Yacub and other fantastical stories is merely a defense against getting conned, and is the same suspicion that Malcolm felt when first confronted with the Nation's doctrine. According to Susan

Harding, converts to born-again Christianity believe in a series of "facts" that non- believers might find incredible (e.g., that "Christ is the literal son of God, that he did rise from the dead"). For believers, "to continue to think otherwise would be irrational; it is disbelief that is false and unthinking" (36). Similarly, converts to the Nation switch their worldview such that belief in the incredible seems logical, and unbelief is illogical.

Malcolm, though he likely quickly saw through the Nation's doctrine, nonetheless textually professes to believe its "truth" and likely initially adopted the NOI worldview.

But as both Robert Vernon and C. Eric Lincoln have asserted, the actual doctrine and ritual of the Nation of Islam was irrelevant to Malcolm's conversion. Vernon writes,

"the religion could have been Black Buddhism or Black Brahmanism or Black Anything with equal effect" (qtd. in Breitman 7). Lincoln argues that the Nation's association with

Islam was incidental: "So long as the movement keeps its color identity with the rising

'black' peoples of Africa and Asia, it could discard all its Islamic attributes—its name, its prayers to Allah, its citations from the Quran, everything—without risking in the smallest degree its appeal to the black masses" (210).6 Malcolm's willingness to suspend his disbelief about the Nation's foundational teachings may be explained by the potential for political agency that Malcolm saw in the NOI. The Nation's version of black nationalism provided a solution to racist oppression in the United States: a self- sustaining, separate black "Nation." This potential for improvement for the black masses—combined with his vulnerability to dramatic change while in prison—propelled 57

Malcolm into conversion.

The actual conversion "moment" is represented in The Autobiography with St.

Paul's language of blinding light on the road to Damascus; at the same time, Malcolm disavows a similarity to Paul:

Many a time, I have looked back, trying to assess, just for myself, my

first reactions to all this [the teachings of the Nation]. Every instinct of

the ghetto jungle streets, every hustling fox and criminal wolf instinct in

me, which would have scoffed at and rejected anything else, was struck

numb. It was as though all of that life merely was back there, without any

remaining effect, or influence. I remember how, some time later, reading

the Bible in the Norfolk Prison Colony library, I came upon, then I read,

over and over, how Paul on the road to Damascus, upon hearing the voice

of Christ, was so smitten that he was knocked off his horse, in a daze. I

do not now, and I did not then, liken myself to Paul. But I do understand

his experience. [...] Not for weeks yet would I deal with the direct,

personal application to myself, as a black man, of the truth. It still was

like a blinding light. (163-4)

Allen Callahan writes of this scene that "[o]nly in the Bible does the Muslim find words to adequately articulate his revelation" (245), but Callahan does not recognize the significance of Malcolm's rhetorical move of using Paul's metaphor of the "blinding light," yet not "liken[ing]" himself to Paul, thus showing the need to distance himself from whiteness and Christianity. It is not surprising that Malcolm uses the language and form of Paul's conversion to frame his own; the road to Damascus conversion is, after 58 all, "the locus classicus of the conversion experience in Western religion and literature" with no equivalent in Islam (Callahan 244).

But the sidestepping away from Paul indicates an important contradiction underlying Malcolm's X's experience of the NOI. Throughout the autobiography,

Malcolm stresses that one of the evils of Christianity for blacks was the requirement to worship an "alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster" (Autobiography 163). Thus Malcolm, as a black man, must not "liken" himself to Paul, a white man. And yet in another part of the text, he triumphantly exposes a blond, blue-eyed Bible instructor to embarrassment when he "proves" that both Paul and Jesus were black, because "the original Hebrews were black" (190). While the obvious reason for this discrepancy between Elijah Muhammad's teachings and

Malcolm's reasoning is that Christians ignorantly teach that Jesus and Paul were white, when they were not, there yet remains an odd discrepancy in the autobiography that never explains this contradiction. We are left thinking that Elijah Muhammad's teachings about Christianity are far too simplistic because they rely on racial binarism and that Malcolm knows this, but has no gracious way of acknowledging this truth.

(Issues of race also arise when Baraka must convince his political cohorts that texts by

Marx and Engels are acceptable to read, even though they are written by white men.)

Indeed, inconsistencies such as this suggest that Malcolm's intelligence was continually exceeding the boundaries of Nation teachings, and while he was unwilling to consciously subvert those teachings, slippages like this one occasionally do surface. One explanation for Malcolm's willingness to suspend his critical faculty during this time is that conversion to the Nation required the wholesale repression of impulses. Not only 59 did Malcolm check bodily impulses toward dance and sexuality, but he also attempted to block his intellect and his ability to detect spurious claims and arguments.

To return to Malcolm's conversion scene, his moment of conversion is preceded by an epiphany when Reginald asserts that "[t]he white man is the devil": "I will never forget: my mind was involuntarily flashing across the entire spectrum of white people I had ever known; [....] My head swam with the parading faces of white people" (159).

This is similar to the pre-death instant when one's life passes before one's eyes—but in this case the summing-up of experience is before rebirth, rather than death. After reviewing all of the white people he has ever known, and coming to the conclusion that the white man (woman) is the devil, Malcolm seems able to relax into belief. Conversion is sometimes based on this kind of either/or binary, and much of its attraction has to do with a dramatic paradigm shift, a feeling that one is now experiencing "the truth." The parallel for Paul was the sensation of scales falling from his eyes after his blinding:

So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on

him he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the

road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight

and be filled with the Holy Spirit." And immediately something like

scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. (Acts 9:17-18)

The conversion moment of losing the scales from one's eyes, and then seeing the world in a completely different way is exciting for its drama, and yet life is infinitely more complex than such an either/or binary allows for. Dyson sees this inability to contain life's complexity as a failing of the fundamentalist Nation:

[0]nce that ethic transformed [followers'] lives—converted them from

hustlers to healers, from pimps to preachers—they were not as open to 60

the possibility that human identity is a complex amalgam of failure and

success, of ideal and reality. [...] The rigid ethic of the Nation of Islam

was quite literal and prevented a complex understanding of the human

negotiations people must pass through in order to achieve any sense of

solid ego identity or self-respect, (qtd. in Winkiel 97)

Malcolm X discovers this lack in the Nation during his two visits to Mecca, when he realizes that the message about "white devils" was not only overstated, but also detrimental to the causes he was ultimately working toward.7

Before moving from Malcolm's conversion to the idea of "Sauling around" in the text, I would like to flesh out the psychology of the Saul-Paul image from Invisible

Man set up in the introduction, an image which I believe has particular resonance in The

Autobiography of Malcolm X. The quotation from Ellison's novel complicates the cleanly split binary of sinner and saint in the life of the convert. The invisible man's grandfather delivers a gem of folk wisdom to his grandson: '"You start Saul, and end up

Paul [....] When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side'" (381). When the invisible man remembers his grandfather's words about the vagaries of conversion it is during the midst of musing about his own transformation from old, bumbling Southern self to the "new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself (380). The

"Brotherhood" proves ultimately to be a chimera of freedom and progress for African

Americans, the invisible man's Pauline public role is unsuccessful, and he descends to his underground refuge at the end of the novel. "Sauling around" in the invisible man's life is not the return of the naive youth who got bloodied in a battle royal in order to 61 spout rhetoric borrowed from Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition speech; Saul is not merely located in chronological time as a pre-conversion identity.

Rather, "Sauling around" is the occasional emergence of the "grandfather part" of his self: "the malicious, arguing part; the dissenting voice, [... ] the cynical, disbelieving part—the traitor self that always threatened internal discord" (335). While the narrator describes (at this point) that part of himself in pejorative terms, he also recognizes that it is the part that will not kowtow to white patriarchy, that insists on cutting through deception, and that "threaten[s] internal discord" because it challenges a passive, slave mentality. Furthermore, it is the voice that the invisible man should have been listening to all along. The Saul-Paul dichotomy represents life ostensibly sliced sharply in two by the blinding conversion on the road to Damascus; in Ellisonian terms that separation between pre- and postconversion selves is actually much more blurred.

The "bad" Saulian self may well perform a return of the repressed in postconversion life, and the repressed material may, in fact, suggest urgent, unmet needs and suffocated knowledge of the Pauline self. Saul may seem to represent the Freudian id; however,

Saul in fact has many of the traits of the ego, particularly that skeptical, cynical faculty, while Paul can be identified with the super-ego. While conversion involves a conscious rejection of the Saulian, sinner self, the old urges, pleasures, and beliefs associated with the earlier identity refuse to go away.

Moreover, according to Alan Segal, when Paul converted to Christianity, he never rejected his Jewishness; in fact, he simply saw Christianity as a "new apocalyptic,

Jewish sect," and continued his commitment to Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew

Bible, or Old Testament of the Christian Bible) after his conversion (6). Michael Grant concurs, writing that throughout his life, Paul continued "to make the most careful use in 62 his preachings and teachings of the Old Testament, just like his Jewish contemporaries, in order to display how the scriptures had been, and were being, fulfilled" (45). Finally, according to Daniel Boyarin, "Paul lived and died convinced that he was a Jew living out Judaism" (2). In other words, there is continuity between Saul the Pharisee and Paul the convert that is rarely emphasized in popular culture. What we are most familiar with is the idea of Paul's dramatic conversion and the sense of sharp division between a man who first persecuted Christ's followers and then became a follower himself. Thus, rather than considering "Sauling around" an anomaly, it is more appropriate to think of it as the maintenance of a core self throughout the vagaries of conversion. For Malcolm, this meant a reversion to a "truer" self; he said in an interview three days before his death, "I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel what I'm thinking and saying now is for myself. Before, it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir" {Malcolm XSpeaks 226).

When Malcolm converted to the Nation of Islam, he submitted to the denial of many desires and impulses; thus, the repressed drives were bound to poke through the seams of the autobiography. The puritanical denials of the flesh in Nation doctrine can be seen as part of the continuum of suffering that American blacks were supposed to undergo in order to make them strong. The Yacub myth teaches that blacks had to endure six-thousand years of oppression and suffering under the "devil white race," and that "some of the original black people should be brought as slaves to North America— to learn to better understand, at first hand, the white devil's true nature, in modern times" (167). Malcolm writes that "[h]uman history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, 63 who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves" (162). The payoff for all of that suffering, however, is that blacks—having finally understood their white masters—will eventually rule after whites are eliminated during "the destruction of the present world"

(Muhammad 303). Following 390 years during which America "would burn in a great lake of fire" (Clegg 66) and an additional 610 years of cooling off, there will be a paradise on earth, "an almost standard version of the hereafter of millenarian groups"

(Clegg 67). Elijah Muhammad describes this earthly paradise: "The earth, the general atmosphere will produce such a change that the people will think it is a new earth. It will be the heaven of the righteous forever! No sickness, no hospitals, no insane asylums, no gambling, no cursing, or swearing will be seen or heard in that life" (Muhammad 304).

Nation doctrine prescribed puritanical and fundamentalist decrees about food, dress, dancing, alcohol, tobacco, and behaviour. Malcolm describes the NOI code in the autobiography:

Any fornication was absolutely forbidden in the Nation of Islam. Any

eating of the filthy pork, or other injurious or unhealthful foods; any use

of tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics. No Muslim who followed Elijah

Muhammad could dance, gamble, date, attend movies, or sports, or take

long vacations from work. Muslims slept no more than health required.

(221)

Clegg claims that rules about the body in Nation of Islam were merely about maintaining health: "In preparation for the destruction of the white world, the righteous

'lost-founds' (or new converts) were required to keep their bodies physically fit and properly nourished" (63). And Edward Curtis points out that care and protection of the black body has, for good reason, been a "central concern in the formation of African American culture" (Black Muslim 96). Because black Americans have had to struggle continually for control of their own bodies (against slavery, rape, lynching), anxiety about abuse of the body permeates Nation of Islam teachings. Preservation of the purity of the black body is set against the white man's poisons and abuses, as well as against white racist fascination with black bodies and black sexuality. Control of one's health, wellness, and safety is an undisputedly positive aspect of Nation of Islam code.

And yet the rigid accompanying rules about sex, dancing, dating, sleep, sports, and movies go beyond mere health maintenance, and actively repress psychological and physical desire. Elijah Muhammad warned against excessive emotion, associating that with the black Christian preachers and "get-happy" slave behaviours (Curtis

"Islamizing" 173-4). But, if you teach your followers that they must repress what you associate with the stereotypical happy-go-lucky "darky" of slavery, you also wipe out other positive emotions—particularly those associated with erotic love, physical affection, and bodily responses to music and rhythm. Fard and Elijah Muhammad considered the dark-suited, sober black man as the "authentic" black man; but what happens to energies that exceed the sober-suited package?

Many early converts to the NOI were drug addicts (Autobiography 262); further,

Malcolm's pre-conversion life was fairly representative of a model convert—studded with all of the forbidden fruits of the Nation: alcohol, drugs, fornication, movies, dancing. But if the saintly postconversion self somehow replaces the sinful self, it also attempts to erase the pleasurable experiences associated with the sinful self. The enjoyment gleaned from taboo activities—"fornication" (voluntary sexual relations outside of wedlock), use of drugs and alcohol, dancing—is always coded as sinful in the

NOI. And yet in Malcolm X's autobiography, descriptions of all of these activities are 65 awash with the physical pleasures of those experiences. Couser notes the conflict between this pleasure and the moral message of the autobiography: Malcolm "delighted in recalling the music, re-creating the language, and reliving the uninhibited dancing he enjoyed in his early days as a hustler. As spontaneous memory competed with detailed analysis, the pleasure in the retelling conflicted with the didactic interpretation" (166).

However, with the exception of the above quoted paragraph on Nation doctrine, where

Malcolm outlines the rules of the religion, Malcolm does not mention the "evils" of dancing; rather he emphasizes its pleasures. This gap in didacticism is an example of the conflict noted by Couser; as Nation minister, Malcolm knows that he can no longer dance and should teach its evils, but the vividness of past pleasure interferes with this obligation.

Just as alcoholics attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are encouraged to remember their last hangover to remind them of why they must remain sober, so NOI converts should remember the pain but not the pleasures of addiction and immoral behaviour, in order to prevent backsliding. But Malcolm seems to defy this rule in his narrative devotion to the memory of his life in Roxbury and Harlem in the autobiography. Chapters 3 to 8 continually remind the reader that Malcolm was depraved, a parasite, down in the mud—yet in the interstices of these reminders of his sinful state are rills of visceral pleasure as Malcolm makes his pre-conversion days

Q

"brilliantly, even lovingly" come to life (Demarest 183).

Nowhere do these "sinful" but wonderful days come to life more compellingly than in the dance scenes. Malcolm X's description of his own and others' experiences dancing in the Roseland ballroom in Roxbury in chapters 3 and 4 ('"Homeboy"' and

"Laura") instantiates the pleasures of "Sauling around." As will become clear, dancing is 66 not only a first-rate pleasure for Malcolm, but also a concrete instance of his "African- ness" and thus introduces double confusion into the text, because for followers of the

NOI, dance is taboo and Africa is viewed negatively.

First, Malcolm sets the scene with a wonderful description of couples dancing:

The band, the spectators and the dancers, would be making the Roseland

Ballroom feel like a big rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning,

pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if

they had gone mad. "Wail, man, wail!" people would be shouting at the

band; and it would be wailing, until first one and then another couple just

ran out of strength and stumbled off toward the crowd, exhausted and

soaked with sweat. (51)

Malcolm here is still a spectator watching from the sidelines, but he feelingly captures the sensation of the rocking ship, the party glow of coloured lights, and the euphoria of dancing hard—a creative, sensual, full-body, sweaty exercise. This felt description, however, is followed directly by Malcolm's admission of various disreputable activities, such as smoking reefers and cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and gambling. The yoking of all of these activities together seems to tinge the dance with evil, even while it seems to emphasize—at the same time—healthy, pleasurable exertion.

Malcolm then opens chapter 4 with the description of his "dancing instincts" at the "pad parties" in Roxbury: "With alcohol or marijuana lightening my head, and that wild music wailing away on those portable record players, it didn't take long to loosen up the dancing instincts in my African heritage. [...] My long-suppressed African instincts broke through, and loose" (56-7). Those "natural" African instincts took over again while Malcolm shined shoes at the Roseland Ballroom: 67

White customers on the shine stand, especially, would laugh to see my

feet suddenly break loose on their own and cut a few steps. Whites are

correct in thinking that black people are natural dancers. Even little kids

are—except for those Negroes today who are so "integrated," as I had

been, that their instincts are inhibited. You know those "dancing jigaboo"

toys that you wind up? Well, I was like a live one—music just wound me

up. (57)

Malcolm here wants his reader to see the dance instinct as a connective thread that ties black Americans back to their severed African roots. The rhythmic dance instinct is read not only as essentially African, but also as a great source of uninhibited pleasure.

Malcolm's notion of an innate black African dance urge may seem to contemporary readers to be as outdated as Freud's frequent use of the word "instinct" (Storr 64). Both writers rely on a now largely discredited idea that there are "aspects of behaviour which

[are] thought to be innate and to develop independently of environmental influences"

(64). However, Malcolm's belief that the dance instinct has been suppressed by integration and Freud's belief that suppressed instincts create pressure (hydraulics)— while outdated—usefully point us to ruptures in Malcolm's text, particularly to a paradox that inheres in the Autobiography about Africa, dancing, and the NOI's doctrine.

Robin Kelly reads the dance scenes in The Autobiography as scenes of

"recuperation]" or "tak[ing] back" the black body at night, the body that has "endured backbreaking wage work, low income, long hours, and pervasive racism" during the day

(238). Thus, dancing for black Americans in wartime Boston was "the opportunity to do what they wished with their own bodies" (238), and consequently a way of 68 counterbalancing the sense during the day of being owned by others, and the historical sense of being owned in slavery. While the drumbeats of Africa are replaced by the wail of Count Basie's band (64), Malcolm reminds us that, for him, dancing is a primal, natural, Africanesque scene of pleasure. His partner, Mamie, dances as if in an "African jungle frenzy" (64), the girls are "jungle-strong, animal-like, bucking and charging"

(66), and the dance scene is a swarm of moving bodies drenched in sweat. While Africa equals primitivism in Nation doctrine, and thus perhaps Malcolm X, under the eye of the super-ego, should have been creating revulsion for this primitive "frenzy" in his readers, there is instead a clear riff of contagious pleasure as he remembers. To further confuse the issue, Malcolm likens himself to a "dancing jigaboo" toy, an unsavory simile that suggests that belief in that same instinctual dancing urge is a racist concept, connected to white devils that manufacture such toys and think of African Americans as "jigaboos."9

It is crucial to recognize here the many contradictory urges that might be operating for Malcolm X. The repression of the dance urge is joined negatively to racial integration, which Malcolm sees as diluting those "natural" urges. On the other hand, the

Nation rules dancing as taboo, yet also sees integration as one of the biggest threats to black health and autonomy. Thus, a paradox obtains because Malcolm is against integration (both because the NOI is against it and it dilutes the dancing instinct), yet he must be in favour of repressing the dancing urge because it is part of the black

American's African heritage. Malcolm believes Africa to be the source of his and other blacks' urge and ability to dance, which he considers to be a racial capacity transported through black slave bodies from Africa to America. But for the Nation, Africa is a mistaken birthplace, and home to all that is dross in black culture (primitivism, jungle- beats). The Autobiography of Malcolm Xis told through the lens of Nation philosophy, 69 and the Nation forbids dancing (Autobiography 221); thus a contradiction underlies

Malcolm's tracing of a black "natural" inclination for rhythm and dance to Africa, and the Nation of Islam's taboo on dance and denigration of Africa. This unsolvable paradox is revealed through textual inconsistencies.

Malcolm does not discuss the Nation's pejorative view of Africa in the

Autobiography; perhaps this is because the doctrinal beliefs strongly contradict his own.

Fard Muhammad (Allah) taught that Shabazz, an "eccentric black scientist" (Clegg 46) made the mistake of relocating his tribe (one of twelve black tribes, and the one from which African Americans supposedly originate) to Africa from East Asia. This relocation was a mistake because the move resulted in the loss of "the cultural legacy of their forefathers [in Mecca], which resulted in a precipitous decline in their level of civilization" (Clegg 47). Furthermore, the move from Mecca and Arabia to Africa changed blacks' hair from lank to frizzy, and gave them more Negroid features (Walker

280; Clegg 47), thus reinforcing the stereotype that kinky hair and Negroid features are associated with the primitive. Elijah Muhammad ascribes the origin of kinky hair to

"one of our dissatisfied scientists, 50,000 years ago, who wanted to make all of us tough and hard in order to endure the life of the jungles of East Asia (Africa) and to overcome the beasts there" (31). Muhammad promoted stereotypical attitudes about Africa's savage primitivism and its need to be civilized, discouraging his followers from wearing

African dashikis and Afro haircuts, calling these trends "jungle styles" (Clegg 240-41;

Curtis, Black 115-16). It is noteworthy that Malcolm fully embraced his interest in

Africa after his break with Elijah Muhammad, and would turn to a pan-Africanist political program near the end of his life with his formation of the Organization of Afro-

American Unity (OAAU).10 Finally free from the doctrinal repression forced by the NOI, Malcolm X was able to adopt his own beliefs about Africa as the important birthplace of black Americans.

The Nation wished to instill pride in the black body by eschewing what they associated with the Southern "Negro" and with white dominance—eating pork, the emotional worship of Christianity, drinking alcohol, the undisciplined, impulse-driven body—and yet in doing so they also banned many sources of pleasure. In its attempt to correct what it saw as racist stereotypes of the emotional, childlike, singing and dancing, pork-loving, lascivious "darky," the NOI decreed that what was "natural" to the black man was the opposite of the white devils' conception of "natural." Thus, for example, to correct the whites' impression that it was natural for blacks to be lazy, childlike, and to love to dance, the Nation conceived of the natural black man as a hard-working adult, restrained and dignified in his actions and movements. Through this logic, the Nation required a wholesale renunciation of human desire, and, by adopting these "white" neo-

Puritan values, could easily appear to be assimilationist. While for Malcolm, dancing is a racialized experience, my own point is a more general one: when religion puritanically insists on stopping the body, the body will out. In the case of Malcolm X, the body

"outs" through textual fissures. I argue here not for a belief in any racial essentialism or a collective memory of Africa's drumbeat, but only for the dichotomy between the textual expression of pleasure in what Malcolm perceives as an African-lineaged dance and the intellectual obeisance to an anti-African theology.

Thus, to return to and close my analysis of the Roseland dance scene, Malcolm must keep to the NOFs code (dancing is forbidden), and ostensibly must associate

Africa with bad primitivism and evil impulse if he is to follow the Nation's teachings about Africa, though in the Autobiography he does not reiterate those specific negative 71 teachings. At the same time, he acknowledges his own pleasure in the dance and his strong feeling that his own and other blacks' dance impulses are genetically traced to

Africa.11 Is it any wonder that Malcolm is both confused and contradictory in trying to reconcile his own love of dancing with being a good Nation of Islam minister? While

David Demarest has argued that Malcolm's "remembered pleasure" simply means that as a "complex" and "tolerant" individual he was able to move "beyond didacticism,"

(183,182), I wish to push a little further than this benign attitude to suggest that

"Sauling around"—remembered pleasure set against a moralistic present—caused

Malcolm deep discomfort.

In his epilogue, Haley gives us an endearing, bittersweet glimpse into the lindy- hopping Malcolm of pre-conversion days, fleshing out this episode of "Sauling around"

(391). To repeat a quotation from this chapter's epigraph,

One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly,

the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers,

"re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—" and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one

hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his

coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those

Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself

and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly

grumpy. (391)

I describe this scene as "bittersweet" because it conveys that at some level, Malcolm is aware of the gap between what he once experienced as African-based, body-pleasure and his current identity as sober, disciplined-body leader of the Nation, wearing a "black mortician's suit" (Rodriguez, Brown 16), and teaching that Africa diluted the rich 72

Islamic heritage of the Tribe of Shabazz. Moreover, Malcolm X is leader of a religion that believes, in Lincoln's words, that "the Negro has already done too much singing and dancing, when he should have been giving his attention to more serious matters" (Black

Muslims 113). The gap between pleasurable experiences of the past, and present protocol disturbs Malcolm, makes him "grumpy," as frictions between our desires and our duties are wont to do.

In Freudian terms, the Nation of Islam becomes the cultural super-ego, insisting on the renunciation of pleasures coded as destructive, such as the impromptu lindy- hopping described above. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, extends the tripartite super-ego ego id construction of the individual to culture:

[The cultural super-ego] does not trouble itself enough about the facts of

the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does

not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it

assumes that a man's ego is psychologically capable of anything that is

required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a

mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be

controlled beyond certain limits. (108-9)

Analogously, Elijah Muhammad, as leader of the NOI, assumed that Nation followers were in full control of themselves when he ruled that they must master many strong impulses, and yet his own multiple extra-marital affairs betray the disconnection between his religious doctrine and desire. This disconnection is what Malcolm knows in his body when he must crush the scat-singing, lindy-hopping self of the id and don the respectable demeanor suitable to a bow-tied follower of the Nation, the cultural super­ ego. 73

Saidiya Hartman's work on the mix of pleasure and terror in slavery's "innocent amusements" helps to historicize this ambivalence about dancing in African American culture and literature. Hartman explains that dancing and singing were never "innocent" pleasures enjoyed by slaves as respite from their work. On the contrary, she suggests, the spectacle of slaves dancing and singing was always for the slave owner's pleasure. This theft of agency can be extended well past emancipation to the Roseland ballroom in

Roxbury (see the Autobiography, chapters 3 and 4) where white dancers and observers came to enjoy the black music and dancing. Hartman theorizes that the slave body is a

"fungibl[e] commodity," and the white owner (or, in the Roseland ballroom, white observer) sees the "captive body [as] an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion"

(21). The white observer/dancer in Roseland, then, acts more subtly than the slaver, but similarly uses the black body's dance for his or her own pleasure.12 Hartman's ideas complicate my implied criticism of the Nation: even while I argue that the taboo on dancing is repressive, I want to show the logic behind such rules. While Fard and Elijah

Muhammad likely did not reason, along Hartman's lines, that dancing in the twentieth century was merely another aspect of "going before the master," they nonetheless felt the Tightness of such a taboo in terms of preserving the dignity and autonomy of the black body. Not to dance, then, was not to afford the white spectator the inevitable pleasure and theft of agency in watching the black body perform.13 Yet dancing was one of the primary outlets for black American expression and pleasure in wartime Boston: 74 thus it is not surprising that Malcolm's reminiscences of dancing instantiate a primary

Saulian narrative rupture in the Pauline text.

Furthermore, the dance taboo, like so many other proscribed activities in Nation doctrine, may have been a direct repudiation of white racist beliefs, stereotypes, and imaginings, in this case the fascination with the black body and black dancing in

Northern urban dance halls and clubs in the early to mid part of the century. In the chapter of his book on the Nation titled "The Ethics of the Black Muslim Body," Curtis does not mention the NOI prohibition on dance, but covers topics of diet, clothing, and contraception, all of which were shaped in reaction against white racist expectations or imagined expectations. For example, the NOI banned many foods "associated [... ] with slave culture" (98), and required female members to wear modest long dresses and scarves. One NOI follower writes, "[o]nly uncivilized women feel they have to be half naked. The Caucasian woman is a good example" (qtd. in Curtis, Black 113). Nation rules were not only meant to illustrate the discrepancy between white stereotypes of blacks and actual black behaviour, they also illustrated the discrepancy between white and black mores. The Nation's decree on dancing was likely a reaction to white beliefs about blacks' "natural rhythm" and aptitude for dance, as well as beliefs about overdetermined black sexuality and desire. Consequently, when Malcolm states that blacks are "natural dancers" (57), he seems to be repeating a stereotype of African

Americans and thus going against the Nation's set of beliefs designed to battle white stereotypes.

The second site of "Sauling around" in The Autobiography of Malcolm X is

Malcolm X's sexuality. Early in the autobiography, Malcolm expresses his abhorrence of his mixed ancestry. His mother's father was white, and while at first he felt that to be 75 light skinned "was some kind of status symbol," he later "learned to hate every drop of that white rapist's blood that is in me" (2). Interracial sex, though not explicitly stated in the rules that Malcolm lists, was clearly against Nation doctrine. The white slaver's rape of the black female slave, the continuing white lust for black women, and any black male preference for white women were all seen as destructive to the black "Nation." If the Nation was concerned that black men were emasculated through white men having sex with black women, another concern was that black men having sex with white women "would lead to the death of black manhood," not merely through the sexual act, but because interracial sex meant an induction to the hated Christianity, a religion that siphoned black power (Curtis, "Islamizing" 172). A cartoon by Eugene Majied in the official newspaper of the Nation, Muhammad Speaks, shows a black man sitting next to and ogling a white woman on a couch, a bottle of alcohol nearby (Figure l).14 The skeletal woman is smoking a cigarette and dressed provocatively in a low-cut mini- dress. "Integration" is tattooed across her chest. She wears a cross around her neck and represents not only taboo activities (smoking, drinking) and integration, but she also embodies Christianity. Interracial sexual desire in the Nation is never merely sexual; it is the vehicle of seduction into an uncritical acceptance of slave-like Christianity, which erases the black man's power and masculinity.

Bruce Perry's biography and other extratextual sources evidence many different romantic and sexual relationships with girls and women throughout Malcolm's life, but the ones that Malcolm highlights in his autobiography are those with Laura and Sophia

(whose real name was Bea Caragulian—see Perry 56) during his pre-conversion days, and Betty, his wife, in postconversion days.15 Laura was a young black woman he met in

Roxbury and his finest lindy-hopping partner, though he rejected her for the white 76

Figure 1 77

Sophia. Laura, Malcolm notes, went the "wrong way" after his rejection of her, turning to drugs and alcohol. According to Malcolm, she grew to hate men so much "she also became a Lesbian" (Autobiography 68). While Malcolm describes Sophia as "almost too fine to believe," he also notes that for a black man to have any white woman that wasn't a "common whore" was a "status symbol of the first order" (67). While it is unproductive to fixate on some illusory truth about Malcolm's relationship with women, it is useful to examine the autobiographical performance of sexuality, especially the implication of postconversion repressed sexuality for this "Black Adonis" (Marable

137). If there is any inkling of Malcolm's sensuality and the sexual pleasure he may have enjoyed, it occurs in the Saul days; the Paul days are sketched with marital drabness and the added disappointment of four daughters when Malcolm wished fervently for sons (Perry 169).

Malcolm cannot, in the guise of minister of the Nation, advertise as pleasurable his relationship with Sophia, the white woman of his Roxbury and Harlem days; instead, he must clothe his desire in Nation rhetoric, admitting that he fell for her wiles because it gave him "status" in "black downtown Roxbury" (68). Any admission of real pleasure or authentic desire for Sophia would be entirely unacceptable from Malcolm's narration through the "prism of the Nation of Islam," much more so than a similar admission about the pleasures of dancing. The stakes are much higher with interracial desire: to admit to it is to threaten the entire separatist edifice of the Nation. Even though Malcolm will say that other black men want to steal his "fine white woman," he always clothes his relationship with Sophia with the cloak of sexual politics. It was about reputation building, not desire. If there was desire, it was perverse desire, manufactured by hatred of the white man: stealing his women away from him was the finest form of revenge. And yet the only real sexual fir isson we get in the autobiography (other than the scornful descriptions of prostitute sex) is in Malcolm's descriptions of this relationship with

Sophia. Laura is a good dancer, but also too much of a good girl and a sexual lightweight. And his relationship with Betty seems purely pragmatic. She is figured as a kind of placeholder in the autobiography—chosen not for love, but because she is the proper age and height (according to Elijah Muhammad's rules), will mother the hoped- for sons, and will provide an acceptable receptacle for Malcolm's sexual urges

(according to Perry, Malcolm quoted Paul on marriage—"it is better to marry than to burn" [169]).

The love scene with Sophia is only implied. One evening, Sophia, a "well built" white woman, approaches Malcolm at a Roseland dance. Although he was on a date with Laura, he drops her off at her home, and rushes back to go out for a drive with

Sophia, and to claim his "status symbol of the first order": "she had a low convertible.

She knew where she was going. Beyond Boston, she pulled off into a side road, and then off that into a deserted lane. And turned off everything but the radio" (67). We are to imagine the rest, as explicitly as we wish, including the hint that while the car's engine and lights are turned off, sexual desire is turned on full. In other words, while a detailed description of this Saulian scene of sexual desire and satisfaction is ruled taboo, we are invited to imagine the full details on the movie screens of our minds.16 Foremost, the scene is one between sexual equals and racial opposites—and thus will "titillate" the reading audience, to use Malcolm's earlier words (150). Sophia knows where she is going—both in her low convertible and in her sexuality—thus she is more of a match than the "[s]oft," "[q]uiet" Laura who seems to have little or no sexual experience (60).

Moreover, much of the power of the scene resides in mimetic desire: a black man 79 desiring and having what white men want to keep for themselves. Mimetic desire accurately—if reductively—summarizes the black-white sexual desire operating in the text: "The object I desire in envious imitation of my neighbor is one he intends to keep for himself, to reserve for [his] own use" (Girard 10).

I suggest that this scene—so short, so unremarkable—is actually shorthand for a whole field of contested desire in mid-century America. Robert Young points out, with the help of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, that "[r]acism is perhaps the best example through which we can immediately grasp the form of desire, and its antithesis, repulsion, as a social production: 'thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy?"

(169). In the context of the short Sophia scene, then, three socially produced group fantasies prevail: that white women's attractiveness is in direct proportion to their forbidden status; that white women lust after black men because they provide maximum sexual pleasure; and that white women are poisonous to black men and thieves of their masculinity. These group fantasies of desire and repulsion infuse the ambivalent scene that is sketched out in a preliminary form only, so that the reader must connect the dots and Malcolm is freed from the actual description of lovemaking. Thus, those group fantasies serve to diffuse any real, individual responsibility for desire or repulsion. This maneuver is pure "Sauling around": Malcolm, minister for a religion that rules that desire for white women is a death wish, displays postconversion caginess about the nature of his desire for Sophia. And yet the very absence of detail opens the imagination to a variety of socially produced fantasies about interracial sex.

While Malcolm's relationship to Sophia, and the degree of desire he feels, is left open to the imagination, his marriage to Betty is the antithetical closing down of desire.

This narrowing of desire is represented metaphorically in the text through the trope of 80

Hollywood movies and romance. When Malcolm first mentions Hollywood, it is in the

Saulian vein of naive enjoyment. He is getting involved with the "hustling" life in

Harlem when he discovers the pleasures of the cinema: "Sometimes I made as many as five in one day, both downtown and in Harlem. I loved the tough guys, the action,

Humphrey Bogart in 'Casablanca,' and I loved all of that dancing and carrying on in such films as 'Stormy Weather' and 'Cabin in the Sky'" (99). (The latter two films, both released in 1943, were the first Hollywood films with black casts.) Later, when Malcolm describes his no-nonsense proposal and wedding to Betty, Hollywood romance is associated with white brainwashing: "I wasn't about to say any of that romance stuff that

Hollywood and television had filled women's heads with. If I was going to do something, I was going to do it directly. And anything I was going to do, I was going to do my way. [...] Not because [... ] [I] saw it in a moving picture somewhere" (229-30).

While I don't suggest that Malcolm was thinking of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) when he wrote about Hollywood films, any reader familiar with canonical African

American literature might connect the scene of Bigger Thomas masturbating in the darkened movie theatre to the idea that Hollywood produced spectacles that enticed

African American audiences with lifestyles and pleasures that they could never attain.

The notion of lusting after what you cannot have (the accoutrements of whiteness— society, money, status, power) is linked strongly to Hollywood movies, especially since

Bigger first watches a newsreel featuring Mary Dalton, the rich white woman he will murder, and then sees the movie Trader Horn (1931), filled with images of "savage"

Africans and a blond queen of the jungle. Bigger sits before the screen feeling that "it was all a game and white people knew how to play it" (33). For Wright, Bigger's

1 7 onanism represents wasted black desire. 81

Though Malcolm does not explicitly racialize this gap between wanting and having, as Wright does, there is nonetheless a suggestion that, despite the advent of the all black cast, Hollywood was not for African Americans (and, of course, movies were another Nation of Islam taboo). Hollywood cinema created impossible-to-fulfill desires, especially for black women who would expect to be treated like the (white) women in romantic films. For Malcolm X, the lack of desire in his marriage is suggested by this insistence that he will do things his way and not the way that white society expects.

While he is expressing the empowerment he feels as a result of joining the Nation, he concurrently rejects his own partner's desires (without knowing what they are) as part of some illusionary package called romance. When he is told by the old "hunchbacked white man" that performed the wedding to "Kiss your bride," he quickly escorts Betty out of the building:

I got her out of there. All of that Hollywood stuff! Like those women

wanting men to pick them up and carry them across thresholds and some

of them weigh more than you do. I don't know how many marriage

breakups are caused by these movie- and television-addicted women

expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out

like Cinderella for dinner and dancing—then getting mad when a poor,

scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all

day, looking for some food. (231)

The dichotomy between the cinematic scene of dark-skinned Malcolm and white Sophia in the open convertible, with the radio playing softly and imagined excesses of sexual desire, and the truncated desire of a same-race marriage devoid of romance and passion works opposite to Malcolm's intentions. Rather than sell the reader on the sensibleness 82 of a Nation-style pragmatic marriage with a "sister," it might stimulate lascivious nostalgia for the Saul days, where one may have been transgressing a Nation taboo (and a nation taboo) on interracial sex, but was at least feeling something in the body.

Sexual "Sauling around" is much more constrained than references to dancing

in The Autobiography of Malcolm X because of the high stakes in the sexual politics of race. The suggestion of nostalgia for passionate sexual exchange with white women is extremely subtle. And yet Malcolm X's brittle, defensive tone when he describes his marriage to Betty in his postconversion days seems to be limned with yearning for a passionate sexual partner, not just a housekeeper and mother to his children. When

Malcolm relents a little from his position that most women are untrustworthy, and admits that he loves Betty, he places that love on a plane above physical attraction: "I guess by now I will say I love Betty. [... ] The Western 'love' concept, you take it apart, it really is lust. But love transcends just the physical. Love is disposition, behavior, attitude, thoughts, likes, dislikes—these things make a beautiful woman, a beautiful wife" (232). While Malcolm has absorbed Islam's teachings about love and marriage, his hesitancy ("I guess by now I will say [...]") speaks to a grudging, almost obligatory love for his wife that he might wish were infused with a little more "lust."

If the Nation of Islam freed Malcolm X from the ravages of drug and alcohol abuse, crime, and poor nutrition, at the same time it placed him in puritanical bondage in the denial of sensual pleasures and insisted that he suspend his disbelief in unbelievable doctrine. My purpose has been to illuminate how Malcolm's conversion to the NOI created the context for textual "Sauling around" in the autobiography, and therefore to show generally how ameliorative conversions described in most conversion narratives 83 usually contain a darker underside, evidencing the sense of loss over pre-conversion activities.

Malcolm's conversion was no doubt felt as a moving of the spirit, but it was also motivated by powerful social forces, in this case the desire for black autonomy in a black "nation." Those forces, as we saw, were powerful enough to make him suppress his own strongly held views, for example his beliefs about black Americans' African heritage. In a 1965 speech he correlated black self-hatred with negative attitudes toward

Africa, thus directly opposing the NOI's coupling of black self-esteem with a detachment from Africa: "In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can't hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the tree. [... ] You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself (Malcolm X

Speaks 168). Finally free of the Nation's doctrine, Malcolm was able to fully articulate his pan-Africanist leanings and his African heritage. We will see in chapter 3 that

Baraka's conversions to several different religions prior to his turn to Marxism were similarly socially produced and—like Malcolm's conversion—were in the service of cultural nationalisms. Like Malcolm, he later criticized those same religions and his own blindness in following them.

Chicano writer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta's conversion from Catholicism to

Protestantism was also propelled by societal influences, but in his case it was his assimilationist desire to enter mainstream white American society. In the next chapter,

"Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar

Zeta Acosta's Autofictions," I will read Acosta's autobiography as a failed conversion narrative, showing that this type of conversion instantiates another kind of "Sauling around": that of the Saulian persistence of ethnic or group identity that—while not 84

"essential"—nonetheless often seems to repel cultural change like oilcloth repels water.

Acosta's deconversion after two years with the Baptist Church can be linked to Richard

Rodriguez's resistance to conversion, which I explore in the final chapter. Even though

Acosta will claim that he is "neither Catholic nor Protestant," but a Chicano "Brown

Buffalo," and Rodriguez sees himself as a fully assimilated American, both writers assert a strong alliance with the Catholic Church, the ancestral church of Mexican

Americans. For Acosta this alliance is cultural and political, through his involvement with Catolicos por La Raza, while for Rodriguez, it is more spiritual and aesthetic.

Nonetheless, those alliances, I argue, voice an anti-conversion attitude that is evidenced in their texts and support my argument that conversion is not always the beautiful metanoia (spiritual turn) that much literature on conversion promises it to be. 85

Chapter Two - Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autofictions

I finally gave up on Catholicism and admitted to Duane Dunham that he knew more about Jesus than I did. We went into the boiler room under the barracks and he called down the Holy Ghost to save me. I took Jesus as my saviour and became a Baptist right on the spot. - Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972 (131)

I took to rising at 3:00 A.M. to pray and read my Bible. [...] But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn't have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. - Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972 (133)

It is Christmas Eve in the year of Huitzilopochtli, 1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil's Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles. - Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, 1973 (11)

In my introduction, I claimed that being alert to "Sauling around" meant being attentive to the complex and subversive aspects of conversion, particularly to sites of double-voicing, falsity, and ambivalence in conversion experiences. If Sauling around for Malcolm X is instantiated in the deep nostalgia for pre-conversion activities as a sober Nation of Islam narrator, then for Oscar Zeta Acosta, it is exemplified in his failed conversion to the Baptist Church, which can be read in his two autofictions, The

Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People

(1973), as his failure to assimilate into mainstream American culture.1 This failure, I argue, is pivotal in the texts: it governs his performance of a parodic Imitatio Christi; it paves the way to Acosta finding his identity as a "Brown Buffalo," or Chicano activist, including his participation in the politico-religious group, Catolicos Por La Raza; and it serves as a microcosmic illustration of the pitfalls of conversion qua assimilation.

Moreover, Acosta's post-deconversion reversion to Catholicism may be read as a form 86 of "Pauling around"; even while he has rejected its truth value, he continues to frame his experiences with religion. A religious narrative from "Sauling around" to "Pauling around" undergirds Acosta's two autofictions: weak, nominal family Catholicism fails to provide a strong sense of ethnic identity; seeking an entre to white society, Acosta converts to the Baptist Church; he then deconverts when that sense of belonging does not materialize; finally, he finds a solid sense of belonging (though not necessarily belief) in the Chicano movement, Catolicos Por La Raza.

Furthermore, the religious narrative in the two texts is bound closely to Acosta's desire for women and his sexuality. His wish to assimilate into American life has much to do with his failed relationships with white, sometimes Baptist, girls. I argue that

Acosta's conversion to the Baptist Church was an unsuccessful means to get and keep the blond, blue-eyed, "pig-tailed belles" {Revolt 31) he had been coveting all of his early life; his deconversion and renewed adherence to a strongly political, Chicano

Catholicism is accompanied by a new appreciation and desire for Chicanas (albeit expressed in sexist terms).

The "Sauling" and "Pauling" around in Acosta's two texts, then, illustrate religious conversion's role as intensely social and often prescriptive. It often promises rewards (ethnic assimilation, social inclusion, relationships) that it simply cannot deliver and, in Acosta's case, actually served to accomplish the opposite of what it promised, by cementing his feeling of exclusion from "white" America and paving the way to his identity formation as a "Brown Buffalo," a name he takes from his identification with the brown shaggy beasts, slaughtered almost to extinction. Acosta's autobiographical persona seems to demonstrate that if you're Mexican American, Mexican American- style Catholicism is the religion that "fits" your culture (whether or not you actually 87 believe in God) because it affirms a set of agreed-upon cultural markers (Our Lady of

Guadalupe, Aztec survivals, respect for history). A sociological truism maintains that people are most likely to affiliate with the religion made accessible by their culture, class, ethnicity, and upbringing; thus, I view this "fit" as a non-essentialist set of factors determining religious behaviour.

Similarly, pre-1975 Nation of Islam carried a strongly prescriptive element: it is the "natural religion for the black man," and excludes whites (Malcolm X,

Autobiography 155). While Malcolm X's autobiography represents conversion to the

Nation as a kind of racial-cultural going home, Acosta's Autobiography shows conversion to the Baptist Church as alienating and his return to Catholicism as a natural homecoming. This issue of religious-racial prescription is one that I will follow in later chapters, and is an important aspect of "Sauling around": if conversion, as a profoundly social process, is always already limited by who you are, then it can never offer an equal opportunity for change to all Americans. Just as the concept of the American dream, ignoring racial, economic, gender, and social obstacles, only pretends to be equally accessible to all Americans, so the potential for conversion is severely constrained by one's identity.

In this chapter I will follow the narrative arc previously sketched to provide corrective readings for The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the

Cockroach People that are attentive to the significance of religion in Acosta's life.

While the scenes of Acosta's conversion and deconversion in The Autobiography are underplayed, and throughout both texts he continually makes light of deity, religion, and religious practices, certain tenebrous, sometimes ironic passages, supported by extratextual material, betray how deeply religion affected his life. By using the term 88

"corrective readings," I mean to suggest that previous analyses of Acosta's autofictions have paid little attention to the significance of religion in these texts. Recent articles and books look at Acosta's autobiographies in the context of fat studies (Chamberlain 2001)

"testimonial satire" (Hames-Garcia 2000, 2004), a bildungsroman of Chicano counterculture (Lee 2000), and "magicorealism" (Aldama 2000; 2003).

Other than scholars noting that Acosta established a rhetorical identification with

Jesus, instantiated in his inaccurate reiteration of his age at the time of narration as thirty-three, "the same age as Jesus when he died" (Autobiography 18), and Hector

Calderon's view that the Autobiography follows the trajectory of a "Christian narrative of guilt, confession and redemption" ("Recorder" 98-9), only one article deals specifically with the role of religion in Acosta's texts. Joe Rodriguez's 1981 assessment of religion in three Chicano "novels" acknowledges the religious dilemmas faced by

Chicano writers as they face a multiplicity of blended religio-cultural traditions

(Catholicism, curandismo or folk healing, and indigenous Mexican religions) and must reconcile their religious identification with Chicano group identity. Rodriguez fails, however, to grasp the complex role of religion in Acosta's texts; his final analysis implies that Acosta sublimates his religious yearnings into drug use, which in turn helps him to adapt to opposing religious outlooks:

Acosta's struggle with religion is a war between multiple outlooks that all

make claims upon him which he cannot reconcile. The grinding day-to­

day clash of these opposed value systems is highlighted in the

Autobiography by the many references to drugs. It often seems as if

Acosta gets no real pleasure from being under the influence of various

substances. Taking drugs does not help him "escape" reality. Instead, 89

drugs appear to make Acosta a mental chameleon better able to deal with

the opposed outlooks that switch on his thoughts. (20)

Rodriguez's article does little to further an understanding of the complex social forces behind Acosta's conversion and deconversion to the Baptist Church; a more comprehensive approach to the matter of religion in Acosta's texts is long overdue.

Before pursuing my argument about religious conversion as cultural assimilation, it will be useful to discuss religion as an aspect of culture or ethnicity. Werner Sollors' division of ethnic components into those derived by "descent" (blood, nature, heredity), and those achieved by "consent" (law, marriage, choice) does not always help to demarcate religion, which seems to fall between those two camps. Audrey Smedley gives a good example of the paradox of religion as biology (or descent): in Inquisitorial

Spain, a society in which religion—as a portion of social identity—was largely seen as a matter of biological heredity, Jews and Moors were pressured into converting to

Christianity. Many Jews and Moors successfully converted and were accepted as

"legitimate" Catholics, thus revealing the "contradiction between the reality of the alteration of social identity, under pressure, and the notion that social identity is a concomitant of unique biological features that are exclusive and unalterable" (67). While social religious identity is changeable by conversion, there persisted a belief in the

"hereditary nature of social status" (66), an idea born out during the Inquisition when

"[fjamily ties were closely scrutinized to discover the 'hidden Jew,'" and "certificates of

Limpieza de sangre," or purity of blood, were sold by the church (66). This paradox— religion as an inherited component of culture that has biological underpinnings versus the understanding that religious beliefs as intellectual products can be rejected and 90 chosen freely—has continued to inform beliefs about religiosity into the twenty-first century.

Henry Adams, at the opening of The Education of Henry Adams (1918), provides an early American autobiographical representation of religion as so ingrained as to seem a biological or racial component of self. Adams describes, in the third person, his own birth in 1838, noting that he was "christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First

Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams" (3). The

"troglodytic" realities of his birth in a presidential, Old New England family, of "the

First Church," are compared to the birth of a Jewish child in Jerusalem: "Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century" (3). In imagining that Boston Unitarianism and its accompanying social milieu physically brands the self to the same degree as circumcision marks the body as

Jewish, Adams establishes the deeply felt loyalty to the religious culture of his family, while at the same time expressing ambivalence toward his heritage by describing it as a handicap to the future. Note, too, that he compares his religion to Judaism, which has historically been configured as both race and religion. This deeply ambivalent relationship to the religion of one's birth, and the requirements of faith that are felt oppressively, as if branded on the body, also marks, to some extent, both Mexican

American and African American autobiographers.

By the postwar period, however, this allegiance to the religion of birth was loosened, and what was once felt by Adams as cultural compulsion and handicap, could be seen as a mantle more easily thrown off. When sociologist Milton Gordon wrote, in 91

1964, that "[fjamily life and religion are, virtually by definition, contained within the ethnic boundaries" (35), he could not foresee the fissures that were already creating breaks between ethnic individuals and their family's religion. As Timothy Smith has shown, the work of earlier mid-century anthropologists (Clifford Geertz, J.C. Mitchell, and Harold J. Isaacs) had tended to confirm the belief in a hardened, "archaic" link between ethnicity (peoplehood) and religion. On the other hand, Abner Cohen's work in

African urban centres in the late 1960s opened up the idea that religion—especially in cities—is a protean force for ethnic groups, often part of the "mobilization of cultural resources [... ] to serve immediate 'interests' or goals" (Smith 1159). This is especially true for Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka, who utilized the Nation of Islam and Kawaida as tools in black nationalism.

Sociologists Will Herberg in the 1950s and Raymond Brady Williams in the

1980s came up with different conclusions about American immigrants than those cited above; they argued that while immigrants may be expected to assimilate to American life by giving up many aspects of their birth culture (language, nationality), they are expected to retain their ancestral religions: "In the United States, religion is the social category with clearest meaning and acceptance in the host society, so the emphasis on religious affiliation and identity is one of the strategies that allows the immigrant to maintain self-identity while simultaneously acquiring community acceptance" (Williams

11).3 In the 1990s, Phillip Hammond and Kee Warner claimed a general trend toward a loosening of links between religion and ethnicity in America. Furthermore, they identified a nuanced relationship between religion and ethnicity, with groups at one end of the spectrum exhibiting a tight, one-to-one, almost deterministic relationship between ethnicity and religion, called "ethnic fusion" (59). This group includes, for example, 92

Jews, the Amish, and Mormons. At the other end of the spectrum lie groups experiencing a much looser relationship between religion and ethnicity, which

Hammond and Warner term "religious ethnicity" (59). Irish, Polish, and Mexican

Catholics are included here because a variety of ethnic groups are linked to one religious tradition: "religious identification can be claimed without claiming the ethnic identification" (59). Hammond and Warner, however, do not account for the permutations in the tradition; for example, Mexican American Catholicism—with its emphasis on the Virgin of Guadalupe—has a vastly different flavour than, say, Irish

Catholicism.

The variance between these claims (religion as protean; religion as constant; the relationship between religion and ethnicity as variable) can be explained by differences between new immigrant communities and long standing communities (both Mexican

American and African American) organized around ethnicity or race, as well as by the recognition that there is both a synchronic continuum from conservation to change, as well as a diachronic wave of change in American ethnic religious groups (for example, the phenomenon of third generation immigrants reverting to the faith and ethnic customs of their grandparents). Certainly the experiences of the four autobiographers under examination are testament to this variety of experience: Malcolm X, Acosta, and Baraka turn away from their birth religions (though Acosta turns back), while Rodriguez adheres closely to his birth religion, resisting change by conversion but, as I will show, inaugurating changes from within his Catholicism. What seems to hold true for all four autobiographers, however, is a deeply prescriptive notion about religion as linked to race and ethnicity, i.e. if you are African American, the Nation or Kawaida are appropriate religions; if you are Mexican American, you better stick with Catholicism (this, despite 93 the phenomenal growth of Latino Protestants). In other words, religious conversion is figured as positive or negative, not according to some supernatural experience of truth by the convert, but according to whether that conversion is appropriate to one's ethnic group (see introduction, first endnote, for an explanation of my use of the term

"ethnic").4

A thumbnail sketch of Acosta's life and work will provide context for the discussion following. Acosta was born in El Paso, Texas in 1935 and disappeared off the coast of Mexico in 1974, possibly murdered during a drug run although this has never been confirmed. He grew up in Riverbank, California, the child of Mexican immigrants.

He joined the U.S. Air Force; played clarinet in the band; converted to the Baptist

Church; was a missionary in a Panamanian leper colony; deconverted; majored in creative writing and mathematics at San Francisco State University; indulged excessively in drugs and alcohol; and became a legal aid lawyer in East Oakland, Hunter

Thompson's attorney (and "Dr. Gonzo" in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1972]), as well as a Chicano activist-lawyer in East L.A. during the time of la movida (what Acosta calls the Chicano movement), defending—among others—the Saint Basil 21, Corky

Gonzalez (author of I Am Joaquin), and leading Chicano/a nationalists. He married twice and had one son, Marco, and, near the end of his short life, wrote two autobiographical books, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the

Cockroach People, both printed by San Francisco's Straight Arrow Press.5

In the Autobiography, Acosta's memories of his childhood and young adulthood in California and his stint in the air force are flashbacks interspersed with a narrative of his psychedelic, drug-riddled road trip in the summer of 1967 through California,

Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, ending in Ciudad Juarez, on the 94

Mexico border. Revolt deals with Acosta's role as a lawyer and political leader during the Chicano uprisings in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Los Angeles and, importantly for my study, delineates Acosta's role in Catolicos Por La Raza, the religio-political group that storms St. Basil's Church on Christmas Eve, 1969 to protest the Catholic

Church's marginalization of the Mexican American community in Los Angeles.

Acosta's experience growing up in Riverbank in the Autobiography describes the optimum context for "assimilative conversion," a term I use to convey Acosta's type of experience. Lofland and Skonovd's classification of "conversion motifs" does not precisely account for this variety, where the convert's desire for cultural assimilation in order to experience group belonging motivates the conversion. The closest category they provide is "affectional conversion," where "personal attachments or strong liking for practicing believers is central to the conversion process" (380). However, this does not capture the flavour of desire for in-group belonging—hence, my own category. The ostensible purpose of Acosta's autobiographical conversion is to "know Jesus," while the underlying desire is to know, understand, and be like the white males in his community. The optimum context for conversion, mentioned above, is comprised of the weak, nominal Catholicism of Acosta's family life—partly a product of the marginalization of Mexican Americans by the Catholic Church during this period (see

Dolan and Dolan and Hinojosa)—and the social/racial/economic hierarchy that operated in Riverbank in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Chapter 6 of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo begins the retrospective about Acosta's childhood, alternating with chapters describing life on the road. As a child, Acosta and his siblings attend "catechism classes at the Lady of Guadalupe" (78), the local Catholic church "where the sisters taught us about sin and social politics" (73). 95

However, Acosta's father—"an indio from the mountains of Durango" (72)—is without

"formal religion" (132), and Catholicism's hold on his mother is only slight. The most compelling example of the marginal role of Catholicism in the Acostas' lives is the ease with which Acosta single-handedly converts his family to the Baptist Church after his own conversion:

I got so good at it [proselytizing], I even converted my entire family, with

the exception of my brother Bob, who decided to stay with the Pope. My

old man had never had any formal religion, so he agreed with every word

I told him. My ma saw how Jesus had cleaned me up, so it seemed like a

good idea. They got saved while I was on a three day pass and sold the

Pink Elephant bar the following month. They never drank again and lived

happily ever after. But of course they screwed up my three sisters with

Jesus as a Baptist, morning, noon and night. (Autobiography 132)

The casualness of getting his family "saved" (a classic instance of "affectional conversion") while on a three-day pass from the air force, and the cartoonish "Pink

Elephant" (conjuring images of the drunk elephant from Disney's 1940 animated feature, Fantasia), juxtaposed with the seriousness of his parents' selling their livelihood and committing to the Baptist Church for life, characterize the sense of ambivalence about religion that we find in Acosta's work.

But it also points to the phenomenon of Protestant denominations attracting

Mexican American Catholics (see for example Sanchez, 151-70). This development was particularly significant in mid-century California where a lack of support from the

Catholic Church for Mexican American parishioners created a context ripe for conversion to Protestantism, which again underlines the intensely social aspect of religious conversion. A combination of factors, such as scarcity of Mexican American priests, segregation, and "whitening" of church ritual and practice, created "the fundamental perception [...] that the [Catholic] Church in California, and the United

States, had failed its Mexican faithful" (Dolan and Hinojosa 129). The dearth of

Mexican American priests to serve Spanish-speaking Catholics had been a chronic problem from the time of the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty in 1848, and continued for more than a century. Historian Donald Swift notes that "[a]s late as 1953, no priests were located in 26 percent of the counties of the United States, most frequently in the South and West" (200). Moreover, those few Mexican American priests operating in the

Southwest were to undergo a "campaign of 'Americanization'" at the hands of the

Anglo-Irish Catholic Church (Sanchez 157). Americanization included the attempted erasure of Mexican American ethnic markers, especially the attempt to eradicate what was viewed as a cult emphasis on Our Lady of Guadalupe (Dolan 144).6

A compelling example of this cultural gap between the hegemony of Irish

Catholicism and Mexican American parishioners appears in what has been called the first Mexican American novel, Jose Antonio Villarreal's semi-autobiographal Pocho

(1959). Villareal's protagonist, Richard, describes to his mother the confession he made to his English-speaking priest, naively revealing the confusion that arises through literal translation:

"He asked me if I liked to play with myself, and I said yes, and he was

angry." With his limited knowledge of English, the translation into

Spanish was a literal one, and she did not fully understand his meaning.

"I could not say no, because it is true that I would rather be alone than

with the Portuguese and the Spaniards. They always hit me, anyway, and 97

make fun of me. Tell me, why should I play with the others if they do not

like me?" (35)

While the priest's question is whether Richard plays with himself, or masturbates (a mortal sin), it is heard by Richard as playing by himself, which leads to his confusion when the priest seems angry at him. The slippage between languages is also a slippage between cultures, symbolizing the gap of non-understanding between the Anglo-Irish institution and Mexican American Catholics.

This historical context of the marginalization of Mexican American Catholics partially informs Acosta's willingness to forsake Catholicism for the Baptist Church. His own parents' indifference to Catholicism may well have been a result of the lack of

Mexican American Catholic infrastructure available in mid-century California. While my central claim is that the combination of such marginalization, Acosta's parents' religious indifference, and a desire to belong to white, mainstream culture are the reasons driving Acosta's conversion, I also note that Protestantism might have allowed more autonomy for Chicana/o nationalism during this period. For example, Catholic services during the pre-Vatican II 1950s would still have been held in Latin, while

Protestantism offered linguistic self-direction for Mexican American converts.

Furthermore, Luis D. Leon's research has shown that evangelical forms of Protestantism offered an attractive asceticism and freedom from alcohol abuse to some mid-century

Mexican American Catholics ("Metaphor"). Thus, while I maintain that a desire for assimilation played a significant role in Acosta's conversion, I allow that Protestantism may have offered benefits other than the potential for absorption into Anglo culture.

As he explains in the Autobiography, the Riverbank of Acosta's childhood is divided into "three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy 98

Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks" (78). This three- tiered hierarchy—ethnic, religious, and economic—will determine Acosta's early life as he attempts in various ways to escape the lowest category of Mexican Catholic peach picker. Falling in love with and ultimately being rejected by one "Protestant" and one

"Holy Roller" in his youth will influence Acosta's later attempted conversion to

"Americanity" via religion.

"Americanity" is C. Eric Lincoln's neologism that combines the "Judeo-Christian tradition" with the "idealistic sentiments of what is commonly called 'The American

Dream'" to describe the "new" religion of America ("Muslim Mission" 279-80). Lincoln uses "Americanity" to argue for the Nation of Islam's exclusion from American life; I use this term because it nicely captures the idea that Acosta was attempting to become more American by adopting a form of Protestantism, the most American religion in

Riverbank hierarchy. Lincoln's coining of "Americanity" gestures toward and updates the notion of "civil religion" introduced by Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social

Contract (1762), and elaborated on by Robert Bellah in reference to America. American

"civil religion" infuses founding myths and national practices with Protestant

Christianity to produce a sacred-secular religious cast over the nation.7

Acosta's first attempt to make inroads on "Americanity" is through his infatuation with Jane Addison. Grade-school Jane lives in the "American sector" (89).

As a white Protestant, she never actually considers Acosta a suitable boyfriend, and is oblivious to his unrequited love. When she asks the teacher to tell Oscar to put his shirt on during a hot day because he stinks, he realizes that all of his attempts to be love­ worthy are vain; he can never be other than a stinking Mexican in her eyes: "I am the nigger, after all. My mother was right. I am nothing but an Indian with sweating body and faltering tits that sag at the sight of a young girl's blue eyes. [...] I shall refuse to play basketball for fear that some day I might have my jersey ripped from me in front of those thousands of pigtailed, blue-eyed girls from America" (94-5).

The second girl, Alice Joy, is an "Okie" and a Baptist, which means that she is one step closer to the lowly Mexicans than Jane is. Acosta hears about Alice, a friend of a friend's sister, when he is hanging out with a bunch of white teenaged boys, "going over the list of broads in the entire San Joaquin Valley" (111). Alice is Acosta's "Miss

It," with "a face of peach, an aura of almond blossoms and the grace of a floating dove"

(111,112). Alice, aged thirteen, reciprocates sixteen year old Oscar's love, but the couple will never get the blessing from her stepfather, a Baptist Church deacon. When

Alice asks what Oscar's religion is, he responds that he is "[s]ort of a Catholic. I got confirmed" (115). Alice explains her stepfather's objection—"Daddy says some

Catholics don't believe in Jesus"—and Oscar retorts, "You can tell him this one does.

He's my favorite saint" (115). When Alice corrects him, telling him that Jesus is not a saint, but the son of God, Oscar brushes his ignorance aside, and tells Alice that she'll learn all about Catholicism when she converts, because he can only marry a Catholic.

This exchange is revealing, because Acosta exposes the casualness of his adherence to

Catholicism while being jocular about the Catholic obsession with saints. His "faith" seems based on unthinking ritual ("Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul" [115]) rather than any deep belief or even cultural commitment. Ironically, Acosta blithely assumes Alice's eventual conversion to Catholicism, whereas he will be the one to convert to the Baptist Church, although his conversion will in no way guarantee that he can marry girls like Alice. After two years of secret dating, their relationship caves in 100 due to fierce cultural resistance from her family; Okie Baptists just don't mix with

Mexican Catholics.9

The theme of Acosta's attraction to blond Anglo girls is contrasted with his indifference to Latino girls and women, and this desire will be reversed, in Revolt of the

Cockroach People, when he begins to notice, admire, and become sexually involved with Mexican American girls and women (I use "girls" because Acosta's first experience with Chicanas is a teenage threesome, ages fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen).

This turn from Anglo blonds to dark Latinas is proof of Acosta's full identification with the Chicano people. Sex and religion are thus strongly linked in both texts: the mistaken conversion to the Baptist Church as a way of attaining "Okie" girls becomes symptomatic of a dysfunctional urge to become Anglicized.10

Acosta's treatment of gender in both narratives is troubling and deserves comment. Carl Scott Gutierrez-Jones notes that part of Oscar's identification as a

"Brown Buffalo" is through misogynistic sexual relations with Chicanas and homosocial bonding with other Chicanos. Louis Mendoza remarks that Acosta reduces sexual intimacy with Chicanas to a "reward of political involvement" and cites Acosta's lack of

"critical analysis on gender" (Historia 232). Hames-Garcia's more benign view is that

Acosta's rendering of his narrators as sexist and homophobic is both part of the testimonio tradition of creating flawed storytellers and a critique of Chicano masculinist identity. While we cannot fully determine the degree of Acosta's intentionality in his sexist portrayals, his public writing confirms the patriarchal and masculinist tendencies of Chicano nationalism. Acosta did not live to see the Chicana criticism of the movement that emerged in the 1970s; had he lived, he may have been positively influenced by it, as there are moments in the texts where he shows a sensitivity to women's oppression in Mexican American culture.

Oscar's sexual initiation in the Autobiography is guided by an Anglo boy. Oscar learns to masturbate from Vernon Knecht, a "big, red-headed German kid" with whom he shares a tent during a Boy Scout camping trip. Vernon is shocked by Oscar's innocence: "Shit, you mean you don't know how to jack off?" (82). When Oscar is scared to do something "dirty" that he will have to confess to the priest before he makes confirmation, Vernon is incredulous: "Well, fuck, man. Just don't tell him" (83). This is a revelation for Oscar, who claims, "I lost most of my religion the same night I learned about sex from old Vernon" (83). Thus, Catholicism for Acosta has been emptied of what little meaning that it had during his childhood; he realizes, with the help of

Protestant friends and girlfriends, that the rituals of prayer and confession are easily shed.

These experiences, then, set the scene for the conversion, for which Acosta claims theological reasons, but which—I argue—is the cumulative result of the many frustrations of being brown, fat, Catholic, and rejected by white non-Catholic girls. In

1954, at age nineteen, just after he joins the air force, Acosta meets Duane Dunham:

One of the guys in the band, a redheaded trombone player from Pomona

who read philosophy started to tell me about his religion. He was a

Baptist and gave me endless leaflets explaining all I had to do to be

saved. He insisted that I leave the Roman Catholic Church immediately,

because it was the "house of the Anti-Christ" prophesied by St. John the

Divine in the Book of Revelations. (131) 102

Oscar reads for a month in order to be able to argue for the merits of Catholicism with

Duane, but he gets shot down: "How about Purgatory," scoffs Duane, "Where's that in the Bible?" (131). Finally, Oscar succumbs to Duane's proselytizing, and is "saved" in the boiler room:

I finally gave up on Catholicism and admitted to Duane Dunham that he

knew more about Jesus than I did. We went into the boiler room under

the barracks and he called down the Holy Ghost to save me. I took Jesus

as my saviour and became a Baptist right on the spot. [... ] I talked Jesus

morning, noon and night. I was a fanatic of the worst kind. During band

rehearsals, in the chow line, late at night in the barracks while lonely kids

wrote letters to their sweethearts. I preached instant salvation to the jazz

musicians of the band. (131)

Rather than describing the euphoric sensation of the Holy Spirit entering him, Acosta relates bloodlessly in one sentence an intellectual conversion that has more to do with being like Duane Dunham than it does with being saved. Acosta's conversion contrasts with the typical born-again Baptist conversion, which Harding describes as a "direct experience of the divine" (38). Conversion involves a sense of the Holy Spirit speaking to the convert and is called "coming to conviction" (38). One reason for the flat tone of

Acosta's conversion is that this narrative—atypically—is not intended to convert the reader through "witnessing," as born-again conversion narratives usually are (Harding

38). On the contrary, Acosta relates his conversion from the viewpoint of an agnostic

Chicano, scornful of his former, slightly ridiculous self. But even taking into account the formulaic characteristics of conversion narratives and Acosta's own narrative viewpoint as non-proselyte, I speculate that the aim of the conversion, rather than getting to know 103

Jesus as a personal saviour, is getting to know about Jesus like Duane does in order to be more like Duane, who presumably has no problem getting and keeping blond, blue-eyed girlfriends. While Acosta's enthusiasm for this new religion is evident in the way he

"talked Jesus morning, noon, and night" (131), an additional social aspiration—the desire for assimilation—adds propulsion to Acosta's moving of the spirit. The pain of repeated rejection and the keen desire to be like other "Americans" are tangible and strong reasons for Acosta to convert to the "white" Baptist Church, the church of his lost love, Alice. In other words, intellect, social aspirations, and desire for assimilation motivate what we expect to be triggered largely by religious epiphany, a moving of the spirit. While no direct textual clues link Acosta's conversion to this purpose of assimilation, it makes retrospective sense that he wished to enter more fully the world of his white male friends. Acosta's autobiographical persona, it should be noted, is meant to convey the shrewdness of his later realization that the conversion was hollow; the enthusiasm and spirituality of the original event is tarnished by that later knowledge.

While it is difficult to read too much sociological significance into a fictionalized account such as The Autobiography, it is nonetheless interesting to position Acosta's conversion in the context of mid-century Mexican America. An increased trend for

Mexican Americans to convert from Catholicism to forms of Protestantism, particularly

"born again" Christianity, can be marked from the 1906 burgeoning of the African

American Pentecostal movement in Los Angeles. The exuberance of that movement overflowed into "Sonoratown," thus affecting many Mexican Americans who then converted to Pentecostal Christianity (Ramirez 574). Acosta's flirtation with the Baptist

Church in the early 1950s can be viewed as performative of a broad "seismic shift"

(Espinoza 597) in the religious pattern of Catholic Mexican Americans in the twentieth 104 century. It is estimated that each year sixty thousand Latino Catholics convert to some form of evangelical or Pentecostal Christianity (Espinoza 597). While this trend has been well documented as a positive, emancipatory movement often led by strong Latino leaders (see Ramirez, Espinoza, and Leon 1998), and we cannot know all of the complex reasons for the large-scale conversions from Catholicism to forms of Protestantism,

Acosta's case shows the difficulties that arise when conversion is undertaken in the hope of achieving social belonging in the white community. William Madsen, in his 1964 study of the Mexican Americans of South Texas, found that "[t]he inglesado [...] hopes that his affiliation with a Protestant Church will help him achieve social acceptance in the Anglo community. He sees conversion and the Protestant ethic as keys that will unlock the door to the Anglo World" (67). For Acosta, those keys simply did not work.

Acosta was in the air force when he converted, and in 1954 he was sent to

Panama, where he joined the First Southern Baptist Church and became a missionary.

Acosta did successful missionary work in Chilibre and the Palo Seco Leper Colony, and was touted as a "Mexican Billy Graham" who "converged] natives right and left" (132-

3). And yet he is never socially accepted by his presumably white co-religionists, and never "invited to the home of any church member" (133). Acosta goes on, "I had no social life except in the jungle where the wild orchids grew and the land crabs scattered at the sound of my feet trampling through the foliage in search of more natives to tell about Jesus" (133). Acosta admits that he was "miserable": "I hurt inside. I didn't have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. I didn't have the very thing I preached" (133). Ethnicity in this case trumps religion; Acosta cannot change the phenotypical badge—his body—that makes him look more like the Indians he converts than like the other Baptist missionaries. Acosta's desire to be accepted by his white cohorts through conversion has been disappointed; rather than bringing him into the magic circle of camaraderie, his conversion highlights racial difference, continues social exclusion, and produces isolation and misery. In Revolt, Acosta will look back on this experience as one of "poison[ing] brothers in Panama with the gringo's venomous

Christ-shit" (47), thus affirming his racial link to his Indian "brothers" while rejecting

Christianity as a white (gringo) religion. Both Acosta and Rodriguez render Indian-ness as constituting the visible sign of their ethnicity, and therefore the part that connects them to their group. Acosta's connection to other indigenous peoples (i.e. the Indians he converts) through his appearance is what will bring him back into the fold of Chicano

Catholicism in Revolt and into the arms of "brown babes." For Rodriguez, the Indian- ness marked on his face and skin is a tenacious link back to the sixteenth century; his

Indian-ness is the part that can and does swallow America and make him American.

Thus, for both writers, Indian ancestry plays a key role in identity.

After almost two years of ascetic living—no jazz, masturbation, sex, movies, cigarettes, or beer—Acosta experiences a crisis of faith. "I made a final study of the

Bible and wrote down everything that sounded true in a notebook on my right. Those things that sounded wrong or inconsistent or that I couldn't believe, I wrote in a notebook to my left. For three months, between 3:00 and 7:00 A.M., sitting under a single bulb in the attic above the barracks, I made a comparative study of the Synoptic

Gospels" (133). The results of his survey reveal only a few pages of "truth" on the right side, while the entire left side of the notebook, for the "wrong or inconsistent" or unbelievable, is filled with chapter and verse notations. "So I gave up Jesus and the

Baptist Church" (133), Acosta writes. The Synoptic Gospels represent three different accounts of the same narrative— those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Consequently, they can be seen as encapsulating the relativity of "many voices" that—ironically—Acosta will champion at the end of his narrative. If Acosta wished to rely on requirements of logical consistency for his faith, the Gospels were sure to fail that test because they instantiate "diverse perspectives" rather than one consistent truth (Nickle 182). While fundamentalist Christians treat the

Bible as God's authority on earth, the fundamentalist preacher is—at the same time— adept at using biblical language in creative, regenerative ways. Harding describes fundamentalist Baptists as imaginative interpreters: "[they] read [... ] the Bible, very differently [from the skeptics]—harmonizing contradictions and infelicities according to interpretive conventions that presume, and thus reveal, God's design. Their Bible, their preacher, is thus constantly creating new truth" (xi). (Harding is referring here specifically to the Baptist followers of Jerry Falwell, but the characteristic applies broadly.) Acosta, perhaps partly because of his intense isolation in the jungle, and partly due to his disappointed desire for social acceptance, was not able to adopt this forgiving attitude toward the living word of God.

Lewis Rambo describes conversion backsliding as a relatively normal process, but he does not entertain the possibility that backsliding is normal because the conversion might have been precipitous or unwise:

When people cannot maintain a sense of euphoria and empowerment, an

inevitable loss of energy may initiate a new crisis. They may worry that

their conversion was not valid, and they may be plagued with old

temptations and doubts. [... ] The human reality seems to be that the

power of the conversion experience will eventually dissipate for most 107

people, and thus maintenance procedures become important to protect a

person either from severe depression or from abandoning the new

religious commitment altogether. Some religious traditions recognize the

problem and prepare people to surrender and commit afresh in response

to each new struggle, to have more patience with themselves and more

willingness to face the reality that lives shaped over many years will

require a long process of reshaping according to new ideas, relationships,

and life-styles. (136-7)

Rambo goes on to identify "evangelical Protestant movements in the United States" as

"less well equipped to deal with this postconversion phenomenon, resulting in many converts dropping out a few months after their conversion experience, or sinking into a slough of dissatisfaction in which their conversion seems to avail little" (137). Rambo does not explain why this is so.

Acosta's "backsliding" was, I suggest, a direct result of the complex, difficult-to- fulfill social desires surrounding his conversion. The truth value of the Bible, I speculate, would have been of moot importance to Acosta had he been granted the sense of belonging and community with other Baptists that he yearned for. For Malcolm X, racial-ethnic belonging in the Nation and the resulting social-political benefits were more important than his actual belief in Nation doctrine; the end justified the means.

Similarly, had Acosta accomplished the kind of social belonging and acceptance he was seeking through joining the Baptist Church, he may well have tolerated any inconsistencies in religious doctrine (or he would have performed his faith creatively, as

Harding cites) just as Malcolm suspended his disbelief in Nation of Islam teachings.

Ultimately, it will be Mexican American Catholicism that provides (in part) the socio- 108 political ethnic community of shared values that Acosta is seeking. As it was for

Malcolm X in relation to the Nation of Islam, for Acosta the truth value of his chosen religion will be secondary to the significance of Mexican American Catholicism as a meaningful cultural, social, and political propellant around which to organize.11

After Acosta's deconversion, he continues to minister to the natives for three months, though "despis[ing]" himself for being a "hypocrite," because he cannot admit to them that "it was all a crock of shit" (133). Acosta writes that when he is discharged from the air force, he returns to the States, gets "reeling drunk" in a hotel in the French

Quarter of New Orleans, and contemplates suicide: "I opened the window, looked down at the cars parked behind the hotel some ten stories down and decided to jump. [... ] I was twenty-one and without God. I had no one to love me and no one for me to love.

Since there was no after-life, what then did it matter?" (134). The accumulation of painful rejections by two blond Protestant girls, the lack of acceptance by the Baptist community, the absence of connection to Mexican American culture, and Acosta's disillusionment with the Bible and Jesus leads him to existential despair. While he closes this chapter with a note of typical self-deprecating humour (he hears an imaginary witness say "[h]e ain't got the balls to do himself in" [134], thus seeing himself as a loser even in attempting suicide), there is nonetheless a deep sadness over his crisis of faith that permeates the text.

The post-deconversion sadness in the Autobiography also permeates a portion of an autobiographical fragment (possibly a first draft of the Autobiography) titled "From

Whence I Came," and made public only ten years ago in Ilan Stavans's Oscar "Zeta"

Acosta: The Uncollected Works (1996).12 Awkwardly, even clumsily written, "From

Whence" deals mostly with Acosta's first five years of life, and contains an intimacy and vulnerability that is for the most part erased in the later texts. While the piece begins in the tone of a public memoir, near the end Acosta adopts the tone of a private letter, and begins to refer to a "You," who is never identified by name, but we come to realize is

Jesus. Acosta refers to "the three years we've spent together" (48), which is roughly the duration that Acosta was a Baptist. Acosta writes, ""I'll capitalize Your name until I finish this letter of resignation, but after that I'll only think of You as I do of any other person who is now dead and gone forever" (48); "It isn't easy for me to sit here now and write this letter to You about all the things that led up to our first real meeting, but I think it's important that we find out why I got involved with You in the first place. It wasn't a natural relationship, You'll have to admit to that. I could easily have gone all through life and never have been saved. And surely it wasn't written in The Book that I should have been a preacher." (49). The letter sounds almost like an expression of unrequited love. Acosta, in describing his relationship to Jesus as unnatural, suggests that he did not freely choose to be "saved," but in addition to spiritual reasons for conversion, he was also submitting to the subtle coercion of external pressures, in this case, the compulsion of cultural assimilation. The sense of regret and pain in this "letter of resignation" from Christianity is palpable.

Moreover, the fragment contains an important reference to Acosta's "downfall"

(49), or conversion, in relation to mimetic desire. Girard's theory explains that mimetic desire propels human experience: like children who all try to grab the same toy, even when dozens of toys are available, we each desire what others desire. Girard reminds us that mimetic desire is not always a bad thing: "if [people] did not of necessity choose for models the human beings who surround them, humanity would have neither language nor culture" he writes. Nonetheless, mimetic desire is "responsible for the best and the 110 worst in us" (16). In "From Whence He Came," Acosta describes how Chet, obviously a non-Mexican American and the most popular and "horniest guy" in Riverbank, coveted

Acosta's girlfriend. Acosta receives this as a compliment, analyzes his disturbing reaction, and specifically relates this incident to his introduction to Jesus:

I remember the first time I introduced him [Chet] to my girlfriend, Nita,

he said "Man, I'd eat her box right now." I thought that was funny as hell

his saying that to her boyfriend. It made me feel big. As You can see I

wasn't exactly what one would call sophisticated or what Sig [his friend,

Harry Sigurdson] would call hip. I mean, what poor taste it is to say a

thing like that to the lover. Sure it makes the guy feel big cause he's got

something the other fellow wants, but it's still no class. The dumb thing is

that the jerk of a lover takes it as a compliment. How strange that that was

the beginning of my downfall. You might say that was our introduction.

You and me, we met when Chet first saw my girl, Nita, and made that

rude remark. (49)

Having "something that the other fellow wants" is precisely the way that Acosta usually sees his white male friends in Riverbank: they have the white girls that he wants.

Though the situation is here reversed, it is nonetheless framed by a sense of dysfunction and related precisely to a belief in Jesus. Thus, Chefs mimetic desire gratifies Acosta

(after all, a white guy wants his girl), but he realizes in retrospect that he was a "jerk of a lover," and also sees this acceptance of mimetic desire initiating his meeting with Jesus.

Acosta may yoke mimetic desire and meeting Jesus because he sees his conversion as an exercise in mimetic desire (wanting what the other Baptists have) rather than doctrinal belief. Thus, "From Whence I Came" supplements the Autobiography by providing Ill important clues to Acosta's negative feelings about his conversion to the Baptist Church; particularly his sense that the conversion was "unnatural" and the result of mimetic desire or a fantasy of cultural assimilation.

But there are also some traces in this example of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reads as homosocial mimetic desire; she reinscribes Girard's mimetic theory of desire to emphasize gender asymmetry, claiming that the male-male relationship takes precedence over desire for the female (Between 21-5). While Carl Scott Gutierrez-Jones notes that part of Oscar's identification as a "Brown Buffalo" is through homosocial bonding with other Chicanos, Oscar's identification as a Baptist through mimetic, homosocial bonding with white boys has been overlooked. Acosta's relationship to Chet in "From Whence," and with Duane and Vernon in The Autobiography, constitutes a pattern of desire for what the white boys have (machismo, the holy spirit, orgasms, white girls) that may conceal a desire for homosocial bonding with those white males.

Acosta's painful deconversion that prompted thoughts of suicide may also have shaped his decision to employ a Christie typology in the narrative, as a way of coming to terms with Jesus' role in his life. In the introduction, I described Hurston's cynicism about conversion accomplishing any material change in the world, a cynicism evident especially in her mocking description of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, renamed Sincere

Determination, as a convert to Father Divine's religion: "With Father Divine at the head

[of the table] and Sincere Determination at the foot, slicing ham and turkey for the saints, there might not be much peace, but the laws would be truly wonderful" (Dust

Tracks 224). Similarly, Acosta's deconversion made him cynical about conversion producing real change (i.e. peace, rather than merely laws), yet ironically, in freeing him from the idea of Jesus as saviour, deconversion allows him to be more like Jesus, the 112 common rebel, who effects material change in the world. In other words, the autobiographical imitation of Christ that Acosta employs in his autofictions serves as a satiric reminder that the secularized image of Jesus Christ as a champion of the oppressed is more potent and real than is the acceptance and embrace by white co­ religionists that Acosta may fantasize. Furthermore, Acosta's use of Jesus is a way of capitalizing on Christ as a figure of hybridity and tension. Jesus Christ is a central figure for all Christian religions, yet he instantiates liminality and, in a fashion, Saul-Paul-ness himself. He was a Jew who became the symbol of a new sect, Christianity, and thus he symbolizes being caught between two cultures and two religions. Acosta may not have been consciously corralling all of these meanings into his Imitatio Christi theme; nonetheless, the Christie identification in the text works to galvanize these parallels between Acosta and Jesus as rebels, in-between heroes, and ambiguous cultural figures.

In Beyond Ethnicity, Werner Sollors points out that the Christie typology, or

Imitatio Christi theme, has been salient in American writing, reflects the strong sense of

Americans as a chosen and misunderstood people, and hearkens back to Thomas a

Kempis's fifteenth-century book of instruction that was widely available in early

America. Sollors provides a wide variation of instances of the imitation of Christ theme; two divergent examples are Cotton Mather's autobiography Paterna (1699-1702) and

William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), featuring protagonist Joe Christmas, where

Faulkner "uses the questionable Christie identity to parallel his theme of doubtful ethnic identity, as the novel becomes an assault on preconceptions" (54). Acosta's Christie typology is employed, I believe, in a slightly different way than in Sollors's examples.

For Acosta, identifying himself with Jesus as a flawed human rather than a worker of miracles allows him to use Jesus' self sacrifice as a model for his own self degradation, 113 but also to utilize the emblem of rebirth to signify his own ascension into a new identity as Brown Buffalo. When Acosta "gave up Jesus" in Panama, he gave up his belief in

Jesus, but found in him a potent symbol of the flawed revolutionary.

Acosta's Jesus identification is established through the reiteration of his age as thirty-three, a reference to stigmata, and a disturbing pseudo-Crucifixion scene.

Acosta states that his age is thirty-three when he leaves San Francisco on July 1,1967,

"the same age as Jesus when he died" (18).13 Frederick Aldama has pointed out that

Acosta could only have been thirty-two years old in July 1967, and thus he "reinvents his age so that when he sets out 'on the road' he is the same age as Christ" ("Oscar"

203). Acosta repeats this inaccuracy about his age in the opening of his sequel to the autobiography, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (24). Furthermore, Acosta reiterates the thirty-three theme when he describes the aftermath of his experience in Juarez,

Mexico at the end of his narrative: "I enter the womb of night and am dead to this world of confusion for thirty-three hours" (195). Why thirty-three hours? Why not thirty?

Twenty-four? Thirty-six?14 These repetitive references to thirty-three suggest Acosta's firm intention to create a Jesus allusion in his work, in particular an allusion to Jesus's age at the crucifixion. Thus, he identifies with Jesus as victim and sacrificial lamb, but in

Acosta's case, sacrificial Brown Buffalo.15

When Oscar carves the initials of his first love, Jane Addison, on his left hand, she dismisses him with a nod, "[w]hat is it? Looks like a cat scratched you" (90). Later,

Oscar will fantasize that when he is dead, Jane "jumps up, runs to the front of the church, takes the rosary from my carved-up, bleeding hands and bends to kiss the little holes in my hands" (95). While the earlier passage describes the tattoo on the left hand only, the latter passage transforms the tattooed initials into stigmata. Oscar's childhood 114 crush on American Jane, a girl he dreamt of "every night for two years" (90) metaphorically crucifies him. Again, Acosta's identification with Jesus and the crucifixion is deployed bathetically.

One of the most chilling scenes in The Autobiography further illustrates Acosta's

Jesus identification. Acosta narrates, in his usual offhand, casual banter, how his father hangs his two sons and his younger brother from the rafters of a chicken coop. Acosta's father, Manuel, an ex-Navy Indio from Durango, is continually trying to make men out of Oscar and his brother Bob. When Oscar, Bob, and their young uncle Hector engage in a rock fight, their father prepares to whip them. In order to soften the blows of the whip, they stuff their underwear with newspapers. When Manuel discovers the papers, he asks

"[o]kay, you cheaters, whose idea was it?" Nobody will confess, so he decides to hang all three of the boys. The scene emerges from Acosta's memory when he recalls that he's never lied to his father "since that day he hung me from a rafter in the chicken coop.

[...] Shit, not even my old man can make me talk once I've made up my mind. I am loyal to the core. Even when he marched us to the chicken coop under the plum tree, did you see me cry? When he made the three of us stand on that four-by-four, tied the rope around our necks, did you hear me beg for mercy?" Acosta continues:

Even when he walked out, leaving us there to die I said nothing. Despite

the fact I was the youngest of the three, you didn't see me holding up any

white flag of surrender. Though as the blood curdled in my legs, even

cramps of electrical shocks up my spine didn't do a thing. I knew my

mother would find us with our tongues hanging out when she came for

the eggs in the morning. And when that mean bantam rooster pecked at 115

my feet, when we could no longer hear my father's voice outside, you

still didn't hear me cry, did you? (81)

Oscar's stoicism, his silence, the presence of the rooster, familiar symbol of Christ's passion: these suggest that Acosta was consciously building the parallel between his

autobiographical persona and Jesus.

The hanging scene is ambiguous. We don't know whether Acosta's father

removed the four-by-four from under the boys' feet, as this action is never described,

and this ambiguity adds to the power of the scene while pushing the Christie parallel

even further. Acosta either wants us to believe that he was actually "hung" with the

support removed from under his feet, or that he simply felt the "shocks" up his spine and

his "blood curdl[ing]" due to the anticipation of being hung. When Acosta writes that his

mother would find them in the morning "with our tongues hanging out," we are led to

believe the hanging is real, and the four-by-four has been removed. However, in this

type of hanging (when the body swings free of any support), death is usually immediate,

so obviously Acosta's father could not have removed the four-by-four or his son would

not be alive to tell his tale! And yet Acosta introduces a sense of unreality and horror:

how could a father actually hang his own child? The scene echoes not only Jesus'

crucifixion but also the story of Abraham and Isaac.

The parallels continue: Jesus' punishment may have originally been scourging

only, but was switched to scourging followed by crucifixion, which Acosta imitates by

having the original beating turn into a hanging. Girard points out that Christ's

crucifixion fits the mythological scapegoating of a victim that has many violent variants:

dismemberment, stoning, and lynching were all common (64-70). Furthermore, in the

Bible "two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left" 116

(Matthew 27:38), and in the Autobiography, Hector and Bob are strung up alongside

Oscar. Manuel's reason for hanging the boys is that none of them will tell the truth.

Jesus says to Pilate, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate then asks Jesus "What is truth?" Jesus refuses to answer (John 18:37-38).

Furthermore, when Manuel walks away from his hanged son, we are reminded of Jesus' plaintive cry to his "father," "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark

15:34).

Acosta's identification with Jesus is always limned with caricature: a rooster pecks at his feet rather than crowing majestically three times; his crime is that of stuffing his underwear, rather than claiming to be King; and crucifixion in Golgotha, the place of skulls—wherein the body is draped on the cross and retains a certain nobility and pathos—is turned into hanging in a shitty chicken coop, where the body wilts. He imagines his mother gathering eggs in the morning—the eggs an allusion to Easter and rebirth—but instead of the Resurrection of the Lord she will find the corpses of children, tongues lolling.

Another Christie parallel emerges at the end of Revolt. While Acosta deconverts from Jesus as saviour in the Autobiography, he finds Jesus in the figure of his brother at the end of Revolt. The narrator, Zeta, visits his brother Jesus in Mexico: "Jesus is my twin, but he came out first. Our parents always called him the older brother. I have had to treat him with the respect that a Chicano gives to the eldest son" (Revolt 189, emphasis in original). (Acosta's actual older brother, Robert, or Bob, was not his twin.)

Further on, Acosta writes, "When the Brown Buffalo left LA and headed for Frisco Bay in the Spring of '72" he had no way of knowing "that he'd meet up with Jesus again" 117

(258). Thus the storyteller Acosta transforms Jesus, the personal saviour of the

Autobiography, into Jesus, the flesh and blood (if fictional) twin brother in Revolt, reflecting his disappointment with conversion as a means to dramatic spiritual and social change.

Acosta imitates Jesus the rebellious carpenter, rather than the supernatural Son of

God. He uses the Jesus allusion to cement the results of his deconversion: he has lost his faith in Jesus as son of God and sees belief in a transcendent being as wasted energy, but the parallels he draws between himself and Jesus highlight the significance of Jesus as a leader of the oppressed who does real work in the world. If religion as a system of belief in a deity has no merit for Acosta, religion does have value as cultural-political vehicle.

In the opening of The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Acosta gives a glimpse of how organized Chicano Catholicism can make important political gains for the Mexican

American people. The opening scene, where the Catolicos For La Raza storm St. Basil's

Church, suggests that Acosta, in his role as a hybrid rebel leader of the poor, protesting oppression by the rich, performs the logical and satisfying denouement of his Jesus association.

Acosta closes The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo with a denunciation of

American colonization of Mexican lands, and a proclamation of his new identity as a

Brown Buffalo. One prong of this attack is directed toward Christianity: "They destroyed our gods and made us bow down to a dead man who's been strung up for 2000 years.... Now what we need is, first to give ourselves a new name. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own.... So I propose that we call ourselves... what's this, you don't want me to attack our religion? Well all right " (198).16 One breath after asserting his anger toward the Spanish colonizers who forced Christianity on 118 the Indios of Mexico, he sheepishly retreats from the criticism he imagines emanating from other Mexican Americans who would bristle at the undermining of Catholicism.

Acosta's criticism of Christianity followed by an imagined interlocutor's disapproval and his own withdrawal encapsulates the ambivalence toward Catholicism expressed by many postwar Mexican American writers. Burton Moore, in Love and Riot, characterizes this reluctance to show disrespect for Catholicism as typical of the Chicano population in the late 1960s. Moore quotes Benny Luna, an associate of Acosta, reacting to Acosta's plans to attack the church: "He might be my brother in the revolution, but man, you're not going to talk about my church. That's how far behind, ideologically, all the militants were out here when I came to Los Angeles. We've been taught so long we've got to have respect" (46-7). This ambivalence usually results from feelings of obligatory obedience and respect toward the controlling religion of the culture (and the colonizer), mixed with speculative criticism and dissent, and sometimes an additional abiding interest in the old religion and magic associated with Aztec gods.17 The new generation's difficult-to-discard respect for the older generation religionists also reminds us of Richard Wright's stinging indictment that I repeat from my introduction: "In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters" (Black Boy 154). This ethnic-religious dilemma is repeated in Acosta's

Chicano group: he and his fellow Chicanos—while politically bold—feel sheepish and guilty when it comes to going against the beliefs of their elders.

The newer style of political Catholicism instantiated in Revolt will raise the ire of those same traditional Mexican Americans who Acosta imagines objecting to his criticism of Christianity in Autobiography. Zeta (the autobiographical narrator in Revolt) 119 reports receiving telephone calls after the St. Basil's episode from Chicanos who claimed that if Acosta "didn't stop staying such horrible things about their religion," they would bomb the office (79). '"The Church,' the Cockroaches of old say to us, 'is the only institution we can turn to for help. It is our religion, don't you understand? We are a very religious people.'" (79). (Acosta uses the term Cockroaches to refer to

Chicanos in his second book, paralleling the status of that lowly but tenacious insect with his compadres, and complementing the Brown Buffaloes of his first book.) Thus, the older generation of Mexican American Catholics—"the Cockroaches of old"—are anxious that political engagement will jeopardize their church.

A solution to the outworn Catholicism of the older generation of Mexican

Americans is located, for Acosta, in the political group Catolicos Por La Raza, organized by Ricardo Cruz in the late 1960s to protest the non-responsiveness of the

Catholic Church to the needs of poor Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Acosta's attempts—through his involvement in this group—to change the Catholic Church from within can be compared fruitfully with Rodriguez's work on transforming his church from the inside out, which I explore in chapter 4. Both writers are potent examples of

"lived religion," illustrating Orsi's claim that religion in America is not entropic, but is, rather, "wildly creative and innovative" ("Everyday" 11). Acosta was one of the twenty- one Catolicos arrested for the storming of St. Basil's Church on Christmas Eve, 1969, an event he describes in the opening of Revolt:

It is Christmas Eve in the year of Huitzilopochtli, 1969. Three hundred

Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil's Roman Catholic Church.

Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the

money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles. [... ] From the 120

mansions of Beverly Hills, the Faithful have come in black shawls, in

dead fur of beasts out of foreign jungles. Calling us savages, they have

already gone into the church, pearls in hand, diamonds in their Colgate

teeth. Now they and Cardinal James Francis Mclntyre sit patiently on

wooden benches inside, crossing themselves and waiting for the bell to

strike twelve, while out in the night three hundred greasers from across

town march and sing tribal songs in an ancient language. (11)

Acosta carefully sets up the dichotomy between the rich parishioners, aligned with their

Irish Cardinal, and the Chicano "greasers" whose Catholicism is mixed liberally with pagan beliefs and rituals ("the year of Huitzilopochtli" instead of the year of Jesus

Christ), and who are identified with the rebel Jesus, driving the money-changers from the temple (Matthew 21:12). Acosta goes on to describe St. Basil's as "Mclntyre's personal monstrosity" built for "five million bucks," and used for "puritanical worship"

(11).

Prior to the description of chaos and violence that ensues when the Chicanos force their way into the church, Acosta asserts the Chicanos' unique combination of

Aztec beliefs and Catholic faith:

Three priests in black and brown shirts pass out the tortillas. Three

hundred Chicanos and other forms of Cockroaches munch on the buttered

body of Huitzilopochtli, on the land-baked pancake of corn, lime, lard

and salt. [... ] We chew the tortillas softly. It is a night of miracles: never

before have the sons of the conquered Aztecas worshipped their dead

gods on the doorstep of the living Christ. While the priests offer red wine 121

and the poor people up-tilt earthen pottery to their brown cold lips, there

are tears here, quiet tears of history. (12-13)

Thus, the Catholic ritual of Eucharist is transposed onto pre-Christian Aztec religion: instead of eating the body and blood of Jesus Christ in communion wafers and wine, corn tortillas become the "buttered body of Huitzilopochtli," the hummingbird god of the Mexitin, an Aztec tribe (Anzaldua, Borderlands 32). The "quiet tears of history" are the symbols of mourning for the domination of the original Indios of Mexico by Spanish colonizers, followed by the continuing oppression of Mexican mestizos by Americans after the Guadelupe-Hidalgo treaty of 1848. And yet Acosta also recognizes the

"miracle" of syncretic religion—that Chicanos can now come together in political support of a Mexican American folk Catholicism lined richly with their pagan rituals, myths, gods, and goddesses, is extraordinary, if not miraculous.

The Chicanos force their way into the church shouting "LET THE POOR

PEOPLE IN" (15), "!QUE VIVA LA RAZA!" and "CHICANO POWER" (18).

Afterwards, Acosta surveys the wreckage: broken glass, debris, and "banners with La

Virgen de Guadalupe drawn in color" (19). The Virgin of Guadalupe was supposed to have appeared to Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyacac in Mexico in 1531, and has since become the mother-virgin-goddess embodiment of Mexican American Catholicism. As a

"boundary-crossing mestizo," the Virgin represents a threat to mainstream patrilinear

American Catholicism (Orsi,"She Came" 24). Gloria Anzaldua writes that Guadalupe is

"the single most potent religious, political and cultural image of the Chicano/mexicano"

("Coatlalopeuh" 53).18 Acosta's inclusion of the trampled Guadalupe banner in the debris on the floor symbolizes the Anglo-Catholic Church's historical attempts to stamp out the "cult" worship of the Virgin (Dolan 144). Thus, in his description of the storming 122 of St. Basil's, Acosta carefully includes all of the elements important to Chicano-style

Catholicism—Aztec gods, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and political agency. His use here of religion as an identity marker rather than a source of belief anticipates Walter Benn

Michaels' recent observation that the reverence for diversity in America has meant that religion is often uncoupled from belief and simply considered as an "identity category along the lines of race and culture" (Trouble 174).

Acosta calls Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird god whose "buttered body" was eaten on the steps of St. Basil's (12), "the principle ancient diety [sic] of the Chicanos"

(33), and "the god of war" (159). Acosta's use of Huitzilopochtli anticipates Gloria

Anzaldiia's interest, as a Chicana, in Aztec deities combined with politicized

Catholicism, but his use in Revolt of the hummingbird god is more nominal and material than spiritual. Huitzilopochtli reappears in the name of the underground newspaper, La

Voz de Huitzilopochtli, produced by the Chicano Militants, and later on Acosta's business cards: "I've had new business cards printed up with the same design of

Huitzilopotchtli [sic] which Chicano Militants wear on their brown berets" (48).

Anzaldiia's commitment to Aztec history, myth, and deity, combined with her worship of and identification with the Virgin, signal her claim for the freedom "to fashion my own gods out of my entrails" (22). In other words, Anzaldiia's heartfelt visceral and

spiritual exploration of ancient Aztec myth and borderlands Catholicism in

Borderlands/La Frontera contrasts rather sharply with Acosta's careless employment of

Huitzilopotchtli and the Virgin as cultural placeholders in a newer (yet older, in its invocation of centuries old gods), hipper syncretic Chicano Catholicism. His appropriation of the symbol of the hummingbird for his business cards is a good

example of Acosta's offhanded employment of Aztec religion as cultural habit rather 123 than belief, and instantiates Michael Hames-Garcia's idea that Acosta is continually undermining the idea of "authentic" ethnicity in his texts. Moreover, Acosta never feels the need to put Aztec religion to the test as he did Christianity; there are no scenes of early morning angst while poring over the truth value of ancestral myth as there is in the

Autobiography when Acosta examines the Synoptic Gospels.

Acosta's turn toward a culturally loaded, Aztec-tinged Mexican American

Catholicism is accompanied by his new interest in Mexican American women, and his turn away from blue-eyed (Baptist) blonds. In the Autobiography, Acosta claims that he was indifferent to Mexican American girls during his school years because they "stuck to themselves" and were "square and homely" (112). Acosta's mother predicts that he will change his mind eventually: "But I didn't for twenty years. All through school, in the Air Force, in San Francisco and in Alpine, I did not know one Mexican girl that aroused the beast within me" (113). Similarly, in Revolt, Acosta regrets that he "never touched a brown skin in tenderness" (47): "All through schools, jobs and bumming, I haven't even held the hand of a Mexican woman" (29), and "[s]ince I have come to LA,

I still have not touched woman of my own culture" (38). Acosta describes an incident from elementary school days, when he agitated to allow Mexican American boys to march with Anglo girls at the grade eight graduation ceremony (he covets Gretchen, "the

German girl whose tits I squeezed in the seventh grade" [Revolt 29]). He relates that not only was he unsuccessful in achieving this partnering, but that "the Mexican girls never spoke to me again" (Revolt 31). Acosta here confirms the pattern so evident in the

Autobiography, that his "first and last trueloves were both pig-tailed belles, and the pattern stuck with me." He goes on to ask the question that his mother asked him so many times, "Am I ashamed of my race?" (Revolt 31). This desire for "pig-tailed belles," 124 however, is successfully replaced in Revolt by an interest in Mexican American women, which seems to be a by-product of his cultural engagement with Chicanismo and

Chicano-style Catholicism. Acosta describes the women at a Chicano rally: "The broads are fantastic. I am eye-popping the incredible asses, the slim waists and the bulging breasts of these savage wenches who move with graceful twists" (38). When he is targeted by three female Chicano "teeny-boppers" as a hero of the movement ("They saw me on TV and decided to come down and join the revolution" [86]), he takes advantage of the situation and becomes sexually involved with all three of them:

For two years now I've sniffed around the courthouse, I've stood around

La Voz waiting for one of these sun children to come down on me, to

open up to my huge arms and big teeth. And yet I've not scored once.

How many times have my pants been hard? How many times have I gone

to bed wet? Alone? How many times have I shouted "Viva la Raza!"

waiting for a score? And how many times have I desired to taste of that

same warmth that is Lady Feathers, my mother, my sisters, my aunts and

my cousins? And now, thanks to the Pope, thanks to the media and thanks

to the revolution, at last I have a brown babe for my hurts. Three of them

under the same blanket! (86-7)

As this quotation evidences, la movida is inextricably combined with Chicano culture, religion, and sexuality for Acosta. We learn two pages on that the Pope fires Cardinal

Mclntryre the week following the Chicano demonstrations; this clear victory for

Mexican American Catholics makes Chicano Catholicism ("thanks to the Pope") the cultural cement that brings Acosta the "brown babes" he has been coveting since his arrival in L.A., and whose warmth he associates with that of his female relatives. 125

Desiring and getting Chicanas marks Acosta's return to the familial, away from the Janes and Alices of his past; his embrace of his "brown" sexuality may be read as the culmination of Acosta's turn to Chicanismo or Mexican American identity, and contrasts with his mistaken wish for Anglo assimilation, the Jesus Christ of the Baptist Church, and blond, blue-eyed girlfriends. While conversion is often represented as surrender

(Rambo 132-7), in Acosta's case it is his deconversion that triggers a sense of surrender.

Acosta's desire for white girls and women was an uphill battle against cultural barriers, whereas when he gives up the Baptist Church and returns to Catholicism and "brown babe[s]" (87), he submits to the comfort of familial culture and a renewed self- confidence. Like Hames-Garcia, I believe that Acosta was undermining the notion of authentic ethnicity; thus I read his switch from "white" to "brown" sexuality and religion as an emotional return to the slightly incestuous comforts of home, rather than a return to an essential or core identity.

Acosta's conversion to, then deconversion from, the Baptist Church, is a form of

"Sauling around" that troubles The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. This troubling is important because it throws new light on the potentially negative aspects of mid-century

Mexican American conversion to Protestantism, illustrates the intensely social aspect of religious conversion, and illuminates the salience, heretofore minimized, of religion in

Acosta's life. Acosta tested religion as a means to social assimilation and as a doctrine of truth, and found both wanting. Conversion failed to deliver the desired sense of belonging to the white American community, and the Bible, upon scrunity, was seen as wrong and inconsistent. Acosta's post-deconversion turn to syncretic Chicano

Catholicism in his sequel autofiction, Revolt of the Cockroach People, can be seen as a form of "Pauling around." In other words, while Acosta rejects religion as a source of 126 truth, he nonetheless continues to adhere to religion as an important cultural ingredient that binds him to his fellow Chicanos and, especially, Chicanas, instantiating religion's societal role. A politicized Mexican American Catholicism infused with Aztec deities is the node around which Acosta organizes his activities as a lover, lawyer, and leader of the Brown Buffaloes in Revolt. (As well, the Christie typology pursued in The

Autobiography is Pauline in the way that it betrays residual traces of Protestantism, since identification with Jesus is a sign of Protestant, rather than Catholic, culture.) Thus, while Acosta turned away from one religion as a source of spirituality and a means to

American assimilation, he turned to another religion as a source of societal, cultural, and ethnic power, arriving at a truth about how religion often functions in America: as identity rather than belief. Similarly, we will see in chapter 4 that Richard Rodriguez is also invested in his identity as a Catholic (even if for very different reasons than Acosta), even though his belief m the church's catechism is seriously compromised by its teaching on homosexuality: thus identity, again, trumps belief. Chapter Three - Amiri Baraka's The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Blue-Black Marxism, Authenticity, and American Puritanism

Black Brown Yellow White. These are some basic colors of my life, in my life. A kind of personal, yet fairly objective class analysis that corresponds (check it) to some real shit out in the streets in these houses and in some people's heads. [... ] And no matter where we would go and what we would get into, when we were true to ourselves, when we were actually pleasing our deepest selves, being the thing we most admired and loved, we were black (and blue). - Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 1984 (53,64)

The Puritans, like all Protestants, especially of the Calvinist variety, believed in predestination; God, they maintained, had determined in advance who was to be saved and who was to be damned. A man's fate was therefore decided before he entered the world of time, and his progress in this world either toward salvation or toward damnation was simply the unfolding of a decree made before he was born. - Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: History of a Puritan Idea, 1963 (67)

Baraka is as removed from sophisticated Marxist thought as Jerry Falwell is from Paul Tillich. Whereas Falwell adheres rather dogmatically to a crude neofundamentalist tradition of Christian thinking, Baraka adheres to an equally dogmatic, neofundamentalist Marxism. Both men are devoutly religious, but Baraka hides his faith in the language of scientific socialism. - Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, 2001 (43 3)

If Alexis de Tocqueville, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Max Weber are correct,

Puritanism—though now an historical, rather than a living religion—is nonetheless at the very fiber of American culture. Tocqueville famously prophesied "the whole destiny of America [is] contained in the first Puritan who landed on these shores" (qtd. in

Bercovitch 19). Bercovitch argues that the literature and language of America, from the

1630s onward, has been haunted by the form and content of the American jeremiad, or political sermon—a rhetorical form of condemnation and exultation central to Puritan leaders. In the first chapter of The American Jeremiad, he captures the breadth of the belief that Puritanism informs Americanism: he cites not only Tocqueville, but Adam 128

Smith, Friedrich Engels, economists Douglass North and Robert Thomas, philosopher

Ralph Barton Perry, and historian Robert E. Brown as all contributing to the links between Puritanism and American religious, economic, social, and political culture.

Weber shows that American patterns of work and saving have been moulded first by

Puritan, then Protestant harnessing of religious energy into economic activity. Moreover,

Puritanism has continued to inform the tenor of American thought and culture throughout the twentieth century: from American exceptionalism (errand into the wilderness) to the narrative of the American dream (success comes to the morally fit).

Thus Puritanism is understood as a lingering force in American life: exceptionalism, opportunity, authenticity, and work as a calling are just a few of the characteristics of that infusing idea. Richard Rodriguez, for example, conceptualizes America as oscillating between two poles: the authentic (Puritan-Protestant) and the inauthentic

(Catholic). I will argue, in this chapter, that Amiri Baraka's 1984 The Autobiography of

LeRoi Jones1 instantiates another—but this time perhaps counterintuitive—by-product of American Puritanism: that of the Marxist blue-black elect. This claim inaugurates a new and important way of reading this overlooked and undertheorized autobiography to spotlight the significance of religion and conversion underlying Baraka's ostensibly

Marxist narrative stance.

Baraka conceptualizes Marxism, to which he turned in 1974 after experimenting with various religions and forms of cultural nationalism, as a colour hierarchy that views blue-blackness as essential to the "authentic" proletariat. A three-way tension between

Marxism, race, and religion develops throughout the narrative. While he characterizes religion as "the old sickness" (458), and links "yellow" Christianity with the bourgeoisie, Baraka describes blue-black Christianity with approbration, presumably 129 because it is the real thing, to be contrasted with white/yellow/bourgeois ersatz

Christianity. He deploys religious language and symbolism throughout the narrative, even while he—as a "scientific socialist"—denigrates religion as simply an element of the superstructure designed to keep the bourgeoisie in power. Echoes of Calvinist predestination in the celebration of only certain African Americans as the Marxist elect, and a persistent religiosity that ties Baraka's hometown Newark to its Puritan founders and to a "New Ark," form a homology in the text between Puritanism, black nationalism, and Marxism. Baraka's memoir reveals not only the trouble with (Marxist) conversion, but also a persistent "Pauling around" that demonstrates his inability to progress beyond "the old sickness of religion" and elitist racial essentialism. Again, as with Malcolm X and Acosta, conversion for Baraka (both religious and non-religious) is compelled primarily by social forces and requirements.

Although much has been written about Baraka as poet, playwright, and novelist, response to Baraka the autobiographer has been thin. From the dearth of commentary on

The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones, one might assume that the book was unremarkable, forgettable, unproblematic, or perhaps simply a transparent historical document. And yet it is none of these things: the Autobiography is a circuitous journey charting Baraka's personal, artistic, political, and religious development, voiced in a jazzy, poetic tone.

Craig Werner's "On the Ends of Afro-American 'Modernist' Autobiography" (1990) is perhaps the sole article that deals with the autobiography as a distinct work, and then only as one among three life narratives (along with Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from

Part One and Samuel Delany's Motion of Light on Water). Jerry Gafio Watts' otherwise fine biography does not treat The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones as a discrete, creative text in Baraka's oeuvre. While he sometimes regards the autobiography 130 critically, at other times Watts seems to rely on it merely as a supplemental source for facts and the representation of reality. This is, of course, a problem that frequently crops up in the field of auto/biography: the biographer makes use of the subject's autobiography or memoir as if it were simply a straightforward historical document, and not the mixed genre, often semi-fictional, text that it usually is (see Valerie Boyd's biography of Zora Neale Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, for another example of this tendency). My hope is that my work here on Baraka's autobiography will initiate more critical interest in this very rich text, a text that has heretofore been used mostly in terms of historical documentation.

I organize my discussion around two related problems in Baraka's autobiography, problems that—once unravelled—lead to my conclusions about the homology between Baraka-style Marxism and Puritan election. The first problem is the way that religion is treated in the text. Baraka's conversion to Marxism caps a series of smaller conversions to movements, traditions, and religions. Baraka thus appears to be a dilettante, switching rapidly from one epiphany to the next. Although change and growth are characteristic of human development, Baraka's changes are often dramatic and hostile to earlier changes: for example, he denounces his first marriage to a white woman; he follows the Yoruba tradition of polygamy, and then severely criticizes that practice as sexist. By the time readers learn about Baraka's final conversion at the close of the autobiography, a degree of skepticism has been generated about his pattern of serial conversion, and thus doubt is thrown on scientific socialism as his final solution to

African American oppression. Furthermore, all of Baraka's changes highlight the social circumstances of conversion against the Augustinian model of personal revelation. 131

The second problem in Baraka's autobiography is a variation on an ideological conundrum that runs through Marxist thought: that of reconciling Marxism with authentic identity. (The flip side of this problem is Marxism's universalist narrative that ignores or obfuscates identity [race and gender] difference.) This problem in Marxist writing ranges from Mao's celebration of the rural peasant to Richard Hoggart's valorization of the real British working class: as certain aspects of being poor are romanticized as positive portions of identity, identity comes to obfuscate class, and the revolution becomes not only irrelevant, but undesirable, because it will erase class difference, the very thing that keeps these "authentic" identities alive. If such workers are alienated from their work, the fulfillment they derive through their "authentic" working class or rural peasant culture makes up for it. Thus, a basic contradiction emerges: Marxists sometimes become more fixated on identity than on historical change or revolution.

Baraka's treatment of Marxism in terms of racial identity, rather than in terms of a universal economic system, complicates this problem of authenticity, because he introduces race as a necessary component of authenticity. Newark's blue-blacks are the true proles, and it is poverty—in part—that creates the black proletariat's genuine culture, their hipness, and their predeliction for the blues (an essential component of that culture). Members of the black working class, far from being alienated, are actually the most psychologically sound African Americans, in touch with their creativity and their feelings. This problem comes as no surprise: throughout the autobiography, Baraka sees his life in terms of "blackness" and the authenticity of that blackness. Baraka has a long pattern of conflating authentic blackness with poverty; more than twenty years prior to the Autobiography, Baraka (then Jones) "confuse[d] his readers because he repeatedly 132 employ [ed] race language to describe class issues" in his music reviews of the early

1960s and Blues People (1963) (Watts 116). Watts describes the dilemma in Baraka's early music writing that I also see as a problem in his autobiography—that those most authentically black will lose their authenticity and distinctiveness if they advance economically; poverty is treated mistakenly as an "ethnic black trait" (Watts 123). While

African American socialists have shaped their political beliefs to respond to the interrelatedness of race and class in African America, and there is a long history of black

Marxism (Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, African forms of socialism),

Baraka's response has been continually to conflate race and class, to posit poverty as a positive racial trait, and to continue to see African America as a black "nation," even though that concept has been shown as unviable.2 This problem in the autobiography forms the basis for my reading of Baraka as neo-Puritan; he makes essence more significant than existence, and thus what one is is more important than what one does.

Ergo, historical change (revolution) is not a focus in Baraka's text because it would erase these class divisions that preserve the sanctity of the black working class. Thus, I see a parallel between the importance of essence in Puritanism (the elect are predestined) and in Baraka's cultural politics (the working class are blue blacks).

While this link between Puritanism and Marxism may seem at odds with

Marxism as a post-atheist economic system, it contains a certain Barakian logic. Watts sees Baraka as a reductionist, ahistorical Marxist. Thus, my own portrait of Baraka as a neo-Puritan, black essentialist Marxist builds from and complements Watts' view. Watts also sees Baraka as a master of self-deception, which agrees with my own sense that

Baraka is not aware of how his "fairly objective class analysis" (53) in the autobiography resembles a Puritan division between the elect and the damned; indeed, 133 he is unaware of how deeply reactionary and religious is his program for black emancipation.

Baraka as Serial Convert

I turn now to the first problem in Baraka's text: that of serial conversion and the skepticism such constant transformations engenders. The theme of religion in Baraka's autobiography is a trajectory culminating in his "conversion" to Marxism in 1974. He moves from childhood Christianity (Baptist Church), to Buddhism, to quasi-religious

Yoruba traditions, to Nation of Islam, to Sunni Islam, to Kawaida, and finally to

Marxism. The Baptist Church he attended was a "yalla" church (his maternal grandfather "was president of the Sunday School at the yellow and brown folks'

Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee" [18-19]), and his attitude toward it is marbled with contradictory feelings. An early play, "The Baptism" (first performed 1964; published 1966),4 explores the hypocrisy of the "yalla" church (distinct from the black church, which has his approval), and his autobiography confirms his strong criticism of what he perceived as a middle-class institution that did not accommodate the real spiritual needs of black people.

Like Malcolm X and Oscar Acosta, Baraka saw (Protestant) Christianity as

"white," and for the most part inappropriate for African Americans. At the same time, he admires black urban storefront churches in Newark because they represent an element of black working-class culture, which is beyond criticism. (I will describe Baraka's colour- class coding later in this chapter; for the time being, suffice it to say that African

Americans are coded from the most authentic [blue-black] to middling [brown] to ersatz

[yellow]. These colours correspond to class from the proletariat to two shades of the petty bourgeoisie. There is some slippage in terminology in the text between bourgeois and petty bourgeois and between brown and yellow; one gleans the overall sense that for

Baraka, yellow and brown are merely different shades of the petty bourgeoisie, with brown closer to black and yellow closer to white.) Yellow-white Christianity, Baraka believes, can be summed up with Pascal's wager: it is based on a cold rationality that says we had better believe in case there is a God.5 But "the passion of the black church,"

Baraka writes, "is very different!" (58). Again, black working-class culture is imbued with passion and feeling. Even though its churches are "dreams housed in despair" (58), they are nonetheless celebrated as manifestations of genuine folk culture.

Baraka's impatience with Christianity, "yalla Jesus," and the middle-class segment of the black population grows textually, as he develops his narrative from the first few chapters ("Young," "Black Brown Yellow White," and "Music") where references to yellowness are mixed with the affections of youth, to his experiences at

Howard University in the early to mid-1950s. By the end of Baraka's experience at

Howard, he has realized that the black university was another form of the "yalla" church:

We were not taught to think but readied for superdomestic service.

(Super to who?) The school was an employment agency at best, at worst

a kind of church. Hypnosis was employed. Old cult practices.

Collective individualism. A church of class and caste conceit. Church

of the the yalla jeeeesus. And so we worshiped there and loved it. (134)

Howard University is the "great launching pad of the flight to this God's heaven" and a way for yellow, bourgeois blacks to train for "pretended progress by the 'colored' few"

(134). In his later descriptions of his experience in the air force or "error farce," he uses similar language to describe the charade of middle-class black (brown) aspirations to 135 yellowness: "the air force had formally ended the great shot-from-cannons stunt of brown folk myth where they are blasted through the plastic tarpaulin of their obvious limitations out at the yalla sun of Jesus' smile" (179-80). Religious metaphor is reiterated in Baraka's text. Even when its presumed purpose is to maintain an attack on bourgeois Christianity that cheats African Americans of finding their true selves, it comes across finally as a persistent "Pauling around" on Baraka's part, because it indicates his inability to escape religious thinking, language, and patterns.

After being discharged "undesirably" from the air force for possessing leftist literature (176-7), Baraka moved to the Village in New York City. He describes working in a bookstore (getting turned on by the moderns) and his attraction to Zen Buddhism.

When he decided to put out a poetry magazine, the title he chose was Zazen, which means sitting meditation in Japanese, and is key to the practice of Zen Buddhism.

Baraka's interest in this Eastern religion, however, was superficial and fairly short lived, partly because it represented a "whitening influence": "this circle of [Steve] Korret's and indeed his influence, to a certain extent, was merely a continuation of the other

'whitening' influences I had been submitting to enthusiastically under the guise of information, education" (187) (While Steve Korret is African American, he has many white friends and is interested in "white" art and philosophy.) Baraka's fascination with

Buddhism is largely cerebral; he does not connect with it the same way he will to black religions such as Kawaida and Islam. Finally, Buddhism is too passive for the dynamic

Baraka ("I was not nonviolent" [237]). He was soon investigating the spiritual possibilities of Islam, Kawaida, and African culture.

Baraka describes the diversity of religious flavours of cultural nationalism swirling around him during his Black Arts year in Harlem (1965): "There were the 136 cultural nationalists like the Nation of Islam, the Yoruba Temple, and even smaller cults and the orthodox or Sunni Muslims, who also had many variations, and the black Jews or Hebrews, the Egyptian Coptics, and various other 'consciousness-raising' religious cults and sects" (317). Black nationalism is frequently articulated through religion or other cultural components; the prime example of religion as a conduit for black nationalism is of course the Nation of Islam. Baraka was keenly aware that black culture

(religion, art, philosophy, dress) provided an attractive base for political movements to a people who had fallen into what Suzan-Lori Parks terms "the Great Hole of History"6 as a result of the cultural and historical aporia created by slavery. While Baraka was interested in the Nation of Islam, mostly because of his great admiration for Malcolm X,

Watts writes that Baraka "never seriously considered joining the organization [Nation of

Islam]" because it meant "relinquishing control of his creativity to the dictates of the

Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Baraka wanted to be a Malcolm X type of leader, and there was no room for such a figure in the Nation of Islam" (251).

Baraka saw the Nation as no longer viable after the death of Malcolm. As well, he saw other followers of the Nation as ineffectual and even ridiculous. For example, he describes one acquaintance as a follower only in superficialities: "his commitment to the

Nation seemed to be the carrying of a Qur'an and the wearing of the funny little suits and bow ties popularized by the Nation, plus carrying a briefcase and standing sluefooted ('45 degrees') the way he thought a good Muslim should" (312). Another acquaintance, Tong Hackensack, shared space in the Black Arts building, and kept

"initiating little bullshit Islamic-related 'rules' for his office" (304). Baraka describes how he and others would rush around trying to get work done while Tong and his

Muslim cronies would sit back "in tilted chairs, a red tarboosh on the desk, upon which 137 not one speck of any productive labor crossed" (304). Baraka writes that the only tangible results of Tong-styled Islam were "negative" ones (312). He thus did not pursue the Nation of Islam to the same degree as he did Sunni Islam (which Malcolm X had switched to after his betrayal by Elijah Muhammad), and two Pan-African quasi- religious movements, the Yoruba Temple, and Kawaida.

The late 1960s "was a moment of general spiritual inquisitiveness" for Baraka

(Watts 310). In a 1968 interview with Austin Clarke, he claimed that religion is "the most admirable attempt man makes to shape his life" {Conversations 36). Baraka became interested in Yoruba cultural nationalism, citing "a sincere belief in the need to go back to my roots" (Autobiography 341). Followers of the Yoruba Temple dressed in the traditional clothing of Nigeria, and believed in "black self-determination" (312). The

Yoruba leader, Baba Oserjeman, encouraged the practice of polygamy, which he called an "ancient custom of our people" (313). In an amusing paragraph, Baraka describes the multiple image switches that Oserjeman—a "con man/hustler"—had undergone over the years: from a poser with an English accent and wearing jodhpurs, named Francis King, to Francisco Rey, a Spaniard, then Serj Khingh, "a little Indian," and finally to his

African identities, Nana Oserjeman of the Damballah Qwedo and Baba Oserjeman

"chief priest of the Yoruba Temple" (312). Baraka seems unaware that he too might be viewed, like Oserjeman and the character Rinehart in Ellison's Invisible Man, as a consummate charlatan who transforms his identity with regularity. Baraka admits, finally, that his attraction for the Yoruba temple was largely an attraction to its practice of polygamy, which paved the way for relationships with multiple women.

His relationship with a young Yoruba follower, Bumi, ends with her sudden death, which Baraka describes as tragic, yet it clears the way for Baraka to pursue a 138 monogamous relationship with Sylvia Robinson (later renamed Amina). Baraka and

Robinson were married in a Yoruba ceremony in August 1967 by Oserjeman (378).

Baraka describes his contact with the Yoruba temple largely as a vehicle for sexual experimentation and only marginally as a political and religious engagement. This echoes Acosta's use of Protestantism as an attempt to gain acceptance from white girls, again highlighting the salience of sociality in religious conversion.

Around the time of the Newark rebellion (summer of 1967), Baraka met Kamiel

Wadud and Hajj Heesham Jaaber, both Sunni Muslims who would influence Baraka significantly. Jaaber was the Islamic priest who had buried Malcolm X (376) and would give LeRoi Jones his new name, Ameer Barakat (The Blessed Prince in Arabic), which

Baraka later "Swahiliz[ed]" to Amiri Baraka under Karenga's Africanizing influence

(376). Naming has been an integral reclamation of self for African Americans since slavery times; freed or escaped slaves would choose their own names to replace ones given them by slave masters. This same transformation through naming was accomplished in Nation of Islam by assigning an X as a placeholder, signifying the

African American's unknown, original African name, as mentioned in chapter 2. Other black writers use the trope of self-naming as conversion to an autonomous self, a self no longer controlled by white others. While for Baraka, the point of the new name is transformation into "a blacker being," he notes ironically that he was merely trading his

American slave name for an Arab slave name (376).

When Baraka moved to Newark, he rented an old house on Stirling Street, called it "Spirit House," and fixed it up to become Newark's informal centre for black art and culture. After his initiation into Sunni Islam, Spirit House became for a time a "Jamat, or gathering place for the faithful," offering "religious instruction" and classes in Arabic 139

(377). While Baraka writes about how Kamiel and Heesham tried to convince him to become a Muslim, he never admits in the autobiography to officially turning to Islam or taking Shahada, a public declaration of one's faith. In two separate 1968 interviews, however, Baraka is quoted as saying, respectively, that he was "an Orthodox Sunni

Muslim" and "a Muslim soothsayer" {Conversations 37, 57). The silence in the autobiography, then, is perhaps another example of Marxist revisionism, the later Baraka hedging the degree of his involvement in religion. He writes of the consolation that

Islam provided when he was convicted and jailed for weapons possession after the

Newark rebellion:

I made a prayer rug out of newspaper and made regular Salat while I was

there and it gave me great comfort. It is easy to see why someone in

prison could cling to Islam. The sense of being supported by a higher

power than the one that is downing you. It is the appeal of all religions—

one is "protected" by a higher power. But not quite enough. (381)

The "not quite enough" comment is instructive because it shows Baraka's ambivalence about the notion of a "higher power," which both appeals to him and yet seems deficient.

At the end of the autobiography, Baraka will claim that socialism is enough because it is a system that addresses the root of the problem (why the jail population is 75 percent black and Latino [382]), rather than simply providing a palliative for those men and women in the prison system.

In the autobiography, Baraka briefly mentions some of the "mystical" ideas that

Kamiel had: "He interspersed Masonic lore with Islam and never ceased telling me that

Masons aspired to be Muslims, that that was the European's way into Al Islam. And that at the 33rd degree of the Masons, the secret or code word was Allahu Akbar (Allah is the 140

Breatestir (377). In a 1968 interview Baraka rspeats §ome ofthis lore that he appropriated from Kamiel: "If you look at the most powerful Masons and Shriners, you will see they are wearing tarbooshes and fezzes on their heads. They understand the scientific utilization of religion and they know how it keeps them in power. The highest- degreed masons make salats [....] They are actually aspiring to be Muslims!"

{Conversations 37-38). But by the time Baraka wrote the autobiography, in the early

1980s, he had divorced himself from the "weird" (Watts 311) ideas expressed in the interview, and projected those ideas solely on Kamiel. The result is that in the autobiography, Baraka paints himself as merely a dabbler in Sunni Islam; just as he does not declare the extent to which he was deified during his Kawaida phase, here he does not let on to what degree he was actually influenced by Kamiel and Heesham.

As he began to get deeper into Karenga-style cultural nationalism, Baraka moved proportionately away from Sunni Islam, which "clashed" with Kawaida's Pan-

Africanism. The Sunnis, Baraka writes, "were not very advanced politically. They said that blacks were really 'Arabs,' that the true Arab was black" but at the same time they were "very derogatory about Africa and things African" (383). The irony, of course, is that neither Karenga nor Bararka were "advanced politically": Karenga's unsophisticated Manichaean attitude—blacks good; whites bad—doomed Kawaida, while Baraka's ahistorical Marxism is interested more in authenticity than change.

In late 1967, Baraka met Maulana Karenga (then Ron Karenga), a charismatic

"paraintellectual" (Watts 312) and son of a Baptist preacher. Watts characterizes

Karenga as "a secular priest who tried to sell black folks a false, other-worldly blackness and ersatz Africanisms" (319). Karenga was largely discredited after being charged with torturing two female members of Kawaida {Autobiography 416; Watts 321). As well, 141

Karenga and some of his followers were later implicated as FBI informants, used by that organization to help bring down the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s

(Watts 318-21). But Karenga and his Kawaida doctrine influenced Baraka deeply, and he was comfortable enough for a time with Kawaida doctrine to embody and preach it to others as the "Imamu" (meaning ruler or leader in Arabic).

Kawaida, as established in the mid-1960s, was also called US (Watts speculates it means either United Slaves but more probably "us" as in "us against them" [312]), and consisted of wearing West African clothes (as with the Yoruba Temple) and following

Karenga's doctrine, called "the Nguzo Saba," or seven principles, which were to be memorized (perhaps following Islam's requirement that the Qu'ran be memorized). As mentioned earlier, black nationalism has historically been offered through the vehicle of cultural nationalism, and Karenga's Kawaida was no exception. Watts believed that much of Karenga's appeal was that he saw that black people needed to feel a sense of cultural authenticity, thus he produced a whole range of cultural commodities—"geles,

Kente cloth, dashikis, Afro hairstyles, African jewelry"—as well as holidays and precepts, to sell African Americans on his elaborate system (315). Baraka is much more forgiving, seeing the wisdom of Karenga's "work with culture" as a way of winning the hearts and minds of African Americans (356), and considering the doctrine to possess

"depth and profundity" (356-7). Moreover, Baraka admits to finding Karenga's discipline (bordering on military) extremely appealing, as other religious and cultural organizations he had encountered previously were disorganized and "random" (357).

Again, it is significant that the stimuli for Baraka's conversion to these various religions are a far cry from the otherworldly voices of children heard by Augustine in the 142

Confessions', religious conversion in Baraka's text (as in Malcolm and Acosta's autobiographies) is largely the product of cultural and political exigencies.

Baraka wrote a pamphlet outlining the seven principles—"7 Principles of US

Maulana Karenga & The Need for a Black Value System"—later reprinted in Raise

Race Rays Raze. It is instructive to look at a portion of Baraka's commentary on the seven principles, in order to contrast his admiration for Karenga's ideas in the late 1960s with his more skeptical view of Karenga in 1984. For example, in the pamphlet, Baraka lists the principles, all with Swahili names for things like "Self-Determination,"

"Purpose," and "Faith," then comments parenthetically,

(The 7 principles are 7 because the number is a meaning-symbol for

this world. As a throw of dice it speaks of spiritual concepts and

scientific principles. It is because of this that the seventh day was

the culmination, as a period of devotion and meditation, for the 6 days

of divine work. Sun-Day. So Maulana speaks of spiritual concepts

& scientific principles embodied as a morality system—complete in

itself, as a contemporary Black philosophy old as the sun.) (Raise 134)

Here, Baraka's old thirst for a "scientific" religion is revealed; in a 1968 interview

Baraka is quoted as saying that, at its highest level, "religion and science are actually the same" (Conversations 52). And yet Baraka's categorization of Karenga's system as

"scientific" because the seventh day is a day of rest after six days of divine work distorts the definition of science. Baraka's devotion to what he calls "scientific socialism," which he opposes with "Utopian" socialism (440), ignores the contemporary view of most economists that Marxism is not scientific, and as well assumes a tension between 143 science and Utopia in socialism that does not exist (i.e. for Marxists, scientific understanding gets us closer to Utopia).7

Baraka's involvement with Kawaida in the late 1960s and early 1970s was intertwined with his participation in the umbrella black nationalist Kawaidan organization, Congress of African Peoples (CAP), of which he became chairman in

1972. As well, he became interested in Pan-Africanism and African socialism, and was influenced by the theories of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, and

Amilcar Cabral (Watts 421). Baraka became convinced, especially after the debacle of helping to elect Ken Gibson, an ineffectual black mayor of Newark, that class must supersede race. Thus, he decided that socialism "was the direction our people had to seek" (440), even though "squar[ing] Marxism with cultural nationalism" (439) was a challenge. One of those challenges would be to convince others in CAP that it was alright to read the work of white men, such as Marx and Engels (437); his conundrum points back to the idea—noted in my introduction—that ethnicity frames conversion. In this case, Baraka's move to Marxism is obstructed by the race problem; while it is acceptable for him to read works by Cabral (black) and even Mao (Chinese), it is suspect to read and believe works written by Caucasians.

He describes his final conversion to socialism as a public event that took place on his fortieth birthday: "At our CAP general assembly in Newark, on my birthday,

October 7, [1974] we declared ourselves a Marxist-Leninist organization. [... ] I was a socialist, at least in name" (444). He reiterates this information on the next page:

"October 7,1974 [was the] date of our public notice to the world of our socialism"

(445). The religious significance of Baraka's date of conversion is only alluded to in his

1997 introduction, when he mentions that Amina and CAP had encouraged a personality cult around "Imamu Baraka," including celebration of his birthday as a high holy day.

This deification of Baraka as a minor god during his years as CAP chairman is not elaborated on in The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones, but Watts describes it in the biography:

A 1972 CAP position paper, "The Beginning of National Movement," describes

Baraka as an "innovative sage and guiding light of the new nationalism,

Kawaida, whose profound words of magnificence turn immediately into deeds of

divine significance." Deeds of divine significance? By the early 1970s, a

photograph of Baraka was placed on the cover of all CAP publications. As if

plastering his photograph on everything was not sufficient to sustain his cult of

personality, beginning in the early 1970s, Newark CAP celebrated Baraka's

birthday in a manner fit for a divine presence. This celebration was announced in

a 1973 edition of the organization's newspaper, Black New Ark. "Leo Baraka,

October 7 is the Birth Date of our leader and teacher of Revolutionary Afrikan

Nationalism, Imamu Amiri Baraka. We advocate this day as our HIGH HOLY

DAY." (370)

In other words, the choice of Baraka's birthday as his day of conversion to socialism is not coincidence: it fits with his pattern of endowing his political and life changes with religious and mystical significance. Just one year prior to his public conversion to socialism, Baraka was being celebrated as a god.

Marxism and Communism have long been thought of as paralleling religion in terms of dogma, patterns of conversion, hierarchy, and apostasy: for example, Czeslaw

Milosz's The Captive Mind (1953) and Richard Crossman and Arthur Koestler's The

God that Failed (1949)} Lynn Higgins writes that the pattern of the conversion 145 narrative, where all that is experienced before the conversion is meant to prepare the convert, "is no less true of Marxists than it is of born again Christians" (420), and both

Watts and Karenga consider Baraka's turn to Marxism as a quasi-religious conversion.

Watts frames Baraka's turn to Marxism as a conversion or "born again" experience

(423-4), while Karenga describes it as a "Hofferian" conversion, a term he derives from

Eric Hoffer's classic psychological portrait of fanatical converts, The True Believer

(1951).9 Hoffer saw a similarity between fanatical believers belonging to mass movements: they are often frustrated individuals, thwarted in their ambitions, and are frequently outside the mainstream of society. These "true believers" are dissatisfied with the past and have illusory hopes for a great future; they form collectives in the hopes of fomenting change. Hoffer thus sees a "family" likeness in very different movements:

"Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical

Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one"

(xiii, xi). Karenga sees Baraka's serial conversions as agreeing with Hoffer's model:

It is [his] Hofferian conversion with its religious compulsion to denounce,

distort, and deny that defines Baraka's criticism and the problems he has

caused himself and the Movement. The rapidity of religious conversions

deny [sic] the requirements of regular development and make sincerity

suspect. Moreover, having seen the burning bush, the tendency is to rush

to convert the world without appropriate consideration for time and

struggle. Such was the case of the conversion by fiat of the Congress of

the African Peoples, and the unwillingness to work through the

quantitative steps that lead to a qualitative leap in consciousness and practice. [... ] In conclusion then, it can be said that Baraka's tragedy is

not his transformation, but the toll it is taking on the Movement as a

result of the counterproductive form it has assumed—the needless

denunciations, distortions, and denials, the bridges burned, the boats sunk

now that he has crossed Jordan into the illusive promised land. (141-2)

Baraka himself was aware that his detractors might see his move to Marxism as simply another in a series of performances or illusions; thus, he writes defensively in his final chapter, "those who think that 'Baraka the Marxist' is just the title of a new play, the latest of the lad's interesting gambols, they must admit to movement" (462). Baraka's loose employment of the conversion narrative to detail his turn to Marxism in 1974 might seem ordinary: he is merely working within the established conventions of ethnic autobiography and Marxist "conversion," and yet there is no inevitability that life writing about Marxism be expressed using religious tropes. On the contrary: Marx viewed all religion as antithetical to socialism. Denys Turner writes that Marx and

Engels believed that "insofar as Christianity is true to itself as religious, it must be alienating politically, and insofar as it engages genuinely with the revolutionary critical program of socialism, it must cease to be genuinely religious" (329). Thus, while

Baraka's semi-religious treatment of Marxism is consonant with his pattern of serial conversion, it muddies his Marxist program and strikes a dissonant chord in the text.

One example of a Communist autobiography that eschews religion and thus accords with Marx and Engels' belief, just cited, about the incompatibility of religion and politics, is Angela Davis' 1974 memoir, Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Her autobiography, which she writes without recourse to a ritual "conversion" or religious metaphor, can serve as contrast to Baraka's, because while both of these African American leaders turned to Communism/Marxism, they describe these turns in different ways. Davis does not organize her autobiography around a grand conversion to

Communism. Her one concession to religious metaphor occurs when she describes reading Marx's The Communist Manifesto fairly early in her narrative, and creates the image of cataracts being cut from her eyes, perhaps an arms-length allusion to Paul's scales falling:

Like an expert surgeon, this document cut away cataracts from my eyes.

The eyes heavy with hatred on Dynamite Hill; the roar of explosives, the

fear, the hidden guns, the weeping Black woman at our door, the children

without lunches, the schoolyard bloodshed, the social games of the Black

middle class [... ] the back of the bus, police searches—it all fell into

place. (110)

But while Davis hints at conversion (cataracts cut from her eyes) in her paradigm shift, the book as a whole steers clear of religious language and the form of the conversion narrative, unlike Baraka's, which revels in religious imagery.10

Baraka claims a substantive move away from cultural nationalism and varieties of religion as forms of that nationalism when he turns to Marxism. Near the end of his autobiography, he denigrates religion, alluding to Marx's famous claim in Toward a

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that religion "is the opium of the people" {Essential 46):

The still useless fantasists holding religious ceremonies in which black

people's freedom is the drug of the set, for the ooooooo's and aaaaaaa's

and jumping and twisting, with the same collection and the same ruthless

preacher and his pitiful tastes. I was a novice in search of blackness still and settled for a

cultural/religious fiction that covered the reality of what we did, the real

achievements, the actual accomplishments. (461)

Yet Watts argues, and I agree, that Baraka's turn from black nationalism to socialism, rather than a genuine political transformation, was merely another superficial shift in his pattern of ritual conversion. Athough Baraka switches from nationalism to socialism in

1974, Watts claims that he was "still wedded to the power of rhetoric and spectacles," as the ceremonial conversion to socialism on his fortieth birthday seems to demonstrate.

Watts continues: "His politics had changed, and yet they remained the same" (400), echoing Baraka's famous line about the "changing same" of African American culture.

Baraka's serial conversions have been in response to his changing sense of social needs and contexts. In other words, there is no substantive change from fragmented to whole identity as might be expected in religious conversion; rather, Baraka remains the same but shifts his allegiances—under the guise of conversion—to the changing social and political context. Thus it makes sense that even while Baraka argues that his new socialism resulted from the realization that race does not guarantee a shared vision—"I knew clearly that just black faces in high places could never bring the change we seek"

(443)—he transposes his romantic, essentialist values about blackness from his nationalist days into his new life as a socialist, categorizing African Americans as blue- black, black, brown, and yellow.

Baraka's Neo-Puritanism

Baraka's way of slotting blacks and yellows into predestined categories, to be discussed in the next section, bears a disturbing resemblance to the American Puritan division of God's elect and the damned. My claim that Baraka is a neo-Puritan requires 149 both some background and some unpacking. The linking of two seemingly antithetical texts (the autobiography of a black radical Marxist and the early American Puritan conversion narrative) may seem surprising, and yet has some precedent. Richard

Rodriguez sees another radical African American, Malcolm X, as an American Puritan.

Malcolm's adherence to the neo-Puritan doctrines of the Nation of Islam (including their emphasis on capitalist enterprises and economic self-sufficiency) links him logically to both Puritanism and Ben Franklin. Rodriguez makes these associations in Brown:

"Malcolm X, an American puritan, discouraged African-American adolescents from hair straighteners and skin lighteners" (49); and, "[h]is voice was high, nasal, a scold's voice.

A hickory stick. But for all his thin stricture, there was something generous about this man, something of Benjamin Franklin—his call to brothers to better themselves" (16).

While Rodriguez does not make the relationship between Franklin and the Puritans explicit, in chapter 2 of The Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber saw Franklin as embodying a secular version of Puritan values, thus making sense of the three-way relationship between Malcolm, Puritanism, and Ben Franklin.

If it seems counterintuitive to join Baraka's Marxism with Puritanism, a religion which has been famously cited by Max Weber as inciting the spirit of capitalism through a work ethic where religious energy is sublimated into money-making, Rodriguez's

Puritan comment locates a truth. The Puritan manner of organizing church members by exclusion (the elect versus the damned) is replicated in racial organization in the Nation of Islam, in black cultural movements such as the Black Arts Movement (in which

Baraka was a prime mover), and in black nationalist organizations such as Kawaida, which Baraka belonged to prior to his turn to Marxism in 1974. This separatism stems from a desire for purity and attempts to exclude the hybrid, the mixed, the charlatan, and the inauthentic. Moreover, Baraka extended those notions of purity into his hierarchical class (Marxist) and colour organization in the autobiography, and located the purest of the pure blue black in one of the centres of Puritan history, Newark (or New Ark), New

Jersey. Like the elect and preterite of American Puritanism, Baraka's blue blacks, blacks, browns, and yellows are assigned their lot at birth, with little, if any, possibility for movement.

Eddie Glaude, Jr. explains that African Americans use Puritan ideology not because it is embedded in American culture (as per Sacvan Bercovitch, Alexis de

Tocqueville, and Max Weber), but rather to oppose and reclaim the foundational metaphors of flight and founding. The Puritan idea of exodus to a New Israel is appropriate only for white Americans: "We are indeed the new Israelites. America is the

New Canaan. That is, unless you're black" (32). Glaude argues that for African

Americans, "the image of America as the New Canaan was reversed. America was

Egypt. [...] This appropriation of the Exodus story aided in African American articulations of their own sense of peoplehood, and also stood as a form of critique of

American society for betraying its ideals" (33).11 Baraka's use of "New Ark" as Puritan revision can be seen as part of this reclamation.

Toni Morrison also appropriates Puritan ideology to establish a link between

African American communities and American Puritanism in her novel Paradise (1997).

Judith Wilt reads Paradise as Morrison's reclamation of the Puritan American narrative of the city upon a hill by African Americans, though she does not read it as precisely oppositional, as per Glaude's thesis. Rather, Wilt considers that Morrison is here representing the indivisible interpenetration of black and white culture, history, and ideology, as Morrison earlier theorized in Playing in the Dark: 151

The work of Toni Morrison is an effort to reclaim, and impart to the

official American idea, the African and African-American story. Her

novels situate themselves steadfastly in "black history"; they are in and of

the communities at the margin of the official American story. But in

every important sense they recognize the one American world whose

many communities go deeply to each other's making, and to the

American definition. In [... ] Paradise, the early American "Puritan"

trajectories of purity and adultery, foundings and flights, are seen

interpellated in, enforced on, enigmatically repeated in, the African-

American story, with its own triumphant and yet cautionary tale of a city

upon a hill. (273-4)

In Paradise, Morrison's fictional exclusionary black community in twentieth-century

Oklahoma (first named New Haven, then Ruby) shares many similarities with early

Puritan communities in New England and with Baraka's prized blue-black New Arkians.

The town's self-appointed genealogist, Patricia Best, calls the founding nine families

"eight-rock" from "a deep deep level in the coal mines," and describes them as "[b]lue- black people" (193), echoing Baraka's terminology. The tragedy (or "cautionary tale") in Morrison's novel is that puritan exceptionalism forces all those who don't fit—the marginal, the immoral, the wounded, the not-black-enough—into the nearby Convent, which is the setting for the scene of carnage that opens the novel. While the scene is gendered (the pure men of Ruby exterminate the abject women of the Convent), it is the religious implications that relate to my discussion of Baraka. If Morrison's novel is "an unsparing critique of the dangers of the Puritan myth of the Exodus" (Wilt 275),

Baraka's autobiography is an unintentional illustration of the dangers of the Puritan 152 myth of predestination. While Baraka's "New Ark" trope may be a defiant taking back of Puritan ideology, the resemblance of his colour-class divisions to the Puritan division of saved-damned is likely not something he intended. Thus, we might read it as an unfortunate product of Puritan legacy, just as the Nation of Islam's division of blacks and white devils might be read as the unexpected product of this exclusionary ideology.

While the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (you are either one of the elect or one of the damned) was central to early (seventeenth-century) American Puritanism, it is important to point out that it was softened by the doctrine of preparation, in which believers were encouraged to do the "spade-work" (Delbanco 49) necessary to make themselves ready for God's uncoerced "covenant of grace." There was nothing a person could do to change the fact of his or her election; however, there were ways that the elect could discover their election, through obedience, faith, and good behaviour. The

Puritan doctrine of preparation, however, was always on guard against Arminianism, the belief that man could somehow affect God's "covenant of grace." Yet Puritans were equally wary of Antinomianism (meaning, literally, against the law), the belief that sanctification was no evidence of justification and that there is no correspondence between a person's actions in this world and his status in the next (Morgan, Puritan

138). Thus, early Puritans were warily perched between the possibility of seeming to try to press for a covenant of works, instead of grace (doing good deeds to show justification) and seeming to believe that behaviour had nothing to do with one's elect or non-elect status.

Arminianism takes its name from Dutch theologian James Arminius (1560-

1609), who broke with Calvinism on the subject of predestination because he believed in the possibility of free will and salvation for all. Both John Cotton and Jonathan Edwards 153 preached against a growing Arminianism in Puritanism, and Arminianism was to strongly inform John Wesley's Methodism that formed in the early 1700s.

Antinomianism, on the other hand, was believed in its extreme form to justify lawlessness and immorality because it claimed that there was no relationship between one's predestined status and one's behaviour. Anne Hutchinson is perhaps the most famous Puritan heretic accused of Antinomianism, but her belief—rather than endorsing lawlessness—was simply that there is no way to recognize the presence of justification.

The following quotation from Morgan's classic biography of Winthrop exemplifies the theological hair-splitting that was commonplace in this period of American religious history:

[Hutchinson] concluded that human actions were no clue to the question of

whether or not this transformation [salvation] had taken place. The fact that a

man behaved in a "sanctified" manner, breaking none of the laws of God, was no

evidence that he was saved. In Puritan terminology this meant that

"sanctification" was no evidence of "justification," that men's lives in this world

offered no evidence of their prospects in the next. [Orthodox Puritans believed] it

was usually possible to recognize sanctification, and that sanctification resulted

from justification was not to be doubted at all. Mrs. Hutchinson doubted and

denied it. She was, it seemed, an Antinomian. (Puritan 138-9)

Thus, early American Puritanism was always struggling to maintain equilibrium between these two extremes: Arminianism that endorsed the role of free will in salvation

and Antinomianism that took predestination to an extreme position that denied any relationship between human action and grace. 154

My analogical model for Baraka's neo-Puritanism is the variety of early

American Puritanism that I have just described: while it struggled between the two poles of Arminianism and Antinomianism, its foundation was the "Calvinist dogma of divine omnipotence and human helplessness" (Morgan, Puritan 36) in which there is but a fragile connection between man's life on earth and after death. Men and women may behave in a saintly fashion (sanctification) and while this may well be a sign they are one of the elect (justification), ultimately only God knows the truth. The emphasis on

God's grace and man's helplessness in affecting his fate parallels Baraka's sense that the black working class in Newark are "saved" not through any efforts on their part, but only because they happen to be born into this valorized class, and thus embody hipness.

But their hipness is also their election manifested, their evidence of justification by sanctification; in other words, Baraka can tell whether someone is authentically black and thus authentically working class through his or her signs of hipness or blue- blackness. Thus, I link these two belief systems—early American Puritanism and

Baraka's neo-Puritan blue-black Marxism—because both rely on notions of predestination (which can be considered a form of essentialism) and purity.

Purity in Puritanism—excluding the impure or sinful from the Church—was a mark of first generation New England Puritans, both separatists and non-separatists.

While the Pilgrims (those who separated from the Church of England) were more adamant about this principle of the gathered church, non-Separatist Puritans also subscribed to the idea of "voluntary association" and the belief that "a church should rest on a covenant, voluntarily subscribed by believers, and should exclude or expel all known evildoers" (Morgan, Visible 31). According to Anne S. Brown and David D.

Hall, Puritan settlers "[r]eject[ed] the inclusive parish system of the Church of England" 155 and "shifted to a model of voluntary or 'gathered' churches based on a very different covenant, the covenant of grace, and open only to adults who could reliably be considered 'visible saints'" (41-2). However, if only God's elect were allowed to become members of early American Puritan Churches, the dilemma was that you could not always tell who was elect and who was non-elect because there was no final or determining link between outward behaviour and election. Another problem that arose from this impulse to keep the elect in and the non-elect out was that the church was thus threatened by extinction from insufficient numbers. The solution to this problem was the

Half-Way Covenant, introduced in 1664, that allowed non-elect offspring of the elect to become full members of the church, excluding their participation in the Lord's Supper

(communion), provided they professed Christianity and led scandal-free lives (Morgan,

Visible 131). As we shall see, this decision infuriated some Puritans and initiated the founding of Newark.

The culmination of the Puritans' new world struggle to include in their churches only those who had God's "saving grace," was the requirement of the written conversion narrative in order to gain membership. That document was supposed to express a convert's "genuine experience of conversion (not doctrinal 'knowledge' or 'belief)"

(Caldwell 45). Conversions were expected to follow a morphology of five predictable steps: "knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance" (Morgan,

Visible 72). The ultimate goal of American Puritans was to make the visible church resemble, as closely as possible, St. Augustine's ideal of the invisible church, which was pure, and "included every person living, dead, or yet to be born, whom God had predestined for salvation" (Morgan, Visible 3). This philosophy of election and authenticity, borrowed from St. Augustine and refined by the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, is significant in connecting Baraka with early American Puritanism. Beyond Baraka's own sense of identity in the text (he believes that he is deeply radical and anti-mainstream America), he exhibits an abiding similarity to the early Puritans in his adherence to a colour hierarchy that has everything to do with a pure essentialism. In the balance of this section, I will explore Baraka's extended metaphor of the "New Ark," a metaphor that signals the resonance between Newark's Puritan origins and his sacralizing of black purity (blue-blackness), which is the subject of the final section.

The notion of the purity of the black masses is established through Baraka's trope of the "New Ark." Born and raised in Newark, Baraka refers repeatedly in the autobiography (as well as his other writing) to the etymology of Newark as "New Ark."

Robert Treat, accompanied by Reverend Abraham Pierson and forty-one Puritan families from Connecticut, founded Newark in 1666, displacing the indigenous

Hackensack Indians (Mumford 13). In 1664 the Connecticut General Assembly advised that all churches in the Bay Colony should follow the Half-Way Covenant, a covenant that allowed non-elect members into gathered churches. Apparently Reverend Pierson

"was so outraged [... ] that he and his entire congregation moved to New Jersey"

(Heimert and Delbanco 381). This is an important point: Newark was settled by dissident separatists from the Puritan Church who were resisting the inclusion of the

(supposedly) non-elect in their churches. This parallels Baraka's own version of black separatism and his own resistance to mixing with "yellow" blacks (the non-elect) of the bourgeoisie. 157

The naming of Newark has implications for Baraka's use of "New Ark." While it is widely believed that the city was named after Newark-on-Trent in England, where

Pierson had a congregation (Cunningham 8), Abraham Resnick claims that "a number of scholars have returned to an earlier theory that the New Jersey city was originally named

New Ark, or New Work, by the Puritan Congregational Church" ("New Jersey

Opinion"). Baraka, in his use of "New Ark," could be merely playing on the African

American pattern of identifying with the Old Testament Jews (for example, "sorrow songs" or spirituals make use of Old Testament narratives and themes), but he is also likely picking up on the Puritan beginnings of his hometown in this biblical reference.

Werner Sollors supports this latter view, commenting that Baraka's use of New Ark

"recaptured [...] the typological dimensions that were probably intended by its first

European settlers" (Beyond 50). Baraka may be "signifyin"' on the fact that Newark's first settlers were early separatist Puritans who wished originally to exclude the non- elect from their churches, just as his brand of cultural nationalism excluded whites, and his later socialism extolled blue-blacks as the most pure. It is clear that Baraka knew of the Puritan founding of Newark, because he notes in the autobiography that Newark's

Robert Treat school was renamed Marcus Garvey school (345), and Kevin Mumford, author of the recent history of Newark, writes that Baraka "led a community board [...] in a movement to change the name of Robert Treat High School to the Marcus Garvey

High School, to honor the famous black leader of Harlem who advocated emigration to

Africa" (14). The pattern of evolving names is significant: the Ark of the Old Testament,

England, and Robert Treat School change to New Ark, New England, and Marcus

Garvey school. Garvey was an extreme black nationalist who urged a return to Africa and condemned the mixing of races, just as Treat and Pierson might have deplored the 158 mixing of the elect and non-elect in their church. Baraka's own role in this renaming is symbolic, I think, of his larger project of repetition and revision (Gates); while he may be cognizant of his empowered appropriation in repeating and revising Newark into

"New Ark," he is unaware of how closely his revision is patterned on notions of purity and essentialism he unwittingly shares with Treat and his cohorts.

For Baraka, "New Ark" was a vessel keeping the pure in and the impure out, first for black nationalism, and then for the black proletariat. The first ark was besieged by the waters of the flood; this "New Ark" is cleansed by the "fire next time" after the flood. Baraka uses purification by fire imagery in the Autobiography (see, for example,

375 and 458-9) and elsewhere; for example, in a 1965 letter to the Amsterdam News, "I would like to see all Black People filled with such hatred that flames would leap from their eyes. A cleansing Black Fire that would again make the earth a sanitary beautiful place" (qtd. in Sollors, Amiri 188).13

"New Ark" appears not only in the Autobiography but in many guises: an unpublished manuscript, The Creation of the New Ark, about the growth of black politics in Newark in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which Baraka says was "written from the deep backwardness of cultural nationalism" {Autobiography 395); an unpublished play, performed in 1974, titled "New Ark's a Moverin"';14 the Newark chapter of CAP

(Congress of African People), headed by Baraka, produced a newspaper called Black

New Ark (Watts 370); the New Ark Fund was the fundraising mechanism for the CFUN

(Committee for the Unified Newark) {Autobiography 396); and the long poem, "The

City of New Ark." "New Ark" is a significant phrase that Baraka comes back to, over and over, throughout his oeuvre. 159

The symbology associated with the ark, and a "New Ark," is one of exclusion, founding or originating couples, safety, purity, and rebirth. In Genesis, chapters 5 to 9,

Noah's fellow men broke their covenant with God, so were to be punished by a flood;

Noah was chosen to preserve life by taking, in his ark, one male and one female of each species of animal, along with his family. Furthermore, by using "New Ark" and figuring himself as a leader of important artistic and political movements, Baraka embodies a

Noah figure, captain of the "New Ark." (Sollors writes that Baraka "offered himself as a new Noah, ready to lead his chosen people out of American bondage in his 'New Ark'"

[Beyond 50]). This allusion pre-empts the expected associations with Noah as father of

Ham, the son who looked upon Noah's nakedness and was banished (Gen. 9:22-24), and thus became the mythological father of the racial tribe of black people. Baraka thus rewrites the racist biblical allusion into an empowering narrative.

The etymology of the word "puritan" is the Latin puritas for purity; for the first

Newark Puritans religious purity was crucial, just as for Baraka—during his phase of cultural nationalism—racial purity was a central concern. During this phase he rejected all white influences and contacts, even his own half-white daughters from his first marriage with Hettie Cohen. Baraka makes striking use of New Ark in reference to black nationalism in a 1970 essay, where he anticipates the city as site of a new "Black nation": "Newark, New Ark, the nationalist sees as the creation of a base, as example, upon which one aspect of the entire Black nation can be built. [... ] We will nationalize the city's institutions as if it were liberated territory in Zimbabwe or Angola" {Raise

163). Baraka goes on to plan for control of institutions and tax monies, naming 1970 as the "Year of Separation" (164). Baraka's separatist vision, again, is very like the Puritan ideal of a church and community comprised entirely of the elect. 160

Eventually, however, the Newark Puritans began to admit non-Puritans into the town because they needed the influx of skilled workers (Cunningham 8). Similarly,

Baraka's doctrine of exclusion would eventually give way when he rejected cultural nationalism for Marxism: near the end of his autobiography, he writes "I was no longer a nationalist, I knew clearly that just black faces in high places could never bring the change we seek" (443). However, Baraka's Marxism continues the racial puritanism established during his cultural nationalist phase.

Baraka's use of "New Ark" refers also to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, most directly in a poem that postdates his autobiography, "The City of New Ark."15

While the "New Ark" trope is a thread that runs through his work, this particular poem captures the trope's wide range of meanings for Baraka, and synthesizes the Newark and

New Ark dialectic: Puritan beginnings and black demographic ends, vessels of promise and vessels of despair, come together in the symbol of the ark as the black body, the self.

The ark as slave ship is signalled near the beginning of the poem: "Tortured Slaves / below decks / Chained / in / Shit / & / Vomit / therein our city / carries in itself/ the

Move / & the Stop" (Every 49). The middle portion of the poem is comprised of prose passages, one of which warns that in the New Ark there is no selling allowed—no

"commodification," "favors," or "tricks" (52). Baraka intones: "No selling nothing. NO yourself either. No selling nothing. You can't give yourself away neither. No free you's and no selling. You is everything, and when that dawns, your day will be here, your ship, o ark, will be and your sea, and your free, oh Ark, o dark lovely ark. Oh place of where, of self of all telling" (52). Here, the city and the self seem to coalesce in a

Marxist Utopia where there is no ownership and the memory of slavery's 161 commodification of dark bodies is eclipsed by the "dark lovely ark" of the free self in a free society.

At the end of the poem, Baraka writes that "Marxism simply tries to bring the

Divine (Mystery) into our fingers as known and usable" (57), possibly alluding to

Ludwig Feuerbach's theory of projection, which significantly influenced Marx's ideas about religion. In Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach reversed Hegel's "notion of the divine spirit as motivating and moving humankind" (Oxtoby 336). Rather, Feuerbach saw religion as a projection of human power and attributes. A belief in God, then, is both a fantastical reflection of the self, as well as a severely alienating experience, because it projects all of one's potential power and good onto an illusory other. In a typical move,

Baraka reclaims religion—the "Divine (Mystery)"—as material and usable, and thus acceptable to Marxism. This is part of Baraka's larger tropological use of "New Ark" as a vessel for racial purity and Marxist ideology, even if the two seem to contradict one another. In the world of Baraka's autobiography, neo-Puritanism, divine mystery, the celebration of race-class authenticity, and Marxist theory can all co-exist.

Baraka's Discourse of Colour Authenticity

It is to Baraka's essentialist values I would now like to turn, in order to introduce the problem around Marxist identity and authenticity in the text. Those essentialist values are firmly instantiated in the colour grid of authenticity that he sets up in chapters

1 and 2, "Young" and "Black Brown Yellow White." In these chapters, he schematizes his colour-based "fairly objective class analysis" (53), an analysis that I argue is highly subjective, romantic, and nostalgic. Susanna Egan sees the "Edenic paradigm" of childhood as one of four central patterns in autobiography {Patterns 7). Here, Baraka, follows that pattern by remembering his childhood in Newark as a kind of lost paradise, 162 vividly recalled as a place where nothing changes and where the blue-black proletariat can be revered as if embedded forever in amber. This quality of stasis and preserved

Eden in Baraka's early chapters contributes to the discrepancy readers might feel at the end of the autobiography, when he pronounces that he is Marxist. His political position as one committed to change seems very much at odds with his reverence for preserving the sacred identity of the black working class.

At the beginning of chapter 2, Baraka suggests that class can be located in a series of partly metaphorical colour strands so that one's "blackness," or alignment with essential African Americanism, is determined by one's socio-economic background. The

"black and blue base" represents the proletarian masses of an "oppressed nationality"

(53), yellow is the middle class or (petty) bourgeoisie, and brown (Baraka's own class) represents a liminal class between black and yellow (though it later becomes evident that brown is merely a hipper shade of petty bourgeois). As the chapter progresses, however,

Baraka infuses the colour coding with much more than socio-economic stratification.

The "fairly objective class analysis" goes out the window as the metaphorical colour grid becomes, in fact, a black authenticity-meter. At the same time, colour is no longer purely metaphorical, as the symbolism slides into phenotype. Marx, while he was quite passionate and derogatory about the lumpenproletariat (in The Eighteenth Brumaire of

Louis Bonaparte 1852), never approaches Baraka's emotional investment in class analyses. Baraka romanticizes what he perceives to be the major class/racial divisions in

Newark, and in doing so positions himself closer to the New England Puritans than to

Karl Marx.

Baraka's hometown, Newark, has a "black and blue base": "the strongest, the deepest, the basic construction element of its design was the black of its bottom of the 163 lives whose majority it held and spoke for" (56). That black-blue foundation gestures not only at Baraka's (LeRoi Jones's) first book, Blues People (1963), in which he delineates the history of "Negro Music in White America," but also refers to Louis Armstrong's song, "Black and Blue."16 Blue may allude both to blue-collar workers and also to the elitist concept of "blue blood," but in this case humble beginnings signal a kind of aristocracy—a reversal of the familiar associations. Marxist logic does not offer to replace the present oppressing class with another made up of the formerly oppressed; rather it promises to do away with class and hierarchy altogether. Yet, Baraka's allusions to a blue-black-blood aristocracy are not really surprising, as he is often imprecise, subjective, and emotional about Marxist theory.

This rich web of meanings suggests that to be black and blue is to be racially black and have the blues (sadness, musicality, and a funky version of nobility), but it also means one is bruised black and blue by oppression. The black and blue base suffers from economic disadvantage, but the compensation is soulfulness, present in blues music, and the legacy of an oppressed people. Thus, while all black people are oppressed, it is working-class African Americans that are crucially and doubly oppressed, which, according to Baraka, imparts a certain authentic value to their existence. Blueness is the heart of black life; in a sentence that may allude to Wallace

Stevens's 1937 poem about the role of the poet in society, "The Man with the Blue

Guitar," Baraka writes "Its [Newark's] beating heart was blue therefore rooted in black life and its streets strummed my head like a guitar" (56). In this case, Wallace's poet is

Baraka, the writer who knows all about the blues (the "blue[s] guitar") and blue- blackness. Similarly, to use "blue-black" as a code for the most authentic blacks is to play with the music allusion, but it also hearkens to the idea that the skin colour of the blackest African blacks—untinged by any racial mixing—is so black as to have a blue sheen. Baraka slides into this biological coding of authenticity that, again, places him with the essentialist Puritans: you can't change or convert to being saved or being blue- black: you were born that way and real transformation is foreclosed.

Baraka self-identifies as from a brown family, and yet he is deeply attracted to the black and blue base. A fluidity of movement is implied—he is brown (which he sometimes calls petty bourgeois) but he seems to be able to access and appreciate the blue-black base, as this "we" paean to blackness attests: "The blues was our black footsteps, our basic reality, the ideological material of our lives" (53). Closing the chapter, he offers a longer hymn of praise, in which blackness becomes the "changing same" of African American life:

But the black was the constant. The people, the life, the rules, the mores,

the on-the-street definitions of what was beautiful or hip. The constant

background of our breathing, the blues, was always everywhere. And

Saturdays raised up like a great space mural (blues as) companionship of

thought and feeling; it was feeling. The real good-looking girls and tough

dudes, who you wanted to make laugh and impress, the style you had to

perfect was black—black and blue.

And though I came striding out of a brown house with plenty of

bullshit packed between my eyes. There was nowhere to go but the black

streets and the people who ran those streets and set the standards of our

being were black. And no matter where we would go and what we would 165

get into, when we were true to ourselves, when we were actually pleasing

our deepest selves, being the thing we most admired and loved, we were

black (and blue). (63-4)

Thus, Baraka sees blue-blackness as foundational, standard setting, and unchanging

("the black was the constant"). The final line quoted above suggests that the black self can accommodate many colour-coded strands, and the "deepest" and most authentic self is the black and blue self. At the same time, there are contradictory hints that consistent access to that blue-black self is unattainable. The "style you had to perfect" was black and blue, and the definitions of "what was beautiful or hip" were black and blue, but only truly working-class blacks who set the standard can successfully achieve perfect style and hipness.

When Baraka describes himself and his family as brown, the content of the description is somewhat vague, compared to the specificity of blackness and yellowness:

"The brown was my family and me, half real and half lodged in dream and shadow"

(54). Brown is the liminal colour/class because it is between yellow and black; it is

"strung out as usual somewhere twixt the two [black and yellow], over here with it, over there without" (57), and, "[t]he browns had to weave in betwixt and between the harshest disasters" (54). In-between brownness seems to allow Baraka to align himself with the black, and he sometimes identifies himself as authentic, even if he is an interloper. His dad, who drives a truck for the post office (59), is a worker, but not exactly "working class." But this identification with blue-blackness is largely illusory.

Even though Baraka includes himself in the "we" of blue-black Newarkians, there is nonetheless a note of wistfulness in his admission of brownness—if only he had been born of the real black working class. 166

When he meets his second wife, Baraka gains authenticity by association. Sylvia

(later Amina) is, after all, "the child of black workers" (444), and they are "a brown boy and a black girl from the blue/grey streets of the New Ark" (445). He refers to the

"irony" of coming back "full circle" to "love in black life" in Central Ward, Newark, and he makes the distinction in his closing chapter between mythical blackness and

"long-sought blackness [... ] that was not mythical," and that could only be found at

"home" in Newark (459). But while that "long-sought blackness" seems to have been located, Baraka illustrates in his 1997 preface to the Autobiography the difficulty, according to Amina, of entering the elect stratum of the blue-black working class due to his petty-bourgeois brown beginnings. He documents his wife Amina's attitude:

One clear expression of our embrace of Marxism has been Amina's

emphatic identification with the working class, since that is her own class

origin and her feeling that this in itself is reason to believe that she is

correct about things I could not possibly understand. Though I have tried

to convince her that twenty-nine years of marriage to a petty bourgeois

intellectual means that the objective social context is petty bourgeois, and

that working class now only refers to her class origins. But she still

rejects that. And the fact of my own pitiful petty bourgeois origins [... ]

means that as a working-class woman there will always be obvious

contradictions between us. (xxiii-xxiv)

Amina is correct about things Amiri "could not possibly understand": Baraka's comment here seems intended to ironically echo the test of racial authenticity. In this introduction, added thirteen years after the original text, Baraka speaks from a more mature, enlightened, and ironic viewpoint about his wife's stubborn sense of essentialism as one of the black proletariat. He may have moved on from his earlier beliefs as expressed in the 1984 autobiography; however, he shows here that Amina sees working-class identity as fixed. Thirty years of marriage cannot make Amiri understand blue-black lived experience; thirty years of marriage cannot make Amina accept the petty-bourgeois social context. Baraka—while charting his own post-autobiography movement—here illustrates the tenacity of belief in blue-black working-class essentialism.

Following brown on the colour grid is yellow. Yellowness, the domain of the petty bourgeoisie, is characterized by Baraka as all that is inauthentic:

The yellow, the artificial, the well-to-do, the middle class really.

Described by a term like petty bourgeoisie with steel precision, but

something else of caste was what my definition came to mean even

without me understanding or saying that. The high-up over the streets

avoiding disaster by several hundred thousand feet and some straight hair.

(54)

A defining ambition of the yellow is to be white, thus the conked or straight hair and the self-elevation ("high-up over the streets" and, later, on "an escalator to nowhere" [63]).

The yellow strata, like the "dicty" folk in Zora Neale Hurston's novels of the 1930s and

Morrison's funk-less Geraldine in The Bluest Eye (1970), comprises those middle-class

African Americans who aspire to whiteness. Baraka has his own various terms for yellows; they are "what we called 'sididdy,' 'ninety,' 'stuck up,' 'snobbery'-time motherfuckers" (102).

A trace of supplemental meaning attaches to Baraka's definition, particularly yellowness as a sense of cowardice. Yellow blacks—in the world of Baraka's autobiography—seem fearful of connecting to their "authentic" roots in blackness, 168 because to do so would be to jeopardize their standing in a white world. While Baraka is keenly aware of the presence of the yellows as he grows up, they have little to do with his life: "we did look at them different—though they were part of a basic yellow reality, that had some presence in official white world as black, but that was meaningless to us in our day-to-day lives" (54). In other words, while whites see yellows as undifferentiated from other blacks, blacks and browns see them as inauthentically black.

While Baraka does not deal with Asians in his colour scheme, there does seem to be some implied allusion to the yellow, Asian "other" in Baraka's language ("we did look at them different"). This hint of xenophobia only strengthens the sense that the African

American "yellow" is utterly alien to the real African Americans or "blue blacks."

Although for the most part Baraka insists that the colour coding is not related to actual colour, there are times when his "objective" class analysis slides into phenotype.

Baraka describes the origin of the (despised) yellows, betraying a racial basis for what is supposed to be an economic metaphor:

A yellowness and brownness, from the slavery time days when the Tom

Jeffersons and other great philosophers would throw black women down

and fuck them up (get them pregnant) with yellow life. And many of their

yellow sons and daughters was the first petty bourgeois we had, even

during slavery times. (80)

Baraka suggests that the introduction of mixed race children into slave families inaugurated the "yellow" petty bourgeoisie in African America. While the terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie have long had pejorative associations (mediocrity, lack of sophistication), Baraka's reading of colour into class removes agency from such bourgeois subjects. Not only are such subjects the issue of violent rape, but, due to no fault of their own, they are inauthentic because of their pretensions to whiteness and the absence of (pure) blue-blackness in their genes/class. This slide between race and class is troubling because it signifies Baraka's inability to recognize the complexity and nuanced history of miscegenation in America. While Richard Rodriguez may go to the other extreme in celebrating the erotic pull toward the racial Other (see chapter 4), at least Rodriguez acknowledges that miscegenation in early America was not always the result of rape, but sometimes the product of love and mutual desire.

The "yellow" black church of Baraka's childhood is a microcosm of the colour- class struggle in the larger world: "the struggle in that church was classic too. Class and

Classic and Class-sick struggle. The browns vs. the yellows and the blacks with the browns vs. the yellows. Under the huge tarpaulin of the white" (57). The church, with a minister "white as snow" (57), is "a yellow folks' church" that preaches the "blunt agitprop" that '"[o]nly the yellow, only the yellow, will see God'" (57). Yet the church also has room for brown and black believers, who express themselves with more raw emotion than the prim yellows: "The brown would fan themselves and fall out from time to time, but not regular like the black, who would 'get happy' at the drop of a note or a word" (57). Baraka finally reduces the struggle to a binary, divided between "those who wanted to eliminate a 'black church' and those who wanted Xtian worship to be a form of African American culture" (58). He pre-empts accusations of reductionism: "Simple now? I remember throwing out, even before writing Blues People, how you could tell much about black people by what church they went to. And under investigation the concreteness and correctness of that staggered me" (58). It is, of course, "those who wanted Xtian worship to be a form of African American culture" that Baraka sides with, 170 because he sees the "black church" as an important cultural repository for the "old warm hymns, the sorrow songs, and gospel" (58).

Thus, Christianity is authenticated by blue-blackness: the "'purest'" black

(Christian) churches are also the "poorest" (58). While these working-class storefront churches may still be predicated on the fantasy of Christianity, or "dreams housed in despair," they are at least culturally genuine compared to the yellow Christian church, which is "more European. White. More bourgeois. Less emotional" (58). Baraka's colour grid demarcates "blackness" as a socio-economic reality, but at the same time it is a mystical or essential "being," and is configured throughout the autobiography as a kind of election to authenticity (you either have it or you don't; you are born into it or not).

Finally, there needs be mention of the infamous lumpenproletariat. Baraka mentions the lumpenproletariat only once, but that mention has powerful associations with both Marx's lumpenproletariat and the discards of humanity excluded from the

English Puritan Churches. Baraka's mention of the lumpen is included as an aside when he mixes in a pejorative whiff for the lowest stratum as an add-on to the positive descriptions of the blue-blacks: the "black was also the damned, the left behind, the left out, the disregarded, the abandoned, the drunk and disorderly, the babbling and the staggering, the put down and the laughed at, the heir of the harshest of lives I could see"

(54). Baraka's catalogue of those "damned" African Americans strangely echoes Marx's partial description of the Paris lumpen in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers" {Eighteenth 75) and to the

"mixed assemblies" of the English Puritan Churches that the American Separatist

Puritans were trying to purify: "dogs and Enchaunters, and Whoremongers, and 171

Murderers, and Idolatours, and whosoever loveth and maketh lyes" (qtd. in Morgan,

Visible 35). While this "damned" portion of the masses seems marginal, and is mentioned only once, the similarities between Baraka and Marx's cataloguing of the lumpen and the seventeenth-century list of scoundrels that must be removed from the church, shows a shared discourse of purity that is applied to class, colour, and religion.

Baraka is an artist and a poet as much as he is a political activist; he may consider that his role as artist frees him from the strictures of political correctness. Thus, his infusion of class identity with poetic sensibility is bound to differentiate him from

Angela Davis's less romantic assessment of black Communism. This is, after all, the writer that gave us the shocking drama, Dutchman, and the polemic "Somebody Blew

Up America"—his controversial response to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the twin towers. Baraka has always used bold strokes of expression and cares little for political correctness; why should we expect his brand of Marxism, for example, to be atheist and anti-essentialist? Baraka writes early in the narrative, "I ain't gonna be an objectivity freak—it's my funking memoirs" (40). Baraka's move of constructing a romantic racial hierarchy based on exclusion is contradictory (and counterintuitive) to

Marxist values; this in part is due to the artistic license fueling Baraka's "Pauling around," or the persistence of his exclusionary religiosity in the face of his Marxism.

However, Baraka's poetic use of religious language and troping is meaningful because it reveals a deep structure of religiosity that suffuses the secular. The trouble with conversion, in Baraka's Autobiography, is that when we expect it to shift to secular change (i.e. Marxism), conversion remains clothed with the same religiosity as before, to the point of incorporating one of the most extreme and debilitating aspects of American religion: the corrosive binary of the Puritan elect and non-elect. Some may read Baraka's racially inflected socialism positively as a brand of syncretic Marxism that rehabilitates Marx for the twenty-first century. But one problem with the use of Marxism to serve identity groups is that it is often piecemeal—Marx's vision of the whole has been replaced with "partial visions—piecemeal struggles of separate groups" (Jacoby 114). Not only do these separate group struggles go against

Marx's vision of totality, they become "local and sedentary" rather than revolutionary

(Jacoby 114). Local, sedentary politics means Baraka is able to accommodate both socialist theory and a fierce commitment to African American proletariat identity, but it also means that his socialist theory remains theoretical and "sedentary."

A second problem with Baraka's linking of class and racial identity is the dangerous romanticism that results from this association, as discussed by Walter Benn

Michaels.17 Baraka's romanticizing of the blue-black elect of Newark can be viewed as part of what Michaels calls the "posthistoricist commitment to seeing the world as organized by identities" (Shape 129). While Michaels is not referring to Baraka, but rather to Art Spiegelman's Maus, which graphically illustrates Michaels' point with

Jews depicted as mice, Germans as cats, and African Americans as black dogs, Baraka's colour coding can be seen as another, perhaps subtler, version of this. Michaels argues that one of the products of organizing the world by identity is that poverty is turned into

"a structure of identification, a relation to identity rather than to money" {Shape 181).

Thus, the poor are envied as living fuller lives and thus "we might say that we—the middle class—not as alive as St. Francis, not as alive as Palestinian suicide bombers— are the victims" (Shape 181). Baraka's commitment to the conservation of black working-class identity is an apt example of Michaels' indictment of poverty as positive identity. In other words, far from the autobiography reflecting Baraka's political 173 program to liberate poor blacks from oppression (an outcome we would expect from his commitment to Marxism), his memoir rather reflects his celebration of the hipness of blue-black election, his nostalgia for his own contact with that hipness, and an intense longing for election himself. According to Watts, "no matter how much he wants to be organically linked to poor blacks, he can never be, a fact that Baraka cannot accept"

(474). Knowing that he is condemned forever to be excluded, by virtue of his petty- bourgeois beginnings, from Newark's "beautiful" and "hip" (63) blue-black base, adds a plaintive note to his descriptions of childhood, as he hovers, yellow-brown, at the margins of the elect.18

Conversion, thus, seems frequently to lead either back to a Saul self, or to the persistence of a Paul self that works against the ostensibly secular narrative. Malcolm X

"Sauls around" in his autobiography; Acosta and Baraka "Paul around," Baraka not only because he continues to think in religious terms after his conversion to scientific socialism, but because his conception of a blue-black working-class essentialism betrays the Paulian false consciousness of the Puritan black nationalist. This quality of conversion "not taking" reflects its profoundly social context: the specific social milieus surrounding conversion do not suddenly disappear because of the convert's professed new belief, no matter how dramatic that change in belief. If Malcolm's postconversion text betrays his nostalgia for pre-conversion interracial sex and dancing, that is because those were the accepted outlets for black masculinity in 1940s Boston and Harlem. If

Acosta was unable to stick with Baptist missionary work in the Panamanian jungle, it is because he could not successfully assimilate into white (racist) Baptist culture in the early 1950s. If the converted Marxist Baraka continues to adopt a shopworn religious essentialism, it is because contemporary America validates cultural-racial identity over class, finally making class into its own celebrated identity. Michaels claims that for writers, class difference "has always seemed an implausible candidate for promotion to the status of a subject position that we must respect" (Shape 180), yet Baraka has done just this by encouraging our worship of those poetically rendered, quintessentially hip, blue-black inhabitants of 1940s Newark.

My next chapter turns to examine the writing of Richard Rodriguez. While

Rodriguez is loyal to his birth religion, Roman Catholicism, I argue that he attempts to convert that religion through his writing about his experience as a gay Catholic.

Rodriguez's experience of "lived religion" as a gay Catholic is characterized by a disturbing tendency to martyrdom. Thus, the trouble with conversion in Rodriguez's text lies in the human distortions required to sway monolithic religion, and the enculturation of religion that compels this distortion in the first place. Rodriguez's writings contrast with Baraka's text, where the trouble with conversion is instantiated by both the hollowness of serial conversion, and the inability to escape the essentializing grasp of

(Puritan) religion, even in an ostensibly secular narrative. And yet these two writers share something: for both, conversion is inherently social, and is not willed by the grace of God, but controlled and buffeted by politics, race, nationalism, economics, and sexuality. Chapter Four - The Limits of Conversion: Richard Rodriguez and Gay Catholicism

Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican." - Richard Rodriguez, interview with Scott London, 1997

When I hear some people say that they are no longer Catholic, it makes no sense to me. You can't be "no longer Catholic"—Catholicism doesn't let you go. There's this feminine impulse within the Church—she takes you, regardless. - Richard Rodriguez, interview with John R. Dunlap, 1998

I like the idea that my impure lover would be the one giving communion at Mass as a eucharistic minister. That's what the church should be about, it seems to me. We should always hand the Eucharist over to a sinner. - Richard Rodriguez, interview with Gregory Wolfe, 2002 (67)

My reading in chapter 2 of Oscar Zeta Acosta's conversion to the Baptist Church and deconversion pointed to the intensely social aspect of religious conversion. As outlined in the introduction, literary studies has tended to consider conversion as the straightforward, divinely inspired transformation from sinner to saved, and has for the most part failed to take into account the social pressures and negative repercussions surrounding this phenomenon. My aim has been to understand autobiographical accounts of ethnic conversion in terms of its problems, failures, and points of resistance.

In regards to Acosta, for example, I looked at his failed attempt at cultural and sexual assimilation to white America through conversion and his nominal rather than substantive return to the syncretic Catholicism of Mexican America. My study of

Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical trilogy—Hunger of Memory: The Education of

Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

(1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002)—again highlights the social aspect of conversion. This time, however, I examine the contradiction in Rodriguez's cultural politics: his embrace of conversion, hybridity, and assimilation seems to gainsay his resistance to personal religious conversion. Rodriguez refuses to label himself as

Chicano1 and champions fluidity through the absorption of language and culture; yet he is adamantly fixed on two points: his religion and his sexuality. While this chapter investigates the role of religion in Rodriguez's work and life, his homosexuality is also important because it is intimately tied to his experience as a practicing Catholic.

Rodriguez, who charted his own Americanization in Hunger, uses one of his favourite tropes when he encourages other Mexicans to "swallow English" and assimilate (see epigraph one), but he stops short at abandoning his cultural cradle Catholicism for a possibly less homophobic Protestantism (or other less homophobic religion).

This stopping short is what I mean by the social and cultural limits to conversion. These limits are drawn by an abiding belief—one that Rodriguez shares with many other Mexican American Catholics—in the almost biological pull toward an ancestral religion. Rodriguez, however, is different from writers like Gloria Anzaldiia and Rudolfo Anaya because he is not so interested in Indian survivals or Mexican

American embellishments as part of his Catholicism; rather, he represents himself as having joined an assimilated American Catholicism as an adult, yet continues to pay intellectual homage to the Mexican flavours of his childhood and his ancestral religion.

Ethnic American Catholics have sometimes treated religion as a last preserve, inculcating a sense that to leave Catholicism is not only a mortal sin, but is "unnatural"

(Rechy 116).2 These social and cultural limits to conversion are those same forces that drew Acosta away from his conversion to Protestantism and back into his old Mexican

American Aztec-Catholicism, even while he proclaimed "I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant" (Autobiography 199). In other words, this cultural force that limits conversion prevents Rodriguez, a writer who is adamant about the necessity for melting- pot American assimilation, from leaving his religion of birth, even though that religion sees him as depraved because of his homosexuality. While this contradiction in

Rodriguez's work is never fully resolved, he does come to a partial resolution. Given that he will never convert to another church, he attempts to "convert" the church he was born into.

While this final stage of my argument may appear in some way contradictory (if conversion is often a negative phenomenon, why disapprove of the resistance to conversion?), it has only the appearance of contradiction. In fact, my argument assumes that the social and cultural forces of religion—which include not only conversion but also forces that prevent conversion—are often deleterious. Thus, in Rodriguez's case, I maintain that his devotion to his religion of birth is not only inconsistent with his philosophy, but is damaging because it is at some cost to his identity as a homosexual man. Thus, while conversion has its pitfalls (Malcolm X, Acosta, Baraka), so too does a fierce resistance to converting away from your religion, especially if that faith censures you, as the Catholic Church does homosexuals.

My consideration of conversion in this chapter is rather a special case, because while I adhere to the usual understanding of conversion when I discuss Rodriguez's resistance to conversion, in the latter part of this chapter I propose a supplemental, metaphorical understanding of religious conversion, but one that is authorized by

Rodriguez's own comments. Here, I consider conversion as an agent of change working on the Catholic Church, thus inverting the usual expectation that conversion is a supernatural agent of change working on the individual. This kind of conversion, I 178 suggest, is the slow, accretive changes made to institutions—not by decree, revolution, or heresy—but by believers living their religion in ways that depart from or subvert doctrine. This quality of change ultimately underlines the social existence of the very institutions said to mediate between humans and the divine. Rodriguez, in a 1997 interview, comments on religious conversion as cultural absorption: "Conversion.

Perhaps cultures absorb one another. If it is true that the Franciscan padre forced the

Eucharist down the Indian's throat, maybe she forgot to close her mouth. Maybe she swallowed the Franciscan priest" (qtd. in Crowley 260). For Rodriguez, religious institutions are altered by the conversions they perform: the Indian's swallowing of the

Franciscan priest accomplishes her own conversion at the same time as it ingests and thus converts the priest/church into other material. While I can offer no concrete proof of the changes that I imagine as arising from Rodriguez's lived religion as a gay Catholic, I do offer the suggestion that an imagined community (Benedict Anderson) of well-read, educated American Catholics now understand their religion slightly differently as a result of reading Rodriguez.

While other kinds of conversion are possible and desirable for Rodriguez (for example, in the areas of language, culture, and race), religious conversion is impossible.

As Rodriguez states in the second epigraph, "[y]ou can't be 'no longer Catholic.'" Thus, he can no more consider converting from Catholicism than he can consider converting from homosexuality: both are non-negotiable features of his identity to which he feels a deep, even biological, commitment. Consequently, the only arena for change is within the church itself. The trouble with this kind of conversion (to return to the broad enquiry of this project) is that in order to enact this change, Rodriguez must position himself as a kind of martyr to a higher principle of love. While Rodriguez is never anything but 179 dignified in his rhetorical maneuvers, there is nonetheless a note of pathos in his position: he is unwilling to change a set of beliefs, yet willing to prostrate himself before an institution that theoretically insults and rejects him. I use the term "theoretically" because Rodriguez's writings suggest that his local church accepts him and his partner as well as their relationship, even granting the lay minister role to his partner (see third epigraph). Rodriguez explains: "[m]y partner and I attend mass every Sunday. Not only are we witnesses to the service, but we are members of the community of worshippers around us. We are already in the church, in other words. So the issue of whether we belong is already mute [sic]" (email communication, November 15,2007). It is the

Catholic Church's orthodox theology that makes Rodriguez angry; his daily, lived experience of that religion in his local church in fact seems to contradict the abstract theology. Thus, Rodriguez rages at the end of Brown against the orthodoxy of the church that sees same-sex love as a "vanity" (230).

The two central but contradictory movements in Rodriguez's autobiographical trilogy—conversion and change versus fixity and essence—provide the conceptual framework for both Rodriguez's resistance to conversion away from his familial

Catholicism and his attempts to sway the church through his martyrdom. While

Rodriguez's books are not religious conversion narratives, they are conversion narratives in the broader sense, like Baraka's, because they chart not only Rodriguez's assimilation or conversion to American-ness through language and education, but also his fascination with America as a nation always undergoing conversion to brownness. Raymund A.

Paredes reads Hunger of Memory as a conversion narrative of the old order, in the same league as Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), where ethnicity is subordinated in order for the autobiographer to become truly American. Days of Obligation can be read as a celebration of the Mexican Indians' conversion to Catholicism, because that submission was actually a powerful ingestion of alterity. Brown, Rodriguez's latest book, explores the trope of brownness as the ongoing accomplishment of erotic mixing in an increasingly miscegenated America. Rodriguez's public voice, then, celebrates impurity, brownness, and change. Rodriguez's brownness contrasts with Acosta's (as well as with Baraka's colour scheme of blue-black, brown, and yellow), and the trope of brown serves nicely as a symbolic demarcation between the two writers. While

Rodriguez's brownness refers positively to the "impurity" and inevitability of racial, ethnic, and cultural mixing and the desire that makes it so, Acosta's brown is used narrowly in "Brown Buffalo," his tribal designation for himself and his fellow Chicanos, who value ethnic endogamy.

The contrary impulse in Rodriguez's work, at tension with this celebration of cultural, personal, and racial conversion, is his unwavering commitment to his Catholic faith, expressed in the chapter "Credo" in Hunger and much of Days, as well as in interviews (again, see epigraph one). Thus, Rodriguez's unshakeable faith (and unswerving sexuality) contrasts with his overall celebration of change and conversion.

Critical Context

Rodriguez's three books are spaced at decadal intervals: 1982,1992, and 2002.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez garnered enormous public attention: praise from mainstream critics and criticism from Chicano/a readers who not only felt betrayed by Rodriguez's stand against affirmative action, bilingualism, and

ESL education tracks, but were upset by what they perceived as rejection of Mexican

American and Chicano culture. Hunger eventually became a standby of freshman courses in American literature/autobiography, as it seemingly advertised the successful 181 assimilation of a bifurcated ethnic self into an American man, its title echoing that quintessentially American autobiography, Education of Henry Adams (1918). Hunger is a series of loosely connected essays, containing Rodriguez's reflections on education, language, class, religion, race, ethnicity, and affirmative action. In this first book,

Rodriguez describes his childhood in a Mexican American family, his Catholic upbringing, the experiences of learning English, of reading hungrily, of attending university and graduate school, and studying Renaissance literature. He explores his feelings about his body and his ethnic self, and his rejection of university job offers because of his feeling that he did not want special treatment as a "minority." Rodriguez conceptualized this first book as a book about class; the opening chapter is titled

"Middle Class Pastoral," and he establishes a sense of looking back, nostalgically, at his working-class past.

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father follows this pattern of collected autobiographical essays, this time including Rodriguez's travelogue of

Mexico and California missions, meditations about Catholicism versus Protestantism, and an essay on AIDs and homosexuality in San Francisco. Rodriguez once categorized his three books as one on class, one on religion, and one on race. Thus, Brown: The Last

Discovery of America (2002) is Rodriguez's extended discussion of brownness, impurity, and desire as fully materialized in race—or more specifically, skin colour.

From his opening consideration of Alexis de Tocqueville's emblematic scene of a white child, brown Indian, and black slave, meant to represent erotic desire for the Other, to his quotation in the final chapter from Jose Vasconcelos's 1925 La Raza Cosmica, which heralds an era of "fusion and mixing of all peoples" (qtd. in Brown 225),

Rodriguez is interested in America as a nation (thankfully) turning brown. While his second book, Days of Obligation, takes its names from the obligatory feast days of the Catholic religion, and one of the essays in Hunger is concerned with

Rodriguez's religious development, the three books have not been examined as religious texts. This is somewhat surprising, considering Rodriguez's controversial position as a gay Catholic, and his strong interest in world religions. (His book in progress, heralded by a January 2008 Harper's article, "Searching for God in the Holy Land," is about the three great religions "of the book" and the vital role that deserts play in these religions.)

Paul Elie, one of the few critics to acknowledge Rodriguez's commitment to religion, labels Rodriguez—along with Dave Eggers and Czeslaw Milosz—a crypto-

Catholic writer (35). But the problem with this formulation is that there is no secret about Rodriguez's Catholicism—nor has he recently made a secret of his feelings about his position as a gay Catholic. His faith figures prominently in all three of his books, as well as in his journalism and interviews. The only secretive aspect of Rodriguez's faith is that it has been downplayed in literary criticism of his work. The literature on

Rodriguez was dominated early on by interest in his disavowal of Chicanismo and his stand against affirmative action and bilingualism, and later by interest in his ostensible representation of multiple or in-between identities. While the mainstream media (Bill

Moyers) and religious scholars (Thomas J. Ferraro, Gregory Wolfe) have taken an interest in Rodriguez's religion, for the most part, literary criticism has not. Ferraro notes that Rodriguez's writing about Catholicism "went virtually unnoticed in the controversy surrounding its politics of race and language" (7).

That "controversy" followed quickly from the publication of Hunger, and was primarily a critical backlash by Chicano/a critics who went on the defensive because

Rodriguez dared to defy the central expectation of normative ethnic autobiography: that 183 the speaker be a spokesperson for and celebrant of his or her culture. Tomas Rivera faulted Hunger as a "humanistic antithesis": he considered Rodriguez's divorce from his native tongue and culture as "anti-humanistic" (107) and the product of an "inferiority complex" (115). Jose David Saldivar got personal by claiming that Rodriguez suffered from "snobbery and bad taste" ("School" 308), and Norma Alcaron charged Rodriguez with "historical naivete" because of his "refusal of ethnicity, except as a private phenomenon" (142).

Since the first wave of critics faulted Rodriguez for rejecting Chicanismo in

Hunger, other critics have been foregrounding Rodriguez's ostensibly postmodern sensibility either by treating him as a writer of multiple identities, or troubling the initial assessments that focused on culture and race. Laura Fine, for example, believes that critics have tended to misread Rodriguez because they look for one identity whereas

Rodriguez "rights" the idea of a singular identity by "rewriting" a multiplicity of identities. Henry Staten shows that when Rodriguez rejects Chicano identity, he does so for complex reasons that stem both from contradictions in Mexican history and from the cluster of class-race beliefs held by his parents. Juan de Castro sees Rodriguez as "a theorist of the borderlands" like Gloria Anzaldiia and Jose David Saldivar (102), though he also importantly shows that Rodriguez's association with the borderlands does not automatically make him a defender of multiculturalism. Nidesh Lawtoo compares

Rodriguez's "epistemology of in-between identities" to Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which is Not One (220). Yet both sets of critics slightly miss the mark. The former group, while regarding Rodriguez as a "fro taco (Chicano Uncle Tom)" (Marquez 238), have not fully acknowledged how Rodriguez's commitment to Catholicism is his own way of maintaining a connection to his Mexican American ethnicity, instantiated particularly in 184 his second book, Days of Obligation, where he predicts that by the twenty-first century,

Catholicism will have been subsumed by Latin America and brownness, "assuming] the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe" (20). The latter group has not recognized that while

Rodriguez may have assimilated into American culture and prizes "brownness," his core, immutable identity is located in his Catholicism and his homosexuality, both of which limit the actual "brownness" or fluidity of identity he appears to celebrate.

My own reading of Rodriguez (in four parts) in relation to his religion and conversion opens up a fresh view of Rodriguez as a religious essentialist and thus a contradictory assimilationist. His celebration of conversion (of Mexican Indians, of language, of class), which I deal with in Part I is consistent with some critics' view of

Rodriguez as the consummate assimilationist. Yet that ethos of conversion seems to oppose his steadfast faith in the Catholic Church (Part II), an aspect of his identity that aligns him with his birth culture. Next, I discuss Rodriguez's metaphorical "conversion" of the Catholic Church through his "lived religion" and his public role as a well-known

Catholic figure (Part III). Finally, I examine Rodriguez's rhetorical role as martyr to love: his religious inculcation at birth has created a subject who feels he cannot leave his church, even while he is denied full acceptance, leading to his position of martyr to the higher principle of love (Part IV). My critical intervention in this field is to use the contradiction in Rodriguez's philosophy—his ethos of conversion opposes his resistance to personal conversion—to open up not only a new view of Rodriguez the religious essentialist, but also to suggest that in this way—the fixity of his Catholicism—he is more like his Chicano/a critics than has been heretofore recognized. While the variety of

Catholicism Rodriguez now espouses is not particularly ethnic, the fact that he continually returns to questions of Mexican American Catholicism and the powerful 185 influence of that religion in his childhood can be read a§ indirect proof of a multiculturalist loyalty to an essentialist conception of culture, as well as proof (in light of my larger argument) of the powerful effect of social imprinting in childhood religious indoctrination.

I. An Ethos of Conversion

Many critics note that Rodriguez relies on a binary structure in Hunger of

Memory, in which the narrative is constructed around the opposing poles of private/public, Spanish/English, Mexican/American, Catholic/Protestant, working class/ middle class, inauthentic/authentic, tragic/comic, feminine/masculine. Indeed, Hunger is about Rodriguez's conversion from one pole to the other (except in the case of feminine

Catholicism, to which he holds resolutely). Even though Rodriguez acknowledges the pain of loss engendered by such conversion, his is a celebration of assimilation to

American-ness and a measure that sees gains outweighing losses. In his second book,

Days of Obligation, Rodriguez also celebrates conversion by approving of the gains that

Mexican Indians made by submitting to colonialism. In Brown, Rodriguez's sense of polar opposites gives way to an overriding understanding of the inevitably mixed quality of life, instantiated in the culminating trope of brownness which fully represents his ethos of conversion.

But while Rodriguez champions immigrant assimilation to American-ness—with himself as a notably successful example—and also celebrates the gains made by Indians via Spanish colonialism, I argue that Rodriguez's narrative is about the absorption of rather than by culture as the critical means of cultural and other transformations. To absorb another's culture assumes a robust self that can take on the Other and subsume differences, whereas to be absorbed into or to surrender to a dominant culture, losing 186 one's differences, assumes a friable self. Rodriguez's views on absorption provide a third term to Americo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldua's ideas. Paredes writes that the

Indians of the Southwest "were absorbed into the blood and the culture of the Spanish settlers" (9); thus, he sees the indigenous peoples as fully assimilated by their colonizers.

Anzaldua, on the other hand, claims that the Indian, "despite extreme despair, suffering and near genocide, has survived" {Borderlands 30) and rebels against and rejects the oppression of the colonizer. While Anzaldua allows that miscegenation produced the hybrid meztizo/a, she insists on the defiant cultural survival of the Indian in language, religion, and biology. Rodriguez's version is that the Indians absorbed alterity while retaining their own essence. While this may seem only slightly different from Anzaldua

(both writers agree that the Indian survives), it is an important difference. Rodriguez's attitude is powerfully conciliatory rather than defiant; it says, "I won't resist you... In fact I am fascinated by you and attracted to you.. .That being the case, I think I will swallow you before you get a chance to swallow me." And this attitude, in fact, rhetorically reverses the image of assimilation, which is usually that the dominant nation swallows the immigrant. This attitude constitutes an important but subtle theme that emerges in Hunger and is carried on in Days.

Rodriguez's use of three different images illustrates the continuity of his concept of the (positive) absorption of alterity and his subtle resistance to being absorbed by.

First, the "scholarship boy" in Hunger represents an undeveloped self that has not yet learned how fully to absorb the Other. Second, Caliban stealing the master's books in

Hunger and Days exemplifies both Rodriguez's hungry, all-consuming subaltern but also illustrates his own refusal to be absorbed by theories of postcolonialism. Finally, the image of Indians eating the conquistadors with their eyes in Days of Obligation captures Rodriguez's counterintuitive argument that the colonized had the upper hand because they powerfully absorbed the Other. I want to spend some time exploring these images because they illustrate what I mean by Rodriguez's "ethos of conversion": it is conversion that is founded on absorption of, rather than absorption by, the Other, and it is important to the final stage of my argument where I discuss Rodriguez's attempted

"conversion" of the Catholic Church.

In the second chapter of Hunger, "Achievement of Desire," Rodriguez describes his epiphanic discovery of Richard Hoggart's Marxist study of the working-class

"scholarship boy" in Hoggart's 1957 classic, The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart was one of the founders of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Rodriguez experiences a sense of eureka when he sees his own alienation from his family in

Hoggart's portrait, which describes how certain bright boys from working-class families take on middle-class education and imitate the language of their schoolmasters, while at the same time becoming alienated from their families and class. Rodriguez identifies with that experience, particularly the sense of oddness in his mimicry of the Other.

When Rodriguez recalls his years studying Renaissance literature at Stanford and

Berkeley, his sense of alienation from that earlier self is evident from the third person narrative, with which he parrots Hoggart's own prose, producing a double distancing:

'Topos... negative capability... vegetation imagery in Shakespearean

comedy.' He lifts an opinion from Coleridge, takes something from Frye

or Empson or Leavis. He even repeats exactly his professor's earlier

comment. All his ideas are clearly borrowed. He seems to have no

thought of his own. (Hunger 66) 188

Later in the chapter, he reflects that "[t]o pass an examination, I copied down exactly what my teachers told me" (73). Like Hoggart's scholarship boy, Rodriguez has become an "expert imbiber and doler-out" (Uses 246). Rodriguez's mimic boy/man does not have the subversive power posited by the "mimic man" of postcolonial theory (V.S.

Naipal, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha); his mimicry is purely imitative and dead, without

Homi Bhabha's "representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal"

(122). Rodriguez represents his early self as friable, absorbed by Western literature and education, rather than creatively absorbing it. His impersonation, unlike Bhabha's articulation of mimicry, is not "a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power" (Bhabha 122). Rather, it is a brittle conversion to American ways that, rather than engendering power, engenders the contempt of others because it is seen as fraudulent: the scholarship boy's listeners

"smile—their look one of disdain" (Hunger 66). But this is because the mimic man in

Hunger represents Rodriguez's undeveloped self. Rodriguez's mature self is represented by his autobiographical persona—the narrator—who can look back with a kind of removed embarrassment and pity at the scholarship boy. Rodriguez's narrator—with the cool irony of the pastoral's aristocrat looking down/back at the simple peasants—looks down/back at his earlier peasant self. Thus, the mature autobiographical persona/narrator of Hunger inhabits some of the subaltern's power, but it is the power to rhetorically consume and convert (through the absorption of culture), rather than to defy and oppose.

This persona first appears in the opening of Hunger, where Rodriguez writes, "I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle"

(3). In introducing Shakespeare's character Caliban from The Tempest, Rodriguez opens a volatile subject without acknowledging its volatility. Caliban has become a central 189 figure in postcolonial revisionism, representing the resistant subaltern who fights both for power and against the perception of his baseness. According to Raymund Paredes and Jose David Saldivar, Rodriguez's figuration of Caliban stealing his master's books as a trope for his own development from a working-class Mexican American into the public intellectual is a toothless one. Paredes and Saldivar see Rodriguez's reference to

Caliban as promising the subversive power that Caliban embodies in Calibanic revisionist writers who rewrite Shakespeare's Tempest from the "colonialist subject's standpoint" (Saldivar, "School" 298).4 But Rodriguez disappoints this promise by not following the expected model of identification with the disgruntled subaltern position:

"Richard Rodriguez is not a Calibanic protagonist in [George] Lamming's, [Aime]

Cesaire's, and Fernandez Retamar's sense; rather, he has become, in Renato Rosaldo's words, 'an icon of collaboration with the English-only movement and the conservative right wing' [28]" (Saldivar, "School" 308). Both Paredes and Saldivar are upset by what they consider Rodriguez's misappropriation of this symbol of subversive power. Paredes writes that Rodriguez "seems to be aligning himself with the revisionist interpreters of

Caliban" but "reveals himself to be neither a revisionist critic nor a defiant Caliban"

(291), while Saldivar prickles over the fact that Rodriguez only "pretends to join

Caliban's school of cultural resistance" (306) and in fact does the opposite by submitting to the dominant culture. Even more telling is Paredes's anxiety that Rodriguez is

"willfully disconnected" from postcolonial theory: "The problem is not so much that

Rodriguez fails to embrace this body of work but that he seems indifferent to its existence" (294).

Chicano critics such as Paredes and Saldivar feel betrayed because Rodriguez refuses to participate in the expected arguments that would ground him in the history of 190 the oppression of his people. In 2004, Rolando Romero joined this critique of

Rodriguez's putative misappropriation of Caliban. Romero claims that Rodriguez uses

Caliban metaphorically, "not in the finger-pointing mode of Roberto Fernandez Retamar but in a white man's burden way" (457). Romero goes on to complain that "[t]he calibanic mode in Rodriguez deceives, arrests, lures into a resolution that is nothing but an agreement with the status quo" (457). In reading Shakespeare without intervention from postcolonial theory, Rodriguez becomes somehow deceptive, a pretender. But why cannot Rodriguez claim and absorb Caliban in his own fashion, without the intercession of postcolonial theory?

Paredes and Saldivar's essays both appeared in the 1992 anthology, Multicultural

Autobiography, and thus they just miss commenting on Rodriguez's further mention of

Caliban in his 1992 Days of Obligation, mention which might have caused them further irritation. (Although it is worth noting that the publication of Days substantially shifted

Saldivar's and other Chicano critics' view of Rodriguez, who was reassessed as non- essentialist, sympathetic to his Mexican roots, and a new writer of the "border." [See

Jose David Saldivar and Stavans 1997; de Castro 2001]) In Days, Rodriguez writes in reference to the trope of Indians eating the conquistadores with their eyes (to be discussed shortly): "Only Shakespeare understood that Indians have eyes. Shakespeare saw Caliban eyeing his master's books—well, why not his master as well? The same dumb lust" (Days 23). Here, Rodriguez's Caliban is a gay "dumb" Indian lusting after his master; Rodriguez's Caliban swallows not only the master's literature, but also his genitals. While erotic desire for the Other is the controlling motif of Brown, the "eating with the eyes" trope in Days, including this mention of Caliban "eyeing" his master, anticipates Rodriguez's later theme of lustful absorption. 191

In an interview with Hector Torres, Rodriguez says that he identifies with

Caliban, because—like Caliban—he has "stolen" culture:

If you can steal the other's culture, if you can take it, if you can swallow

his langue, if you can learn Japanese, if you can learn French history, if

you can take this, you are going to win. Because the principle of merely

preserving one's culture, which is part of my problem with the Chicano

culture, is that it seems to me to be much too interested in preservation

and not enough in acquisition. Acquisition is the great modern principle.

(176)

Again, the Caliban trope offers a springboard for Rodriguez to describe his sense of omnivorous mastery and triumph as an American—a notion that irritates and puzzles some critics. Rodriguez continues to confound the postcolonial expectation that Caliban be represented in a particular way and by only particular subjects. His own refusal to be absorbed by postcolonial theory and imitate the postcolonial writer's use of Caliban instantiates his own brand of defiance and his insistence that he will absorb, rather than be absorbed.5

In his second book, Days, Rodriguez uses the trope of Mexican Indians eating the conquerors with their eyes, which shows a further development of absorption of rather than by. The book opens with Rodriguez's visit to Mexico, land of his ancestors, and his rumination about Indians and survival, and how Indian-ness matters to his own identity as an American. (This connection to his indigenity links Rodriguez to Acosta, whose Indian-ness makes him like the Panamanian natives. To be [part] Indian, descending from the first peoples of the Americas, serves each writer to construct a solid foundation for identity. For Acosta, Indian-ness importantly informs his Chicanismo; for 192

Rodriguez, Indian-ness is represented as the tenacious portion of Mexican American identity, the will to survive and absorb.) First, Rodriguez sets the Indian in a passive role, to be appropriated by the Spanish: "The Indian stands in the same relationship to modernity as she did to Spain—willing to marry, to breed, to disappear in order to ensure her inclusion in time; refusing to absent herself from the future. The Indian has chosen to survive, to consort with the living, to live in the city, to crawl on her hands and knees, if need be, to Mexico City or L.A." (24). This follows the same logic (in reverse) of the old adage about American Indians: they were too proud to submit to the dominant culture (i.e. intermarry) so they have been decimated. But what seems like passivity, nay even humiliating weakness (crawling on one's hands and knees), turns out to be strength, as Rodriguez's next paragraph makes clear: "I take it as an Indian achievement that I am alive, that I am Catholic, that I speak English, that I am an American. My life began, it did not end, in the sixteenth century" (24). Rodriguez loves paradox; here he commends the Indian's strength, but that strength resides in the Indian willingness to be appropriated by another culture. That appropriation also resulted in miscegenation, which Rodriguez sees as ultimately humane: "The success of Spanish Catholicism in

Mexico resulted in a kind of proof—a profound concession to humanity: the mestizaje"

(20).

But it is not so simple. Next, Rodriguez performs his rhetorical magic: that

Indian achievement has not been its passivity or its receptivity, but in its triumphant ability to morph and survive. Rodriguez looks around him as he negotiates the streets of

Mexico City and realizes that each face looks like his own: "Where, then, is the famous conquistador? We have eaten him, the crowd tells me, we have eaten him with our eyes"

(24). Norma Alarcon explains that Rodriguez is "play[ing] here with a Mexican idiom 193 applied to those that look too directly at another: 'Comerselo con los ojos"' (146). This trope suggests several things at once. To eat the conquistador is to digest him, making the Indian eater the more powerful agent, reversing the usual eating trope of assimilation. Use of the Mexican Spanish idiom here further suggests boldness, even defiance, in the close gaze. Furthermore, the expression includes an "element of desire, of wanting to possess what is watched, in a sexual sense or otherwise, with a more general possessive intent."6

But to eat the colonizer can also be related to transubstantiation during the sacrament of the Eucharist; to eat Jesus' body and blood in the wafer and wine is to take on some of Jesus' mystical power and holiness. While this correlation between eating the conquistadores with the eyes and the Eucharist may seem merely speculation,

Rodriguez asserts linkages between eating the body of Jesus Christ, conversion, and absorption of the Other in an unusual comment during an interview with Paul Crowley:

There may be a feminine impulse within colonial history that we do not

understand. It's not as simple as two males butting heads—one wins, the

other loses. Perhaps there is such a thing as seduction. Conversion.

Perhaps cultures absorb one another. If it is true that the Franciscan padre

forced the Eucharist down the Indian's throat, maybe she forgot to close

her mouth. Maybe she swallowed the Franciscan priest. (260)

Rodriguez refers to the "feminine impulse" that he uses to describe the Catholic

Church's seduction, of not letting go of her people. Thus Rodriguez figures the feminine as tenacious, seductive, and absorbing (for Rodriguez, gender is another essentialism). In this instance the female Indian swallows not only the wafer of Eucharist, but the priest as well, giving substance to Catholicism's hint of cannibalism in the Eucharist and the cannibalism of Caliban (an anagram of cannibal), who lusts after his master (Days 23).

Rodriguez is also furthering here the idea initiated in Days, that the power of the colonized lies in her ability to cannibalize and absorb alterity. In this quotation, conversion is equated with seduction, which again is linked to the larger thesis in Brown where sexual desire is always pushing in the direction away from purity and toward mixture, impurity, and conversion (change). For the Indians to eat the conquistadors, then, suggests that they ingest the power, language, religion, and culture of their

European colonizers and appropriate that power, language, religion, and culture without losing themselves. Moreover, this expression suggests that, rather than submitting sexually to their conquerors, it was the Indians who were the seducers (which accords with some versions of the Malinche story, in which the Indian seductress betrays her people by partnering with Cortes and then shares power with him). Rodriguez asks us to look at contemporary Mexico City from Malinche's eyes:

Look once more at the city from La Malinche's point of view. Mexico is

littered with the shells and skulls of Spain, cathedrals, poems, and the

limbs of orange trees. But everywhere you look in this great museum of

Spain you see living Indians.

Where are the conquistadores? (Days 23)

To eat with one's eyes is to ingest intellectually, aesthetically, and erotically: to swallow the other through a piercing gaze without losing one's self, and to eject the detritus (shells and skulls) while the self lives on. As in the quotation from a recent interview (epigraph one), Rodriguez understands assimilation as absorption of language and culture that supplements rather than replaces, making the subject stronger. 195

Rodriguez announces, after his translation of "comerselo con los ojos," that

Mexico City is "the capital of modernity, for in the sixteenth century, under the tutelage of a curious Indian whore [Malinche], under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven,

Mexico initiated the task of the twenty-first century—the renewal of the old, the known world, through miscegenation" (24-5). Here, absorption is rendered specifically in terms of miscegenation, which can be linked directly to his own claim that he owes his existence to "an Indian achievement" (24): Thus, his life as an English-speaking

Catholic American is owed to the Indian's powerful absorption of European culture and religion, and her willingness to interbreed for the sake of survival.

II. Steadfast Catholic

I still believe you cannot speak more than one language at a time. There's no such thing. It's like being bisexual. You just can't do it. You can perform architecturally. You can perform, but you can't be truly bisexual, you can't be bilingual. There's no such thing. - Richard Rodriguez, Interview with Hector Torres, 2003 (180)

If Rodriguez praises the remarkable ability of his Mexican Indian ancestor to swallow religious alterity through conversion, he is not so sanguine about his own capacity: in fact he is unable to convert (to Protestantism) or deconvert (from

Catholicism) when it comes to his religious faith. Hunger of Memory is a memoir of loss and assimilation: loss of language, culture, family, class, and assimilation to middle- class American life through education. Brown is a celebration of mixing. But in two areas—religion and sexuality—Rodriguez does not, will not, can not mix, convert, or assimilate. (Gender might be considered a third area, because Rodriguez consistently represents the Catholic Church as feminine.) While the quotation from his Torres interview (above) does not mention religion, it nonetheless reflects Rodriguez's 196 commitment to authentic identity: you can "perform" sexually, linguistically, and by extension, religiously—but that performance will not be authentic.

Rodriguez is fascinated by "[b]rown children" with "[m]ixed soul": products of interfaith marriages such as the "young woman from San Jose" who is "the daughter of a

'New York Jew' and an 'Iranian Muslim'" (Brown 202, 203). But while he is fascinated by this phenomenon and sees it as proof of victorious brownness, Rodriguez is himself an upholder of unmixed Catholicism. In other words, his theory applies to others, but in his own life as a homosexual, Rodriguez preserves the purity of his Catholic faith, a faith that will not be compromised by children of potentially mixed religion because it is unlikely that Rodriguez will ever reproduce. This is merely one of the many contradictions within Rodriguez's philosophy of browning.

Rodriguez's commitment to his Catholicism comes through powerfully in

"Credo," the third chapter of Hunger of Memory. Enculturated from birth as a cradle

Catholic, Rodriguez writes, "I was un catolico before I was a Catholic. This is, I acquired my earliest sense of the Church—and my membership in it—through my parents' Mexican Catholicism" (81). But, unlike Acosta's experience of the church,

Rodriguez's Catholicism is described as much more than a set of cultural practices; it is a deeply held faith nurtured first by his Mexican American family and later by his Irish

American nun-teachers. While I emphasize Rodriguez's religion as more than an aspect of culture, I also believe that the early cultural component is key to his preservation of faith; while he is the consummate assimilated American, he also continually reminds us that (his) Catholicism is brown and turning browner, and is a religion ultimately at odds with white American Protestantism (see, particularly, his chapter "The Latin American 197

Novel" in Days). His keeping with the church can be read psychologically as one way to compensate for his betrayal of family and culture.

The visceral experience of childhood Catholicism is a key to Rodriguez's lifelong commitment to the church. Rodriguez's sense that he cannot leave Catholicism, that it is in fact hard-wired into his self, is seeded by these early, primal childhood experiences that are at once visceral, sensual, and aesthetic. In "Credo," Rodriguez describes his immersion in Catholic life during childhood: "Living in a community of shared faith, I enjoyed much more than mere social reenforcement of religious belief.

Experienced continuously in public and private, Catholicism shaped my whole day. It framed my experience of eating and sleeping and washing; it named the season and the hour" (80). It is impossible, in the experience that Rodriguez goes on to describe in detail, to separate religion from culture, or a religious sphere from a secular sphere; religion is culture, and there is nothing outside of religion.

It is not only his parents' beliefs that have penetrated Rodriguez's life; the sensuality and eroticism of the Catholic Church imprint him in deep and exciting ways: the "marriage" of nuns to Christ, the suffering of St. Sebastian, the dizzying, "mucous perfume of white flowers at the celebration of rebirth" all "touched alive some very private sexual excitement; it pronounced my sexuality important" (84). Rodriguez admits that "[t]he Church [... ] excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed"

(84).8 Sexuality repressed has a potential to create much more excitement than sexuality openly expressed; this, too, formed the basis of my argument for the reading of The

Autobiography of Malcolm X, where Malcolm's story of pre-conversion sensuality titillates even while it warns. This potential for excitement by repression and reprobation is connected to Rodriguez's rhetorical position as homosexual martyr to love (to be 198 discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter). While he is angry at the church's position on his sexuality, there is also value in the hidden, the mysterious, the repressed, the private, and this adds a frisson to his experience as a sexual transgressor of church doctrine.

The fullness and sensuality of Rodriguez's Catholic experience as a child—at home, school, and church; in his body, intellect, and emotion—informs his sense that this was a non-negotiable, essential part of life: "For non-Catholics, it seemed, there was all white and no yolk" (78). Mary McCarthy, though she left Catholicism during her youth, confirms this vital sensual-aesthetic experience of the Catholic Church in

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood:

Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church

and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the

words of the mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter

lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps,

holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a

saint's picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and

debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of

Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw

myself into it with ardour, this sensuous life.... (xxv-xxvi)

McCarthy's sense of being stamped by this experience of richness, beauty, and ceremony is—like Rodriguez's—considered as beneficial to childhood, even though her later doubts about the existence of God would lead her to atheism.9 Camille Paglia echoes this intransigent (cultural) Catholicism: "I feel I am Italian Catholic in my bones"

(239). Michele Dillon found that lesbian and gay Catholics insisted on their inability to be anything other than Catholic, again, sometimes citing biology. She quotes one

Catholic lesbian who says, "[i]t's like a gene thing. Nobody can take that away and tell me that I'm not" (115).

In "Credo," Rodriguez sees the deficits of non-Catholics in terms of their being cheated of those sensual mysteries: "on Sundays they got all dressed up," he writes,

"only to go to a church where there was no incense, no sacred body and blood, and no confessional box" (78). While the latter part of "Credo" details the change in

Rodriguez's involvement in the Catholic Church as he grew to manhood as paralleling the Catholic Church's changes after Vatican II, he continues to "claim" his Catholicism

(102). He longs for the mystery of Latin liturgy and the paradoxical sense of private communion with other Catholics that the Latin mass facilitated.

Rodriguez's Catholicism is cemented in his second book. In an interview,

Rodriguez says "[m]y most powerful connection to Mexico comes through Catholicism, and so I wrote Days of Obligation, which is really a book about religion and my sense of the tragic in America, a country that does not admit the tragic sense of life. [... ] And many people didn't respond to that book, because who cares about Catholicism and tragedy in a world that's becoming techy-Buddhist?" (qtd. in Wolfe 55). In Days,

Rodriguez makes clear that his loyalty for the Latin mass has much to do with commonality. His argument against bilingualism in schools is modified and extended to apply to the mass; mass held in a variety of languages simply encourages separation of

Catholics and postpones Americanization, while a mass in Latin would extend the

"knowledge of union, the mystical body ofChrisF (italics in original 196). 200

Moreover, much of Rodriguez's affection and loyalty to Catholicism is due to its emphasis on community and the mediation of the priest, as set against the lonely individuality of the Protestant. Rodriguez visualizes the Catholic Church thus:

The prayerful life of the church is a communal achievement, prayer going

on like the tide of the sea. The implication of Catholicism is that man is

powerless alone. Catholicism is a religion of meditation. The Church is

our mother [....] Catholics are children. Catholicism may be

administered by embarrassed, celibate men, but the intuition of

Catholicism is voluptuous, feminine, sure. (Days 181)

Rodriguez continues to be attracted to what he sees as the feminine, communal aspect of

Catholicism not least because he sustained the serious loss of home life when he became a "scholarship boy," as detailed in Hunger, which created a gulf between him and his parents and their culture. In other words, the steadfastness of his Catholicism may be inversely proportionate to what is perceived by many Chicano/as as his lack of loyalty to home, family, language, and culture. Catholicism stands in as an abstract home and mother to Rodriguez who views his alienation from his own Mexican American home as a necessary step in his Americanization.

While Days, as mentioned above, cements Rodriguez's Catholicism in a series of essay reflections (on Mexico, the California Missions, being gay in San Francisco during the era of AIDS), it also captures more fully than Hunger his fascination with Protestant culture. In the penultimate chapter of Days, he considers this fascination and the stronger appeal felt by those Latino Catholics who take the step of converting to Protestantism.

He considers the central attractions of Protestantism for Latino Catholics to be the promise of material success and the quality of optimism and potential symbolized by the 201 empty cross. In Rodriguez's work, remembered childhood experiences often contain the richest translation of feeling, and his attraction for Protestantism is no exception. While the adult Rodriguez writes, after witnessing public confession at an evangelical prayer service, that he is "appalled by the nakedness, the humorlessness, the sweetness of evangelical conversion narratives" (180), his childhood memory of entering an empty

Presbyterian Church relays a different quality of experience:

The room glows with daylight drawn through yellow glass windows.

There are no side altars, no statues. There is a wooden pulpit. And a

table on which stands a plain wooden cross. [... ] This is only a room—a

place of assembly—now empty but for its honeyed light [....] Whereas

my church is never empty so long as the ruby burns in the sanctuary

lamp, but my church is filled with all times and all places. All the same, I

like this plain room, this empty Protestant shell. (181)

Rodriguez likes the empty shell of Protestantism, just as in graduate school he was attracted to a study of the Reformation, Puritans, and Puritan autobiography. Broadly speaking, in Rodriguez's work Puritanism and Protestantism come to represent fiercely individual worship and, by extension, individualism in America. This individualism is always in tension with his ancestral communal Catholicism. Taking liberty with

Rodriguez's egg metaphor, we might imagine pre-reformation Christianity as the whole egg, with the Reformation producing a Protestantism that is like an egg stripped of its rich, nourishing yolk. This explains Rodriguez's consistent sense of there being something missing from Protestantism; it is in fact a religion that is nostalgic for the fullness it once had: "Protestantism [... ] offers a tidy faith, the old way, rural and close, albeit without the sentient authority of velvet and roses. The small Protestant 202 church revives the Catholic memory of the countryside" (198). Rodriguez's steadfast

Catholicism is bound up in this complex web of associations: deep childhood memories, visceral, sensual pleasures, a sense of fullness, and an intellectual justification of the presence of Catholicism against the absence of Protestantism (even though Rodriguez somewhat paradoxically pits an authentic Protestantism against an inauthentic

Catholicism). By extension, the problem with Acosta's childhood experience and the reason he so blithely converted to the Baptist Church, is that he was not bathed in an ethnically rendered, cradle Catholicism as Rodriguez was. His childhood faith is shaky at best, so he forsakes Catholicism for a form of Protestantism. After deconversion, he is attracted to the cultural components of Mexican American Catholicism, and thus is encouraged to go back into the fold in order to solidify his ethnic belonging. We can see from these contrasting experiences of Acosta and Rodriguez, then, that conversion and resistance to conversion have everything to do with cultural context.

III. Lived Religion and "Conversion" of the Church

As I have established, Rodriguez sees his identity as a Catholic as fixed, thus he cannot change himself through conversion to another religion even though Catholicism will not embrace him as a gay man. Because he cannot change his religion, Rodriguez's solution is to change his church. The synthesis or reconciliation of this dialectic in

Rodriguez's work is his recent critique of the Catholic Church in writing and interviews.

While he does not articulate it in these terms, I believe his critique instantiates an attempted conversion of Catholicism through "lived religion" as a gay Catholic. I have made the claim that religious conversion in literary texts is as much the product of social context as it is of revelatory experience; my point here is that social context changes (or converts) institutions as well as people. (Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Rinehart's 203 recent book Converting Culture sets a precedent for the consideration of the

"conversion" of institutions: they devote one section of their anthology to "Converting

Institutions.") Rodriguez and his partner's long and continuing participation in the

Catholic sacraments during weekly mass demonstrates his belonging to the Catholic

Church (email communication November 15,2007), despite the fact that church doctrine rejects his sexual identity. In this way, I argue, religion is performative; Catholicism changes through Rodriguez's participation within the church as a gay man and through his writing about those experiences (his version of "lived religion"), just as the performance of Mexican American folk Catholicism (home altars, emphasis on Our

Lady of Guadalupe) has changed Catholicism over time.

'"Lived religion,' Robert Orsi concedes, "is an awkward neologism," but he likes it "because it recalls the phrase 'lived experience' used by existentialists for men and women 'everywhere where [they are],' as Sartre has written, 'at... work, in [their] home[s], in the street'" (7). His own prime example of lived religion is the everyday miracle of the "Bronx Lourdes," a replication in the North Bronx of the Lourdes grotto, where Catholics come to sample the "precious liquid" which is actually nothing more than New York City tap water (3). This instance of Catholics deciding what they believe is holy through their own practices is an example of lived religion as an appropriation of authority. While the Vatican may scoff at the "holy water" of this faux Lourdes,

Catholics from all over America visit the springs and through their observances grant it a kind of holiness. In this way, religion is performative: if some of the content of

Catholicism resides in the authority of the Magisterium, some of that content must, too reside in what faithful Catholics actually do in their everyday lives. 204

Orsi's example serves as an introduction to my own consideration of Rodriguez's lived religious experience as a gay Catholic. I propose that this experience—but particularly his writing and talking about it—is changing or converting Catholicism. The conversion to be sure is not the stuff of Saul-to-Paul drama, or the quick change of

Vatican II, but rather the slow accretion of marks made by lived religion that shifts patterns of religious practice over time. In some religious traditions, surrender is a valued constituent of conversion, one characterized by "submission] to the authority of a guru, teacher, institution, or other form of authority that will guide the convert's actions, associations, and beliefs" (Rambo 132). I suggest that institutions, too, inevitably submit to conversion by the people simply because institutions cannot control the way that believers interpret, observe, feel, and perform their faith, and it is in this gap between doctrine and lived religion where change occurs, and also where doctrine and tradition are conveyed and disseminated. As Ferraro frames this discrepancy between doctrine and practice, the Catholic Church generates "forms of worship [... ] yet knows not how to sanction [them]" (13). The figure of Juan Soldado (or John Soldier in English) is an excellent example of an unsanctioned form of worship; Soldado has become the saint of illegal border crossings for many Mexican Catholics, protecting the passage of immigrants from Mexico to the U.S. and assisting them with becoming legal

Americans. The worship of saints is foundational to the Catholic faith; however, the church refuses to acknowledge this saint, "overlooking] Soldado in even its most preliminary canonization decisions" (Leon, "Metaphor" 548). The church's neglect of

"Saint" Soldado "has not discouraged Mexican and Chicano devotion to him" (548), which illustrates the fertile gap between church doctrine and lived religion. The change via "lived religion" that I am discussing in relation to Rodriguez has the added authority of literature. Like other Catholic writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Thomas

Merton, Rodriguez changes and even subverts the face of Catholicism through that writing. While papal edicts may not be affected by Rodriguez's writings, readers' perceptions of what it means to be Catholic are changed by his words.

Before moving on to Rodriguez's specific version of conversion of his church, it will be useful to sketch briefly the changes in the Catholic Church in the twentieth century. Vatican II (1962-1965) ushered in an era of dramatic transformation in the church, including the introduction of vernacular mass, an ecumenical posture, and a spirit of worldly engagement (Dolan, In Search 193). That spirit of worldly engagement stimulated further changes: a new commitment to social justice, the inauguration of feminism in the church, and the advent of liberation theology (199,235). Moreover, writes Dolan, there was a new Catholic willingness to practice religion publicly, beginning in the 1960s and increasing in the 1970s and 1980s (204). A post-Vatican II restructuring of the church and an American "democratic impulse" (204) paved the way for "fewer priests and more lay ministers, fewer Mass and sacraments Catholics as well as more dynamic parish communities, widespread dissent on issues of doctrine along with intense commitment to religion" (Dolan 196).

These changes show that while "the Catholic Church presents an image of a divinely prescribed hierarchical institution whose teaching is constant and immutable [..

. ] from an historical perspective it is evident that change in doctrines and practices has been a feature of the church since earliest times" (Dillon 34). Michele Dillon furthermore underscores these changes in the church as always in response to societies' changing contexts: 206

The church hierarchy's emphasis on an immutable tradition obscures the

fact that the church hierarchy redraws the boundaries of Catholicism in

response to changing historical, political, and cultural contexts, and that

in this process it is responsive not only to political elites and anonymous

social forces (e.g., the Enlightenment) but to the circumstances and

traditions of the communities (the laity) that comprise the church. (34-5)

While the changes listed in the previous paragraph suggest that the church is becoming more flexible in the twentieth century in response to society's relative liberalization, some of its shifts represent resistance to change. One current instantiation of that resistance is the seven new sins, unveiled in March 2008, which were supposed to show the relevance of the Catholic Church as it responds to contemporary ethical challenges, such as pollution and drug abuse. However, the inclusion of birth control—a very old taboo—on the list seems to illustrate that the church needs to register anew its continued resistance to widespread use of birth control by Catholics.

As for its doctrine regarding homosexuality, the Catholic Church has moved from what in contemporary America would be considered a tolerant policy on same-sex love to a much more proscriptive and damning attitude. While current Catholic catechism sees homosexual acts as "acts of great depravity," Yale historian John

Boswell's groundbreaking research, published in 1980, showed that the early church

(prior to the fourteenth century) tolerated homosexuality and accepted passionate same- sex friendships (Dillon 37-40; Boswell 200-02). As European society narrowed its views on sexuality, Christianity followed suit (Boswell 127-8). In other words, the church did not initiate the taboo on homosexuality, but followed the mores of contemporary society.

Twentieth-century American Catholicism, then, inherits the anti-homosexual doctrine of early modern Europe, but historical change from liberalism to conservatism shows that—once again—the church can and will change. While attitudes toward homosexuality were overwhelmingly negative during the 1970s and 1980s, a poll published in 2001 shows that, beginning in the early 1990s, "Americans appear to be gradually becoming more accepting of homosexuality, independent of shifts in demographics and cultural ideological beliefs in the population" (Loftus 780). A more recent study (2008) by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that 58 percent of American Catholics "believe society should accept homosexuality"

(Kuruvila). In other words, Catholics, as members of the wider American population, are becoming more liberal in their attitudes toward homosexuality. The church—while recalcitrant on this issue now—may eventually soften in response to its believers, in the same way that it has responded in the past, as Dillon cites, above. This seems to be the expectation implied in Rodriguez's attitude: given time, societal pressure, and the lived experience of Catholics like himself, the church will come around.

The Catholic Church current doctrine deems that homosexuals deserve compassion because they do not choose their sexual orientation but are, rather, victims of it, they are nonetheless "called to chastity," because the only acceptable sexual union is that between married men and women. Article 2359 of the official catechism of the

Roman Catholic Church reads that "By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection"

("Roman").10 In other words, if you are gay in the Catholic Church, you are tolerated, pitied, and expected to renounce your sexuality by living the life of a celibate. Clearly, lived Catholicism cannot be contained by those strictures: there are many publicly homosexual Catholic Americans who are not "chaste," and Rodriguez's position is of course not unprecedented. Numerous books that "break the silence" about gay Catholics as well as gay priests and nuns have been published, among them Donald Boisvert and

Robert Goss's Gay Catholic Priests and Clerical Sexual Misconduct: Breaking the

Silence in 2005, Mark Jordan's The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern

Catholicism in 2002, and Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan's Lesbian Nuns:

Breaking Silence in 1986.

Moreover, DignityUSA is a longstanding group formed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Catholics who are working to maintain their Catholicism and positive sexual identities. Michele Dillon's 1995 study of the Dignity/Boston chapter, formed in

1972 as part of DignityUSA, shows how participants in this group "rework

[Catholicism's] sacramental rituals in ways that affirm the validity of a gay or lesbian

Catholicism" (116). The group is not allowed to use Catholic Church facilities, so they use a Protestant church to hold weekly mass (117), presided over by gay Catholic priests, some of whom have been prohibited by church authorities to celebrate mass because of their public homosexuality (132). What is striking about Dillon's findings is that the majority of these participants, like Rodriguez, feel a biological compulsion to remain Catholic; they feel that Catholicism is an essential(ized) part of their identities just as their sexuality is. Despite the fact that the homophobic church will not sanction their "lifestyle," they insist on belonging to the "larger culture, history, and tradition of

Catholicism" (118).

Dillon specifically cites the importance of Catholicism for this group as a

"community of religious memory" (123); in other words, formative childhood experiences are the girders that keep members connected to this institution that persists in seeing them as outside its margins. (Actual childhood memories are distinct from the multicultural trope of memory wherein one "remembers" the religion of the ancestors even though one has not experienced it. Anzaldua's connection to the Aztec religion is one example of this.) The Dignity/Boston group, then, is a microcosm of American

Catholic gays and lesbians who are in the continual process of forging new identities that combine a connection to ancestral Catholicism with an affirmation of their sexuality. As Dillon points out, their ability to do so rests partly on the malleability of religious symbols; while keeping the traditional Sunday mass, Dignity/Boston priests and churchgoers work "innovatively [... ] with and around the traditional Mass liturgy"

(133), adding an emphasis on the value of participants ("I am worthy" instead of "I am unworthy"), and referring to "Christ's gay and lesbian brothers and sisters" (133). In doing so, they are creating an alternative "body of Christ," as the original body excludes them.11

But Rodriguez is different from lesbian nuns and gay priests, as well as from

Courage and Dignity members. He does not want to remain chaste, create an alternative

"body of Christ," nor change the liturgy (except, perhaps, back to Latin). Neither does he wish to claim that he is "worthy." In fact, he embraces the notion that the Catholic

Church is for sinners, losers, and the unworthy. He attends mass at a "regular" church every Sunday with his male partner. What he does want to do, and is doing, is to insist that he—as a homosexual man—is a legitimate member of the church and will continue to be a member, despite the church's decree that he is somehow depraved.

But Rodriguez has not always represented himself as such. In Hunger, he largely elides discussion of his adult sexuality. In Days he offers hints about his homosexuality

(in the chapter "Late Victorians" about the San Francisco gay community), but it is 210 during interviews in the late 1990s and in Brown where Rodriguez finally voices his dissent as a gay Catholic. In the Crowley interview published in 1997, Rodriguez uses as the "moral example" of a good Catholic, his gay neighbour, a retired Navy officer, who smokes, drinks, and frequents gay bars, but also drives old ladies to church and "visits the sick, takes Communion to them" (263). This man is the real substance of the church, even while his presence "the Church will not accept officially" (263). Rodriguez goes on to elaborate how people change the church:

I accept the fact that the Church, as an institution, is conservative—by

definition resistant to change. But what that means is that the agents for

change and growth in the church are always the people in the pews, not

the cardinals in their silk shrouds. The shepherd is moved by the sheep,

even the sinner within the flock. (264)

While this interview, over a decade old, shows Rodriguez's commitment to change from within the church, he seems still unwilling to step into the role of the one who enacts change. It is with the publication of Brown, and his public appearances surrounding and following that book, that Rodriguez and his partner are embodied as agents of change; the sinful, gay ex-Navy officer disappears and it is Rodriguez's lover who gives communion to the sick and the old (see epigraph).

Near the close of Brown, Rodriguez importantly describes the tension between being gay and being Catholic. First, he notes that to be a gay Catholic is often viewed as paradoxical, or somehow inauthentic:

I am often enough asked how it is I call myself a gay Catholic. A

paradox? Does the question betray a misunderstanding of both states? No,

not really. What you are asking is how can I be an upstanding one and the 211

other. When you slice an avocado, the pit has to go with one side or the

other, doesn't it? Weighting one side or the other. A question about the

authenticity of the soul, I suppose. Or the wishbone—some little tug-of-

war; some tension. (224)

He then goes on to write that he has come to depend on that tension. This irreconcilability is itself a part of his identity, constituting what he thinks of as brownness. He writes that he was born Catholic, then asks, "Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay" (224). Thus, to be born both gay and

Catholic means that Rodriguez must daily embody this brown contradiction. But the contradiction is not in his identity—it is in his belonging to a church that cannot embrace that identity.

And embodying this contradiction makes Rodriguez angry. He reveals in a 2002 interview that he wrote part of Brown "in great anger against the Church, which describes my own love as a vanity. At the very end of the book I describe being in bed with a man whom I would die for, a man whom I have lived with for over twenty-five years and who distributes communion to the elderly and the dying. He is as good a man as I can imagine. I am in a rage precisely because the Church is more easy with crimes of hatred than with what he does" (qtd. in Wolfe 60). On the last page of Brown,

Rodriguez eloquently expresses that aforementioned anger at the church when he ponders the magisterial teaching that his love for his male partner is mere "vanity":

[R]age fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself

comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend,

against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for

myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to 212

understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love

breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the

dark, even before the birds cry. (230)

Thus, the powerful closing of this book is an anguished cry about compromised identity, and speaks to what I mean by Rodriguez's conversion of the church. Through his admission of suffering and living paradox, Rodriguez marks Catholicism by refusing to be contained by the church's teaching that he remain celibate, thus becoming a martyr to the principle of love.

IV. Rodriguez as Martyr

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert points out that Rodriguez sets himself up as a martyr figure both in Hunger and in Days. Rodriguez, "metaphorically flagellated through confession and invoking the mea culpas necessary for absolution, is but an adult version of the child who would 'study pictures of martyrs—white-robed virgins fallen in death and the young, almost smiling, St. Sebastian, transfigured in pain' [84]—martyred, but ultimately triumphant" (87). Paravisini-Gebert here suggests that Rodriguez's martyrdom stems from his Catholicism, and becomes most pronounced in Days when he figures AIDs victims as the "collective martyred body," confirming his "philosophy of life rooted in a Catholic upbringing" (88). Paravisini-Gebert's essay appeared before the publication of Brown; thus her own understanding of Rodriguez the gay Catholic rests on his persona in Days, that of the outsider, expelled from the Garden of Eden because of his sexual transgression: "I, barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the early paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew" (qtd. in Paravisini-Gebert 88; Days 47). 213

That image from Days is countered by the closing scene in Brown, just discussed, where Rodriguez is in bed with his lover, raging at the absurdity of a church that worries more about "crimes" of love than those of hate. These contrasting images register a movement in the two texts: first, homosexuality is figured as a site of sin and barrenness in the eyes of Rodriguez's church, and the hardness of his tailbone against the hardness of the pew suggests not only the unyielding nature of Catholic doctrine, but also Rodriguez's alienated discomfort. He is "barren" and alone. At the end of Brown,

Rodriguez lies in the comfort of pre-dawn bed, "listening] to the breathing of the man lying beside me" (229). He continues to position himself as a martyr because he insists on loyalty to the higher principle of love, which the institution has betrayed. However, he is no longer the lone man on a church pew, but is lying with the man he loves, and thus speaking from the place of his own vulnerability and—paradoxically—power. In the first instance, he sees himself as transgressor of his church; in the second, he sees the church as transgressing his humanity. To be sinned against places Rodriguez in a more powerful position as martyr than his former position in Days as sinner. His writing then, moves in rhetorical succession that builds the case of the Catholic homosexual martyr, from his childhood sensual appreciation of "the young, almost smiling, St. Sebastian, transfigured in pain" {Hunger 84), to the "barren skeptic" on the "cold, hard pew" {Days

47), to the sexually and emotionally fulfilled, yet angry and vulnerable man in bed with his male lover, sinned against by a recalcitrant Catholic Church that preaches love and is yet blind to it.

In a 2007 interview with Mary Ambrose, Rodriguez again affirmed that it is better to articulate one's belief within the uneasy confines of an imperfect church, than to shout from outside of it: 214

I find that in the struggle over abortion, gay marriage, the churches have

taken the negative stance in their institutional life. But I find them very

consoling. There is much in Christianity that I use, steal, learn from,

borrow, depend upon. Its inability to teach me about my experience of

love is insufficient for me to walk away from it.

In some way the people in the pew teach the priest—the Church—what it

means to love. The left, like spoiled children, having been accused of

being sinful by the Church, they decide the Church is really sinful. That's

not useful. More useful is to spend a life of service to a Church that is not

easily yours. ("Mystery")

Here, Rodriguez returns to a theme from the 1997 interview, that the sheep can move the shepherd, as well as to his claim that—regardless of its infelicities—he can never leave the church. "I would very much like to be able, as many Americans do, to choose my way out of Catholicism, but I can't," said Rodriguez in 2002. "I consider my

Catholicism to be a providential gift, and I don't feel it is a choice" (qtd. in Wolfe 61).

As we have seen, Rodriguez views conversion as the absorption of the Other, and thus as a way of subsuming the power of alterity without losing the self. In the same way, Rodriguez subsumes the power of Catholicism—"There is much in Christianity that I use, steal, learn from, borrow, depend upon"—but retains his own power as a gay man and as a writer. In other words, while martyrdom may be psychologically distasteful, it is well to remember that Rodriguez is first and foremost a skilled essayist, and that martyrdom and sainthood are two pillars of Catholic ideology. The way that

Rodriguez has positioned himself as more sinned against than sinning is a profoundly strategic move from a consummate rhetorician; by placing his valuation of God's universal love as superior to the church's outdated doctrine about homosexuality, he portrays himself as more sophisticated, humane, and intelligent than the church fathers.

In this way, he may well be compared to Luther, and his impulses thus might be seen as

Protestant in nature (with the emphasis on the "protest" in Protestant).

I have argued previously that conversion can be a negative dissolution of self.

But when religion has so captured its believers that they imagine they are genetically

Catholic, even when they are condemned by their own church, then it would seem that conversion to another religion might be a positive move: conversion could eradicate censure and actively bring about a sense of self approval. Rodriguez's resistance to conversion and his attempt to "convert" a powerful institution that refuses to accept him illustrates a broader trouble with religion (its indoctrinatory force) rather than just the trouble with conversion. Rodriguez frequently acknowledges the many gifts that

Catholicism has given him—both aesthetic and philosophical. He feels not only sinned against by the church, but writes movingly about how his life has been enriched by his faith. Nonetheless, Rodriguez's situation exemplifies the tremendous social and cultural power of religion, a power grounded—for many ethnic Catholics—in biology and ethnicity. Here Rodriguez and Acosta—vastly different writers—are alike, because it is the traditional church of their culture that holds them. Acosta's biological pull is back to the church via brown sexuality (sex with Chicanas), while Rodriguez's "brown"

(homo)sexuality creates a rift between him and the church. Yet for both, conversion to

Protestantism is unworkable.

The contradictions in Rodriguez's philosophy may point to his own discomfort with religion's tremendous social power, and I close this chapter by turning to Rodriguez's rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe story as an illustration of this discomfort. In Days, Rodriguez spends several pages narrating his own poetic and romanticized version of the Virgin myth to his Anglo friend, Lynn, over a "very late lunch" (16). In 1531, the Mexican Indians were "demoralized by the routing of their gods" when Juan Diego climbed Tepayac Hill and heard a woman's voice calling him:

""Juan crossed himself, he fell to his knees, /He covered his eyes and prepared to be blinded" (17). Lapsing into poetry, Rodriguez here uses the road to Damascus trope of the light blinding Saul's eyes. After his miraculous experience face to face with the

Virgin, who spoke to him in "Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue" (18), Juan makes a trip to the

Bishop of Mexico. When Juan must prove to the Bishop that he has seen the Virgin on the Hill, he collects "Castilian roses," which are "impossible in Mexico in December of

1531," and before the Bishop, he "parts his cloak, the roses tumble; the bishop falls to his knees" (19). "The legend concludes," Rodriguez writes, "with a concession to humanity—proof more durable than roses—the imprint of the Virgin's image upon the cloak of Juan Diego" (19). We sense Rodriguez's pleasure in the beauty and mystery of the story.

But Rodriguez's listener, Lynn, is less than delighted. She calls this story, which led to the mass conversion of Indians to Catholicism, a "Spanish trick" and a

"recruitment poster for the new religion" (19). Rodriguez responds: "Why do we assume

Spain made up the story? The importance of the story is that Indians believed it" (19).

For Rodriguez, this is the inaugural moment of the browning of Catholicism, and he loves the tale because it instantiates his theory of the absorption of culture. And yet the gullibility of the Indians (they "believed it") nudges us to consider another way of

"swallowing" culture: "swallowing" a tall tale empties the agency and power meant to 217 embody Rodriguez's original trope of swallowing culture. For all of his romanticizing of the Virgin tale and the mass conversion of the Indians to Catholicism that resulted from it, Rodriguez is painfully aware that this religion that his forbears swallowed is the same religion that brands his sexuality a "moral depravity." He has made absorption a beautiful, powerful trope in his oeuvre, and yet sometimes he hints to his reader that he would like to halt this inevitable "swallowing" of the other's culture and religion. What if, for example (and this is my question, not Rodriguez's), the Indians had been more like the Chinese, and resisted Christian attempts at conversion? (Rambo 36). A hint of

Rodriguez's desire for agency comes through hauntingly in the Wolfe interview, when he mourns his lack of control: "I would very much like to be able, as many Americans do, to choose my way out of Catholicism, but I can't" (qtd. in Wolfe 61). In the sixteenth century, overbearing social forces pushed Indians into Catholicism, and in the twentieth century, those same forces impel Rodriguez to stick with his historical religion. Even in the midst of his celebration of faith, Rodriguez gives us evidence of his own awareness of the trouble with conversion, and by extension, the trouble with religion. 218

Conclusion: The Trouble with Conversion is the Trouble with Religion

[Virtually no one in the United States understands the war against terrorism as a war against Islam; indeed, no one really thinks of Islam, or any other religion, as a set of beliefs in the same way that communism was. We treat religion on the model of a culture, which is to say, we treat people who belong to other religions not as if they have false beliefs but as if they have different identities. Religious belief as belief—which would require a commitment on the part of people who didn't believe in Islam to the idea that people who did believe in Islam were mistaken—is replaced by religion as a kind of identity, from which standpoint, people who believe differently are treated as people who are different.12 Their religious convictions are redescribed as expressions of their culture, like an ethnic cuisine or, if we want a less trivial but equally disabling example, like a language. Languages are neither true nor false, and if we treat religions like language, then we will regard them too as neither true nor false, just different. - Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 2004 (170-1)

I have argued that the trouble with both conversion and the resistance to conversion is that these phenomena are socially and culturally determined in ways that we continue to ignore, in criticism and in life. Kimberly Rae Connor renders African

American female writers' search for identity as religious experience: "Through conversion they have sought not only spiritual empowerment through redemption by

God but self-empowerment by affirming qualities of selfhood and womanhood and claiming them as sacred" (4). Lewis Rambo writes that religious conversion offers "the kind of meaningfulness associated with new life, new love, new beginnings," and he calls the need for renewal "innate" and "universal" (4). But the problem with conflating religious conversion with the normative identity crises that occur regularly both in real life journeys and in literature is that religious conversion then becomes naturalized: it is considered as merely one flavour of the many kinds of conversion that life entails.

However, the examples of the three resistant, inauthentic converts that I used in my introduction—James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright— 219 instantiate the abnormality, even aberrance, of religious conversion. When communities or cultures insist on religious conversion as initiation for membership, conversion can be viewed as a much more negative phenomenon than the normative, positive one presented by Connor.

My work has been to detect occurrences of conversion or experiences of religion where the expected process of self-doubt to harmony, or the expected state of harmony

(Rodriguez) is marred or torqued by societal and cultural expectation. In the autobiographies I study, ancestral loyalty and the need for social belonging trump both the expected sense of personal epiphany and the truth requirements of religion. The difficulties around conversion for the African American and Mexican American autobiographers I examine is part of a larger trouble with religion in multicultural

America, where religion has become cultural badge or treated as biological necessity, regardless of its harm, repression, or truth value. The significance of this is that religions attached so muscularly to culture, and thus prized as merely aspects of multiculturalism, are rarely examined and criticized as belief systems.

Gloria Anzaldua's text Borderlands/La Frontera functions as a suitable cap to this study's examination of the social frame of religious experience in twentieth-century ethnic American autobiography because it provides a good example of multiculturalism's move toward religion treated as cultural identity. Anzaldiia performs a conversion back to the pagan religion of her Mexican Indian forbears, the Aztecs.

Configuring Mexican American religion as a palimpsest, with Aztec deities, belief, and rituals pushing up through history and informing Catholic beliefs, she writes that "[i]n the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Central and South America the indio and the mestizo continue to worship the old spirit entities (including Guadalupe) and their supernatural 220 power, under the guise of Christian saints" (31). Anzaldua renders the continuity and sacredness of ancestral belief very personal in her chapters 3 and 4, "Entering into the

Serpent" and "The Coatlicue State." In chapter 3, she shows how the folk Catholicism of her family encouraged her interest and devotion to Coatlicue, or "Serpent Skirt," a

Mesoamerican fertility/Earth goddess with "a human skull or serpent for a head, a necklace of human hearts, a skirt of twisted serpents and taloned feet" (27). Anzaldua explains that Coatlicue is the earliest goddess in a linking chain of female serpent figures: Coatlalopeuh, Tonantsi, and—surprisingly—la Virgen de Guadalupe.

According to Anzaldua, Guadalupe's name was homophonous with Coatlalopueh; thus colonizers associated her with the "patroness of West Central Spain" (29) and she became an aspect of the Catholic Virgen of Guadalupe. Despite differences in the serpent figures, Anzaldua seems to be proposing a continuity of belief from the pre-

Columbian to the contemporary era, and this continuity of belief and symbol is made visceral in her own experience of the "Coatlicue state," described in chapter 4.

Anzaldua's practice of a living Aztec religion takes the form of her recurring entry into the "Coatlicue state," a liminal, epiphanic state that allows contact with the pre-Columbian symbol of the serpent: "the symbol of the dark sexual drive, the chthonic

(underworld), the feminine, the serpentine movement of sexuality, of creativity, the basis of all energy and life" (Borderlands 35). Anzaldua uses most of the chapter to describe her adult experiences in the Coatlicue state; however, she introduces her descriptions with the claim, "I was two or three years old the first time Coatlicue visited my psyche, the first time she 'devoured' me (and I 'fell' into the underworld)" (42). This claim is important because it places her belief in Coatlicue well outside of the domain of consent: not only was Anzaldua only a toddler when she first experienced Coatlicue, she 221 was "devoured" by the serpent and "fell" into the state—actions in which her agency is removed. (This image of being devoured by the serpent can be seen in opposition to

Rodriguez's reverse image of the colonized devouring the oppressor's culture.) In this respect, her entry into Coatlicue is very like a Saul-to-Paul conversion both in its dramatic suddenness and its quality of surrender. Anzaldua's conversion is determined by descent: it is the pull of "racial karma" {Interviews 24), ethnic memory, or Jungian archetype—all unconscious forces beyond one's control.13

When we say we believe in something, there is the presumption that we can choose not to believe the same thing. In other words, (religious) belief, unlike other aspects of culture (Sollors' descent versus consent), is usually a package of beliefs and practices that one can negotiate, although we saw in chapter 2 that this "negotiation" is complicated by notions about heredity and religion. Anzaldua implies that her devotion to Aztec gods and rituals—particularly Coatlicue—is part of an Indian genetic blueprint, and is thus beyond her control. She chooses to surrender to what she already is; her mixed Aztec-Mexican-folk Catholic roots are as magnets that pull her back into her religious culture. Like Rodriguez and Acosta, she is compelled toward the religion of her people, though unlike Rodriguez, her compulsion is conceptualized not as the result of cradle enculturation, but of some kind of deeper (imagined) ethnic memory of her Aztec forbears.

This cultural-religious compulsion may seem unremarkable: even if it strikes one at times as fanciful, it is merely consistent with a strategic ethnic essentialism that insists that we be what we already are through genealogy. But Anzaldua's devotion to Aztec deities can be seen as part of a larger post-1960s movement of American multiculturalism that not only carries a "built-in racial prescriptivism" (Douglas 539), 222 but also celebrates religions as aspects of identity, rather than examining them as debatable belief systems. Michaels writes, to repeat a sentence from my epigraph, that

"[ljanguages are neither true nor false, and if we treat religions like language, then we will regard them too as neither true nor false, just different" (171). This sounds acceptable, but when taken to an extreme of celebratory multiculturalism, the idea that religions are merely aspects of identity and not true or false can lead to an illogical cultural relativism. For example, Nicholas Humphrey describes a documentary about

Inca culture shown on American television. The 500-year-old remains of an Inca girl were found in Peru in 1995, and the makers of the documentary proposed that such victims would lovingly choose to sacrifice themselves to their deities. Humphrey writes that television viewers were supposed

to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with

the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been

selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the

television programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice

was in its own way a glorious cultural invention - another jewel in the

crown of multiculturalism, if you like. (305)

Humphrey goes on to express his dismay at this suggestion: "How dare they invite us— in our sitting rooms, watching television—to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder [...] ?" (306). While Anzaldua's descent into the underworld, unlike the valorization of Inca human sacrifice, poses no real moral danger because it is private and non-violent, her suggestion that religion is an essentialized portion of identity can be linked to a web of associated problems. These problems have recently been explored 223 cogently and convincingly by Michaels in The Shape of the Signifier and its sequel, The

Trouble with Diversity.

In The Shape of the Signifier, Michaels argues that contemporary American theory and literature replace ideological difference (what we believe) with cultural difference (who we are), and in doing so, make it possible to view poverty as an identity.

In the final chapter of The Trouble with Diversity, Michaels argues that in America's liberal push to honour "diversity," it treats religions on the "cultural model," as "mere differences in perspective" rather than differences in belief (173). One of the products of this view of multicultural religion (as aspects of identity, they are all equal and deserving of our respect) is that it can foreclose criticism of religious belief because, after all, you should not attack identity. Important to my own study is the point that Michaels makes that when religion is ascribed to identity it is difficult to separate the religion from the person, and thus critique of the religion (or conversion to that religion) ends up looking like criticism of the person's identity.

For example, even though there is proof Malcolm X did not actually believe

Nation of Islam doctrine, he continued as a member of the Nation because that identity served his political purposes for twelve years. But the association with Malcolm and his

Nation identity (masculine, "our own black shining Prince!"14 ascetic, powerful) has meant that critique of the repressed and negative aspects of his Nation identity is rare.

Malcolm's NOI-black nationalist identity becomes sacred, and the beliefs that undergird the religion (for example, Yacub, a mad scientist, created the white race) are obfuscated in the drive to preserve and respect religious difference. Harding has shown that (born- again) believers use belief to fill in gaps: faith is a necessary—not secondary—exercise that smoothes over inconsistencies and subdues questions in order to support doctrine 224 that does not make sense. In other words, religion acts as putty, filling in cracks in credulity. Harding writes that "modern Bible believers effectively and perpetually close the gap [between the language of the Bible and reality] and so generate a world in which their faith is obviously true" (272). Similarly, Malcolm and Acosta each for a time

"generate [d] a world in which their faith is obviously true" (Harding 272) in order to identify with a coherent social order. Framed this way, religious belief is no longer debatable, but rather an integral and unquestioned aspect of identity.

Religion as identity produces a blind spot in the literature and criticism. That blind spot is evident in Connor's book, where Zora Neale Hurston is seen as a willing and positive convert to Christianity, even while Hurston's own words contradict this view. Thus, literary studies has been seduced by the dictates of multicultural relativism: we not only respect but celebrate cultural difference, including religious difference, even if religious difference conceals untenable beliefs and practices such as unhealthy asceticism, homophobia, and misogyny.

Like religion in general, conversion is largely determined by social and cultural forces. Converts are always limited by the religions at hand. Despite our language of consent and choice, there is no social framework that would allow Malcolm to become a

Mormon, Acosta a Buddhist, Baraka a Jew, or Rodriguez a Hindu. The range of religious choices is always historically, socially, and geographically determined. I have shown in this study that what we might expect to be at least partially the result of a turn toward a new (truer, better) set of beliefs is actually more a turn toward attempted political, cultural, or social cohesion. Thus, Michaels' critique of a cultural relativism that treats ideological difference as cultural difference is partly off the mark; often my writers turn or return to religions not because they subscribe to their belief systems or 225 ideology, but because the cloak of culture or politics justifies the set of beliefs. Thus,

Michaels does not say (but surely knows) that the reason we treat religion as simply differential aspects of culture is because in many cases what is significant about religions is not their belief systems but the social and political power they shoulder for their particular culture.

Acosta provides a good illustration of the anatomical differences between religion as belief and religion as culture: when he tries on Protestantism in the form of the Baptist faith, I have speculated that he wants to identify with the young white male

Baptists in his community and become an acceptable mate to white Protestant girls, which is of course a social motivation. Acosta, in trying on a new religion, is trying on a new identity. But when his religion does not allow him to penetrate cultural and racial barriers (his fellow Baptists missionaries exclude him), he turns to examine his new religion as a belief system. When Acosta pores over the Synoptic Gospels under the bare light bulb from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock each morning for several months, and finds his religion lacking the truth value he was seeking, he is not being a good multiculturalist.

By understanding religion as system of belief that can be right or wrong, he ignores multiculturalism's precept that religions are simply different, equal, variations of culture rather than truth systems.

However, when he leads other politically motivated Chicano Catholics in the storming of St. Basil's Church, he is not so worried about the truth value of his new

(old) religion: he has already rejected Catholicism and claimed he is neither Catholic nor

Protestant. Thus, his alignment with Catholicism is all about co-opting the identity of the

Chicano folk Catholic for political, cultural, and even business purposes (Acosta includes an image of Huitzilopochtli on his new business cards). His involvement with 226

Catolicos por la Raza becomes an entree back into Mexican American culture and group identity, rather than the adoption of a set of religious beliefs. After his initial involvement with the Catolicos Acosta writes,

I haven't thought of myself as a member of a group since I was with the

Baptists in 1956. A dozen years have come and gone. I realize I've hardly

even spoken to anyone in Spanish since I left Panama. All through

schools, jobs and bumming, I haven't even held the hand of a Mexican

woman, excepting whores who are all the same anyhow. {Revolt 28-9)

Thus, the St. Basil's episode acts as a catalyst for a series of changes in Acosta's life that brings him back into the cultural fold. It is easy to see why religion might be seen as simply a system of equal differences (not true or false), like language or food, because so often its truth value is irrelevant; cultural and social power draws or repels followers.

Similarly, there is evidence that Malcolm X shed belief in the Nation's religious doctrine early on in his tenure as a leader in the Nation. But he kept to the ways of the group, knowing that the Nation provided, in the guise of religion, a powerful vehicle for black emancipation and autonomy. Again, truth value is moot: what was important for

Malcolm were the political and social changes the Nation helped him to accomplish.

When I argue that his autobiography reveals the detrimental effects of sticking with the

NOI's repressive religion, it is with the understanding that social and political thought often seem inseparable from religious belief. It was no easy accomplishment for

Malcolm to drop his membership in the Nation and switch to Sunni Islam; in fact, this switch probably cost him his life.

Thus, my critique of the trouble with conversion is always undergirded with recognition that religious conversion and religion are often vehicles for other discourses. 227

In The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones, we saw that Baraka's commitment to black poverty as an identity looked a great deal like a neo-Puritan essentialism. In fact, discourses of authenticity and essentialism are often embedded in religious doctrine and belief—Nation of Islam is the true religion of the black man, only the elect (authentic believer) shall be saved, Catholicism is in my genes—and these discourses frequently overlap with cultural politics.

For all four of the writers I discuss, race and culture determine religion. Such determinism occludes choice and, by extension, precludes debates about truth (how can a race or culture be true or false?). Sollors writes that the language of consent "stresses our abilities as mature free agents and 'architects of our fates' to choose our spouses, our destinies, and our political systems" (Beyond 6). While religions as systems of belief would seem to belong to the arena of consent, religions as embedded in culture seem, rather, to belong to the arena of descent, which comprises relationships of "blood or nature" (6). Religion and, by extension, conversion, are of course complex combinations of the forces of consent and descent, and to make a prescriptive argument that all religion and conversion should be consensual is of course both ridiculous and reductive.

But when religion becomes who we are, it leaves the sphere of debatable beliefs, and becomes a part of the untouchable arena of cultural identity. This is the point that

Michaels makes in both of his recent books: we have entered a realm where ways of being (ontology) have replaced ways of believing (ideology).

Consider Rodriguez. He is a sophisticated thinker and writer who constantly exercises life and belief choices, stresses his own agency, and makes claims about the relative fluidity of identity (for example, he rejected academic jobs because they would limit his freedom to choose his identity as non-Chicano). So there is something sobering about the fact that Rodriguez, a man with much authority in his writing, seems strangely trapped by his church: "I would very much like to be able, as many Americans do, to choose my way out of Catholicism, but I can't" (qtd. in Wolfe 61). While I have argued that he is doing what he can to change Catholicism through observances and writing, he cannot step away from it, which would be the most adamant statement of belief.

Rodriguez is under the sway of the seductive "female" church, and—to borrow his own imagery—she has swallowed him. When Rodriguez writes or talks about his

Catholicism, it seems to me to be slightly out of character, because in this one area a man in control has surrendered control of his life. He disagrees profoundly with his religion on an issue central to his own life (homosexuality), and yet he finds it impossible to leave the fold.

Throughout this project, I have registered religion and conversion's seductive social and cultural forces, and multiculturalism's treatment of religion as identity.

However, I wish to end on a softer note, by borrowing Zora Neale Hurston's generous words as my final ones: "It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me" {Dust Tracks

226). Notes

Notes to Introduction

1 When I use the term "ethnic," as I do throughout to apply to both Mexican

American and African American subjects, I do so with an awareness of the ongoing difficulties that arise from terminology to describe minority groups in the United States.

A recent volume edited by Jorge J.E. Gracia, Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino

Identity, wrestles with the viability of the terms of race and ethnicity, and the practical and philosophical difficulties that arise from the fact that "we have no effective critieria to establish membership in races or ethne" (3). However, writers need to carve out the definitions they will be working with, so I choose to use ethnic, partly because it seems to me to be not as fraught as and more capacious than "race." Yet phenotype is at stake: to put it crudely, Acosta, Rodriguez, Malcolm X, and Baraka each self-identify as men of "colour," as black and brown males. Malcolm and Baraka were, for a time, black nationalists; Acosta's wish to assimilate as a teenager had much to do with his brown skin and his later identification as "Brown Buffalo" has much to do with brownness;

Rodriguez writes feelingly about his skin colour in "Complexion," a chapter in Hunger of Memory. For all of my writers, then, construction of identity is based strongly on physiognomy and the experiences of oppression and otherness resulting from racial designation. Skin colour speaks meaningfully and often in their autobiographies. Yet to describe these writers only in terms of race, even in its fullest meaning as in Omi and

Winant's socially, culturally, and politically constituted "racial formation," is to miss the capacious, umbrella-ness of a term like "ethnicity," despite its messiness and etymological baggage (as Werner Sollors reminds us, the Greek ethnikos meant 230

"gentile" and "heathen"; the root ethnos refers to "others" [Beyond 25]). Ethnic, for my purposes, is a "catch-all" term (Franco 20) that refers primarily to contingent group self- identification, and as such can cut across or include terms of nation, race, politics, and culture.

2 There are, of course, exceptions to this expected movement. Two that come to mind are Church of Christ converts, who—according to Lewis Rambo—are expected to experience a "coming to brokenness" when they convert, "which involves incorporating a keen sense of personal sinfulness and corruption, an individual acknowledgement of responsibility for sin, and an awareness that sin caused the death of Jesus on the cross"

(71-2). American Puritan conversion was also a movement fraught with negative emotion: it brought the convert to a state of prolonged uncertainty (hardly a comfortable position), because to be too certain of salvation was evidence that you were not actually saved. Converts eventually come to a state of "assurance," but that was followed by an

"Evangelicall sorrow" or "a grief for sin, because it is sin" (Morgan, Visible 69).

3 For more on both the negative and positive impact of Nation of Islam and Sunni

Islam on African American women, see Sonsyrea Tate, Little X: Growing up in the

Nation of Islam (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997). Also see "The

Quest for Peace in Submission: Reflections on the Journey of American Women

Converts to Islam" by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and "African American Islam as an

Expression of Converts' Religious Faith and Nationalist Dreams and Ambitions" by

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, both in Women Embracing Islam: Gender and

Conversion in the West, ed. Karin van Nieuwkerk (Austin, Texas: University of Texas

Press, 2006) 19-47, and 172-91. 231

4 Hurston's protest that religion is suitable for others but not for her is reminiscent of similar comments made by an earlier ethnic American autobiographer, Mary Antin

(1881-1949) in The Promised Land (1912). Antin describes how she was left to her own devices as a Russian Jewish immigrant teenager in Boston while her parents struggled to support their large family. She frequently attended entertainment shows put on at the local Protestant Church, which were mounted with the ultimate goal of proselytizing and converting attendees. Antin had discarded the strict Jewish laws and religious beliefs of her family as part of her assimilation to American life (which, by the way, is contrary to

Will Herberg's assessment of religion being the one aspect of culture not given up by the immigrant). She is not taken in by the pastor's guile: "An uncompromising atheist, such as I was at the age of fourteen, was bound to scorn all those who sought to implant religion in their fellow men, and thereby prolong the reign of superstition" (268). But

Brother Hotchkins, she notes one paragraph later, was only trying to "appl[y] soap and water in his own way" to the tenement dwellers of Boston, and she gives him his due:

"Brother Hotchkins must pray, and I must bear witness, and another must nurse a feeble infant. We are all honest workmen, and deserve standing-room in the workshop of sweating humanity" (269-70). Thus, like Hurston, Antin does not finally begrudge others their religiosity, but asserts it is not necessary for her own happiness. (Antin shares something else with Hurston: they both attended Barnard College.)

Autobiography is an inherently unstable genre, and its truth claims are always suspect, due to the writer's subjectivity, memory's unreliability, and the autobiographer's rhetorical and creative aims, which may entail omissions, embellishments, and transformations of the "truth." See particularly Timothy Dow 232

Adams's Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1990). A. Robert Lee wonders if it can be "doubted that autobiography works always as its own species of fiction, persona as much as person, conjuration as much as actuality?" (Multicultural 38).

6 Robert Hemenway, Hurston's first biographer, claims that Dust Tracks is a book of complex contradictions and omissions for two central reasons. First, Hurston was constrained by the demands of her publishers and editors at wartime; her criticisms of

American politics were omitted or muted from early manuscripts. Second, Hurston struggled between two autobiographical personas: the representative voice of the

African American "folk" that she celebrated in her novels and ethnography, and the voice of an Barnard-educated, singular, black American woman and anthropologist. The product, according to Hemenway, is "an autobiography at war with itself (277-8).

While my choice of three early African American autobiographers to the exclusion of early Mexican American autobiographers may seem to unbalance my study, my justification for this exclusion is that there are really no analogous early Mexican

American examples. Genero Padilla's research shows that early Mexican American autobiography has been viewed in the context of social history rather than as the autobiographical products of individuals. The reasons for this are complex and many, but three salient differences between African American and Mexican American literary history are first, that Mexican American literary history is truncated (dating from the

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) compared to African American literary history (the earliest published slave narratives date from the late eighteenth century). Second,

Mexican American autobiographical narratives have often gone unpublished, unlike 233

their counterpart slave narratives that were frequently published to advocate for the abolition of slavery. Finally, autobiography has come to be considered a primary genre for African Americans, due in part to its long history and its importance in establishing

African American identity and literature. Individual conversion experiences recorded in autobiographical texts are thus more frequent in African American narratives—in part because of the greater numbers of narratives—and are correspondingly rare or absent in early Mexican American texts.

8 James Baldwin is another African American autobiographer who rejected the black

Christian church of his upbringing. His attitudes about religion and his experience as a child preacher are described in the semi-autobiographical Go Tell it on the Mountain

(1953) and the autobiographical The Fire Next Time (1962). In the latter book, Baldwin calls his stint as a preacher the "gimmick" (24) that kept him off the streets, and claims that his discovery of Dostoevski and study of the Gospels in high school made him an unbeliever (34-5). He notes, furthermore, the hypocrisy and limitations of the church; it

"was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy

Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door" (39-40).

9 See Sidonie Smith's chapter on Malcolm X in Where I'm Bound: Patterns of

Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut:

Greenwood Press, 1974) and Carol Ohmann, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X: A

Revolutionary Use of the Franklin Tradition," American Quarterly 22 (1970): 131-49.

See also Mark A. Sanders, "Theorizing the Collaborative Self: The Dynamics of

Contour and Content in the Dictated Autobiography," New Literary History 25.2

(Spring 1994): 445-58. Sanders argues that Haley, rather than Malcolm, molded 234

Malcolm's story to fit the narrative pattern of the American self-made man.

10 See Allen Dwight Callahan's article for an excellent discussion of this dichotomy:

'"Brother Saul': An Ambivalent Witness to Freedom," Semeia 83-84 (1988): 235-50.

11 Lewis Rambo, a leading conversion scholar, has compiled a comprehensive bibliography on conversion studies that can be accessed through his website: http://www.sfts.edu/rambo/Con_Bib_6_4_02.htm

Karl Morrison's work on Augustine's Confessions, Herman-Judah's Short Account of His Own Conversion, and the Dialogues of Constantine Tsatsos, probes the question of ineffability and metaphor in the conversion narrative. He notes that for each of the three narrators he studies "concealment was a condition of the experience and the narrative of conversion," "the hermeneutic project of conversion remained thinkable for them all because of metaphor," and "they took for granted the difference between what was called conversion and a fictive tale about it" (xvii). See Conversion and Text: The

Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1992).

13 Holte followed his 1982 article with two useful "sourcebooks": one about ethnic autobiography and one about religious conversion: The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for the

Study of Ethnic-American Autobiography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) and The

Conversion Experience in America: A Sourcebook on Religious Conversion

Autobiography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). Both of these are important sources in the study of ethnic religious conversion: the book on ethnic American autobiography includes an entry on Malcolm X, and the book on the conversion experience includes listings for Frederick Douglass, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Olaudah Equiano, Malcolm X, 235

Eldridge Cleaver, Black Elk, Piri Thomas, and Nicky Cruz. Neither book, however, focuses specifically on the difficulties and particularities of the ethnic conversion narrative.

See James Robert Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives

(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992) and A. Robert Lee, Multicultural

American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions

(Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), specifically chapter 2,

"Selves: Autobiography, Autoethnicity, Autofiction." See also Anne E. Goldman, Take

My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and William Boelhower, "The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States" in Paul John Eakin, ed., American

Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1991) 123-41. MELUShas published two special issues on ethnic autobiography: 9.2

1982 (on ethnic autobiography and biography) and 14 1987 (on ethnic autobiography).

There has been a much larger body of work on African American autobiography alone, because of the primacy of the genre in black American letters from the slave narrative onwards. See Paul Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1974); Sidonie Smith, Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and

Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,

1974); William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story. The First Century of Afro-American

Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Valerie Smith,

Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1987); Joanne Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: 236

A Tradition Within A Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and V.P.

Franklin, Living our Stories, Telling our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the

African-American Intellectual Tradition (New York: Scribner, 1995).

Genero Padilla has produced the most compelling scholarship on Mexican American autobiography. See My History, Not Yours: the Formation of Mexican American

Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) and "Rediscovering

Nineteenth-Century Mexican-American Autobiography" in Memory, Narrative, and

Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T.

Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994) 305-

331.

15 Peter Stromberg wrote, in his 1993 study of the language of the evangelical

Christian conversion narrative, that other than Caldwell's work on the Puritan conversion narratives, he knew of "no detailed studies of the conversion narrative as a genre" (5). Unfortunately, fifteen years later, this research gap remains largely unfilled, with no overarching work on the conversion narrative genre as yet. For works on early, selected conversion narratives see Karl Morrison's Conversion and Text: The Cases of

Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1992) and Patricia Caldwell's, The Puritan Conversion

Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1983). For work on American women's conversion narratives, see Virginia

Lieson Brereton's From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the

Present (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991). 237

For broad commentary on religious conversion, the following list—by no means complete—contains significant titles of the last twenty-five years: Lewis R. Rambo,

Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Karl

F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

1992); Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies, eds.

Christopher Lamb and M. Darrol Bryant (London: Cassell, 1999); Joe Edward Barnhart and Mary Ann Barnhart, The New Birth: A Naturalistic View of Religious Conversion

(Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1981); ChanaUllman, The Transformed

Self: The Psychology of Religious Conversion (New York: Plenum, 1989). Also see endnote 11, for Rambo's ongoing bibliography. Additionally, Gary Comstock has produced two editions of Religious Autobiographies (Belmont, California: Thompson

Wadsworth, 1994,2004). This is a textbook for use in undergraduate courses in religious studies.

To date, I have not found a full-length book study devoted to the intersection of ethnic autobiography and conversion. However, articles have been published on the conversion narratives of individual ethnic autobiographers, as well as on religion and

American autobiography. See, for example, Elizabeth J. West's "Reworking the

Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig" in MELUS 24.2 (Summer

1999): 3-27. Also see "Religion and American Autobiographical Writing" by Susan

Juster, John D. Barbour, Gary Comstock, and Richard Rabinowitz in Religion and

American Culture 9.1 (Winter 1999): 1-29. A comprehensive search of the following journals turned up only a handful of articles relating to the ethnic conversion narrative:

Religion and American Culture, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, MELUS, Christianity and Literature, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Religion and

Literature, PMLA, American Literature, and American Literary History.

1 7

For more on conversion narratives and mimesis, see Geoffrey Gait Harpham's

"Conversion and the Language of Autobiography" in Studies in Autobiography, ed.

James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 42-50. For the rhetoric of persuasion in the telling of conversion narratives in Fundamentalist Christianity, see

Susan Harding's The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), especially chapter 1, "Speaking is

Believing." 1 Q

See Kleiner's review of Michel Onfray's In Defense of Atheism: The Case Against

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Toronto: Viking, 2007) in the February 17, 2007 issue of The Globe and Mail, p. D3.

19 The belief or non-belief in a transcendent being obviously affects the outcomes of research. While I hope to offer a "thick description" (Geertz) of conversion experience for the writers I study, I take Rambo's point, that from his perspective (and perhaps that of other scholars of faith), I must be missing something integral to the experience.

Marable breaks this down into "930 books, 360 films and Internet educational resources, and 350 sound recordings" (161). See "Malcolm X's Life-After-Death" in

Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake

America's Racial Future (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006).

21 Recent work, however, problematizes the stereotyped hostility between "cross and crescent." Louis DeCaro, a prominent Malcolm scholar, argues that Malcolm's anti-

Christian sentiments expressed in the Autobiography merely "reiterated [Elijah] 239

Muhammad's teachings," and that Christianity had a powerful and even positive influence on Malcolm that has been ignored and misunderstood (Malcolm and the Cross

105).

22 In Borderlands/ La Frontera, Anzaldua represents religious conversion as a return to the Aztec goddesses that lie underneath the veneer of Catholicism and the symbolism of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As my interest lies, rather, in the magnetic push-pull between Catholicism and Protestantism, I will be dealing only peripherally with

Anzaldua's "autocritique" in this study (the term is from Sidonie Smith and Julia

Watson's Reading Autobiography 156).

For a mid-century discussion of "Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North," see Arthur Huff Fauset's (brother of Jessie Fauset—of Harlem Renaissance fame) anthropological study, Black Gods of the Metropolis (New York: Octagon Books, 1944).

For more recent scholarship on African American religion, see African-American

Religion: Interpretative Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert

J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge, 1997); C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's

The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press,

1990); Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer's African-American Religion in the Twentieth

Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

Press, 1992), and Albert J. Raboteau's Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-

American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 240

Notes to Chapter One

1 It is important to historicize Nation doctrine and philosophy, which remained remarkably consistent from the NOI's inception in 1930 until its leader Elijah

Muhammad's death in 1975. When Elijah's son, Wallace Deen Muhammad, took over leadership of the Nation after his father's death, he worked toward "Islamizing" the religion to bring it closer to Sunni teaching and to de-emphasize the component of racial separatism. In 1976 he changed the name of the organization to "The World Community of Al-Islam in the West," and finally to "The American Muslim Mission." Louis

Farrakhan, a Nation follower disillusioned by these changes, broke off and formed an independent Nation of Islam that largely adhered to Elijah Muhammad's original tenets.

See C. Eric Lincoln, "The Muslim Mission in the Context of American Social History,"

African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E.

Fulop & Albert J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge, 1997) 279-294.

2 Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little and died El-Hajj Malik E-Shabazz. I will, however, refer to him as Malcolm X or Malcolm throughout this discussion because this is the name he is most commonly known by, and the name embedded in the title of the text that I am discussing. The "X" designation for Nation of Islam followers was supposed to signify an unknowable ancestry that would be cleared up on Judgement

Day. It poses a problem for the writer, in that there seems to be an interminable repetitiveness in always referring to "Malcolm X" when one is used to having a surname to alternate with a full name. Thus, I have chosen to switch between "Malcolm" and

"Malcolm X" for some small variety. The problem that arises from this use, however, is that "Malcolm" sounds very familiar, almost disrespectful. This is one of several 241

unintended effects of the Nation designation. I will mention three others here. First, the surname "X" makes everyone in the Nation seem the same (shades of Ellison's invisible man); second, the "X" gestures toward the "x variable" from math, suggesting not only the unknown factor that Elijah Muhammad wanted to emphasize, but the arbitrariness of the unknown; third, "X" represents the Christian cross, surely another unintended irony.

In particular, Dyson names the following writers as celebrating Malcolm X's

NOI/black nationalist identity: John Henrik Clarke, W. Keoraperse Kgositsile,

Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, Albert Cleage, Patricia Robinson, Oba T'Shaka, and

Benjamin Karim.

For work on The Autobiography of Malcolm Xas a conversion narrative, see James

Holte, "The Representative Voice: Autobiography and the Ethnic Experience, " MELUS

9.2 (Summer 1982): 25-46; Barrett John Mandel, "The Didactic Achievement of

Malcolm X's Autobiography," Afro-American Studies 2 (1972): 269-74; Carol Ohmann,

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X: A Revolutionary use of the Franklin Tradition."

American Quarterly 22 (1970): 131-49; John Paul Eakin, "Malcolm X and the Limits of

Autobiography," Criticism 18 (1976): 230-42; and Sidonie Smith's "Conversions" in

Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography

(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1974) 77-101. G. Thomas Couser sees the autobiography as a conversion narrative in the "prophetic mode"; see American

Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

1979).

As for the Haley collaboration, there is a built-in difficulty in discussing the prose of the autobiography as if it were produced by Malcolm. For many years, the assumption 242

had been that, while the autobiography was the result of many interviews between Haley and Malcolm X, Malcolm X had reviewed the final manuscript and approved it before his death. Marable's work has shed new light on this assumption, with evidence that

Haley may have suppressed material, and worked with a political purpose to slant the text in various ways. Thus, as I discuss the text and subtleties of language in the text as if they originate from Malcolm alone, I do so with the knowledge that this is somewhat inaccurate. And yet to constantly account for and speculate about Haley's adaptation and input would be to substantially lengthen the chapter, and complicate and even obfuscate my central argument. For work on how the collaboration with Alex Haley affects the text, see Manning Marable, "Malcolm X's Life-After-Death: The Dispossession of a

Legacy" in Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can

Remake America's Racial Future (New York: Basic Books, 2006) 121-77. Also see

Albert Stone, "Two Recreate One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black

Autobiography—Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X" in Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1982) 231-64; and

Mark Sanders, "Theorizing the Collaborative Self: The Dynamics of Contour and

Content in the Dictated Autobiography" in New Literary History 25:2 (Spring 1994):

445-58.

5 While I have used Malcolm's narrative about Nation of Islam mythology, the most comprehensive version I have found of Nation of Islam teachings is in Claude Andrew

Clegg Ill's biography of Elijah Muhammad: An Original Man: the Life and Times of

Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997) 41-73. 243

6 Jerry Gafio Watts, however, believes that the Nation was a custom vehicle for

Malcolm's rage and political empowerment: "had there been no Nation of Islam, there would not have been a Malcolm" (18).

7 These visits precipitated Malcolm's second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam.

While this second conversion was instrumental in shifting Malcolm X's political agenda away from black separatism to a more inclusive vision, I will not be dealing with the later conversion in this chapter. My primary reason for so doing is that the narration of the autobiography was largely from the point of view of Malcolm X, minister of the

NOI, and not the later identity. Haley urged Malcolm to leave the text as it was, even though Malcolm wished at one point to edit the autobiography to reflect his later beliefs and his rejection of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. Thus, I maintain, it is the NOI point of view and the NOI conversion that produce the "Sauling around" effect in the text.

8 Piri Thomas' ethnic conversion narrative, Down These Mean Streets, offers another example of an autobiographer's keen pleasure in reminiscing about "sinful" behaviour.

He describes his buddy shooting heroin and is horrified, yet as an ex-addict, he also is vividly reminded of the sensual pleasures of shooting up: '"I'm glad you're clean, Piri,'

I heard Carlito's voice soft and tender and harsh. His eyes closed and the needle still in his arm like it didn't want to come out, like a lover who has loved and cannot find the way to withdraw. Carlito's fingers pulled out the needle and a juicy glob of dark, dark blood oozed out, a quick finger smeared the blood away, and more oozed out" (329-30).

Carlito's harsh yet tender voice, the sexual simile of the needle in the vein, and the

"juicy glob of dark, dark blood" reveal the ache of desire mixed with pleasure that

Thomas feels in witnessing the injection, and reliving his own. 244

9 Malcolm X was likely not thinking about Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in his reference to the "dancing jigaboo toy," so the allusion to Clifton and his dancing Sambo toys is probably unintentional. However, it points to a motif in African American life and literature—a sense that white treatment of blacks reduced them to puppets or empty dolls, and it indicates Malcolm's awareness of white racist imagining of black rhythm.

I According to the book jacket of the Grove Press paperback edition of the autobiography, Alex Haley became interested in his African roots as a result of his collaboration on the autobiography, and subsequently researched and wrote the bestselling book Roots (1976).

II Some of the ambivalence Malcolm felt about Africa was surely tied to his father's involvement with Marcus Garvey's U.N.I.A. (United Negro Improvement Association) and the back-to-Africa movement, described early in the autobiography (4-7). Malcolm admired his father's role in this organization.

12 The extreme of this form of white to black spectatorship is sexual voyeurism.

Malcolm X describes a form of this: "Rudy, I remember, spoke of one old white man who paid a black couple to let him watch them have intercourse on his bed. Another was so 'sensitive' that he paid to sit on a chair outside a room where a couple was—he got his satisfaction just from imagining what was going on inside" (140).

13 There is a long history of anxiety about the representation and use of black bodies dancing and black sexuality in African American literature, particularly white appropriation of black bodily pleasure. During the Harlem Renaissance, for instance,

W.E.B. Du Bois roundly criticized white novelist Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, accusing Van Vechten of using what might be seen as the "underbelly" of black life for 245

white pleasure (one of the most memorable scenes in the book is the description of a black dance).

14 There are no longer copyrights on Muhammad Speaks newspaper (information obtained by email correspondence March 11, 2008 with Nation of Islam's Women

Committed to Preserving the Truth [noiwc.org]).

151 use Bruce Perry's 1992 biography of Malcolm sparingly, aware that several

African American scholars think that this text is faulty and even slanderous. See, for example, Amiri Baraka's "Malcolm as Ideology," John Edgar Wideman's "Malcolm X:

The Art of Autobiography," and Arnold Rampersad "The Color of His Eyes: Bruce

Perry's Malcolm and Malcolm's Malcolm." All three essays are in Malcolm X: In Our

Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is scheduled to be published in 2009.

16 It is difficult not to think of Spike Lee's movie when reading this scene with

Sophia, a richly cinematic setting that Lee exploits for all of its unspoken sexuality, bell hooks notes, however, and I agree, that in his portrayal of Sophia in the film, Lee

"refuses to allow for the possibility that there could be meaningful affectional ties between a black man and a white woman which transcend the sexual. The film does not show that Malcolm maintained contact with Sophia long after their sexual relationship ended." hooks goes on to say that in "Lee's version, relationships between black men and white women never transcend the sexual" (14). While Malcolm iterates and reiterates the self-destructive aspects of his relationship with Sophia, the one- 246

dimensionality of his recurrent tagging belies the longevity and complexity of that partnership, an affiliation that incorporated sex, business, and friendship.

i n

In The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison also represents Hollywood movies as holding out impossible romantic, material, and aesthetic ideals to African Americans, particularly women. Pauline's addiction to movies leads to her emulation of the blond

Jean Harlow and thus fosters self-hatred: "The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture show. Every time I got, I went, I'd go early, before the show started. [... ] White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with the bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. [. . . J There I was, five months, pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then " (97-8).

Notes to Chapter Two

1 A. Robert Lee applies "autofiction" to Acosta's work. French critics in the 1970s coined this term to capture the illusoriness of the genre boundary between autobiography and fiction. Lee describes Acosta's texts: "This is self, and story, as consciously embodied fiction, real but offered as though collusively and under licence of narrative invention" (Multicultural 61). Also see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's definition of autofiction in Reading Autobiography, p. 186.

2 While Hector Calderon reads Acosta's autobiography as a quest for his Chicano identity, he also maintains that the story draws from "the easily recognizable Christian narrative of guilt, confession, and redemption. Acosta superimposes on his 247

autobiographical narrative the story of the Christian Messiah. In his thirty-third year (he was actually thirty-two), Acosta will symbolically die in San Francisco to be reborn, resurrected in El Paso as a Chicano and as a leader of his people" ("Recorder" 98-9).

Calderon also notes two other scenes that he reads as satirically biblical: the dinner scene in La Fior d'ltalia restaurant is the Last Supper, and Acosta's girlfriend "suck[ing] out mucous from his nose after too much cocaine (63)" is a suffering Madonna

("Recorder" 106-7).

See Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious

Sociology (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1955) and Williams'

Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American

Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Both sociologists argue that religion, for immigrants, is the one component of ethnicity that is either retained or returned to as an identity marker.

4 Malcolm's second conversion to Sunni Islam can be seen as a corrective to the

Nation's too restrictive racial prescription; he considered his switch to a fuller version of

Islam as a turn to a religion appropriate to all men and women, thus transcending that prescriptive aspect of religion.

5 Biographical information is gathered from various sources; in particular, see the excellent website produced by California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (University of California, Santa Barbara), where Acosta's papers are housed: http://cemaweb.library.ucsb.edu/acosta_toc.html

6 See also Patrick McNamara's 1995 article, "Assumptions, Theories and Methods in the Study of Latino Religion After 25 Years." 248

See Bellah's "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus: Journal of the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences 96.1 (Winter 1967): 1-21.

8 In Revolt, when Acosta has switched his allegiance to Chicanas, he refers to one of his girlfriends, Elena Lowrider, as his new "Miss Esa" (203), which may be read as the

Latina equivalent of the Anglo "Miss It." Esa is the feminine counterpart for Ese, which can be roughly translated as "homeboy." See the online dictionary of "Alternative

Spanish" or slang: http://www.alternative-dictionaries.net/dictionary/Spanish/

9 In the 1960s, Acosta wrote a piece that he described as the "Romeo and Juliet story of Oakies [sic] and Chicanos in the valley" (qtd. in Calderon, "Recorder" 95), likely based on his experiences with Alice.

10 Acosta bemoans his small penis several times in the Autobiography (for example,

"[e]veryone knew I had the smallest prick in the world" [82]), whereas in Revolt this anxiety is altogether absent; the turn to Chicanas seems to boost his manhood (or, perhaps, machismo).

11 Cesar Chavez is another example of a Mexican American leader utilizing his

Mexican American Catholicism for political aims. During the United Farm Workers' grape boycotts in the 1970s, Chavez made certain there was always a banner of Our

Lady of Guadalupe in evidence. Acosta, in Revolt, has a scene where Zeta visits Chavez in a chapel during Chavez's fast, and describes both a painting and a figure of the Virgin

(44).

12 Early in "From Whence I Came" Acosta refers to "now" as 1966, and to his age as

"nearly thirty-one" (20); however, Stavans has included "[Circa 1971]" at the end of the piece. It seems likely the piece was written earlier than 1971, not only because of the 249

reference to 1966, but also because the piece ends as a "letter of resignation" to Jesus

(referred to as "You"). Acosta was a Baptist from 1954 to 1956, which suggests the earlier date rather than the later one, as 1966 would have been closer in time to his

"resignation." I find it puzzling that Stavans (or somebody else) added the "[Circa

1971]" to the end of this piece; a trip to the archives in Santa Barbara would be necessary to try to solve this mystery.

13 In Spanish, the imperative "Diga treintay tres," or "say thirty-three," is what doctors will often say when examining a patient's chest or back; the r's in the phrase when spoken showcase the health of the respiratory system. When Acosta repeats thirty- three, he may be hinting at the idiomatic use of the word treintay tres in juxtaposition to a belief in the number's mystical property as Jesus's supposed age at the time of his death. Perhaps Acosta is suggesting that to say thirty-three is almost as banal as to say

"ah" for the doctor, and thus implies a certain arbitrariness in the story of Jesus.

(Personal email conversation July 17,2006 with Miguel Murmis, native Spanish speaker.)

14 While Jesus was in the tomb for three days rather than thirty-three hours before his resurrection, I do think that Acosta is alluding to that event here. He is reborn in a sense when he awakes and decides to embrace his Chicano identity as a "Brown Buffalo."

15 There are also several extra-textual references to Acosta's identification with Jesus.

Ilan Stavans revised the subtitle to his second edition of Acosta's biography to allude to

Acosta's patterning of his life on Jesus': Bandido: Oscar "Zeta" Acosta and the

Chicano Experience (1995) was modified to Bandido: the Death and Resurrection of

Oscar Zeta Acosta (2003). Hunter Thompson, in his introduction to the 1989 Vintage 250

editions of both of Acosta's books, writes that Acosta had a "de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three—just like Jesus Christ" (Autobiography 6).

Finally, Acosta himself wrote about Thompson in an unpublished manuscript, and made reference to his own stigmata: "[Ever since my arrival in East Aztlan in the winter of

'67] I'd been teaching him all that I [found out] about Doctor Gonzo, the grand master of Mongolia.... But it had taken him three years to learn the basic facts of the universe.

I finally had to show him the holes in my palms before he'd consent to be my official biographer" (qtd. in Calderon, "Recorder" 88).

16 Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, a novel published the same year as Acosta's

The Autobiography, deals with a Mexican American community's conflict between

Roman Catholicism and the religion and magic of the old pagan gods of pre-conquest

Mexico. The conflict is embodied in the young protagonist and narrator, Tony, who wonders how to reconcile the two forces of religion in this life. Anaya's novel points to a dilemma implied in Acosta's autobiography. Much of the tension arises from the gap between institutions and personal belief; Gilberto Hinojosa writes that "Mexican

Americans have for centuries integrated the supernatural with the joys and tribulations of their worldly society through their belief system. Their faith has been closely linked to institutional religion and is nourished by it, but Mexicano religiosity has also been independent of official structures" (Prologue, Mexican Americans 12).

17 Arturo Islas's 1990 novel, Migrant Souls, depicts this generational conflict beautifully. The middle generation of children in the Angel family, living in Texas near the Mexico border, are critical of the Catholic Church, yet seem unable to break away from it. The older generation, particularly the women, are keepers of Mexican 251

Catholicism, considering it to be a civilizing, Spanish part of their heritage. Miguel

Chico, the gay wayward son, remonstrates with his equally wayward cousin, Josefina:

"God, Josie, you are just like every smart Mexican Catholic sinner I know. You hate the

Church and then you get married and baptize your children in it. Sheep. All sheep"

(191).

10

Practice of syncretic Mexican American Catholicism—the cultural adaptation of

European-style Catholicism mixed with worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe, curandismo, folk and pagan (Aztec) elements—created tensions and dilemmas that are well illustrated in many Mexican American novels and autobiographies. For example,

Tomas Rivera's "... y no se lo trago la tierra" (1971), Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me,

Ultima (1972), Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, Arturo Islas's Migrant

Souls (1990), John Rechy's The Miraculous Day ofAmalia Gomez (1991), and Ana

Castillo's So Far From God (1993) all deal with the divided loyalties, confusions, and power struggles that erupt from Mexican American religious beliefs and institutions.

Notes to Chapter Three

The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones was first published by Freundlich in 1984; however, I have chosen to use the 1997 edition because it restores sections edited out of the original, as well as providing a useful retrospective introduction by the author.

2 The thesis of the "Black Belt Nation" was, according to William J. Maxwell, "the controversial centerpiece of Communist policy on African America in the 1930s" (162) and was derived from Stalin's theory that a "community of culture " (qtd. in Maxwell, emphasis in original 162) comprised a nation. Watts points out that Baraka's attempt to 252

"reinvigorate" this fifty-year-old idea was an example of "his continued unwillingness to confront the needs of black Americans," and "the Communist Party's support of a Negro nation was viewed by most blacks as somewhat ludicrous and unrealistic" (436).

While I acknowledge the strong linking of religion and Marxism in movements like liberation theology, I also maintain that according to logic, Baraka's claim to "scientific socialism" should make him strictly materialist.

"The Baptism," an experimental play about a homosexual—the only character that can see through the hypocrisy of the Baptist Church—and a masturbating teenage-boy

Christ figure murdered by the congregation, was first performed in 1964, and published in an edition with a second play, "The Toilet" (1963). This amusing concatenation of baptism and toilets further suggests Baraka's contempt for "yalla" Christianity.

5 Thomas Merton, famous American convert to Catholicism, describes an attitude similar to Baraka's toward the bourgeoisie as fundamentally resistant to real religion and spirituality: "The one thing that seemed to me more or less impossible was for grace to penetrate the thick, resilient hide of bourgeois smugness and really take hold of the immortal soul beneath that surface, in order to make something out of it" (354).

6 See Suzan-Lori Parks "The America Play" in The America Play and Other Works.

See as well, Baraka's essay "The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites and Bpower

Mooments" printed in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965.

7 Karl Popper, in The Poverty of Historicism (1957) showed that Marx's theories were not scientific because they could not be proved false or refuted, one criterion of a scientific idea. Again, Baraka's Marxism ignores theoretical advances about Marxism over the last fiftyyears . Watts claims that "[t]he 'Marxism' espoused by Baraka is not 253

informed by the work of any major twentieth-century Marxist thinkers except for Lenin,

Mao, and Cabral. It was as if Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci,

Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, or Lucien Goldmann never existed. Their work does not inform his 'Marxism'" (443).

8 Milosz conceptualizes the Soviet regime in postwar Poland as "the New Faith" in his book. Crossman and Koestler collect stories from ex-Communists about their disillusionment with "the god that failed." In a positive vein, Erich Fromm considers

Marx's philosophy "in the tradition of prophetic Messianism [because] it was aimed at the full realization of individualism" (3). There are other examples of Communism treated as religion and the turn to it as conversion. Thomas Merton, in Seven Storey

Mountain, writes about his misguided first conversion: "The truth is, I was in the thick of a conversion [....] I was becoming a Communist" (131). Later, he comments that

"[i]t [Communism] was an easy and handy religion—too easy in fact. It told me that all the evils in the world were the product of capitalism" (134).

9 Ro Sigmund claims, in a 1984 article that pre-dates the publication of the

Autobiography, that Baraka articulates a "Negro-to-Black conversion" in the final chapter of his experimental novel, The System of Dante's Hell. Sigmund sees this type of

"conversion" as archetypical of post-1960 African American autobiography. See "The

'Negro-to-Black' Conversion in Contemporary Afro-American Autobiography: Two

Patterns," Rags and Celebration: Essays on Contemporary Afro-American Writing

(Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984) 69-84.

10 Baraka's narrative, as a Marxist conversion narrative, may be read as somewhere in between Davis's secular autobiography and Eldridge Cleaver's religious conversion 254

narrative, Soul on Fire. In that memoir, Cleaver reflects back on how he turned away from socialism to fundamentalist Christianity, because socialism could not accommodate art or idealism (even though this is a distortion of Marxist thought).

Cleaver explains:

Away from home, Marxism got very flaky. The most powerful, single

breakthrough, in my Communist-held position, was the birth of my

children. For me, each one was sort of a cosmic, spiritual event. A

miracle ... first, Maceo, and then my daughter. I didn't come out of the

Marxist philosophy all at once. But this crack appeared like a breach in

the wall—and the crack which never closed was the affirmation of life

that gripped me at my children's birth and kept saying to me: here is a

soul, here is a link in the chain of life.

Very carefully, communism had divided everything into materialism

and idealism. Everything you couldn't measure or weigh, well, that was

idealism, and therefore it didn't exist. Music, poetry, your soul, and

everything that is related to religion was false. I had seen now in my own

experience and with my children that this was not true. (135).

Even though Watts sees him as Manichean, Baraka—situated between Davis and

Cleaver—is able to contain his artist and his Marxist identities.

1 See also David Howard-Pitney's rewriting of Sacvan Bercovitch's The American

Jeremiad in relation to black American experience: The African American Jeremiad:

Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Albert J.

Raboteau also writes about the inverted myth of national identity; see chapter 1 in A Fire 255 in My Bones: Reflection on African-American Religious History. Boston: Beacon Press,

1995.

12 Baraka also refers in the autobiography to "the old traditional black lie" that his father tells: "he thought Newark was New York" (15) and thus migrated there from the

South and didn't find out until later that he was in the lesser city. This particular joke plays on the idea of the Southern black ear interpreting "Newark" as a drawled "New

York" with the "y" sound dropped. As well, Baraka is toying with the idea of authenticity; Newark is a pretend New York, an imitation or disappointing dried fruit version of the big apple: "The Apple but turned out to be the prune (Newark) or the raisin" (3). Here, too, he may be alluding to Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun.

Baraka's fire imagery echoes Baldwin's book The Fire Next Time (1962), an extended autobiographical essay on racism. Baldwin's title, derived from an African

American spiritual, signifies God's intention to express his wrath, after the flood, by means of a more destructive and all-encompassing fire. Moreover, Baraka was co-editor, with Larry Neal, of Black Fire, an anthology of Black Arts writing published in 1968.

14 This title of this play echoes a Negro spiritual collected by Rosamund and James

Weldon Johnson in The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, titled "De 01' Ark's A-

Moverin' an' I'm Goin' Home" (25-6).

15 "The City of New Ark" appears in the 2006 anthology of African American poetry,

Every Goodbye Ain 't Gone (editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey). The date of this poem is not certain, but at one point in the middle of the poem, Baraka inserts the numbers 8/89, so it may be from August 1989. Another, shorter version of the poem, 256

"The City of New Ark: Wave Beats," was published in Grand Street magazine, Volume

39,1991.

Lyrics to Armstrong's song follow; see http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/louis+armstrong/black+blue_20085352.html

Cold empty bed...springs hurt my head

Feels like ole ned...wished I was dead

What did I do...to be so black and blue

Even the mouse...ran from my house

They laugh at you...and all that you do

What did I do...to be so black and blue

Im white...inside...but, that dont help my case

Thats life...cant hide...what is in my face

How would it end...aint got a friend

My only sin...is in my skin

What did I do...to be so black and blue

(instrumental break)

How would it end...i aint got a friend

My only sin...is in my skin 257

What did I do...to be so black and blue

17 Michaels makes this argument elegantly in his two recent books: The Shape of the

Signifier and The Trouble With Diversity.

1 O

Baraka's liminal status—neither fully accepted by working-class blacks and unwilling to associate himself with middle-class blacks—is a central theme of his novel,

The System of Dante's Hell. Watts writes that Roi, the autobiographical protagonist of

System, "is too 'white' to be accepted by nonbourgeois blacks (the only authentic blacks) and yet not 'white' enough to be attracted to black bourgeois life" (95).

Notes to Chapter Four

1 In an interview with Scott London, Rodriguez explains his dis-identification with

Chicanos: "In many ways, I'm free to range as widely as I do intellectually precisely because I'm not at a university. The tiresome Chicanos would be after me all the time.

You know: 'We saw your piece yesterday, and we didn't like what you said,' or, 'You didn't sound happy enough,' or, 'You didn't sound proud enough.'"

There is a wonderful scene in John Rechy's The Miraculous Day ofAmalia Gomez that illustrates the Mexican American Catholic's sense of disbelief at Catholic-to-

Protestant conversion. Amalia, the novel's protagonist, "could not understand Mexicans who became Protestants. It was unnatural" (116). She is accosted in a street in her neighbourhood by a group of born-again Christians (former Catholics) and she and other

Mexican American Catholics on the street begin a back and forth verbal battle (that turns physical). The born-again Christians claim, "God is everywhere" and "You're going to 258

hell if you don't heed the word," and the Catholics say things like, "Get out of our neighborhood" and "I was born Catholic and I'm gonna die Catholic" (116-117).

Juan de Castro's important article argues that we should be careful in associating the post-Days Rodriguez, the defender of "browning" and hybridity, with Anzaldua and other Chicano writers. Rodriguez's theory of hybridity is quite different from that of other border theorists, because—de Castro claims—he uses it to argue for the eventual homogenization (browning) of America that would allow policies based on racial difference to disappear. In other words, Rodriguez presents a challenge because he refuses to be politically pigeonholed; ideas that might seem at first glance to make him fit into the school of thought that prizes cultural difference and multiculturalism in fact do no such work.

Jose David Saldivar's "School of Caliban" was published in a different form

(chapter 6) in his book The Dialectics of Our America (Durham: Duke University Press,

1991) 123-48.1 chose to discuss the later essay because it appeared in conjunction with

Paredes's essay in Multicultural Autobiography. The pairing of these two essays side by side in Payne's anthology seems to me to be an intentional swipe at Rodriguez.

5 Gustavo Perez Firmat reads Rodriguez's identification with Caliban as equivocal, noting that "the invocation of Caliban in the very first sentence as if he were the author's brutish muse does not square with the book's tone and content." Rodriguez feels liberated, rather than enslaved, "by his assimilation into North American culture" (257).

Furthermore, Rodriguez "forsake[s] Caliban by labeling his text 'Ariel's song,' an identification subtly reinforced in the title of the first chapter, 'Aria'" (257), thus emphasizing Rodriguez's identification with a more suitable muse. 259

6 Email communication with Miguel Murmis, native Spanish speaker, November 23,

2007.

7 The relationship between Aztec cannibalism and Catholic Eucharist is made explicit by Gloria Anzaldua in her poem "The Cannibal's Cancion" (Borderlands 143).

o

Camille Paglia (b. 1947), Rodriguez's Catholic contemporary, elaborates on the thrill she felt seeing the overwhelming statue of St. Sebastian in her church: "It was a semi-nude young man with a loincloth slipping off his hips, and the look on his face was one of mild pleasure, as opposed to the pain you'd expect if your body were penetrated by all those arrows" (239). Like Rodriguez, Paglia admits to feeling a "sadomasochistic or homoerotic sensuality about the image" (239). See Ferraro's "A Pornographic Nun:

An Interview with Camille Paglia" in Catholic Lives, Contemporary America. Ed.

Thomas J. Ferraro (Durham, Duke University Press, 1997) 238-58.

9 Paul Giles claims that McCarthy, while positioning herself in an atheist, existentialist ethic, in fact is unable to "slough off Catholicism" in her text. According to

Giles, while McCarthy criticizes the Catholic "cultural traits" of "a lack of interest in secular morality" and "a self-indulgent delight in aesthetics," those traits "surreptitiously manifest themselves in the aesthetic form of McCarthy's text: the conscious authorial

'mind' is again compromised by the unconscious textual 'body'" (451). Giles's argument is supported by Rodriguez's view of the inescapability of Catholicism. Even while McCarthy ostensibly rejects its values, she reiterates them in her prose. See Paul

Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992). 260

See also www.vatican.ca for the text of "Considerations Regarding Proposals to

Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons," approved by John

Paul II in 2003.

11 While the Catholic Church does not endorse Dignity, they do sanction "Courage," an apostolate of the Roman Catholic Church that counsels Catholics attracted to the same sex to remain chaste. Their website promises that "[b]y developing an interior life of chastity, which is the universal call to all Christians, one can move beyond the confines of the homosexual identity to a more complete one in Christ" ("Welcome").

Their name is appropriate; great courage is required to face a lifetime of ignoring one's sexual desire.

Notes to Conclusion

12 The trouble with Michaels' assessment here is that unfortunately he treats Islam as homogenous, whereas it is heterogenous. Islam is not one belief, but many, and sometimes it opposes liberal values, while other times it affirms them.

13 Anzaldua calls Coatlicue an "archetype" (46) and credits Jung's ideas in a footnote

(95n6).

14 From Ossie Davis's Eulogy for Malcolm X, delivered February 27,1965 and reprinted in Malcolm X: The Man and his Times. Ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York:

The Macmillan Company, 1969) xi-xii. Works Cited

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. 1972. New York: Vintage

Books, 1989.

—. "From Whence I Came." Oscar "Zeta " Acosta: The Uncollected Works. Ed. Ilan

Stavans. Houston, Texas: Arte Publico Press, 1996. 19-52.

—. Oscar "Zeta" Acosta: The Uncollected Works. Ed. Ilan Stavans. Houston, Texas:

Arte Publico Press, 1996.

—. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. 1973. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1918.

Adams, Timothy Dow. Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Alarcon, Norma. "Tropology of Hunger: The 'Miseducation' of Richard Rodriguez. The

Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.140-52.

Aldama, Frederick Luis. "Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta: Magicorealism and Chicano Auto-bio-

graphe." LIT 11 (2000): 199-218.

—. Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana

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