Abuse, Resistance and Recovery in Black Women's Literature

It’s Time to Tell: Abuse, Resistance and Recovery in Black Women’s Literature DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Candice Linette Pipes Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Valerie Lee, Advisor Adeleke Adeeko Debra Moddelmog Copyright by Candice Linette Pipes 2010 The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Abstract This project examines how black women writers, specifically by writing scenes of violence, explore the sociopolitical, racial, economic, and gender exploitation through the abuse of black women within their texts. Part of the goal of this project is to reclaim the literature of black women from the clutches of a black masculinist understanding and reject these superficial readings in an effort to make sense of the black-on-black violence documented in the works of black women authors. To be more specific, the intent of this study is to investigate the ways in which collective emotional trauma and individual physical and sexual abuses against black women exist as power performances. These violences enacted against black women in black women’s writing serve as a way for socially, economically, and culturally disempowered bodies to claim power by overpowering a body even more marginalized. The extensive pattern in the work of black women writers who write about the violence experienced by black women prompts a series of questions: Why do texts written by these black women overwhelmingly contain scenes of emotional, physical and sexual abuse? What purposes do black women authors have in constructing these scenes of abuse predominantly at the hands of black men? How complicit do these authors suggest that the black community is in allowing acts of violence to occur? How effective are these texts in breaking the silence of abuse beyond any fictional realm, and what kind of power does this attainment of voice give ii African American women readers of these texts? Can we read these texts’ exposure of violence against black women as resistance narratives? What is lost or gained through such a reading? Scenes of emotional trauma and of physical and sexual abuse proliferate in each of the primary texts chosen for this study: Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sapphire’s Push, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. These black women authors attempt to break the silences inherent to abuse, silences accentuated by the subordinated position of racial minority in order to expose the terror inflicted on black women and girls because of their marginalized place in society. These women not only indict the individual action of abusers, but examine the larger social implications of power relations in this country where the marginalization of black skin and female sex are systemically and politically maintained and reproduced. Ultimately, the texts used in this study depict black women victims of violence to implicate the role abuse plays in exposing and manifesting the multiple oppressions inherent to the position of double jeopardy black women occupy, indict the role that black women play as scapegoats for the anger black men feel as a result of their societal emasculation, reject the invisibility of the abused black female body, and resist the “soul murder” of black male patriarchy (King 16). iii Dedication So that my daughter and all other little black girls might be a little safer and a little stronger. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their encouragement, feedback, and intellectual nurturance. I would like to thank my father who was the first to read every page and provide candid, honest help. I would like to thank my mother and sister for their unconditional love and support. I would like to thank my husband for his never ending belief in me and my daughter for her smiles. Lastly, I would like to thank The Ohio State University for an amazing experience. Go Buckeyes. v Vita June 1994……………………………Decatur High School 1998…………………………………B.S. English, The United States Air Force Academy 2003…………………………………M.A. English, Louisiana Tech University 2007 to present ..............................................Graduate Student, Department of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: “This is Not a Story to Pass On”: Cultural Trauma and the Abused Black Female Body in Dessa Rose and Corregidora ................................................................. 25 Chapter 2: Exploded Dreams: An Examination of Rape in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf and The Women of Brewster Place ....... 87 Chapter 3: Exposing the Black Girl-Child Victim of Incestuous Rape in The Bluest Eye and Push……………………………………………………………….………………..151 Chapter 4: "Don't Explain Me": Violent Resistance to Abuse as a Means of Self- Actualization in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Eva's Man……………………...215 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...274 References……………………………………………………………………………...288 vii Introduction We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of “mainstream” culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation). - Toni Cade Bambara When Toni Cade Bambara edited The Black Woman: An Anthology, a collection of essays, poetry, and short fiction in 1970, she unwittingly began what some have called The Second Renaissance, a movement of black women writers motivated by an intense desire to write themselves into existence and resist the oppression and limitation of racial and gender subordination as the above quote taken from the first lines of the anthology’s Preface demonstrates. Comparable to the impact Alain Locke’s The New Negro had in formulating and shaping the Harlem Renaissance,1 Bambara’s anthology also delivered a prescription for emerging black women writers to introduce socio-sexual platforms until then thematically underdeveloped and/or untouched by black women. The anthology presents black women as activists willing to speak out against the systematic oppression 1 Noted Harlem Renaissance scholar, Arnold Rampersad, in his Introduction to The New Negro calls it the “Bible” of the Harlem Renaissance because of its attempt to “in a fairly ambitious, expansive way…offer a definition of this cultural movement” (ix). 1 of black women living in a white male-dominated society, while acknowledging the objectified position of black women within the black community itself. Struggling for liberation on multiple fronts, these black women began to reject the silencing of the past and refused to submit to the prostration of the black woman in patriarchal social reformation projects like those often associated with the Black Power Movement. In doing so, these women began the process of artistic creation by answering a call to expose the truths of the black woman’s existence. This project will examine how black women writers, specifically by writing scenes of violence, examine sociopolitical, racial, economic, and gender exploitation through the abuse of black women within their texts. The black women authors in The Black Woman anthology began the work of resisting what Patricia Hill Collins calls the “controlling images” of black womanhood by asking the question: “How, on what terms, and by whom is the black woman to be defined?” Significantly, a critical element to answering this question is acknowledging and claiming the abuse black women suffer, even the abuse suffered at the hands of the black men they love. For this reason, several of the essayists in this collection broach the subject of black women’s abuse. Abbey Lincoln asks, “To whom will she cry rape?” (98). Frances Beale accuses black men of using black women “as the scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system has perpetrated on black men” and points to the governmentally sponsored sterilization of non-white women as “outright surgical genocide” (116). Toni Cade Bambara condemns the silence of the black community, revealing how, “we rap about being correct but ignore the danger of having one half of our population regard the other with such condescension and perhaps fear that half finds 2 it necessary to ‘reclaim his manhood’ by denying her her personhood” (125). Lastly, Jeane Carey Bond and Patricia Peery ask, “Is the Black male castrated?,” and detail the problem with excusatory statements: “for the duration

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