OBJ (Application/Pdf)
ABSTRACT
HUMANITIES
PERRO, EBONY L. B.A. UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE, 2011
M.A. UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA AT LAFAYETTE, 2014
COMING OF (R)AGE: CONSTRUCTING COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK
GIRLHOOD FROM THE ANGRY DECADE TO THE AGE OF RAGE
Committee Chair: Stephanie Sears, Ph.D.
Dissertation dated July 2019
This dissertation assesses rage and its utility for fictional Black girls and adolescents in asserting their humanity, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to their identity formation. Through analyses of six novels:
1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath, Eyes, Memory, 3) The Hate U Give, 4) The Bluest Eye,
5) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 6) The Poet X, this research presents rage as a canonical theme in Black women’s coming-of-age narratives and presents connections between rage, rights, and resistance. The connections, revealed through stimuli and adaptations associated with rage, frame an argument for North Americas as an arbiter of anger. The novels construct an “arc of anger” that places them in conversation about
Black girl rage and presents a tradition of Black women crafting Black girl protagonists who are conduits for counternarratives of rage. This dissertation also examines how i history, memory, and culture contribute to Black girls’ frustrations and knowledge bases.
By looking to works published between the angry decade (the 1960s) and the age of rage
(the 2010s), the research presents ways Black women novelists and their characters return to rage to combat social institutions and critique social constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood.
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COMING OF (R)AGE: CONSTRUCTING COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK
GIRLHOOD FROM THE ANGRY DECADE TO THE AGE OF RAGE
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLARK ATLANTA UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
BY
EBONY LE’ANN PERRO
DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITIES
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
JULY 2019
© 2019
EBONY LE’ANN PERRO
All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to acknowledge Black girls for being beacons of hope. I thank them for their anger, wisdom, and creativity. This work would not be possible without the inspiration of Black girls and the people who supported me. I thank my mother, Barbara
Perro Frederick and my sister, Sydnie, who made sacrifices for my education. I appreciate my extended family for their prayers. I thank my committee for encouraging me and devoting their time and expertise to this project. I am eternally grateful to Dr.
Stephanie Sears for leading this project and to Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans for her leadership in the African American Studies, Africana Women’s Studies, and History Department. I am humbled and honored to have worked with Dr. Maia Butler. I thank her for her mentorship and friendship. I am sincerely grateful to the faculty and staff who invested their energy in me: Dr. Rico Chapman, Dr. Daniel Black, Dr. Viktor Osinubi, Dr.
Tamalyn Peterson, Dr. Danille Taylor, Mr. Clarence Wilson, and Ms. Mary Jackson.
I thank my Clark Atlanta University family (especially Marcus and Amanda) for loving me through this process. I appreciate everyone who supported me financially and emotionally. I am thankful for my best friend, Jess, for her support and patience. I say
Ubuntu to my mentor and honorary reader, Jessica Jones. Lastly, I am forever indebted to the ancestors, Dr. Georgene Bess-Montgomery, and my Black girl rage class for reminding of the functions of this work beyond the classroom.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Purpose of the Research ...... 6
Statement of the Problem ...... 10
Research Questions ...... 12
Significance of the Study ...... 12
Return to Rage: Coming-of-Age Narratives and Anger ...... 14
Lift Every Voice: Black Girl Protagonists and Black Feminist Storytelling ...... 20
Margins, Lines, and Arcs: Black Feminist Orientations and Literary Criticism ...... 25
Chapter Organization ...... 29
II. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 33
Theoretical Framework ...... 33 Racialized Rage: Critical Attention to Intersectional Anger ...... 39
From Margin to Center: Black Girlhood Studies ...... 56
Building from the Bildungsroman: Coming-of-Age in Literary Criticism ...... 65
Black Girl Rage: Interstices of Intersectional Work ...... 73
III. METHODOLOGY ...... 76 Research Design...... 78
Justification for Method: Black Feminist Leanings ...... 86
Research Ethics ...... 88
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CHAPTER
IV. CARTOGRAPHIES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE: MAPPING MEMORY AND HISTORY THROUGH NATIONAL NARRATIVE DISCREPANCIES ...... 92 American Dreams and Nightmares: Anger and Antagonism in God Bless the Child ...... 96
Transnational Traumas: Diasporic Iterations of Adolescent Anger ...... 109
THUG LIFE: Rage, Rights, and Resistance ...... 119
Conclusion ...... 133
V. WHITE NOISE, BLACK RAGE: COUNTERING HEGEMONIC VIOLENCE ACROSS PLACE AND TIME THROUGH BLACK GIRL EPISTEMOLOGIES ...... 136 In Living Color(ism): Morrison, Melanin, and Black Girl Rage ...... 141
Enraged in Harlem: Canonical Knowledge and Radical Subjectivity ...... 153
“No tú eres facil”: Afro-Latinx Adaptations of Anger ...... 163
Conclusion ...... 174
IV. CONCLUSION: LIBERATION AND LITERATURE: TOWARD COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE ...... 177
Arcs of Anger: Black Girl Rage in Black Women’s Literature ...... 180
Layers of Liberation: Implications of the Study ...... 183
Extending the Arc: Rage into the Future ...... 187
WORKS CITED ...... 191
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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
Blackgirls carry answers, solutions to our ailments and yours/ just watch our movement, and mind our stories. (Hill 8) Dominique Hill’s encouragement to mind Black girls’ stories calls attention to their experiences and voices. While Hill writes of real Black girls as solution-builders and knowledge-bearers, critical inquiry of novels reveals that Black women novelists envision fictitious Black girls in parallel manners. To that end, Black girl narratives are repositories for alternative epistemologies. From the stories of real and imagined
(literary) Black girls, it is possible to ruminate ideas that aid in Black people’s liberation.
Their stories assert their voices and illuminate Black girlhood as a decolonial force. From
Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Maria Stewart’s “The First Stages of Life” (1861) to Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017) and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018), accounts of girlhood position Black girls as adapters with “perceptive wit” who reveal behaviors that “if followed, will lead African Americans one step closer toward achieving full citizenship rights in all aspects of American life” (Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The
First Stage of Life’” 152-153). Perceptive wit arises from anger, marginalization, and denial of childhood. Listening to and investigating their stories reveals discrepancies
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2 between Black girls’ narratives and narratives presented by broader society. Narrative arcs created by entwined national and personal narratives inform stories and interpretations of Black girl rage. Despite tendencies to view rage as a loss of control, Black women’s fiction posits this emotion as two-fold: a controlled rage exerted through the prose and a stimulus-driven, adaptive rage experienced by Black girl protagonists.
Black women’s literary canon and contemporary conversations in feminist and womanist studies position anger and rage as integral to social change and personal development. Alice Walker observes anger as an awakening that fuels creativity and coexists with peace (“What to Do with an Arrow in Your Heart”). Black girl characters attempt to bring peace into their lives through “courageous or willful behavior” (Walker,
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 7); therefore, they reflect womanist consciousness and inventiveness. In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960 (1987),
Mary Helen Washington asserts that the “most compelling themes of contemporary literature” include “the struggle to sustain one’s identity in a racist and sexist society, the silences that result from repressed anger, and the need to assert a creative life” (xvi).1
This dissertation features novels published between 1964 and 2018: God Bless the Child
(1964), The Bluest Eye (1970), Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), Breath, Eyes,
Memory (1994), The Hate U Give (2017), The Poet X (2018). The research examines fictional Black girls whose anger, marked by pathological nation states, distorts their
1 Examples of literature reflecting these themes include novels such as Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1953).
3 girlhoods and forces them into creative ways of sustaining themselves in North America.
The selected novels return to Washington’s themes. Counter to Washington, however, this study not only addresses silences that occur from restrained anger but also reveals visibility that stems from uninhibited anger.
The shift from repressed to expressed anger connects the canonical theme of anger to the “changing same.” Nazera Sadiq Wright’s epilogue to Black Girlhood in the
Nineteenth Century (2016) presents Amiri Baraka’s 1966 theorization of the changing same. Baraka notes that jazz and rhythm and blues have the same origins, but jazz conformed to a pattern of the “changing same” (179). Baraka’s notion alludes to United
States culture as a culprit in limiting the expressive form of jazz. The norms in North
America also impress these limitations on Black girlhood. In her essay, “The Changing
Same:” Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists—Iola Leroy and The
Color Purple,” Deborah E. McDowell communicates the changing same in terms of textual similarities. McDowell writes, “I see literary influence, to borrow from Julia
Kristeva, in the intertextual sense, each text in dialogue with all previous texts, transforming and retaining narrative patterns and strategies in endless possibility” (48).
Representations of anger in the selected texts reflect the transformation and retention mentioned by McDowell. The patterns demonstrate that although forms and expressions of oppression may change, the resulting (“same”) anger is in dialogue with other texts and contexts.
4 With the changing same, Black women’s literature reveals the emergence of resistant rage and “arcs of anger.2” The authors and their Black girl protagonists are resistant knowers who affirm the productive possibilities of rage by offering insight into its variant forms. Through portrayals of mad Black girls, coming-of-age narratives by
Black women novelists become sites for constructing Black girlhood counternarratives of and through rage. The literary Black girls presented in this dissertation portray anger as an emotion tied to awareness. Black girl counternarratives embedded in the analyzed coming-of-age novels establish how literary and literal descent (i.e., nationality and origins) mark Black girls’ ascents into anger, rage, outrage, and alternative epistemologies. As Black girls express their feelings and reactions to their environments, their epistemological standpoints create counternarratives of tropes that plague Black communities. As the trope maintain a power structure, they are inherently political—as are Black girls’ responses to these images. Through their depictions of Black girls, Black women authors also respond to these images.
Of these tropes, perhaps the most challenging to defy is the angry Black girl
(woman). While rooted in caricatures of Black women, unlike other stereotypes, the angry Black woman maintains mutability because it is not bound to a specific context, class, or age group. Its unboundedness makes Black girls vulnerable to this image; its mutability carves space for examining a range of rage-induced reactions. Carolyn West implores that the angry Black woman trope has “become a template for portraying almost
2 The arcs of anger in this work trace anger in Black women’s fiction and situates novels published between two historically and culturally relevant epochs that center this emotion: the “angry decade” (1960s) and the “age of rage” (2010s).
5 all Black women” (149), such is also applicable for Black girls. The “template” often dictates the ways Black girls and women navigate the world, but they find ways to defy and revise this image through rejection of this narrative and interjection of their models.
As opposed to framing rage as unfavorable, Black women authors position Black girl rage as an interruption of silence. The novelists disrupt strategic deafness through narratives that illuminate rage as a byproduct of national histories.3 Oppressive colonial forces frequently spawn this emotion, ironically giving rise to a potentially decolonial force. Anger, namely in response to subjugation, serves as a means of empowerment for
Black girls and adolescents.4 Anger functions beyond individual empowerment; this emotion ignites political movements. To dilute its productive possibilities, people in power decenter or distort it in master narratives of social progress. These dominant narratives compel the decentered voices to chronicle their experiences through counternarratives of rage.
Critical discourse surrounding anger reshapes narratives, invokes debates about the utility of anger, and presents distinctions between anger, rage, and outrage. 5 Black rage garners the attention of scholars, psychologists, and criminal defense lawyers, yet remains understudied in relation to Black girls, particularly in literature. Prefacing the
3 In the introduction to Moving Beyond Boundaries Volume 1: International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (1995) edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Davies indicates that Black women not only speak but also critique the “strategic deafness” of oppressors (3). 4 See Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018). 5 Sue J. Kim, author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013) discusses anger as a response to “individual harms or desires, but outrage is produced collectively from agreed upon values and is tied to action” (177). Deborah Cohen, author of Rage and Activism: The Promise of Black Lives Matter (2017), explores rage as an emotion “linked to social structure through activism” (38).
6 term rage with Black constructs it as “racial anger” unique to lived experiences of Black people.6 Consequently, Black rage presents itself differently than the rage of non-Black people. The insertions of gender and childhood further complicate rage and contribute to nuanced meanings of the emotion. Gender, race, age, and other markers of identity inform how individuals come to “know” the anger. Knowing this emotion shapes Black girls’ negotiation of their spaces and ushers them into productive anger. As the nation suppresses their desires and freedoms, Alison Bailey argues for different “textures” of anger including a “knowing resistant anger” that allows “marginalized knowers” to combat epistemic injustices (94). Resistant knowers’ epistemological standpoints reveal conflicts between what they know and what society deems as true. Alternative ways of knowing provide diverse narratives that counteract dominant discourses and stimuli that often impede Black girls’ development. The knowledge creates narratives of the knowers’ anger; these stories of anger often manifest in Black women’s fiction.
Purpose of the Research
This dissertation engages Black girlhood in Black women’s literary tradition to address the circular presence of Black girl rage. In this study, coming-of-age novels illuminate stimuli and adaptations connected to Black girls’ rage, demonstrating how rage helps girls navigate society. The work exhibits how coming-of-age narratives by Black women utilize Black girl protagonists to challenge extant normative notions of rage.
Positioning this emotion as central to the girls’ growing resistance of institutionalized
6 Racial anger refers to “the anger rising from racial/national formations appearing in various specific forms around the world commonly conditioned by global capitalism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and liberal individualism” (Kim 5).
7 oppression and structural violence, the novelists create characters who display connections between affect and awareness. The study shows that the Black girl protagonists experience concurrent developmental processes—of themselves and their anger.
With the current surge of interest in rage, it is necessary to discuss and theorize this emotion. As fiction is a longstanding medium for capturing the lives, desires, and epistemological standpoints of Black girls and women, the purpose of this research is to identify how Black women’s fiction communicates the impact of national history on
Black girls’ emotions. It also illustrates anger as central to Black women’s literary tradition. The research traces the response of rage in Black girls through examining how coming-of-age novels by select Black women represent Black girls navigating interlocking oppressions, coming to consciousness, and taking control of “controlling images.” By regaining and redirecting the power in tropes of Black girlhood, Black girls empower themselves. The research presents a literary arc of anger by entering conversations (glossed in the literature review) about Black rage, Black girlhood, coming-of-age, and the structural violence that accompanies misrepresentation of anger.
The research contributes to the growing scholarship transforming images of Black girls and Black rage. Examining the worldviews of fictional Black girls builds context for
Black girl rage and challenging presuppositions of its futility. Historically, Black women novelists positioned Black girls as conduits for reconstructing narratives surrounding anger and rage. Although society reprimands Black girls for asserting their voices, the
Black literary imagination increasingly acknowledges Black girls’ ways of knowing and
8 responding. Scholars such as Jerome Bump posit “emotions often generate more energy for reform of race, class, and gender inequities than abstractions” (147), therefore, the novelists demonstrate anger and rage as regenerative forces.
The central focus on coming-of-age, voice, changing same, and arcs of anger employs the Black feminist and womanist tenets of voice, counter-hegemony, and the validity of emotion (e.g., ethics of caring).7 These tenets understood through Black feminist and womanist epistemology and intersectionality assess rage and its utility for
Black girls in asserting their humanity and citizenship, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to identity formation. The work examines how Black girls’ fury begins a transformative process—whether consciously or unconsciously— into what bell hooks refers to in Black Looks: Race and Representation
(1992) as the “radical subject” (47) through counter-hegemonic iterations of emotions.
With rage central to their developmental processes, the girls utilize radical and subversive means of asserting themselves.
The girls in the novels engage in decolonial work through their resistance efforts. bell hooks proclaims decolonization is chiefly a “political process accompanied by struggle; therefore, to define ourselves in and beyond the act of resistance to domination, we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (Black Looks 5). The Black girl protagonists’ coming-of-
7 See Audre Lorde’s’ Sister Outsider (1986) and Clenora Hudson-Weems’ Africana Womanist Literary Theory (2004) for theorizing about voice. See bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) for Black women’s counter-hegemonic strategies and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (1990) for ethics of caring.
9 age processes propagate self-definition and resistance of hegemonic forces that narrow the possibilities of their lives. The girls engage memory and history in their transformations into radical subjects. The protagonists remember, imagine, and rage, therefore, through their resistance become central to counter (hegemonic) narratives.
Thus, beyond the radical subject, this project recalls the past through canonical texts and engages the present through emergent writers. Analyzing works across place and time aids in developing arcs of anger. Invoking arcs of anger acknowledges Black girls’ exercising of rage to define their futures.
By arguing that the select coming-of-age novels construct counternarratives of rage, it is possible not only to trace the “changing same” of Black girls’ rage in significant literary and political movements but also in the genre. Through constructing arcs of anger, the analyses attempt to push Black girls and Black women’s literary contributions to the fore of dialogues about rage. The goal is to pull angry Black girls from the literary archive and demonstrate how a focus on their representation adds insight to the growing field of Black Girlhood Studies, increasingly timely, considering discourse about Black Lives Matter and anger as a catalyst for social change.
Through content (textual) analysis of the selected novels, this project investigates how authors write wrath into their literature to define Black girl rage as a political rostrum for Black girls. As this study focuses on the transformative power of rage through analyzing its fictional representations by Black women, it considers these representations’ challenges to norms and systems. Following hooks’ call to engage race and representation beyond challenging the status quo, these representations reveal that
10 “[i]t is also about transforming the image . . . pos[ing] critical alternatives . . . and mov[ing] us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation” (Black Looks 4). Contending with dualistic thinking about anger and rage is necessary to create transgressive images and radical subjects that defy master narratives in attempts to narrate their lives. This line of thinking dismantles polarizing perceptions of Black girls’ emotions.
Analysis of God Bless the Child, Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Hate U Give, The
Bluest Eye, Daddy Was a Number Runner, and The Poet X traces the experience and performance of rage and argues its cultural significance. The study presents rage as central to gaining access to rights and the formation of Black girl activist consciousness.
The research also traces the work of Black women authors to revise dominant narratives of angry Black girls in the context of coming-of-age narratives.
Statement of the Problem
While scholars and activists establish the productive possibilities of anger exhibited by members of marginalized groups, broader society continuously demonizes this emotion and considers it counterproductive. Despite increased knowledge surrounding rage, the structural violence that triggers it continues. Failure to see rage as a valid response to structural violence allows dominant narratives to prevail. These narratives propagate the invalidation of Black girls and women’s emotions.
While a plethora of novels by Black women constructs counternarratives of rage, research does not adequately examine the evolution (changing same) of Black girl rage in
11 the same ways it explores the evolution of the tropes to which it is bound. Professedly, the generalizations and myths informing controlling images of Black girls justify the girls’ treatment. In the case of rage, which often signals recognition of a problem, these myths can suppress awareness and change the ways individuals govern themselves.
Conditioned to view rage negatively, many Black women restrain themselves to avoid stereotypes surrounding anger. The tropes are particularly paralyzing for girls. While the misinterpretation of rage is a continuing problem, ironically, the rage is a potential corrective.
The problem of policing and overwriting narratives of Black girls and women warrants studies of these narratives and their purposes. The distortion of rage and Black girl voices are persisting global issues. Christy Rishoi, author of From Girl to Woman:
American Women’s Coming-of-Age Narratives (2003), addresses the continuing problem of muting marginalized people who resist subjugation. Rishoi frames coming-of-age narratives as political and notes that “[s]tories of resistance and difference have always been in circulation, but they are typically silenced in public discourse because they fail to invoke the universal subject of liberal humanism” (4). Silencing of these stories perpetuates master narratives and limits access to epistemological truths. Continuous marginalization, exclusion, and oppression of Black girls in public discourse and scholarship propel the research to join the conversations centering Black girls and their anger as catalysts for social change.
12 Research Questions
The research suggests narratives authored by Black women as solutions to problems surrounding inaccurate notions about rage. The research questions are as follows: How do coming-of-age narratives by Black women present Black girl rage?
What connections does the literature make between rage, rights, and resistance? What do the novels reveal about anger in Black women’s literary tradition?
Significance of the Study
The creation of Black Girlhood Studies carves a space for this work preceded by the progenitors of Black Girlhood Studies and Black Youth Studies. The 1970s introduced Joyce A. Ladner’s Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971). Ladner and the scholars who succeed her foster a tradition of “political relationship[s] of being in community with and for Black girls” (Owens et al. 118). The scholarship of these women attends to the construct of Black girlhood while privileging girls’ lived experiences.
Ladner’s intellectual labor ties the study of Black girl rage to anti-oppressive work and demonstrates the necessity of Black girls’ contributions and contributions of those who study them. Ladner argues that “[t]he total misrepresentation of the Black community and the various myths which surround it can be seen in microcosm in the Black female adolescent” (xxxiii). Ladner’s argument about myths and microcosms supports this study of Black girl rage. This misrepresentation not only reveals itself through ethnographical work such as Ladner’s but also through literary studies. Centering Black girl voices in fiction positions their narratives as instrumental to combatting misrepresentations. This research engages Black Girl Solidarity Praxis as its entrance into the emergent field of
13 Black Girlhood Studies. In print and practice, this work attends to investigating and comprehending rage to position the researcher and authors as a “co-conspirator[s] of the radical acts of freedom [Black girls] imagine and enact” (Owens et al.116). The radical acts of Black girl protagonists demonstrate what Black women novelists teach their readers about rage.
By presenting the primacy of literature authored by Black women to understanding Black girlhood(s), the research proves to be a significant move toward gaining insight into how Black girls are vessels for articulating Black rage. The study reveals that while Black rage gained its widespread exposure through historical and cultural movements, introductions of Black girl rage to the larger public have been through prose. The work joins conversations surrounding the consequences of ignoring
Black rage. Aligning with Debora Thompson’s 2017 article “An Exoneration of Black
Rage,” an underlying assumption of this work is that it will contribute to comprehending how emotions inform racial politics (458). The work goes a step further to include gender politics and their role in rage.
Just as Black women’s literature, theory, and criticism challenge conditions of blackness, demonstrating Black women as unabashedly Black [and] woman, these works reveal unabashed anger as a tool for survival. In the studied novels, expressing rage demonstrates a refusal to cleave to norms that force Black girls to compromise portions of their identities. Significantly, this work also delivers literary criticism by examining the many ways arcs of anger appear historically, thematically, and canonically. The novels situated in an “arc of anger” formed by the Civil Right Era (initiated in the angry
14 decade) and the Black Lives Matter Era (initiated in the age of rage) emphasize the omnipresence of Black rage and the ways North American cultures surrogate that rage.
Race and gender barriers intensify the antagonistic forces of the Americas. In
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & The
New Left (1979) Sara Evans writes, “Twice in the history of the United States the struggle for racial equality has been mid-wife to a feminist movement— in the abolition movement of the 1830s and again in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s” (24). The struggle for racial equality is also “mid-wife” to Black rage. Omnipresent rage continues to birth movements. The contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement indicates the midwifery spawned by the nation’s hierarchical structure. The movements create counternarratives that reveal narrative discrepancies between the nation and marginalized groups. The novels, published between these movements allow for assessment of the contours of Black girl rage by demonstrating its many forms. Each book contributes to shaping knowledge on rage from historical, cultural, and social perspectives.
Return to Rage: Coming-of-Age Narratives and Anger
Greta LeSeur indicates the Black Bildungsroman (coming-of-age narrative) is an adaptation of the German form; therefore, it is appropriate to utilize this genre to study
Black girls’ adaptations to their environments. As the central focus of coming-of-age narratives is a metamorphosis, this genre displays the metamorphosis of anger in individual novels and the canon. The utility of anger becomes apparent as Black girls in the novels reject social mores. As their narratives collide with the narrative of larger society, discrepancies arise. Christy Rishoi indicates that coming-of-age narratives
15 articulate the conflicts and pain that accompany youth. She notes that these narratives provide “a congenial form for women writers to successfully question the power of dominant ideologies to construct their lives” (9). Through Black girls, the authors in this dissertation question dominant ideologies that drive fury. Black women’s coming-of-age novels present a necessary return to rage that combats master narratives that dictate Black girls’ roles in society.
This study extends Pamela Groves’ work on coming-of-rage from her 1995 article
“Coming-of-Rage: Young, Black, and Female in America.” Black girls in the selected fiction attempt to denounce indoctrination into racialized gender roles by resisting systems and rejecting patriarchal norms. Through their emotive behaviors, Black girls attempt to reclaim and redefine their rage. 8 This reclamation work, central to their self- definition, allows for framing their development through Groves’ concept of coming-of- rage, which focuses on the negotiation of the social fabric smothering Black girls. Stock stories and dominant narratives attempt to stifle Black girls’ development; as they age, they often “com[e] into an understanding of [their] own devaluation that grows out of the pervasiveness of controlling images in society and the way those images catalog people”
(47). Black girls who experience coming-of-rage evaluate their devaluation. As they occupy the periphery, they combat epistemic violence. During coming-of-age, they grapple with implications of biology, form gendered, raced identities, and often experience and work to comprehend rage-inducing trauma.
8 In “The Verb is No: Towards a Grammar of Black Women’s Anger,” Therí A. Pickens writes that scholarly conversations on anger aim to “depathologize anger” and “reclaim the ideological validity of that emotion” (16).
16 Groves’ notion, a play on coming-of-age, articulates the significance of anger to
Black girls’ development. She anchors her concept firmly in the United States, exposing how “American lifestyle do[es] not permit childhood to linger” (LeSeur 4). The characters, forced to grow up quickly, realize that their race, age, and gender make them susceptible to abuse and oppression. Groves views coming-of-age as a learning experience noting that “[t]he struggle to understand one’s history, relate it to one’s present, and integrate the complex consequences inherent in these matters, is an important element of coming-of-age as a black woman in this hemisphere” (47). Her integration of past and present sustains the arc of anger and a return to rage. She claims that her selected texts “resolve the rage and restore the selves of these girls by offering strategies of resistance as they work toward liberation” (57). This dissertation troubles the notion of “resolving” the rage, as I see the rage serving a purpose beyond the individual.
Though it is necessary for Black girls’ development, it is also integral for resistance of injustices against communities.
My formulation of coming-of-rage differs from Groves’ position; I discuss not only the epiphanies that trigger rage but also explain the utility of the responses. While
Groves focuses solely on U.S. girlhood, I explore diasporic rage, and by extension, girlhood with a focus on how nation informs Black girl rage and adolescent anger. As
Groves identifies six challenges to becoming a Black woman: invisibility/otherness, negative self-image, sexual and other violence, drug abuse and crime, lack of faith in
Black men, and a loss of voice (51), this research includes broader themes (e.g., intersectionality and epistemology) that present stimuli (loss of perceived control,
17 deprivation, and discrepancies) and adaptations (voice, violence, and alternative epistemologies) entrenched in anger.
As consciousness collides with physical and social development, coming-of-rage highlights the development of anger. With the coming-of-age genre, novelists represent the transition from childhood to adulthood. Black novelists in this genre construct texts focusing on initiation into Black public life and chronicle the difficulties that contribute to characters’ emotive behaviors. The authors’ and characters’ intersectional approaches to understanding rage, development, and Black girlhood(s) demonstrate how race, gender, class, nation, and other markers of identity inform resistance. Examining these features is vital to understanding the range of historical, psychological, and cultural factors influencing Black girl protagonists’ emotive responses and their stories.
Lucy Wilson’s introduction to In Due Season: Essays on Novels of Development by Caribbean Women Writers (2008) justifies juxtaposition of U.S. and Caribbean coming-of-age literature in the context of this research. Wilson presents the Caribbean tradition as rooted in “movement away from linearity and closure” (xi). She notes that male novelists of Caribbean bildungsromane write of the realities of colonial Caribbean life, carving space for Caribbean women’s “radical transformation of the genre” (ix). This radical transformation also manifests in the selected women-authored Black American coming-of-age narratives and narratives of first-generation Americans by making Black girls and women’s anger not only visible but also a viable source of healing and resistance. The transformation makes way for radical subjects and the presence of an arc of anger: “In their hands the Bildungsroman has expanded its focus to include the stages
18 of a woman’s life from adolescence to old age, implicitly recognizing that Bildung
(learning, education, refinement) occurs throughout the lifecycle” (ix). The Caribbean-
American texts in this study radically transform the genre by demonstrating cycles of anger. Danticat’s 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory and Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2018 The Poet X upend the literary form. Acevedo’s text written in verse defies traditional novel construction, while Danticat’s novel of return and remembrance opens a discourse about generational trauma and development.
The selected coming-of-age novels reflect coming-of-rage and defiance of the angry Black girl trope. Used as a mode of silencing, the angry Black girl trope, conditions
Black girls to fear rather than feel rage. In the texts analyzed in this study, silence is “a condition of oppression” (Bailey 96). Despite censorship and suppression, Black girl rage reverberates from the margins as a solution to subjugation. The characters come to realize
“part of resisting oppression is finding a voice that effectively pushes back against the weight of imposed silences” (96). When their voices are muted or ignored, the girls find other ways to resist: Black girl anger turns to action becoming “an audible expression of resistance to the sufferings of injustice” (96). Tempered by their environments, their anger varies in degree, but the emotion remains a constant reminder of shifts in their consciousness and increasing awareness of intersectionality. Normative behaviors and righteous acts of rage make Black girls hyper-visible, yet they still struggle with society muffling their voices.
Through rage and anger, the Black girl characters reclaim their voices. Therí A.
Pickens points to anger as “one of those ruptures of silence and an affective charge and
19 emotional experience that resonates interpersonally and politically” (16). This “affective charge” brings clarity driven by emotion. Though the anger is legible, because of their age, those around them misread it. Age often serves as a barrier that prevents Black girls from expressing their opinions and ways of knowing. Consequently, their means of asserting their voices often move beyond the spoken.
Even Black girls who are not privy to the history of systemic oppression notice its weight through their daily observations. Claudine Raynaud writes that discovery of racism is part of Black protagonists’ education and journey to self as “emphasis is placed upon being African American in America, where ownership, belonging, and their negation, and dispossession, are central to notions of identity” (106). Incorporating Black girls who are not African American but reside in the United States adds layers to the study of Black girls’ anger. Including an immigrant and a first-generation American angry girl further implicates America in the development of that anger. For Black girls, the discovery of racism intensifies with exposure to sexism. Anger sparks as the girls are not allowed to own their sexuality and consistently have their voices negated.
The growth of their anger signals recognition of their stations. The Black girl protagonists use their anger to build their futures. Sophie’s memories in Breath, Eyes,
Memory, Rosie’s following of her grandmother’s deluded American Dream in God Bless the Child, and Starr’s mention of ancestral rage in The Hate U Give elucidate how the characters return to rage that precedes them. Francie’s shift in consciousness in Daddy
Was a Number Runner after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Claudia’s destruction of the white doll in The Bluest Eye, and Xiomara’s anger at the Catholic Church in The Poet X
20 are indicative of how systemic oppression, degradation of blackness, and cultural norms position Black girlhood as an othered space.
The ancestry of othering contributes to an ancestry of anger. Katie Vaz’s framing of womanism addresses the historical presence of rage. She observes that “[womanism] seriously considers the contributions of the African ancestral heritage and Africans’ life today and pursues the sanctity of the family broadly defined (Thomas 1998)” (Vaz 234).
An ancestry of anger that arose from attempts at self and communal preservation displays the historical antecedents of Black girl rage and ushers forth a greater understanding of the emotion in the age of rage. Vaz notes that womanists conceive new ways of piloting their lives in a hierarchical world dictated by social constructions, but they also use their
“foremothers’ rituals and survival tools to live in hostile environments” (234). Black girls combine their predecessors’ strategies with ones of their design in efforts to liberate themselves from oppressive forces. Through rage, the girls create tools for surviving and adapting. With anger tethered to their growth, tracing the growth of the character’s rage provides insight into their identity development. The rage gestated in the narratives encourages the girls to access their voices and tell their stories.
Lift Every Voice 9: Black Girl Protagonists and Feminist Storytelling
Voice is not only central to understanding counternarratives but also Black girls’ development and manifestations of their rage. Rebecca Carroll, author of Sugar in the
Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America (1997), indicates that for Black girls, “the voice comes from a place of solo identity, of begrudged and premature independence and
9 Borrowed from James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice” (1900).
21 of crazy-making uncertainty” (13). The precarious position of Black girls often forces premature independence and knowing that compels them to respond, although often uncertainly, to their environments. Their voices become central to meaning-making practices and adaptations. As a result, listening to their voices aids Black girls in empowering themselves, countering oppressive forces, and validating and representing emotions.
The “speaker” and “listener” are central to understanding voice. In Moving
Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (1995), Carole
E. Boyce Davies asserts that silence and voicelessness allied with the issues of hearing and listening were the most pressing concerns of the historical moment. Davies writes,
“in my view then, we need to foreground the need to HEAR WOMEN’S VOICES as well as MAKING WOMEN’S VOICES HEARD and therefore activate a conceptual challenge to selective hearing or mis-hearing” (3). The novelists chosen for this research amplify the voices of Black girls; through counternarratives, they challenge the “mis- hearing” of Black girls’ anger. Davies’ argument allows space for the numerous ways
Black girls use voice or strategic silence. She also creates a dialogue for the ways governing bodies use their voices and silence against them:
Historically, for Black women, physical and emotional brutality and various
forms of epistemic violence often have been directed at curtailing articulations.
The denial of black women’s voices produced an emotional memory and stress
which can implode or come out in explosive ways. This, in turn, produces another
construction: that of the ‘angry black woman.’ Still, it must be noted that it is not
22 always anger that one sees in black women who have learned to speak, but
passion. And in a culture where passion is negated except in sexuality, a person
who speaks passionately to issues is assigned to anger by the passionless. (3)
Facing epistemic violence and silencing, the Black girls in the texts exhibit anger attached to awareness of their treatment in society and their homes. Though Davies addresses the possibility of passionate responses, this work explicitly looks to Black girl protagonists written as angry to explicate the use of their voices in constructing counternarratives to conventional notions of the “angry Black girl.”
Overshadowing or ignoring of Black girls’ voices necessitates retelling their stories. In “Narrative: The Road to Black Feminist Theory,” Jewel Amoah display the function of voices of people of color. She views storytelling as reclamation work:
The practice of Narrative functions to allow traditionally marginalized and
disempowered groups, such as women and people of color, to reclaim their
voices. Also, by laying claim to personal Narrative (i.e., the telling of one's own
story), oppressed peoples are able to create spheres of theorized existence, and
thus remove themselves from the marginalized position to which the dominant
society has relegated them. (85)
Amoah and other Black women scholars present voice as integral to resisting hegemony and disrupting dominant narratives. As the girls tell their stories, rage becomes a focal point of their “theorized existence.” They construct new realities and attempt to demarginalize themselves. “The voice” guides Black girls and Black communities to speak from their understandings and envision a future of their design.
23 The novelists demonstrate that even when Black girls’ stories have commonalities, there is no singular story of Black girlhood. Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s 2009 TedTalk “The Danger of a Single Story” enlightens viewers about the necessity of moving beyond stock narratives and one-dimensional perspectives. Adichie indicates that single stories generate stereotypes. Though not wholly untrue, stereotypes are incomplete depictions of their subjects. For Adichie, the single story “makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult” (Adichie). Single stories do not capture the multidimensionality of Black girlhood; engagement of multiple perspectives and voices expands the scope of humanity. Adichie warns of how “impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children” (Adichie). Her mention of the impressionability of children illuminates the urgent, consistent need for counternarratives.
Single stories highlight the insidious nature of dominant culture against the realities of impressionable youth. Adichie notes that the single story maintains a power structure. She likens this power to the Igbo term “nkali,” which translates to “to be greater than another.” Adichie indicates, “Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power” (Adichie). Black women novelists employing Black girls as storytellers and narrators push for new narratives; they negotiate power differentials by revealing Black girl truths.
Storytelling is imperative for Black girls whose narratives conflict with master narratives. Sandra Hughes-Hassell applies counter-storytelling to Young Adult Literature,
24 discussing how it highlights and combats exclusion. With counter-storytelling, Hughes-
Hassel challenges the singularity that accompanies meta- and master narratives. From
Hughes-Hassell’s perspective, counter-storytelling is also critical to coming-of-age not only because it gives voices to adolescent readers and characters but also because
“central to counter-storytelling is an examination of racism and its impact on people of color and indigenous peoples” (221). Counter-storytelling extends to examinations of other institutions and experiences. Developing counter-stories about rage reveals its functions and how markers of identity shape those functions.
Black women’s writing not only illustrates how Black women fuse markers of their identities but also how they fuse history, lived experiences, and creative license to produce texts that critique humanity while speaking to peculiarities of Black girls and women’s lives. The prevailing themes of Black women’s literature point to counternarratives as central to resistance:
When studying the writings of African American women throughout history, it
becomes clear that they wrote to counter false and incomplete depictions that have
long been prevalent in society. Using their pens to fight back, writing became a
vehicle to define their lives. From colonial and antebellum periods to the twenty-
first century, Black women expressed themselves across several themes involving
beauty, gender, race, education, intellect, artistic sensibility, identity, religion,
family, relationships, and intergenerational representations of health and life (Lee,
2006). (Muhammad 227)
25 Muhammad illuminates a tradition of counternarratives by presenting several themes in
Black women’s self-definition. Her work reiterates how Black women create full stories of and for themselves through writing. Outlining of the tradition of writing as resistance, she invites a discourse for the literary tradition as a platform for articulating the validity of anger.
Margins, Lines, and Arcs: Black Feminist Orientations and Literary Criticism
Black women writers develop their traditions, patterns, and forms based on their experiences and exclusion from wider canons. Discussions centering Black women’s writing often reference literary foremothers and common content in Black women’s narratives. These references and commonalities substantiate a historical and cultural genealogy of anger that supports what I term “arcs of anger.” The primary arc of anger in this study, situated between the “angry decade” (the 1960s) and the “age of rage” (the
2010s) influences readings of anger in novels while illuminating the conditions that inform the texts’ production. The other arcs of anger are produced within the texts and their intertextualities. Just as an arc is a small portion of a circle, these arcs of anger are small portions of a broader conversation surrounding anger and narratives. The notion of circularity speaks to Black women scholars’ need to look backward and forward simultaneously. The arcs communicate what Flo Kennedy refers to as the circularity of oppression.10 Within the arcs developed in Black women’s literature, specifically in the
10 With this theory, Kennedy explores the institutionalization of oppression by speaking to how oppressed people can be complicit in their oppression, how they can actively oppress others, and how people consent to oppression. She opens her essay “Institutionalized Oppression vs. the Female” from Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) with “[p]eople who have trouble accepting the thesis that women are an oppressed group might somewhat be placated by my theory of the circularity of oppression” (438).
26 texts of this research, modalities of anger that attempt to halt this cyclical nature of oppression are present. The authoring of Black girls’ anger across epochs also aids the development of an arc of anger in Black women’s literary tradition. Invoking the words of Audre Lorde justifies the symbolic use of the arc. Lorde writes in “Eye to Eye: Black
Women, Hatred, and Anger” that “[e]very Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers” (145). This curve, or arc, is evident in the selected texts as the girls navigate latent and active angers.
The literature mirrors the historical arc of anger situated between the Civil Rights
Era, the rise of Black feminism(s), and the Black Lives Matter Era. The Civil Rights
Movement put American incivility at the center of global discourse, garnering much attention in public and scholarly conversations, particularly in terms of political struggles and Black rage driven by inequality. Beverly Guy-Sheftall calls attention to the sixties as the “angry decade” indicating that much of Black women’s frustrations connected to the
“male-dominated Civil Rights and black nationalist movements of the sixties” (xvi). Her centering of women’s anger articulates Black women’s and girl rage as specialized anger.
Black women’s issues often occupied the periphery of political conversations, but their contributions to activism and literature demonstrate the influence of their voices. The angry decade coupled with the present-day age of rage illuminates oscillation between anger and rage. The Black girl characters and their communities circle back to these emotions to grapple with issues plaguing their nation.
Black feminist writers construct metaphors that shape the discourse and trajectory of Black feminist criticism, Black literary traditions, and by extension, Black women’s
27 lives. To explicate the peripheral existences of Black communities, writers like bell hooks and Mae Henderson utilize the concepts of margins and borders.11 A host of Black women writers presents their ideas about the development of Black women’s authorship utilizing similar methods. This research plays on Black feminist orientations of generational and genealogical influences. Citing Joanne M. Braxton’s argument for
“unwritten texts and subtexts” that influence Black women readers and writers, the study presents coming-of-age novels as central to constructing a “tradition within a tradition” and to developing arcs of anger and counternarratives of Black girlhood.12
Critics Cheryl A. Wall and Michelle Cliff utilize “the line” to trace the lineage of
Black women’s writing. Borrowing form Cheryl A. Wall, much of Black feminist literary criticism “worries the line:”
Scholars have set forth competing theories of African American literary tradition
for which the line is a fitting metaphor. Whether one perceives texts as responding
to their precursors or as signifying on them, tradition constitutes a theoretical line
in which texts produce and are produced by other texts. These intertextual
connections may be thematic or mythical, rhetorical, or figurative. (Worrying the
Line 11)
The texts in this research signify on and respond to Black people’s anger. The arc of anger seeks to examine thematic and historical connections in literature. Though the texts
11 See bell hooks’ From Margin to Center (1984) and Mae Henderson’s Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies (1995). 12 See Joanne M. Braxton’s Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989) for insight on how Black women construct traditions in literature.
28 are not responding to one another, they are responding to cultural phenomena that shape
Black girlhood and anger. While the line is a sufficient metaphor in terms of chronicling literary lineage, the arc speaks to multiple genealogies, particularly anger as a
“genealogical phenomenon” (Chemaly 289). The arc unveils the interrelatedness of Black girls’ anger. Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s
Anger (2018), indicates that “anger is not unidirectional, but part of endless mental, physical, and intellectual feedback loops” (xiv). These loops, seen in literature, can be examined to make assertions about representations of Black girl rage.
While complicating notions of lines and traditions, Deborah McDowell’s work on the changing same supports arc and circle metaphors. McDowell articulates that the
“particulars of a black feminist critical position have been difficult to reconcile,” specifically in articulating an “organic line of descent and connection from black women writers to black women critics to literary characters” (21). As her work concerns the shifts (cultural, critical, and aesthetic) that shape Black women’s writing (xii), engaging her notion of the changing same presents a focus on the shifts in interpretations of Black girlhood and rage presented in coming-of-age narratives. The changing same also reveals consistencies in Black anger’s root causes: oppression and marginalization. While it is possible to trace generational connections and continuity in Black women’s writing, acknowledging shifts allows for a nuanced reading of rage.
McDowell appeals for nuanced understandings of Black women’s literary tradition. She cites Hortense Spillers’ “A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love” as an exemplar for problematizing notions of tradition. Spillers’ work moves beyond the “line” and
29 staunch understandings of tradition. She assesses that literature “tend[s] to move in cycles rather than straight lines” (294-95). The cycles justify metaphors beyond the line. Spillers notes that “[i]ronically the right not to accede to the simplifications and mystifications of a strictly historiographical timeline that now promises the greatest freedom of discourse to black people, to black women, as critics, teachers, writers, and thinkers” (295). A shift in metaphor offers new ways of thinking about the convergence of past, present, and future. While it engages chronology through the publication dates of the novels, this dissertation does not implore a strict line argument; instead, it engages the arc to center the novels and characters’ return to anger.
The realism in the novels is emblematic of the texts’ setting and context. Cheryl
Wall cautions that engaging African American literature as merely mimetic or sociological is a misreading “to read that way is inanely reductive, but to read black writing as if it has no relation to political reality is to vitiate its power” (Changing Our
Own Words 9). The selected narratives reveal Black girls’ political realities. While fictive, the narratives display experiences underscored by the North American cultural climate. The accounts, constructed as imaginative mimesis, not only acknowledge what is but also what could be.
Chapter Organization
The first three chapters of the dissertation contain the framing material for the study of Black girl rage. Chapter One contextualizes the research and briefly introduces how Black women’s literary tradition gives voice to Black girls and demonstrates the possibility of Black women’s writing informing understandings of rage. The chapter
30 situates the research across the disciplines of Africana Women’s Studies, Black Girlhood
Studies, and Literary Studies while defining the scope of the study. This introduction presents the concepts: coming-of-age, coming-of-rage, changing same, arcs of anger, and voice. It acknowledges stimuli and adaptations that aid in counternarrative construction and rage formulation. The chapter also indicates the research questions, the purpose of the research, statement of the problem, and the significance of the study.
Chapter Two defines the fundamental concepts and reviews literature in intersectional studies of rage, Black Girlhood Studies, and literary criticism. Relatedly, it demonstrates how these fields converge. It houses the theoretical framework of epistemology and intersectionality. The chapter presents the historical and cultural relevance of Black girlhood and Black rage, merging the discourses of these two phenomena. This chapter presents girlhood, rage, and coming-of-age as sites of contestation. The literature traces work on rage from the angry decade to the age of rage, and indicates how anger, girlhood, and bildungsroman transform when prefaced with
“Black.” The chapter demonstrates how the body of work in each field carves a space for this project by revealing the gaps and the common threads presented in the scholars’ analyses of the selected phenomena.
Chapter Three outlines the methodology of the study. Sarojini Nadir’s method of the STORY mode guides the research. It explains the method and the research design, as well as the underlying assumptions. This section revisits the research questions and indicates how they inform the method. It highlights how the study lends itself to content
(textual) analysis and presents the chosen texts, rationale, and selection criteria. The
31 methodology explicates the procedures and analytical strategies that shape the subsequent chapters. Additionally, it situates the research as Black feminist work by presenting its contributions to the method construction.
Chapter Four, titled “Cartographies of Black Girl Rage: Mapping Memory and
History through National Narrative Discrepancies,” argues that the literal and figurative landscapes of North America cultivate anger. The chapter illuminates the “cartographies of rage” by mapping how locations, both social and geographical, inform the characters’ coming-of-rage. Engaging the ways Black girls respond to memories and histories
(individual and collective) reveals the stimuli for rage. Invoking the problematics of the
“American Dream,” state-sanctioned violence, and national narratives, the chapter positions nation as an antagonist and illuminates Black girls’ decolonial work.
“Cartographies of Black Girl Rage” engages the books 1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath,
Eyes, Memory, and 3) The Hate U Give presenting a historical arc of anger by opening with the angry decades and closing with the age of rage.
Chapter Five, titled “White Noise, Black Rage: Countering Hegemonic Violence across Place and Time through Black Girl Epistemologies,” presents adaptations that accompany rage. The positioning of Black girl rage in the chapter reveals how the characters develop alternative ways of knowing. Specifically engaging the characters’
“oppositional gazes” and often violent attempts to combat injustices and imposed silence,
“White Noise, Black Rage” centralizes rage in the protagonists’ consciousness development and critiques veneration of whiteness and patriarchal norms. As the girls assert their voices and humanity, they highlight how governing bodies—public and
32 private —inform anger. The chapter includes the novels 1) The Bluest Eye, 2) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 3) The Poet X in a thematic arc of anger.
The concluding chapter, “Liberation and Literature: Toward Counternarratives of
Black Girl Rage,” summarizes the scope of the study and reiterates its critical interventions at the interstices and intersections of Black Girlhood Studies, Literary
Studies, and Africana Women’s Studies. It presents the novels as counternarratives that critique the nation— as they reveal the stimuli and adaptations connected to rage. The conclusion looks forward into further facets of exploring coming-of-age narratives and rage. It also provides insight into pedagogical approaches to rage and the ways rage can bring healing.
Each chapter responds to the research questions, providing context for Black women novelists’ representations of Black girl rage. Relatedly, the novels connect rage to awareness of intersectionality and intra/interracial prejudices. The analysis of each novel illuminates the connection between affect and awareness while articulating how Black girls resist when denied their right to girlhood. The dissertation seeks to illustrate rage as a resistant, decolonial force that becomes a channel for voice acquisition. While outlining the features of this emotion, the works are bonded through arcs of anger and affective cycles of anger, rage, and outrage.
CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
The literature in this chapter reflects research conducted on rage, Black girlhood, coming-of-age, and literary representations thereof. The literature review articulates the necessity of engaging work across several disciplines to gain a broader understanding of
Black girl rage. It elucidates how Black girls occupy or—are rendered invisible—by the gaps in each body of literature. This review also articulates how ideas in these disciplines align around Black girls’ representation. Contributing to definitions of the key terms appearing in the introduction: rage, Black girlhood, and coming-of-age, the literature review displays the political nature of these terms. Organized into three sections around salient discourse about rage, Black girlhood studies, and finally, literary studies focusing on coming-of-age narratives, the literature review demonstrates the need for the critical interventions proposed by this study.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical lenses of this research amplify Black girls’ knowledge and lived experiences. Considering the study’s focus on Black girls as knowledge-bearers, Black feminist and womanist epistemology establish the study’s framework. These epistemologies reveal the centrality of Black girls’ knowledge to the trajectory of their lives. Their manifestations of rage also inform this trajectory. It is evident that rage is
33
34 raced and gendered based on the ways it is experienced, projected, and enacted on Black girl bodies. While all genders experience emotions as natural responses to daily occurrences, Black girlhood and adolescence highlight the potency of rage. For this reason, Black feminist and womanist work centering intersectionality and knowledge creation aids in understanding the phenomenon of rage. To identify the stimuli and adaptations that accompany rage, it is critical to utilize theories that explain responses to oppression. The theories offer a dialogue of resistance and construct a rage-centered discursive community.
As the Black girl protagonists excavate and reveal their subjugated knowledge, rage surfaces. Black feminist and womanist epistemologies inform the characters’ adaptations. These epistemologies present “lived experience as a criterion of meaning”
(Collins 275). The stimuli generated by the nation influence Black girls’ lived experiences and subsequent meaning-making processes. Collins writes, “An experiential, material basis underlines a Black feminist epistemology, namely collective experiences and accompanying worldviews that U.S. Black women sustained based on our particular history” (274). Collins’ framing situates history as central to the marginalization and knowledge creation that set the stimuli and adaptations in motion. Linda Thomas’ articulation of womanist epistemology from “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a
New Anthropological Paradigm,” notes that womanist epistemology is about “holistic survival and liberation” (488). As the girls adapt and employ knowledge, they reflect womanist epistemologies through unfettered indignation.
35 Black feminist epistemology’s centering of emotions adds layers to understanding
Black girl knowledge. Collins indicates that an “ethic of caring” is part of Black women’s alternative epistemology and “suggests that personal expressiveness, emotion, and empathy are central to the knowledge validation process” (281-282). As the girls in the novels come to see their rage as rational, they also see their knowledge as valid.
Application of Black feminist epistemology reveals how the girls come to trust their emotions and arrive at their truths. This ethic of caring complicates the line between reason and emotion and elucidates how rage aids in coming to clarity about one’ positionality. Constructing a lens around rage is important to “untangling the relationships between knowledge and empowerment” (Collins 229). Knowing that rage can be empowering is the first step to reclaiming Black rage as a mode of preservation and an acknowledgment of the fullness of Black (girl) humanity. Knowing the role of intersectionality and realizing that oppression is multi-layered allows for varying modes of interpretation.
Feminist and critical race theorists employ intersectionality as an analytical tool.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the theory of intersectionality to comprehend the multi-layered oppression that Black women faced and studied for centuries. At the crux of Crenshaw’s argument surrounding intersectionality is the dismantling of the “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis”
(“Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex”139). As notions of intersectionality evolve beyond race and sex, intersectionality addresses the correlation between identity markers, one’s treatment, and responses to that treatment. The tendency to overlook what
36 Crenshaw calls the “unique compoundness of [Black women’s] situations” can trigger rage when outside forces attempt to render intersections invisible (150).
Through intersectionality, Crenshaw elucidates the cartography of Black women’s oppression. In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw expands discussions surrounding intersectionality.
She centers identity politics to examine intragroup conflict and difference. This examination bolsters the argument surrounding this dissertation’s analysis of intersectional rage. By highlighting intersectional subordination “that is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment,” (1249) Crenshaw provides a framework for understanding Black girl rage. She carves space for comprehending the ways oppression informs emotions. Her varying types of intersectionality: structural, political, and representational also reflect this issue.
Examining representations of Black girls and their struggles is integral to comprehending Black girlhood. As Crenshaw speculates, “Perhaps the devaluation of women of color implicit here is linked to how women of color are presented in cultural imagery” (1282). Black writers take control of these images as “scholars in a wide range of fields are increasingly coming to acknowledge the centrality of the issues of representation and racial hierarchy in the United States” (1283). Because of the importance of accurate depictions, Crenshaw constructs representational intersectionality, a useful framework for examining literature, popular culture, and specific to this dissertation, coming-of-age narratives. Representational intersectionality includes “both
37 the ways in which these images are produced through a confluence of prevalent narratives of race and gender, as well as recognition of how contemporary critiques of racist and sexist representation marginalize women of color” (1283). This confluence of images constructed about Black women tends to shape the images written by Black women. Representational intersectionality guides the construction of counternarratives of rage by engaging images written by Black women to combat pervasive dominant narratives. Oppressive states, in turn, beget more rage, revealing some of the effects and affects of intersectional oppression.
Theories rooted in girlhood and citizenship also inform analyses of the novels.
Aimee Meredith Cox’s notion of “missing the middle” from Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (2015) provides a theory of intersectionality specific to Black girls. This theoretical approach to understanding girlhood reveals how oppression and identity politics impact Black girls:
Missing the middle is a statement about intersectionality, multiple jeopardy, and
the peculiar position of Black girls in the United States. Missing the middle
speaks to Black girls’ understandings of their rights as citizens and how other
people abuse these rights. The missing middle is grounded in Black girls’
identification of the complicated interplay of external and self-evaluations fueled
by the representational work of labels and tropes hurled at them from multiple
points of origin. One of these points is the nexus of intersecting discourses erected
around youth culture, girlhood, low-income black communities, and social
mobility in the United States. (10)
38 The missing middle addresses connections the research makes between rage, rights, and resistance. It connects Black girls’ comprehension of their positions to how they combat social institutions and recognize their citizenship.
The theoretical underpinnings of this work also scaffold the notion of coming to voice through seeing, knowing, and acting. Application of bell hooks’ work on the
“oppositional gaze” demonstrate the characters as active observers. hooks open her chapter “Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectator” from Black Looks: Race and
Representation by writing about the “hard, intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority” (115). Inspired by the youth, hooks’ theorizing of the oppositional gaze aligns with the reimagining of rage and controlling images in two ways: 1) it allows
Black girls to move between performer and spectator, and 2) it demonstrates this gaze— and by extension this movement—as a mode of resistance. She positions the oppositional gaze as an “overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire” (116). Utilizing this lens demonstrates the rebellious desire for Black girls to exert their rage. It invites Black women to look to each other and Black girls, specifically, those presented in the literature, to see rage as liberatory. It implores an oppositional stance toward false representations of Black girlhood and provides a unique angle of vision—a Black girl gaze— that demonstrates how these girls see themselves and their surroundings.
As spectators, the girls in the novels bear witness to the attempted destruction of their communities and being. In reference to the oppositional gaze, hooks writes, “critical black women’s spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black
39 women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (128).
Though hooks acknowledges Black women’s resistance, she also writes, “We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reaction. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” (128). With hooks’ theory, it is possible to vet rage from these angles as spectators, experiencers, and readers of the selected coming-of- age novels.
Intersectionality and epistemology display the connection between knowledge and empowerment. The frameworks provided show markers of identity as informing rage and its stimuli and adaptations. Each scholar is privy to Black girls’ critiques of cultures and spaces into which they are ushered. These approaches are necessary for understanding
Black girl rage in both active and passive forms; subsequently, the approaches aid in articulating circumstances that necessitate rage. The theories guide the construction of counternarratives of rage while positioning “growing up” and growing conscious as interrelated.
Racialized Rage: Critical Attention to Intersectional Anger
This section of the literature review reflects the discourse surrounding rage from both racialized and gendered perspectives. It establishes the power of rage and justifies an intersectional analysis while exploring the lack of literary criticism surrounding anger. The presented literature expresses the requisite need to examine rage from multiple angles. The literature places cultural critics, psychologists, and feminist scholars in conversation while delineating gaps in works that attend to Black girl and Black adolescent rage. Discourses
40 surrounding Black rage, its function, and its validity heightened after the Civil Rights
Movement and intensified through attention to the Black Lives Matter Movement. Black writers consistently express discontent about usurping of Black bodies and Black narratives; responses to usurpation include rewriting or subverting inaccurate representations of blackness and rage. Black men have engaged Black rage in the legal system and Black rage as a humanistic impulse to demonstrate rage as a response to injustice.1 Black women like Brittney Cooper frame this emotion as a feminist superpower, while Audre Lorde frames it as an antidote to racism. Alice Walker and Myisha Cherry position it as a moral emotion. The raced and gendered perspectives aid in constructing definitions and representations of Black girl rage.
The term, Black rage, popularized by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs in the eponymous Black Rage (1968), responds to the unique experiences of Black people amid the Civil Rights Era. Grier and Cobbs discuss how anger arises, the historical influences of the emotion, and how it manifests in Black women, men, and children by highlighting
Black love, education, gender constructs, and mental health. While Grier and Cobbs do not provide a precise definition for Black rage, these psychiatrists purport that Black rage is frustration rooted in the inability to imagine social progress in a discriminatory space. Here,
Grier and Cobbs express a limited view of Black rage. The novelists in this research look to Black rage as a means of social progress.
1 See Paul Harris’ Black Rage Confronts the Law (1997), Roosevelt Nobles’ Black Rage in the American Prison System (2008), and Leonard Moore’s Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism (2010) and Sincere Kirabo’s Black Conscious Rage: Humanist Essays on Identity, Culture, Oppression, and Liberation (forthcoming).
41 As opposed to naming adaptations that allow Black people to thrive, Grier and
Cobbs, name defense mechanisms and discuss treatment for mental health issues that arise from frustration. Through the plights of Black men, they justify distrust of white Americans and indicate that Black men must develop cultural paranoia and see every white man as a
“potential enemy” unless proven otherwise; the paranoia results in cultural depression
(178). They present paranoia and depression as part of a “Black norm” for survival (179) as they “searched for the essence of what it means to be a black American in a nation that reserved (and in many instances, continues to reserve) a uniquely disfavored place for its black citizens” (xii). Grier and Cobbs’ positioning of rage is not a productive, system changing rage. Instead, it is a damaging rage that lacks critical insight and rationalizes attacking people as opposed to systems.
Though counterproductive in some areas, through their demonstration of the psychological weight of systemic oppression, Grier and Cobbs create an accessible medium for clinicians and non-specialists to understand “the inner conflicts and the desperation of black life in the United States.”2 They indicate that “aggression” forms out of oppression and that all Black people are angry (3-4) because they are “locked into a life of struggle” (153). Grier and Cobbs write that Black rage threatens to shatter the nation that Black people aided in building (24). This “threat” is necessary for rebuilding a country founded on marginalization. Their assessment aids in broadening conversations surround nation and anger.
2 This quotation is from the book’s subtitle
42 The text also makes strides in understanding Black women’s rage. Grier and Cobbs dedicate a chapter to “acquiring womanhood” in which they focus on Black women’s worth in terms of their attractiveness and relationships with men. Their framing of women’s desires is one-dimensional and at times, apolitical. This dissertation politicizes Black girl rage and moves beyond desires rooted in male companionship. However, their discussion about Black girls relinquishing their childhoods at earlier ages than their white counterparts provides a springboard for conversations about abbreviated girlhoods. While Grier and
Cobbs’ analysis primarily addresses the “private sphere” and beauty standards, the interventions made in this dissertation will address Black girl rage and its contributions to public discourses.
Beyond the psychiatric lens, scholars see rage as a productive response to racism.
With Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995), bell hooks implores the insertion of Black women into public conversations about race. She revises the narrative surrounding Black rage and utilizes her feminist lens to discuss ending racism and engaging rage as a form of militant resistance. A series of “racialized experiences involving black women” spawned the term killing rage. (11). Though hooks does not condone murder, she articulates the strength of the sensation of rage. hooks adds layers to conversations surrounding rage by placing class and other hierarchical systems at the center of her analysis. She proclaims that “[t]he rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged” (30). Privilege grants the luxury of avoiding rage, in turn, causing people to downplay the rage of others. hooks writes that rage is often associated with the underclass and youth who have less incentive to restrain their rage (12). She notes that
43 “those of us who made it” (namely adults and people in stable environments) have mastered the repression of rage. Her assessment justifies a study of raced, gendered, and age group specific rage.
hooks critiques of Black Rage while examining the sociology of rage. In hooks’ estimation, Grier and Cobbs’ articulation of rage is pathologizing, which in turn requires a more nuanced reading of rage. Though she does not dedicate space distinctly to Black girl rage, she supplies a Black feminist reading that leads readers to fiction (The Bluest
Eye) to gain a more comprehensive understanding of rage. In her critique, she delineates rage a source of healing:
Even though black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs could write an
entire book called Black Rage, they used their Freudian standpoint to convince
readers that rage was merely a sign of powerlessness. They named it pathological,
explained it away. They did not urge the larger culture to see black rage as
something other than a sickness, to see it as potentially healthy, potentially
healing response to oppression and exploitation. (12)
While she agrees that rage is a response to the environment, hooks believes that rage is a mode resistance and trigger for change. She asserts that people must “understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action” (16). The novels in this study situate rage as a response to struggle as the girls’ adaptations lead them to courageous action.
While some novels in this research precede the work of Audre Lorde, her perspective shapes the analysis. Her heavily cited essay “Uses of Anger: Women
44 Responding to Racism” is critical to understanding the triggers of rage. Lorde posits that
Black women are “responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation” (124). She reinforces the necessity and power of properly channeled rage, fashioning space for considering characters’ actions as responses to intersectional oppression. She sees the potential for all Black women—and by extension girls—to look to their anger because “[e]very woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (131). Lorde indicates that for Black women and girls, rage is essential to prioritization of self.
As “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” opens a conversation about ideological struggles contributing to rage, Lorde’s “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” does work to normalize rage. Lorde demonstrates the roles of transgenerational and ancestral rage to consciousness shaping. Black women and girls must recognize the history of their anger and learn “[h]ow to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it…” (145). When and if this rage builds in childhood, it is often more difficult to understand, yet harnessing it is vital to the outcome of an individual’s life to combat the “societal death wish directed against us from the moment we were born Black and female in America” (146). Although Black girls are often unable to articulate the source of rage, difference is at the core of their responses to the outside
45 world. Lorde’s work leads the charge for more recent academic discourse demonstrating the consequences of ignoring Black rage.3
Black rage is unique in that it has spiritual undertones. In The Way of Tenderness:
Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender (2015) Zenju Earthlyn Manuel argues that markers of identity are central to one’s awakenings and revelations. Her text inserts sexuality and sexual orientation into discourses about rage. She views rage as a source of healing and revival that informs activism. Rage allows people to purge their pain. Manuel correlates rage and spirituality through the claim that “[s]piritual awakening arises from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other. It may erupt from the fear and rage we tiptoe around” (6). Enlightenment arises from struggle, lived, experiences, and rage. She believes that though people are socialized to assume that the anger is regressive, it is a “misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace” (5). Like Alice Walker, she does not see rage and peace as antithetical; instead, rage supplies a consciousness that makes people aware of their spiritual needs and forces them to consider how rage can be the impetus for constructing an equitable world.
Manuel sees the potential of rage to form community and notes how oppression leads people to collective rage. Instead of seeing rage as pathological, she frames oppression as a disease and articulates its symptoms. These “symptoms” give rise to rage,
3 Other Black women who are not Women’s Studies scholars also write about rage and girlhood. Etta James’ memoir Rage to Survive (1995) and Jill Nelson’s Straight, No Chaser: How I became a Grown-Up Black Woman (1999) chronicle their respective experiences with rage. Denene Millner, Angela Burt- Murray, and Mitzi Millner’s The Angry Black Woman’s Guide to Life (2004) teaches women how and why to embrace anger. Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) chronicles a tumultuous girlhood in the Civil Rights Era.
46 which can remedy these issues. Beyond rage, Manuel’s research connects to this study through her use of Michelle M. Wright’s notion of biological myths. These myths produce bigotry that substantiates Black people’s rage. The inaccurate historical narratives that provide these myths create tension and hatred between races (44). The myths and extant dehumanization bonded to them inform rage: “Rage springs up when certain embodied forms of life—blackness, queerness, and so on—are not recognized and honored as a part of nature” (91). Having markers of identity viewed as unnatural takes an emotional toll on Black people. This lack of recognition often consumes Black girls and seek ways to heal from it.
Connected to the spiritual ideations of rage is the healing associated with understanding rage. Ruth King’s Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible
(2004) rooted in the self-help genre, supplies strategies for coping with and comprehending rage. She realizes the wisdom housed in rage (xv)—a testament to its consciousness-raising properties. King constructs the metaphor of rage as a child. For
King, “rage is an oppressed child emotion…tied to our personal childhood traumas that have been suppressed; old because she is an accumulation of unresolved anger and shame some of which may be passed down for many generations” (3). Her metaphor suits the research on the development of rage in Black girls. While speaking to the development of rage, King distinguishes between anger and rage. To King, anger connects to disappointment, dissatisfaction, and “current injustice,” while rage is a primary physical reaction that is rooted in the buildup of anger. She writes, “Rage is a visceral and instinctive response when we feel we have little or no control over what is threatening or
47 harming us” (4). Her framing of rage supplies the stimuli of loss of perceived control present in the analysis chapters of this dissertation.
She articulates that trauma (emotional neglect, abuse, and loss) induces rage, again proving that rage must be triggered. Though trauma generates rage, King encourages recovery work that compels people to face and remember their traumas. The act of remembering generates an ancestral, familial rage that King frames as “rage inheritance,” as she reminds that rage is not exclusively “ours” (14). Since the rage does not solely belong to individuals, King’s work establishes an arc of anger that connects
Black people’s lives. Encouraging acknowledgment of anger’s causes and effects, King positions inherited rage as a “bequest of unresolved rage from our parents and ancestors.
This includes generations of unresolved rage from institutions of influence, such as family, law, politics, education, and religion, as well as from constructions such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, and culture” (14). Her assertion aligns her with scholars, such Lorde and Grier and Cobbs who speak on lineages of rage. She makes a unique contribution to rage studies by tying rage to health (physical and mental) while seeking inner peace and recovery from past traumas.
Recovery work in studying rage also requires a historical approach. Carol
Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth about our Racial Divide (2016), interrogates negative notions of Black rage by examining policies and movements. She believes media and society’s focus on Black rage misdirects and misleads people. Her work acknowledges people’s questioning of destructive behavior as a response to injustice. Examining governmental policies and events that made national headlines,
48 Anderson concludes that white rage is the issue. She positions white rage as the kindling for Black rage, “White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see” (3). Her counternarrative of racial rage embeds white rage into North American social structures, posturing it as a response to Black advancement. To Anderson, white rage is structural violence. Her text provides ample reasons for Black people to be mad in America. While White Rage chronicles history, Anderson implores that Americans look to the future by denying white rage.
Anderson’s critique reminds people of the role of whiteness in Black rage. Her project connects to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (1992) which discusses that although blackness and whiteness are dichotomous phenomena, they are understood on a relational axis. Morrison writes that
“[o]ne can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of
Americanness” (6) Both Anderson and Morrison’s studies allude to constructions invented by white people that shape narratives of the country (and literature). National narratives in response to the Africanist presence include “significant and underscored omission, starling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts” (Morrison 6). These narratives contribute to dominant discourses surrounding people of color. The narratives construct an oppositional reality rooted in “the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy” (13). It is white rage; however, that becomes an incubator for Black rage.
49 Anderson and Morrison’s works support the study of Black girl rage and address how whiteness shapes understandings of cultural norms and racial performances. While these women critique whiteness and the nation to explain rage and racial identity, a host of feminist critics follow suit.
Black feminist cultural critics and other critics of color engage rage and its power.
Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower (2018) adds to the Black feminist tradition invoking rage. Her original contribution of
“orchestrated fury” is influenced by Audre Lorde’s “The Use of Anger: Women
Response to Racism.” Through firsthand experiences and cultural analysis, Cooper asserts rage as a superpower, a response to “America’s cultural investment in the disrespect of Black women” (151). She demonstrates how rage is central to movement building, arguing that activist work makes anger orchestrated, channeled, and well defined. Eloquent rage can arise in individuals and make small-scale changes, but “the collective orchestrated fury of Black women can move the world” (168). The collective force of rage services communities by dismantling and rebuilding systems. Cooper attends to the rage of both women and girls and observes that Black girl rage reveals the conditions they suffer, namely in the education system. For Cooper, rage is a means of exposing injustice in America.
Injustice garners a complex matrix of emotions; although, rage is often the primary emotion. Sue J. Kim’s On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative (2013) focuses on this primacy by detailing the cognitive and cultural underpinnings of anger. Looking to cognitive psychology, Kim explains how audiences, characters, and authors of cultural
50 productions shape anger. She presents anger tied to historical, social, and cultural contexts and reveals how anger’s development is contingent on factors beyond the external. Kim asserts, “Anger may be partly physiological, cognitive, and psychological, yet it is also deeply ideological, inseparable from factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and religion” (2). This amalgam of intersecting constructs and contexts inform the possibilities of collective anger. Her definition of racial anger, “refers to the anger rising from racial/national formations appearing in various specific forms around the world commonly conditioned by global capitalism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and liberal individualism” (5). Racial anger is omnipresent, and in Kim’s view, political. A distinction between anger and outrage displays outrage as an organizing principle in achieving “true” democracy. Once (and often before) rage activates, larger society attempts to suppress it through the implementation of controlling images.
Kim’s discussion of reclamations of anger supports this study’s connection of emotions to epochs. She articulates reclamation of anger as in concert with the introduction of Ethnic Studies and the political uprisings of people of color in the 1960s and 1970s:
The reclamation of political anger occurred somewhat ironically, alongside the
challenges to pathologizing of brown bodies as irrationally pathologically anger.
Work on anger in ethnic and postcolonial studies has largely involved reclaiming
and exploring the ideological validity of emotion as well as interrogating
characterizations of minorities in the West and Third World peoples as
pathologically volatile, and irrational in their anger. (49)
51 Exploration of ideological functions of anger binds Kim’s work to the current discourse on anger and aids in understanding anger as a response to the violent acts impressed on communities of color. This dissertation adds to coalescing conversations about anger, age, and gender and utilizes narratives to discuss anger in youth. As the conversations surrounding youth were “relatively narrow for disciplinary and methodological reasons,”
(160) cross-disciplinary studies such as this are necessary for revealing anger as a transformative means of altering the future (50).
Transformations of epistemologies of rage present in contemporary feminist discourse aim to create counternarratives. Soraya Chemaly’s text Rage Becomes Her: The
Power of Women’s Anger (2018) revises views of women’s anger. She implores that women have the right to be angry and looks to the productive possibilities of anger while examining its cultural relevance. She sees rage as a resource to combat oppression and enact change but also understands how cultural influences undermine women’s anger to maintain patriarchal power structures. She focuses on cultural moments such as #MeToo to position women’s anger as “saying ‘no’ in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything else but ‘no’” (xix). Chemaly offers insight on what to do with rage and identifies four skills that allow people to use the anger productively: 1) anger consciousness, 2) anger talk, 3) listening to others, and 4) “think tank” or strategizing”
(262-263). She also sees anger as a “genealogical phenomenon” that correlates to the anger of one’s relatives. Chemaly’s claim aids in developing an argument around transgenerational and inherited anger—in the Black girl protagonists and the canon.
52 Literary critics see the necessity of reinterpreting anger in women and marginalized groups. While this dissertation argues for counternarratives of rage, Linda
Grasso, author of The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America
1820-1860 (2005), articulates that threads of anger have been present in American women’s literature since the nineteenth century. She constructs rage as a mode of analysis and a centerpiece of women’s literature. The mode of analysis in this dissertation is similar to Grasso’s framing of anger as a paradigm in women’s literature:
Anger can be an organizing principle of American women’s literary history when
it is employed as a mode of inquiry. By identifying the sources of women’s rage
and analyzing how their anger assumes literary expression, anger can be used as a
paradigm for understanding the ways in which women, at different historical
moments, have responded to myriad forms of oppression. (4)
Grasso views anger as the lens through which to interpret her selected texts. The lens of anger allows for an assessment of the “canonical theme” of rage present in the selected coming-of-age (bildungsromane) texts and aids in destigmatizing and “un-othering” rage.
Grasso’s text supplies an entry point into literary discourses about rage, particularly with her focus on anger in the American literary tradition, but her work does not explicitly address girlhood. Stephen T. Moore also engages literary representations of rage in The
Cry of Black Rage in African American Literature from Frederick Douglass to Richard
Wright (2013). Moore writes, “[m]ost studies of rage are one-dimensional; however, black rage cannot be accurately understood by exploring it from one gender because male and female experiences are often different from each other, even when affected by
53 racism” (1). Moore creates his arc of anger in the African American literary tradition and makes statements about the utility of studying rage. He studies rage to comprehend the
“pathologies and strengths of a people whose history is rooted in severe denial of their inalienable rights” (1). Moore’s focus on history and rights brings to the fore dialogues about the employment of rage to gain rights.
In addition to literary and cultural assessments of rage, there are contemporary assessments rooted in social sciences. Niza Yanay, author of Ideology of Hatred: The
Psychic Power of Discourse (2012), examines hatred from a psychosocial perspective.
Yanay explicates how conceptions of hatred inform political and national conversations.
She moves beyond conventional understandings of hatred to advance an ideology of this phenomenon. She also examines its role in power differentials, addressing rage and its connection to hatred: “Black rage is also the idiom that privileged whites defensively and stereotypically identify with black people’s nature and with their own fear” (22). Society falsely positions rage as symptomatic of internal or pathological issues of the enraged, but Yanay argues it is incorrect to assume rage is synonymous with hatred. Her distinction is necessary for understanding rage and its functions:
Royzman, McCauley, and Rozin conclude that personalized, generalized, or
globalized anger has become a popular view of hatred. However, when rage or
strong anger is linked to hatred, it is often in the service of a particular ideological
tie linking the anger of the oppressed with hateful attitudes and emotions. A
critical approach to power relations, inequality, and oppression should question
the tie between ‘rage’ and ‘hatred.’ (21)
54 A multi-faceted reading of rage counters the notion that these concepts are synonymous, particularly in the case of oppression-based rage. Rage, framed as a consciousness- building emotion, reflects self and communal love. The rage sparks actions that benefit the community. Yanay’s argument, however, does not mean hatred is not possible; it simply bolsters the claim that rage does not always birth hatred.
Yanay destigmatizes the rage of people of color and demonstrates it as purposeful. Her understanding of rage illuminates it as adaptive rather than pathological:
In contrast to white fear, black rage is a mode of resistance against black
victimization, a struggle of liberation from white supremacy. Although rage, like
hate, is a burning feeling, it is, unlike hatred, a constructive, healing, and
transformative response to racism. Rage is a signifier of critical consciousness, an
antidote to hatred, the kind of effect that characterizes politicized subjects. (22)
Yanay’s understanding of rage is critical to theorizing about Black girlhood and Black rage. As Black girls move toward a consciousness of self, they use rage to respond to racism in feats of personal activism.
Activist impulses are central to understanding the political thrusts of anger.
Deborah J. Cohen explores rage from the vantage point of activism and social justice work in her chapter “Rage and Activism: The Promise of Black Lives Matter” from
Violence Against Black Bodies: An Intersectional Analysis of How Black Lives Continue to Matter (2017). She argues that rage is central to activist work, particularly for Black women. Her assertions support the interventions made in this dissertation. Rage becomes a medium for expressing the message that “Black lives matter.” Cohen examines rage as
55 “a legitimate, righteous response to persistence systematic social inequalities to grapple with the positive functions and outcomes offered by rage and to forge connections between emotions and social structure” (38). She insists that rage threatens those in power because of its “capacity for producing change” (38). Parallel to Carol Anderson,
Cohen writes that the origins of Black rage are “systemic white racism” and a privileging white rage over Black rage (39). Her sociological approach is beneficial in terms of understanding how social interactions and the structure of society produce and suppress rage.
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger
(2018) traces the history of women’s anger to prove its revolutionary tendencies. She centers the emotion in activist work while illustrating the ways patriarchal American society distorts narratives of rage. She engages political moments from voter suppression to #Metoo, pointing out the “nexus of women’s anger and American politics” (xviii). She notes the erasure of how women’s anger shaped the nation. Patriarchal norms prove to be divisive forces that spark and reject anger in women, while justifying it in (white) men.
Traister positions the current climate of America as responsible for “an era of renewed rage” (xxiii) but demonstrates that ascendancy of anger is not a new phenomenon. By articulating who and what is responsible for women’s rage, Traister implores that “being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective” (250). Her words demonstrate rage as a practice of solidarity and as a decolonizing force (a notion central to this dissertation). Traister makes an important claim by stating that anger “prompt[s] women to make radical art” (211). This radical art
56 frequently produces radical subjects like the Black girl characters who inspired this dissertation.
The presented texts illustrate the political underpinnings of rage and articulate its triggers and functions. The body of work demonstrates the racialized and gendered undertones of rage. In defining rage, the authors envision it as a means to liberatory practices. The texts show how discourses of anger evolve, yet a gap remains in terms of discussing Black girl rage in literature. The scholarship contextualizes rage from cultural and ideological standpoints. The host of scholars construct a counternarrative of rage that divulges the power of this emotion. The theories, concepts, and arguments also bolster the claim that the national climate plays a role in rage.
From Margin to Center: Black Girlhood Studies 4
Black Girlhood Studies grows out of Black Women’s Studies and acknowledges the voices and experiences of Black girls. The field acknowledges the necessity of interdisciplinary work and the use of multiple methodologies to engage Black girls’ lives.
The topical strains of Black Girlhood Studies center telling Black girls’ stories in their voices, examining programming, and critiquing educational systems—including the criminalization of Black girls in schools. While historical accounts of Black girlhood have been published, and Black girl literacy studies have heightened, literary studies of
Black girlhood and rage are limited. 5 Wanda Brooks, Jonda McNair, and KaaVonia
4 The title is borrowed form bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984). 5 See Wilma King’s Stolen Childhoods: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America (1998) and African American Childhoods (2008) and Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2001) for historical accounts of Black girlhood.
57 Hinton-Johnson discuss representations of beauty in young adult literature while Simone
Gibson and Elizabeth Marshall examine Black girlhood in urban fiction, however, if mentioned, discussions of rage are cursory. The plethora of work in this field reveals that those who engage in Black Girlhood Studies aim to tell accurate stories about Black girls.
Current Black Girlhood Studies scholars carry forward the ideas of Joyce Ladner and Rebecca Carroll. In “10 Years of Black Girl Studies: A Pedagogy of Doing”
Chamara Jewel Kwayke, Dominique C. Hill, and Durell M. Callier articulate how Black
Girlhood Studies 1) “[provides] better understanding of how [Black girls] survive and thwart systemic violence and persistent inequalities and 2) “[carves space for] a celebration of their ingenious approaches to real and imagined social change” (1). This research on Black girl rage in Black women’s literature does what Kwayke, Hill, and
Callier propose. Black girl rage is part of the resistance of systemic and cyclical violence; acknowledgment of the rage without condemnation of injustice inhibits celebration of
Black girls as change agents.
Ruth Nicole Brown arguably reinvigorated academic investment in Black girls and sparked the creation of a formalized discipline. Her book Black Girlhood
Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (2009), discusses the role of hip-hop and feminist theory in present-day interpretations and performances of Black girlhood.
Brown emphasizes the production of Black girl-authored narratives through her Saving
Our Lives Hear Truths (SOLHOT) program. Her work calls attention to “personal and collective emancipation” (3). Like many Black girlhood scholars, Brown illustrates an understanding of “institutional narratives” (19) designed to dictate Black girls’
58 performances. For Brown, Black girlhood celebration constructs a “counternarrative of identity” (28) and includes “[s]peaking back to institutional narratives, family narratives, and cultural narratives” (30). Her work is part of the conversant literature used to explain counternarratives that arise from Black girl epistemologies. She suggests looking to academic foremothers for strategies to transform power differentials while positioning
Black girls as knowledge producers (26-27). With hip-hop culture as a guide, Brown necessitates celebrating Black girls and their voices. Her ethnographic work focuses on empowerment and rewriting narratives. Though Black women’s literature predates her formulation of narrative discrepancies, the novels’ representations of Black girlhood(s) reflect Black subjectivities that conflict with dominant perceptions of Black girls’ lives.
Brown theorizes these discrepancies and considers of the ways “dominant” narratives and narratives created by Black girls inform and reject one another to create these discrepancies (34). Analyzing coming-of-age narratives can combat narrative discrepancies between representations of Black girl rage.
Brown’s fluid definition of girlhood as “representations, memories, and lived experiences of being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female” (1) supplies the foundation for constructing counternarratives of Black girlhood and rage.
While Black girlhood is not a monolith, collective representations, lived experiences, and memories evoke rage. Her assertion that “Black girlhood is not dependent then, on age, physical maturity, or any essential category of identity” (1) justifies analyzing texts that move beyond conventional age limits of girlhood. Broadening girlhood beyond the
59 strictures of the United States’ legal definitions also attends to diasporic constructions of girlhood reflected in this study.
Ruth Nicole Brown’s second major project, Hear Our Truths: The Creative
Potential of Black Girlhood (2013), continues the work of Black Girlhood Celebration.
By grounding the work in liberation efforts, Brown looks toward the future of Black
Girlhood Studies and Black girls. Her work adds layers to this project as she articulates
Black girlhood as an “organizing construct” (1). As rage is an organizing principle, her idea validates this study. She reminds readers that Black girls have voices. Brown uses
Black girls’ creative productions to display their voices; their use of art demonstrates the usefulness of creative works in articulating Black girl’s ideas. Additionally, Brown indicates that Black girl silence can stem from self or society, as “girls may be willfully lost in fearful power struggles that position them as mute” (184). Literature and other creative works articulate their responses to the conditions of their lives.
Creative productions speak to the conditions of Black girlhood but so does the framing of this life stage. Robin Boylorn of the Crunk Feminist Collective closes the literal gap between Black and girl (Blackgirl) to demonstrate that these two markers of identity are inextricable. This intersectional approach illuminates that Black girls have no space to move between race and gender; therefore, they often begin to resist this lack of flexibility: “Blackgirls are consistently made aware of their race and sex simultaneously.
There is not a pause, a break, a separation, a breather, a moment when their self- awareness as Black-bodied girls is not required in a racist anti-Black misogynist and patriarchal culture” (Cooper, Morris, and Boylin 108). This self-awareness accompanies
60 rage. The Crunk Feminist Collective illuminates the constant battles that Black girls must fight and details how they become aware of their positions.
Just as Copper, Morris, and Boylin link Black and girl to display rigidity of these identity markers, in her article “Blackgirl, One Word: Necessary Transgressions in the
Name of Imagining Black Girlhood,” Dominique Hill’s transgressive combination of blackgirl also merges these markers. She writes, “Blackgirl one word rejects compartmentalization of Blackgirls’ lives, stories, and bodies and serves as a symbolic transgression to see them/us as complex and whole” (2). Fiction authored by Black women consistently offers methods for transgressing expectations, revealing the consequences of Black girls not being “whole.” Returning to representations in Black women’s literature illustrates how novels inform theoretical and practical frameworks of not only Black women’s research but also their lives.
Writers like Monique Morris, author of Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in School (2016), investigate “risk behavior” and policing of Black girls in schools.
Morris expands the discourse on the school-to-prison pipeline by developing an analysis inclusive of girls. She theorizes the concept of pushout that revises the pipeline narrative to include denial of Black girls’ education (e.g., suspension and alternative schools). She examines the punitive consequences Black girls face in schools, and she exposes the problems in the system. Like other writers in Black Girlhood Studies, she critically assesses the connections between “delinquency” and survival, an overarching theme in the discourse surrounding Black girls. According to Morris, “girls learn adaptive behaviors—ways of responding to oppressive conditions defined by race, sexuality, class,
61 and gender. Any or all of these may come into play as girls confront growing pains within structures where [their] age is ultimately nothing but a number” (35). Aligning with Morris, this dissertation brings clarity to rage viewed as deviant and articulates how it is employed in survival strategies.
Morris also engages the Angry Black Woman trope and its power to overdetermine Black girls’ performances and impact public perceptions of them. Morris writes that “the angry Black woman meme—a neck-rolling finger-in-your-face, hands- on-hips posturing—is at the center of the public misunderstanding of what it means to be
Black and female in America” (59). She notes that misunderstanding arises when girls provide their opinions or defend themselves (59). As a result, some Black girls decide to remain silent or risk labeling as angry or disruptive. This dilemma reaches beyond educational institutions and affects their navigation of other institutions (e.g., family and society). Black girls recognize that “the audacity to stand up and be heard in the face of fierce patriarchy and racial oppression is not always celebrated; instead, adults with authority have interpreted it as being angry and combative” (Morris 79). Because of their age, their resistance can be read as behavioral problems.
In her preface to Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship
(2015), Aimee Meredith Cox’s introductory statement indicates the weight race and youth carry. Cox writes, “Black youth are under siege in the United States, especially those living in or near poverty” (vii). Those living in poverty are targets of laws, policies, and America’s informal, yet institutionalized caste system. This ethnographic work disrupts common narratives surrounding Black girlhood and permits Black girls to
62 discuss how they negotiate the social fabric. The Black girls at the featured homeless shelter take critical stances in defending and explaining how they assert and appraise their citizenship. Cox’s use of choreography and citizenship reveals Black girls’ awareness of their conditions; the girls in this dissertation “choreograph” ways to disrupt, and maneuver through their peripheral locations much like the girls in Cox’s research.
Black Girlhood Studies scholars also theorize from Black girls’ emotive responses to articulate the impact of their lived experiences. Joyce West Stevens, author of Smart and Sassy: The Strength of Inner-City Girls (2002), theorizes sass and positions it as an adaptive behavior to combat silencing in American society. Her work enters conversations about the ways Black girls must alter their behaviors to sustain themselves in the Americas. The adaptations in this dissertation function in ways similar to Stevens’ positioning of sass. She utilizes a person-process-context model to illustrate the factors that shape sass in inner-city Black girls. She uses their narratives to assert her argument; her research reveals that “smart and sassy identities” are taken up to “resist controlling racist images” (61). This behavior is rooted in “assertive personal agency” (77). While
Stevens focuses on Black girls being smart and sassy, she opens a discourse for this dissertation to examine Black girl characters who are angry and aware. Studies of Black girl rage can align with Stevens’ notions of sass as “willful forthrightness…and resistance” (97). Resistant rage, like sass, shapes adaptations of voice, violence, and alternative epistemologies. Beyond her theorization of sass, Steven provides explications of adolescence that are useful to this study.
63 Stevens’ study of adolescence moves her toward understanding Black girls’ sassiness. She defines adolescence as “a transitional developmental period between childhood and adulthood marked by vital biological cognitive, and socioemotional changes” (25). The changes, coupled with their realities, breed sass. Locating adolescence as a developmental and transitional period aligns with this dissertation centering of development of girl protagonists and their rage. Stevens’ outlining of adolescence provides context that centers emotions and experiences. Viewing sass as a strategy for adolescents to “make visible and heard the boldness, determination, and courage” (ix), she articulates that the youth will forge social change. Stevens also theorizes that Black female adolescents develop assertive attitudes to mediate “exposure to risk elements” (xiii). The risk elements are akin to the stimuli presented in this dissertation.
Nazera Sadiq Wright marks her contribution to Black Girlhood Studies through an examination of print culture and literature in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
(2016). Her work traces a genealogy of Black girlhood and provides the theoretical intervention of “prematurely knowing” while highlighting Black girl rebellion and resourcefulness. Framing much of her work in the context of responses to injustice, she aims to “trace a literary tradition of irrepressible black girls from the earliest examples of writing on black girlhood” (1). Wright identifies tropes (early awareness, self-sufficiency, and resilient willfulness) constructed by Black writers that continue in contemporary literature and aid in identity formation (6). While Wright’s focus is not the bildungsroman or coming-of-age form, her work applies to understanding Black
64 protagonists’ development. She argues that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, “black writers used black girls as tools to put forth their social and political agendas” (2). This argument places my work in conversation with Wright’s as I trace the arc of anger in Black women’s literature through Black girl characters. Wright notes that writers saw the power in Black girlhood; therefore, they created instructive figures who informed readers about “unlawful society” (6). Her arguments relate to Black girl rage as she illustrates Black girls’ challenges to social mores can lead to “isolation, loneliness and despair” (13). Her genealogy traces generational connections and allows for a conversation about generational growth.
Wright makes observations about the realities of Black girls. She writes, “Black activists linked the management of black children’s tempers to the futurity of the black race” (73). Rage, if channeled properly, will carry Black communities through to the future. Wright positions Black girls as “seekers of their own fate” (90) and “harnessers of their inner resources” (91). She asserts Black girl agency and notes misrepresentations of
Black girlhood. Her work offers a “theoretical landscape” for responding to and identifying attacks on Black girls (179). This dissertation expands Wright’s work into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and demonstrates how writers delineate the movement mentioned by Wright.
The presented texts move Black girls from margin to center and demonstrate how they assert their citizenship and grapple with intersectional identities. The scholars see
Black girls as key to comprehending Black people’s plights. The literature shows Black girls’ contributions to society—despite having to navigate growing up and growing
65 conscious. It demonstrates that conversations surrounding Black girlhoods are rooted in resistance, creative potential, and rage. The current body of research defines girlhood and studies Black girls’ responses to prejudice.
Building from the Bildungsroman: Coming of Age in Literary Criticism
Literary critics and theorists who examine novels representing childhood and development often situate these narratives in the genre of bildungsroman. Critics who examine narratives centering child protagonists of color highlight authors’ writing against this historically white, masculinist tradition. Contemporary writers go beyond the ideas of
Mikhail Bakhtin and Jerome Buckley who discuss narratives of white male protagonists.6
The literary criticism establishes distinct African American and African diasporic aesthetics despite a clear response to this German genre. This criticism challenges the rigidity of the genre form; scholarship on Black coming-of-age narratives illustrates multivocality of the texts while illuminating how writers of color position their texts as revisionist works that deliberately—or sometimes inadvertently—unsettle, broaden, redefine, or defy the genre (to become anti-bildungsromane or coming-of-age narratives).
The literature justifies the use of the term coming-of-age. The presented texts illustrate not only a focus on subjectivity but also the tensions inherent in labeling and defining these works.
Because this genre chronicles formative years, a host of scholars classifies the selected novels as bildungsromane. The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical
6 See Bakhtin’s “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism” (1996) and Buckley’s Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974).
66 and Biographical Forms (2001) defines bildungsroman as a “novel of formation” and situates both female and Black bildungsromane against the narrative resolutions of the
German version claiming that they “reject the possibility of attaining harmony with the existing social order” (Burt 106). The Black bildungsroman often presents an intensified adolescence markedly different from conventional (i.e., white) novels of formation.
Though Black novelists have constructed texts chronicling development since the inception of Black authored novels, it was not until 1995 that these became classified as
“Black bildungsroman.”
With Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (1995), Greta LeSeur outlines the tradition of Black coming-of-age novels in the United States and the
Caribbean. She repurposes the bildungsroman for Black people’s use because “[t]he
Black experience in the United States or West Indies cannot be limited to or defined by parochial frames of reference and value that are derived from traditions (White and
European)” (2). LeSeur deems expansion of the definition and conventions of the bildungsroman necessary for understanding Black experiences, particularly those presented in the literary imagination. LeSeur asserts that the Black (female) bildungsroman addresses the difficulties of Black girlhood:
Black women writers do not concentrate only on youthful recognition by the
dominant society; rather, they collectively depict Black women’s internal struggle
to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity, gender definition, and the
awakening of their sexual being. In short, they seek to discover, direct, and re-
67 create the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual, and other forms of societal
repression, producing a literature not confined to the “usual” Bildung mode. (101)
Moving beyond bildung traditions of individual assimilation and acceptance into society through quest stories, LeSeur indicates how Black women’s traditions supplant this notion and use individuals to tell stories of collective struggle. Prefacing bildungsroman with the Black demonstrates the primacy of race in shaping the protagonist’s journey, yet appropriating the German namesake remains a complicated notion in literary criticism.
Coming-of-age narratives of other marginalized groups articulate the cultural and national contributions of this storytelling mode. Martin Japtok, author of Growing Up
Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American
Fiction (2005), juxtaposes Jewish American and African American novels based on two common threads: cultural nationalism and the bildungsroman genre to articulate similarities between the groups’ coming-of-age novels published in the twentieth century.
He examines “growing up” by utilizing the lens of the “ethnic situation” in the United
States. Through his work, he highlights presentations and perceptions constructed by these ethnic groups. Aligning with other studies of the bildung mode, he traces a growing awareness, albeit of ethnicity and culture, as opposed to race and color as primary organizing principles in the construction of the narratives and identities. Japtok positions bildungsromane as “counternarratives to prevailing anti-Semitic and anti-African reality”
(25). His entry point into the discourse surrounding the bildungsroman demonstrates the political and social functions of the genre when utilized by marginalized groups. His
68 explicit mention of counternarratives allows this dissertation to move forward conversations about Black girls and rage as vehicles for counternarrative production.
Scholars also examine ethnic bildungsromane though engaging gender. In
Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic Women’s Fiction (2011),
Stella Bolaki considers the hybridity of the narrative form when adopted by ethnic writers. She articulates that the bildungsroman is not an antiquated form but one that can be revised and shifted by contemporary authors. One goal of her text is to “challenge the idea that reading ethnic American and postcolonial texts in the context of the
Bildungsroman inevitably downplays their social and historical specificities in order to integrate them into a universalizing narrative” (13). Bolaki sees the connections between ethnic literature and the bildung mode. She uses concepts such as mobility and trauma to thematize her work. She “unsettles” the bildungsroman by opening the discourse for expansion of the genre; she aims to move the debates surrounding the genre forward by challenging the rigidity of literary conventions. Bolaki blurs boundaries and accounts for the rise of comparative literature. She justifies binding her selected text to the bildung mode by articulating that the name of bildung relates to product and process.
Bolaki demonstrates similarities and differences between conventional and contemporary bildungsromane, yet she indicates reading ethnic texts as bildungsroman is purposeful, particularly, as it relates to “becoming American.” For Bolaki, “the readings… unsettle the category, raising new questions as to the functions of the genre and the project of Bildung in an ethnic American and postcolonial context” (20).
Unsettling demonstrates how ethnic writers construct counternarratives and “expand the
69 rubric” (247) not only to increase inclusivity and tell their stories impactfully but also to demonstrate what facets of society influence identity formation in their respective communities and characters. The novels examined in this dissertation show the revisionary work of Black women writers troubling the bildung narrative, especially through their attention to representations of systematic oppression and experimentation with genre form.
Growing Up a Woman: The Private/Public Divide in the Narratives of Female
Development, a collection edited by Soňa Šnicová and Milena Kostić examines how genre and gender intersect (1). Through fifteen essays, contributors explicate the exigency of contemporary literary criticism of the bildungsroman. The text highlights how the genre transforms through print and other mediums. It also illustrates the role of feminist critics in redefining the genre and themes relative to coming-of-age as a girl.
Each essay calls attention to girls’ negotiation of public and private spaces; the negotiation influences their development. The thematic underpinning of the text includes escaping patriarchal norms and the influence of traditions (cultural and literary). The
“Shedding Shackles of Tradition” section of the text presents “Third Generation Nigerian
Female Writers and the Bildungsroman: Breaking Free from Patriarchy” by Cedric
Courtois which indicates that adopting a traditionally masculine literary form can be an act of protest (102). He writes that “addition of gender—female Bildungsroman—has made the genre evolve, taking it from what had become, a static genre to new borders— whether they be linked to gender or to literary norms” (102). Courtois demonstrates the role of women in the recreation of the genre. Women defy traditions and etch a place for
70 girls’ ideas and experiences. This gender analysis lends itself to the study of Black girl rage in coming-of-age narratives.
Some scholars reject the label of bildungsroman and opt for the flexible and inclusive, less Eurocentric label of the coming-of-age narrative. Christy Rishoi uses the moniker coming-of-age narrative in From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming- of-Age Narratives (2003) to refer to American women’s narratives documenting shifts from girlhood to womanhood. The texts she analyzes defy categorization as bildungsromane. She blurs genre boundaries by using autobiographical narratives. Rishoi poses questions about girls’ feelings toward becoming women and what it meant to transition into womanhood in twentieth-century America. To answer these questions, she evaluates texts about women who “resist negative constructions of womanhood and actively create oppositional identities for themselves” (8). She writes that to achieve this feat, “writers must also reject conventional literary genres” (8). She, like other literary critics, rejects the parameters of master narratives and “master forms,” proving that the stories of women and girls do not fit these traditions.
Rishoi claims that narratives fuse literary devices to “challenge hegemonic constructions of identity and womanhood” to form “interrogative” texts (8). She focuses on subjectivity by examining cultural experiences and claiming that coming-of-age is a period where identity is in flux (13). Her focus on subjectivity allows for raced and gendered analysis. While her primary focus is memoirs, Rishoi provides context for coming-of-age narratives and explores how coming-of-age manifests in the women’s alterations of the bildungsroman. Rishoi justifies the use of coming-of-age narrative as
71 opposed to bildungsroman and provides support for the notion that these narratives reflect a form of resistance.
The devices and themes that accompany coming-of-age are contingent on positionality; therefore, scholars have written about the genre based on characters’ social locations. Claudine Raynaud, the author of “Coming of Age in the African American
Novel,” begins her chapter of The Cambridge Companion to African American Literature
(2004) by defining coming-of-age as reaching the age of maturity or “discretion,” and informs readers that realization of racism is central to a protagonist’s education and development (106). While admitting some commonalities between coming-of-age novels and bildungsromane, Raynaud articulates the failures of the bildungsroman to encompass the African American novel. Raynaud’s text illustrates the significance of history to the shaping of coming-of-age texts but alludes to different resolutions for Black and white narratives. Historical significance aids in constructing the arc of anger through coming- of-age novels that highlight rage. She offers that African American bildungsromane critique the concept of coming-of-age and situates it as a “distorted or reversed process”
(109). The ideas presented leave space for a discussion of the complex nature of
“growing up” and in a Black body with exposure to adult content, discriminatory practices, and accelerated maturation. The reversed process also revises the concept of linearity seen in white forms of the genre. This reversing also complicates the line metaphor and favors the arc.
Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction by Kenneth Millard (2007) focuses on how the “formative years” inform identity. His study builds on the notion that
72 adolescents are critical to social change (1). Millard articulates that the genre influences analysis of texts but alludes to difficulties of situating narratives about adolescence in a genre. He indicates that there are “semantic difficulties with both bildungsroman and coming-of-age. For example, “coming of age is used to mean ‘to reach full legal status’…the term also carries cultural relativity that needs to be taken into account” (4).
In the literary context, coming-of-age does not necessarily mean reaching full legal status or adulthood; it is an allusion to transition. Cultural relativity captures the fluid meaning of coming-of-age. The cultural relativity mentioned by Millard is pivotal when analyzing texts outside of a U.S. context.
Millard also speaks to the relevance of the adolescent stage of life in the construction of the genre “formative experiences can occur at any age, but in terms of literary genre the expression ‘coming of age’ is conventionally used of adolescence” (4).
He indicates that adolescence occurs between the ages of twelve and nineteen, but coming-of-age experiences can occur into the twenties (4-5). Millard pushes the conversation about the fluidity of the genre, further expressing parameters on age are “not the best guide to that teleological process which is the proper focus of the coming-of-age narrative” (5). As a solution to this problem, Millard proposes a focus on the concept of innocence. Additionally, he frames the coming-of-age narrative as an “American narrative of national identity; the individual new citizen’s drive toward new forms of independence is coterminous with that of the burgeoning nation” (6). As the coming-of- age narrative is about national identity, Black girl narratives reveal discrepancies between national identities and their own. Millard concludes his text by indicating that coming-of-
73 age novels represent the history of the protagonists and the context that seizes their innocence. Lastly, he believes that the content and the context of the novels in the genre move critics to social and political interpretation of fiction (183).
The criticism in this section contextualizes the functions and thematic underpinnings of the presented novels. It allows for a shift from the bildungs mode to coming-of-age to broaden the discourse and discuss the fluidity of the genre. It builds from the bildungsroman to trace the polysemic nature of the literary form. It also chronicles the expansion of the genre in relation to marginalized authors and characters.
The literature positions coming-of-age as an American concept and justifies its use, in terms of life stage, in the study. The discussion of the political impulses of the novels supports their use to articulate the voices and rage of the Black girl characters in the selected texts.
Black Girl Rage: Interstices of Intersectional Work The literature presented in this section provides an overview of studies centering anger, Black girlhood, and bildungs forms. The body of knowledge provides continuing and contemporary arguments about the phenomena examined in this research. Each section presents reasons for marginalized groups’ anger and provides context for national history’s influence on rage, Black girlhood, and coming-of-age. The literature, coupled with the theoretical framework, positions identity markers as central to comprehending constructions of rage, girlhood, and development.
At the interstices of this intersectional work lies the validation of arcs of anger and Black girl rage. Reaching back to theories and arguments about rage from the Civil
74 Rights Era and the rise of Black feminisms and juxtaposing them with notions of anger in present-day extends the narrative of rage along a historical arc. The scholars who write about rage support an arc of anger by expressing inherited, ancestral rage. Despite its production in different spaces epochs, the literature notes anger as a response to injustice.
Notions about Black girlhood presented in this chapter reveal that Black girls are not complicit in their oppression. They develop adaptations and creatively attempt demarginalization. The adaptations aid in the construction of counternarratives of Black girlhood and rage, as much of the scholarship responds to controlling images and institutional narratives. The scholars depict how Black girls represent themselves and their experiences. The scholarship celebrates Black girls while acknowledging the degradation they face on communal and national scales. While revealing their unique experiences, the scholarship alludes to the conflicts that arise as Black girls come of age.
Though some scholars address Black girl rage, stimuli, and adaptations, this dissertation converges these phenomena to explain the counternarratives created in Black girl coming-of-age narratives.
Extending and troubling the bildungsroman genre, Black women explore girls’ growth. As revealed through the presented research, coming-of-age narratives trace development beyond age. With a focus on citizenship and identity, the research reveals coming-of-age as a political process. Coming-of-age narratives by Black women reflect the rising consciousness and rage of Black girls. The conversant literature reveals coming-of-age narratives by and about people of color as counternarratives central to anti-oppressive discourses.
75 The sections engage intersectionality and numerous ways of knowing. Through examinations of the ways race, gender, and class inform emotional states, childhood, and narrative construction, the literature sustains the argument about national narratives and development. Each section contributes to the validity of this study while demonstrating how the fields merge to assess Black girl rage in literature. Reviewing the literature demonstrates the gaps in each field and positions this work as being at the interstices of these fields. The sections create a nuanced conversation about how oppression contributes to dialogues in each field. The work calls to mind Mae Henderson’s notion of speaking in tongues through creating a heteroglossic conversation that moves toward constructing counternarratives of the presented phenomena.
CHAPTER III
METHODOLOGY
A content (textual) analysis of coming-of-age novels by Black women reveals challenges to normative notions of rage while bringing Black girls’ responses to the forefront. Framed by arcs of anger, the study uncovers continuity in the select Black women novelists’ writing of rage. Intersectionality and epistemology inform the hermeneutic of anger; the interpretative lens suggests intertextualities of the Black girls’ lives by bridging social location and knowledge acquisition. Analysis of the six novels 1)
God Bless the Child, 2) The Bluest Eye, 3) Daddy Was a Number Runner, 4) Breath,
Eyes, Memory, 5) The Hate U Give, and 6) The Poet X reveals Black girl protagonists as resistant knowers and alternative epistemology creators who construct counternarratives through rage. The varying forms and uses of their rage create a discursive community of thematically linked texts that address the intersections of coming-of-age and coming-of- rage. The narratives, set against national and cultural backdrops that accelerate Black girlhood and cultivate raced/gendered anger, implicate space and place in the development of ire and identity. The conversant literature in the literature review positions rage as a disruptor of silence. Brittney Cooper’s Black feminist perspective frames rage as a response to American “cultural investment” of disrespecting Black women (151). As presented in the novels, cultural investment in devaluing Black women—and by extension girls— reinforces master narratives and tropes of blackness 76
77 that have a global reach. The analysis, divided into two chapters, provides the dimensions of anger by highlighting the ways North American societies attempt to muffle mad Black girls and deny them the right of being their authentic selves.
Overlapping and prominent themes in the literature review and data set aid in ascertaining the stimuli (deprivation, discrepancies, and loss of perceived control) that elicit adaptations (voice, violence, and alternative epistemologies). Cultural and social institutions produce the stimuli; the resulting adaptations illustrate the protagonists’ coming-of-age as processes informed by anger. Monique Morris notes that adults “miss the specific ways in which Black girls learn adaptive behaviors—ways of responding to oppressive conditions defined by race, sexuality, class, and gender” (35). The stimuli and responses in the novels are collated in this research. Rage, the primary adaptation, gives rise to other responses that construct counternarratives of girlhood that allow for envisioning rage in several ways: 1) as epistemological, 2) as decolonial force/resistance,
3) as a channel for voice acquisition, and 4) as an assertion of humanity. The method responds to the problem of master and stock narratives that contribute to and justify structural violence and controlling images.
The literature review reveals the prominence of intersectionality when analyzing rage, girlhood, and narratives. Gaps in investigating these concepts communicate the exigency of merging studies of the phenomena to comprehend Black girlhood. The research questions interrogate the political underpinnings of fiction about Black girls and the ways Black women-authored coming-of-age-narratives upend myths that ignore the epistemological dimensions and connotative differences of anger. The following
78 questions lead this study: How do coming-of-age narratives by Black women present
Black girl rage? What connections does the literature make between rage, rights, and resistance? What do the novels reveal about anger in Black women’s literary tradition?
Answering these questions reveals the novels as sites for resisting dominant narratives and requires a data set of coming-of-age novels–across several periods—with angry
Black girl protagonists. The use of literature allows for contextualization of rage during distinct cultural eras. To that end, the wide publication range responds to the question of literary tradition. The polysemy of literature, coupled with its capacity to transcend generations, serves as a rationale for its use. Transcendence across generational boundaries bolsters the claim of the presence of arcs of anger. This transcendence aids in creating relational axes that thematically connect the novels. Examining coming-of-age novels allows discussing not only rage and its ties to the characters but also the development or “coming-of-age” of Black women’s literature and the resulting arcs of anger.
Research Design
The research began by ascertaining a suitable medium for a) identifying the practices that accompany rage development, b) exploring the stimuli of Black girl rage, and c) determining the adaptations that arise from the rage. As critical conversations position coming-of age-narratives by Black women as subversions or counternarratives of the bildungsroman, the selection of the coming-of-age subgenre constitutes a methodological consideration. Coming-of-age is a principal component in this research; therefore, it was imperative to center novels that amplify Black girls’ development either
79 through narration or plot structure. In the analysis of the novels, it was possible to draw connections between the development of the central characters (coming-of-age) and the development of their anger (coming-of-rage).
Textual analysis is the most logical approach to the research. Textual analysis, a
“sub-methodology” of content analysis, allows for a nuanced engagement of the literature through close reading. Close reading formulates an argument based on textual evidence and inferred meaning. Sharon Lockyer writes that “[t]extual analysis is a method of data analysis that closely examines either the content and meaning of texts or their structure and discourse” (886). This study examines the content of the texts to make meaning of
Black girl’s coming-of-age. Textual analysis is the preferred mode for scholars who intend to draw meaning from literary texts. Textual analysis is based on the researcher’s interpretation and requires a thorough examination of a text’s content. What is latent in the text or discernable from the structure is also essential when engaging literature.
This qualitative study detects themes and patterns that reinforce rage as epistemological. Additionally, the textual analysis leaves space for examining historical views of Black girl rage and how depictions have shifted. While understudied in academic discourse, Black women’s fiction is saturated with Black girl protagonists who must learn to channel their anger. The rationale for utilizing texts relates to Patricia
Leavy’s assertion that cultural artifacts reveal cultural “struggles over meaning” (222).
Leavy notes that as these meanings become embedded in national and cultural memories, they generate ideas and ideologies. As the artifacts may also present contradictory notions, “by investigating culture… dominant narratives, images, ideas, and stereotyped
80 representations can be exposed and challenged” (222). Textual analysis invites an exploration of contradictory notions of rage and carves space for counternarratives that subvert stereotypical representations of angry Black girls.
Discerning meaning is the primary function of textual analysis. Constructing and revealing “new” meanings of a text provides more nuanced readings of the presented material. Lockyer writes, “Meaning is derived from the codes, conventions, and genre of the text and its social, cultural, historical, and ideological context—which can work together to convey a preferred reading of the text” (886). Through this method, the study provides insight into the multi-layered meanings of the selected texts by examining their conventions and mimetic qualities. Because the texts are set in different epochs, this work concludes how positionality and history collide in the construction of rage. The textual analysis creates an understanding of specific iterations of rage and juxtaposes them.
Identifying iterations of rage and examining their contexts moves the research toward specific interpretations.
The patterns in the novels speak to and confront Black girls’ issues while illuminating their agency and the radical, creative ways they shapeshift in their communities. The resulting analysis situates the study in the realm of feminist work designed “to explore both progress and problems in the area of women-relevant scholarship” (Lockyer 234). Feminist textual analysis can ascertain what cultural artifacts reveal about a culture; therefore, textual analysis is also exploratory. With a central goal of examining what the novels reveal about Black girl rage, the analysis is employed to
“explore issues that have been central to women’s lives—issues that have historically
81 been made to appear invisible within academic literature” (Lockyer 224). Combatting this invisibility demonstrates resistance of epistemic violence and master narratives. Marjorie
Devault also views literature as a tool for examining social structures, lived experiences, and human conditions asserting, “[m]any sociologists of literature and some literary critics, recognizing that cultural works are produced in social context, have argued that novels can be taken as sociological data and used as indicators of the prevailing attitudes and social relations” (109). As the selected texts are not produced in a vacuum, they simultaneously inform and are informed by social context. The novels, particularly those published during and reflective of cultural movements, echo socio-political and cultural forces that affect girls’ lives.
Six novels were selected from Black women’s literary canon. The period for publication dates from 1964 to 2018 encapsulates modern moments of resistance, contemporary constructions of Black girlhood, and continuities in how Black women write iterations of ire. In “Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in the Angry Decades” from Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought
(1995), Beverly Guy-Sheftall references the “well-documented” history of the “angry decades” (143). The nomenclature “angry decade” demonstrates that Black history and
Black literary canons posit interlocking oppressions as central to the Black rage prefaced by displacement and disruption. These disruptions— spatial or cognitive—contribute to manifestations of rage that vary in degree based on collective and personal histories.
Guy-Sheftall’s recognition of the 1960s as the “angry decades” provides a logical entry point for this study.
82 Because this study centers Black women’s writing to reflect the literary and ancestral arc/hive of anger, the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (2007) informs the data set. This comprehensive resource includes 168 Black women writers inclusive of women who invoke diaspora, “forgotten” writers, and authors of Young
Adult fiction. The editor indicates that though it is not the first encyclopedia to detail the work of Black women, it “fills a gap that is genre inclusive” (xii). As the most current encyclopedia concerning Black women writers, this text is essential to constructing the data set. Of the 168 women writers in the text, 62 are novelists. Authors with debut novels published between the 1960s (the angry decade) and the release date of the encyclopedia were considered for the data set. The novels pulled from the encyclopedia include, Kristen Hunter’s God Bless the Child (1964), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
(1970), Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) and Edwidge
Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). 1Though the encyclopedia only lists publications before 2007, a public resurgence of rage shifted the cultural climate. This resurgence, marked by political turmoil, intersecting movements (e.g., Black Lives
Matter, #YouOkSis, and #Metoo), and continuing frustrations from marginalized groups builds on previous anger that was a product of national failures to protect the lives and civil rights of all citizens.
1 The following were excised because of lack of rage Ellease Southerland’s Let the Lion Eat Straw (1979), Doris Jean Austin’s After the Garden (1987) Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family (1989), and Dori Sanders’ Clover (1990).
83 Inclusion of recently published texts speaking to this resurgence is necessary. The
2010s—dubbed the “age of rage” and the Black Lives Matter Era by several platforms— complete the study. 2 With the insertion of the age of rage, the timeframe includes two points that make up a historical and cultural arc of anger. The angry decade (framed by the Civil Rights Era) marks the entry point of the study. The age of rage (framed by the
Black Lives Matter Era) is a second point. The cultural moments present in the novels reveal the circularity of oppression and allude to building frustrations and arcs of anger beyond literature. The rationale for the selection of texts reflects the deliberate, strategic, and aesthetic choices of Black women novelists who chronicle the emerging outrage of their Black girl protagonists in their debut fiction publications. As the publication date of the encyclopedia precedes the end of the timeframe, the research extended to another medium, the National Book Foundation’s National Book Award List.
Since the concept of nation informs this dissertation, Black women’s fiction receiving national recognition through this list—while critiquing nation and illustrating
Black girl rage—completes the study. The fiction and the young people’s fiction categories between 2007 and 2018 were assessed. Of the novels receiving accolades during this period, six were debut novels by Black women: Touching Snow (2007) by M.
Sindy Felin, The Summer Prince (2013) by Alaya Dawn John, American Street (2017) by
Ibi Zoboi, The Hate U Give (2017) by Angie Thomas, and The Poet X (2018) by
2 Diana Beyer “The Age of Rage and Resentment.” Huffington Post. https://www.huffingtonpost.com. Adam Bhala Lough Alt-Right: Age of Rage, and Soraya Chemaly. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018) all indicate present-day as the “age of rage.”
84 Elizabeth Acevedo. The Hate U Give and The Poet X best aligned with the purpose of the research.3 Both The Hate U Give and The Poet X are National Book Award winners in the Young Adult Literature category.
The data analysis includes coding which requires: a) pre-reading the text to ensure a focus on rage b) a second reading to mine data c) dividing the data into segments and searching for commonalities in relation to themes and tropes as well as the behaviors of the girl characters and d) locating interconnectivity in those segments. With each text, I located the instances of Black girl rage and examined the context in which the rage occurred. Then, the iterations of anger were divided into thematic categories to identify the salient stimuli and adaptations. Each discussion includes three novels that reflect the prominence of arcs of anger. Additionally, the first discussion includes texts that make up the poles of the historical arc of anger.
Because American society and hegemonic forces attempt to force Black girls to live in illusions, the chapters present nation (Chapter Four) and knowledge (Chapter
Five) as entities that generate stimuli and adaptations of rage. The analysis accounted for the girls’ markers of identity, making explicit that rage results from their positionality and epistemology. The mode of analysis parallels that of Lindo Grasso, who writes of anger as a paradigm in women’s literature:
Anger can be an organizing principle of American women’s literary history when
it is employed as a mode of inquiry. By identifying the sources of women’s rage
3 Touching Snow and American Street, and Summer Prince were excised for minimal representations of rage. Additionally, Summer Prince was removed because it falls into the category of Speculative Fiction.
85 and analyzing how their anger assumes literary expression, anger can be used as a
paradigm for understanding the ways in which women at different historical
moments, have responded to myriad forms of oppression. (4)
Grasso views rage as the lens from which to interpret the selected texts of her authors.
Similarly, this research centers rage to discern its functions in Black women’s literature—and Black girlhood—while addressing the interlocking oppressions that result from living in North America. In chapter four, memoricity leads the data analysis: “It has manifested in the importance of characters’ lineages, histories, feelings, lost loved ones, and themselves” (118). A focus on memoricity draws an arc of anger that looks to cultural and personal memories that heighten frustration as the chapter moves through each novel.
Chapter Five, informed by oppositional gazes, notes the girls’ reactions to and rejection of the stimuli. Their ways of knowing and seeing produce adaptations that transform them into radical subjects.
The functions of Black women’s stories inform the analytical strategies. Patricia
Hill Collins indicates that Black women use literature as a medium for constructing Black feminist consciousness (251-252). Black women’s fiction not only houses knowledge but also creates knowledge by revealing alternative epistemologies to readers. In “Stories are
Data with Soul”—lessons from black feminist epistemology” Sarojini Nadar explains the relevance of narrative analysis (akin to textual analysis) to Black feminist research and provides an analytical technique for accessing and recognizing this knowledge—and by extension the counternarratives embedded in narratives. Nadir argues, “Narrative can be researched itself, or narrative can be used as a research method to produce data” (24). She
86 writes that narrative analysis expands the boundaries of research through the STORY mode. The acronym, which stands for (S)uspicion of master narratives of knowledge,
(T)ools for knowledge gathering and dissemination, (O)bjection to objectivity,
(R)eflexivity and positioning of the researcher; and (Y)earning for work and for transformation and change, applies to understanding the research process and analysis of the selected texts (23). The researcher and the protagonists are skeptical of the narratives provided by the nation and use their subjectivity, experience, and history to gather and present knowledge that aims to change the discourses surrounding Black girl rage. Nadir expresses that Black feminist scholarship objects master narratives through counternarratives formed by Black women’s experiences (23). Nadir’s framing of qualitative research supports the use of feminist textual analysis. Her work also alludes to the significance of narratives and literary studies. Black feminist ideas like Nadir’s shape and justify the method.
Justification for Method: Black Feminist Leanings
Black women literary critics supply methodological considerations that guide this study. Deborah McDowell’s The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory (1995) houses a section titled “Thinking about Methods” wherein she indicates that “[a] footing in black history and culture serves as the basis for the study of literature…a contextual approach to black women’s literature exposes the conditions under which literature is produced, published, and reviewed” (11). McDowell’s assertion directly correlates to the methodological and analytical considerations of this project. The development of an arc of anger and an argument about its nature speaks to the texts’
87 context. McDowell looks to Barbara Smith to demonstrate that “rigorous textual analysis” requires “isolating as many thematic, stylistic, and linguistic commonalities among black women writers as possible” (13). The novel groupings isolate several themes rooted in the stimuli and adaptations of the Black girls’ fury.
Themes excavated from the novels exemplify the commonalities in writing.
Careful consideration to avoid oversimplification of common threads alleviates generalizations:
Even though isolating such thematic and imaginisitic commonalities should
continue to be one of the black feminist critic’s most urgent tasks, she should
beware of generalizing on the basis of too few examples. If one argues
authoritatively for the existence of a black female “consciousness” or “vision” or
“literary tradition,” one must be sure that the parallels found recur with enough
consistency to support these generalizations. (McDowell 14)
The literary tradition’s presentation of anger can be argued authoritatively, as feminist critics like Mary Helen Washington note its presence. Engaging “canonical themes” lessened the likelihood of generalizing about the presence of anger in Black women’s literary tradition. Examining Black women’s literature outside of the data set also confirmed the presence of rage and anger in the Black women’s body of fiction.
Centering epistemological standpoints and hermeneutical circles in the literature aligns with Black feminist scholarship. The alternative epistemologies illuminate Black girl characters’ resistant knowing. Alternative epistemologies aid their meaning-making processes and resulting adaptations. These narratives of knowing (i.e., counternarratives)
88 inform readings of the texts and encourage probing and rereading of the Black women’s larger body of work for similar motifs. In Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers,
Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), Cheryl Wall indicates that “Black women writers’ rereading of African American and American literary traditions produces what
Adrienne Rich called a quarter century ago ‘re-vision’—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new direction” (5-6). Wall’s rereading invokes the circle metaphor and reinforces the validity of examining Black women’s literary traditions through arcs of anger. The methodology implores looking back at
Black women’s texts for re-visioning rage.
Informed by Black feminist scholars such as Jewel Amoah, the methodology privileges storytelling. Amoah writes that storytelling “is a tradition based on the continuity of wisdom, and it functions to assert the voice of the oppressed... It is also an educational tool, and for many, it is a way of life. For others, it is the only way to comprehend, analyze, and deal with life” (84). Her emphasis on continuity justifies analyses of arcs of anger that connect Black women’s storytelling. The consistent presence of Black girl anger also functions to assert the voice of the oppressed and reveals the wisdom in rage; therefore, Amoah’s perspective influences the analytical strategies in this research. The notion of storytelling as an educational tool aligns with this dissertation’s attention to knowledge building practices and comprehension of rage.
Research Ethics
Several assumptions and hypotheses underlie the method that may also contribute to its limitations. Reliability and validity are key concerns in subjective research like
89 textual analysis. Lockyer asserts, “Critics of textual analysis have questioned the validity of the approach, arguing that a reading of a text echoes the perspective of the researcher and that the specific approaches used to analyze texts are as ideological as the texts themselves” (886). Researchers’ identity markers and experiences influence their readings. This is not always detrimental; it creates opportunities to form unique interpretations. Black women researchers can attest to the fruitfulness of Black girls’ anger and utilize their standpoints to enhance the interpretation. The critique presented by
Lockyer informs the Black feminist approach herein. It also aligns with Black feminist approaches to emotions (e.g., ethics of caring). It demonstrates the influence of subjectivity and points to the co-creation of meaning between the researcher and the text—and by extension, the author(s). The connections to Black feminist tenets and the attention to raced, gendered issues also ground the study in Black feminist methodology.
However, other assumptions are that the researcher cannot discern authorial intent, and there is no firsthand knowledge.
This project also takes into consideration “subjugated knowledge” as important to constructing feminist research. Black girls’ knowledge is subjugated, and their emotions are often invalidated. Situating emotions in feminist research practices emphasizes subjectivity and reiterates anger an emotion of awareness:
Feminists like Alison Jaggar recognized emotion as a critical aspect of knowledge
seeking and made the case that the importance of emotions and values should be
validated within the research process. According to Jaggar, it is unrealistic to
assume that emotions and values will not affect the data, especially because
90 emotions often motivate the researchers’ selection of topics and questions as well
as the methods by which those topics and questions are studied. (Jaggar qtd. in
Hesse-Biber 5)
Hesse-Biber’s invocation of Jaggar repositions the personal as political (and vice versa).
Emotions influenced readings of the texts and informed the topic selection. Though
Jaggar does not explicitly state that knowledge surrounding productivity of emotions is subjugated knowledge, she is aware of their role—and by extension subjectivity’s role— in research. In “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Jaggar writes, “emotions may be helpful and even necessary rather than inimical to the construction of knowledge” (146). Whereas larger society would deem emotions as debilitating in the knowledge production process, Jaggar privileges them. Jaggar insists that experience shapes emotions. Her notions are necessary to reiterate rage as an essential force in Black women’s countering of master narratives.
This anti-oppressive research demonstrates how Black girl protagonists reveal rage as a counterhegemonic, decolonial force. The dissertation aligns with “Becoming an
Anti-Oppressive Researcher” presented in Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches (2005). Potts and Brown articulate that anti-oppressive research has a communal function, “Committing ourselves to anti-oppressive work means committing to social change and taking an active role in that change” (255). This research commits to changing perceptions of Black girls and rage. The interpretation of rage in this dissertation makes strides toward emancipation from the angry Black girl trope.
Feminist methodology focuses on centering women’s voices. As this study centers the
91 voices and experiences of Black girls, feminist methodology is essential to the success of this project. The methodology guides the research by supporting the idea that Black girl rage is a platform upon which Black girls can assert their humanity and identities. The method informs readings of how systemic oppression influences Black girl rage. The intertextualities and intersubjectivities garnered from a close reading of the novels allow for an understanding of rage that invokes arcs of anger. The research design is rooted in
Black feminist textual analysis; specifically, the STORY mode. The research questions implore the method; the responses to the questions implore liberation from false narratives of Black girlhood and rage by critically examining the functions and triggers of the fury and how the conflict between the two produce counternarratives. The method and analysis connect to Cynthia Burack’s Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups in that group (Black girls’) identity correlates to “likely sources of threat” (4) (i.e., stimuli).
CHAPTER IV
CARTOGRAPHIES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE: MAPPING MEMORY AND HISTORY THROUGH NATIONAL NARRATIVE DISCREPANCIES
Connected by anger and disrupted childhoods, the protagonists of God Bless the
Child, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Hate U Give reveal girlhoods burdened by infringement of national and cultural politics into their lives. Interconnectivity of the texts establishes cartographies of rage across geographical boundaries. The novels exist along multiple arcs of time and experience that create intertwining circles of national and personal narratives. Memories, histories, and continental connections bond the texts by creating “a series of overlapping, discontinuous, and multiple interpretable discursive sites” (Smith xvii). Each novel becomes a site for examining stimuli for rage. Operating across overlapping themes and histories that reflect Valerie Smith’s “theorizing black feminism,” the novels’ ordering locates them in an arc of building frustrations that marks ascents into anger (God Bless the Child), rage (Breath, Eyes, Memory), and outrage (The
Hate U Give).
The novels, set in different eras, speak to the timelessness of Black girls’ anger.
The chapter begins with God Bless the Child, published in the “angry decade” and closes with The Hate U Give, published in the “age of rage.” Each text returns to the genesis of the protagonist’s anger and the ways national and community origins shape indignation.
92
93 As landscape (e.g., geographical, cultural, and political) is an architect of rage, Edouard
Glissant’s position that “landscape is not saturated with a single History[sic] but effervescent with intermingled histories, spread around, rushing to fuse without destroying or reducing each other” justifies reading Danticat’s Haitian text alongside
African American texts (154). The intertwined histories reflect the intertwining systems and colonial forces that dictate Black girls’ treatment. While the settings change, the hierarchal systems embedded in those settings remain the same. The grouping exhibits the authors’ shared commitments to highlighting geography as central to shaping Black girls’ lives. Their intertwined histories and collective memories, as Black girls growing up in North America, reveal common threads in these Black women novelists’ representations of anger.
As memories reveal sources of frustration, the arc of anger forms through the recollection of trauma and notions of return. Because of its connections to circularity, memoricity, as theorized by Marquis Bey, informs the structure of this chapter: “[i]t is linked to the past, yet distinct from it insofar as memory shrouds the past and uses it to think the present in and through the past, and the past in and through the present.
Literarily, it has manifested in characters feeling compelled to carry, quite literally, their history with them, a history that is, in a word, blackened” (118). The girls’ histories,
“blackened” by experiences, are consequences of their race. Memoricity contextualizes anger by linking this emotion to the national past and present. The novels address collective memoricity. As each character carries personal and national histories that shape their emotive responses, they “speak to multiple audiences simultaneously across history”
94 (Smith xviii). Speaking to multiple audiences, generations, and timelines the novels articulate the ways anger resurfaces in narratives of Black girlhood. Memoricity aids the girls in recognizing conflicts between nationhood and Black girlhood as their rage propels them into futures that denounce master narratives.
Whereas society views anger from Black girls as unacceptable and conceptualizes it as threatening, these novels show anger as productive and auspicious. This chapter reflects the protagonists’ challenges to national narratives, particularly those that contribute to their anger. The novels demonstrate how the girls diffuse iterations of oppression (stimuli). Each characters’ navigation of public and private spheres chronicles displacement within their “home” spaces. The displacement is a result of the stimuli
(deprivation, discrepancies, and loss of perceived control) of anger and rejection of archetypal Black girlhood in their respective epochs.
The narrative discrepancies created by national history illuminate North America as an arbiter of anger. Discrepancies arise as Black girls are “typically not included in the conversations that shape [their] lives and destiny” (Brown, Black Girlhood Celebration
20). Exclusion from these conversations and recognition of deprivation of agency produces a loss of perceived control. 1 Katie Vaz, author of “Womanist Archetypal
Psychology: A Model of Counseling for Black Women and Couples Based on Yoruba
Mythology,” argues the connection between rage and loss of control: “[r]age develops when either the individual or the other person (who is designated as part of the self and
1 Francesco Pagnini, Katherine Bercovitz, and Ellen Langer write that perceived control refers to “an individual’s belief about his or her own capability of exerting influence on internal states and behaviors, as well as one’s external environment” (“Perceived Control and Mindfulness: Implications for Clinical Practice” 91).
95 who is expected to function in a particular capacity) ‘fails’ to live up to its assigned role.
This is particularly irritating to the vulnerable self because it serves as a reminder that s/he is not in full control” (236). Since the nation fails to support Black girls, it complicates their abilities to perform their “roles.” Because the girls fail to adhere to the status quo, loss of perceived control adds to their frustration; anger becomes a response to the loss of rights and dignity (Cherry). Myisha Cherry positions anger as motivation, noting that it “change[s] the situation.” The brain’s desire and belief systems are triggered when people react to stimuli to regain control (Cherry). The framing of Black girls in institutional narratives forces them to create alternative ways of being and “break routine” to resist false narratives about them (Brown, Black Girlhood Celebration 26).
The break in routine starts with the recognition of the stimuli that reinforce the pathological oppression the nation impresses on Black girls.
A focus on the nation’s reach into the lives, communities, and domestic spheres, of Black girls informs readings of the characters’ anger as dialectical. In On Anger: Race,
Cognition, Narrative, Sue J. Kim writes that dialectical anger is “an ongoing (and not necessarily teleological) process a combination of many historical factors that produce a certain experience and expression of a person’s anger at a particular moment in time” (6).
As an ongoing individual and communal experience, rage exists across an arc informed by history, movements, and moments. This dialectical reading contributes to understanding the historicity of the arc of anger. The history of imposed silence, injustice, and narrative discrepancies—which are common across sites of diaspora in the Americas even while manifesting in heterogeneous historically and geographically specific ways—
96 contributes to Black girl rage. Institutional and epistemic violence show Black girl characters as angry for themselves and others. Sue J. Kim asserts that anger links to power structures, “we tend to think of anger as individual, but its causes and effects are really systemic—and our lack of ability to think and feel systemically exacerbates the conditions which make people angry” (68). Systemic causes (e.g., triggers of anger) addressed in this chapter aid in discerning Black girls’ awareness of intersectionality.
American Dreams and Nightmares: Anger and Antagonism in God Bless the
Child
Despite publication at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the “Second
Reconstruction,” Kristin Hunter’s God Bless the Child (1964) is notably missing from broader conversations about Black women’s literature.2 Hunter’s novel is critical to the developing of the arc of anger in Black women’s literary tradition and illustrating narrative discrepancies present in Black girl coming-of-age narratives. In his introduction to God Bless the Child, Darwin Turner credits Hunter as one of the earliest Black women novelists to trace development from girlhood to adulthood. Her venture into the coming- of-age genre and positioning in the “angry decade” makes her work integral to this research. Chronicling the protagonist, Rosalie (Rosie) Fleming’s, anger positions
Hunter’s work as relevant to the discourse surrounding the foundations of the United
States, Black American literature, and rising frustrations of Black girls and women who
2 Gerald Early indicates that at the time of publication of his 1986 article “Working Girl Blues: Mothers, Daughters, and the Image of Billie Holiday in Kristin Hunter's God Bless the Child,” that one out of nine book-length publications about Black women’s writing included substantive information about Kristin Hunter.
97 lose perceived control in a nation that deprives them of their civil and human rights.3
Rosie’s anger and failed attempts at the American Dream expose racially and economically coded narrative discrepancies. Her unconscious pursuit of the dream stirs frustrations that make maladaptive coping mechanisms central to her lifestyle.
Set in the urban North, God Bless the Child chronicles the short life of Rosie
Fleming, an impoverished Black girl raised by a neglectful, single mother. Informed by her grandmother’s delusions, at an early age, Rosie takes up the charge to uplift her family from poverty. In her attempts at upward mobility, she compromises her morals and, furthermore, deteriorates her health and youth in a coming-of-age thwarted by poverty, illusions of the American Dream, and a lack of love from her mother. Her rising frustrations at an inability to achieve her goals eventually turns her anger into madness, as she works herself to death.
Hunter’s critique of the American Dream makes subtle statements about the
United States’ identity politics and its contribution to the anger of marginalized groups.
The American Dream postures the United States—by way of its hierarchical structure, hypocritical statutes, and “bootstrap mentality”—as an antagonistic force for those whose markers of identity prevent them from achieving a dream constructed by white society.
The American Dream perpetuates a veneer of the United States as a “land of opportunity” for all citizens, creating a cycle of oppression that sustains the hierarchical nature of U.S.
3 The Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers illuminates that African American literature not only provides insight into African American culture it also served as a mode of activism (xiii). Page’s positioning of African American literature in Black activist traditions creates a liberator-oppressor dichotomy that reveals activist undertones in the literature and confronts the colonial racist past (and present) of the Americas.
98 society. The hierarchy reflects the myriad denied privileges that force Black girls to find creative ways to acquire these rights. God Bless the Child troubles the American Dream by complicating the claim that hard work and ambition change one’s position. Hunter uses variant forms of dreams: myths (the American Dream), aspirations (pursing of dreams) and unconscious self-stories (sleep dreams) to develop Rosie’s racialized rage.
Rosie’s pain plays a significant role in understanding her anger and, thus, understanding the systems she is fighting. Her pain reveals itself in moments of anger toward friends and family. Though Hunter’s characterization of Rosie is that of an ambitious, non-conforming, Black girl, Hunter also captures the “bluesiness” of Black girlhood through her appropriation of the song “God Bless the Child.” To illustrate
Rosie’s pain, Hunter builds parallels between Rosie’s life and the life of jazz singer Billie
Holiday (1915-1959). It is evident that “[t]he pain was written into [her] part” as her mantra “God Bless the child that’s got his own” comes from a song inspired by a soured mother-daughter relationship and angry disputes over money (Hunter 166). This belief system carries the narrative; the actions of her mother also feed her anger, as Rosie secretly desires love. At an early age, Rosie must forge her path to success. To explain her decision to enter the workforce instead of finishing school, Rosie merges the words of her mother and Billie Holiday. Citing Holiday alludes to the tragedies of Rosie’s life and harkens back to her complex mother-daughter relationship:
Well, my Mom says nobody never put down no bed of roses for her to lay on. She
says I’ve got to make my own, same way she made hers… I will, too, I ain’t
99 taking nothin’ from nobody. I believe in Mama may have and Papa may have, but
God bless the child that’s got his own. (40)
Rosie demonstrates how neither she nor her mother received coddling (or nurturing).
Because of the emotional distance and push for independence, Rosie indicates that she will uplift herself through hard work and will not accept gestures of kindness from anyone. The deprivation of love is a result of her mother rearing her to survive against an
American backdrop.
Hunter illustrates Rosie’s inchoate anger and chronicles the difficulties she faces in her attempts to blossom into adulthood. The illusions produced by this myth of the
American Dream illuminate the racist, classist ways this dream becomes an impossibility for a Black girl. Ironically, Rosie tries to contradict and combat narrative discrepancies of
Black girlhood by feeding into a false narrative of the American Dream. Her ambition- laced anger is a means of asserting her humanity and demonstrating her right to the
“luxuries” that accompany the American Dream. Rosie’s assertion of her humanity leads
Lovalerie King to position her and the host of characters chasing dreams as “mutants spawned from an ideology that so clearly links human value to materiality, wealth and affluence” (133). Though this idea applies to American citizens in general, for Rosie, this mentality spawns anger that mutates into ambition. This transformation humanizes her in the landscape of a nation where she inherits a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society that ensconces her in poverty and feeds her dialectical anger.4
4 bell hooks contextualizes the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in The Will to Love: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004).
100 Rosie’s anger is rooted in personal injustices that reflect systemic issues. As her anger is a product of history—national and personal—it is a response to how the nation punishes her for her intersectional identity. Her responses are “embodied frustrations that are encountered when obstacles are placed directly in the way of [her] attainment of goals” (Kim 6). Despite her efforts, Rosie consistently faces a loss of perceived control and develops new strategies (i.e., acquires more jobs) to regain command of her life as her “anger implicates agency” (Ortony, Clore, and Collins 141). The obstacles not only deter her from her goals but also infringe on her right to shape and pursue them.
Simultaneously pushed back and driven forward by the obstacle of poverty, through her materialism, Rosie subscribes to the capitalist system but also rejects patriarchal norms through her work and intimate relationships. As a poor Black girl, Rosie faces a conundrum that necessitates participating in the capitalist system for upward mobility.
Binding herself to this system could potentially liberate her from poverty, but her anger is an uncalculated response to the deprivation that motivates her material gain, not a reformation of the system. The white patriarchal norms embedded in the system and the façade of the American Dream overwrite Rosie’s attempts to manifest her destiny, and her anger turns inward to those closest to her.
Rosie’s frustrations have no reasonable outlet. She begins to use anger to shield herself from pain. She even resorts to violence as evidenced by her killing of the roaches, her strained relationship with her mother, her self-inflicted cut with shards of the rainbow bowl, and her violent defense of her best friend, Dolly. Rosie’s interactions with Black tertiary characters demonstrate her subtle uses of anger to combat injustice against others.
101 In elementary school, Rosie’s befriends Dolly, a sheltered girl whom Rosie’s tries to protect and impart with “street smarts.” As the “Hair Inspection Patrol” on the playground inspects Dolly, Rosie intervenes. The girls prey on Dolly for her docility and beauty. Rosie opts for violence that presents her anger in service to others, as “time slowed down, Dolly saw a dazzling light emerge from Rosie’s pocket, saw the scabby, rust colored fingers move to Bessie’s throat, then felt the grip in her hair relax and fall away” (31). Rosie cuts Bessie’s throat with a piece of the rainbow bowl given to her by grandmother (Lourinda) and shattered by her mother (Queenie). Rosie’s slicing of a
Black girl’s throat with a shard of the rainbow bowl stolen by Lourinda is a symbolic representation of the American Dream. The splintered bowl suggests that Rosie can only obtain fragments of the dream. The use of the splintered bowl is an act of violence reflective of the structural violence that prevents attainment of the dream. The violence also manifests epistemically as Rosie learns ill-fitted notions of success through watching and mimicking elder characters.
Deprived of a “normal” childhood, Rosie’s imitation of adults indicates her perception of adulthood and success. In her youth, she finds excitement in the forbidden act of rummaging through her mother’s drawers. She fantasizes about an alternate life:
“the vision in the mirror was not Rosie Fleming, it was Missiris, Madam Queen in the house where Granny worked, Princess in all the fairy tales…Missiris was spoiled rotten because she had a sweet mother named Missemilie and a beautiful grandmother called
Misshellen” (14). Her imagined life represents the gravity of narrative discrepancies. She must cleave to unattainable fantasies because what she sees in the white family contrasts
102 with her life. This moment early in the novel demonstrates two triggers of her anger: her complex familial relationships (deprivation and discrepancy) and an inability to acquire the American Dream (loss of perceived control and discrepancy). Her fantasy provides a distorted vision of her dreams of a loving family and access to material possessions. Her epistemological standpoint as a young girl allows her to draw conclusions—although shortsighted ones—about upward mobility and access to privilege. Recognition of the discrepancies between her life and the lives of the white characters inform her rebellious nature and “activate emotions that produce motivations” for changing her station (Reeve
286).
Without fully understanding intersectionality and her location within the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, Rosie continuously compares herself to white people—particularly those who achieve the American Dream. Ironically, it is her lack of understanding that leads her to attack (though inadvertently and unsuccessfully) this system through her work ethic. As a teenager, Rosie has lofty goals. She drops out of school, just short of graduation. Her rationale for doing so is to make money quicker.
When discussing her decision with her friends Dolly and Larnie, she says, “[t]here’s
Rockefeller and all them other people with all that money. There’s me wanting some of it. So why shouldn’t I have it?” (36). Rosie’s statement reveals her naiveté, but Dolly tells her that she cannot have everything she wants. In what the narrator positions as “helpless fury,” Rosie retorts that Dolly and Larnie are fools for wasting time on education. Rosie does not see that “those other people” she references are white men who do not grapple with the historical weight of race and gender oppression. Here, Rosie demonstrates the
103 mentality that accompanies the American Dream but does not realize that this dream requires markers of identity and privileges that she does not possess.
In childhood and adolescence Rosie’s race and environment influence her disposition and objectives, but “her adult conception of womanhood and independence is shaped as a result of a far wider misogynist culture” (Cashman 273). The patriarchal systems that Rosie encounters reveal themselves through white characters like Benny.
Hunter writes him as “The Man” a reference to 1960s rhetoric about white patriarchal power structures (25). At the beginning of the novel, Rosie questions the greed of rich:
“Why was it, she wondered, that people who had nothing could always afford to give some of it away? While rich people like Benny and Mr. Connelly always made you pay for everything?” (26-27). These men use their money to remain in power and to perpetuate their purported supremacy. Rosie sees their success and chooses to start a number running “business.” She seeks counsel from Benny, who controls much of the number running game and the Avenue. Benny explains to Rosie that there is a system in place:
‘Everybody in this world has a role,’ Benny said enigmatically. ‘You want the
secret to success? Find out what your role is and play it. You’ve got a lot to learn
Rosie or whatever your name is. You better do yourself a favor. Come work for
me. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, and don’t do anything
but wait on the customers. I’ll let you know when you are ready to do more.’ (54-
55)
104 Benny’s statement alludes to race, class, and gender roles used to suppress people who occupy the lower tiers of the social hierarchy. Rosie, at first infuriated by Benny’s proposition, begins to work for him as a server. Her employment places her in a subservient role. Rosie attempts to resist and defy those confines and works herself into poor health. Rosie’s attitudes are unconscious responses to the construction of her intersectional identity, specifically the limitations that it affords her, spawned from the misogynistic undertones of her community, the United States, and the American Dream.
Though Rosie invests in the American Dream and views it as an investment in herself,
Hunter uses her as a vessel to demonstrate the problems with the American Dream and the anger that can arise attempting to attain the dream.
Compounded issues complicate the attainment of the American Dream and cause
Rosie to misdirect her dialectical anger. For the duration of the narrative, Rosie is unable to think systemically, and it contributes to her anger. She articulates a loss of perceived control, as she is unable to direct her narrative. The obstacles that Rosie encounters are ones that precede her existence. David M. Jones writes that issues Black Americans and fictional characters like Rosie faced in her time period include: the scarcity of jobs, inadequate housing, family instability, and tensions among white business owners and
Black employees and consumers (356). The overarching antagonistic entities that create these problems are North America and the pseudo-American Dream. Attempting to build the dream builds frustration. Though her mother claims she never matures, she attempts to come-of-age while in conflict with the American Dream, using her anger to assert herself as an adult.
105 As Rosie moves through her journey of development, she works tirelessly to achieve “her” dream. Her purchase of a decrepit home provides her with a semblance of it. The dilapidated house symbolizes her condition and the American Dream in a Black context. She only notices its decay after waking from her dream about being in a garden owned by rich white people (to whom she is invisible). In her dream, she moves freely through the opulent garden filled with Lincoln Continentals and butterflies. She chases a butterfly that constantly moves beyond her reach—much like the American Dream. Rosie finally catches the butterfly and wakes to a roach in her hand. Butterflies symbolize metamorphosis, but the roach indicates the ubiquity and ugliness of poverty. The dream reflects a stifled coming-of-age and an inchoate coming-of-rage. Rosie’s waking from the dream reflects her new awareness of the limits of her environment; the newfound awareness brings Rosie’s sole transformation. It is the realization of the harsh realities of the unyielding nature of her life. As she moves through the house, she discovers that what she saw as beauty and opulence was merely a façade:
The question was: were they new, or had they been there all the time? Had her
living room shrunk overnight to its present crowded proportions, or had it always
been less grand than her magnifying imagination made it seem? One thing was
clear: she had fought and clawed her way to the place where she wanted to be,
only to see it crumble into the same ruins she had left behind. (304)
The narrator presents a series of questions that lead Rosie to understand the veneers that shape her false consciousness. Her imagination and determination to live out her dreams
106 blinded her from seeing that she has not eluded her class status or even moved to higher quality conditions.
Rosie’s response to her dream demonstrates how dreams shape her anger. A dream is what brings Rosie clarity about her reality and “the blinders thus come off in time only for Rosie to see clearly what her past has been, and that she has not escaped it at all. . . The delusions she suffers on her deathbed are the clearest visions she has”
(Harris 57). Rosie’s clarity brings her not only rage but also madness as “she ran from wall to wall, banging, smashing, squashing with both hands, eyes blurred with tears and rage” (Hunter 305). After she runs through the house in search of roaches, she flees to the
Avenue in her nightgown. There, she goes into the bar and begins to destroy glasses after denial of service. The shattering of the glass reflects the shattering of her dream. Thrown into the street, she dies shortly thereafter. Her tragic ending suggests what happens when
Black girls are unable to understand or change their positionality within the nation. They must combat systematically predetermined historical constructions of their identity; hence, the possibility of anger turning inward, destroying the girl instead of the system.
Cleaving to fantasies of bootstrapping her way into a secure and comfortable position within the racial landscape of the nation, and realizing these dreams have not manifested, fuels Rosie’s fury in her final scene of the novel, a scene that reiterates the consequences of deprivation, discrepancies, and loss of perceived control.
While the American Dream symbolizes self-fashioning, Rosie’s attempts to achieve it cause her to unravel. Hunter illustrates how the dream affects Rosie psychologically and alludes to the dangers of muffled anger. Gerald Early notes that
107 “[t]he most telling and devastating point the novel makes is that American materialist culture tends not to make poor black people but to unmake them” (437). Here, Early presents the narrative discrepancy between the American Dream and Black life. Rosie’s anger manifests in her ambition, but the ambition is not enough to combat American culture. Although the dream causes her to unravel psychologically, Rosie’s narrative offers not only a critique of American values but also criticism of Black people buying into these beliefs. Though her attempt to fashion a new life fails, in her final moments,
Rosie comes to clarity about the absurdity of the values she once upheld.
Hunter chronicles the tragedies embedded in Rosie’s life and constructs a narrative of her arrested development—that extends to the development of Rosie’s anger.
Rosalie Fleming is young, Black, and ambitious, but all of this leads her to premature death. Joyce Hope Scott writes that “Rosie is not defeated by lack of courage and determination; she fails because she lacks the solid ancestral grounding in black survival consciousness” (184). Black survival consciousness arises through comprehension of history and memories; in turn, this survival relies on ancestral rage. Though Rosie fails, she is not solely responsible for her downfall. Her family unit and society also played a role in her demise.
God Bless the Child illuminates the travesties that accompany trying to achieve the American dream, particularly without a thorough comprehension of its foundations or pitfalls. Hunter employs Rosie as a channel to explicate the dangers of the American
Dream and to display Black people’s anger about this antagonistic force. Despite Rosie’s inability to achieve her goals, anger and frustration humanize her. Her narrative reflects
108 the ideas of Audre Lorde in “Learning from the 60s,” “for we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through [this]…we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision” (135). Rosie operates with an incomplete vision. Her anger has potential, yet like Rosie, it never fully develops.
Influenced by environmental factors, Rosie proves that Black girl rage does not develop in isolation. While Pamela Groves argues that Black girls may compromise their identities for success (65), Rosie’s rearing does not allow her to cultivate an identity or personality outside of her desires for success. Her upbringing lessens her chances at success, as she is unable to think critically and create strategies that would better serve her. Rosie, then, embodies the lyrics attached to the last section of the novel “them that’s not shall lose.”
Though Rosie’s anger does not lead her to liberation or acquisition of the
American Dream, the iterations of anger reflect the ways American cultural norms force
Black girls to live on the margins of society. Her anger and demise carve space for continued examination of nationhood vis-à-vis girlhood. The frustrations rooted in nationally accepted constructs, manufactured deprivations, and mother-wounds present in
God Bless the Child return in Edwidge’s Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory through colonial history and transnational traumas that spark the rising frustrations of Sophie
Caco. The mother-wounds reflected in Sophie’s narratives are the consequences of a mother wounded by patriarchal cultural norms, national violence, and deprivation of bodily autonomy that develop diasporic iterations of anger. The next section explores
109 family dynamics associated with internalized deprivation and its toxicity in family systems.
Transnational Traumas: Diasporic Iterations of Adolescent Anger
Through its Haitian protagonist, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory evokes diasporic and transnational conversations about nationhood, girlhood, and rage.
Sophie Caco’s contentious mother-daughter relationship, resistance of tradition, and diasporic ways of knowing position her emotive responses as modes of reconciling with memories. As Sophie experiences a transnational girlhood, migration and memories inform the stimuli for a transformative coming-of-rage. Trauma and coalescing cultures shape Sophie’s anger; furthermore, the culturally informed traumas ultimately lead to a healing rage and subsequent liberation. Chronicling her dual and dueling childhoods in
Haiti and New York, she experiences a “second bildungsroman” by emigrating to an urban area where coming-of-age experiences are markedly different from home (LeSeur
5). Her two bildungs demonstrate diasporic coming-of-age and tensions that arise from developing in a “developing” nation.
Breath, Eyes, Memory begins with twelve-year-old Sophie Caco who learns from
Tante Atie, her other-mother, that she will be relocating from Croix-des-Roset to New
York to live with her mother—whom she only knows through messages on cassette tapes.
Upon arriving in New York, Sophie is subject to a migratory experience that disrupts her life. She must learn U.S. customs at school but is still subject to Haitian practices at home. One tradition her mother maintains is “testing.” With testing, Martine, her mother, inserts a finger into Sophie’s vagina to ensure that her hymen is intact. Upon arrival,
110 Sophie learns of her mother’s rape; Martine abandoned her to escape the memory of the assault. Sophie’s discovery that she is a child of rape influences the Caco women’s relationship. The plot, driven by memories and violence, chronicles Sophie’s journey, which brings freedom and healing to the Caco family.
Both the concept of diaspora and Sophie’s cyclical narrative support the arc metaphor. Jana Evans Braziel’s rethinking and theorizing of diaspora as metasporic, or
“mark[ing] a continual moving across borders and boundaries of identity, identification, nationalities, languages, and places of becoming” aids in positioning this narrative in the arc metaphor (114). Sophie oscillates on a spectrum of dormant anger and expressed rage across this metasporic plane. Engaging Black girl rage in parts of the western hemisphere outside of the U.S. is in keeping with the arc metaphor. Including diasporic iterations of rage also aligns with Kobena Mercer’s notions of diaspora challenging, “monologic exclusivity on which dominant versions of national identity and collective belongings are based” (65). Mercer’s assertion aligns with positioning Breath, Eyes, Memory as a commentary on national discourse and negative homogenous conceptions of Black girl rage.
Produced during Haitian political turmoil, Breath, Eyes, Memory speaks to both national and transnational iterations of anger rooted in collective memories and development that span from the macro level of the national to the micro level of the domestic and the individual. Revisioning of memories and Haitian/Caco traditions through Sophie’s narration politicizes her girlhood and anger. Danticat’s implementation of three generations of women with the surname Caco, a reference to peasant soldiers
111 who fought corrupt Haitian governments in the nineteenth century (Marouan 39), combats institutional narratives of history, rage, and girlhood. With the use of the name
Caco, “Danticat is reclaiming women’s contribution and involvement in the Caco resistance movement, opening the past to reinterpretation, and telling of Haitian history from a female perspective” (Marouan 39). As a conduit for re-memory, Sophie reinterprets a past that haunts her mother and reveals new narratives and ways of being for Haitian women.
Danticat’s depictions of generational, national, and transnational conflicts reflect deprivation, discrepancies, and loss of perceived control. In “Reframing Haitian
Literature Transnationally: Identifying New and Revised Tropes of Haitian Identity in
Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory,” Nadége Clitandre notes that Danticat reconceptualizes notions of home by “mak[ing] the readers aware of the tensions and oscillations between political/public discourse of home as nation and the private/intimate spaces of home as the day-to-day lived experiences of a nation’s people” (94). The oscillations not only sustain the arc metaphor but also present the stimuli as tiered when the political and personal collide. Responding to these tensions reveals Sophie’s building frustration.
Danticat presents narrative discrepancies, especially through the historical and contemporary relationship between Haiti and the United States. The connections between the Haitian and United States settings and, further, the bridges between the personal, domestic, and national spheres are demonstrated, in part, by the inclusion of historically constructed spirituality and folktales. Features that manifest transnationally are cultural
112 symbols of Black womanhood. Danticat uses Erzulie as her primary cultural/national image. Marouan positions the story of Vodou loa Erzulie and the folktales in the novel as frame stories for the transformative processes experienced by the Caco women. One representation is Erzulie as an angry Black woman, “a red-eyed loa of fury and vengeance” whose rage is continuously summoned and redeployed by her devotees for protection and blessings (Marouan 40) As Marouan frames Ezurlie as the most contradictory of the Vodou loa, her statement makes a claim about the contradictory understandings of racialized anger.
What makes Sophie’s rage racialized is how she understands her positionality as a
Black Haitian girl through her maternal lineage, which is also situated in the historical lineage of the nation and its political intrusions into her family’s domestic sphere, and which is further situated within the spiritual discourses of Vodou and national folktales.
The complex rendering of her intersectional identity is grounded in national histories of colonial conquest: enslavement, sugar production, contact between indigenous, colonial, and African cultures, and continuous American imperialist presence in Haiti. That Vodou is a religion born out of these complex international and intercultural contacts and invoked in present-day understandings of Haitian girlhood and womanhood, speaks to racially and nationally informed understandings of Sophie’s and her family’s place in the
Americas, in their local communities, and the confines of their respective domestic spheres.
Early in the novel, Tante Atie tells Sophie about the Guinea people who carry the sky on their heads. Tante states, “These people do not know who they are, but if you see
113 a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head” (25). Sophie carries the burden of intergenerational trauma. The story foreshadows
Sophie’s life in New York, where she becomes victim to her mother’s testing and seeks to disrupt this familial violence rooted in Haitian cultural norms. These burdens are the stimuli for Sophie’s emotive responses and reactions.
Though Sophie’s conception is a result of politically contextualized rape, Danticat uses Sophie’s subjectivity as a Black girl to interrupt the patriarchal narrative of virginity testing and imposed silence enacted by mother figures. At the beginning of the novel,
Tante Atie voices that “[t]he young should learn from the old, not the other way around”
(4). This notion extends far beyond Tante Atie’s reference to formal education; this cultural norm imposes silence on children, particularly girls. Black girl epistemologies and hermeneutics are foreclosed and downcast by adults through systematic silencing that attempts to re-inscribe hegemonic control over girls’ bodies through activities such as virginity testing. By recollecting Dominique Hills’s notion of minding Black girl stories and applying it to the narrative of Sophie Caco, special attention can be paid to Sophie’s meaning-making practices and their impact on the purposefulness of her trauma-informed anger. The hermeneutics reflected by her elders impart harmful knowledge, as
“nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms” (Danticat 234). Sophie’s inherited trauma emphasizes memory and historical genealogy that serves as the stimulus for rage.
Sophie’s Haitian American girlhood is an inversion of the age compression experienced by American Black girls. Though treated as if she should “know better” she
114 is not assigned the adult-like characteristics of American Black girls, yet her story reflects
“deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape” (Morris 34). While other protagonists in this chapter experience girlhoods “interchangeable with Black womanhood,” (34) Sophie’s mother relegates her to a perpetual state of girlhood. At eighteen, Sophie becomes interested in the company of men; her mother reminds her that
“a good girl would never be alone with a man, an older one at that” (72). Initially,
Sophie’s interest lies in a platonic companionship, and then it blossoms into a love interest. Joseph is the first person to acknowledge Sophie’s womanhood. Despite
Sophie’s age, her mother does not consider her a woman. American legal constructions of womanhood do not transfer over cultural boundaries, and Sophie is subject to her mother’s strict rules. Sophie must ask for permission to date. She asks, “I am past eighteen now…Is it okay if I like someone?” (78). Martine has caveats that cause Sophie to lie and hide her love interest. Frustration builds as Martine deprives Sophie of companionship.
Generational conflicts breed deprivation and discrepancies that indicate Sophie’s minimal control over her life. A conversation between Sophie and her mother reveals incongruences between generations. Martine indicates that finding companions proves difficult for Sophie’s generation. Martine notes that girls must choose between the
Haitians who follow antiquated practices and new-generation Haitians. She notes, “[t]he old-fashioned ones are not exactly prize fruits. They make you cook plantains and rice and beans and never let you feed them lasagna. The problem with the new generation is
115 that a lot of them have lost a sense of obligation to the family’s honor” (80). Though
Martine refers to love interests, her words indicate how the “old-fashioned” interferes with self-fashioning. Martine feels obligated to protect the family’s honor through guarding Sophie’s virginity. Though aware of the difficulties Haitian girls face in obtaining a suitable mate, she does not see problems with adhering to the testing. The tensions that arise from this conflict are indicative of the ways exile informs diasporic iterations of anger.
The violence produced through Martine’s inability to keep Sophie sheltered reflects national discourses about regulating girls’ behavior. Martine engages a new form of violence when Sophie arrives home late after a secret outing with Joseph. The belt that
Martine awaits Sophie with is reflective of disciplinary violence. This type of violence reflects the structural violence wielded ( as a threat) to maintain order. Instead of beating her, when Martine discovers that Sophie has lied about her suitor, she increases the testing. During the tests, Sophie recalls pleasant memories of Haiti to suppress the pain.
Martine tests Sophie every week to ensure that she is still “whole” but does not realize that the testing breaks her (86). Thus Martine, a victim of rape, in turn, “performs a
(state-sanctioned) rape of sorts on her daughter as she re-appropriates and re- approximates torture” (Alexander 376). Her act is rooted in patriarchal norms. Martine is not protecting Sophie’s virginity for Sophie’s sake; she is preserving the families honor and ensuring Sophie’s purity for her future husband. Martine also tests Sophie out of blind allegiance to tradition and perpetuates the cycle of incestuous violence. Danticat utilizes testing and other phenomena as symbols of the Haitian nation.
116 The symbols and sacred figures in the novel speak to the development of Sophie’s character. The story of the bleeding woman “marks the Caco women’s struggle with their womanhood and sexuality and expresses their desire for transformation” (Marouan 38).
Sophie narrates this story; before she begins, she indicates her loss of perceived control narrating, “I was feeling so lost, like there was no longer any reason for me to live” (87).
To take control, Sophie grabs a mortar and pestle to break her hymen. As the bleeding woman consults Erzulie to stop bleeding, Sophie channels Eruzlie to stop the trauma. As she tears her hymen, Sophie becomes a reflection of the bleeding woman and Eruzlie’s anger.
Sophie’s perpetual silence about the trauma inflicted by her mother intensifies her simmering anger. The silence plays a role in her development and coming-of-rage
Her silence reflects Isabel Hoving’s positioning of silence in her introduction to In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers (2001):
In much postcolonial writing, silence, not speech itself, plays the crucial role in
the process of finding a voice. For many, especially women silence is the
condition of (obedient) muteness and self-effacement that has to be overcome,
and thus it serves as a negative phase in the process. This silence appears as the
inability to make an authoritative use of dominant or even nondominant
discourses…Silence can be seen as an obstacle to speech, but also as an
instrument to find a new voice. (23)
Imposed silence associated with Haitian girlhood relegates Sophie to muteness. Initially, she obediently subjects herself to the testing, but “doubles” herself each time she
117 experiences the process. When Sophie grows tired of this process, she begins a new chapter in her coming-of-rage through breaking her hymen: “My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet and stuffed them into a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s finger back every time she tested me” (88). This act lifts the veil silence, as Sophie begins to develop some agency; she responds to stimuli of violence with self-governed, liberatory violence, a productive contradiction that frees her from her mother’s abuse.
Breaking her hymen is an act of anger that rejects Haitian cultural norms. The break constitutes a break in the generational “curse” that looms in her family. The act asserts her humanity through manipulation of a symbol of virginity and right to define herself through this decolonial act of resistance. For Sophie, this moment represents
“breaking manacles, an act of freedom” (Danticat 130), as her transformation includes the understanding that “[she] cannot always carry the pain, [she] must liberate [her]self”
(157). Her liberation is not a linear process. As she comes of age, she must deal with generational tensions and the consequences of this self-inflicted violence.
Self-inflicted violence resurfaces through her mother’s suicide; this repeated motif reflects not only memory but also a return to sources of pain. Unable to handle the psychological trauma of a second pregnancy, Martine stabs herself to death. After the suicide, Sophie returns to Haiti; here is where the resolution of the text—and her rage—
occurs. At her mother’s funeral, Sophie engages in a liberatory act. She returns to the cane field where her mother’s rape occurred and narrates a moment of healing rage:
118 I ran through the cane field, attacking the cane, I took off my shoes and began to
beat a cane stalk. I pounded it until it began to lean over. I pushed over the cane
stalk. It snapped back, striking my shoulder. I pulled at it, yanking it from the
ground. My palm was bleeding...The funeral crowd was now standing between
the stalks, watching me beat the cane…from where I was standing, my
grandmother should like the women from the market place, ‘Ou libére’ Are you
free? Tante Atie echoed her cry, her voice quivering with her sobs. ‘Ou libére!’
(233)
Sophie’s inherited chagrin morphs into rage. She forgives her mother and completes her coming-of-age in a space “where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her” (234). Danticat makes clear that not only does Sophie’s maturation occur in tandem with the maturation her anger but also that the dual maturations are accompanied by an acknowledgment of the past.
Breath, Eyes, Memory acknowledges that Black girl rage and oppressive, limiting tropes of Black girlhood are not exclusive to the United States. They are rooted in hierarchical constructions of humanity grounded in the colonial construction of the
Americas, of which Haiti and the island of Hispaniola belong, especially as an early space of representations of Black existence and experience in the colonial landscape of the Western corner of the triangular trade. As Braziel and Mannur remind, “diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation-states” (Braziel and Mannur 7). A rethinking of these “rubrics” is
119 important to engaging transnational iterations of anger and challenging normative notions of Black girls’ treatment.
The final section of this chapter, shaped by the mantra THUG LIFE, creates a bridge between the three texts. THUG LIFE (The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks
Everyone) reflects the stimuli that create Black girl rage and inform their negotiations of their spaces. THUG LIFE, then, serves as a metonym for cyclical violence reflected in each text. THUG LIFE suggests that continuity exists in the exploration of the triggers.
The final section explicates a climatic rage that directly and publicly confronts power structures.
THUG LIFE: Rage, Rights, and Resistance
Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017) is a contemporary coming-of-age narrative that reflects critical junctures of Black girlhood for the protagonist Starr Carter.
Starr is maturing in a space where Black people’s anger and resistance are maturing. The maturation occurs at the nexus of Starr and her community’s moves from silence to
“[r]ageful activism [which] counter[s] the alienating effects of oppression by connecting people back to themselves, their freedom, and what they care most deeply about” (Cohen
41). The murder of a Black teen at the hands of the police mends a community divided by warring gangs. The community agrees that Khalil’s murder is an egregious act worthy of public, politically-charged displays of emotion. Layered with the historical and emotional weight of oppression and state violence against Black communities in the United States, the novel demonstrates the myriad possibilities of Black girl emotions and their utility in confronting narrative discrepancies.
120 Starr’s transformation is rooted in her ascent into outrage. Thomas positions Starr as a conduit for expressing the validity of Black rage. Starr’s rage reflects national outrage about police violence, Starr, then, employs her rage and subsequent outage as a rostrum for revealing conflicts between the nation and her neighborhood of Garden
Heights (a microcosm of the U.S. Black population). The ideological and psychological underpinnings of her anger become tied to “THUG LIFE” (The Hate U Give Little
Infants Fuck Everybody). Because her anger links to her markers of identity and lived experiences, Starr’s coming-of-age is saturated with this emotion. The novel traces the ways rage and injustice inform sixteen-year-old Starr’s worldview. Although her father taught Starr Black history—particularly the revolutionary and radical moments—nothing prepares Starr for having to relive the trauma of losing two friends to senseless violence or having to decide whether to contribute to Black radical traditions. Starr straddles her two worlds while balancing everyday life with having to speak as the sole witness in the case of “Officer One-Fifteen.” Her choices illustrate the connections between rage, rights, and resistance.
Starr’s civic engagement, propelled by her growing fury reflects Deborah J.
Cohen’s framing of rage as a “legitimate, righteous response to persistent, systematic social inequalities” (38) and signals Starr’s recognition of her positionality. Cohen’s situating of rage ties it to the nation. While the initial impetus for Starr’s rage is the murder of her best friend Khalil, her rage becomes amplified by her growing awareness of injustice and denial of Black people’s rights in Garden Heights. With an understanding of her positionality comes an understanding of the necessity of resistance in obtaining
121 justice and acquiring rights. The acronym that informs the novel’s title fundamentally changes Starr’s understanding of her station as a young Black girl in a neighborhood marginalized by economic and racial disparities. From Khalil, she learns of Tupac’s mantra THUG LIFE. Before his murder, Khalil asserts that this means that “[w]hat society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out” (17). Khalil’s interpretation of THUG LIFE alludes to denial of the youth’s rights and their resulting resistance. THUG LIFE also alludes to the sociocultural and psycho-emotional consequences of the stimuli and limiting the consequences for self-development in
America.
A significant thread of the plot is Starr’s grappling with her two personas. The novel opens with Starr feeling out of place at a party in Garden Heights, where she reveals two versions of herself, neither of which neatly fit into the spaces she occupies.
Starr feels that “there are just some places where it’s not enough to be [herself]. Either version of [herself]” (3). As Starr narrates, she articulates that there is Garden Heights
Starr (daughter of a former gang lord) and Williamson Starr (who attempts to appeal to her white prep school friends). She continually feels a “twoness” because of tensions between living in the underserved Black neighborhood of Garden Heights and attending a white prep school. By the conclusion of the novel, Starr’s “twoness” is reconciled through her absorption of THUG LIFE. In “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a
Nexus of Ideas,” Derrick P. Alridge writes that Mutula Shakur aided Tupac in resolving his double consciousness through THUG LIFE. Shakur envisioned THUG LIFE as a philosophy grounded in an understanding of economic oppression; it acknowledges the
122 “underground economic structure that will always be functional as long as we are an oppressed people” (Talibah Mbonisi qtd. in Alridge 244). The underground structure reveals how Black communities are deprived of opportunities. Starr lives in a neighborhood that normalizes crime and drug dealing. The drug activity reflects the survival principles attached to THUG LIFE. As indicated by Mbonisi, “you will have pimps, drug dealers, and everything else because people gotta feed their families and they can't do it because they are not allowed to participate in the capitalist structure in the
United States” (244). Thomas’ invocation of THUG LIFE illuminates the economic discrepancies, depravity, and lack of control that become stimuli for rage.
As Starr’s central concerns are being viewed as “angry” and “ghetto” by her suburban, majority white Williamson peers, her development and the merging of her identities are intimately intertwined with acceptance of her anger (which requires rejection of dominant, national narratives). Early in the novel, Starr explains that
“Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off, so nobody will think she’s the ‘angry black girl’ (71). Starr attempts to protect herself from judgment by depriving herself of emoting. Chemaly notes that the “Angry Black Woman” trope silences Black girls and women. They grapple with the tensions that arise and the “abiding dangers of institutionalized violence that might result from their expressing justifiable rage” (xvii).
Starr polices and silences herself to avoid master narratives of Black people’s anger, yet this fails to protect her from institutionalized violence.
The more she is exposed to institutionalized violence, the more insight she gains on correlations between intersectionality, perception, and her position as a Black teenager
123 in the United States. Like Rosie and Sophie, because of her environment, Starr grapples with prematurely knowing. Early exposure to trauma plays a critical role in cultivating
Starr’s anger and subjectivity. At ten, Starr witnesses the death of her friend, Natasha, in a drive-by shooting. Exposure to mortality ushers her into a new realm of knowing. At twelve, Starr’s father, Maverick, converses with her about what to do if pulled over by the police because he believes that she is old enough to get shot or arrested (20). Then, at sixteen, she is “a vital part of [the] investigation of Khalil’s murder” (94). Her experiences, memories, and the information she consumes heighten her awareness of what she is subject to in Garden Heights and the United States.
Starr’s transformation into a political actor is supported by a Black woman, April
Ofrah, an attorney and founder of Just Us for Justice. Ms. Ofrah establishes Starr as critical to obtaining justice for Khalil, “Starr offers a unique perspective in this, one you don’t get a lot with these cases, and I want to make sure her rights are protected and that her voice is her without her being—” (134). Ms. Ofrah is aware that because of Starr’s age, there is a possibility of exploitation or manipulation that encroaches on her rights.
Starr’s perspective, informed by serving as the sole witness of the murder, alters her girlhood experiences in the age of rage. Growing up in the Black Lives Matter
Movement, Starr witnesses police brutality outside of her neighborhood and is aware of the dangers of speaking out. Crippled by fear of police and threats from the public, Starr retreats into silence by attempting to maintain her anonymity and initially denies association with Khalil. Readers bear witness to the ways Starr’s dichotomous worlds
124 over-determine her responses. She denies Khalil, yet her anger at the situation and frustration with her fears activate.
Khalil’s death surfaces the narrative discrepancies and warring realities in the nation. The embers of Starr’s anger reignite as her peers show no concern for the life of a
Black boy. Their complicity heightens Starr’s awareness of the differences between her and her white counterparts. When Starr reaches her boiling point, “all [her] Williamson rules go out the door, and Starr from Garden Heights shows up. ‘What the fuck that got to do with it?,’” Starr inquires when Hailey comments about protesting a “drug dealer’s death” (183). After their exchange, Starr expresses that she wants to fight everyone because, while they are excited about a day off, she must live with the trauma of Khalil’s death every day (183). Even in this experience, Starr consciously decides against revealing her relationship with Khalil to her prep school peers. While she experiences her coming-of-rage transformation, she is still unwilling to disclose information in specific spaces and chooses to be angry in isolation.
As Khalil cannot speak for himself, Starr’s testimony is a means of reshaping the narrative that media and police constructed. She realizes that because issues of stereotyping and police violence are systemic that “[her] silence will not protect [her]” nor will it benefit her community (Lorde 41). Thomas strategically uses another Black girl, Starr’s Garden Heights friend Kenya, to encourage her to react to injustice and view the trauma as not exclusively hers. Kenya’s understanding of community recalls Ruth
King's notion of rage inheritance (14). Kenya urges Starr to speak out on television,
“Here you are, with a chance to help change what happens in our whole neighborhood,
125 and you staying quiet like a coward” (198). Kenya foreshadows outrage. Her indictment of Starr’s silence reveals the stimuli of loss of perceived control and Starr’s power in challenging false narratives.
Starr becomes increasingly aware that her silence impacts her community. She narrates, “This is about Us, with a capital U; everybody who looks like us, feels like us, and is experiencing this pain with us despite not knowing me or Khalil. My silence isn’t helping Us” (171). Starr recognizes that the impact of her voice extends beyond her community of Garden Heights. Although the culture of silence in her neighborhood often determines outcomes in criminal activity, Starr makes a choice that shifts the culture.
Starr’s coming to clarity about the meaning and applicability of THUG LIFE to the current moment signal her shifts in consciousness and necessitate the use of her voice. In a conversation with her father, Starr mentions, “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later…I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us period…Black people, minorities, poor people.
Everybody at the bottom in society” (168). At this moment, Starr alludes to a communal rage and developing comprehension that the “system’s still giving hate, and everybody’s still getting fucked” (171). Maverick indicates that THUG LIFE results from deprivation and lack of opportunities and systems designed against Black people.
Starr, then, comprehends the relevance of THUG LIFE to the turmoil in Garden
Heights. She comes to understand the historical trends of police violence against Black people:
126 Everybody’s pissed ‘cause One-Fifteen hasn’t been charged …but also because
he’s not the first one to do something like this and get away with it. It’s been
happening, and people will keep rioting until it changes. So, I guess the system’s
still giving hate, and everybody’s still getting fucked? (170-71)
A genealogy of hatred produced an arc of anger in Black communities. The historical narratives of oppression stimulate conflicts between Black people and the nation.
Starr now understands that people are speaking out to enact change; therefore, she cannot be silent. Her realization that she can and must be politically engaged justifies her rage and her impending “loud” reactions to the situation. Starr’s actions and reactions— both strategic and spontaneous—are indicative of the acts of shapeshifting that contribute to her personal and political growth. The concept of shapeshifting, as presented in Aimee
Meredith Cox’s Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (2015), lends itself to understanding how Black girls like Starr resist:
Shapeshifting describes how young Black women living in the United States
engage with, confront, challenge, invert, unsettle, and expose the material impact
of systemic oppression. Shapeshifting is an act, a theory, and, in this sense, a form
of praxis that— although uniquely definitive of and defined by Black girls—
reveals our collective vulnerabilities. (7)
127 Exerting her rage, using her voice, and ultimately engaging in protest and retaliation toward the police are how Starr chooses to shapeshift. She uses her voice to tell the
“counter-story” (i.e., the truth) about the life-altering moment of Khalil’s death. 5
The overwriting of Khalil’s narrative starts Starr’s journey toward developing a critical standpoint on THUG LIFE. As Starr watches “One-Fifteen’s” father in a television interview recounting the night’s events, she articulates the death of fear, foreshadowing the death of dichotomous Starr. The father’s false narrative prompts Starr to say, “[t]onight they shot me too, more than once, and killed part of me. Unfortunately for them, it’s the part that felt any hesitation about speaking out” (247). Ironically, this gives rise to the decolonial forces of her rage. Starr wants to take control of her narrative and publicly use her voice and perspective as the witness to Khalil’s murder. Five weeks after the incident, Ms. Ofrah schedules an interview on national news giving Starr a public platform to voice her reality and revise the previously presented narrative. She recalls that her voice is how she must fight, so she is adamant about revealing the truth.
She goes against the judgment of those who coached her by discussing Khalil’s drug dealing and ties to the King Lords. She is aware of the influence of her voice; this overpowers the fear of retaliation from the King. As she peers into the camera, she thinks of Kenya’s notion that the truth can change Garden Heights. She sees each fact she speaks as a jab because “when you fight, you put yourself out there, not caring who you hurt or if you’ll get hurt” (290). During the concluding question of the interview, Starr
5 Sandra Hughes-Hassell, author of “Multicultural Young Adult Literature as a Form of Counter- Storytelling,” indicates that “counter-stories can show us that what we believe is inaccurate or false; they can highlight exclusionary practices and policies” (2415).
128 delivers the final hit. When asked what she would say to office Cruise, Starr replies, “I’d ask him if she wished he shot me too” (290). Starr’s interview serves as the beginning of her leanings toward social justice work and transforming her voice into action.
When Starr begins working to understand the rage she feels about her newly understood marginalization and ever-present danger, she attempts to learn more about her feelings. She indicates that WebMD refers to anger as a stage of grief, but she does not believe that she can move past this stage (343). Starr also reflects on the wisdom shared by her father to contextualize her anger, “Daddy once told me there’s a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn’t stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there’s nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated” (196). This rage is not exclusive to Black men; Black girls’ and women’s histories and experiences in present-day inform their righteous anger about the danger and injustice facing their bodies, their families, and their communities. While
Starr reflects on her father’s warning that there is nothing more dangerous than activated rage, the stage is set for her anger to become a focused and functional fury, one that is critical to her activism and developing identity formation.
As the pressure mounts for Starr to decide on whether and how she will respond to the developing media circus around Khalil’s death, her anger becomes central to collective resistance of the hate and indifference coming from the media and the police department. She realizes that her anger has the potential to be beneficial for the collective of her home community and can birth a collective rage aimed for change. She narrates,
“People say misery loves company, but I think it’s like that with anger too. I’m not the
129 only one pissed—everyone around me is. They didn’t have to be sitting in the passenger’s seat when it happened. My anger is theirs, and theirs is mine” (393). The collective anger reveals that the stimuli not only impact Black girls, but the community at large. Starr builds community through anger. By this point, Starr envisions anger as having the potential to become an organizing force for community response to the fallout from Khalil’s case. Throughout the novel, Starr learns how to harness this anger and begins to redirect it. Niza Yanay, the author of the Ideology of Hatred (2012), destigmatizes the rage of people of color and demonstrates it as purposeful. Her understanding of rage frames the emotion as adaptive rather than pathological:
In contrast to white fear, black rage is a mode of resistance against black
victimization, a struggle of liberation from white supremacy. Although rage, like
hate, is a burning feeling, it is, unlike hatred, a constructive, healing, and
transformative response to racism. Rage is a signifier of critical consciousness, an
antidote to hatred, the kind of effect that characterizes politicized subjects. (22)
The rage liberates Starr from her fears and her maladaptive negotiations of society.
Starr’s rage is resistant in that she uses it to heal and seek justice. She realizes that the anger is productive and can circumvent the hate given to the Garden Heights community and Black people in America.
Upon the verdict, Starr’s anger has transformed into rage. She feels that it is necessary to protest or riot as a means of asserting her voice—since her testimonies did not garner the desired results, Starr reacts impulsively claiming, “[t]hey gave me the hate, and now I wanna fuck everybody, even if I’m not sure how” (389). Starr is responding to
130 hatred with rage (although inchoate) and not yet what Brittney Cooper terms in Eloquent
Rage as orchestrated fury; it is still a refusal to be silenced or shamed (152). At this moment, Starr’s building rage is compulsive rather than calculated.
For Cooper, the orchestration of fury occurs through movement building and activist work that allows well-defined channeled rage. As she notes the need for collective resistance, the novel’s conclusion moves Starr toward this type of fury. Cooper argues that the Black Lives Matter Movement exemplifies the need for collective rage, particularly for Black women who “live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have the right to feel it”
(169). Starr uses the rage as an exhibition of humanity for herself and other subjugated people. Her decision to participate in “the fight” places her at the center of the
“orchestrated” demonstration.
Starr comes to learn that her public demonstrations and activism contribute to the national discourse of race and police brutality. She also learns that the case influences her future. Starr voices, “[n]o matter what the grand jury decided, I’m still “Starr who was with Khalil,” and I don’t wanna be seen tonight. Just heard” (392). This sentiment changes as Starr marches the streets with her community. She addresses the crowd and the police force present at the protest. She leads the crowd in a chant as police implore them to disperse. The police hurl tear gas at the citizens, and in an act of wrathful resistance, Starr shapeshifts and heaves the gas back at the police. Interaction with the police animates Starr’s unbridled rage. When asked by her parents why she retaliated at the police, her response is “I was mad” (427). The following day, Starr demonstrates a
131 new level of consciousness and clarity Thomas writes, “We did all that stuff last night because we were pissed, and it fucked all of us. Now we have to somehow un-fuck everybody” (432). Starr’s father indicates that she is suddenly community-minded; an indication of how her rage has transformed her. Her anger at injustice transforms to outrage because of her concerns for the community. The anger aligns with Myisha
Cherry’s framing of the emotion in her TEDTalk “Anger is not a Bad Word” “it recognizes wrongdoing…so when someone is angry at injustice they’re not just concerned with themselves but also other people…the anger does not violate other people’s rights, and most importantly, it desires change” (Cherry). Starr recognizes wrongdoing and is ushered into a tradition of collective rage supported by her traumatic memories and U.S. history of police brutality and marginalization of Black people.
After thirteen short weeks, Starr learns the function of her seemingly negative emotions. She can see rage as productive. Her self-awareness and awareness of the political and cultural climate of the nation guide her into outrage based on “ethics, compassion, and justice” (Kim 176). Starr’s coming-of-rage moved her from grief to outrage and encouraged her to develop an interest in being a change agent and comprehending institutionalized racism. Sue J. Kim positions outrage as critical to dismantling oppressive systems:
To remedy the systemic and ubiquitous—but often decentralized—violations of
human rights and to achieve the goals of democracy, freedom, and equity, we
need not anger fueled by a sense of individual harm or desires, but rather outrage
132 produced from collectively articulated and agreed upon-principles and values.
(177)
By the conclusion of the novel, Starr’s anger has fully developed; it moves beyond the pain and grief associated with the loss of Khalil. It is informed by “collective notions of justice, ethics, and rights” (Kim 177). Her anger expands beyond her home in Garden
Heights to the national level. Starr recognizes the necessity of outrage, particularly, when she leads the collective chant of “Khalil lived!” during the protests on verdict night (412).
The community agrees that Black lives matter and that Khalil’s murder was unjustified.
The end of the novel demonstrates outrage as a positive force. Starr calls the names of people murdered by police or vigilantes (e.g., Aiyana, Trayvon, Rekia, and
Michael) and then acknowledges Black people in the United States and community of
Garden Heights unity and civic engagement:
Others are fighting too, even in the Garden, where sometimes it feels like there’s
not a lot worth fighting for. People are realizing and shouting and marching and
demanding. They’re not forgetting. I think that’s the most important part.
Khalil, I’ll never forget. I’ll never give up. I’ll never be quiet. I promise. (444) The resistance struggle occurs across class, gender, and age lines. Starr sees that she is not alone in her outrage and alludes to the generational and communal common contexts that drive Black activism. She makes a promise to continue to be vocal about injustices, thus, marking her evolution and concluding the coming-of-age narrative. The arc of anger
133 contributes to Starr’s quest for personal and collective liberation while making her perceptive to marginality. Her position and epistemological viewpoints afford her “a vantage point from which to critique the dominant hegemony and envision creating a counter-hegemony” (hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center 16). Starr believes that in the future things will change because there will always be people willing to fight.
The Hate U Give deftly engages community responses to structural inequalities and police violence and the exigent discourse of the Black Lives Matter Era. It represents how the nation, neighborhood, and governing bodies inform Black girls’ coming-of-age; the novel also demonstrates how these entities fuel the protagonist’s anger. Thomas shows the potential for rage and civic engagement to begin with an individual and extend to the community. Despite marring by tragedy, she can restore herself and become a productive citizen. Although she must deal with problems incited on the national level and in her community, Starr ultimately learns that home is where the hate is(n’t).
Conclusion
These novels feature Black girls across North America and their experiences of oppression in geographically and historically constituted ways. The young protagonists experience silencing and willful misreading of their identities on valences as they navigate the borders of their locally and nationally defined community spheres. As they come of age, which involves understanding their positions within their communities and their identities, they grapple with comprehending the origins of their anger and wielding it to serve themselves and their communities in resisting racialized and gendered injustice.
134 The novel grouping articulates stimuli that produce rage and present an arc of anger across Black women’s writing. With the nation as an antagonist, the girls are subject to deprivation, loss of perceived control, and narrative discrepancies. Through the
American Dream, virginity testing, and police violence, the novels demonstrate a plethora of triggers for rage. Combatting controlling images and gender/race expectations informed by their ages and location, the girls find creative ways to define themselves and shape their destinies. They become radical subjects who defy expectations through ambition, agency, and voice. The texts chronicle building frustrations of the characters and demonstrate the common contexts of Black girlhood. Using memoricity to map
Black girl rage and locate it in relation to traditions and conflicts in the Americas, the characters demonstrate the emotional weight of their histories.
God Bless the Child, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Hate U Give produce unique narratives of Black girlhood fixed in violence, history, and memory. By constructing adversarial relationships between Black girlhood and nationhood, the novels demonstrate how Black girls perform decolonial work in their communities and cultures. The novels acknowledge coming of age in the United States as a process of navigating American cultural norms surrogated by remnants of colonialism. Colored by nationalist discourse and antagonistic forces, their coming-of-age informs their proclivity for anger. The novels embody Toni Morrison’s notions presented in “Memory, Creation, and Fiction” that address the pervasiveness of the stimuli. Morrison writes, “Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often extremely hard to seek out both the stimulus and its galaxy and to recognize their
135 value when they arrive” (327). Black girls come to recognize the value of their reactions to these stimuli despite America’s disguising the existence of the triggers. The stimuli, however, set in motion the emotions that drive the adaptations presented in the next chapter.
CHAPTER V
WHITE NOISE, BLACK RAGE: COUNTERING HEGEMONIC VIOLENCE ACROSS PLACE AND TIME THROUGH BLACK GIRL EPISTEMOLOGIES
Anchored in the voices of the narrators of Toni Morrison’s (The Bluest Eye),
Louise Meriwether’s (Daddy Was a Number Runner), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s (The Poet
X) debut novels, this chapter demonstrates Black girls’ use of rage to combat hegemonic violence. The authors focus on adaptations that stem from this violence. Invoking arcs of anger informed by national and cultural climates, the novelists present the problematic ways American society forces Black girls to live in illusions that deny their humanity and ignore their anger. Highlighting creative negotiations of their unique positionalities, these
“radical subjects” assert agency through adaptive anger. In these coming-of-age novels, epistemic violence sparks the protagonists’ respective comings-of-rage. Building from the nation’s imposing of identities, harmful stimuli, and myths presented in chapter four, this chapter observes the ways the nation sets in motion specific responses that undermine the impressing of controlling images and silence. Instances of epistemic and structural violence shape the narratives. The instances of violence connect to violations of the characters’ rights and inform the counter-hegemonic strategies they develop to assert themselves. Otherwise lost in a cacophony of adult voices, these girls’ queries and responses to structural inequalities are indicative of their hermeneutics and the epistemological underpinnings of their anger.
136
137 The novel grouping demonstrates rage formation in relation to the characters’ respective social locations. Set in different environments and epochs like the previous chapter, these novels prove that while geographically specific national paradigms can influence anger, positionality plays a primary role in its utility. As the girls develop an increasing awareness of the workings of intersectionality within their identities, the arc of anger reflected in their narratives becomes more prominent. Each character makes explicit that their anger is in response to oppressive forces, which in turn, allows the authors to utilize their subversions of the bildungs form to implicate national discourses as sources of Black girl rage. The protagonists’ reactions to the conditions of their lives address broader problems connected to what bell hooks refers to in The Will to Change:
Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) as the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” at the center of the nation’s politics (17). As nationhood informs girlhood, the novels illuminate how the nation, cultural institutions, and knowledge contribute to Black girls’ coming-of-age.
Through addressing epistemic violence on national and familial scales, this chapter continues in the vein of addressing national and individual narratives that simultaneously adultify and infantilize Black girls causing tension as they form their identities. As stimuli prime and condition girls for adaptations, rage activates specific behaviors. Upon reaching the pinnacle of frustration, the girls in each novel react in ways that critique the culture of America and its institutions. The novels display “productive contradictions” of normative conceptions of emotions. In her chapter “Productive
Contradictions: Afro-Caribbean Diasporic Feminism and the Question of Exile” from
138 Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), Myriam
Chancy theorizes about exile as a “productive contradiction.” Her theorizing aids in understanding how Black girls’ anger exiles them as the “condition of exile crosses boundaries of self and other, of citizenship and nationality, of home and homeland” (1).
As the girls are ostracized, their exile becomes the “source from which [they] find the strength to counter their multiple points of oppression and generate their own sense of self, as the very mechanism of alienation becomes the mechanism for liberation” (14).
Their age and rising anger alienate them, but also leads them to liberative practices framed by their epistemologies and desires to combat hegemonic violence.
These productive contradictions reveal the intentionality of each girl’s rage and how its expression suits the oppression they are experiencing. Each novel offers commentary that reflects Myisha Cherry’s notion that “anger is necessary for the pursuit of justice” (“Anger is not a Bad Word”) and positions it as necessary in “humans’ emotion-laden quest for survival, adaptation, and mental health” (Reeve 246). The framing of life as a “quest” justifies the use of coming-of-age-novels that articulate Black girls’ journey through rage. As the girls seek justice for themselves and those around them, they employ anger as a “motivational impulse to do what [they] might not otherwise do” (Reeve 287). The novels reflect three varying Black girl subjectivities that once again address anger, rage, and outrage.
The interpretations of each protagonists’ surroundings and experiences to which they bear witness can be framed through the act of seeing. Each girl’s spectatorship and subsequent skepticism of the knowledge she consumes contributes to the development of
139 her voice and oppositional gaze. Grounded in questioning or opposing adult actions and explanations, these oppositional gazes—both deliberate and unintentional— position sight (e.g., observation) as a site of resistance. The rebellious desires reflect anger.
Longing to look and be seen manifests through oppositional gazes toward narrative discrepancies and hegemonic violence. As spectators, the girls witness the attempted destruction of their communities and their being. Their visions and re-visions of the spaces they occupy increase their visibility as they voice their opinions and react to their conditions.
As the girls develop, they become critical of their environments and engage in what hooks refers to as “critical black women’s spectatorship;” when Black women [and girls] counter dominant epistemological standpoints and lines of vision, only then does the critical spectatorship become a “site of resistance” (hooks, Black Looks 128). The shifting gazes of Claudia, Francie, and Xiomara oppose dominant cultural understandings of their respective Black girl identities and locations in the national landscape while constructing counternarratives of rage that illuminate their inclusion in Black women’s literary arc of anger.
Oppositional gazes arise from epistemic contrasts. Differences in the ways the characters comprehend marginalization contribute to their navigation of emotions. The knowledge they acquire from their gendered and racialized experiences shapes their rage.
They each provide a distinctive “Black girl gaze” that demonstrates how they interpret the world and channel their rage in response to their environments. Their
“epistemological choices” aid them in deciding “whom to trust, what to believe, and why
140 something is true” (Collins 271). The discoveries they make through their epistemological choices inform their maturation processes. Their interpretative lenses lead them to rebel against oppressive societal norms. In What White Looks Like: African
American Philosophers on the Question of Whiteness (2004), George Yancy articulates that interrogation of the ontology of whiteness is a mode of challenging its “hegemonic gaze,” doing so critiques the “representational power of whiteness…For whiteness sees what it wants to see…The power and privilege of whiteness obfuscates its own complicity in seeing a ‘reality’ that it constructs as objective” (10). The subjectivities of the characters combat epistemic violence and build contentious relationships between white “noise” and Black rage. The girls come to clarity about the devaluation of communities and how the adults closest to them adhere to toxic cultural norms. In acts of rage-filled resistance, they demonstrate their agency and oppositional gazes. With epistemic violence, patriarchy, and whiteness as the primary stimuli of oppositional gazes, these Black girls attempt to re-envision life.
Morrison, Meriwether, and Acevedo employ devices that depict their protagonists’ resistance of master narratives. The use of white popular culture and its canonical representations demonstrate whiteness’ pervasive nature while presenting the strategies exercised to combat hegemonic forces. Claudia, Francie, and Xiomara grapple with what Nicole R. Fleetwood situates as iconicity, defined as “the ways in which singular images or signs come to represent a whole host of historical occurrences and processes” (2). Much of the imagery the girls encounter ensues rage, but rage enlightens them about the prominence of white and patriarchal norms. Claudia and Xiomara see
141 others perpetuate whiteness as the standard through white dolls and white Jesus, respectively, while Francie’s images are rooted in films and literature that reinforce stereotypes of inferiority and savagery of Black people. They reject these images and question their value. Their seemingly counterproductive, angry responses can be situated in the broader context of addressing structural issues. Their reactions, though often violent, present them as iconoclasts who attempt to dismantle and decenter whiteness. As they narrate coming-of-age stories, Claudia, Francie, and Xiomara’s iconoclasm provides counternarratives of anger.
In Living Color(ism): Morrison, Melanin, and Black Girl Rage
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) is laden with metatextuality in that it critiques not only narratives of Black life but also the structure of American humanity. It is a palimpsest that subverts narratives constructed by white literary canons and realities.
Morrison delves into the psyches of Black adolescent girls while challenging the validity of white narratives within the context of Black communities. Commonly classified as a bildungsroman, the novel reveals how the central characters come to understand their intersections. Morrison shows Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove as two extremes of anger. Through these child protagonists, Morrison illustrates the damaging effects of colorism on Black youth. She reveals attempted erasure of Black culture through the infiltration (and invitation) of whiteness into Black spaces. Through Claudia, a child narrator, Morrison tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove and her longing for blue eyes and beauty but also tells the story of the collective damage imposed on Black people who accept white beauty standards.
142 Her novel, positioned as a collective bildungsroman, traces the development of several characters. In Gunilla Kester’s chapter “A Double Code: Language and the
Female Subject in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Gayl Jones’ Eva Man,” from
Writing the Subject: Bildung and the African American Text (1995), Kester writes of intertwining maturation stories in the novel. Though Kester’s analysis centers Pecola, she acknowledges focal shifts and intersecting subplots that demonstrate communal stasis:
It might be tempting to argue that the novel is focused on the narrator Claudia’s
process of maturation rather than on Pecola’s, that the novel describes the Bildung
of Claudia rather than the (anti)Bildung…Even though Claudia opens the novel
by describing her own maturation process as one of ‘adjustment, not
improvement’ (22), neither the focus nor the narrative voice stays with Claudia.
(93)
While Claudia is not the central focus of the novel, her characterization and “adjustment” best represent “productive contradictions” and adaptations that are not self-destructive.
Kester describes the “chorus of blending female voices” to demonstrate the generational ties between Black girls’ and women’s negotiation of life in the United States. Her notion can be placed in conversation with McDowell’s “changing same.” The generational bridges not only build a context distinct from the classical (white) genre but also demonstrate how trauma manifests generationally. The “changing same” notes the progressions of representations of rage rooted in Black girl epistemologies.
Employing themes of sight and perception, The Bluest Eye implores analysis of oppositional gazes and alternative epistemologies. Morrison’s subversive narrative is
143 positioned by Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert as a “novel of education” and development, further demonstrating the validity of examining Black girls’ knowledge (12). Heinert demonstrates that dominant cultural narratives impact not only the characters’ development but also their education (16). Claudia’s frame of reference not only arises from her experiences as a Black girl but also from her behavior of those around her.
Heinert illuminates multiple narrative strains, but the primary plot devices come from stories of Claudia and Pecola who witness “fractured, varied, and suppressive” bildungs of secondary characters (23). While Pecola internalizes the madness that surrounds her,
Claudia rejects expected behavioral norms. Heinert notes that varying sources of information construct an educational narrative for Pecola and Claudia. As the novel concludes, Pecola’s experiences a failed bildungs while Claudia resists her informal education (23). Parents, friends, and acquaintances directly impact how the girls recognize what holds value in the world.
The iconography of the dolls provides insight into its influence on Black girls.
Dolls are a symbolic cultural artifact in America, as dolls are replicas of humans, representation in diverse forms is critical. In the 1940s, however, when The Bluest Eye is set, Black dolls were not mass produced. The veneration of white dolls by adults alludes to white humanity as the archetypal humanity. The doll symbolizes many issues that frustrate young Black girls: gender roles, premature motherhood, beauty, and whiteness.
Claudia evinces that white beauty standards affect the development of Black girls;
Morrison makes this clear with the use of Shirley Temple and the baby doll. Black girls can possess the doll but can never possess the beauty associated with it. Morrison, then,
144 chronicles frustration associated with the recognition that one cannot achieve the standards imposed through iconic figures like the Shirley Temple and the doll. Claudia adapts her behavior to reveal her role as a counter-hegemonic force. Melissa Harris-Perry articulates that “[t]hrough Claudia’s jealous rage about Shirley Temple, Morrison reveals how black girls are forced to live in a world that declares Shirley Temple beautiful and worthy...Along with Claudia, we can be outraged by a world that negates and erases black girls” (130). Pecola, a victim of colorism, racism, and rape, is unable to release her rage or combat her shame. Claudia, however, exerts a violent rage onto white girls and dolls that reflect whiteness.
In a space where it is difficult for Claudia to use her voice, she combats and adapts to epistemic violence with physical violence. Claudia’s first execution of violent rage is with a doll. Though she demonstrates a proclivity for violence that she wishes to enact onto her white neighbor, Rosemary Villanucci, her “unsullied hatred” is explained through her narration about Shirley Temple. Before her exposure to this exemplar of girlhood, she experienced “a stranger, more frightening thing than hatred for all the
Shirley Temples of the world” that began with the gift of a doll (19). The “frightening thing” is a violent rage, a wave of uncultivated anger. Claudia recognizes that the doll has significance beyond being a gift, “adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (19). While bombarded with images of whiteness and surrounded by people who revere these images, Claudia does not idolize
145 whiteness. In a sense, she must parent herself and adapt to a world that places value on something she does not desire or understand.
Part of Claudia’s frustration is lack of voice; no one asks what she desires.
Claudia desires experiences as opposed to possessions. Despite her actions toward the doll, she reflects an awareness of her position. Her standpoint rationalizes her anger and reveals how the doll provides pain. Seeking the source of the doll’s beauty, Claudia symbolically transfers pain onto the doll when she destroys it. In the article “Oh! You
Beautiful Doll, Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison”
Trinna Frever writes that this scene in the novel is multi-layered:
Morrison makes it clear through further description and through the careful
juxtaposition of this passage with discussion of pop culture icons like Shirley
Temple that the “fondest wish” enforced upon the young narrator is not only a
gender script, not only a script of motherhood pressed into her unwilling hands in
the form of a baby doll whose “dimpled hands scratched” and whose lacey dress
‘irritated any embrace.’ The ‘wish’ is also an act of racial and cultural
imperialism, a presumption of the beauty that is part and parcel of an
imperialistic, white, dominant United States culture. (123)
This wish is to have a doll as well as the characteristics of the white doll. Adults forcing the doll onto her and telling her to appreciate it emphasizes their desire to conform. The appreciation of the doll also implies that Black people can contribute to their psychological destruction.
146 Morrison addresses the absorption of whiteness as a destructive rite of passage for
Black youth. While both Frieda and Pecola move into a realm of self-doubt with their love of Shirley Temple, Claudia resists. Claudia narrates, “Younger than both Frieda and
Pecola, I had not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her. What I felt at that time was unsullied hatred” (19). Claudia, only nine years old, has not assimilated into a Black culture that venerates white standards of beauty. Morrison offers commentary about identity development and regression. Frever observes that “racial self-loathing” visible in The Bluest Eye’s girl characters stems from “the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze. The doll encapsulates these “damaging” forces, and the damage done to the doll is one of the character’s and the narrative’s modes of resistance” (123). Claudia resists white patriarchal norms and refutes the desirability of whiteness. Her violence allows her to adapt to her surroundings without succumbing to notions of white superiority.
Claudia assesses differences between herself and white children. In reference to her white doll, Claudia declares, “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me” (20). Frever believes Claudia’s words help to establish
Morrison’s attitude toward white beauty standards. Morrison uses the idea of beauty and delicateness to reemphasize the dolls “iconographic power.” (124). Frever notes, “For it is the presumption of the doll’s beauty that compels Claudia to destroy it, and it is its actual fragility—as contrasted with the girl’s own strength—that makes such an act
147 possible” (124). Claudia’s brutalizing of little white girls has the same logic. Amanda
Putnam views violence as a mode of resistance:
Ranging in age from children to adolescents and adults, these female characters
choose violence to find an escape—a disruption of the multifaceted oppression
they have suffered within a white patriarchal society where black women are
tormented and subjugated by social and racial domination, exclusion, and
rejection. (25-26)
While Claudia takes an analytical and externally destructive stance on the matter of beauty, other characters internalize the association of whiteness with beauty. The reactions represent two paths Black girls take in society: assimilation and rebellion.
Bergner illustrates that the novel depicts Pecola as a “nonadaptive negotiator” to white- dominated mass culture, and contrastingly presents Claudia as an adapter or in Cox’s terms, a shapeshifter. As Claudia rejects the white ideal, “[t]hus the novel represents racist American culture as damaging to African American children’s sense of self and represents African American children’s identity as resilient and adaptive” (321).
Claudia’s resiliency demonstrates the power and function of her rage.
The Bluest Eye explains how unjustified hatred rooted in phenotypic differences overdetermines what individuals project into the world. The children are vessels for communicating the historical and cultural devastation of Black people’s degradation, particularly as it relates to colorism. Maureen Peal’s reaction to Pecola and the MacTeer girls is indicative of the ways socialization informs interpretations of blackness. Maureen refers to the girls as “black and ugly” and reminds them that she is cute. Her
148 interpretation contributes to Claudia’s self-perception and her reading of those around her. Claudia recalls part of her coming-of-rage where she attempts to ascertain the differences between Maureen and her dark-skinned counterparts:
We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last
words. If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we
were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still
lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of
parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the
eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What
was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless
and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. (74)
There is confirmation of a color caste through the girls’ interactions with Maureen and observation of Maureen’s treatment. While Claudia dismantles the dolls, she does not dismantle the system of oppression that causes a cycle of epistemic violence. Her assessments of Maureen and the “Thing” align with hooks’ framing of oppositional gazes and agency: “spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see” (247).
Claudia’s literal gaze and her epistemological standpoint aid in understanding that her anger should be directed toward “the Thing.”
Her violent verbal exchange with Maureen allows her to see skin tone bias within her community. Though Maureen’s light skin does not elevate her to the plane that
149 whiteness would, Claudia’s realization that Maureen is “cute” forces her to question beauty standards, her value, and ideas of those surrounding her:
Realizing their own worth is in question, young black girls attempt to upset
white oppression by redefining the limits of their power and powerlessness.
Young black girls reacting to the oppressiveness of white dominance or to the
stringency of traditional female-behavior expectations counter with physical
violence to find strength within what often are positions of weakness. Likewise,
other black female children react verbally to withstand the force of ever-present
white-societal beauty standards that could otherwise crush their self-identity.
(Putnam 26)
Amanda Putnam illuminates how Black girls reach beyond the spoken. Though Claudia is silenced in spaces occupied by adults, she verbalizes her feelings to Maureen and narrates her “chance to show anger” (Morrison 71). Through the encounter, Claudia learns a new emotion, jealousy; this “strange new feeling” adds to her education about life and informs her epistemological standpoint (73). Though she directs her anger at
Maureen, she is aware that “Maureen Peal is not the enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful” but excluded
Pecola and the MacTeer girls from the beauty” (75). While her self-awareness ignites rage and an acute awareness of “the Thing,” she is unable to produce tangible results with her anger.
“The Thing” manifests throughout the narrative, yet it is Claudia’s interaction with another Black girl—though of mixed race—that solidifies the reach of whiteness
150 and ties it to beauty. George Yancy relates the Thing to knowledge and Claudia’s consciousness of the “particularity (nonuniversality) of white beauty” (132). As Claudia ponders what she “lacks” she is faced with the tensions between blackness and whiteness:
“This Thing, this signifier of purity, cleanliness, and goodness, is the product of a generative context of white hegemony. This Thing is not an ontological notion, but something that grows out of a social nexus of power/knowledge” (Yancy 132). The knowledge constructed through whiteness creates a power differential, one that Claudia attempts to overturn. Reading Claudia’s anger as a response to epistemic violence aids in constructing adaptive knowledge. Her anger is justified, as others relay their toxic knowledge to vulnerable Pecola. Claudia’s rage, then, can also be situated as Black girl solidarity praxis.
The crux of the cultural critique supplied by Morrison is based in whiteness’ perversion of beauty. Through dichotomous notions of beauty and ugliness, Morrison houses several themes and motifs that are derivatives of this binary. Stephanie M. H.
Camp declares that Morrison’s ideas resonate with Black people of all ages and transcend time periods:
One of the messages of the novel was that black children, and by extension black
people, ‘collected self-contempt by the heap’ by valorizing beauty, which went
without saying by 1970 meant a white supremacist beauty idea…The broad
intensely engaged reception that The Bluest Eye has received hints at the
persisting relevance of its main theme: a pervasive and painful valorization of
white beauty. (688)
151 This valorization of white beauty leads to a multitude of issues such as racism, colorism, and ethnocentrism. The discriminatory practices associated with oppressive institutions lead to trauma and rage, particularly, for those reared to revere the same entities that reject them.
Claudia’s anger ties to knowledge transmitted through white girls. Encounters with whiteness illustrate its allure and capacity to stir emotions. The opening of the
“Autumn” section begins with Claudia and Freida staring at Rosemary Villanucci sitting in a Buick eating bread and butter. Claudia desires to “poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth” (9). Though Claudia and
Frieda are unaware of the meaning of Rosemary’s invitation to pull down her pants, they do know that she is offering them something “precious” and that they will pridefully deny
(9). It is one of the many encounters where Claudia reacts violently to whiteness. A second encounter with a white girl arouses Claudia’s anger and aids in comprehending the value of whiteness. Claudia experiences a “familiar violence” when she learns that a white girl calls Pecola’s mother, Polly. Claudia narrates, “Her calling Mrs. Breedlove
Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove, seemed reason enough to scratch her” (123). Both encounters illuminate how Claudia comes to associate white bodies with inequity.
As Claudia narrates, memory plays a crucial role in her epistemology and anger.
After Cholly impregnates Pecola, Claudia recalls how people devalue Pecola—and by extension Black girlhood. She remembers Pauline knocking down Pecola and then consoling a white girl. She recollects the boys’ cruel, ironic taunting of Pecola and
152 worshiping of Maureen. After reflecting on these events, she narrates, “[o]r maybe we didn’t remember; we just knew” (191). Claudia’s acknowledgment of what she and her sister knew demonstrates how Morrison centers epistemology. What they learn and observe shapes their personas and Claudia’s coming-of-rage:
We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody,
considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful
analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any
attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not
known to us—not then. Our only handicap was our size; people gave us orders
because they were bigger and stronger. So, it was with confidence, strengthened
by pity and pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a
human life. (191)
Their marginalization and isolation force them to adapt and alternative ways of knowing.
Claudia’s oppositional gaze, then, influences her anger. While hooks elucidates that oppositional gazes arise out of the repression of Black people’s “right to observation,” for these Black girls, they also arise out of their age and gender (248).
The Bluest Eye gives voice to Black girls and chronicles the rage that often accompanies Black youth. The text demonstrates the impact of (North) American culture as well as the psychological trauma that leads to rage. Morrison’s central characters allow readers to witness whiteness usurping Black girls’ sanity. For readers, whiteness is presented as a trinity of privilege, exclusion, and hegemony. For the young characters, namely Pecola, it operates as covetable, illusory, and alluring. Through the rage of Black
153 girls, Morrison articulates the role of melanin in the construction of personhood while documenting the corrosion of people who struggle for meaning and wholeness.
Ironically, melanin, a biological protectant causes schisms interracially, intraracially, and psychologically leading to vulnerability, self-hatred, and oppression from which the characters often find themselves defenseless. Among the most vulnerable are Claudia
MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove.
The text constructs visions of both the impressionability and the consciousness of
Black girls conditioned to consume whiteness. This consumption (or rejection in
Claudia’s case) births rage and preoccupation with adult issues. The rage is exerted through resistance or internalized through self-destruction. Each girl experiences anger or anxiety because of the liminal space of Black girlhood. Just as Claudia exudes adaptive anger that aids her in negotiation the margins and centering herself, Francie Coffin’s rage presents more adaptations and heightened anger and rage that transfer onto people and subverts systems. Like Claudia, Francie becomes aware of the “the thing,” and it makes her “feel evil.” Unlike Claudia, however, Francie is exposed to public protests and adaptations birthed from rage. Her story reveals frustrations that move into rage and even more violent reactions and interactions.
Enraged in Harlem: Canonical Knowledge and Radical Subjectivity
Daddy Was a Number Runner chronicles the accelerated maturation process of
Francie Coffin. Growing up in the Great Depression creates “quiet outrage” (Collins,
“Poor and Black and Apt to Stay that Way” 49) in twelve-year-old Francie. She must negotiate poverty, blackness, and adolescence. Though she has yet to grasp nuances and
154 paradoxes of her life, Francie is determined that her Black “girlness” will not be her coffin. The New York setting shapes her anger as she must adapt to an abbreviated girlhood. James Baldwin describes Meriwether’s development of the environment in
Daddy Was a Number Runner noting, “The streets, tenements, fire-escapes, the elders, and the urgent concerns of childhood—or, rather the helpless intensity of anguish with which one watches one’s childhood disappear—are rendered very vividly indeed” (5).
Francie’s adaptations are vivid against the backdrop of the Harlem cityscape. Forced to create her own knowledge and compelled to commit violent acts, Francie’s accelerated maturation reveals Meriwether’s angry aesthetic: “she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country” (Baldwin 7). Francie’s experiences display American cultural politics and systemic exclusion from participation in the capitalist system in sustainable ways. Baldwin addresses North America as a culprit in shaping the point of view of Meriwether’s protagonist.
Race, age, poverty, and gender also help Francie Coffin cultivate ways of knowing that ultimately lead to her coming-of-rage: “Francie’s narrative voice is held to an adolescent perspective and focuses primarily on external events, as if desperate to remain intact against destructive forces of white racism and male predation, she is unable to look deeply within” (McKay 210). As the narrator, the information that Francie chooses to reveal and interpret highlights the ways she adapts to society. This defense mechanism, or adaptation, eventually triggers her anger at her living conditions and “the sense of physical and social isolation from the white city [that] invites a forceful critique
155 of American sociopolitical institutions” (Demirtü rk 157). The isolation escalates the emotional intensity of the narrative as Francie is forced into situations to which no child should bear witness. Francie observes events that become the center of her knowledge base. These external events cause her to internalize trauma, much like that of the characters in The Bluest Eye. Contrastingly, her anger turns to apathy instead of the shame that Pecola experiences and the eventual acquiescence of adult Claudia.
Francie’s body is a subject to comparison (self-assessment), critique (colorism) exploitation (sexual assault), and harm (bullying). Amanda Davis writes that her victimization is planted firmly in her “black girlness:”
Francie's freedom of movement becomes extricably bound to these attempts at
victimization, for nowhere is her body completely safe. Meriwether's depiction of
a young girl negotiating the racialized and gendered world around her powerfully
demonstrates that the ways in which we inherit our understanding of social and
economic imbalances can be as oppressive as the structures themselves,
particularly if this knowledge is derived in part from the bodily experience of
violation. (29)
Francie rejects these inherited imbalances and formulates her own knowledge. She finds safety in her anger. Her knowledge of the racialized world is presented through constructions of whiteness. While Claudia’s concept of whiteness primarily attaches to white girls and the destruction of their bodies, Francie’s narrative includes white men and women. Though they differ, for both characters, “growing up means watching everyone
156 around them grow down” (Lanser 209). As she ascends into anger, Black adults and white people gradually become demystified.
The Bluest Eye and Daddy Was a Number Runner utilize molestation and early sexual encounters to trouble the notion of Black girl innocence and to examine their exploitation. The adult perpetrators anticipate shaming Black girls into silence; however, in the case of Francie, she finds her “voice” by fighting back against repeat offenders.
Neither Claudia nor Francie fully grasp the gravity of the encounters they experience and witness. Francie has several encounters with white molesters who exploit her poverty.
Emine Lâ le Demirtü rk writes in “Writing the Urban Discourse into the Black Ghetto
Imaginary: Louise Meriwether’s “Daddy Was a Number Runner” that “sexual harassment is a key factor” in the life of a Black girl in the “ghetto” (74). Sexual encounters are comment threads in The Bluest Eye and Daddy Was a Number Runner, which moves this factor beyond geography and opens discourse about social landscapes. Demirtü rk notes that Francie does not understand sexual harassment, but once she begins to menstruate, she attempts to adhere to her mother’s advice about staying away from men (74). At the beginning of the novel, she encounters the man who followed her to the movies and fondled her. Each time he encounters her, he attempts to coax her with a dime. During one encounter, he exposes his penis (15-16). Their third encounter, at the movies, involves manual penetration. The man exploits Francie’s youthful innocence and lack of resources. The white butcher and baker also utilize their power as white men to enact sexual and epistemic violence on Francie. Knowing that she comes from an impoverished
157 family, the men give Francie extra food in exchange for fondling her. Each man pays her for her silence, which informs the way she understands power relations.
White women and girls also contribute to the development of Francie’s epistemological standpoint. Francie risks failure in her cooking and sewing classes, namely due to disinterest in domestic skills and lack of investment in the recipes presented by her white teacher. She would prefer “learning how to cook mustard greens or pigtails, but they didn’t teach stuff like that…” (141). Francie’s disconnect and unfamiliarity with the cooking styles presented in class result in her truancy. She skips class to read library books and “smutty” stories. Francie’s strategy for passing the course is to coax her classmate into allowing her to copy recipes. Though Francie attends a predominately Black school, she has one white classmate, Joan. Francie describes Joan as stuck up and friendless, but Francie convinces her to cheat by offering her the “dirty books.” When Francie goes to Joan’s house to retrieve the recipe book, she is not invited into the home. Francie narrates, “I went home, feeling a little evil “cause she made me wait outside instead of inviting me in and introducing me to her mother” (143). This evil feeling is anger. The denial of access into Joan’s home is a symbolic act of racism that informs Francie’s feelings toward whiteness. Through this encounter, Francie is further educated about racial dynamics.
Francie’s formal education plays on dominant narratives about American social norms and upward mobility. Her teacher, Mrs. Abowitz, believes that Francie has the potential to be a seamstress. Francie, however, has loftier aspirations of becoming a secretary. Mrs. Abowitz tells Francie her career goal is impractical because “[t]here
158 aren’t very many jobs for Negroes in that field. And while you’re going to school, you should learn those things which will stand you in good stead when you have to work”
(144). Francie provides a “suddenly stubborn response” to Mrs. Abowitz, one that alludes to her radical subjectivity and resistance of the status quo. Mrs. Abowitz tells Francie that she does not understand why they teach a course like typing to “frustrate you people”
(144). Mrs. Abowitz’s commentary demonstrates that she does not forecast any changes in the social climate, and Francie’s frustration increases.
Francie’s education continues in the streets of Harlem. Her various sources of education demonstrate the multiple ways Black girls acquire and internalize knowledge.
This intersecting and sometimes conflicting knowledge shapes her anger and oppositional gaze. The streets are where Francie sees a glimmer of hope. She sees activists who are conscious of oppression and actively disrupt dominant narratives in “a space that runs counter the to the culture-of-poverty argument” (Demirtü rk 76). By seeing these different angles of vision, Francie makes assessments about her station in life and her community.
Meriwether’s novel constructs a narrative where “the streets are not merely sites of crime and danger but also of black consciousness-raising efforts to keep the communal bond between black people in the ghetto and elsewhere” (Demirtü rk 76). Francie, though, looks at some of the street speakers with an oppositional gaze. She sees a speaker on
114th Street who shouts “God made you black and he didn’t make a mistake…We still need a country of our own. Black people should not be encouraged to remain in the white man’s land. Do you want to remain a slave forever?” (Meriwether 77). Francie thinks,
“[w]ho wanted to go back to Africa? Didn’t we have enough trouble right here?” (77).
159 This passage reveals that Francie is now aware of the difficulties of Black people in
America. She formulates her own body of knowledge about the plight of her people.
Her father, Adam, tries to protect her from certain bodies of knowledge, but he cannot shield her from the knowledge girlhood plays a role in creating. Because of the age difference between Rebecca and Francie, Adam disapproves of their friendship.
Francie reflects, “Daddy didn’t like me hanging out with her too much because he said she was too old for me. She was about sixteen. Daddy was afraid she might tell me something about boys, but she never did, nobody except Sukie and that wasn’t much.
Sometimes I thought I must be the dumbest girl in Harlem” (63). Adam’s attempts at preserving Francie’s innocence of sexual knowledge is insufficient in protecting her from predators. Though Francie believes herself to lack knowledge about boys, she possesses knowledge that Nellie McKay frames as “ghetto-survival wisdom” (211). McKay’s notion of ghetto-survival wisdom illuminates how living in Harlem shapes Francie’s epistemology:
Francie Coffin is twelve years old. She is old enough to know how to use the
‘jumper’ to turn on the electric lights at night (a necessary skill, since months
earlier the utility company disconnected the power to their apartment because of
nonpayment of bills), and she knows how to sneak a ride on the subway to save a
nickel. She is also old enough to know exactly how to hide the numbers slips on
the drawer ledge of the buffet in her apartment so that they will not be discovered
by the police who periodically take it into their heads to search poor blacks for
these scraps… (211)
160 Francie’s knowledge moves beyond street smarts; this body knowledge develops from her struggle as a poor Black girl in the city. While wisdom allows her some comfort and protection, it also defines her accelerated maturation process.
Francie’s realization of the depth of her people’s oppression transforms her. Much of her understanding of oppression comes through literature and film. The literature she reads plays a pivotal role in her coming-of-rage. In the afterword to the text, Nellie
McKay writes that after reading Home to Harlem (1928), “[Francie’s] sense of self is heightened...She finds the literature from life ‘very funny and kind of sad,’ but it gives her ammunition to use in her own development” (228). In reading Home to Harlem,
Francie abandons fairy tales in favor of realistic fiction from the “Negro Section” of the library. Her understanding of her world is enhanced by engaging in this mimetic fiction.
As she grows out of fairy tales, she grows into her rage and heightened perceptiveness to her environment.
Like Claudia, her feelings toward whiteness are revealed through accessing and assessing white cultural productions and icons. After reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), she feels “black and evil toward whites” (115). This canonical abolitionist text reveals to Francie the longstanding injustices of Black people in America. Coupled with Francie’s reality, her knew knowledge aids in developing her rage-based revelations about life in Harlem. Her new-found anger at white people displays an acute awareness of how systems set in place by white Americans encroach on
Black Americans’ rights. As the text progresses, she becomes increasingly conscious and frustrated.
161 When Francie turns thirteen, her consciousness shifts. In the movie theater, she finds herself “rooting for the Indians;” their plight angers her. Francie narrates, “I didn’t want them to get wiped out again, but the cavalry rode in just in the nick of time and those Indians were slaughtered like always. It made me mad. That white man who had broken the treaty with them was the real villain” (174). She recognizes the ill-treatment of the indigenous people and the violent nature of the white cowboys. Additionally, her plight begins to stir a fury in her. She becomes more critical of her environment and implores, “There was something black and evil in these streets, and that something was in me, too” (174). At this point, Francie begins to fight back against her abusers. She jabs the baker who molests her, imagines scratching and punishing her father, and punches her best—though abusive—friend Sukie.
Francie experiences a fury similar to what Sukie experiences throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Francie constantly questions and is a victim of
Sukie’s rage. She no longer ponders on Sukie’s abrasiveness. In the early pages of the text, Francie says, “That Sukie. I wondered what made her so mean? She was too pretty to be so evil” (27). The roles become reversed, and Sukie wonders what “set[s] [Francie] off” (29). Sukie, like Pecola, has experienced trauma that produces anxiety. Sukie already understands the implications of her biology, race, and gender. By the novel's end, Francie also begins to experience this phenomenon. She has a visceral reaction during Robert’s political manifesto, after which, in her eyes, her father loses his magic, and she becomes pessimistic. She states, “I tried to get again that nice feeling I had for all of Harlem a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t. We was all poor and black and apt to stay that way, and that
162 was that” (208). Her words demonstrate her knowledge of longstanding oppression and the ways the systems solidify poverty in her community. Francie begins to lose her innocence, but through her rage, readers can see her transform into a radical subject when addressing gender and age-based oppression.
Meriwether demonstrates how individuals can function through their rage. She also demonstrates a girl’s attempt to find meaning. As Paule Marshall presents the humor in the text as part of the “black survival kit,” Meriwether’s narrative reveals rage as a tool for Black girl survival while coming-of-age in the United States. The rage is as a potential source of coping for the girl characters and reveals a developing awareness of their stations in life. Baldwin’s assertion in the foreword indicates the validity of this claim, “the wound is the wound made upon the recognition that one is regarded as a worthless human being, and further, in the case of this particular black girl, upon the recognition that the men, one’s only hope, have also been cut down and cannot save you”
(6). Since no one can save her, Francie attempts to save herself through her adaptations.
Daddy Was a Number Runner and The Bluest Eye were published during what
Deborah McDowell notes in her preface to ‘The Changing Same’: Black Women’s
Literature, Criticism, and Theory (1995) as an “epochal moment” in publishing for Black
American women (xiii). This epochal moment, a Black women writers’ renaissance also reflects an epochal moment for literary constructions of Black girl rage. The chapter moves to the age of rage, another epochal moment to continue the arc of anger.
The final section engages diaspora and the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship polluted with toxic cultural norms. Linked to the previous text by violence, knowledge
163 production, and counter-hegemony, this text expands the arc of anger with its positive resolution generated by anger.
“No tú eres fácil”: Afro-Latinx Adaptation of Anger
In The Poet X, Xiomara Batista journals her journey through girlhood in Harlem.
As the child of immigrant parents, she must navigate a Black girlhood informed by her status as a first-generation Dominican American. The generational and intercultural clashes in her household dictate her identity formation and resistance. She is subject to normalized harsh treatment as Mami tells her that “this country is too soft/and gives kids too many choices” and uses “the island” as punishment (16). Through this U.S.-
Dominican Republic dichotomy, Acevedo sets up conflicting national principles that are equally damaging to Xiomara. With poetry and violence as outlets, Xiomara wars against colonizing forces and shapes the arc of her narrative as an Afro-Latinx teenager. Her life is informed by the idea that “[w]hen your body takes up more room than your voice/ you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, /which is why I let my knuckles talk for me”
(5). She fights patriarchal notions that make men and boys comfortable with objectifying her and bullying her gay brother.
Her Afro-Latinx heritage shapes responses to the outside world and the ways her community responds to her behavior and appearance. Since “Afro-Latino identity in particular sets the groundwork for questioning the hegemonic positionality to which
Afro-Latinos and non-Afro Latinos can subscribe,” (Luis 34) Xiomara’s subjectivity (as an Afro-Latinx girl) creates a multi-faceted rage that speaks to diasporic narratives discrepancies coded in national narratives. Her dual voices (Dominican and American)
164 sculpt her understanding of the world. Through her unique lens, she decodes the problems within her family structure and the traditions upheld by her family members.
Her familial relationships and peoples’ responses to her body heighten Xiomara’s frustrations.
The Poet X demonstrates the ways a complicated matrix of race, ethnicity, girlhood, and first-generation Americanness influence identity development, anger, and intersectional experiences. Xiomara, whose name means “one who is ready for war” fights imposition of the institution of religion into her life and, in turn, opens discourse surrounding Black girls and their roles in decolonizing (7). Like the other novelists in this study, Acevedo utilizes her protagonist as a conduit for expressing rage about dysfunctional systems but also constructs the narrative of Xiomara to center Afro-Latinx voices and assert their blackness. In an interview for Latina Magazine, Jenifer Calle indicates that Xiomara’s Afro-Latinadad informs her journey. Acevedo informs Calle of the importance of her heritage and implores the necessity of centering African ancestry and identity:
I fundamentally believe that celebrating my Afro-Latinidad and continuing a
nuanced conversation about how racial identity in our varied countries has
developed (and, indeed, is developing) is how I remember and re-center my
ancestors. I refuse to not put them at the forefront of my own story when they’ve
been white-washed out of the popular narrative for hundreds of years. (Calle)
Through her narrative, Acevedo contributes to the evolution of the genre by writing in verse. Her content speaks to the coming-of-age of a Black community acknowledging the
165 implications of colonial histories connecting Black people in the United States to those of
Spanish speaking locations within the Americas—who are also a part of the African diaspora. As she continues a “nuanced conversation” about the development of racial identity, she imparts Xiomara to tell the story through her personal development.
Xiomara’s insular nature contradicts her proclivity for violence. Her violence, however, combats violence that is symbolic of hegemony. Much of her violent behavior is in defense of herself or her twin brother. As she fights his bullies, she notes, “he didn’t fight because my hands became fists for him. / My hands learned how to bleed when other kids tried to make him the wound” (45). The children in the community see Twin as abnormal, and Xiomara fights this epistemic violence with her physical violence. She repeats this pattern of violence in defense of herself when boys sexualize her. She also desires to enact violence on the students in her confirmation class who stare at her, particularly as she questions the norms of the church.
Through Xiomara, Acevedo troubles the images of the Angry Black Woman and
Spicy Latina. While Debra Castillo debunks the stereotype of Latin America as the “land of emotion” (4), she explains that what is more dangerous is the internalization of this myth. This cultural myth, much like absorption of the negative connotations of the Angry
Black Woman shapes the ways the characters withhold their emotions. Mami’s stoicism makes the expression of anger difficult for Xiomara, and her two outlets: poetry and violence become her solace.
Channeling her anger at the objectification and policing of her body, Xiomara uses poetry as an alternative weapon where violence does not suffice. Through her
166 creativity, Xiomara asserts her standpoint on the struggles of growing up in her Catholic household while facing other girlhood trials. The crux of Xiomara’s narrative is the rejection of the patriarchal norms that accompany Catholicism and shape her relationship with her mother. As she transcribes her thoughts on the pages of her notebook, it is
Xiomara’s voice—though one that is initially unheard by an audience—that sustains her in her unsupportive environment and ultimately leads to the mending of her familial relationships. The culture of the household is “Mira, muchacha,” a refrain that Xiomara must constantly hear while silenced. Forced to subscribe to culturally informed gender roles that stifle her personal growth and emotions, Xiomara uses the written word as a bridge to the acquisition of her voice.
One of the first times Xiomara uses her voice is to challenge notions accepted in the church. In her “Church Mass” verse Xiomara indicates that she loved mass when she was younger. As she matured, she began to think about the structure of the Catholic
Church. Here, Acevedo makes explicit Xiomara coming-of-age and its connections to her coming-of-rage. With her growth comes recognition of epistemic violence and the way the Catholic Church constructs narratives. Bridget Kavane notes that “[e]xamining religious discourse in contemporary Latin fiction aids in the understanding of how religion creates, mediates, or changes Latino culture and identity” (4). Kavane’s position demonstrates that Xiomara’s questioning of the church is a means of forging her identity.
She becomes frustrated by church doctrine and its focus on policing women. She notices that only certain biblical women are worthy of emulation. Xiomara realizes that the iconography of the church is designed to suppress women:
167 When I’m told girls/
Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t//
When the only girl I’m supposed to be
was an impregnated virgin
who was probably scared shitless//
When I’m told to have faith
in the father the son
in men and men are the first ones
to make me feel so small. (58-59)
Xiomara relationship with her faith becomes tenuous as she begins to comprehend and question the scriptures and tenets of the church. She interprets the images of submissive women who do not have agency. She develops her own body of knowledge about church iconography, which has an extensive history of connotative meanings constructed by men. The final line of her verse connects these men to the boys and men in her community who gaze upon her maturing body, focused on her developing secondary sex characteristics.
Her interrogation of the church structure also contests the structure of her home and many Dominican ideals. Debra Castillo argues that Latin American literature by women presents opposition or acquiesce to historical, social, and political customs that are products of colonialism and post-colonialism (11). Xiomara’s interrogation presents her opposition to these customs and systems as she defies dichotomous representations of
Latinx women through her Afro-Latinx identity and rage. Her anger is in response to the
168 constraints of expected performances of Latinx girls. These expected performances of hypersexual (public sphere) and virginal (private sphere) conflict and further complicate
Xiomara’s identity development and rage.
As Xiomara attempts to make meaning of her surroundings while formulating her identity, gendered meanings are ascribed to her body. These meanings are a result of patriarchal society and “the privatized and inward-looking Hispanic house” (Franco 507)
Jean Franco’s “Beyond: Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power, and the Third-World
Intelligentsia,” demonstrates entrapment of Latinx women in a structure that dictates their gendered performances wherein these expectations extend beyond the church and become part of Dominican cultural stereotypes that overdetermine actions and reactions.1
Franco presents the limited options that Latinx women have in terms of framing their womanhood. While Franco addresses the identities imposed on women, she centers the phallus to demonstrate that patriarchal forces construct these identities. For Xiomara, these images provoke anger—just as any deviation from the virgin figure angers Mami and Papi. When Xiomara leaves the house to go skating with a boy, upon this discovering her absence, Papi calls her a cuero (whore). Mami brings her the alter to “look the Virgin
Mary in the eye” and repent (200). Again, Xiomara must face an image that is impossible to uphold. Xiomara notes that no one calls men cueros. Despite her virginity, she accepts the label of cuero because it is a “loose thing/Tied down by no one.” (206). Her
1 See Franco’s diagram of gendered identities on page 507 of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988).
169 acceptance of the label is part of her journey toward constructing a counternarrative of girlhood.
Xiomara’s emotional response aligns with Castillo’s argument that society perceives women who escape these metaphorical prisons to be spiritually impure,
“madwomen” (12). The spiritual impurity narrative that plagues rebellious girls and women presents itself through Mami’s constant refrain of “no tú eres fácil” (you are not easy) and her speculation that Xiomara has demons inside of her. Ironically, this madness, for Xiomara reflects clarity and sanity. What is framed as psychosis and anti-
Catholicism for Mami is a conscious, anti-oppressive rage for Xiomara. Though Mami sees Xiomara as difficult, Xiomara attempts to unpack the complex ideas of her culture that deny her agency and right to “normal” girlhood.
Her questioning of the church moves beyond an interrogation of icons, symbols, and scriptures to a critique of the institution. Her thinking aligns with ideas presented in
Jeana DelRosso’s “The Covenant as Colonist: Catholicism in the Works of
Contemporary Writers in the Americas.” DelRosso indicates that “the connections between Catholicism and ethnicity in recent writings by women in the Americas demonstrate how such writers critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct Catholicism in terms of its relationship to nationhood and its colonial history” (183). Catholicism, then, becomes representative of iconicity; it reflects the historical process of colonization, in this instance, in the Americas, allowing Acevedo to position Xiomara as a decolonial force. Though Xiomara is not attempting to dismantle the entire system, she acknowledges and resists the broader social structures represented through the church.
170 She also comes to understand the church’s role in her silence—both in the institution itself and its figurative presence in her home. Religion dictates practices in the Batista’s lives. Xiomara asks, “What’s the point of God giving me life/if I can’t live my own? //
Why does listening to his commandments mean I need to shut down my own voice?”
(57). She challenges doctrines that suppress free will and exploration of self by questioning interpretations of God’s word. The imposed silence rooted in epistemic violence prompts the adaptation of Xiomara’s voice.
Her reactions to the church signal a shift in consciousness. She is no longer willing to accept the patriarchal notions that accompany the biblical narrative of Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. Though the narrative itself is problematic to Xiomara, it is the imagery in the church that incites Xiomara’s skepticism and disconnect, as she writes, “When I look around the church/ and none of the depictions of angels/or Jesus or
Mary, not one of the disciples look/ like me: morenita and big and angry” (59). Xiomara confronts the whiteness and chauvinism that accompanies her religion. Her acknowledgment of her anger and blackness articulates the complex, paradoxical ways in which the Catholic church and its idols erase both parts of her.
Acevedo’s application of biblical stories demonstrates women and girls as knowledge producers. As Xiomara develops her own body of knowledge, she questions knowledge she is conditioned to consume; she enquires about Eve’s consumption of the apple. Father Sean indicates that Eve’s story is a parable, and Eve could have made
“better choices” (119). Eve’s story holds lessons about obedience and blame, lessons that make Xiomara skeptical and dissuade women from seeking knowledge. She alludes to
171 her education as a reason for her contesting the story “[e]ither because of what I was learning in school and in real life, / I think it all just seems like bullshit/So I say so. Out loud. To Father Sean” (119). Xiomara’ education—both formal and informal—influences her critical stance of Father Sean’s notions. As she becomes more aware of governing bodies, hierarchies, and the matrix of domination, she refuses to remain quiet about issues she has with Catholicism, its iconography, and the way each circumscribes her developing identity. Xiomara begins to cultivate her voice through the entity that values her silence.
Xiomara’s conflicts with Catholic master narratives chronicle the ways she comes to resist imposed knowledge. When Xiomara disconnects from Catholicism, she adapts her behavior and stops taking communion. This act symbolizes her refusal to consume knowledge of which she is suspicious. Receiving the body of Christ is a symbolic act of faith that Mami deems a requirement in her household. Mami reinforces patriarchal norms and, in turn, stifles Xiomara’s voice. Mami and Father Sean are unrelenting in their interpretations of the faith, but Xiomara hold’s firm in her newfound challenging of religious doctrine through alternative epistemology. Her shift in behavior and acquisition of knowledge inform the multiple strains of development (identity, voice, and rage) present in the text.
The theme of voice positions the novel as a counter-story and Xiomara as counter-storyteller. As Acevedo centers voice, she echoes the sentiments presented in bell hooks’ Talking Back: Thinking Feminist and Thinking Black (1989) in which hooks theorizes about the liberated voice:
172 Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited
and those who stand and struggle side by side as a gesture of defiance that heals,
that makes new life and growth possible. It is that action of speech of ‘talking
back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our
movement from object to subject—the liberated voice. (9)
The liberated voice speaks authentically and disrupts counter-hegemonic narratives. The speaker, in this case, Xiomara, moves from silence to speech and anger to action; she
“talks back” to hegemony while asserting her right to girlhood. Xiomara writes a journal entry titled “I think the Story of Genesis is Mad Stupid” where she questions the creation story. She asks Father Sean if the Bible is a poem and questions whether the text is metaphorical. Through her line of questioning, she “talks back” and formulates her own story. Her questioning of Genesis and the church begins her process of voice acquisition and coming-of-rage. As her knowledge starts to grow, so does her resistance.
Once Xiomara is introduced to spoken word, she has another outlet to articulate the sources of her frustration. Her English teacher shows her a video of a Black woman poet who vents her irritations about Black womanhood in America. Xiomara connects to her and writes, “She’s saying the thoughts I didn’t know anyone else had//We’re different this poet and I/ In looks, in body, in background But I don’t feel so different /when I listen to her. I feel heard” (76). Exposure to this Black woman’s story sparks Xiomara’s venture into poetry club and slam poetry. As “spoken word continues to this day as the literary fabric of civil rights” (Colón 152), Xiomara uses it as a platform to assert her humanity.
173 Xiomara’s journal traces her journey toward the release of her anger. When Mami discovers her book of poetry, she invades Xiomara’s privacy and reads it. Xiomara is angry, but holds her emotions back, narrating, “My anger wants to become a creature/with teeth and nails but I keep it collared/because this is my mother/ And I am sorry” (302). In a fit of anger and disappointment, Mami burns the journal. As Xiomara watches the journal engulf in flames, she becomes increasingly angered and gains the courage to use her voice:
And as she recites Scripture
Words tumble out of my mouth too,
All of the poems and stanzas I’ve memorized spill out,
Getting louder and louder, all out of order,
Until I’m yelling at the top of my lungs,
Heaving the words like weapons from my chest;
They’re the only thing I can fight back with. (305)
Xiomara logs the mother-daughter tensions that force her to adapt and find creative outlets. The clashing and converging of the biblical and secular illuminate the convergence of “faith, suffering, and violence” (Kevane 6) seen through the novel’s critique of Catholicism. The clash also reflects how “[a]t times, the violence forces characters to commit violent acts of their own--in some ways highlighting the link between violence and protest, violence and action--that create change” (Kevane 6). Her words and adaptations are her weapons for surviving and circumventing systems.
174 Once her creative outlet burns, Xiomara is forced to use her voice to defend herself. This moment traces the circularity in the novel. Though she loses one form of her voice, she begins to cultivate another and eventually returns to verse through slam poetry, which ironically restores her relationship with her mother. Once Mami understands the value of Xiomara’s creative productions, they redevelop a relationship and start a dialogue, Mami’s final words in the novel are “Pa’lante, Xiomara. /Que para atrás ni para coger impulso” (355) which translates to “go forth and gain momentum.” It is Xiomara’s words and anger that resolve the tension in her family. As she is encouraged to move forward and reconcile with her mother and rage, her narrative completes the arc and reveals the fruitfulness of her adaptations.
Conclusion
While children are the focus of the texts, it is evident that secondary characters have an immense impact on fashioning the protagonists’ identities. Forced to adapt and taught to assimilate, the girls combat the hegemonic violence that accompanies assimilation and acceptance the norms of their respective communities. Because of their precarious positions as Black girls, they become prematurely knowing in unique ways.
As the adults condition the girls to accept their standards and cultural norms, parental figures and adult tertiary characters become arbiters of Black girl anger. Through transference of trauma and demonstration of complicity toward society’s hierarchy, the adults expose children to the harsh realities of Black girlhood. The exposure leads the girls to alternative epistemologies as they form their own opinions and attempt to create new realities. Claudia’s violent reactions to white dolls and white peers are adaptations
175 that arise from rejecting white standards of beauty. Francie’s violence and seeking of new knowledge correlate to her poverty and realization that she unprotected from the traumas of her social location. Xiomara’s violence and artistic impulse are outcomes of her family’s stifling of her growth and the constricting nature of her religion.
The girls’ actions unearth the arc of anger through their thematically tied iterations of fury. The chapter examines building frustrations and various forms of violence and voice that represent Black girl knowledge. The end of the chapter reveals a liberatory rage that aids in change and reconciliation. The rhetorical moves of the authors and the research depict rage as recurring through an arc of reactions that suggest a changing same. Patricia Hill Collins notes that “U.S. Black women writers not only portray the range of responses that individual African-American women express concerning their objectification as the Other: they also document the process of personal growth toward positive self-definitions” (94). The chapter presents a broad range of responses to objectification, silence, and violence. As they work through rage, their alternative epistemologies confirm their self-worth.
Melissa Harris-Perry articulates that misrecognition of African American women
“creates specific expectations for their behavior within American polity” (21). The misrecognition also applies to the Black girl characters in this chapter. Distorted
American conceptions of girlhood force them to adapt: “When they confront race and gender stereotypes, black [girls] are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black
[girls] tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion” (29). The protagonists refuse to bend
176 and instead bend notions that ostracize and infuriate them. They assert their humanity through epistemological, decolonial rage.
The girls’ marginalization espouses responses that shape their understandings of
Black girlhood. The girls adapt and reveal the problems in their societies. Brittney
Cooper notes, “It’s the disruptive girls. The loud, rowdy, attitudinal Black girls, and the defiant, quiet, insolent Black girls who expose every day exactly what the system is made of” (138). In creative ways, Claudia, Francie, and Xiomara reveal how the systems repress Black girls who create counter-hegemonic discourses in the twentieth (The Bluest
Eye and Daddy Was A Number Runner) and twenty-first centuries (The Poet X). Each novel presents Black girl epistemologies and oppositional gazes that cultivate their anger and position them as radical subjects who counter epistemic violence with their voices and adaptive violence that is symbolic of fighting systemic oppression and stock narratives. The adaptations reveal the counternarratives produced by Black girls.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION: LIBERATION AND LITERATURE: TOWARD COUNTERNARRATIVES OF BLACK GIRL RAGE
The contemporary national climate reflects the compounded intersectional rage of women. As they reach their boiling points, society is starting to understand the power and possibilities inherent in women’s rage. While the contemporary world is sensationalizing and capitalizing off rage, Black women’s writing has historically taken up the charge of rationalizing rage, particularly, through Black girls. Black women writers construct counternarratives to the shame and silence imposed on Black girls and women by history and society. The novels present in this study show that Black women have long been privy to the productive possibilities that arise from anger and rage. This study addressed
Black girl rage in the context of the national narratives in the western hemisphere, with focus on the United States and the Caribbean, to demonstrate how Black women novelists who write about Black girlhood in North America archive anger through coming-of-age narratives.
This dissertation positions the novels and the stories they tell about Black girls as sites of critical inquiry and repositories of alternative epistemologies. The counternarratives produced through the novels also reveal the truths that lie in fiction.
The six novelists provide insight into Black girlhood and present Black girl rage as a
177
178 a fruitful emotion. The novelists decolonize rage and present the decolonized minds of
Black girls. The authors present the girls as decolonizers through an emphasis on “new forms of becoming” that “stand outside the hegemonic text of white Western epistemologies” (Tate 3). “Standing outside” allows the authors and girls to speak beyond the margins to create counternarratives that expose their realities. Their work aligns with
Bettina Judd’s assertation that “[a]rt makes it possible to trace the contours of anger—to unveil the thing that fuels it—and thus land on steadier ground in some kind of truth”
(184). Through their protagonists, the authors reveal narrative discrepancies about anger, girlhood, and the nation. The rage of Rosie, Sophie, Starr, Claudia, Francie, and Xiomara reflects a genealogy of rage that builds off the tensions in Black girlhood. As the girls talk back to oppression, the novels talk back to literary traditions and national narratives.
The writers’ framing of anger allows Black girls to reclaim rage through radical acts that outline anger as epistemological, resistant, and humanizing.
The authors connect rage, rights, and resistance, and through representations of these phenomena become connected in a tradition that centers anger. By tracking the recurring themes rooted in the stimuli of deprivation, discrepancies, and loss of perceived control, an arc of anger is crafted that generates adaptations of voice, knowledge, and anti-hegemonic violence. Soraya Chemaly indicates, “When asked what triggers their feeling of anger and aggression, most girls cite some form of social inequality, experienced in varying degrees, as a significant factor” (22). This research addressed social inequalities and fictional Black girls’ responses to them to destigmatize rage and
179 present the nation’s climate as a trigger for anger and aggression that altesr the trajectories of the girls’ lives.
Black girls are the past and the future. By looking back at specters of girlhood,
Black communities can look forward to the possibilities that arise from their emotive behaviors—rage in particular—and affective resistance. While affective resistance is commonly classified as a negative response to change, affective resistance in Black girls evolves from the recognition of oppression and the resulting shifts in consciousness that stem from this recognition. It may be a response to the lack of change that triggers anger or rage, as seen through Francie’s final word of “shit” in Daddy Was a Number Runner.
(208). Though her environment did not change, Francie changed. Her “nice feelings” for
Harlem dwindled with her rising consciousness of the social stratum. While she seems apathetic, the novel’s ending reminds readers of Francie’s anger. Like the other protagonists, she produces a counternarrative by demonstrating connections be anger and consciousness.
The messages embedded in the texts form counternarratives of Black girlhood and rage. Through their radical subjectivities, the girls demonstrate their power and knowledge. At the end of The Bluest Eye, Claudia implicates the nation in distorting
Black girls’ self-image. She articulates that “the land of the entire country was hostile to marigold that year” (206). Her narration supports a counternarrative that places the onus on the nation. With the marigold metaphor, she reflects on the ways America stifles
Black children’s growth. The Poet X and Breath, Eyes Memory present liberatory practices informed by rage. Xiomara comes to understand the power in her words after
180 rejecting religion. Sophie sees that her sacrifices free her and future generations of Caco women from testing. These two characters present freedom from oppressive cultural practices through subversive means. While God Bless the Child ends with Rosie’s death, a counternarrative still surfaces. Rosie is a radical subject who defies gender norms and presents anger as a motivational. Starr’s narration of Khalil’s story in THUG offers a literal counternarrative and allows her to reclaim anger without regard for the Angry
Black girl stereotype. The resolutions of these novels present Black girl activist consciousness and multi-layered understandings of the functions and triggers of rage.
The research implores a return to rage and views Black women’s writing through the thinking of Teju Cole: “Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days all three” (@TejuCole). The women writers riot and “right” through their use of Black girl rage to illuminate how Black girls can offer correctives for local, national, and global problems. With their counternarratives, they tell new stories of rage and Black girlhood.
Arcs of Anger: Black Girl Rage in Black Women’s Literature
The arcs are informed by history and culture and, thus, elucidate the validity of rage outside of the novels. The poles of the “angry decade” and the “age of rage’ situate
Black girls’ anger in relation to interlaced legacies of activism, resistance, the establishment of personal and civil rights, and literary conversations thereof. Each novel positions Black girls as critics of the nation. The results imply that Black girls’ stories and rage should be given serious consideration in terms of strategies for collective freedom. The chapters present the girls’ counternarratives as revolutionary, liberatory
181 responses to systems of domination. Through chronicling the stimuli and subsequent adaptations of rage, the novels provide layers of liberation that correlate to the mounting frustrations at the denial of rights. Black girls create not only counternarratives but also counter-systems that attempt to disrupt the changing same. While the individual experiences of the girls are analyzed, the experiences reflect the harsh realities of Black girlhood across North America.
The girls’ anger—understood as ancestral and inherited—is often seen as dangerous or selfish, but it is indeed a rage that services them and those with whom they interact:
Ancestral anger resonates in both backward- and forward-looking ways.
Sometimes anger requires that we dwell on the past. Sometimes our anger
reorients itself toward the creation and maintenance of new ‘worlds.’ So, one
texture of anger feels the oppressed reality and history, and the other feels the
resistant reality and possible futures. (Bailey 107)
For the characters, this ancestral rage reconstructs their realities and presents them as forward thinkers. Bailey’s framing of ancestral rage reiterates the validity of utilizing the arc motif to explain anger and its correlation to the circularity of oppression.
The literature continues the historical counternarrative of rage, rearticulating—
and firmly centering—the importance of Black girls’ standpoints and emotions. I draw upon the work of critical race theorists and literary critics to position the works of the selected authors of the study as counter-stories and the girl protagonists as counter- storytellers. Richard Delgado examines legal narratives to demonstrate the exigency of
182 storytelling for outgroups “whose marginality defines the boundaries of the mainstream, whose voice and perspective—whose consciousness—has been suppressed, devalued, and abnormalized” (2412). The girls reject marginality and attempt to redefine themselves through normalizing rage and disseminating their knowledge. Telling stories centers the lives and voices of people relegated to the margins; storytelling is imperative for Black girls whose age also serves in their silencing. Richard Delgado indicates the recounting of the narratives can destroy counterproductive mindsets, presuppositions, and hegemonic practices; he also argues that storytelling can alleviate oppression (2413-14).
In “Legal Storytelling and Narrative Analysis” from Critical Race Theory: An
Introduction, Delgado articulates how stories can aid in understanding race; he shows the counter-stories can be modes of resistance against commonly accepted notions:
Society constructs the social world through a series of tacit agreements mediated
by images, pictures, tales, and scripts. Much of what we believe is ridiculous, self-
serving, or cruel, but not perceived to be so at the time. Attacking embedded
preconceptions that marginalize others or conceal their humanity is a legitimate
function of all fiction. (42)
Delgado alludes to the power of storytelling and positions fiction as a mechanism for shifting narratives embedded into cultures. The protagonists do not tacitly consent to their stations like the secondary and territory characters. The characters and authors employ representational intersectionality to combat false of distorted images and change the status of Black girls in the Americas. The girls’ stories impart Aimee Meredith Cox’s notion of the missing middle, a theorization of Black girls’ experiences with
183 intersectional oppression in the United States that centers Black girls representations and marks their attunement to the need to create “measures of success, health, and happiness”
(10). Through their anger, the girls seek happiness and wholeness. Invoking the missing middle enhances the arc metaphor; as it alludes to filling in gaps in research on Black girls, it implores a return to their rage and representation across literary history.
Articulating an arc of anger and the counternarratives produced within it means looking to Black women’s literary traditions while engaging canonical, historical, and cultural connections.
Layers of Liberation: Implications of the Study
This study is a means to liberation for girls and women. The protagonists of God
Bless the Child, The Bluest Eye, Daddy Was a Number Runner, Breath, Eyes, Memory,
The Hate U Give, and The Poet X are radical subjects who attempt to liberate themselves from oppressive forces. While Johnson and Neville, authors of “Using Counterstories to
Critique Racism: Critical Race Theory Beloved and The Hate U Give,” indicate that The
Hate U Give “tells an American story that challenges dominant narratives of equality and racial progress,” each novel in this dissertation functions in this manner (124). The arc of anger constructs counternarratives that tell the story of American ideals that are impossible for Black girls to uphold. The girls challenge literal and figurative penal systems designed to control them. The characters, narratives, and the mode of analysis reflect the “(S)uspicion of master narratives of knowledge, (T)ools for knowledge gathering and dissemination, (O)bjection to objectivity, (R)eflexivity and positioning of the researcher [storyteller]; and (Y)earning for work and for transformation and change”
184 (STORY) method (Nadir 23). Each girl questions master narratives and acquires epistemological tools for understanding the world. They object objectivity and yearn for change in their lives.
As revealed through textual analysis, the girls demonstrate adaptation without accommodation or assimilation and prove that Black girl epistemologies create unique ways of challenging hegemonic discourse. Each girl illuminates the myriad possibilities of Black girl rage and the multiple ways society attempts to destroy, police, and deny them. The girls assert their humanity and citizenship will utilizing epistemological rage as a decolonial tool to assert their voices. The novel cluster proves that despite publication in different epochs, the treatment of Black girls continues to reveal their status as a marginalized group both inter- and intra- racially. Borrowing from Nazera
Wright, the research examines a tradition of “irrepressible black girls” (1), to contribute to discourses of canonical themes and womanist/feminist literary criticism. The research creates a counternarrative to the angry Black woman trope, subverting this controlling image and demonstrating the function, validity, and beauty of Black rage. This investigation of Black girl rage adds to the fields of Africana Women’s Studies, Literary
Studies, and Black Girlhood Studies, as this group of texts has not been analyzed together or through this lens. The ultimate objective of reclaiming rage and outlining its connotation as an anti-oppressive emotion rooted in in/justice is to dismantle negative tropes. A second purpose is to frame coming-of-rage narratives as palimpsests that overwrite conventional notions of the coming-of-age novel. This overwriting is indicative of the controlled rage exhibited by the authors.
185 The research aimed to re-center and reenter Black girls’ stories to follow
Domonique Hill’s philosophy of paying attention to Black girls stories and seeing the stories as paths to freedom. As communities and nations mind Black girl stories, they can theorize from Black girlhood and examine their negotiations of the periphery to interrogate and absolve the structural problems in North American territories. As Nazera
Sadiq Wright discusses Black girls’ strategies for survival, she positions Black girlhood as a “methodological practice” and leaves space for determining rage as a method of survival (“Maria Stewart’s First Stage of Life 154). Black girls’ steps to freedom can be modified and used as tactics of liberation for adults. Aligning with the arc and circle metaphors, Wright references to the early work of Maria Stewart to display Black women’s employment girl protagonists to demonstrate the possibilities of Black resistance:
To take control over and address fully the circumstances that hampered their
lives, black women writers endowed their fictional girl characters with room to
maneuver, make decisions, and create paths for improvements. Black girls were
represented with physical endurance and demonstrated resilience and
determination in the face of the most extreme circumstances. Stewart joined black
women writers who presented black girls who engaged in indecorous conduct and
unvirtuous behavior as strategies for survival. These black girl protagonists
exposed how society sanctioned their victimization, precluded their protection,
and violated their virtue. (Wright 155)
186 Early women writers demonstrate that youth “afforded” Black girls space for reactionary behaviors solicited by oppression. Black girls could attempt to “rage against the machine” in an effort of self-preservation, means of expression, and a mode of visibility.
Writers who are the historical antecedents of authors in the angry decade and age of rage fashioned space for continued research on the plights of Black girls and the adjustments they make to control their narratives and critique societies. Black women writers document these navigations and express Black girlhood as a channel for revealing the nation’s problems.
Black girls in the twenty-first century still seek visibility and voice. Over a century after Fannie Barrier Williams addressed Black girls’ burdens, the changing same of oppression and rage shapes Black girls’ identities. In “The Colored Girl,” Williams writes, “[the colored girl] is not known and hence not believed in; she belongs to a race that is best designated by the term ‘problem,’ and she lives beneath the shadow of that problem which envelops and obscures her” (150). Williams’ argument carries forward to contemporary life and literature. She aids in framing Black girls as solutions as opposed to problems. Black girls must be seen and heard; literature allows them to be seen in ways that defy the confines of reality. Since Black girls are not known, they find alternative methods of being heard and seen. The Black girls in this dissertation rise above the shadows through unfettered anger. They become solution-builders who inform their communities and refuse to be scapegoats for the problems created by the Americas.
Where false narratives of angry Black girls are woven into the fabric of national discourses to rationalize injustices perpetrated against them, through their writing of rage,
187 the novelists make critical interventions to revise those narratives. Their creative works demonstrate Black girl rage as a catalyst for change. The novels also reveal the circularity of oppression that Black girl protagonists attempt to disrupt this domination. Through their narrative arcs, the selected coming-of-age novels reveal an arc of anger that elucidates how direct references and allusions to anger speak to illusions of girlhood in
North America. Because of the tropes of blackness, national climate, and conflicts in their homes space, each character is adultified and denied the right to a childhood. This work illuminates cartographies of rage by mapping how the locations, both social and geographical, inform the characters’ coming of age and their subsequent anger. The research attends to the lack of research surrounding the Black girl rage in Black women’s literature. As Black girls’ and women’s histories undergird their rage, and in an affective turn, their rage undergirds their histories, it is necessary to take up this work. From the horrors of the Middle Passage to the Black Lives Matter Movement, rage has been an exhibition of humanity and a mode of resistance and healing. Historical and canonical arcs of anger work together to illuminate the ways Black girls have intercepted commodification, objectification, and abuse of their bodies and ideas by rebelling against tyranny and oppression.
Extending the Arc: Rage into the Future
Alice Walker implores that communities be “in circle about their rage” so that it guides them away from danger and “toward what is useful” (“What to Do with an Arrow in Your Heart”). Her words extend the arc of anger beyond literature and encourage people to develop bonds over collective anger. Forming these communities encourages
188 change and facilitates comprehension of rage. Being in solidarity about the productive possibilities of this emotion allows groups to strategize and create counternarratives and counter systems that challenge established knowledge. Brittney Cooper notes that rage dismantles systems but also has the power to rebuild them since “the clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of”’ (273). Walker and Cooper show Americans that anger and peace are not always opposing forces and that counternarratives supply not only stories but also strategies for future resistance.
Future studies of the arc of anger will traverse more national borders and address
Black girl rage on a global scale and include more “coming to America” narratives.
Expansion of this dissertation into a scholarly monograph will expound upon diasporic representations and myths of rage (e.g., the fiery West Indian and Spicy (Afro) Latina) and include more literature across the timeline. It will examine more extensively the hermeneutics of Black girls and the ways authors situate themselves in or resist the canon. The arc of anger can be addressed across other timelines, genres, and mediums such as music and film to reiterate Black women and girls’ knowledge and functions of anger. As their epistemologies frame black women and girls' anger, perhaps one of the most constructive ways to extend the arc of anger is to present it in classroom spaces to develop a pedagogy of rage that demarginalizes academia (institutionalized knowlege) and uses fiction, critical works, and lived experiences to present rage as valid.
Informed by the personal and political weight of emotions, a rage-informed pedagogy transgresses boundaries of conventional education, including commitment to
189 critical emotional praxis and critical peace education, which address “issues of structural inequalities and aims at cultivating a sense of transformative agency (both individual and collective) to advance peacebuilding” (Zembylas 4). As structural violence causes anger and grief, I encourage turning anger into action. My commitment to bridging critical analytical work with students’ lived experiences and emotional capacities is vital to my pedagogical goals of situating students, their educational activities, and their scholastic pathways as essential to peacebuilding efforts in their campus and home communities.
The national climate makes room for rage in the classroom. Deborah Cohen, the author of “Learning for a Change: Rage and the Promise of the Feminist Classroom,” sees the place of rage in social change and education:
Rage begins the process of educating for critical consciousness and serves as a
catalyst for thinking about personal and social change. Talking about rage with
students can be used as an analytical tool to synthesize ‘personal troubles’ and
‘public issues’ (Mills 1959) and to foster a sociological and feminist imagination
to ‘talk back’ (hooks 1989) to structures of domination. (169)
Critical consciousness, as seen through this dissertation, is imperative to the development of self and working toward goals of systemic change. Rage exposes the intersections of the personal and political; it encourages people to examine broader social structures and the interrelatedness of racialized and gendered incidents that are purportedly isolated. If
Black people are enraged, they are not yet numb to the systemic, structural violence that is impressed upon marginalized groups. Through tracing the historical and cultural significance of rage and the origins of their rage, people provide directives for the future.
190 Looking to Black girls, specifically, allows people see the debilitating impact of social hierarchies and acknowledge that despite some people benefitting from these systems, the systems must be revised if the nation is to uphold the narrative of freedom, liberty, and inalienable rights
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