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QUIET BROWN BUDDHA(S): BLACK WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, SILENCE AND AMERICAN CULTURE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Corrie Beatrice Claiborne, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2000

Dissertation Committee: Approved By

Professor Valerie Lee, Adviser

Professor Jacqueline Jones-Royster

Professor Beverly Moss Adviser Department of English UMI Number 9982540

UMI'

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Beii & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT

Through examining current works of art, cultural criticism, literary theory, and racial theory, this dissertation examines the construction of a tradition of African-American women's intellectualism, inaugurated with the

publishing of Anna Julia Cooper's ^ Voiœ From the South\x\.W i^l. More

specifically, I explore what happens when intellectual discourse by black women,

as Karla Holloway suggests, shifts or locates itself within an African-American

cultural matrix. By interrogating the culturally specific strategies of reading,

writing, and interpreting provided by women like bell hooks and Patricia

Williams, this dissertation asserts that contemporary black women theorists are

reconfiguring the intellectual life in new and empowering ways.

Likewise, in looking specifically at the evidence of public intellectualism,

taken largely firom w ritten and published manuscripts, I disprove here the notion

that the voices and creativi^ black women have been silenced by a dominant

culture that is outwardly hostile to black women's intellectual lives. Instead 1

argue that the opposite is true, that the hostility and extreme conditions in the

Post-Reconstruction Era are responsible, almost more than any other factors, for

i i black women's desire to create and to be conscious and complex thinkers, who explore the geography of their world through the mind.

Using Marita Bonner's essay, "On being Young, Colored, and A Woman,"

Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, and Alice Walker's "In Search of

Our Mothers' Gardens" as frame texts, I seek to define what intellectualism is for

black women. It seems that the definition must be race and gender specific and

is vastly different from our traditional concepts of the term. Working principally

with the concepts of intellectualism put forth by William Banks, Joy James, bell

hooks. Cornel West, and Alice Walker, I locate the source of this difference.

Moreover, I make the claim that intellectual writing by black women is almost

always tied to the desire to establish a sense of agency or identity in the text.

Beginning with Alice Walker's understanding of what it was like for a

woman such as Phillis Wheatley, who was bom a slave, to attempt to become an

artist, I trace the development of the intellectual impulse hrom slavery to the

present. I end my work with an examination of the career of Toni Morrison, who

has become perhaps the contemporary symbol of the intellectual black woman,

with the publishing of her novels, short stories, plays, books of literary criticism

and race theory, her winning of the Nobel Prize, and her frequent appearances

on Oprah's book club. Tied in with this analysis of the intellectual lives of black

women is a critique of the way that perceptions of black female identity both

helps and hinders the reception of their cultural products. My work is in part

i i i based on Ann duCille's and bell hooks' understanding of commodity culture and the seductiveness of narratives of "Otherness." Moreover, this study seeks to separate out female intellectualism from a tradition of black male intellectualism that is largely configured by people like W.E.B. Du Bois and Henry Louis Gates.

The questions that this dissertation pose are: what exactly do race and gender have to do with the way that black women think, with what they write, and how they write it? How have our concepts of black women's identities influenced the way that we read black texts? And, finally, what is the difference between having a "voice" in the text as opposed to merely being a "presence" in the literature? This dissertation, contrary to the practice of cultural piracy that many in the dominant culture employ, finally allows black women to speak for themselves.

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I wish to thank God with Whom I have become close personal friends during the writing of this dissertation. I would like to thank my

Adviser, Valerie Lee, who literally saved my life in countless ways on too many occasions to mention. To the remaining committee members: Jacqueline Jones-

Royster and Beverly Moss, who have inspired me by their work as scholars, I am indebted to you for constantly providing me with ways to think and present myself and my ideas. In particular, I wish to thank Professor Royster for giving me the initial idea for this dissertation as the result of her own phenomenal work and her innovative graduate course.The Essayist Tradition Am ong AMcan-

Ameiican Women, that she offered in my second year as a Ph D. student.

I want to thank The Ohio State University for providing a supportive environment in which to work. I especially want to thank the CIC Fellows

Program and the Office of Minority Affairs for providing monetary support for my work throughout my graduate career. To all of my fellow Affican-American students in the English Department, thank you for providing me with a homeplace. I am of course deeply indebted to my family for not writingo ttme as the black sheep during my long and arduous journey through graduate school. I am thankful to my father who, as an intellectual in his own right, I owe the gift of always wanting to do "it" better, no matter what "it" is. 1 thank him for all his advice on navigating the pitfalls of the academic profession. 1 owe to my mother my strength of purpose and my life-thank you. To my sister and brother, thanks for the company. To my grandmothers, thank you for your spirit and humor.

Finally, to William Moore, Jr., thank you for developing my soul and always pushing me to grow up and to learn to love myself. You have changed my life.

VI VITA

October 13,1970 ...... Bom--Durham, North Carolina

1993 ...... B.A. in English, Syracuse University

1995...... M.A. in English, University of South Carolina

1997 ...... Adjunct Professor, Antioch College

1999-2000...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

“Leaving Abjection: Where ‘Black’ Meets Theory.”Modem Language Studies. 26.4 (Fall 1996): 27-36.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English Concentration: African-American Literature

vu TABLE OF CONTENTS

A bstract...... ii Acknowledgments...... v V ita...... vii Introduction...... 1

Chapters:

1. What My Grandmother Knew: A Personal Memoir...... 34

2. Perspicacity...... 61

3. Silence...... 96

4. O f Love and Lies: Understanding the Divide Between Black Male and Female Intellectuals...... 118

5. "I Will Call Her Beloved, Which Was Not Beloved:" Black Female Identity and The Pitfalls of Popularity...... 142

Conclusion...... 177 Bibliography...... 189

vm INTRODUCTION

A PRELUDE: "LEAVING ABJECTION" '

N ot me. N ot that But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing.... There, abject and alyection are m y safeguards. The primers o f m y culture.

-Julia Kristeva

In my house, there is a huge leather-bound dictionary that is as old as I am, if not older. I know for certain that it has been with my family as long as I have been alive. The letters on the cover are worn away now, but at one time they read:The Random House Dictionary o fthe English Language, The College

E d itio n . This heavy volume was imposing to a young mind just leaming how to read. In picking up the dictionary for the first time in my seventh year of life, I thought that English could not possibly be my native language—simply because I would never be able to master all of the words hrom which this language was composed. Nevertheless, I sat down with this big, magical book that appeared to hold all of the keys to knowledge and power, and attempted to learn the English tongue. Every time I encountered a word that I did not understand, I would

‘ This section was onginally published as an “Leavmg Abjection: ‘Where Black’ Meets Theory.”Modem Language Studies. 26.4 (Fall 1996)27-36. 1 look it up. Words like "axiomatic," "abyss" and "ribald" frequently drove me in search of the dictionary. However, other, more common words were also the subjects of my searches. In particular, I remember seeking out the dictionary to see if I really knew what "black" meant. This investigation was prompted by a white girl in my class telling me this was what I was. I thought I knew what

"black" signified—it was the crayon color that I always used for people's hair in my childish drawings, the color of my grandmother's hying pan. InR andom the

House DictionaryX learned that it was also "lacking hue or brightness;" or "of, or

pertaining to, or belonging to an ethnic group characterized by dark skin

pigmentation; a Negro." This was okay. These ideas were not entirely radical

and could be integrated easily into my understanding of "blackness," such as it

was; but, then, my eyes were assaulted by the other definitions: "soiled or

stained with dirt," "gloomy," "pessimistic," "boding iU," "harmful,"

"inexcusable," and, finally, "evil."E vil, I thought. Was this g irl talking about

m e? I knew that I may have been many things, but evil was definitely not one of

them. In the years to come, the significance of language to identity construction

would become apparent, and I would begin to understand that essentially what

linguistics and current literary theory were positing is that it is entirely possible

to be all of these things at once, or none of them. Through reading

psychoanalytic theory and engaging French feminist thought, I also would

realize that finding an identity necessitates A at meaning or value be inscribed on the body, even when it is the inscription of someone else's desires. I would know deeply in my soul, as W.E.B. Du Bois knew, that being "black" meant living under a veil which obscured the knowledge that "black people needed," and made it "a twice-told tale to [their] white neighbors." ^ Finally, as a black woman, I would conclude that history and the English language had conspired to make me this "other," this abject being—before 1 even had the tools or the time to participate in the discourse.

It would be a long time-almost twenty years-down a winding stretch of road marked by obstacles and other various pitfalls before 1 would come to the point where I supposedly possessed these tools—the theoretical models with which to argue that being a black woman did not make one inherently evil. It is not that 1 had not known this at some level all along, but in order to make a case for black subjectivity, especially in graduate school, I needed to employ that coded language in which so many white male academics speak. I had to leam the "twice-told tale" so that I could participate in the theoretical debates that were raging about subjectivity and language in the academy. I became a covert operative," the spook who sat by the door," in order to leam the passwords so that 1 could in turn subvert the language. However, a curious thing happened when I began to read all of this postmodern or post-structuralist theory: I started to see how much this theory did not take into account black experiences.

^ W .EB. Du Bois, The Souk o fBlack Folk, (New Yoric: Vintage, 1990) 9. 3 although the theorists were claiming in so many ways to be dismantling race and difference. This is not to argue that black people have no connection to postmodern discourse whatsoever, because certainly Cornel West and bell hooks have presented strong arguments for the link between African Americans and postmodernism. ^ But in so many of these theories black people, women especially, seem to be invisible, and if not invisible then simply wrong. The project to make black women present in theoretical discourse has, as a result, become my primary function as an academic. Furthermore, in so much that we

(meaning black women) are already theorized, talked about, or lied about—made to feel evil and otherwise outcast~"colorizing theory" offers the only alternative to absence or, perhaps even, silence.

When the French feminist Julia Kristeva formulated the idea of

"approaching abjection" as a way in which to make oneself subject instead of object, the one desiring instead of the one desired, it spoke to a need that seemed particular to black women. Kristeva understands that to be anabjectS s to be on the verge of becoming. It is the "not me, not that, but the not nothing, either-it is the "'something' that I do not recognize as a thing" that is always on the horizon of discovery.'* An abject, by its very nature, is opposed to the "I," underneath it, at least at the level where identity engages the psyche. Following this logic, it is

^ See, in particular, bell hooks’s essay “Postmodern Blackness” inYearning: Race. Gender, And Cultural Politics B oston: South End Press, 1990) 23-31. * Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur, trans. Leon Roudiez (New Yoric Columbia UP, 1982) 1. The title of my essay deliberately recalls the title of Kristeva’s first chapter, “Approaching Abjection." 4 precisely through abjection, humiliation, trauma, or the repetition of "sublime affects" produced by the trauma that a sense of identity can be gained. This would seem to be true at least in so much as the sublime, as it is figured by

Immanuel Kant, is a motivating presence. ^ In fact, the process of individuation first requires, in the one seeking to become a speaking subject, a notion of

"sublime alienation." In my estimation, black women have no trouble understanding and experiencing "sublime alienation '-perhaps, even, "sublime alienation" should be another way to define "black." However, black women, after centuries of alienation and abjection, are still only convenient dark bodies through which others-read here as white, nude, and powerful-come to know themselves. And not only is it for white men that black women must bear the burden of all proof, so to speak, but for anyone who seeks to use the image of black women as the emblem of oppression, as a way of approaching the abject.

As Slavoj Zizek explains, alienated others (women, people of color, the impoverished) become referents in the European mind set, "the decentered other place of my own splitting... [so that] what propels me to 'communicate' with them is the hope that I'll receive the truth about myself, my own desire. " ®

Therefore, the inclusion of the black figure in theory has been historically a false

^ For a discussion o f the importance o f the sublime, see Kant’s “ The Analytic o f the Sublime” inThe Critique o f Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. London: Oxford, 1952.90-203. ‘ Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegei, and the Critique o f Ideology (Durham: Duke UP, 1993)31. inclusion that never really produces anything substantive about black subjectivity. Theories of abjection, in particular, become less of a way for black women to know themselves, than an opportunity to create all sorts of myths and attach them to black women's representations.

In her Deals With the D evil and Other Reasons to Riot, Pearl Qeage describes the way in which black representations are appropriated by the dominant discourse and the sense of powerlessness that she feels, as a black woman, because of the way in which her identity is linguistically constituted as abject:

"Woman," Japanese feminist/artist Yoko Ono once said, "is the nigger of the world." 1 have always found this quote hrom Yoko offensively interesting. Who was she talking to? The question assumes that one can't be a female and a "nigger" at the same time. Where does that leave black women? Maybe that makes us the nigger-nigger of the world. Double niggers. The mind boggles at the kind of oppression that would await such a cursed being. A creature oppressed by racism and sexism, buffeted hrom the niggerhaters to the womanhaters and back again with hardly time enough to take a deep breath and try to hgure out what to do about it. ^

Qeage humorously looks at the serious subject of over-dehnition that plagues black women. Black women, as they are presented in this passage, are truly abject beings, so far hrom any sense of identity that they merely disappear or become invisible when trying to engage in the discourse of domination. This utter abjection, or "sublime alienation," would seem, at least according to

^ Pearl Cleage, Deals iVith the Devi! and Other Reasons to Riot (Sew York: Ballantine Books, 1993) 21. 6 Kristeva's argument, to put black women in the ripe position to become subjects.

However, black women are so burdened with other people's problems, carrying the weight of everyone's signification, that they cannot find their way through this dejection to the other side. What emerges as identity for black women trying to theorize their own position is a jumble of stereotypes. Thus, as Michele

Wallace's Black Macho and the M yth o fthe Superwoman black women merely become an amalgam of their representations:

Sapphire. Mammy. Tragic mulatto Wench. Workhorse, can swing

an ax, lift a load, pick cotton with any man. A wonderful

housekeeper... hard on and unsupporting of black men,

domineering, castrating Sorrow roles right off her brow like so

much rain— Tough, unfeminine, opposed to women's rights

movements, considers herself already liberated Definitely not a

dreamer... *

The variety of meanings that black women take on is not just a way for European

Americans to contain them, but it is also the primary material from which black

people reading the texts must construct an identity. Black women, then, accept

the images of the "mammy," whore, and workhorse-become complidt in them

in fact-because this is the only history that the English language provides them.

Indeed, a complicity in false history is what happens when a little black girl

' Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth and the Super-Wonum (New York: Dial Press, 1978) 106-7. reads in the dictionary that black means evil and believes it. Moreover, the theoretical problems that the adoption of historically loaded words cause to concepts of identity are made plain, for example, in Toni Morrison'sS u la when

two women attempt to engage in a dialogue about the nature of black female

subjectivity:

[Nel] You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can't act like

a man. You can't be walking around all independent like, doing

whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don't.

[Sula] You repeating yourself.

[Nel] How repeating myself?

[Sula] You say that I am a woman and a colored woman. Ain't that

the same as being a man? '

Both Nel and Sula share a sense of oppression, a sense of themselves as abject

beings. Instead of unifying the subject, abjection pulls the women in so many

ditferent directions that it is nearly impossible to grasp a theoretical leg on which

to stand. These women ultimately end up with an idea that they are men

because the terms "black" and "woman" carry too much baggage, too many

conflicting notions of womanhood, to be made sense of. More importantly, the

move Morrison's novel seems to be calling for is the same move that a black

female intellectual must make in terms of gaining a voice for black women in the

’ Toni Monrison,Sula (New York: Plume, 1987) 142*3. 8 theoretical discourse. It is the move to challenge the definitions, to separate black women firom this abject history and propose a counter-history that opens up the space for black female presence.

Certainly abjection has an important place in African American literature.

One cannot read Richard Wright'sNative Sonot Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man without also understanding abjection and its significance to identity. However, theories of abjection seem to break down in African American literature precisely when dominant notions of identity come into contact with black subjects who conceive of themselves outside of their stereotypical representations, outside of the dictionary definitions. Likewise, it is apparent in reading black women's texts that black subjectivity cannot define itself through the historical knowledge gained from European cultures. Zora Neale Hurston's seminal work T h e ir E y e s

Were Watching C odsu^esis that black women cannot employ European modes of knowledge in order to understand themselves. For example, Hurston's main character, Janie Starks, tries to identify herself in a photograph, but has great difficulty correlating her identity to the image that is reflected back:

So when we looked at the picture and everybody got pointed out

there wasn't nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair

standing by Elanor. Dat's where Ah waz s'posed to be, but Ah

couldn't recognize that dark chile as me. So Ah ast, "Where is me? I don't see me." ... Ah looked at the picture for a long time and

seen it was my dress and mah hair so Ah said: " Aw,aw! Ah'm

colored!"

The realization that Janie finally reaches, the understanding that she is colored," does not signify her gaining an identity; it points, instead, to the fact that she has internalized the photographer's gaze, become the object of desire, the abject.

Janie has come to feel what it means in society to be a woman and have black skin. It is a knowledge that is gained firom "scientific fact"-the visual representation of her difference in the photograph. She then takes on the negative historical characteristics of race and gender that are implicated in that photograph to become that "mammy," that workhorse, or, as Hurston identifies it, that mule, which must bear the weight of the world on its back. Approaching abjection here does not lead to the monumental change in the psyche that is necessary for Janie's being to be bom. Indeed, it is not until much later, at the end of the novel, that Janie is able to throw off the empirical knowledge gained firom the photograph as a "not-truth," that she is able to leave abjection behind and find that outside of it is

... peace. She pulled in the horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it

firom around the waist of the world and draped it over her

10 shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to

come and see (184).

It is not approaching abjection, but leaving it behind that is the radical act.

Al^ection, like so many other theories, is formed out of historical ideologies that do not relate to our experience, and cannot, by that very fact, speak to the situation of African American women. By employing a counter-strategy that recognizes abjection but up-roots it as a truth of the black condition, as Hurston does, black women are able to leap over the boundaries of ideology and history and find themselves whole.

This counter-strategy that black women use in order to identify themselves, despite the smoke-screens that are created by the dominant discourse, most closely resembles the notion of "effective history" that Michel

Foucault advocates as a means of destabilizing the "truth" of social or racial categories. As Foucault maintains.

History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces

discontinuity into our very being-as it divides our emotions,

dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body, and sets it up against

itself. "Effective" history deprives the self of the reassuring

stability of life and nature It will uproot its traditional

foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God ( New York: Harper & Row, 1937,1990) 9. All 11 is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for

cutting. "

The idea that Foucault has of history as a counter-memory or as one that cuts back into the universally held forms of knowledge is a valuable concept, because it allows for the existence of multiple stories. A6ican American women's history is an "effective" history in that it disrupts and destabilizes the very foundation of

European knowledge. Leaving abjection necessitates the establishing of what

Foucault would call a counter-memory. However, his theory of "effective" history does not speak necessarily to the experiences of African American women because it does not account for the fact that African American women by merely being bom black and female are always already unstable and disruptive to the dominant structure. The mere fact of blackness and femaleness produces a multiplicity of selves that questions the "stability of life and nature" which

Foucault states should be the aim of all language. Foucault assumes that a subject needs to seek discontinuity and abjection, while not realizing that there are subjects for whom, perhaps, the reverse is true.

Karla F. C. Holloway is a theorist who, like Foucault, recognizes the importance of history, but who also realizes the necessity of employing culturally specific theoretical strategies in order to construct useful dialogues about subjectivity. While her ideas share some afrinity with Foucault's, her notions of

fiuther references to this work appear in the text

12 "shift" and "mediation" tailor the dominant theories specifically to African

American women's literature. As Holloway explains,

shift happens when the textual language "bends" in an

acknowledgement of "experience and value" that are not Western.

A critical language that does not acknowledge the bend or is itself

inflexible and monolithic artificially submerges the multiple voices

within literature. In consequence, critical strategies that address the

issues within these texts must be mediative strategies between the

traditional ideologies of the theoretical discourse and the ancestry

of the text itself.

The shift that should happen when reading black literary texts is the same shift that must occur when reading literary theory. While it is easy to call for mediation with regards to reading specific works of ethnic literature, theorists unfortunately do not apply the same level of mediation to the underlying theories that are used to give meaning to the primary texts. Holloway's analysis seems to be pointing those of us who are concerned with the scholarship and production of letters in the direction that we all must move: toward an understanding of history that does not originate from a single source, toward a notion of language that allows for and does not collapse difference.

" Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 154. Karla F.C. Holloway,Moorings & Metaphors: Figures o f Culture and Gender in Black fVomen’s Literature (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1992) 62. 13 Indeed, it is not theory that is the enemy here. Theory should not be thrown out as simply irrelevant. It already exists; we (black women) are already being theorized whether we like it or not. Nevertheless, it is obvious that in many theoretical frameworks black people, in general, and black women, in particular, are getting literally lost in language, in the shuffle between signifiers and signifieds. For example, the poet, essayist, and critic Gloria Wade-Gayles claims in her 1996 collection of essays.Rooted Against the Wind, that much of the current theoretical language is not shifting, as Karla Holloway suggests, to recognize the importance of experience and the reality of black life:

How unimaginable and unthinkable it is to teach a black woman's novel without teaching a black woman's experience. But it can happen! If you teach theory, theory, and more theory. Actually the problem is not theory, without which we would be crippled as a discipline, but rather the amount of it, the way it defies the critic, the way it makes the circle of the privileged smaller, the way it validates a white male reading of black women's literature, the way it brings tenure politics into the classroom. In the world of theory- saturation, theory-dependence, and theory-consumption, you can teach Be/ovedynÛ\o\xt hearing Baby Suggs's words that the problem in the world is white folks, and, above the deadly drone of the world critic who sees through a white male lens, you might never hear Suggs say, "Love yourself... Love your neck... Love your dark, dark liver." Hugged too closely and used in the wrong way and for the wrong reason, theory can chafe the soul and sabotage the goal of studying literature.. (165).

Wade-Gayles is suggesting that there needs to be a way to bring the longing of the "soul," the drive to express one's self, in alignment with the desire for an intellectual life. In fact intellectuals should regard these lacunae, the divides

14 between theory and lived experience, as challenges-where we are excluded in the discourse we should include ourselves, wherever we are misrepresented we should set the record straight. It is up to the new generation of writers and thinkers, of which I consider myself a member, to bridge the gap between theory and practice—to make the space where "black" meets theory a field of limitless possibilities.

THE PROJECT

My dissertation investigates the way in which black women as intellectuals have been incorporated into the traditional literary canon and, seemingly, into mainstream American culture. In this postmodern moment, it appears that the recent interest in the "Other," and, more specifically, in black women's texts and representations as the ultimate forms of "Otherness," signals on some universal level that the critical issues about race and sex that are involved in reading African-American literature, and that have historically been a hindrance to the literature being read or critiqued seriously by anyone who is not black, have somehow been resolved and made invalid. Obviously, the struggle that Nineteenth Century women were engaged in, the battle to come to voice as fully individuated speaking subjects, has been fought and won.

However, against claims of arrival and against the celebration of women's voices, there is a pernicious backlash that has caused the voices of intellectual women, especially black intellectual women to be lost amidst the cacophony of criticism.

15 Instead of participating fully in critiquing themselves and their culture, black women have become elevated to a mythical status in which their image and words can be bought, sold, and traded by anyone wishing to prove that he or she is hip enough to be engaged in cultural criticism and debates about otherness and narrative."

Indeed, as Ann duCille claims, a cult of "true black womanhood" has sprung up in terms of intellectual production resulting in the commodification of black women and, curiously, in black women intellectuals being "silenced" again on the grounds that they are too easily classified, that their works are too available, and that everything that needs to be said about them has already been said." Therefore, Quiet Brown Buddha(s): Black Women Intellectuals, Silence, andAmerican Culturevs a work that seeks to uncover the "absent presence" of black women in intellectual debates and ofier a way of theorizing and reading black texts that is not based on assumptions about black female identity that are often so violently wrong.

Blackness is indeed hot property. It is not unusual to drive down any suburban street anywhere in America and witness teens of all racial backgrounds listening to rap music, wearing their hair in braids, and reading Maya Angelou's

" The claim that "otherness" has become the hot, and often necessary, area o f inquiry in terms of fmding academic jobs and publishing is held by many theorists. See in particular bell hooks'Black Looks (Boston: South End Press, 1992), Ann duCille's Sfa'nTrade (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), and "Of Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems" by Kimberly Brown reprintedOther in Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and US. Women o f Color, (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1998). " See Ann duCille's chapter "The Occult of True Black Womanhood" mSkin Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 81-119. 16 / fùiovir W hy the Cage Bird Sings lor their high school English classes. Moreover, the proliferation of Women's studies and Ahican-American Studies departments on college campuses across the country seems to offer legitimization to an area of inquiry that for the majority of American history has only been an exotic sideshow to the main events—Ernest Hemingway's battle with the sea and

William Faulkner's tragicomic Southerners. Black women have arrived, so to speak. The call by feminists such as Annette Kolodny, Jane Tompkins, and Susan

Willis has been heard. American culture has expanded to place alternative narratives, literature by Native Americans, Chicano/as, and Lesbians and Gays, for example, in conversation with the dominant discourse of baseball, capitalism, and Western expansion. It seems that it is passe to still be talking about women being silenced. However, the silencing that goes on in terms of Ahrican-

American women's intellectualism has nothing to do with lack of voice or being able to speak and everything to do with concealment and distortion, with who is speaking and who is listening when they speak. By challenging the prevailing notions of women's silence and critiquing theorists like Henry Louis Gates, this work argues that the only way out of the damage done by notions of mythical black womanhood is to begin to seriously turn our attention to criticizing the critics and examining exactly "when and where" black women enter into the intellectual debates.

17 Much, of course, has been written about women's silence, about the ways in which women have been ignored, subjugated, and relegated to virtual powerlessness and obscurity. Indeed it seems that when talking about women and literature the focus in Women's Studies, English, and American Studies departments has been on women's lack—their lack of a safe space in which to create, their lack of time because of forced commitments to domestic issues, and

their lack of voice. Women were conveniently shut-up and shut-away, according

to Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert. We were and are the mad women in the

attic.'* Confounded by yellow wallpaper, we became tragic Emily Dickinsons,

Sylvia Plaths, and Mrs. Dalloways—women who were and are not comfortable in

the exterior world of men and certainly not as public intellectuals who could

challenge the bastions of the male academy. And if the woman was black, Asiem,

or Latina, so much the worse. It meant that as a colored woman she was the

lowliest of the low, the most abject being imaginable, the most stifled creatively.

If, as according to Yoko Ono, women are indeed "the niggers of the world," then

playwright/author Pearl Cleage is correct in reasoning that black women are

"the nigger-niggers of the world. Double niggers. A creature so buffeted by

racism and sexism that she could hardly draw a breath and decided what to do

about it" {Deals W ith the Devil, 21). But where does insisting on this old

'* The full name o f Sandra Gflbeifs and Susaa Gubar’s famous text on women writers isMad Women in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, 1979.

18 stereotype of silence and subjugation leave us as women who indeed have something to say and are a viable part of American culture? It leaves us displaced, outside, buried under the weight of false images. Thus, in order to come inside and take our rightful places as a part of the canon, it is necessary that we cast off the stereotype and reveal the power underneath the silence. We must insist like Marita Bonner did in 1925 that silence is not the limit of black women's intellectualism. For these female intellectuals, who Bonner appropriately labeled "brown Buddhas," silence is the prelude:

So— being a woman—you can w a it .. But quiet Quiet Like Buddha—who brown like I am - sat entirely at ease, entirely sure o fhim self; m o tio n l^ and knowing a thousand or moreyears before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands. M otionless on the outside. But on the inside? Silent. S till... "Perhaps Buddha is a woman. " So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, attheeyesso that life w ill Bow into andnot byyou. A ndyou can gather as it passes the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw unders^ding to yourself. A nd then you can, when the tim e is ripe, swoop toyour feet-atyour fu ll height-ata single gesture. Ready to go where? W hy... wherever Ckximotions. **

Bonner first recognized that there is something profound and different in black women's silence.^^ She posited that a lack of attention to black women's

From Marita Bonner’s essay "On being Young, Colored and A Woman " reprintedFrye in Streets and Environs.

" The idea of silence, of course, is not only used to talk about the way that women have been treated in the academy, it is also apart of the dieoretical concerns m many other areas such as in film and in politics. 19 work, did not mean that work was not being done. What was perceived as silence by the larger culture was actually waiting. It is Bonner and her life as a public intellectual that inspired the writing of this dissertation. This quiet

Radcliffe -educated woman understood the very great distinction between being silent and being silenced. Moreover, my investigation into just how unsilent

black women have been in voicing their opinions, from the Reconstruction to the

present, begins by focusing on Bonner'sFrye Street and Environs dcc\ài Anna Julia

Cooper's A Voice From the South as texts which only hint at the promise of

African-American women's intellectualism to come in later periods.

THE METHOD

My study of black women intellectuals is largely thematic. I begin my

investigation by considering the lives of black women, like my own

grandmother, who operate out of an intellectual paradigm that places primacy

on the culture of lived experience. I go "in search of my (own) mothers'

gardens," so to speak, in order to demonstrate the way that black women have

struggled to fashion themselves as intellectuals since the Black Women's Era of

the 1890s. In setting up this tradition of black women's intellectualism, I find

that it is also necessary to define the intellectuals' project. Because of the fact that

black women's contemporary intellectual work is based on foundational texts

like Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice From the South, I argue that intellectualism for

Moreover, sflence is not particular to the female. One can talk about male silence with as much validity, for example. However, I would like to argue dut the issue of silence seems to come up in particularly 20 black women can only be sustained by recognizing that black women were and are committed to constructing their own intellectual lineage by engaging in the powerful narrative strategy of writing themselves into their texts.

As V. P. Franklin argues inLiving Our Stoiies, Telling Our Truths:

Autobiography and the M aking o f the African-American Intellectual Tradition,

"the autobiography has been the most important literary genre in the AMcan-

American intellectual tradition in the United States" (11). However, Franklin primarily considers, in his valuable study, the manner in which intellectuals write their life stories in book-length formal autobiographies. What this dissertation does is to extend Franklin's study and examine the ways that women weave autobiography into their literary and cultural criticism—into their poems, essays, and novels. For example, instead of merely reading Zora Neale

Hurston's D ust Tracks on the Roadio discover how Hurston conceptualizes race and gender while talking about her personal experience, as Franklin does; I look at how Hurston reveals herself in her novelTheir Eyes Were Watching Cod against the picture that she provides of her life inDust Tracks on theRoadio display how both are equally autobiographical and equally valuable. I concentrate on the lived experience of black women intellectuals in order to show how a black woman can theorize about what it means to be both black and female in America simply by making it obvious who is speaking. By asserting

complex ways when reading black women’s works. 21 their individuality, black women are, in fact, outlining a theoretical practice. It is clear that autobiography has an important place in the intellectual traditions of both black men and women, but I argue that what makes black women part of their own individual tradition, the "brown buddha" tradition, is that they are able to assert their personal identities, to enter into the autobiographical mode in unexpected ways that are truly transformative.^*

Indeed, while race and gender theory and cultural criticism are the primary elements that comprise black women's intellectual discourse, African-

American women tend to write about these issues in particularly personal terms.

In drawing closely from the poetry of Jayne Cortez and Ntozake Shange; the

prose of Gloria Wade-Gayles, bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Pearl Cleage, and

Alice Walker; and the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and, the

lesser known, Annie Greene Nelson; 1 am able to examine the ways that Ahican-

American women's intellectual discourse incorporates both race theory and

autobiography in order to create a separate black identity, an identity contrary to

the dominant notions. Moreover, it is this task of creating an identity that is the

driving force behind much of the cultural production by black women, who also

seek to claim themselves as intellectuals.

" My sense of what many of the black women that I examine in this dissertation are doing theoretically through using personal narrative is largely based on the politics of location and identity. This mode of theorizing that I am calling “ mtimate theorizing,” can be likened to Kimberely Brown’s term ’ehnopoetics.” and this type of theorizmg becomes transformative because it connects the identity of the 22 Indeed, the stakes in the game of identity politics are high. It seems that when one allows others to "call one out of one's name/' it justifies all sorts of heinous acts done out of their misperceptions. Further, it is through establishing an identity that African-American women intellectuals find that they are hree to

create, that their works are given intrinsic rather than relational value. 1 seek to endow my work with intrinsic value as well by theorizing intimately, by

speaking in a manner that makes my identity evident in the text. 1, like many of

the contemporary black women intellectuals that 1 discuss in this dissertation,

consciously choose to make the personal political. In relying on my own

personal stories, and a diction and tone that is rooted in Ahican-American

expressive culture, 1 attempt to put theory into practice. This work is modeled

after the phenomenal writing of contemporary intellectuals like bell hooks and

Patricia Williams.

Moreover, while there are many examples of black women's

intellectualism that 1 can draw from, 1 find that 1 rely heavily on bell hooks in this

dissertation, because as an author of over 15 books, hooks is one of America's

most prolific intellectuals, race and gender notwithstanding, hooks is

responsible for much of my understanding of what intellectual work is and her

words are used to support many of my arguments. I think the weight I give to

cultural critic with the identity of the community, thereby destroymg the stereotypes that for so long have held power. 23 hooks' theories in this dissertation is justified and should mirror the seriousness that her work receives in literary studies overall.

By retracing all the seemingly small contributions that black women, through their very presence, have made to American culture and by conducting a study that considers the ways in which black women's thoughts have been subsumed into the dominant literature, 1 argue that an interrogation of black women's intellectual lives should be an integral part of literary studies, and, moreover, that they have always been, whether we recognize it or not, at the very "center" of American culture.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY

In chapter one, I re-trace Alice Walker's steps, noting how the essay "In

Search of My Mother's Gcirdens" set an adverse precedent for the way that we view the tradition of black women's intellectualism. 1 make the argument that the image of the firustrated intellectual, that Walker reasoned all black women artists were, has actually hindered, in some senses, our understanding of the strong tradition of black women's writing. Many of our contemporary literary theorists, even some black female theorists, seemed to have based the recovery work of black women's texts on two primary ideas given in Walker's ground breaking essay; namely that high and low art have equal value, and, secondly,

that the life of a black woman artist is hard. While supporting Walker's idea that vernacular culture or "low art" should be weighted equally with what is

24 considered to be high art, I take issue with the idea that the only way to begin to consider the impact of a black woman's writing life is by examining its problems.

Being wedded to this notion of difficulty lends itself to the mythology that black women have a silenced and inefectual voice in American culture. The diffculties of the writing life, instead of being a deterrent to intellectual production, are in fact the fire that often leads many black women to theorize initially about their lives. I acknowledge that the journey to becoming an intellectual is different for black women, but that this ditference does not make their journey any less significant. I hope that this chapter will enter my work into the myriad conversations that are currently going on about intellectualism.

However, I intend to focus precisely how black women enter into these conversations and not on the elements that keep them removed or silent. By giving value to black women's experiences, it is then possible to talk about the way that black women have established themselves as intellectuals.

In the chapter two, I (re)define a black female intellectuals' project.

Perhaps, the topic of intellectualism among black people deserves a lengthy investigation, simply because for too long intellectualism and blackness have been treated as two dialogically opposed ideas. I define intellectualism here as the exercise of the creative and contemplative side of the brain. Intellectualism thus become synonymous with theorizing. However, in this chapter, I reveal how necessary blackness or race is as a concept to black women's intellectualism.

25 I dte the current popularity of "race writing" and show how our contemporary notions of racial discourse is the legacy of the work begun by black women, like

Cooper, Gertrude Mossell, and Ida B. Wells, at the turn of the century. 1 situate this study within the new wave of interest that has been occurring about black intellectuals, but I also make the claim that these black women have always been present throughout the American literary landscape. Likewise, 1 offer an analysis of identity and politics and the ways in which they both operate in

American intellectual discourse in the 1990s.

Against Ross Posnock's thesis inColor & Culture: Black W riters and the

M akingof the M odem Intellectual Hm X being a race man or woman is actually anti-intellectual, I argue the race and identity is the very foundation of intellectual work for the women that 1 consider in this dissertation. However, my analysis of "identity politics" is also both multi-faceted and historical in that it considers the different ways that intellectual narratives about racial uplift impact the very material conditions of African-Americans. 1 am concerned here with the degree of mobility that the work which one does in the academy has in the street, with what currency "insurgent black intellectual life, "as bell hooks and Cornel

West term it, has. 1 formulate an overall sense of what intellectualism does by considering the course of intellectual action or activism outlined in works such as hooks' and West's Breaking Bread, and Patricia Williams'Alchem y o£Race and

R ig h ts, Moreover, I consider how the concept of what it means to be an

26 intellectual has changed because of the way that women have been able to use autobiography in their intellectual discourse. It is this use of the autobiographical mode that forms the foundation of a tradition of Ahrican-

American female intellectualism.

Although the thrust of my scholarship is largely devoted to constructing an overall sense of a tradition of black writing with an eye towards defining intellectualism, my research revealed that the project might more aptly be described as a way of exploding the term intellectualism by coming to a greater understanding of what is meant when we utter the word "tradition." Moreover, much has been written about traditions in literature, but not enough has been written about the fluid nature of tradition, the way the tradition weaves in and out of other traditions, the way that tradition ebbs and flows. Professor and author Jacqueline Royster, however, is one intellectual who recognizes the continual presence of black women thinkers and the strength of their traditions in American discourse. Royster uses the image ofTraces o fa Stream to describe the way that black women writers seem to constitute themselves as a movement and then seemingly disappear in the face if sociopolitical constraints, only to reemerge as popular once again because of the consistent power of their work.

Indeed, a tradition of black women's intellectualism is formed out of many things; the canon of African-American literature, the canon of American literature, feminism, religious discourse, and less admirable traditions like

27 institutional racism and capitalism. All of these traditions should be considered equally when black women write. Also, it is immature and disingenuous to imagine that black women create their own traditions despite not because of their challenges. I examine how these challenges, race and gender issues, produce differences between what is commonly thought of as the African-

American intellectual tradition and Affican-American women's intellectual tradition(s). Moreover by investigating the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, who many consider to be the father of Affican American Studies and the quintessential black intellectual, 1 am able to distinguish exactly where women fit into and depart from the world's perception of African-American literzuy tradition (read here as largely a male tradition).

Far from being set in stone, new traditions are created every time a black woman picks up the pen to write, they are created every time she speaks. Using

Henry Louis Gates' definition of tradition, as set forth in the foreword to the

Schomburg Library's Collection of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, I argue that the idea of building tradition(s) is an integral part of a black female intellectual enterprise. Yet I also call for a new notion of tradition that allows us to, in fact, revisit the idea of black women's silence. Indeed, it is hard to maintain the idea that black women's words have been silenced in the face of evidence or

"traces" which prove that black women have a long-standing tradition of intellectualism that has never really disappeared.

28 In chapter three, I talk about the idea of women's silence as it is presented in feminist discourse by probing the question of whether or not white women's theories Ht black women's bodies. I begin this chapter by looking at Joy James' provocative notion that silence only occurs when there is an absence of the written word and when black women are complicit in their own silencing. In

James' estimation, then, a person cannot be "silenced," he or she can only refuse to speak. As many black women have always theorized about their lives and exhibited a sense of agency through their poems, essays, plays, and novels, it is clear that silence is not one of the primary elements of black women's intellectual experiences.

While it is true that when black women write there is an awareness of audience that sometimes leads to a shift or mediation of voice from "the margin to the center," often the black women that 1 examine in this dissertation are careful to write in ways that make it impossible to divorce the person speaking hrom what is being said. Nevertheless, 1 also consider in this chapter the way that the academic life, with the challenges of getting tenured and getting published, has led to all sorts of pressure on many black women intellectuals to

"sound like " their white male counterparts. Moreover, 1 argue, for the most part, that the only time black women are forgotten and unheard is when they give into the constraints of the ivory tower and mute their own voices. 1 use the examples of Trudier Harris and Patricia Williams to discuss the ways that intellectual

29 women in the academy either are working toward making themselves present or actively muting their voices for the sake of acceptance and employment Finally

1 consider the ways that black women have managed to make a tradition of unsilencing themselves through using their own personal narratives. In looking at the career of Zora Neale Hurston, who successfully blended personal experience with the academic life, 1 provide a theoretical model through which black women intellectuals can protect themselves from the pull of obscurity.

Although much of what is written about Hurston's life focuses on the fact that she died in an unmarked grave, her wonderful contributions to society forgotten and devalued, 1 look at the success of Hurston's life in being able to

maintain her fascination with blackness despite the constraints of the time in

which she wrote. 1 also do an analysis of a Southern intellectual woman, Annie

Greene Nelson, who despite having been raised in poverty and having no money

to speak of, managed to fashion herself as an author, playwright and storyteller.

Nelson is not a woman who is widely known outside of South Carolina, but, as

the first black woman to publish a novel in the state, she gives credence to the

fact that black women were not silenced because of sociopolitical conditions—

meaning they were not deterred from becoming intellectuals because some

people believed that it would be too difficult to do so. Nelson also provides

evidence that black women primarily wrote for black audiences and were

primarily interested in locating their stories within black culture. The discussion

30 of identity and audience in Nelson's work then becomes an excellent bridge into the next chapter in which I discuss the theoretical language used by literary critics and how questions of audience and intention impact the way we read black women's texts.

In chapter four, 1 problematize the use of postmodern theory. Many black theorists have questioned the applicability of postmodern theory to black texts.

Intellectuals like Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks, and Barbara

Christian have actually found that there is a space for African-Americans, more specifically African-American women in the theoretical debates. Despite the seeming inaccessibility of contemporary literary theory, there are many intellectuals who have been able to negotiate this terrain successfully. However, instead of celebrating this success, it seems more valuable to question what the limits are of postmodern theory. It seems that postmodern theory breaks down at the exact moment that it attempts to talk about blackness and gender in any way outside of our stereotypical notions of the terms. This chapter considers the divide between Africcin-American male and female intellectuals along theoretical lines. It examines the seeming unwillingness of the male theorists to do intellectual work that is culturally specific. It also teases out what role if any emotionalism has in intellectual work. I revisit bell hooks' notion that love or lack there of, particularly love of black culture, plays a role in the way that black women "do" theory. By once again going over the historic debates that took

31 place inNewLiteraiyHîstoiy\>etwesx{. Joyce A. Joyce, Henry Louis Gates, and

Houston Baker, I consider how black men have also participated in the distortion of the black female image. Likewise, I read Joyce's and Gayles' works ageiinst

Henry L. Gates' and Houston Baker's in order to uncover which voices are really privileged in terms of African-American women's literature. It is only by examining male bias in intellectual discourse that it is possible to establish the black female intellectual's identity.

In chapter five, 1 consider what it means to be a public black female intellectual. What is it that causes some black women to become celebrated and accepted? What accounts for the phenomenal power and popularity of Oprah

Winfrey? How is Winfrey as a cultural icon complicit in the silencing of other black women figures? Why is it that her movie Belovedvfd& a box ofrice nightmare? And where exactly does Toni Morrison, as Nobel Prize winner and an "accepted" member of the literary canon, frt into all of this? All these question are posed with the desire to tease out the way in which popularity has actually hindered the work of black women intellectuals. Using Ann duCille's work in her essay "The Occult of True Black Womanhood, " I interrogate the manner in which the black female image is portrayed in popular culture.

As bell hooks notes in her Black Looks, black women, as exotic others, are being literally consumed by popular culture. This consumption means that rarely are black women discussed, theorized, or viewed without some reference to The

32 Black Woman, this black everywoman who is symbolized by Oprah Winfrey,

Toni Morrison, and, even on some small level, hooks herself. Moreover, by examining Morrison's stellar career as an author and spokesperson, I discuss ways in which fame can silence women. I consider the difference between being a public and private intellectual and the significance that has in terms of where women fit into American culture. I read Morrison's works as emblematic of the full intellectual participation which Marita Bonner and Anna Julia Cooper promised at the turn of the century. However, Morrison, far from suggesting that the fight to be heard has been won, makes a case for the ways that black women's true voices continue to be silenced.

In summation, I hope that this work will show the significant ways that black women intellectuals have contributed to American culture. It seems apropos to point out here that black women throughout history have been building on Cooper's assertion that "only the Black woman can say when and where I enter... the whole Negro race enters with me." Although the black woman may have entered quietly, she will leave this century as one of the most recognized and valued voices in literature. I hope that my work will spur further investigation into black women's cultural products, because there are many more black women who could not be talked about within the confines of this dissertation, but deserve more attention. This is a starting point for informed readers to consider the ways that black women intellectuals have been

33 making an impact not only amongst themselves but in the larger society. Bonner is correct in this; It is definitely time for black women who have been sitting like all knowing Buddhas, comfortable in the position of icon or convenient and usable dark body, to finally stand on our feet.

34 CHAPTERl

WHAT MY GRANDMOTHER KNEW: A PERSONAL MEMOIR

M ygrandmother was a beautiful woman. When Iask anyone for accounts o fher life this is what they say. She was a beautiful woman, a little vain, but she married well. M ygrandfather Qaibome was an older man and found him a fine young thing. True she washvm the wrong side o f the tracks, but she waspretty and she expected the world to take care o fher because o f that fact. lam notas goodlooking as m y grandmother, but Ihave always fe lt a close afSnity to her.

Perhaps it is because I was bom the same week that she died, orperhaps it is because m y m iddle name is taken from her first name. W hatever m y spiritual and em otional connection is to this woman, Ihave always known that "pretty" couldnot be her whole story, all o f what she was. She m ust have thought about the px)litical dynamics that made it neœssary for her to seek r ^ ^ tiom her difficult life in marriage. Surely shepondered the racial structure o f Danville,

Virginia and what role growing up in the segregated South playedin her destiny. Surely she considered these things because she made choices about

35 her life based on her understanding o f race andgender and the lim its that they placed on her m obility.

Less reported is the fact that m ygrandmother was smart. M y father is the only one to say that she had been the sm artest person in her high school class and would ha ve been welcomed m anyone's college. M y father speaks o f his m other'syearning for an intellectual life. He talks about her need to be significant andhow this need waspresent in theJournals she kept. M y grandmother could have been an Arma Julia Cooper, Pauline H opkins, Zora

Neale Hurston, or Toni Morrison, but the life o fthe public intellectual wasn't

what she chose. She chose pretty instead, and it is this choice that keeps me up at n ig h t.

THE BEGINNING: AUCE WALKER'S "IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS' GARDENS

Almost thirty years ago, Alice Walker was the first one to call to my attention, or to anyone's attention for that matter, the necessity of going "in search of our mothers' gardens" if we are ever to truly understand and

It is extremely unusual for black women to keep record o f their private lives, unless they were already published writers. Many journals by black women have been lost in fire or by other natural means, as is the case with my grandmother’s writings, or they have simply been lost. I have been trying to form a collection o f black women’s journals before 1950, but I have found it to be extremely difficult Usually those who had time to write, who were not burdened by work, cleaning, childrearing, or just plain fear, were those who had the things that Virginia Wolf ,in her famous essay, claimed were necessary for an intellectual life: a “ room o f one’s own” and money, which buys you die time to create. My grandmother, was extremely fortunate in that she did have the time to write—she had all of the luxuries and time which pretty could buy her. 36 appreciate the creativity of black women “ The reason. Walker argued, that it is so important to go on this quest to uncover the artistic and intellectual lives of women like my grandmother, our great-grandmothers, or our slave women ancestors is because if we did not, then we would by default support the idea that black women had not produced any intelligent or worthwhile cultural products until well into the 1950s—the black female intellectuals' emergence being marked in the dominant culture, of course, by Gwendolyn Brooks winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her collection of poetry,Annie Allen. Walker's "In

Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" suggests, rightfully so, that we need to ferret out incidents of black women's intellectualism and creativity because the harshness of these women's lives often precluded them from becoming celebrated artists, writers, poets, and dramatists. Although Walker only refers to our mothers and grandmothers as "artists," I use the terms "artist" and

"intellectual" interchangeably because I believe that to be an artist is coterminus with the desire to have an intellectual understanding of the world. Moreover, being an intellectual simply implies that you have employed the contemplative and creative portion of the brain in order to arrive at some workable theory that can be expressed in writing (which is the intellectual form that I am principally concerned with in this study), or through dance, song, sculpture, or a pot of coUard greens.

This idea is &om an essay and book of die same tide.In Search o f Our Mothers ' Gardens: fVonuinist 37 More importantly, our evaluation of the lives of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers as ones of dull labor and child-rearing, what Zora Neale

Hurston terms "mules of the world," leads us to suspect as readers the nature of black women's intellectualism and question whether or not what these women, as former slaves and children of slaves, have to say is of value to anyone who wants an accurate and thought-provoking picture of the world around us. In pointing out the problems that awaited women like Walker's own mother who strove to be an artist/ gardener in the Post-Reconstruction Era, Walker uses Jean

Toomer's descriptions in 1925 of the way that southern life dissipated the spirituality and creative force of the women who lived there, especially if these women were black. Walker states that black women living in the early part of the Twentieth Century

stumbled blindly through their lives: creatures so abused and

mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they

considered themselves unworthy of even hope. In the selfless

abstractions their bodies became to men who used them, they

became "sexual objects," more even than mere women: they

became "Saints"... These crazy saints stared out at the world,

wildly, like lunatics-or quietly, like suicides... Who were these

Prose. San Diego Jlarcouit Biacc Jovanovich, 1983. Ail Anther references to this work appear in the text 38 saints? These crazy, loony, pitiful women? Some of them without a

doubt were our mothers and grandmothers (402).

While Walker's descriptions are surely accurate, the fate of suicide and pain is not what was or is true for all black women who wanted to make a creative life for themselves. If it were, we would not have such a strong tradition of literature by African-American women dating back to the very early arrival of Africans to these shores.

Walker's essay leads us to question what was different about the women who were not held back by circumstance and did create, those women who felt an almost religious-like calling to give voice to what was happening in the world around them—women like Mary Church Terrrel, Gertrude Mossell, Anna Julia

Cooper, Ida B. Wells, France Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Marita Bonner, Phillis

Wheatley and Harriet Jacobs. ^ What about women like my grandmother who created by writing in journals, but had this work destroyed-was her life one of mind-numbing pain? My grandmother was not a saint, neither was she crazy or pitiful. Yes she had to use her intellectualism and creativity to figure how to make a life for herself outside of her family's less than prosperous past, but even

It is necessary to note that many of the black women who found their way into print in the early Twentieth Century were able to do so because of their class status. Women like Mary Church Terrel, who was educated at Oberlin College, would have had a very different life from a woman like Walker’s grandmother or even my grandmother, for that matter. However, many who read and interpreted Alice Walker’s essay did not make the distinction between middle class, educated black women and poor, Southern black women. An analysis of Walker’s essay seemed to lump all black women together and place

39 this choice shows that there was a power in her creativity, no matter how much it was masked.

It seems that in popular parlance, even to some of our leading intellectual women like Walker, Angela Davis, or Barbara Christian, that a black woman's identity in the post-Reconstruction era was largely configured by her role as a laborer. Angela Davis argues, for example, that labor was the defining aspect of black women's lives:

the enormous space that work occupies in Black women's lives

today follows a pattern established during the very earliest days of

slavery. As slaves, compulsory labor overshadowed every other

aspect of women's existence. It would seem, therefore, that the

starting point for the exploration of Black women's lives under

slavery would be an appraisal of their role as workers.”

However in limiting the exploration of black women's lives to their function as workers or servants (Black women have historically operated in some caretaking capacity as maids or mammies) any serious study into the lives of black women who decided not to function in a serving capacity is severely stymied.

Moreover, as bell hooks notes, the insistence on maintaining the stereotypical representations of black women as caregivers and servants impacts the value them at the lowest common denominator. It is the stereotype of abjection” which many theorists including black women theorists have latched onto.

40 that black people themselves place on intellectual work: "Cultural insistence that black women be regarded as 'service workers' no matter our job or career status, as well as Black female passive acceptance of such roles may be the major factor preventing more black women from choosing to become intellectuals"(B rea kin g

Bread, 155).

Alice Walker's words seemed to be passively accepting the role of black women as service workers leading others to surmise that no matter what intellectual work black women aspire to, it is their role as servants to which they ultimately return. Moreover, Walker's revision of Phillis Wheatley's life in "In

Search of Our Mother's Gardens" looks not at its triumphs, because of her successful writing life, but at its apparent tragedy. Despite the fact that Wheatley gained heedom from her master because of her ability to construct poems written in a language that was not originally her own, and often had a servant herself for many years because of her favored status as a poet. Walker sees

Wheatley's life as one of frustration. Walker states:

she [Wheatley] was "so thwarted and hinderedby... contrary

instincts, that she... lost her health..." In the last years of her life,

burdened not only with the need to express her gift but also with a

penniless, friendless 'freedom' and several small children for whom

she was forced to do strenuous work to feed, she lost her health,

^ From Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class. Although Davis began her career strictly looking at the 41 certainly. Suffering from malnutrition and neglect and who knows

w hat mental agonies, Phillis Wheatley died (405).

In an effort to explain why it is that only recently attention has been given to black women and their artistic and intellectual expression, arguments are made about the conditions of black women's lives and how it was nearly impossible, if not illegal, for them to engage in any sustained intellectual or artistic effort.

Reading Henry Louis Gates' essay " Writing "Race" and the Difference it Makes" the obstacles that lay in the way of a black person (without even throwing gender into the mix) theorizing about their lives and expressing that theory in some outward manner is made plain. Gates argues that more often than not intellectualism and writing was spurred on by the belief of its very impossibility;

If blacks could publish imaginative literature, then they could, in

effect, take a few "giant steps" up the chain of being in an evil game

of "Mother, May I?" For example scores of reviews of Wheatley's

book argued that the publication of her poems meant that the

African was indeed human and should not be enslaved... Writing,

for these slaves, was not an activity of the mind; rather it was a

commodity which they were forced to trade their humanity...

work of Black women as laborers, more recently she has turned to study of black women intellectualism and Blues Music in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism published in 1998. 42 Ironically, Anglo-African writing arose as a response to allegations

of its absence

This is hardly an atmosphere that encourages the contemplative life, which according to bell hooks necessitates time away from the pressures of daily existence. Black women's daily lives were about nothing but pressure.

However, I would like to contend something radically different here, that perhaps these conditions were not limiting but inspiring. So much is made of the fact, as Barbara Christian notes, that " the economic and social restrictions of slavery and racism have historically stunted the creative lives of black women," that almost no serious theoretical attention is paid to the way that these very same horrors have driven African-American women to make tremendous contributions to American culture through their intellectual expression.^^

Black people's lives were and are hard, but there is something compelling in looking at the problems imposed by race and class, not as the limit of black

women's existence as intellectuals, but as a point of departure. As Alfonso

Hawkins notes in his dissertation on the musical underpinnings of African-

American autobiography, "pain is often a prerequisite to creative endeavors."”

Although many theorists have noted the role that suffering has played in

” From the introduction to"‘Race, " Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1985) 8-11. ” from Barbara Christian’s Essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” ReprintedWithin in the Circle: An Anthology ofAfrican-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell. Duke University Press: Durham, 1994. p. 411. ” From Alfonso Hawkins’s dissertationThe Musical Tradition as an Affirmation o f Cultural Identity in African American Autobiography (The Ohio State Unhrersity ) 1993:110. 43 generating jazz, blues, and Negro spirituals, not enough attention is placed on the way that hardships have also contributed to the development of theoretical and intellectual writing.

It is no accident that bell hooks has been the only person, to my knowledge, to write consistently about the role that love, with its joy and sorrows, has played in intellectual discourse by African Americans. W In o u n d s o f Passion: A W riting U fe, hooks explores the way that her 15-year love affair contributed in indispensable ways to her development as a feminist and scholar.

In this work, that is as much an autobiography as it is a book of literary and cultural criticism, hooks points out that the word passion is taken ffom the Latin

F a to ir , which means to suffer. The same passion that goes into love relationships is also the inspirational fire that goes into writing and intellectual work. One suffers in love as one suffers in their creative life.

When bell hooks first began to write about love, as she has in W o u n d s o f

Passion and her most recent work. A ll A bout Lave, many people began questioning why a serious intellectual and academician would talk about such unlearned and even primal things. In talking to several scholars informally about the work I do and my desire to talk about intellectual women like bell

Houston Baker’s Blues Ideology and African American Literature is one attempt to look at the way that the Blues, with its basis in hardship fomwlates a mode of literary practice, but in Baker’s abstract applications the book never really attempts to bridge the gap between the intellect and the emotions. W .E£. Du Bois manages to talk about the emotive function of black hardship in hisSouls o f Black Folk, but he only refers to slavery and how it gave birth to sorrow songs. He does not mention suffering as a basis for literary enterprises. 44 hooks, I immediately elicit comments about what is wrong with hooks' work.

Many have said to me, and these people wish to remain anonymous, that hooks' criticism seems to them to be an extended means of therapy-simply a way for her to work out her own personal problems. "Why doesn't she just go see a psychologist." "I am sick of reading about her childhood angst," one colleague spoke in whispers. The problem it seems is not so much with hooks as an intellectual, but with the material that is at the basis of her intellectual understanding. It seems that many readers of her work, especially if they consider themselves scholars, take issue with the fact that hooks does not hide her past in shame, or make excuses for the fact that her work relies heavily on anecdotes from her family and community. She unabashedly says that if it were not for her past, and the feelings of suffering she endured, that she would not have begun to think seriously about the way that culture and politics intersect in our lives, hooks states:

1 turned towards intellectual work in a desperate search for an

oppositional standpoint that would help me survive a painful

childhood... During adolescence, I underwent a conversion

process that pushed me towards intellectual life. Constantly

persecuted and punished in our family, my attempts to understand

my lot pushed me in the direction of critical analytical thought.

Standing at a distance from my childhood experience, looking at it

45 with detached disengagement, was a survival strategy for me...

Wounded, at times persecuted and abused, I found the life of the

mind a refuge, a sanctuary where I could experience a sense of

agency and thereby construct my own subject identity.”

It is the abuse and suffering which allows hooks to fashion herself as a writer, just as it is the harshness of being a slave, laborer, or someone who is historically and systematically discriminated against on the basis of both race and gender that allowed many black women to write. However, the official story is that it was these things that prevented women from ever coming to voice. Much of the argument against the possibility of black women being intellectuals seems to based on the idea that it was extremely difficult for

European Americans to create under such circumstances. To be a serious artist or thinker who had the time to look critically at American life and culture, you had to have been a woman like Emily Dickinson, who was agoraphobic and supported financially by her family; you had to have, as Virginia Wolf suggested,

"a room of one's own." What did it mean if you lived in a tent, were illiterate, and no one in your family knew what a dollar bill looked like? Well since

Dickinson, Virginia Wolf, and others would not have been able to create under such circumstances, then surely these "mules of the world" would not be able to d o it.

” From bell hooks’ and Cornel West’sBreaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South 46 In returning to Alice Walker's ground breaking essay, we can see how her evaluation of the struggle inherent in black women's lives might have led others to misunderstand her words and set an adverse precedent for the way that

African-American women's intellectual work would be examined. Walker asks us to imagine for ourselves what life would have been like for women like my grandmother who wished to fashion herself as an artist or intellectual. The picture that Walker paints makes the possibility my grandmother being anything other than an abused wife and mother seem pretty grim:

For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but

Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of

creativity in them for which there was no release... What did it

mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time?

In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question cruel enough to

stop the blood.

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who

died under some ignorant and depraved overseer's lash? or was

she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she

cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets.. (402).

Walker paints a very poetic picture of the dire conditions of black women's lives, but she never meant for that picture to become all of what black women are. In

EndPtess, 1991) 148-9.

47 the second half of the essay she attempts to reclaim the notion of a black woman artist by saying that if we want representations of black women's genius we need not look in museums and libraries, but at the way that these women have functioned in the home. However by the time Walker writes the sentence, "but this is not the end of the story," it is too late (403). The readers of the essay have already been so thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of black women being artists that it is a difficult discursive leap to make to now believe that these women are really very creative people, even if this creativity is largely unrecognized. It is understandable that the readers of the essay cannot make the connection between the two disparate images of the insane saint and the quiltmaker. Walker's essay makes it too easy for her audience to go off on romantic tangents imagining how difficult it was for black women historically to find creative expression.

White women, who first read Walker's essay inM s. magazine in 1972,

might have been guilty of romanticizing the lives of older black women

intellectuals and artists, because the idea of black women existing only as abject

beings would have worked particularly well with their own political agenda. It

is easy to imagine that they hoped to form solidarity with black women based on

the idea of suffering and silence as the primary hindrance to equality. Although

largely the focus in feminist writing was on white women who were struggling

48 artists, black women later found a loophole into the feminist movement by also arguing inequality based on silence and forced domestic responsibilities.

However, it is the second half of Walker's essay that is especially important to black women who are also feminist, because this section posits the idea that black women become artists by creating objects that have "everyday use." **

In the second half of the essay. Walker relates the personal story of her own mother, who as she said, "literally covered the holes in the wall with sunflowers" (408). Her mother's ability to garden, in Walker's estimation, is the same as say Van Gogh creating his own "Sunflowers." It has the same value.

Walker's essay is unbelievably important in that it helped to change the dominant culture's perception of the work that black women do in the world.

Walker, like Ntozake Shange, recognized that it had long been the practice in

America to devalue what Ahrican American's were doing as low art and anti­ intellectual because it did not ht into standard forms. For example, Shange argues in a interview with Qaudia Tate inBlack Women W riters A t Work,

It annoys me when people think my writing isn't intellectual. That to me is a denigration of Ahro-American culture. I have an overwhelming amount of material that I could footnote if I wanted to. I could make my work very official and European and say "the Del Vikings were a group of singers." ... but why should I... There has been a systematic cultural attack on black people that has propagated the misconception that we have only this little thing over here: this bottle top and this piece of gum ... So it is important for me to keep writing these things that refer to our culture, even

“ Everyday Use” is the title o f one of Walker’s short stories which explores that value of folk culture in daily life. 49 though in the U S. it is called "popular culture" or "vernacular culture." For me James Brown, Earth Wind, and Fire, [andJThe Art Ensemble of Chicago... are all h fg h a x t. I will stick to my guns about that. We do not have to refer continually to European art as the standard. That's absurd and racist, and I won't participate in an utter lie. My work is one of the few ways I can preserve the elements of our culture that need to be remembered and absolutely revered (164).

However important the acknowledgement is of "low" or vernacular art as important work, we cannot help but to put pressure on some of Shange's and

Walker's assumptions. While it is true that many women found the intellectu£il life a difficult one to lead, and chose instead to make a mean pot of coUard greens, or like my grandmother to make a pretty life, it takes the attention away from women who did decide to create as public intellectuals. The idea that black women's intellectualism primarily exists at a vernacular level is both true and untrue.

It is true in that many black women, and indeed all black people, as

Houston Baker maintains, base their creativity on certain aspects of black culture—the use of a hybrid language, folk, blues and work songs, etc. However what is untrue and even a dangerous assumption is the idea that the only

intellectualism that black women are capable of is the type that exist in quilts, in song, in cooking, and in other forms of folk expression. What Walker was saying

is that these forms of creativity are as valuable as the canvas, sculpture, essay,

novel, or poem, because it is common in dominant American culture to devalue

that which is not written. Indeed, much of the recovery work that scholars have 50 been doing in African-American literature has been devoted to the idea that something that we have is just as good as the body of literature that forms the western canon or the western artistic traditions. The argument goes like this: the reason that Africans don't have as large a body of written work is because their tradition is largely oral. African societies were based on the spoken word or the talking drum. As the rap artist Mos Def says, when we have something to say we put it in song. He raps "we sing songs of inspiration, we sing songs of liberation, we sing songs to get our minds up off our fucked up situation."”

It is true that our traditions did not need to necessarily be written down in order to be passed down, but 1 believe that being wedded to that idea prevents us hrom really looking fully looking into what happens when black women actually take the leap of faith from crazy saint to published author. As Marita

Bonner notes. Black women who are artists are like Buddha(s), not like lunatics.

These intellectuzd women have been sitting silently, but "entirely sure of

[themselves]; motionless and knowing"-realizing that when the time is "ripe,

[they can swoop to [their] feet-at [their] full height-at a single gesture."

THE PROBLEM OF RACE AND THE DIFFERENCES IMPOSED BY GENDER

So contrary to popular belief, the AAican-American female intellectual has

always existed and been an important part of the American literary landscape for

as long as there have been Africans in this country. Being a graduate student in

” From Mos D efs latest CD. The song is entitled “Rock and Roll.” 51 an English department and one who is primarily concerned with American literature, I, unfortunately, had not met these women often. I did not know their names. I did not know where they lived and what they did. Because of the little attention paid them, it seemed that these women were hardly more than speculation, rumor, and myth. 1 did not know these women but instinctively knew that they existed. How did I know? I am a black woman. 1 am surrounded by black women. 1 have seen the way that black women like my grandmother and mother behave in their communities and homes. In fact, knowing what 1 do about black women's strength, creativity, and promise it was impossible to believe that black women had not contributed in some very important ways to

American literature and literary theory.

1 realize that in a post-modern age when most Academicians insist on the death of the author and the primacy of the text, to claim that I knew about a rich tradition of Ahrican-American women's intellectualism by virtue of the fact of shared identity is a dangerous declaration. Of course race is not real, it is a construct. That is what we are told. Language is not colored. This whole "race thing" would seem to be a figment of our imagination if not for the fact that it has become such a commodity in popular culture. We traffic in race. Race writing has become compulsive (perhaps it is because of great racial moments like the O.J. Simpson case or the Qarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings) and it has since the 1800s comprised a vast amount of our literary output-not just by

52 African Americans but by White Americans as well. What is most ironic about race writing is that authors and theorists build entire careers as race writers seemingly without any complicity. Most of these theorists like Kwame Anthony

Appiah and Henry Louis Gates spend a lot of time insisting that race doesn't exist, while, at the same time, becoming the leading race theorists. What

perpetuates "race" writing, autobiographical narratives, essays, fiction, and other

forms of art by black intellectuals is the adamant dismissal by race theorists of

race as a motivating presence in American culture.

Race is a closed system-which, suffering from inertia, must eventually, it

seems, wind down. However, race is such an integral part of our consciousness,

whether real or imagined, so that much of our energy, almost against our will,

goes into examining it and keeping it alive. Race is an old construct that we just

do not want to let go. It is both the calm and the storm, the challenge and the

refuge. It is like an abusive lover.

It was in slavery that race first became a powerful visual and literary

signifier. Dark meant slave. Light meant free. It was a simple relational equation

really. Skin color which was once incidental became defining. If you fell on the

wrong side of this imagined dividing line, it meant that you were forced into

inhumanity, that you could be beaten, raped, told where to go, when to get up,

and what to do. If you fell on the other, then you had the right to create your

own destiny. You were free. Race, color consciousness, identity politics, or by

53 whatever name this system of classification, justification and reward, of checks and balances is called became a heavily contested area firaught with danger-so dangerous in fact that it could very well cost you your life.

Witness the period of lynching that took place firom the 1882 until 1936.

Of the 3,383 people lynched over this period, more than 30 percent were men who allegedly committed the egregious crime of race mixing. It is not apparent whether or not any of these men actually had relations with any white women, but no matter if their relationship was cosensual or not, whether there was a

relationship or not, because of the stigma of race, sex between a black man and a

white woman was always constituted as rape.“ It would be wonderful to

trivialize race. We all on some subconscious level wish to do it. To be able to ask

naive questions like the black motorist Rodney King, who, after being beaten

because of his race and having a riot spring up around that beating, questioned

why black and white people "cannot just get along." There is always a denial of

history in literary studies that makes it more comfortable to talk about the

literature as if it did not matter who was writing. But it does. What does it mean

that my grandmother, being a pretty southern black woman, wrote small,

although lost, narratives of her life? What does it mean that in yearning for an

intellectual life, she chose the kind of pampered existence that many white

women were fleeing? What did it mean that she watched the black women

54 around her work their whole lives? How did this affect the way that she expressed herself? These are questions of personal significance to me that I need my grandmother's presence to answer.

It is impossible to theorize about my grandmother's life without understanding how she thought about her own situation. Since her writing is lost to us all, 1 am hoping to find her voice in the voices of the women in this dissertation: Anna Julia Cooper, Marita Bonner, Patricia Williams, bell hooks,

Toni Morrison, and Ann duCille—women who have had similar experiences based on race, class, and sex. I am looking for my grandmother's face in the faces of these women.

INTELLECTUALS VS. EDUCATORS

The search for my grandmother's voice seemed to many at first to be a wild goose chase, a search and seizure mission to uncover a cachet of intellectual black women who we thought lived at one time but we never knew for sure since there had not been any record of their achievements. Marita Bonner spoke prophetically inFrye Street and Environs^ a collection of short stories, essays, and plays that comprised this Radcliffe-educated woman's writing life- of the role that the black woman intellectual would come to play in American culture some 65 years later. Bonner understood, then, that the black women who seemed ignored, silenced, and ineffectual in early 20th Century American culture

^ This infonnation is taken from John Blassingame’s and Maiy Frances Berry’sLong Memory: The Black 55 were in fact laying-in-wait for a time in which they could "swoop to [their] feet" and emergea s the voice of reason, as the leaders in a new world order. Bonner intuited that wisdom was gendered female, but she also realized, paradoxically, that in the delivering of lectures, the telling of stories, the braiding of hair, the sewing of quilts, the publishing of articles and books, and in the myriad of other ways that women transmit their ideas and share their intellectual property that there had been an error in translation, an error so gross that women and wisdom were often believed to be two separate domains. The wisdom was passed down while the women were merely passed over. This erasure, of course, had everything to do with power.

It was really an insidious act—this deracination—this forced removal of women from the land of wisdom. It was a witch hunt that proved so effective that it even convinced some women that they did not possess any knowledge that was worth public exposure. Women moved inward, their intellectualism became mostly a private affair. They wrote in journals, were creative homemakers, and took part in church activities. They did not forget that they possessed a wisdom that was almost older than time, but it seemed that they did think that proving women were by nature as intellectual as men could perhaps wait. They were content to do what women who knew that they had been gifted intellectually always did— they became teachers. So, far from being silenced.

Experience in America. (New Yoik and Oxford: Oxford Unwersi^ Press, 1983)123. 56 these women used the limitations placed on them by place, color, economics, and gender to find crafty ways to disseminate their ideas.

The landscape is littered with them-these great women who insisted that their young charges leam the classics, be proficient in languages, be whizzes at mathematics, leam a trade, and, on top of all that, be cleaner and more polite than their white counterparts (because as my maternal grandmother, herself a teacher for 40 years, would always say, "a black person had to be twice as good because they had twice as far to rise"). These women often put off making their own statement about the place of black women in intellectual thought, instead they raised a race of children and young adults to be intellectuals. This is of course a commendable feat. However, this nurturing of knowledge in others was actually at the expense of their own identity. The dominant culture would, because of this choice, chose to believe that the only intellectualism that black women were capable of was teaching. According to bell hooks inB r e a k in g

Bread: Insurgent Black IhtellectuaJ U fe ^ e idea that teaching and intellectualism were synonymous was also a readily made assumption in the black community:

Growing up in a segregated, southern, poor and working-class

community where education was valued primarily as a means of

class mobility, "intellectual life" was always linked to the career of

teaching. It was the outward service as a "teacher" helping to

uplift the race, where teachers could gain an individual acceptance

57 within the black community... Growing up in such a world, it was

more than evident that there was a socially understood difference

between excelling academically and becoming an intellectual.

Anyone could teach but not everyone would be an intellectual

(148-9).

While it is true that the teaching profession was a socially accepted form of intellectual expression, it is also true that not everyone who was a teacher was an intellectual. However, in the case of black women we know that many of women who were frustrated in their writing lives found a way to disseminate their ideas in the classroom. Moreover, while many black women only became teachers and did not publish their work, there eire a few who did both well. For example,

Anna Julia Cooper, who is arguably one of the most important black female intellectuals, spent almost her entire life as a contemplative and creative writer and popular public speaker who also found expression through teaching. It is important to know her story.

ANNA JULIA COOPER: A REAUSTIC IMAGE OF AN EARLY BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUAL

At a very young age, the precocious Cooper was discouraged from letting her intellectualism form fully because at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh,

North Carolina black women were encouraged to express interests in subjects having to do with nursing and home economics. Cooper wanted to study classics but had to content herself with trades. She did not give up on her dream 58 of letting her intellectual life flourish and, after going to Oberlin College and meeting other women like Mary Church Terrell who were also black and interested in non-traditional studies, she decided to more fully devote herself to her first love. However, in many of her teaching jobs controversy would surround her teaching of the classics, and other non-technical subjects.

When Cooper was principal of the prestigious M street school in

Washington D C. during the years 1901-1930, she insisted on offering a classical education to the students—giving practical application to the theory that is attributed to Du Bois and his notion of the "talented tenth." However, she suffered ffom this choice and according to Charles Lemmert she had to leave her post for five years because her theories about teaching differed so greatly ffom

Booker T. Washington's, who at the time was the most powerful black man in the land." She was fired ffom that job under a flurry of scandal in 1906, part of which was the accusation that she was having an illicit affair with a boarder.^^

However, many, herself included, believed that she was fired because of the kinds of courses she insisted on teaching and because men were ffightened of just how intelligent and powerful she was. What speaks most poignantly to the fact that Cooper had a lifelong struggle to claim herself as an intellectual is the fact that she felt that she had to wait until she was 66 years old so that she could

^ ' The controveisy surrounding Cooper and her teaching is discussed in the introductory chapterThe of Voice o f Anna Julia Cooper. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers] 9-11. This is also the source of much of the bibliographic information that I relate about Cooper. All further references to this work appear in the text. 59 finish her requirements to get her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1892,

Anna Julia Cooper became the first black woman to publish a book-length collection of feminist essays. Her book, XVoiœ From the South,\&dt.vciodi

It is Cooper's intellectual life as a writer instead of a teacher that is most intriguing. What is most apparent in her writing is that she perceives the role of women as thinkers to be one of their most valuable jobs. Contrary to the general perception of black women being frustrated creatively, especially if they were slaves or ex-slaves. Cooper doesn't feel limited by race, gender, geography, or a history of slavery in terms of the kind of time and efrort that she can devote to her intellectualism. Moreover, she doesn't seem to fall into the notion that black women's intellectual work suffers because of the lack of attention given to it. For example. Cooper states, "not unfelt, if unproclaimed has been the work and the influence of the colored woman of America" (115). She did not believe that because the dominant culture and even black men didn't assign value to the work that black women intellectuals were doing that their work was futile or worthless. It would be hard to place Cooper in the paradigm of the abused and frustrated creative that has been so long been the predominant image of black women, intellectual or not When Cooper asserted that.

Charles Lemmert reports that the allegations centered around Cooper’s foster son. P.9 60 In this last decade of our century, changes of such moment are in

progress... To be a woman in such an age carries with it a

privilege and opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman

of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep

significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it

seems to me, unique in the ages (117).

The pride and the utter sense of satisfaction and accomplishment is w hat is apparent in Cooper's writing. No where in her descriptions is a woman anything like what Walker described. Moreover, it is the pain and the struggle that Cooper endured on her way to becoming the great thinker, writer, feminist, and teacher that she was that makes her story all the more interesting. It is apparent that nothing was going to stand in the way of Cooper asserting her voice. Her collection of essays is aptly titled, y4Voice From the South, \xcdi\xs& she gave voice and validity to women who chose an intellectual path. It is difficult then to give much credence to the arguments that her voice was silenced within the tradition of Affican American literature or in the larger culture.

How can we possibly argue that Cooper, a woman who was Principal of the M Street School in Washington DC, who taught Latin, Greek, and

Mathematics at St. Augustine's College, Lincoln Institute, and Wilberforce

University produced a line of intellectual discourse that began and ended in the

Women's Era of the 1890s? Do we think th a ta woman who received a Ph D. at

61 66 years of age was silenced and ineffectual? Do we think that Cooper whispered when she said, "Only the Black woman can say when and where the I enter in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood... then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." Those were not whispered words. She was not a silenced woman. She possessed not merely a voice, but shouted out from the South to literally change the American intellectual landscape.

Obviously Cooper knew what my Grandmother knew: although the intellectual path is arduous and winding, once on that road there is no turning back. My grandmother knew that struggle was only the beginning of the black woman's journey as an intellectual. Perhaps the poet Jayne Cortez speaks for my grandmother and all the other black women who wish to fashion themselves as intellectuals when she says: "It's nothing/ this tragedy in our arms/ we can invent new bones/ new flesh/ new flowers against m adness/... it's nothing." "

The poem “ It’s Nothing” is from Jayne Cortez’s collectionCoagulations (New Yorit: Thundennouth Press, 1984)15. 62 CHAPTER!

PERSPICACITY: (1. n. keenness of mental perception; discernment, penetration)

Throughout our history... Black intellectuals have emerged from all classes and conditions o f life. However, the decision to consciously pursue an intellectual path has always been an exceptional and difficult choice. For many o f us it has been more like a "calling" than a vocational choice. We have been moved, pushed, even, in the direction o f intellectual work by forces stronger than individual will. •bell hooks, “Black Women Intellectuals’*

So knowing, what is known? that we carry our baggage in our cupped hands ... that it is more difficult than faith to serve only one calling one commitment one devotion in one life... -Lucille Clifton, “Far Memory”

THEORIZING BLACKNESS: RACE AND THE INTELLECTUAL PATH

Black people: this seems to be a subject that I am always talking about in some way or another, especially since I've been in graduate school. I remember trying to explain to one of the elders in my church, a very wise woman, what

63 exactly it was that I was doing in school. I tried to tell her that 1 was involved in the fierce debates that were raging in the academy about representation and race, that 1 was concerned with language and ways of reading, that 1 sought to find meaning in the gaps between signs, signifieds and signifiers. 1 was claiming my space and asserting my voice. On and on I went trying to explain what my work was, all the while thinking that this woman, who in all probability never went to college and never read any essay on critical race theory, could not possibly understand. And this beautiful woman, in this outstandingly extravagant, big, blue hat which shielded her face hrom the hot South Carolina sun, sat patiently through my ramblings about literan' theory and cultural studies and then simply said, "Oh, you talking about black people." "Why did you need to go all the way around the tree just to come back to the house?" So, in order to honor my elder's wisdom, 1 am very proud to say that 1 consider "talking about black people" to be my life's work and, furthermore, my exploration of black women and their words and images is part of a longstanding tradition of discourse in which intellectuals have theorized about what it means to be an African in this country that we call America.

Indeed, it seems as if I and many other black intellectuals are still grappling with the question that plagued W.E.B Du Bois in 1903: "what does it mean to be a problem?" Surely since the very early arrival of our ancestors to these shores, the ways in which black folks have sought to answer this question

64 has taken many forms: auto-biographical narratives, essays, novels, poems, folk songs, spirituals, plays and sermons, etc. Most of the early intellectual discourse dealt with race eind representation, or rather the content of our character, simply because these were the grounds upon which White America argued for slavery.”

As Henry Louis Gates, in the introduction toRace, W riting and D ifference, maintains, it was the very fact of slavery which compelled these bound individuals to write, that in fact the African American literary tradition emerged precisely because of allegations of its absence. Gates also argues that through their intellectual production, black people basically sought to establish their humanity and, in turn, their freedom. We immediately think of many black intellectuals who literally wrote themselves out of slavery: of course, Phillis

Wheatley, whose poems were the commodity she used to gain her walking papers, but also people like Maria Stewart, David Walker, Martin Delaney, and

Frederick Douglass whose works insisted on the rights of black people. The act of talking about black people became our primary intellectual enterprise precisely because it was so necessary to our very survival. As Patricia Williams w rites in The Alchem y o f Race and Rights, survival and identity go hand in hand. Moreover, the formation of an identity is severely limited by American culture, which asks the black thinker to construct an image of himself based on white ideals, ideals that are fundamentally damaging to African-Americans'

” I think that reading the pro-slavery arguments written by the Govemon of the slave states and other 65 sense of their own power. Williams writes, the cultural domination of blacks by whites means that the black self is placed at a distance even from itself... So blacks in white society are conditioned from infancy to see in themselves only what others, who despise them, see (62). Therefore, in order to be able to argue for their humanity and rights it was necessary for black people to devote their primary intellectual effort, enormous effort, in fact, to constructing an identity that would go against the damaging images that appear in almost every aspect of popular culture. The quedity of black people's day to day lives was definitely hampered by these images, because then one could argue, as many Americans did, that no one needed any affirmative action programs or welfare for inner city children because there was J.J. who appeared weekly on the television program.

Good Times. Because of J.J's laughing and joking demeanor, for example, the

American public was able to infer that black people were actually having a really good time being poor.

Moreover, there were so many in the dominant culture who ascribed to

Karl Marx's belief that since a people could not speak for themselves (meaning that they did not possess the intelligence to speak for themselves), then they must be spoken for. The results were television programs such as A m osn'

Andy, Good Times, andW hat's Happening, and official studies like the

M oniyhan Report, which brought to the world's attention that the fault for high

officials is extremely instnictive. Reading collections likeCotton is King helps one understand the backdrop agamst which black people had to construct their own identity. 66 rates of poverty and crime in the black community could be rested solely on the shoulders of black women who act as heads of their own households. We saw and continue to see in countless ways that when others, meaning white

Americans, speak for black women and/ or write about them it not only leads to misconceptions but to all sorts of violence being done in the name of both scholarly study and God.

Moreover, theorizing about black people, although significant in the 19th century has gained additional currency in more recent times particularly since the advent of African American studies as a discipline at our major white universities. The 1990's alone have witnessed the publication of several outstanding works by black intellectuals, such as bell hooks, Patricia J. Williams,

Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison and Gloria Wade-

Gayles, which attest to the importance of the black experience and attempt to answer Du Hois' probing question: what does it mean to be considered a problem by American society? And while black people were and are a very popular topic in intellectual discourse, increasingly we are becoming more fascinated with the idea of what it means to be both black and intellectual—meaning more and more we see, really in some sort of cannibalistic fashion, black intellectuals writing about other black intellectuals. Immediately 1 can think of four books that have emerged within the last five years: Joy James'Transcending the Talented Tenth:

Black Leaders and American Jhteilectuals, Routledge, 1997; VP Franklin's L iv in g

67 O urStoiies, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the M aking o f the AM can-

Am eiican intellectual Tradition, Scribner's, 1996; William Banks's B la c k

Intellectuals: Race and R esponsibility in American Life, Norton, 1996; and Ross

Posnock's Color and Culture. Black W riters and the M aking o f the M odem

Intellectual, Harvard UP,1998. All of these are really excellent intellectual studies that deal with AMcan-Americans who are arguably the best at writing or thinking about the situation that black people find themselves in.

However, it is important here to once again define my usage of the term intellectual. William Banks provides a particularly good definition in his book.

Banks, using Richard Hofstadter, defines the intellectuîil's project by insisting that a distinction be made between intellectualism and intelligence. According to Hofstadter: " the intellect... is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, the intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, imagines."” Although surely Dubois, Anna Julia Cooper, bell hooks, Toni Morrison and others are intelligent, what makes them intellectual, it seems, is the way in which they

"examine, theorize, or imagine " race. So in this way, Cassandra Wilson is an intellectual. Ice Cube is an intellectual, Jonathan Green, a wonderful painter firom

South Carolina is an intellectual. And the act of being an intellectual is created out of an oppositional stance—that is to say that what makes one intellectual is

68 arguing a point outside of the realm of what is basically considered fact. This oppositional stance is what Du Bois called "Double-consciousness." Therefore, if intelligence is judged by our ability to largely grasp what is factual (for example, we are intelligent if we can understand a mathematical formula), intellectualism is based on the idea that there is no fact, merely different ways of seeing, different approaches.

Again intellectualism thrives on the differences, on what is oppositional.

Thus we could not conceive of women's studies had not our educational system been largely male-centered, we could not conceive of any sort of ethnic studies had not our "valued" knowledge been mostly Euro-centric. Indeed, nothing happens in a vacuum. What we call African-American intellectualism exists because there was a competing line of discourse that argued for the very impossibility of black people being intellectual. One can think ofThe B ell Curve, a book which argued against African-Americans' inherent intelligence and intellectual ability and easily see what kind of intelligent intellectual response that this "scholarly study" has inspired in black people. All of this to say, then, that there would have been no America had it not been for black people.

Further, this idea of black people's metaphoric power supports Toni

Morrison's premise inPlaying in the Dark: W hiteness and the Literary

Im agination that it is black people's role as "outsiders," as the ominous dark

Hofstadter is quoted in William Bank’sBlack intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Lifo 69 presence, which enabled white American writers to construct an image of

America as the "land of the free and the home of the brave" with their words.

For example, Morrison states,

the way in which artists-and the society that bred them- transferred internal conflicts to a "blank darkness," to a conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies, is a major theme in American literature. The rights of man, for example, an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded, was inevitably yoked to Ahicanism. Its history, its origin is permanenüy allied with another seductive concept: the hierarchy of race... The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted heedom—if it did not in fact create it-like slavery. Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-hree but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination (38).

Morrison's work helps us to understand how the concepts of both

"America" and "blackness" are formed in the literature of white Americans.

However, it is also necessary to see how these concepts are formed in black intellectual discourse. An understanding of oppositions is useful here as well, although traditionally this is not a phenomenon that is discussed within the confines of African American culture, itself. When we think of "blackness," we think in terms of monolithic ideas: Jazz, Negro spirituals, police brutality, and

Martin Luther King. We do not consider that in accepting these spedhc

(New York: WW Norton, 1996] xv-jtvi 70 historical elements as the definition of blackness, that we are in fact accepting essentialist notions of black identity which may be re-inscribing racists ideals.

We do well to remember that Patricia Williams said that the elements that we use to configure our identities are actually formed out of the hatred or misconceptions of white Americans, or out of the belief that what is white is right and what is black is not. For exzunple, the major thrust of literature written by black women writers is to give evidence to the fact that there is a discourse other than the master narrative, the story of " America," which is often white and male. In terms of intellectual production, many people have become interested in these competing discourses by black women, whether it is because, as Ann duCille claims, the traditional fields of literary study have been too well-mined to make anyone who is a traditionalist competitive for academic jobs, or if it is that others feel that there is something to be learned about their own identity by reading black texts.

This turn toward blackness by the larger culture has curiously given rise to a reproduction of "master narrative" within African-American intellectualism, which is always already marginal. Therefore, a new concept of Afiican-

American identity and culture in intellectual discourse exists primarily because of the work of males and European Americans who began to contemplate

71 blackness in an attempt to celebrate difference.^* Whereas African-American intellectuals historically began exploring blackness as a topic out of political necessity— the abolition of slavery and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and

1970s, for example—many more have begun to talk about race because the larger culture has demanded it. America, in fact, has elected spokespeople for this camp of difference.

READING HENRY LOUIS GATES: THE PROBLEM OF COMMODIFYING BLACKNESS

Henry L. Gates, the head of the African American Studies Department at

Harvard University, Co-editor of theNorton Anthology o fAMcan American

Literature, creator along with Microsoft of the Ahricana Bicartat, and one of the few professors of English, to my knowledge, who makes in excess of one million dollars a year, represents the success that is possible in trafficking in difference.

He is the guest of honor at the party that has been going on over the last ten years or so in celebration of Affican American culture. He has reached the pinnacle of achievement as a black public intellectual, with success unparalleled since that of W E B. Du Bois. He has also become the limiting factor of what is acceptable in the field. However, we must consider why Gates has so easily become a spokesperson. His ready acceptance of accolades and appointments from white America makes some of us a little bit suspicious.

See Bell Hooks’ chapter " Eating the Other” inBlack Looks: Race and Representation [Boston: South

72 Gates will readily agree that there is no such thing as race. He states in the introduction to"Race, " Writing, andD iâêrence^ï race

as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long

been recognized to be a fiction... The sense of difference defined

in popular usages of the term "race" has both described and

inscribedilàiiexeTvDes of language, belief system, artistic tradition,

and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes

such as rhythm, athletic ability, celebration, usury, fidelity, and so

forth... Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so

very arbitrary in its application. The biological criteria used to

determine "difference" in sex simply do not hold when applied to

"race" (4-5).

The question that arises then is: why is it that Gates has spent an entire career proselytizing about a classification of people that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist? Why doesn't he then talk about something else? The answer may lie in the fact that there is something very compelling about this "race thing."

Moreover, there is a culture that has sprung up around the idea of being black, whether this blackness is real or imagined. Gates is primarily useful as an intellectual in the fact that he is able to sustain a discourse on black culture.

Gates' popularity and his power is apparent, for example, in an editorial that

End Press, 1992] 21-39. 73 appeared in TheN ew York TimesdccA elsewhere urging black Americans to find a way to get on the information superhighway, lest they allow their culture die out.

Because of the dissolution of the black community as we know it, with black Americans moving out of "the hood" due to jobs and educational opportunities. Gates argues in the editorial that appeared last year that the only way we can maintain social structures like the black church, the barber shop, or even the street comer is for middle class blacks to get in touch with their less fortunate counterparts online. He makes the particularly horrible analogy that

"the internet is the modem day equivalent of the talking drum." It is difficult to believe that he can make such cultural pronouncements without anyone calling him on it. In no way can the impersonality of a computer be compared with the life and beauty of the music of the drum. There seems nothing more removed hrom our vernacular and spontaneous culture than the scripted and very white culture that you find on the computer. The comparison between the drum and the intemet is a convenient trope, to use one of Gates' favorite words, but it is hardly accurate. What struck me in reading this is that if Microsoft was paying my bills, as they were Gates's, 1 might be tempted to make a monumental leap and claim that the owning a computer is what made one black. There is an uncomfortable negotiation when talking about "the Negro problem " in Gates' work. Yet, all Gates does is talk about Negroes and their problems. Most likely a

74 doser analysis needs to be done in terms of what intellectuals like Gates are actually saying when they speak. I argue that what makes a black intellectual intellectual is the fact that they theorize about race in some fashion— that it is this question of race which drives them. However, what Gates proves is that the intention to help blacks or to ameliorate the inequities in sodety which are based on race are not the only motivations for writing. Money is obviously another.

Issues of intention also reveal themselves in the way that critics such as

Gates "do theory." The idea that postmodern paradigms, which are not culturally located in the black community, can be used in order to examine black literary practices is based on the idea of blackness as a commodity. The idea of commodification of blackness leads to the idea that one can somehow make black culture universal. However, as Morrison notes in her Playing in the Darkz. lot is compromised when intellectuals fall into the trap of being universal and thus marketable. Morrison argues, "Criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-hree' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist" (12).

Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that the reason that many African-

American intellectuals began to write initially is because of how bad the situation was for African-Americans. Ida B. Wells wrote because of lynching, Anna Julia

Cooper wrote about the woman, the Indian, and the standards for education that all black women should hold. Charles Chesnutt wrote comical narratives that

75 only slightly masked the critiques of the caste system in America. More often than not, it is hardship and struggle that is the starting point for much that is created in black culture. When an intellectual creates out of a desire that is not rooted in recognizing the hardships inherent in black life, his intellectualism must be called into question, because it is not culturally linked to the reality of black life. Theory should have a life outside of the confines of the essay, they should have "street value" in order to be accurate. For Gates to argue that blacks need to go out and buy a computer in order to stay culturally connected disregards the fact that many black people do not have the material resources to do so, nor the access to education that would allow them to be able to use the computer effectively. Gates does not start his editorial with any acknowledgement of how difficult it is for black people to make the leap from barely even entering a library to computer ownership. He does not even seem to question how many black people who are interested in maintaining a cultural link to the inner cities would even be readingThe New York Tùnes’m. the first place. ”

INTELLECTUAL WORK AND THE PROBLEM OF RACE

Contrary to what Ross Posnock argues inColor & Culture: Black W riters and the M aking olthe M odem Intellectual, the desire to be a race man or woman like W.E.B. Du Bois or Anna Julia Cooper only contributes to the quality of one's

The reason that I actually found the article is because my father showed it to me. My father, who is a 76 intellectual work, not detracts from it. For Posnock, it is the call to "stand up" for the race that detracts from one's ability to produce truly thoughtful and useful work. Posnock, would wholeheartedly support much of Gates's arguments in

The New York TZmegeditorial which denies the power of race as a overwhelmingly motivating presence. Posnock probably would support Gates' theories, because as the leader of the "talented tenth" of black intellectuals. Gates is able to separate the fact of his blackness from his role as an intellectual.

Moreover, Gates is able to possess a detachment which would render him successful as an intellectual in Posnock's estimation. Furthermore, Posnock's work is devoted to separating out the idea of race from intellectual effort. He states,

I examine how literary artists devised ways to exit the "American Museum of Unnatural History," to make black intellectualmeaxs. more than race man or woman... In a society as obsessed with race as the United States the effort could never be entirely successful... The American Museum still stands, most recently renovated and repaved with the good intentions of multiculturalist identity politics. But what has been generally been unrecognized, misunderstood, or undervalued is the effort made to lift the burden of being a group representative or exemplar. To escape the pressure to conform to the familiar and die recognizable, to stereotypes, is to be free to delete the first word or to accent to second in the phraseblack intellectual ox to vary one's inflections at will or as circumstance dictates. To impart something of this liabili^ and this ambition to interrogate the very category of race, I use the term antirace atan or woman. '

professor of Business at James Madison University, routinely readsThe New York Times to stay abreast in the business world, not to stay culturally connected to black people.

77 Posnock believes that race is a burden that prevents one(ro m being intellectual.

He sees that the only way that black men and women are successful as intellectuals is when they do not let their work become limited to proving anything about blackness. He surprisingly views many of our race champions and black intellectual heroes as anti-race men and women. These anti race men and women include people like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Alain

Locke, and W.E.B Du Bois. Posnock maintains that although these people wrote almost exclusively about what it means to be black, they ultimately wanted to liberate themselves from the yoke of race. In this way Posnock argues that Du

Bois, long considered one of our most important race men with the publishing of his S o u ls o fBla ck F o lk dccA his organization of the NAACP, was instead a universalist who was working out of the notion of pragmatism put forth by his

Harvard contemporary William James.

For Posnock, the idea of the black intellectual began through and because of white men. Further, Posnock maintains that the term intellectual comes &om

Emile Zola and the Dreyfusards:

The very word "intellectual" entered political discourse only a

century ago, in 1898 when Zola (among other professionals) left his

study, interrupting his novelistic labors to enter the political

maelstrom of the Dreyfus Affair. Zola and the Dreyfusards saw

From Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making o f the Modem 78 themselves as giving voice to humankind's sense of justice and

humanity against the anti-Semitism of the French nationals. For

intruding where they did not belong and invoking universal

values, the Dreyfusards were scorned asdéracinés and branded

with the imprecation of Les Intellectuels

It is the idea that the Dreyfusards advocated universal values that seems most important to Posnock, not the fact that they left the writing of novels to work consistently against eradicating a social wrong. It is easy then for Posnock to talk about the work of black intellectuals being universal while forgetting that at the same time these black people had to work at ending racism, if for no other reason than to have their voice, as marginalized people, heard.

Instead Posnock would like to talk about the fact that there seems to be some connection between Willizun James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, most likely because they were all educated at Harvard, which would seemingly make the theories they espoused the same. What Posnock is forgetting is that they weren't the same. Locke and Du Bois couldn't simply argue for universalism or pragmatism outside of their realities as black men. When you cannot go into certain public spaces because of the color of your skin, it is difficult to maintain impartiality and universality. Even Gates, who maintains that race is a fiction, recognizes that the "fact of blackness" will always in some ways prevent one

lntellectuai\Cmlani%C’. Harvard UP, 1998] p. 5. All further references to this work appear in the text 79 from being impartial. Gates, inLo€>se Canons:Notes on the Culture Wars, uses the example of his difficulty in hailing a taxi in New York to underscore this point:

In the face of Anthony Appiah's and my own critique of what we

might think of as "black essentialism," Houston Baker demands

that we remember what we might characterize as the "taxi fallacy."

Houston, Anthony, and 1 emerge from the splendid isolation

of the Schomburg Library and stand together on the comer of 135th

Street and Malcolm X Boulevard attempting to hail a taxi to return

to the Yale Club. With taxis shooting by us as if we did not exist,

Anthony and I cry out in perplexity, "But sir, it's only a trope." If

only that'sa llii was (147).

THE PLURALITY OF BLACKNESS

Nevertheless, where Posnock and 1, and possibly Gates, would agree is

that it is difficult for black intellectuals to assert just one definition of blackness.

Posnock states, " the assumption of a monolithic black community is becoming

harder to maintain. One reason is the increasing recognition accorded to biracial

and multiracial heritage. Another is the impact of events such as the Anita Hill/

Carence Thomas hearings" (27). However, just because there is a splintering of

identity within the black community this does not mean that blackness as a

80 literary signiHer is any less powerful. It also does not mean that black intellectuals do not have a sense of their own identity, an identity which for the most part is still collective. Therefore, we have people like Toni Morrison saying that she is a "black" writer. You have people still making pronouncements about race as if it means something, because for the greater part, it still does. Posnock is mistaken when he assumes that just because racial identity is constantly shifting and changing that it is not real. It is real as long as people believe in it.

Moreover, intellectuals like Du Bois and Hurston stake their very lives on the fact that race is a real presence.

When people quote controversial passages from Hurston, such as the declaration that she is "not tragically colored" or her statementD in ust Tracks on th e R o a d ^Sna!t "there is no The Negrohste," it is usually with an eye toward proving that Hurston secretly had hatred for her own race. However, 1 believe that her commitment to talking exclusively about black people proves that nothing could be further from the truth. What makes her a race woman is that she is willing to write about black people with a sense of their own humanity despite the fact that American culture would portray it otherwise. It is not that

Hurston's pronouncements aren't sometimes contradictory, because often they are. But, ultimately, what the contradictions show, what the resistance against certain classifications of blackness show, is that there is an awareness of a two­ fold identity: one which the larger culture would have us believe, an identity that

81 is formed exclusively on the basis of stereotype, and another which is formed on the basis of autobiography and the stories of the people. It is the intellectual's job to find identity in the dance between these two understandings. This is what Du

Bois, Locke, and Hurston did very well, it is what makes that black intellectual an intellectual.

AN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

Thus, in order to be considered as an intellectual, especially when this intellectual has come to understand that he or she possess a "twoness" or a

"double-consciousness" that irrevocably changes his or her view on the world, it is necessary to look back and reflect on the past social or cultural situation if one wants to construct any cogent thoughts about the present. This act of "looking back to move ahead" is called "self-inventory" by Gomel West. Likewise, West sees that this sort of inventory, this taking stock of where black people stand, is necessary if any concrete changes are going to occur in the political realities of black people's lives. West's and hook's Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black

IntellectualLife\& , moreover, a call for the rise of the black intellectual.

Curiously this call is predicated on the notion that the black intellectual has in fact always existed. As West states in section entitled "The future of the Black

Intellectual,"

the future... lies neither in a deferential position toward the

Western parent nor a nostalgic search for the African one. Rather it

82 resides in a critical negation, wise preservation, and insurgent

transformation of this hybrid lineage which protects the earth and

projects a better world (146).

This act of negation, transformation, and preservation out of a warring consciousness, is what black people have historically done when they've begun to think of themselves in terms of a tradition. Indeed, constructing a tradition means looking back on certain situations with honesty, instead of with the desire to romanticize or overly valorize, in order to give an accurate accounting of the way that black people have participated in the literary enterprise. It would seem that West's way of the future has been paradoxically thed e r ig e u r mode of intellectualism for black people. Black people have continually been involved in trying to claim a tradition of black writing. Indeed, Victoria Earle Matthews's

"The Value of Race Literature" (1895), Mrs. N.F. Mossell's The Work o fthe Ahro-

American Woman (1894), and Anna Julia Cooper'sA Voice From the South

(1892) all sought to construct an early tradition of women's writing. Like West, each of these women found transformative possibilities in "tradition," a power in citing examples of how black women borrowed brom each other to build a common notion of identity. Therefore, it is not so strange that Henry Louis Gates seems to be preoccupied with this notion of tradition in both the introduction to

Reading Black, ReadingFeministand in the foreword to theSchomburg Library o f Nineteenth Century Black Women W riters. Henry Louis Gates's

83 understanding of "tradition" is particularly instructive not only for women, but for anyone who wants to understand how intellectualism meshes with the common black cultural practice that we call building a tradition. Gates states.

Literary works configure into a tradition not because of some

mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of race

or gender, but because the writers read other writers andg ro u n d

their representations of experience in models of language provided

largely by other writers to whom they feel akin. It is through this

mode of literary revision, amply evident in the texts themselves—in

formal echoes, recast metaphors, even in parody-that a "tradition"

emerges and defines itself (SLNCBWW, xviii).

Gates's understanding of tradition clearly reproduces some of what West calls a insurgent intellectualism. In fact, the act of reading other theorists and intellectuals and revising the words of those theorists is the primary work of an intellectual.

While this project began as a way of constructing an overall sense of the tradition of black writing with an eye towards defining intellectualism, the project has evolved into a way of exploding the term intellectualism through coming to a greater understanding of what is meant when we utter the word

"tradition." While the College Edition of the Random House Dictionary defines intellectualism as simply "the exercise of the intellect," it seems that for Afiican-

84 Americans intellectuals it has a much broader definition. It is a definition that sounds more like Random House's explanation of tradition: "the handing down of statements, beliefs, legends, customs, etc., especially from generation to generation by word of mouth or by practice." What becomes tradition for the dominant culture, this practice of customs, becomes an act of intellectualism for black writers and theorists. Thus it is appeirent that for black thinkers there exists not so much an intellectual tradition as an intellectualism that is perhaps the same as tradition.

W.E.B. DU BOIS: AN INTELLECTUAL STANDARD

There is no figure for whom the concepts of tradition and intellectualism merge more than in W.E.B. Du Bois. Surely the person or intellectual to whom most black writers turn to in order to ground their experience of race is W E B.

Du Bois. It could also be stated that much of the reason that current scholars feel it necessary to tackle the question of the color line is because of the powerful language that Du Bois used in his text and because of the observations that he made about blackness. Therefore, it is necessary to include in any study on black intellectualism an analysis of Du Bois'S o u ls o fBla ck F o lk, because in so many ways this work is considered the birth of black intellectualism, and, by the same token, the birth of a tradition. The far-reaching effects of Du Bois's work, which is most readily apparent in works which revisit Du Bois' words such as the collection of essays edited by Gerald Early calledLure and Loathing. This

85 volume gives credence to the fact that in order to be considered an intellectual in black circles it is almost always necessary to use the language of Du Bois, whether it is revised radically or not, or at least one must take up the type of analysis that Du Bois is best known for. In so much that intellectualism equals tradition in black life, nothing makes that fact more apparent than witnessing how Du Bois is recast again and again in the work of latter day intellectuals.

In the introduction to the Vintage Book edition of W.E.B. Du Bois'The

Souls o fBlack Folk, John Edgar Wideman asserts that Du Bois' work "creates an enduring model for the emerging field of Afro-American Studies." ” Wideman's analysis of the import of Du Bois' work is paradoxically both disturbing and expected. On one hand, Wideman's statement is expected because it is impossible to remain unchanged after reading Du Bois' prose. For example, Du

Bois talks of "spiritual strivings" and of "two souls, two thoughts,... two warring ideals in one dark body" (8). Prose that powerful must do something.

Why could it not create the paradigm for the study of black life? Surely anyone readingS o u ls for the first time will notice its far-reaching effects.

Du Bois, William Edward BurghaidtThe Souls o fBlack Folk. New Yoric: Vintage, 1990. xiii. All Anther references to this work appear in the text 86 In Du Bois' voice you hear, for instance, what would later become the rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King and the pan-Ahrican politics of Malcolm X; and even later, the foundations for the vernacular theories that undergird Amiri

Baraka's Blues People, bell hooks' work, and Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, andABro-American Literatuie. On the other hand, it is disturbing in some ways to hear that Du Bois sets the standard for the study of black culture and life, because there were so many of his contemporaries, namely Anna Julia Cooper and Frances Harper, who were also attempting to probe the same questions.

One must also wonder why the names of Martin R. Delany, Edward Blyden,

Henry M. Turner, George Washington Williams, and Alexander Crummell are not as well known as those of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida

Wells, and Du Bois.*" Nevertheless The Souls o fBlack Folkmvist be conceived of as a part of the birth of black studies because it formulated the fundamental question that seemed to challenge all black intellectuals; "how does it feel to be a problem" (7)?

W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis of the "Negro Problem" or of the color line is amazingly rich. He understands that underneath all social structures is the ex­ slave basically calling out for the right to humanity. This humanity can only be found in education for the so recently emancipated souls. Like Carter G.

Woodson, education for Du Bois would become the ultimate test of freedom, the

The idea of the forgotten intellectual is taken from Harold Cruse’sJhe Crisis o fthe Negro Intellectual. 87 primary marker of how far black people had come. However, it is clear that Du

Bois was not advocating the same type of education for everyone. In his estimation, an elect few should be the ones on whom the cultural memory was to be bestowed and they would carry that weight for all people. Of the much analyzed debates between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois, little seems to be made of the fact that Du Bois saw that there was a place for technical education, but he felt that this type of training should not be the limit, nor the end of our struggle for equality. In his chapter on Washington, Du Bois finds that programs like Tuskegee represent the old Negro attitude of "adjustment and submission"

(42). It is clear that not only was Du Bois advocating another way of educating black youth, but also another way of learning, a new mode of thought that didn't limit his people to brute, mind-dulling labor. This mode of thought is also fleshed out in Woodson'sThe Mis-Education o fthe Negro when he begins to talk about a new program of educating black children that would not be founded out of the understanding that blacks are a problem, but that will give them the tools with which to bear the burden that race has placed on them.'*'

The downfall of the race comes, Du Bois argues, when black people begin to believe that money is all. Many of Du Bois' chapters engage the American materialist culture and the way in which it has bankrupt black people's lives and spirits. Particularly in "Of the Wings of Atlanta" and "Of the Quest of the

New Yoric William Monow& Co, 1967. Cruse, of course, goes into extensive detail about the importance of these people to the development of the tradition. 8 8 Golden Fleece" we see how money is the problem for the newly-freed men and women, and how, in turn, this translates into a problem of race. Unlike Gates and Posnock, Du Bois refrains from arguing for "universal values" that are called for in commodity culture. He does not suggest that the idea of American determinism or capitalism holds solutions for black people's problems. It is clear, instead, that the answers lie in turning a way from the material to the cultural and spiritual.

The last section ofSouJsdesA s with the importance of spiritual songs and the tale that they tell. In ways that black music is always linked to larger equality issues for black Americans, Du Bois finds definite value in sorrow songs. The recognition of the value of the black folk was certainly present in the writings of

Charles W. Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, Du Bois' contemporaries.

However, it wouldn't be until a Howard University philosophy professor, Alain

Locke, attempted to define the nature of black aesthetics in his anthologyT he

N e w N e g ro (1925) that black culture would take on the theoretical importance that it did inS o u ls. Precisely what was new about the Negro in the Harlem

Renaissance was the awareness of the cultural riches that black people possessed.

Locke knew as Du Bois knew that freedom would only arrive in the songs, shouts, and poems of black people.

From the Introduction of Woodson’sThe Mis-Education o fthe Negro. New York: Ams Press, 1933. 89 Finally after having read Du Bois and many of the early works of literary and cultural criticism, it is impossible not to be struck by the idea thatT he S o u ls o fBlack FoIkyid& a beginning, and if not a beginning, a significant motivating presence. John Edgar Wideman speaks eloquently of the emotions that Du Hois' prose produces. Wideman describes the pain, nostalgia, feelings of wonder, and anger. Why anger? It is an anger that we can all share because the issue that so greatly affected black intellectuals at the turn of the century is still affecting black thinkers today. Reading Du Bois calls attention to the unfortunate fact that the

Negro is still a "problem."

GENDERING TRADITION

Conversely, the biggest challenge to building a tradition of Affican-American intellectualism seems to be that black women and black men are seen as parts of largely separate traditions. Indeed, much of women's intellectual contributions is geared toward recovering "the lost texts," proto-feminist texts, that somehow are forgotten when we begin to talk about the serious issues of race and nation.

With few exceptions almost all of the writing by black women intellectuals seeks to pull the contribution of women out of the whole and have it construct its own tradition. For example, the anthologyW o rd s o f Fire\& a good example of a movement to construct a individual women's intellectual tradition. I would like to argue that while it is certainly important to recover the woman's role in building their own traditions, it is also important to begin to construct a tradition

90 that is shared. Breaking B r e a d to do this in a very rudimentary fashion.

Although West suggests that the future lies in some sort of intellectual insurgency, a brighter future seems to be available by collapsing the two traditions of black male and female writing to see where and how often they intersect. This means recalling Gates notion of tradition and finding what echoes of female writing is apparent in male texts. It means trying to find traces of

Langston Hughes in Zora Neale Hurston, borrowings of Frances Harper in

Sterling Brown. The future lies in revealing that gender difference is not a barrier but the gateway to greater possibilities of cultural production for both men and women, for the whole of Ahrican-American literature.

However, at present, there is still a divide between black male and female intellectuals that prevents this type of intellectual community from being formed. This divide has everything to do with the lack of recognition of the important contributions that women have made to a shared tradition.

Unfortunately when we think of the Ahrican-American intellectual tradition, our concepts of that canon are usually male. If we want to understand how the intellectual tradition has been gendered male, we must consider the examples of

Cooper's and Du Bois' intellectual lives.

ANNA JULIA COOPER AND W.E.B. DU BOIS

Du Bois, by many considered to be the father of black studies, is called in the introduction to theNorton Anthology o fAMcan-American Literature a

91 "Renaissance Man" who was "the most multifaceted, prolific, and influential writer that black America has ever produced, with one of the widest ranging intellects of any of his American contemporaries" (606). While Cooper in this same edition is called merely a woman with "a lifelong commitment to education for black people, women in particular." On one hand, Du Bois' comment that

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the Color line" is considered the most prophetic statement uttered by anyone in this century, and on the other hand Cooper's arguments seemed to have hardly reiised an eyebrow. For example Cooper states, quite remarkably given the time period, that

Negro woman stands now at the gateway of this new era of

American civilization. In her hands must be molded the strength,

the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic force, the

social and economic intercourse of that era. To be alive in such an

epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime (143).

What the Norton anthology ultimately suggests is that Du Hois' work, particularly his Souls o fBlack Folk, published in 1903 is an example of individual genius with far reaching and invaluable influence, while Cooper's 1892A Voice

6om t/wSouthvtas simply a book that was characteristic of its time and only valuable to other women. The fallacy of this thinking is quite clear. Are we to believe that no men read Cooper's work? Are we to think that there was no

92 active intellectual discourse between black men and women? Are we to think that oppositional views on gender did not in some ways impact our discussions on race? I would think not

It seems really curious then that in 1892, in the same year that Cooper published A Voice From the South, when Monroe Major asked Frederick

Douglass to provide some names for a volume he was creating on prominent black women, Douglass replied " 1 have thus far seen no book of importance written by a Negro woman and 1 know of no one among us who can appropriately be called famous." This from a man who would latter be called a feminist. He is forgetting of course women like Ida B. Wells-Bamett, and Frances

Harper who among other things published respectivelySouthern Horrors: Lynch

Law and A ll Its Phases dxA lola Leroyxn this very same year. 1 think he knew of these women, although he did not mention them. Contrary to arguments that suggest that women of this period were silenced and subjugated, there is much to suggest that the 1890's were indeed the "black women's era."

Black women were actively engaged in the intellectual debates raging at the turn of the century. They both absorbed and exchanged ideas. Cooper admits that what led her to writeA Voice hrom the South was hearing Alexander

CrummeTs, a preacher and leading intellectual in his own right, address at the

1883 Freedman's Aid Society entitled "The Black Woman of the South: Her

Neglects and Her Needs." However, Cooper did not merely regurgitate

93 Crummeb views but expanded them into her own. Thus, it is hard to believe that Douglass or for that matter Du Bois, someone who is considered the quintessential intellectual, did not read and was not influenced by Cooper's work. Many scholars, like Mary Helen Washington, Louise Hutchinson, Joy

James, and Karen Baker Fletcher suggest in fact that there is glaring evidence that points to the overwhelming contributions that Cooper had on Du Bois' thinking. They cite, for example, the fact that Du Bois quotes directly hrom

Cooper in his work D a rkw a ter although he gives her no acknowledgement. The fallacy again, in Cooper's case, is to mistake lack of acknowledgement for being ineffectual.

History has witnessed what has happened when a group truly tries to be productive without any sort of intellectual interaction. Take under consideration. The American Negro Academy founded by Crummel in 1897 with such lofty goals as to "aid the youth of genius in the attainment of the highest culture at home and abroad; to aid, by publications, vindication of the race hrom vicious assaults in all lines of truth and learning; and to publish, if possible, an

"Annual" of original topics, of a racial nature, by select members, and by these and other diverse means to raise the standard of intellectual development among

American Negroes. This group composed entirely of men, such as Du Bois,

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Carter G. Woodson, disbanded in 1928 never having achieved its goals. Central to the failure of this organization was the fact that it

94 never included women, but yet was supposed to be the voice of all black people.

Indeed, it is difficult to talk fully about race without talking about gender.

Thinking further about the fallacy of individual intellectual production which the ANA succumbed to, can we truly argue that W.E.B. Du Bois, although surely a great man, was the father of black studies, while ignoring the pressure that gendered readings placed on racial discourse? Cooper's dynamic work surely caused Du Bois to rethink not only the role of women in society, but his own process of intellectualizing.

"WOMAN IS NOT UNDEVELOPED MAN, BUT DIVERSE:" ANNA JUUA COOPER AND THE FUTURE

Not only did Cooper's language and the use of intertextuality make her unique, but also the fact that she choose collected essays as the medium through which to best display her views. It wasn't that black women had not been collecting their essays prior to Anna Julia Cooper's work. Ann Plato published her E ssa ys, which was a collection of biographic and various prose and poetry in 1841. Also, in the same year that Cooper gave usA VoiœFrom the South, Ida

B. Wells offered herSouthern Horrors: Lynch Law in A ll Its P haxs However, essays in a collected form had not been as established a medium for black women as the novel or other forms of prose (Although Royster makes compelling arguments about the pervasiveness of the essay in black women's literary practices). Thus, it is also significant that in the same year as Cooper's and Wells's works appeared there was Francis E.W. Harper'slola Leroy, a novel. 95 Anna Julia Cooper's collected essays, then, were not radical in that there were many women who chose to pick up the pen and write. In fact, the close of the

Nineteenth Century would as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. maintains became known as the "Black Women's Era" because of the tremendous outpouring of literature by black women. More importantly, much of the work that these women produced would be revolutionary in that is considered both the woman question and the

Negro problem in ways that would radically change society.

Anna Julia Cooper is one who changed society with her complex

understanding of gender issues. The example of Cooper's intellectual life is the

perfect starting point from which to begin to talk about the way in which black

women began to gender the intellectual tradition in their favor. And it is

working from her position as a woman that made it possible for Cooper to more

completely and successfully theorize about the race problem. Likewise, Cooper

understands the connection between her gender and her ability to be an

intellectual poised to give comment on any area of life. Cooper states, for

example, "no woman could possibly put herself or her sex outside any of the

interests that afreet humanity. All departments in this new era are hers, in the

sense that her interests2 ire in all and through all" (144). Likewise, Hazel V.

Carby recognizes the importance of examining black women, like Cooper, in

order to determine how gender impacted their intellectual lives. Carby's "'On

The Threshold of the Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black

96 Feminist Theory" looks at the way that Cooper, Ida B. Wells and Pauline

Hopkins began to radically treat political and social issues through the essay and other forms of prose. Part of her project, Carby states, is to merely shed light on the work by these women that is often forgotten or under-considered. She states.

One the one hand, Ahro-American cultural analysis and criticism

has traditionally characterized the turn of the century as the age of

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois 1 wish to reconsider

the decade of the 1890s as the "woman's era' not merely in order to

insert women into the gaps in our cultural history ( to compete for

intellectual dominance with men) but to shift the object of

interpretation brom individual intellectual genius to the collective

production and interrelation of forms of knowledge among black

women intellectuals.

What makes Carby's essay so indispensable is that she points out the significance of black women's collective production, or, rather, situates black women's writing within a tradition that looks at the construction of knowledge and its importance to social change. This sort of revisioning is necessary, but it is also necessary to expand our focus to contemporary black women intellectuals, who have in so many ways become the inheritors of the tradition that Wells, Harper, and Cooper defined. The first step in making our notion of tradition all-inclusive

97 is to finally put to rest the idea that black women have been silenced in intellectual discourse. It is especially apparent by looking at the way that black women have used their perspicacity in the academy that black women have been consistently establishing their presence in intellectual circles.

Caiby’s essay is reprinted in“Race, " Writing, and Difference, Ed. Heniy Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986. p. 302 98 CHAPTERS

SILENCE

In the depth o f my soul there is A wordless song~a song that lives in the seed o fmy heart ... It is a song composed by contemplation And published by silence, And shunned by clamor. And folded by truth. And repeated by dreams. And understood by love. And hidden by awakening. And sung by the soul -Kahlil Gibran, "Song of the Soul”

Part o f me wants to disappear, to pull the earth on top o f me. Then there is this part that digs me up with this pen and turns my sad blackface to the light..

-Toi Derricotte, “ On the Turning Up o f Unidentified Black Female Corpses”

Joy James is an academician who has often written about the role of black women in political and intellectual movements. More importanüy,^ her work seems to be concerned with questions of silence and voice. In the conclusion to a volume James edited with Ruth Farmer entidedSpM t, Space, and Survival, 99 James defines silence as "the absence of our words and the presence of our complicity/"*^ James' notion of silence is, in a sense, much like the traditional definition of silence, which has been shaped in part by the discourse in women's studies departments. James herself teaches in the Women's Studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It would, therefore, not be a gross overstatement to say that much of James' writing comes out of her desire to follow a feminist agenda.

Silence in terms of a woman's literary voice, is an absence of sound, it is omission. Usually when used in a feminist context, silence is a verb, it is something that is done to women by men. It is the way in which patriarchal culture is enforced. James surely believes that in order for women to achieve equality and all the things that come along with that like happiness, heedom, and money, then women's voices need to be heard. This initial step on the feminist agenda, which has largely been structured for the benefit of white women, is to allow the women to speak for themselves. It is this first step to unsilence that has been the primary preoccupation of women writers and political activists since the early Twentieth Century. However, in talking specifically about the silence that surrounds black women in the white academy.

From Spirit. Space, Survival: African-American Women in White Academe. New York: Roudedge, 1993. p. 223. All further references to this work appear in the text 100 James suggests something vastly different, that the silence is at times voluntary .**4

It is not an act which women are the victims of, i.e "the patricurchal language has silenced them," or "their voices are silenced in the discourse." Instead, silence is something that black women willingly participate in, have to be complicit in, for their very survival as intellectuals.

Survival for Affican American women has always meant knowing

our place. This does not mean that we haven't challenged what that

place is, or whose right it is to define it for us. Rather, we are

conscious that many think that we don't belong in certain settings.

Academe... is one of those settings. We have chosen academe

because of our commitment to education, to serving ourselves and

our communities. Yet it often appears the only way to survive is

through silence... If silent, we lose our ability to challenge (223).

What is so interesting about James' writing is that she talks about the complicity that women, specifically black women, have in their own silence. Silence seems to be a choice that James and other black women make in order to make money through their intellectual efforts. Paradoxically silence also seems to be the one

** There are many notions of silence at work here. There is first and foremost the idea that women have not had a voice in American literature. It is this notion of silence based on argiunents about black women’s lack of access to the means of production, in particular, that I take issue with. The second notion of silence has to do with writing in a manner that politicizes what one writes so that person may be able to fit into an hostile enviromnent This is the notion of silence that James is talking about here. The third notion of silence is the idea that although women have been writing and producing intellectual literature, much o f what they have said has been misinterpreted and misunderstood. This is the notion o f silence that intrigues me the most in this dissertation, although I discuss how silence worics in all three levels o f the term. 101 thing that is standing in the way of black women achieving intellectual parity.

James later states,

Ahrican American women have an important stake in reworking

academe so that silence is not a prerequisite for professional

progress (and survival). This requires courageous speech (223).

There seems to be a delicate balance that must be negotiated between establishing your identity and being silent. Marita Bonner wrote that the silence that black women had been displaying in the earlier part of the Twentieth century was a knowing silence. It was a silence that was more akin to stillness, a lack of motion, not a violent act that required the removal of any sense of agency.

"So being a woman you can wait," Bonner wrote, in addressing black women

who wanted to fashion themselves as intellectuals. "Silent.. .Still." The silence

that Bonner is talking about makes it possible to maintain one's sense of self

while participating in the activity of creating culture. Even as Bonner wrote

about being silent and still in terms of her creative endeavors, she was working

as an intellectual. She was publishing her short stories, plays, and essays.

Silence was not something that was done to her, it was not a suffering silence,

characterized by bitter lamentations about the fact that she wasn't being well

received by a white audience or even by her black male counterparts, it was a

knowing silence that enabled her to keep working because she knew, that despite

102 all evidence to the contrary, her words had both value and power. Bonner cautioned black women intellectuals to be "like Buddha—who brown like I am - sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand or more years before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands."

Bonner was not a frustrated intellectual, bemoaning the fact that the patriarchal culture had silenced her. Instead she seemed to be saying that the world may not be ready for intellectual black women, but that they should continue doing what they are doing-creating. It is not logical to argue that she was prevented from having an authentic voice or in having that voice suppressed. Remember that Joy James defines silence, for black women, as both an "absence of our words and our complicity in it." Therefore, why claim that black women are silent when there has never been at any time in our history the absence of black women's words.

This is not to say that women have not been ignored and omitted from the official story. This is not to say that black women's voices are always taken at face value, because as we will later see, that is clearly not the case. Most people, even most scholars in English and African-American Studies departments do not know who Marita Bonner is. Many have never heard of her nor do they have any interest in learning about her life and work. Black women have, it is true, often been silenced, but this only happens with their complicity. Many black

103 women writers have given up part of themselves in order to gain something from the white community, whether it be a job, a sense of recognition, or simply a chance to be considered part of the national narrative. Moreover, this complicity only happens when they are not working hrom a black aesthetic and make no move to locate their theoretical strategies. It cannot be claimed,

therefore, when a black woman is writing in the autobiographical mode, that she

has been silenced. Writing one's personal narrative, or with a personal

perspective, then becomes a truly transformative voice and a literary practice

that resists suppression.

SILENCE AND CULTURAL SPECM aiY

Many of the argument about silence that black women engage in are

influenced heavily by the arguments that white feminists are making, and

oftentimes these theories about victimization do not quite flt black women

writers and their cultural products. The divide between black women and white

women seems to be particularly apparent when thinking of questions of voice

and self esteem. For example, in the courses that 1 teach on Ahican-American

literature, I usually begin the first day of class with an exercise set up to reveal

what stereotypes different students might hold about both white and black

people, and men and women. Invariably when I put the category "black

woman" on the chalkboard next to the category "white woman," and 1 ask the

students to call out the first images that come to their minds, the differences in

104 the perceptions of the two are startling. Almost always the first words that appear on the board about black women are that they are "loud" and have "an attitude." For white women, the immediate response is "stupid" and

"materialistic." While all of the examples are stereotypes that the students have about both black and white women, it seems that their immediate assumptions say a lot about the different ways that black women and white women experience silence.

It is obvious firom the exercise on stereotypes that finding a way to connect to their authentic voice is not black women's issue. If anything black women are too vocal when it comes to telling people who they are and what they believe. As bell hooks noted in her aptly titled bookT a lk in g B a ck, it is often the fact that black women have "too much lip" and their refusal to meekly go along with the game that causes them the most problems. Almost everyone in

American culture has an image of the loud, opinionated black woman. We all know her, no matter how much we say that she doesn't represent us individually. This neck-rolling finger-popping quick-witted and quick- tongued ghetto girl, who always seems to be "showing out" in public has become the national representative for black women, and this figure is anything but silent. This black woman is also anything but lacking in a belief in her own worth. In a study done with black women and white women on the effect of fashion magazines on body image, researchers found that white women were

105 more likely to compare themselves negatively with the thin fashion models, question their own appearance, and resort to all sorts of tactics, even dangerous ones, to mold themselves into the fashion model look. Black women, on the other hand, were more likely to look at the models and not really be aHected by what they saw. Black women, even if they were overweight, sometimes grossly overweight, usually displayed a healthy self-image in the face of visual evidence which would suggest that there might be something wrong with a black woman's hrame. All of this to say, that oftentimes white women's lives and black women's lives are not necessarily parallel. White women seem to be operating from a different sense of themselves, I would even say more of a lack of self identification, and thus silence, than black women.

Although it is apparent elsewhere, black women's strong sense of self- identification is particularly evident in their personal writing. When black women write in non-fiction prose, they are actually by that very fact asserting their identity and resisting commodification. The reason that the theorist bell hooks has been so successful in her writing life is because all of her works, some

15 books, are extremely personal and self-identified. It is impossible when reading hook's work to take her out of the text, thus it is impossible for her to be silenced, hooks didn't begin writing so that she could maintain her space in academe. Moreover, she continues to write in a style which most people deem

"not scholarly," even after her professional accolades, because that is how she

106 remains present, how she represents who she is as a scholar. In fact, she has never compromised herself, refusing to be complicit in her own silencing.

SILENCE AND THE ACADEMIC LIFE

hooks also represents the seemingly contrary trend of "the black academic superwoman." It seems so odd that black women are so invested in the notion that they have been silenced, or are required to be silent, in order to succeed, when many black women intellectuals speak of having to be in ^ ct to be too visible or so many things to so many people that they actually suffer "academic burnout." According to Adrienne AndrewsSpirit, in Space, and Survival, black women are often subject to exhaustion from being "the ultimate representative."

As a double minority, black women are often required to serve on any committee that the institutions to which they belong, who are seeking outward signs of diversity, require. Likewise, many African-American students who feel culturally adrift in the seas of whiteness that are the major research universities seek out these women figures as replacement family or community members, so that they may reconstruct a notion of home in an environment that is anything but homelike. However, the ability of the universities and colleges to use the figures of black female intellectuals as representations of difierence speaks to the type of silence that can occur when the icons of blackness and femaleness becomes more important than their actual work. This commodification speaks to the "absent presence" of the black women in intellectual discourse.

107 More to the point, in a recent collection entitledS o u l, edited by Monique

Guillory, several well-known black academics discuss what their lives have been like as dark spots in the "Ivory Tower." In particular, Trudier Harris' descriptions of being a graduate student at Ohio State University and a young assistant professor at William and Mary speaks to the persistent themes of silence and rejection that plague many blacks in a world that is thought of as primarily white. Harris states.

Perhaps the most that 1 can say about my ventures into the

predominantly White and hallowed halls of academia is that it

teaches you resilience. Having grown up in an all black

community in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my arrival as a graduate

student at the Ohio State University was something of a shock. I

had never been around so many White people before, and I never

had my intellect questioned the way that it was in that

environment... 1 decided to leave Ohio State after my first year as

a graduate student (305).

We know from the fact of her writing in ibu/and her stellar work as an academic, that Harris changed her mind and decided to stay and acquire the qualifications that marks one an intellectual in the dominant culture, but at what cost? What is it that she gave up? Was it perhaps her real voice? Even though she is recognized as an authority in her field, did she lose a sense of her own

108 agency in becoming a writer and scholar with a Ph D ? Is Joy James correct in assuming that Harris had to be complicit in muting her own voice in order to survive in a environment which is hostile to the very notion of black women being intellectuals? Maybe.

Later in describing what tactics she had to resort to in order to stay connected (read here as stay sane and black) after acquiring her first academic job, Harris finds that she must leave in order to continue participating in scholarly work within the halls of the academy. She writes.

Going home was essential because there were no "living mirrors"

on the William and Mary campus. Of the 425 faculty members

there were only two Black folks-me and a guy from Haiti. Imagine

being 50 percent of the Black faculty on a university campus...

Attending conferences worked as inspirationally as going home.

After each outing, I would revise the paper and submit it for

publication somewhere. Being at William and Mary, therefore,

made me realize that I had to write my way out of that

environment. Not because people were necessarily inhospitable,

but because of a lack of culture and a society of people like myself.

I would drive down to Hampton Institute when I wanted to see

Black people who were not taking the garbage out of my office or

who were not pruning the beautiful lawns... (306-7).

109 This autobiographical narrative is not about Harris' inclusion in the academy, it is about her strategies of resistance, of the way that she managed to escape. She says that she "had to write herselfo u to i her environment" While it is true that she remains today a viable voice in Ahrican-American literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I wonder in what ways she had to be complicit in her own silence in order to do so. Why was it necessary for her to leave in order to find her voice? Could she not have brought Alabama to William and

Mary? What practices could be so transformative as to allow Harris to write herself into instead of out of the dominant narrative of the Ivory Tower.

Many people who first read this piece perceived it as shocking because of the level of dissatisfaction she revealed about the academic life. 1 believe that it is not so shocking, Harris quite possibly suppressed this part of her story in order to be successful. What is shocking to me is that she has been able to go this long without speaking about this particular experience, or with such theoretical intimacy. It is Harris finally bringing Alabama into her theoretical life. She has finally come home.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON: WRITING HERSELF INTO THE ACADEMY

In talking more specifically about the way in which the academic life suppresses the voice of black women, I think it is important to look at the work of women who refused to be complicit in their own silencing. Therefore, as a

110 scholar, I am much more intrigued by black women who write about bringing their homeplace into the academy-women like bell hooks, Patricia Williams, and

Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston, perhaps more than any other woman intellectual, has been instrumental in making black women present in the academy. She has resisted silence at every turn. Through her anthropological studies, novels, and autobiographical writings, she reformed our very notions of what it means to be an intellectual. By taking what was generally thought of as low or vernacular culture and elevating it to high art and a subject worthy of serious inquiry, she resisted the pull of silence. The focus on the fact that Hurston died alone, after being reduced to living on welfare and working at cleaning white people's houses, takes away the extraordinary gift that her work was to American culture.

While her life surely came to a tragic end, and she was not necessarily given the monetary rewards that she deserved, her life is one that many women who are seeking a sense of their own identity in their critical work seek to emulate. The greatest crime done to her in our current view of her work is the insistence that she lived a intellectual life that was marked by defeat. If any thing Hurston's story is a triumph and a symbol of the type of agency which many black women thinkers aspire to. Alfonso Hawkins agrees with my estimation of Hurston's career when he writes,

America failed her. She did not fail America. A testament to that

fact is seen in the revitalized study of her life and work. Genius

111 lives beyond acceptance, greatness is its child. Humanity rises

above all else. Zora Neale Hurston possessed all three.

Hawkins also agrees with my theory that personal or autobiographical narrative is the most transformative and valuable part of the African-American literary voice. His dissertation examines the way that music, specifically jazz and blues, impacts autobiography. He talks in particular about Hurston's D usf Tracks on the Road and how it employs an improvisational structure much like a be-bop song. I am perhaps more interested in how the autobiographical narrative and the fact of a black woman's intellectualism contributed to jazz music, but

Hawkins work is valuable in that it examines questions of authenticity, acceptance, and audience. Hawkins' dissertation relies heavily on the work of

Robert Hemenway. Moreover, both Hawkins and Hemenway produce arguments about the importance of black autobiography. For example,

Hemenway states.

Black American autobiography is a unique genre. Black

autobiograph{ers} usually are people who have forged their

identity despite attempts to deny them a sense of personal worth;

the tension between an individual and stereotype, between what

one thinks of himself and what white society expects him to be,

grants special energy to autobiographical prose. The author.

From Alfonso Hawkms’ dissertationThe Musical Tradition As An Affirmation o f Cultural Identic in 112 having escaped self-description and self-defeat that whites have

hoped to impose, speaks from a position of privilege and

responsibility; the autobiographical account is presumed to contain

both lessons for black people—how to combat racism and how to

afrirm the self, and indictments for whites/®

Hurston's use of the autobiographical narrative not only inD ust Tracks on the

R o a d but also in Their Eyes fVere W atching GodzrA M ules and M en shows that she was operating from a position of privilege. Hurston was not silenced in her intellectual life, because she used her works to affirm her own identity-to affirm the richness of black culture, which she spent her entire life exploring.

Perhaps the only time that Hurston's agency can be called into question was, not at her death, but when she existed as a part of the "Niggerati" by virtue of white patronage. There are evident contradictions in her literary persona during that timethat seem to point to the fact, as Ross Posnock maintains, that she was trying to be universal or pragmatic in her approach to writing. Instead of these contradictions revealing that she wanted to distance herself from her race, 1 posit that they give evidence to the way that black intellectual women are constantly revising themselves through autobiography. Moreover, the contradictions highlight the notion that black women's ideas of identity are in fact fluid instead of essential. When identity is constantly shifting, yet created out of the intention

African American Autobiography^ Ohio State University, 1993)p.l01.

113 to give marginalized people a voice, the intellectual is then able to make linguistic connections with community. It is this connection with community that finally allows intellectual women to find a niche for themselves.

A DEEP LONGING: ANNIE GREENE NELSON AND THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

No one represents the paradox of silence, the value of the autobiographical narrative, and the crucible of the intellectual path more than

Annie Greene Nelson. Nelson, if she were alive today, would have been 98 years old. As it stands, this black woman firom rural South Carolina died at 91 in 1993 after completing three novels, one play, and an as yet unpublished autobiography. Everything about Nelson's life suggests that her words should have never found their way to the printed page, that she should not have had enough agency to write, yet alone to attempt to publish her works. If Alice

Walker's understanding of the plight of black women intellectuals in the Post-

Reconstruction South is true, then we would have no language to even begin talking about someone like Nelson, who followed her drive to write and to share her words with others as if it were a religious calling. For example, in talking about how she became the first black woman in South Carolina to write and publish a novel. Nelson describes a mystical, conversion-like experience, similar to Hurston's, that foretold of her great achievement. Nelson states.

^ Hemengway’s words are quoted fromZora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1977)278. 114 I was left one evening near a wood, in a cotton field... I looked

around and I saw little colored moons everywhere, moving all

around me. 1 wasn't afraid: 1 just watched, and then they went off.

It was like Joseph's dream about the sun and the moon and the

eleven stars bowing down to him. 1 felt that 1 had been picked out

for something special, and 1 came out of that cotton field

determined to make something of myself.

Far hrom being daunted by the limitations of growing up as the oldest of thirteen children of share-cropping parents, she found that it was struggle that forced her to write. Nelson states, "1 was determined not to suffer like so many I saw."

"But," as Margaret Thomas states, "it was the suffering she had witnessed amongst her people that led to a feeling that she had to put into words the

deprivations, the fears, the joys, and the abiding courage of her race."^* Nelson,

through the genres of drama, poetry, fiction, and autobiography, shows that she

is upholding the tradition of the great black intellectuals of her time. She

uncovers the truth about black people through detailed explorations into their

lives and a complete analysis of the ways that race and class impact their

decisions. In an autobiography that is structured in the form of letters to her

dead father. Nelson reveals some of her views of race and the changing times;

" from the intioduction toAfter the Storm (Columbia,SC:Hainpton Publishing, 1942)iv. "ib id . 115 When I see the masses of blacks still oppressed, I wonder if

integration is the best thing for the black man under this system...

Are we being captured by unfulfilled promises? Will the white

man ever accept us fully?

... There is a group here called the Nation of Islam. They believe

and feel that they have set the standards for the black man's

culture... Muhammad teaches that firom the moment that the

black man's labor and culture are no longer converted into Anglo-

American capital or social and political power, the black man will

have destroyed the master color relationship and will be firee to

achieve self- respect and equality.

Paw I am telling these things because they are so recent you

could never imagine the great changes that have taken place since

you left. "

This is pretty heady stuff for a woman whose Southern background as well as poverty would suggest that she would not have the time to consider the role that integration played in race consciousness. Surely as a woman who had lived through the Great Depression, with children to feed, and at the time no husband-

- he had unexpectedly run off- and no job, the topic of conversation in Nelson's memoir could have easily turned to her personal struggles with finding teaching

From Nelson unpublished autobiographyLetters to Paw With Love. Circa. 1976. 116 jobs and with eventually finding a more reliable man to marry. Although she does discuss personal anecdotes at length and these accounts help the reader to feel Nelson's presence in the text, it is clear that she is also contemplating the larger society and what her role as a black woman is in it. At times her writing seems almost philosophical. She writes further in her autobiography

My life has been a panorama. Something has always happened—

sometimes good, other times hurtful—but thank God you taught me

to be strong. You taught me that the world was ruled by thoughts

and that the man or woman who thinks gets the most out of

life (18).

At times Nelson's autobiography is more like a self-help book. It is full of practical information that the reader can use, life lessons. Although the book is pointedly addressing her father, it is clear that Nelson wrote with a larger audience in mind. Perhaps, the reason that this memoir was never published is because of the fact that it seems to be such an intimate dialogue with her father, and of little value to anyone in the outside world. Moreover, it is easy to mistake the one-sided portrait of her father and the effusive praise she offers him as her attempt to construct a memorial to him. However moments such as the above analysis of the political philosophy of the Nation of Islam make it quite plain that she wished not only to tell her father about the way that race consciousness had changed in the 50 years since he had died, but that she wanted to make a

117 statement about her place within the racial struggle. But the purity of her experience could be attributed to the fact that she saw political necessity in informing black life with beauty and power. One must wonder about the level of disingenuousness on her part. It seems that her life was almost too idyllic.

Although I am interested in looking at the value of black women's non­ fiction prose in terms of its overall transformational value in the canon, 1 am particularly interested in Nelson's work because all of her fiction was taken directly from the pages of her life and the lives of those around her. As Nelson maintains, " everyone is a true story."

My path to Annie Greene Nelson was largely serendipitous. I happened to be in an old library on the University of South Carolina Campus. The South

Carolinana Library, as it is called, is a story in and of itself. Built in 1801, the library seemed to be resistant to the very idea of 29 year-old black female graduate student being there-every thing was a reminder that the university had been set up for the sons of white plantation owners. As I walked past busts and imposing portraits of former governors and other leaders in South Carolina history (all white males), I literally felt small. I had come here in order to do some historical research to corroborate Jean Toomer's, Alice Walker's, and

Angela Davis' descriptions of the lives of black women. The South Caroliniana

Library, as it turns out, houses the largest archives in the state for slave records,

WPA paper, and all manners of personal collections. It is an invaluable resource

118 for anyone looking in to slave history. 1 am not sure, however, how many black people actually take advantage of its resources. It is the paucity of black researchers that actually helped to bring Nelson's works to me.

When I told one of the librarians that I was working on black intellectual women and I was trying to find if any of the collections contained letters by black women describing what their daily lives were like, they were able to pull up all manner of church records and files. It seemed that the librarians thought that there were all sorts of information available on researching African-Americans, although the search category that they used was Negro (I don't want to even think about why they hadn't updated their catalog to at least include "Black" or

"Colored" as categories, if they couldn't make the monumental leap to African-

American). They seemed overwhelmingly glad to see me and helpful.

As it turned out, one of the librarians was reading one of Annie Greene

Nelson's novels. It also seemed that they had recently acquired her unpublished autobiography and were about to add it to their archives. 1 had never heard of her. So the librarian suggested that it might be interesting to read some of her writing while she went to pull out the other "Negro" files. At the frrst reading, I fell in love w ith Nelson's words. I then began to ask myself why it is that 1 never heard of her.

I had grown up in South Carolina. I had always been an avid reader, harboring early ambitions of being a novelist myself, it would have been

119 wonderful to learn that a black woman had become a published author of some local acclaim as early as 1942. Why was it that she wasn't known nationally?

Her works have somewhat of the same character and level of skill as Nella

Larsen's, Jessie Fauset's or Ann retry's works. Why isn't she included in any of the anthologies of African-American literature? And what does her absence in these collections say about power and the way that it operates in black women's lives?

It seems that the very fact of her writing disproves the notion that the early intellectual works of black women were silenced, meaning shut down and prevented firom being produced by the patriarchal culture. Nelson's literary career disproves the general idea that the Ufe of a black woman intellectual was ultimately one that led to a penniless and horrible death in an unmarked grave.

Could it be that the only ones who are really responsible for preventing Neslon's work from being more recognized is other black women, who as the principal inheritors of a tradition of women's writing, did not talk about or acknowledge that a woman- poor, black, and southern-managed to create a literary life for herself without being dejected and demoralized by the process.

I am not ready to claim that her outward silence was some sort of vast conspiracy, but I am willing to admit that at times it is too easy to claim struggle as an excuse for not considering works by African-American women more seriously. It seems to be too convenient to jump on the bandwagon of abused

120 saints and crazy suicides. Although Nelson's works, for the most part, did not find themselves a home outside of the confines of South Carolina, the only silence that she experienced was a waiting silence, the type of silence that Marita

Bonner talked about-a silence that was an afiirmation of black life because it resisted white acceptance and authentication. She wrote for her people. For example. Nelson was quoted in a newspaper article that appeared on the day after her death as saying, "I always tried to write what 1 thought would inspire people. .. I wanted to write about love and how we can love each other even when things can be sad." “ Nelson proved that whenever you write in an autobiographical mode, you are writing from a true sense of agency. Like Zora

Neale Hurston, Annie Greene Nelson showed that narrative based on real life experience is truly transformative. Just because it had taken several years after the height of Hurston's writing career for her to become a celebrated literary figure, it did not mean that her work was silenced. It merely meant that the world was not ready to accept black women on their own terms. Similarly,

Nelson continued to write her stories because she refused to be subsumed into the larger culture-she did not want to lead an unexamined life. The works of

Hurston and Nelson, in terms of voice and presence, give evidence to the fact that finally the mountain does eventually come to Muhammad.

The State Newspaper DccaxAxrlA, 1993.1-B. 121 CHAPTER4

OF LOVE AND LIES: UNDERSTANDING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN BLACK MALE AND FEMALE INTELLECTUALS

Nobody told me that leaving home would be like this—that the world would be so full o f lies. I thought that when I left home, I would leave the lies behind, that I would make a whole new worldfo r myselffull o f clarity and light. The truth is the light. —bell hooks, Wounds o f Passion

When Jesus bid us to love our enemies. He is speaking neither of eros or philia; He is speaking o f agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all men ... Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it... Therefore, ifI respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensif/ the cleavage in broken community. lean only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love...

-Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom

When. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of our great AMcan-American intellectuals and leaders, spoke of the need to close the gap in any community with love, he could not have known how necessary his words would be for the intellectuals who would follow in his footsteps. Reading the now infamous

"debates" that occurred inN ew Literary H istory xcs. the mid-1980s between Joyce

A. Joyce, Henry Louis Gates, and Houston Baker, it becomes apparent that the

122 new intellectuals, like King, also thought it important to talk about the need for love, although very little of it was given within the confines of their respective essays.

Joyce A. Joyce's essay led the charge. Although at first glance her "The

Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism" seemed to me fairly innocuous, it spawned impassioned and, dare I say, hateful retorts fiom the two well-respected male academics. Professor Joyce started her essay by relating the story of having a student come into her ofiice to complain/ seek advice after reading the essay "On Being 'W hite'... And Other Lies" by James

Baldwin in JEksefzce magazine. Baldwin's words are not reproduced for us by

Joyce, but we have a sense of what they were or at least how they were perceived through the reader's, the young student's, eyes. Joyce writes, " this bright young woman was bothered because she knew that if she only marginally understood the essay, then many of 'our people.'.. would not understand the essay" (335).

To put it more simply, at issue was the fact that many of our recent intellectuals seem to be engaged in theoretical work that baffles, if not insults, black readers.

In their power struggle over words, over who has the authority and the ability to

"claim " black culture, many intellectuals, particularly if they are male, have taken to performing linguistic tricks in order to legitimize their voice. Often these tricks are done at the expense of clarity and good sense. As professor

123 Joyce's student said of Baldwin, when an intellectual speaks, "he is supposed to be clear" (335).

This call to clarity by a young student causes Joyce A. Joyce to begin to question the sense of elitism that seems to be present in much of our intellectual discourse. Joyce then begins to consider the "historical interrelationship between literature, class, values, and the literary canon," and determines that black intellectuals seemed to have divorced themselves from the cultural community

(335). Furthermore, she adds that Black intellectuals have a responsibility to maintain some sense of connection with the community hrom which they sprang, if their work is going to be clear enough to be accepted by their primary audience. This connection needs to be both methodological and linguistic, or more plainly, black intellectuals need to write for their black audience in ways that are culturally familiar. In talking in detail about this responsibility that black intellectuals, specifically black literary theorists, have to their black audience, Joyce writes.

Since the Black creative writer has always used language as a

means of communication to bind people together, the job of the

Black literary critic should be to find a point of merger between the

communal, utilitarian, phenomenal nature of Black literature and

the aesthetic or linguistic-if you will-analyses that illuminate the

"universality of the literary text" (343).

124 In essence, Joyce A. Joyce is asking that the theoretical works produced about black literature, and, by extension, about black culture, be more like the literature itself—that the language, to be extremely colloquial, be more "black." She bases this argument on the fact that, as she sees it, many outstanding black creative writers, have also been the leading black literary theorists. She mentions specifically James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes,

Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed and Imiri Baraka. Although it is curious that her list only includes males, she is making the valuable point that reading literary criticism should produce the same pleasure as reading a novel by Toni Morrison.

Morrison's hauntingly poetic words inBeloveds\\a\ûd be like an instruction to the literary critic. For example, Morrison states.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees

drawn up; holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and

contains the rocker. It's an inside kind- wrapped tight like skin.

Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down.

It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the

sound of one's feet going seem to come hrom a far-off place (274).

Joyce is claiming that theoretical language should produce the same feeling that you get when reading the above passage. Black literary criticism should, furthermore, come out of the same cultural memory that Morrison draws on to tell her fictional tale. And in drawing on this cultural memory, or black aesthetic,

125 the writing is thus more easily understood by the black community or anyone who is interested in reading works of literature by African-Americans. The theoretical writing is therefore as clear as the literature about which it theorizes.

However, since the advent of postructuralism, Joyce argues, black cultural criticism hasn't been doing this. Black critics have in fact given over the riches of the black expressive culture in order to whole heatedly take up the theoretical stance and linguistic practices of Europeans and European Americans.

Moreover, it seems to be only male theorists that are doing this. Joyce maintains that this shift in alliance has led to a startling drop in the quality of our intellectual discourse:

Black postructuralist critics have adopted a linguistic system and

an accompanying worldview that communicate to a smaU, isolated

audience. Their pseudoscientific language is distant and sterile.

These writers evince their powers of ratiocination with an

overwhelming denial of most, if not all, the senses... As

[Richard] Wright predicted this merger of Black expression into the

mainstream estranges the Black poststructuralist in a manner that

he perhaps "never w anted".. (340).

Thus, theoretical writing must merge with creative writing if it is going to be fully comprehended and appreciated. At the time when Joyce A. Joyce wrote this article, many of the leading theorists were not doing this, but, then, many of

126 the leading theorists were males who traded in the theoretical modes of

Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown and Richard Wright for the possibilities found in Derrida, Frederic Jameson, and Paul de Man. Black women intellectuals, on the other hand, have always seemed to recognize that there was a space for creative writing within the theoretical. Had Joyce mentioned the likes of her contemporary Alice Walker, she could have then provided examples of how to successfully bring the culture to bear in the writing of literary criticism.

Although I take issue with some of the ideas in Walker's essay "In Search of Our

Mother's Gardens," it really is a beautifully written piece which shows how one can use "clear" language to talk about how African-American women's literary traditions have been formed. Likewise, in much of the current intellectual discourse by black women, the writing is often very creative and almost more akin to diary entries than academic research. For example, bell hooks, who often begins her works of cultural criticism with personal vignettes, successfully blends her creative, poetic side with the need to be a thoughtful scholar. In

W ounds o f Passion, a book about poetry, literary inspiration, the academic life, and, of all things, love, hooks displays the type of criticism that Joyce A. Joyce would call responsible, hooks writes.

The intersection of poetry and punishment, a mind/body split,

dominated her childhood. In every way her body was the enemy.

Food did not interest her. she was desperate to erase all

127 possibilities of growing to be a woman. Her dream wets to be a

poet. Her earliest understanding of what that might mean came

from Emily Dickinson.. (4).

Although she is addressing herself in third person, hooks is talking about the very personal journey of coming into her own as a writer and poet. The subtitle of this work is a w riting life, hooks explores here how one comes to write, but in doing so she also manages to offer literary, feminist, and cultural criticism. The proceeding passage, for example, is as much about the politics of the body and the difficulties of being a woman as it is about poetry. It is a subtle thing, the way that she creates her prose so that she is more present in the text. However,

Joyce is arguing, and 1 agree, that the only way that the criticism can really be useful in talking about black culture is when it is drawn hrom a black aesthetic and sensibility, from an autobiographical stance. It should always be plain who is speaking, or, rather, what subject position the author is coming from. One can make pronouncements, like Toni Morrison did at the beginningPlaying of in the

Dark: W hiteness and the Literary hnagination, and say "my work requires me to think how hree I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, and wholly radalized world" (4); or one can simply let the style of the text speak for itself.

Patricia Williams's Alchem y o f Race andRights provides another example of how one can blend the creative with the theoretical in order to make

128 oneself present in the text. For example, she states in the first chapter of her book on the law, language, and race relations:

Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you

deserve to know that it's a bad morning. I am very depressed. It

always takes a while to sort out what is wrong, but it usually starts

with some kind of perfectly irrational thought such as: 1 Aa/le being

a lawyer. This morning Tm sitting up in the bed reading about

redhibitory vices. A redhibitory vice is a defect in merchandise

which, if existing at the time of purchase, gives rise to a claim

allowing the buyer to return the thing and to get back part or all of

the purchase price. The case Tm reading is an 1835 decision hrom

Louisiana, involving the redhibitory vice of craziness:

"The plaintiff alleged that he purchased of the

defendant a slave named Kate, for which he paid $500, and

in two or three days after it was discovered that the slave

was crazy, and run away, and that the vices were known to

the defendant...

It was contended [by the seller] that Kate was not

crazy but only stupid, and stupidity is not madness; but on

the contrary an apparent defect... The code has declared

that a sale may be avoided on account of a vice or defect, 129 which renders the thing absolutely useless... We are

satisfied that the slave in question was wholly, and perhaps

worse than useless."

As I said, this is a morning when 1 hate being a lawyer, a teacher,

and just about everything else about my life... you should know

that you are dealing with someone who is writing in an old terry

bathrobe with a little fringe of blue and white tassels dangling hrom

the hem, trying to decide if she is stupid or crazy (3-4).

It is cleeur that Williams is talking about the very complex subject of racism and the construction of the law, however she does not resort to legal language to do it. Instead she makes her self present in the text by linking her own sense of identity with a slave who was deemed defective merchandise. The connection she makes is a very personal one. Williams wants the reader to understand that

there is as much difference between being a law professor and a "crazy" slave in

1835. This difference is collapsed through the style of Williams's prose. When

one allows the style of the text to be its own story, it is no longer necessary to

hide behind jargon and/ or highly academic language in order to make the work

significant. Moreover, Joyce reasons that to be present in the text is to make it

obvious that one is paying attention to the black audience, about whom the

material is written. This paying attention she calls an act of love:

130 black creative art is an act of love which attempts to destroy

estrangement and elitism by demonstrating a strong fondness or

enthusiasm for freedom and an affectionate concern for the lives of

people, especially black people... It should be the job of the Black

literary critic to force ideas to the surface, to give them force in

order to affect, to guide, to animate, and to arouse the minds and

emotions of black people (343).

Gloria Wade-Gayles in her 19% collection of essays edso talks about love and its place in literary criticism. Like Joyce, Wade-Gayles is concerned that much of the intellectual or theoretical writing about black literature and culture seems to be devoid of the very spirit or essence which makes writing by black people worthy of study. Wade-Gayles states.

Several years ago, I wrote an entry in my journal entitled "Requiem

for a Love." The love was black women s literature which is

sometimes made unrecognizable in criticism that killed another

love—language. It is sometimes so cold this language, sometimes

unfathomable, deliberately unfathomable; a mausoleum of syllables

that have no breath, no soul; a language that obfuscates that which

is supposed to inform, enlighten, humanize, transform, and

transport to realms of feeling and being mere words cannot

describe. I wrote that in the plethora of ize-words (problematize,

131 historicize, sexualize, radalize, valorize, scientize) I could find little

of the beauty and simplicity that moved me as a teenager and later

motivated me to become a teacher of literature, sending me joyous

to critical essays on works 1 loved... "

It is clear that in using the words "joyous," "beauty," and "love" (four times) Wade-Gayles wishes to link intellectualism with the personal and the emotional. Moreover, many black women theorists, like Wade-Gayles and Joyce, have found that in making the personal political or in making themselves present in the text through personal stories that they have become more effective theorists—they have, in fact, been able to offer the readers of their works a better, perhaps more intimate, understanding of black culture and black literature.

Love seems to be both the methodology and the subject of many of the works by

Affican-American women intellectuals.

More than anything else however, it is the call to love and for arousing the emotions and sentiments of black people that seemed to bother the two male theorists who first responded to Joyce A. Joyce's essay in August/September

1987 edition ofN ew Literary H istory. It seemed that both Houston Baker and

Henry Louis Gates found that community, love, and the ability to write in un- jargoned language to be completely useless and, if not useless, then merely beside the point. Gates' response in his essay, "What's Love Got To Do With It?':

From Gloria Wade Gayles’Rooted Against the M%^{Bos(oa: Beacon Press, 1996} p. 165-6. Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom," was particularly harsh in discussing the need for love and community in cultural criticism.

Gates starts his essay with a quote hrom Tina Turner's song of the same title. It seems that he is intent on showing that he knows about black popular culture, or wishes to reveal that he is black, should anyone question that fact.

Although his language is quite colloquial and often funny, he decides that he is going to play the intellectual dozens with Joyce, ridiculing both her ability to comprehend complex subject matter and her sanity. Moreover, both he and

Houston Baker make the argument, although it is slightly veiled, that women like Joyce A. Joyce seemed to be intent on criticizing the intellectual work of black men only because of their own embittered relationships with them. Baker, for example, mentions at the start of his conunentary that the only people to criticize his work have been black women. Bciker states, "The fact that both were

Ahro-American women [the ones with whom he was in a debate] may be altogether fortuitous. In any case, my response is directed toward a group. It is directed against specific conservatisms, misjudgements, and errors"(363). 1 am not exactly sure why he considers the fact that it is only women who criticize him fortuitous. I can only imagine that it must give him the opportunity to say a lot of things against black women that he couldn't otherwise. And, he does direct his response toward the group of black women intellectuals through Joyce. He uses strong terms like "attack" and "animosity" frequently in his essay, while

133 Gates uses the term "nigger-bating" to describe what it was that Joyce did by writing an essay about how to love one's culture. When reading the rousing and angry responses to a fairly straightforward essay that didn't really name-call, one must ask themselves what is at the root of Gates' and Baker's anger against Joyce

(and it doesn't just seem directed at her, but to all black women). 1 read that underneath both Gates' and Baker's response what they are really saying is: "see, these black women don't know what they are talking about." "They are only mad because we chose white women to marry." "We are just as black as anybody else—they are just jealous." Their arguments are a little too reminiscent of

Clarence Thomas saying that the case against him was "high-tech lynching," while denying the fact that he actually did sexually harass Anita Hill. It is worth the trouble to ferret out exactly where the division between black women and men theorists seemed to have occurred.

Gates insists that instead of employing theoretical modes that allow him to be a cheerleader for black culture, he wishes to put pressure on that culture in order to see it more clearly. Gates states in "What's Love Got To Do With It?," "

I have tried to utilize contemporary literary theory to defamiliarize the texts of the black tradition, to create distance between this black reader and our black texts, so that I may more readily see the formal workings of those texts" (352).

Moreover, he feels that the only way he is able to maintain the integrity of black literature is "by trying to avoid confusing my experience as an Ahro-American

134 with the black act of language" (352). His methods of distancing himself in order to achieve intellectual integrity are apparent in his 1989 American Book Award- winningSignifying M onkey: A Theory o f AM can-American Literary Criticism .

For example, in his famous critical text, he interprets the opening passage of Zora

Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were W atching Godvn ways that make it difficult to locate it as a book that is a powerful affirmation of the black woman's identity.

Instead he curiously chooses to explore how Hurston's narrative is a reworking of Frederick Douglass's TheN arrativeofthe L ife o f Frederick Douglass. The passage of Hurston's that he examines follows first:

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they

come in with the tide. For others they sail on forever on the

horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns

his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all the things they don't want to

remember and remember everything that they don't want to forget.

The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly

(170).

Of this passage he remarks,

Hurston underscores her revision of Douglass's canonical text by

using two chiasmuses in her opening paragraphs. The subject of 135 the second paragraph ofTheir Eyes fVere fVakhing God (yfomen) reverses the subject of the first (men) and figures the nature of the respective desire in opposite terms. A man's desire becomes reified onto a disappearing ship, and he is transformed firom a human being into "a Watcher," his desire personified onto an object...

A woman by contrast, represents desire metaphorically, rather than metonymically, by controlling the process of memory, an active subjective process in the pun on (re)membering, as in the process of narration which Janie will share with her friend, Pheoby, and which we shall "overhear." For a woman, "The dream is the truth"; the truth is her dream. Janie as we shall see, is thought to be (and is maintained) "inarticulate" by her first two husbands but is a master of metaphorical narration; Joe Starks, her most oppressive husband, by contrast, is the master of metonym, an opposition which Janie must navigate her selves through to achieve self-knowledge. The first sentence ("Now women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget") is itself a chiasmus

(women/ remember/ / remember/forget), similar in structure to

Douglass's famous chiasmus, "You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man. " Indeed, Douglass's

136 major contribution to the slave's narrative was to make the

chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which the slave-

object writes himself or herself into a human-subject through the

act of writing... Hurston, in these enigmatic opening paragraphs.

Signifies upon Douglass through formal revision (171-2).

This passage is quoted at length for several reasons: the first is to give one a sense of how Gates's arguments develop; the second is to give evidence that his analysis, although outwardly scholarly, entirely misses several critical points; and the third is to provide an example of how dense, alienating, or cold his writing style is. Even though 1 am a fairly educated person, 1 must agree with

Gayles and Joyce that the tone of the above passage makes me question what

Gates's intent is in writing it, and if he is truly writing about a book that is one of my personal favorites. Isn'tTheir Eyes Were W atching G od a love story? Isn't it important to talk about the ways that Janie found herself, her identity, in and through this love story? And what, if anything, does any of this have to do with

Frederick Douglass?

In returning to Gates's essay in "What's Love Got to Do With It?," Gates calls the type of analysis that I provide of his work an unfair attack that can attributed to black people's inherent resistance to theory. Moreover, he states that this resistance, Joyce's resistance, is the same as saying that both he and

Baker are "nouveau ideological Uncle Toms because [they] read and write

137 theory^' (359). Although, Gates seems to resist anything personal that would locate him in the text, that would affîrm his blackness in his theoretical writings, he is quick to launch a personal attack against Joyce. He states.

Does my work "negate [my] blackness," as Joyce Joyce claims? 1

would challenge Joyce Joyce todem onstrate dCKpN\\ste^ in my entire

work where 1 have, even, once, negated my blackness, simply

because I have attacked an era in logic in the work of certain Black

Aestheticians does not mean that I am antiblack, or that I do not

love black art or music, or that I fell alienated from black people, or

that I am trying to pass like some poststructural ex-colored man...

No, Joyce Joyce, 1 am as black as I ever was, which is as black

as I want to be... And for the record, let me add that only a black

person alienated from black language use could fail to understand

that we have been deconstructing white people's languages...

since 1619. That is what signifying is all about. (If you don't believe

me ask your grandparents, or your parents, especially your

mother) (358-9).

In other words. Gates is telling Joyce: "Your Mamma, " an all too familiar form of reversing an insult in the black community. And Houstons Baker's words are hardly more charitable in his commentary " In Dubious Battle. " Baker asserts here that the type of love that Joyce is calling for is a return to the type of Stepin'

138 Fetchit' performance that was often require of black artists in white America.

Moreover, he suggests that these sorts of intellectual performances are based on essentialist notions of black identity that are entirely wrong:

many people share Professor Joyce's essential animosity toward

recent modes of critical and theoretical discussion that have

enlarged the universe of discourse surrounding Ahro-American

expressive culture. Their animosity springs hrom the fact that the

new critical and theoretical modes marking investigations of black

expressive culture so clearly escape the minstrel simplicity that

Anglo-Americans have traditionally imagined and assigned... as

the farthest reaches of the black voice in the United States (366).

What these debates and the level of animosity that the black male intellectuals display toward the female intellectuals show is that there are fundamental differences in approach (distance vs. presence, culturally specific aesthetic practices vs. universal poetics) that need to be addressed if we are ever going to form an intellectual conununity. To my understanding, the benefits of forming an intellectual community are that intellectuals are able to work on ways to accommodate difference within their theories, ways that then dismantle any of hope of maintaining the stereotypes that the dominate culture holds about black people or their intellectual discourse. As bell hooks states in Breaking Bread, community is the only way to ensure that the intellectual voice is heard and

139 accepted, hooks states, "communities emerge from the resistance efforts of men zmd women who recognize that we strengthen our position by supporting one another"(161). What's love got to do with forming an intellectual strategy that allows black voices to be finally fully heard? Apparently a lot.

LOVE AS A THEORETICAL PRACTICE

Kimberly N. Brown discusses love, the split between male and female theorists, and the importance of identity in the text in her essay "Of

Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems: The Revolutionary

Ideas Behind the Poetry of fayne Cortez." The principal thesis of Brown's essay is that emotions and intimacy have a place in theorizing:

Jayne Cortez's poetry serves as an excellent example of how one

can theorize through scars. Her poetry also illustrates how

"theory" can be found in many forms. ScarM In cationzs well as in

her other books of poetry, Cortez creates an ethnopoetics that blurs

the lines between lived experience and theory. By ethnopoetics, I

mean a theoretical ideology— in this instance, of revolution

informed by her position as a third world subject... Her project

mirrors both the goals of the black female anthologies, such as

Sturdy Black Brid ^ ... and The Black W oman ... and the goals

140 of the Black Arts M ovement which saw art as "functional,

collective, and committed" (karenga 391). ”

We see examples of ethnopoetics or love everywhere in black women's intellectual discourse. For example, with another poet Ntozake Shange, we see how her poetry also mirrors her theory. Ntozake Shange's works give voice to the richness of the Ahican-American existence. In her poems we see once again a blurring of the lines between what Kimberely Brown called "lived experience and theory." Moreover, Shange's works while political (meaning that she is consciously working for the liberation of black women, and by extension all black people) also embodies the spirit of the blues, the intensity of a strong religion, the hope of the an enslaved people, and the realization of Hughes's

"dream deferred." Creating then, for this intellectual/artist/poet becomes not a singular instance of muse and paper, but a revolutionary act of claiming "the

homeplace," which brings with is the taste of grandma's collard greens and the

feeling of sunlight seeping into the soul.

Ntozake Shange is a poet who is greatly invested in the African-American

artist's tradition. In fact, all of Shange's poems are celebrations of form,

language, and African-American tradition. Juxtaposing Shange's collections of

poetry The lx>ve Space Demands, Nappy E d ^ , A D aughter's Geography, and

R iddin'the M oon in Thrasopens up a world that is filled with the ritual and

^ This is taken from Kimberly Brown’s “ O f Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems" is 141 spiritual presence of being. Indeed, reading Shange's poetry ellicits the feeling of the familiar: the syncopated beats of an African drum, the passion of a new love.

Moreover, what is particularly engaging about Shange is her upbeat, street-smart manner of speaking, and the way in which she uses her language (language that is often slightly obscene, profane, or simply forthright) to talk about the problems in the black community and the state of the world at large.

Language obviously has that power. InN appy Edges^t\ax\%

It is significant that Shange recognizes that a poem can behave like a kiss because it echoes the notion that the freedom fighter Che Guevarra held: love lead to true revolution. This is idea of a relationship between love and revolution is one which many black women intellectuals seem to share, particularly the aforementioned bell hooks, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Patricia

Williams, Joyce A. Joyce, and Jayne Cortez. However, the love that Shange talks about is also devoted to eradicating the lies about a black woman's experience

reprinted inOther Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. IVomen o f Color ( Utbana: U. o f Illinois Press, 1998.) 142 and revealing the problems with the black woman's identity in order to offer solutions for her apparent victimization. Therefore, when she gives us (the readers) a poem, she is "not only giving to us what the world has given her," but she is displaying her love for her audience.

Shange offers her poems to the "silenced" colored girls who are her audience, with what the you poet Ruth Forman calls a "black woman's love bite." Shange's poems exhibit a kind of radical love that can change the face of the universe. Indeed, all of her collections of poetry deal with her "radical love:" the love of family, of art, of the people, of life, and that love of love.

For example in her collection T h e Love Space D em ands’HXxyiake. Shange was doing some serious loving. Here Shange lays out all her loves: her love of music, of her child, of certain geographical areas, and especially her love of black men. The title of the collection is significant, whether it is read a space demanding love of the demands of the "love space," because what the title points to is the fact that to love is all. Shange is also careful to show in her poetry the manner in which love works its way into all relationships, sexual and non- sexual, and indeed into the very heart of world events.

The poem "irrepressibly bronze, beautiful & mine" which serves as the

"premise/promise" for the collection is an example of a poem that deals with

Shange's love of black men. This poem clearly states that black men are

143 necessary to a "daughter's geography/' to this area that Shange has mapped out as the love space. Shange writes.

All my life they've been near me/ these men ... my eight-year-old precocious soul was hankering for the days to come with one/ one of them colored fellas who'd be mine/ on purpose/ not /just because of some pigmentation problem/ or a grandfather clause in Mississippi. ”

The poem sets the tone for the rest of the collection which thoroughly explores what these "colored fellas" have meant to the whole idea of love. The poem is a tribute to black men's uniqueness and beauty. Moreover, the loving language that Shange uses counters the arguments that are made by Henry L. Gates,

Houston Baker, or other black male critics, that Shange's representations of men are for the express purpose of male bashing.^*

From The Love Space Demands ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991)3. All further references to this work appear in the text ^ WhenFor Colored Girts Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf appeared in the early 1970s, many male critics were outraged at what they considered to be the unfair and h a ^ portrayal of men. Since that tune there have been many critics who charge that women like Alice Walker and Terry Mcmillan have taken up the gaimtlet of negatively portraying black men. It is interesting to note how the debate about the portrayal of black men characters have mken place. See in particular, Calvin C. Hemton’s “The Negro Artist and the Sexual Mountain” and Anne duCille’s essay “Monster, She Wrote: Race and the Problem of Reading Gender-Wise.” 144 In contrast, Shange's alludes in "irrepressiblybronze.. that she wants to claim black mean as hers, even the parts diat she doesn't like. Her poem continues:

Friend of my father's who drove each summer from denver to St. louis/ with some different white woman/ i remember one seemed to like me/ she had rose blond hair i wondered/ why do you like me you're with him and he's mine he's colored/ he'll always be like th at/ like m e.. (3).

Shange writes this poem to re-affîrm the ties that bind black men and women— directly calling into mind the legacy of slavery, the changing times in America, and the fact that black men have been less the "property" of black women than they have of white men and women.

Moreover, "irrepressibly bronze, beautiful & mine" is a wonderful poem to consider because of the language and the varied ways that it displays that one can write a love poem. The poem itself is broken down into three sections that are written in very distinct styles. Section i. is written as a narrative hrom the

African oral tradition, and it incorporates the dialect and wording of the

"common folk;" Section ii. is written in fragments, more like traditional poetry;

Section iii. is written like a folk tale which, using images of "whistling lizards" 145 and "palm fronds," embodies the elements of the supernatural that all good folk talks should include in order to be truly believable.

The language in this poem is significant because, not only does it map out the different writing styles that are a part of black artistic expression, but it displays the difierent writing styles that undergird Shange's theoretical position.

Moreover, Shange's love of language is grand, like Coltrane's "Love Supreme."

This does not necessarily mean that she is only talking about love as it connects to happiness. She is talking about a love that recognizes the usefulness of struggle. Remember that black women's intellectualism is bom out of conflict and opposition. Thus, the use of love as a theoretical strategy seeks to make even this struggle beautiful.

Shange's love is like blues music which reveals both a passion for and a regret in living. The seeming paradox of blues music as both a joy and a sorrow

is argued, for example, by the great blues man Blind Lemon Jefferson, who said,

"you can love your woman so much that when she leaves you it makes you sing

the blues, and you can love your woman so much that when she comes back you

will still be singing the blues." ” More concretely, as Bernard Bell notes, blues

music is "a lyrical expression of hard times and the possibility of overcoming

personal misery through toughness of spirit." Like blues music, Shange's

Lyrics quoted fiommemoty. From Bernard Bell'sThe Folk Roots o f Afro-American Poerry(Detioit: Broadside Press, 1974)61. 1 4 6 poem conveys the fact that it is possible to overcome hardship from a theoretical position of love.

Finally in order to make black theoretical language more accessible it is necessary to bridge the gap between what contemporary male and female intellectuals are doing within the confrnes of their writing. We, as readers, must first recognize, as Kimberly Brown states, that "Henry Louis Gates and Houston

Baker-both literally and figuratively define 'the black literary tradition.'" ” We have to ask ourselves what it means that these two men have been invested with this power, and we must frnd ways to allow black women to construct their own notions of tradition. The only way for black women intellectuals to do participate in building a tradition is to seek commonality with the male theorists-

-and this commonality can only be found in asserting some sense of black identity. So the black female intellectual asks us to think about intention, emd she uses the character Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison'sB e l o v e d a model. Baby

Suggs cautions us,

O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck

unnoosed and straight. So love your neck... And all your inside

parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you have got to love

them. The dark, dark liver-love it, love it, and the beat and beating

heart, love that too (88).

” From Brown essay “Poststiucturalist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems,” p.6S. 147 CHAPTERS

"I WILL CALL HER BELOVED WHICH WAS NOT BELOVED": BLACK FEMALE IDENTITY AND THE PITFALLS OF POPULARITY

There was no way in hell that a blackface could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip o ffear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro 'sface in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob... it would have to be something out o f the ordinary—something that white people would find interesting. -Toni Morrison,Beloved

"It was not a story to pass on" Toni Morrison writes at the end of her

Pulitzer Prize winning novelB e lo v e d . Yet pass it on she does, masterfully relating a narrative about slavery and its emotional, psychological, and cultural effects. "It was not a story to pass on," of course, because slavery had long been an issue that people did not want to talk about. Heavy, unwieldy. Even

Morrison in a 1987 USA Today interview said she was reluctant to write the book because "she worried that she didn't have the emotional resources to stay there for years" -there being in the midst of the unbelievable 400 year holocaust that is

American Slavery. But for 31/2 years, carrying the image of a metal bit in a bleeding mouth in her mind, Morrison rose every morning before dawn and on

148 yellow legal pads set out to tell the tale of a young female escaped slave, who after 28 days of freedom is found by her master and, on threat of capture, murders her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. The dead child comes back to haunt its mother 18 years later, thus fashioning an intricate tale of love, family, longing, and the supernatural.

This neo-slave narrative is dedicated to the 60 Million and more who were lost in the Middle Passage, lost to a system that was set up to dehumanize a race people. The novel's epigraph, which is taken from Romans 9:25 reads: "I WILL

CALL THEM MY PEOPLE, WHICH WERE NOT MY PEOPLE AND HER

BELOVED, WHICH WAS NOT BELOVED" alerting the reader that this is a tale of remembrance, of atonement for pasts sins, that this novel is Morrison's labor of love for a community of displaced Africans who have been anything but loved in this place that is America.

But of course all of this is known. It seems barely necessary to give any background on Morrison or on her seminal workB e lo v e d , because post- Nobel prize, post- N ew York Times Bestsellers Lists, post-Oprah's book club, we have come to look upon her as one of the most preeminent authors in America, as an established member if not poster child for the American literary canon.^ We have analyzed, discussed, and produced scholarship on Morrison at an almost

” Oprah’s book club is largely responsible for the phenomenal popularity of Morrison’s works, as the book club is responsible for the enormous overall growth in the publishing industry. When a book is featured on Oprah’s television program it immediately goes toThe New York Times Bestseilers List. However, I do not wish to collapse the viewmg audience of Oprah’s program and the people who study Morrison’s works in 149 alarming rate. A quick look into the database of the MLA International

Bibliography pulls up close to 1,000 journal articles, books, dissertations, and essays on Morrison's work. Because of Morrison's popularity, it is not a big jump in logic to assume that the claims that black female intellectuals' have been making since the late 1970's about the marginalization, suppression, and underappreciation of African-American women's voices may no longer hold weight. Morrison's novels sit on our shelves in our homes and both her fiction and non-fiction are liberally scattered across the college curricula. If there was ever a time to argue that black women have arrived, so to speak, it would be now. Surely Morrison's winning the highest literary prize in the land enters black women into a new narrative of transcendence and familiarity. Surely if a black woman, a single mother, can find such critical acclaim for her work—then all women who write about the struggle to come to voice as a speaking subject, while being an alienated other, are also by proxy acclaimed, understood, and most importantly heard. Indeed, the 1990's would seem to be the "new black woman's era." ” For instance, the wonderful black feminist theorist Anne duCille writes in her book The Skin T rade^\., " Today there is so much interest in black women that she has begun to think of herself as a sacred text" (81).

the academy. I realize that those are two very difierent audiences. I am concerned with popular perception of Oprah, but mostly this dissertation interrogates the way Morrison is used in English Departments. * The first great period for the production of black women’s intellectual writing is recognized by many scholars to have occurred 100 years before in the 1890s. 150 Conversely, in looking closely at the scholarship on Morrison and at her public reception via her on-going celebrity on Oprah's book club and in the media, it becomes obvious that there is a gap in knowledge between what

Morrison's works are trying to convey and the way that they are being received. For many, especially in this commodity culture, success in terms of sales of books or in the ability to gamer a movie deal suggests that the American public is validating or approving of the history or story of black people.

However, in reading what Morrison writes about her own works and reading

the literary theories outlined in her critical books and essays, it is quite clear that

it is dangerous to assume that everyone is accepting a black woman's identity just because they have bought one of Morrison's novels. What they are accepting

is the mythology of black women or rather, of Morrison's " otherness," because

that is what is currently e n v o g u e .

Moreover, Morrison is an easily usable symbol of difference because of the

way that she has been featured in the press since winning the Nobel Prize.

Despite Morrison'sPlaying in the Dark: W hiteness A nd The Literary

Irnagination\yem% the only book of literary criticism in my memory to show up

on The N ew York Times Best sellers iMt, Morrison's role as an intellectual is not

being honored. Concomitantly, it seems to me that it is Morrison's very celebrity

as a black female literary superstar that is preventing her works from truly being

interrogated and understood. And this is not just a problem for Toni Morrison.

151 As bell hooks states in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black ùitellectual Like, it is a problem that exists for all black intellectual women:

Whenever 1 ask students to name Black intellectuals, without

requesting that they be gender-specific, they invariably name black

men: Du Bois, Delaney, Garvey, Malcolm X and even contemporary

folks like Cornel West emd Henry Louis Gates are mentioned...

After much pause, they begin to call out the names of famous

contemporary black women writers, usually Alice Walker or Toni

Morrison... And those who invoke the names of Walker and

Morrison have rarely read their non-fiction work, and often have

no clue as to the scope and range of their thought (150-1).

It appears that the American public is more interested or fascinated by the fact that Morrison is a black female who has accomplished all of these great things: the Nobel Prize, movie deals, and multiple appearance on Oprah, than they are with the beauty, poetry, and magic of her words. As bell hooks notes in

Black Looks: Race and Representation^^. American population has fallen in love

"otherness" and black women as the ultimate other, instead of with the truth of black existence:

mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly

declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found

in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The

152 commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it has

offered new delight, more intense, more satisfying than the normal

ways of doing and feeling (21).

However the problem with all this popularity, this new enjoyment that is found in the exotic other, is that often it leaves black women and their true identity out of consideration. People are willing to settle for the mass produced identity

instead:

When gender and racial difference meet in the bodies of black

women, the result is the invention of an other Otherness, a

hyperstatic alterity. Mass culture, as hooks argues, produces and

perpetuates the commodification of otherness through the

exploitation of the black female body. In the 1990s, however, the

main sites of exploitation are not simply the cabaret, the speakeasy,

the music video, the glamour magazine; they are also the toy

industry, the academy, the publishing business, the intellectual

community." “

What looks like appreciation of black people's stories by white people is

actually the very insidious act of trying to uproot both a sense of identity and

culture hrom black people. However, hooks states in many choose

to see the popularity of blackness and femaleness as a good thing because it

^ fiom duCille’s Skin rra

Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation" (26). Nevertheless, the problem with popularity is that often the very fact of celebrity masks individual identity; or, more pointedly, the show of celebrating difference allows us to harbor the illusion that black people are now fully free and equal in America, while actually very little has changed in the material or political existence of black lives. As Bill Cosby once said, "being on television does not reduce my chances of being asked to carry a white person's bags when we are both staying in the same five star

hotel." When all is said and done, the fact of being black and female in America

is still based on the same troubled 400-year history of slavery. Celebrity allows

people to momentarily forget that fact.

Anne duCille says this about the sudden celebrity that has visited black

women:

In the words of Houston Baker, "Affo-American women's

expressivity and the analyses that it has promoted during the past

two decades represents the most dramatically charged field for the

convergence of matters of race, class, and gender today." Of

course, one of the dangers of standing at an intersection-

154 particularly at such a suddenly busy, three-way intersection-is the

likelihood of being run over by oncoming traffic (83).

The problems of conunodification and sudden celebrity are most apparent when looking at the career of Toni Morrison, although this is certainly the case for other black women—even Oprah Winfrey, whose own celebrity has changed the way that people approach Morrison's works. I argue that Morrison's works are being both misappropriated and misunderstood, because people are trying to fit her sense of identity into a dominant paradigm. The defining element about

Toni Morrison is-and this is one reason that I think that people claims that her works are so "difficult" to read— that on every level she resists commodification and works hard at establishing her own sense of identity.

Why is it that 1 stand here making the claim that Morrison's works are not

understood when so much time has been spent by fairly intelligent people in writing about her and her novels? How is it that after years of begging and

pleading, to anyone who would listen, for inclusion can I now be saying that

attention to Black women's writing is a bad thing? The answer to this question

most likely has something to do with the critique that Joyce A. Joyce otiered in

N ew Literary History 2io a \x t the theorizing that is going on in black culture by

the dominant male theorists. The reason that we must question black women's

new-found popularity has everything to do with intent and engagement with the

text. Professor Joyce ought simply ask: "Where's the Love?"

155 READING BELO VED A S A CULTURAL PRODUCT

In returning to Morrison's novelBelovedvxxà. looking at the Elm adaptation that Oprah Winhrey produced, it is possible to uncover where

Morrison sense of identity clashes with popular mythology. The most important aspect of both the book and the Elm, a fact which has led to the novel being misinterpreted, is the concept of American slavery.

Slavery is not a metaphor, despite Henry Louis Gates' fondness for saying that race is a trope. The image of the violence enacted on people with darker skins and slightly flatter noses in this country does not symbolize the struggle of a newly democratic America in black intellectual texts. Our struggle

is our struggle. Period. Whereas blackness, as Morrison has so correctly

pointed out inP la y in g in th e D ark, functions as a backdrop against which white

people can fashion their own identity in Ection written by white Americans, in

black texts blackness is just what it is. BeIoved\& about slavery. Yet, in reading

the jacket copy on video, it becomes quite possible to believe that the movie is

about something else. The copy reads:

Oprah WinEey and Dany Glover play the unforgettable lead

roles in a powerful and widely acclaimed cinematic triumph Eom

Jonathan Demme-the Academy Award winning directorS ilen of ce

o f the Lambs,

156 On a difficult journey to find freedom, Sethe is constantly

confronted by the secrets that have haunted her for years. Then, an

old friend from her past unexpectedly reenters her life. With his

help, Sethe may finally be able to rediscover who she is and regain

her lost sense of hope.

No where in the description of the movieB e lo v e d à o they mention that this movie is about slavery. They don't mention that Sethe and her "old friend" knew each other because they were slaves on a plantation together. They do not tell you what Sethe was trying to escape from in a "difficult journey to find freedom." They do not mention that the reason that the main character lost all sense of hope and needed to "rediscover who she is" is because the system of slavery is so dehumanizing that it is difficult to maintain the idea that there is hope or even, that when a slave, that you are human.

I believe that part of the reason that this movie failed so horribly at the box office is that people did not know what in the world it was about. In trying to remove slavery as central theme in the story, there was no story. In efrect, the producers of the movie were trying to apply a white reading strategy to

Morrison's novel. Ann duCille calls this strategy " the Driving Miss Daisy

Complex, " which is when white people use black people's narratives as a way for other whites to come to a better understanding of themselves. Whereas blackness "signifies" something else in white texts or films (for example, I wrote

1 5 7 a whole paper on the way that black figures are used in musicals to make the white characters seem more soulful or sexual), in black texts they are there simply to convey their own meaning. Toni Morrison was trying to tell the story about the forgotten Africans lost to the system of slavery. She was not trying to tell a universal tale about the reuniting of old Mends or about the way in which most people come to their own sense of identity as Americans. The story was about a slave who was forgotten but has every right to be remembered. For example, Morrison writes poignantly at the end of herB e lo v e d kA her yearning to recall the lost narrative of the slave:

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere

knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot

be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were,

how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she

has claim, she is not claimed...

They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their

tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on

the porch deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those who had

spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until

they realized that they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing

that she said, and began to believe that other than what they

158 themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at ail. So, in

the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. .(274).

Morrison is trying to give the experience of being a black woman in America a name. Her story will be nothing like One must ask herself why Oprah would even employ a white male director to tell a black woman's story. I think that the answer lay in the fact that Oprah is a victim of celebrity herself. Being a multimillionaire and a woman's whose face is seen in almost all the households in America, regardless of race, Oprah Winfrey quite possibly believed that she could take slavery and make it sell. If anyone could make a profitable movie about misfortune, it would be Oprah. However, what she did not account for is how many people actually do not see her as a black woman, as opposed to "Oprah," the icon. Usually, when I have engaged white women in conversations about Oprah and her television program, they confide in me that they don't really see Oprah as "black," but more like themselves ( 1 am not quite sure why white women think that telling me that someone is not really black is a compliment. However, it is something that I have often heard said about myself). So, in the end, Oprah might have believed her own press, she might have believed that whatever she said would be accepted by the American public because she said it. Winfrey also thought it was possible to universalize the message that Morrison was to give. She thought it possible to make the escape hrom slavery indicative of something else: the escape from the problems of

159 modem day life, maybe. Moreover, Winfrey was attempting to do what so many people in this culture do, use the idea of race and gender as a vehicle.

The way that American culture attaches so many other issues to race and gender becomes evident when we look at the hoopla surrounding Morrison's award of the Nobel Prize. Morrison, to her credit, has often resisted the pull of her own press. For example, in March of 1981 when she was featured on the cover of N e w s w e e k , she said, "Are you really going to put a middle-aged, gray­ haired colored lady on the cover of this magazine?" Therefore, it is easy to imagine the gasps that came from her, as well as from many in the American literary community and the general population at large on October 7,1993 when the Swedish Academy announced that Morrison was the winner of The Nobel

Prize for Literature. For example, in an article that appeared by William Grimes on the front page ofThe N ew York Times ov\. October 8,1993, Morrison was called "a surprise winner." The report follows:

the announcement that Ms. Morrison had won the Nobel Prize

came as something of a surprise. Speculation in the Swedish press

had swirled around four possible candidates: Seamus Haney, the

Irish poet, who had been considered the front-runner for several

years; Hugo Qaus, a Belgian poet, poet, playwright and film maker

who writes in Flemish; Bei Dad, an exiled Chinese poet; All Ahmed

160 Saeed, a Syrian-bom Lebanese poet who writes under the name

Adonis.

. . . Ms. Morrison said that she had risen about 4:30 a m. to

write and was startled to hear the phone ring a few hours later. "I

knew that it was terrible news," she said, "and when a friend of

mine on the other end said, " 'did you hear?' then I knew it was

something awful. " "It took me a while to accept it."

Some hours later, the permanent secretary of the Swedish

Academy called her to confirm that she had won the prize and told

her that a letter would be on its way.

"1 said why don't you send me a fax?" .. Somehow 1 felt

that if 1 saw the fax. I'd know that it wîisn't a dream or somebody's

hallucination.

The media had, indeed, found something extraordinary, and reporters descended on the normally serene Princeton University campus, in order to place this old "colored lady" on the front of almost every major and minor newspaper across the country, as well as on all of the major television networks.

The news, it seemed was that a black woman had won the Nobel Prize when the odds were purportedly not in her favor. Morrison's statement about the prize mirrored this idea. She stated in a telephone interview with Grimes, "this is a

161 palpable tremor of delight for me." "It is wholly unexpected and so satisfying," and "what is most wonderful for me personally is to know that the prize has at last been awarded to and African -American." Nevertheless, the cacophony of disparate voices in the public was cdmost deafening. However, they all seemed to be asking the same question: How did she win? Very few people, including the author even knew she was in the running. The prize had gone consecutively to three authors who wrote in English, wasn't it about time that the prize went to someone writing in some strange, exotic language? Since the prize went to an

American, why was she chosen instead of Thomas Pynchon or Joyce Carol Oates, the other serious contenders? And, finally, why had it taken the academy so long to honor an African-American woman? The answers to these questions seemed to have everything to do with the marketability and popularity of

Otherness or difference.

No matter what side of the debate that one took, it seemed obvious that

Morrison had arrived by winning the "big" prize—had, in fact, been accepted into the white literary canon that she spent most of her life challenging. Therefore, the fact that Morrison is the first African-American woman to win the prize is significant-although it is my belief that it is not the significant reason that she should have won-because not only does the award signal the pinnacle of a stellar literary career, but, also in the minds of the public, the validation of a

This quote is taken 6otn a telephone conversation that William Grimes had with Morrison the day of the 162 unique American voice, as well as the changing face of American publishing.

Likewise, it seems useful to know a little bit about the prize itself and how it has come to represent entree into the literary canon.

The Nobel Prize for Literature was established in 1893 by the will of

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish dynamite inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, scientist, and amateur writer. The will set up a trust that would award the "most important and original discoveries or the most striking advances in the wide sphere of knowledge or in the path of human progress."

In the final will of November 27,1895, it added to the first criteria that "one of the annual five awards will be given to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency." Indeed, the "ideal tendency" clause is what ultimately decides who shall get the prize, not the fact that one can simply write well. Tendency seems to me to be analogous with intention. ^

In fact the prize, which carries with it a $825,000 monetary reward, is put through a very painstaking process. The eighteen-member literary conunittee of the Swedish Academy, who are supposed to base their decisions on how closely the author fits the profile outlined by Nobel, himself, must wade through some

400 nominations to arrive at a single winner. Nevertheless, the critics of the prize

award. All the information on the Nobel Prize is taken from a series entitledThe Nobel Prize fVinners: Literature(JEng,]t!wood Clifis, NJ; Salem Press, 1987, ) Volume I- in. All further references to this work appear in die text 163 often claim that the awards are capricious and/or irrational. Moreover, the critics seem to feel that the award is made only as a political statement, i.e. " the grand gesture," "the recognition of dift^erence." Thus, the prize becomes an automatically authenticating gesture and, especially for those who feel that their author/representative has been slighted, a game of numbers: How many women authors have been represented? How many Americans? How many people of color? And even more signiftcant, perhaps, is who is the first of these particular groups to win.

Morrison became the eighth woman, eleventh American, and the first

Afiican-American to win the prize. Although she was the 90th winner of the literary award, it was her being the first black American woman that made her winning significant.

The effect of being a first, especially in terms of critical reception has been well established in the prize's history. For instance, in 1913 Rabindranath Tagore became the first person of color to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tagore, a poet whose principle language was Bengali, was chosen, according to the

Academy, for "his universal quality, the spiritual quality of his verse, and {for} his efforts to reconcile Eastern and Western thought." But, especially, the committee found him worthy of the prize because of this feeling of "ideal tendency" in his works, which I read as willingness to celebrate difference.

164 Due to the time in which he won and the United States's troubled history of race relations, Tagore's award elicited a little more than a gasp hrom the

American public. When the press finally admitted that Tagore won, there was of course several cries of outrage:

In the United States, the press, except forThe New York Times,

paid little attention to the award. The first mention of the award

(November 14,1913) remarked on Tagore's race in distinctly

American terms. (Remarking) that it was the "first time that this

prize had been given to anybody but a white person." .. And (in

another article) the following day, the writer stated, American

reactions were described as a mixture of surprise and resentment

that Occidental writers were passed over in favor of a "Hindu

Bard " with "a name hard to pronounce." The writer added that

Tagore, " if not exactly one of us, is, as an Aryan, a distant relation

of all white folk" ... While acknowledging the spirituality of

Tagore's verse the writer concluded that spirituality did not make

literary greatness and regarded the award as evidence of a lack of

great contemporary writers (184-5).

The reception surrounding Tagore's award reveals the type of phenomena that surrounds the popularity of difference in culture. Celebrity, at once, both reveals a desire to revel in the exotic and the need to subsume the exotic into the

165 dominant culture. The writer's need to assert Tagore's whiteness, after questioning in the above passage why Tagore won the award, is evidence of the contradictory ways in which celebrity works. It is understandable to realize that

Tagore, as the first man of color to win the Nobel Prize, was met with incredible resistance. It is harder to understand how underneath the typical racist resistance is the more insidious desire to celebrate and praise difference, with an eye toward making difference seem like just more the same.

Echoes of the criticism of Tagore's award were definitely heard in the critics of Morrison's award. Very little had changed in terms of our complex history of race relations in the 80 years that separated Morrison's award from

Tagore's. When Morrison won the prize, most of the announcements in the press did not concentrate on Morrison's skill as an author, but on her race. For example, Edwin M. Yoder, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote a piece entitled "Racial Significance Often Figures in Choosing Nobel Wirmers" that appeared in several newspapers. It is only later in the article, almost at its end that Yoder admits that he never read any of Morrison's books. Yet he is quick to point out that the only reason that she won is her race. He states,

"the old fashioned idea that race is irrelevant to the judgments of literary value is obviously passe." "When you combine the urge to patronize by race to the perennial weakness of the Swedish Academy for gestures of social significance, what you get is eccentric choices— like this one." By the time that Morrison had

166 arrived on Oprah's book dub to discuss her book B e lo v e d (and subsequently

P a ra d ise andThe Bluest Eyè^ all that was known really about her is that she was the black woman who won the Nobel Prize. She had become the symbol in literary cirdes of an acceptable form of black femaleness. All of this despite the fact, like the columnist Yoder, many people did not actually read her words.

However, Morrison has had, all in all, a very successful literary career.

Her 1974 book S u la was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1977, when

SongofSoIomonyias published it became the first Ahican-American book since

N a tiv e S o n io be a Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, as well as winning the

Fiction Award from the National Book Critics Circle. The book, which wasn't highly promoted at the time, had only a 20,000 copy 1st printing. In 1977,

Morrison also received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

Award, and President Carter appointed her to the National Council of the Arts.

When T a rB abyw 9S published by Knopf in 1981, Morrison was featured on the cover of N e w sw ee k. In 1987 whenB e l o v e d published it was billed as "the great American novel " and had 115,000 copy first printing, as well as being appointed a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. The movie rights to the book were purchased in 1988 by Winfrey for an undisclosed sum. Also in 1988,

48 black critics and writers protested nationally whenBeloveddàà. not receive the National Book Award, but two months later, (many believe as a result of the protest) the book received the Pulitzer Prize. Be/ovedbecaaae her most

167 successful book, remaining on the Publisher's M/&a(^Bestsellers List for 24 weeks, and then after she received the Pulitzer, returning to the list for an additional five weeks. It is believed thatB elovedSs one of the primary reasons that she won the Nobel Prize. Since her winning the Nobel Prize, all of her novels have been staples on theN ew York Times Bestsellers List, chiefly because

Oprah keeps featuring Morrison's works on her book club. Anything featured on Oprah's book club is an automatic bestseller and many say that Winfrey, in fact, runs the publishing industry. Knopf has also re-released Morrison's works as a boxed set, which certain hasn't hurt the sales of her books. A little less known is the influence that Morrison has had as an editor.

Morrison retired as a senior editor at Random House after a 20-year career in 1984. It is obvious that in looking at those whose careers she handled that she was not only interested in her own voice, but in that of other black writers.

While at Random House, she credited with presiding over a cultural awakening in the book industry, publishing titles by Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones,

Angela Davis, and a landmark book in black history.They Came Before

C o lu m b u s, by Ivan Van Sertima. It seems that on all levels she was and is committed to giving voice to the black experience, but, because of her popularity, there is a contrary strain that leads to the desire by the American public to pull her voice into the master narrative, to make her representation more mainstream, or more mythical. For example, Morrison stated in a 1993 interview Tin h e P a ris

168 R evieivÛ \2A. she is fully aware of the desire by her white reading audience to subsume her and to control who she represents:

INTERVIEWER Why do you think that people ask, "Why don't you write

something that we can understand?" Do you threaten them by not

writing in the typical, linear, chronological way?

MORRISON I don't think they mean that. I think they mean, "are you going to

write a book about white people?" For them, perhaps that is a kind

of compliment They're saying, "You write well enough, I would

even let you write about me." They couldn't say that to anybody

else... What is behind the question is, there's a center, which is

white, and then there are all of these regional blacks or Asians, or

any sort of marginal people. That question can only be asked hrom

the center. Bill Moyers asked me that when-are-you-going-to-

write-about question on television. I just said, "Well maybe one

day"... but I couldn't say to him, you know, you can only ask that

question hrom the center... The point is that he is patronizing; he's

saying, "You could come to the center if you wanted to" ... And

169 I'm sayings "Yeah, well I am going to stay out here on the margin

and let the center look for me." “

As an intellectual Toni Morrison has theorized about how to make the black experience central. As an author, Morrison upholds her theoretical position by creating works in which her identity as a black woman is fully felt. Despite the

pitfalls of celebrity, she holds fast the notion that she should be present in the

text. While she realizes that it may be astounding that anyone who came out of

the history of slavery and gender oppression can actually write because of the

overwhelming nature of this type of oppression, write she does. In her novels,

we see how she puts into practice her theory of "letting the center look for her

on the margins." All of her works of literature are predicated on her intellectual

undersbmding of the power of identity to be truly transformative.

"RECLAIMING THE 'I'": TONI MORRISON'S USE OF IDENTITY IN THE TEXT

The idea of creating an identity as a transformative strategy is particularly

evident in Toni Morrison's intellectual discourse because she seems to recognize

the dangers of being explained by people other than herself. Likewise, Morrison

uses her novels, specifically Tar Baby, Sula, andB elo ved , to invent herself (in

saying "her," I mean African-American women on the whole). In fact Morrison

firmly places the "I" back into identity, through her distinct literary style. She

" From Elisa SchappeU’s interview, “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV.” The Paris Review(Noveniber 1993)119-20. 170 does not allow African-American women to be decentered, broken down explained, or categorized by others. Indeed, her representations do not lend themselves to explanation, or trying to describe what it means to have Sula's or

Sethe's experience to anyone who isn't directly familiar with it Morrison makes it plain that her stories are for "the tribe," and while anyone can read her books and find value in them, the texts are not for or about others. Morrison's belief in writing out of the margins instead of the center is seen, for example, by the way that she assumes a certain knowledge of experience on the part of her readers about the black community. Moreover, her understanding of the identity of the black woman is not one that can be appropriated by others, although many male theorists would argue that there cannot be an essentialized experience, and, therefore, no "black woman." However, those theorists who argue that writers who create an identity in the text based on certain aspects of lived experience are essentializing, do not seem to recognize the nature of a distinct Afiican-American discourse. Indeed, the argument on my part is not that there is the ultimate or epitome of "the black woman," but that she is composed of many things: a family, a community, a race.

There seems to be a certain rootedness to history for Afiican-Americans which makes the meaning the "I" inclusive and indicative of multiple identities.

Therefore when Sethe claims in üsÆ^m/that "I got a tree on my back," she is not only creating of describing herself, but she is also making a Sojourner Truth, an

171 Eartha Kitt, and "the black girl." Likewise, the myriad representations of women and the process of being and becoming a black woman are extremely varied in

Morrison's texts, but nonetheless familiar. Toni Morrison inTar Baby, Sula, and

B e lo v e d n o t only creates incredible characters, but unmistakenly reclaims her right to the "I" through creating a space for the collective African-American woman to exist.

Mziking a black woman is a powerful and empowering act. It must be because so many have attempted to do it. Many white men have attempted to make her a "hotentot" or an "Aunt Jemima;" many white women have tried to make her "a sister" zmd have her fight for the right to equal employment, telling her that freedom came with the right to work—while, ironically, black women have done nothing but work their entire lives; and black men either were not there to invent black women and, if they were, there minds were so entrapped by mental slavery that they often had conflicting notion of her: "whore," "super woman," "a woman, but not as good as a white woman," etc... Essentially others were telling a black woman who she should be, what she meant when she said "I."

Morrison does not concern herself with the ways that other people

"make" black women. She uses her gift of language to create them. For example, in T a r B aby, her extensive passage describing soldier ants seems to be speaking directly of and for African-American women. The passage follows:

172 Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for the

soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are

women and there is so much to do-the work is literally endless. So

many to be bom and fed, then found and buried. There is no time

for dreaming. The life of their world requires organization so tight

and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are

seldom produced. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by

the queen who surmises by some four-million-year-old magic she is

heiress to, that it is tim e... That is aU. Bearing, hunting, eating,

fighting, burying (290).

It is not necessary for Morrison to state directly that the soldier ant is like the black woman because the parallel here is clearly drawn.

There seems to be certain associations that Morrison wants her reading audience to make with images of strength, for example, and someone who raised five children alone, worked three jobs, and put aU her kids through coUege. And, we make the association. It is as if we hear the voices of black women shouting in affirmation in church: "speak the word, sister," or "that alright, teU the truth."

Also, the line "no time for dreaming" that is repeated in the passage links directly to the main character Jadine's thoughts in the preceding paragraph.

For example, Jadine states, "no more dreams of safety... A grown woman did not need safety and its dreams. She was the safety she longed for"

173 (290). Indeed, Morrison seems to be creating space for black women to exist from a collective identity. Morrison in declaring that "she was the safety she longed for" places women and their discourse as distinct, or something that clearly exists far away from black men and certainly white women and men who do not understand her. Likewise, the distinct nature of the black woman is seen in this novel by the way that Morrison placed certain criteria on what it means to be black and then a woman.

The relationship between Jadine and her aunt Ondine, who is a maid to a wealthy white couple, more than anything in the novel manifests this process of becoming a black woman. For instance. Ondine offers to her niece the necessary advice for becoming a woman. Ondine states,

Jadine, a girl has got to be a daughter first, she have to leant that.

And if she never leams how to be a daughter, she can't never leant

how to be a woman. 1 mean a real woman-a woman good enough

for a man-good enough for the respect of other women (281).

What is implicit in this passage is that for African-Americans there is a knowledge of identity that does not seem to stem from the corporal "1" or the self but ffom some collective sense of community. The fact that an understanding of community is necessary to individual identity explains then how Morrison can arrive at the notion of "the black woman." Although

Morrison does use stereotypical representations as contrasts to her own unique

174 characters, she ultimately does not seem to be concerned about who shall accept, for example, Jadine or Ondine as real characters outside of the black community.

Indeed, Morrison's theoretical position is hrmly rooted in the black aesthetic, it comes out of her love for certain aspects of her culture. What makes Morrison a great female intellectual is that she is a great "race woman" who uses her words, as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells did at the turn of the Twentieth Century,

to build and strengthen the black community. Morrison is not concerned with

whether or nor she is canonized or reweirded for her efforts by the larger society-

-although recognition certainly has been hers. She is only intent that her

message be received by the people for whom it will hold the greatest value.

Moreover, the recognition inherent in Nobel Prizes and the like are only

secondary or after-effects. The goal as a race woman should always be to be of

your people. This practice can be called, if it is necessary to name it "the political

linguistics of love."

Therefore, the question arises as to whether or not there can be a blanket

political purpose of all black texts. It would seem that all African-American texts

are necessarily political, no matter what the subject matter or who is writing.

Thus, it is the very nature of African -American culture and discourse to include

all black texts because we are a collective people with a collective agenda. And,

in returning toT ar B a b y, Morrison's use of the chorus of black women who

follow Jadine, as if to remind her of the fact that she is part of this thing, this

175 collective black community, speaks for the fact that there is some political accountability of all black authors. The very thing that sparks recognition when we speak of black women as soldier ants is the very element which keeps us distinct, or rather individual.

However, the character Jadine is an interesting one in that she is what would be commonly called a "wanna be" in African-American culture because it seems that she wants to be white, or at least not be so closely associated with black people and their negative representations. However, the black community will not let her go. For example, the fact that all black people have a tie to the black community whether they seek it or not is evident inT a r B a b y in the passage in which a chorus of women follow Jadine into her dreams and psyche:

Jadine opened her arms to this man accustomed to the best pussy in

Florida. It must have been that thought, put there by Soldier, that

made her competitive, made her struggle to out do Cheyenne and

surpass all of her legendary gifts. She was thinking of her,

whipped on by her, and that, perhaps, plus the fact that she left the

door unlatched and Son opened it on its hinges... and it stayed

wide open but they had not noticed because they were only paying

attention to each other so that must have been how and why

Cheyenne got in, and then the rest: Rosa and Therese and Son's

dead mother and Sally Sarah Sadie Brown and Ondine and Soldiers

176 wife Ellen and Francine from the mental institution and her own

dead mother and even the woman in yellow (257-8).

This passage is significant because it points to many things about black characters in black novels. One is that the black community is composed of a multiplicity of different people-no one is thrown out, "too outdoors," or exiled from the collective group. Secondly, it points to the fact that Toni Morrison is herself a black woman who recognizes that the mothers, the crazy women, the maids, etc. have a right to Jadine, that somehow she is connected to them. And all these women become Jadine. It is impossible for Jadine, in the realization of herself as an African-American woman, to just be a black girl individually.

When she says "I am Jadine" she brings into the equation those who came before her: her mother and aunt, the women who have touched Son's life and those who she only has seen or heard mention of. These women will not let her escape her identity, or have the attitude that she is her own woman, free to travel all over the world, to marry a white man, to call a black man a nigger, to not do right by her kin and just exist. All of the other women who make up the sisterhood will hold her accountable. Thus, it is significant that the women who visit Jadine in

Eloe, while she is making love to Son, bear their breasts to her, because essentially they are trying to make Jadine aware of their collective selves.

However, Jadine takes it as a sign of her own shortcomings. She states, "1 have breasts too" (258). But, as Ondine has already implied, it takes more than female

177 body parts to make a woman. Thus when Morrison states, "but they did not believe her." "They just held their own higher and pushed their own farther out and looked at her" (258), it calls attention to mind that Jadine is still not a woman in their eyes because she has not learned how to be their daughter. Jadine hasn't in fact recognized what makes them common, or what makes them black women. Jadine often prides herself in thinking that she is nothing like her aunt

Ondine, a woman who slaved for white people, but her release will only come in acknowledging their similarities. Even Son, although he does it negatively, attempts to portray a single image of the black woman, an image that cannot be reduced to generalization or speculation. Son states.

You sweep me under the rug and your children will cut your

throat... the one is Europe you were thinking about marrying?

Go have his children. Then you bitches can do what you have

always done: take care of white folk's children. That's what you

were bom for; that's what you waited for all your life... that's your

job. You have been doing it for two hundred years, you can do it

for two hundred m ore... Fat or skinny, head rag or wig, cook or

model,.. that's what you so and when you don't have nay white

man's baby to take care of you make one out of the babies that

black men give you (259).

178 Therefore, the idea of how a black woman loves takes on a whole new meaning.

She cannot simply feel free to love a white man individually without invoking images of the past, specifically slavery. And the black man's anger at women loving outside the tribe are plain, although Son's voice and anger in the above passage is a woman's creation. Indeed, the stakes for loving are high. It seems that oppression has so tainted black women and men that they cannot simply exist to love one another. That is why love as a literary strategy is the most healing and transformative.

Likewise, it is a narrative device in many of Morrison's novels to examine women both in and out of love, while women and men form a community and after the men leave. And the men always leave. However, the absence of black men can serve to manifest certain inherent truths about the black community.

The first fact being that men always seem to be absent, whether the man be in jail, dead, or with too many other women to be called "my man "- all of these images fit the description that Morrison gives us of Soldier ants whose males were not near the females except to reproduce. Secondly, in the males' absence the females become stronger. It is because black men always seem to leave that women have more room to create themselves. For example, in Æ /om/when

Paul D leaves Sethe, she becomes further acquainted with her feelings as a woman. It is in Paul D's absence that Beloved, Denver, and Sethe become girls together, with nothing to concentrate on but themselves. InTarBabyxX. is after

179 Son leaves that Ondine finally gives Jadine the talk about being a woman. Also, in 6«6w hen Ajax leaves Sula and Jude leave Nel, the emphasis is allowed to go back to the women and their Mendship. Thus, the significance is not necessarily in the fact that the men left, but in what it means to the women when they do.

For instance, Nel states after Jude has had an affair with Sula,

Goo no, not Sula. Here she was in the midst of hating it, scared of

it, and again she thought of Sula as if they were still friends and

talked things over. That was too much. To lose Jude and not have

Sula to talk about it to because it was Sula that her left her for (110).

Moreover, the dialogue that takes place between the two women after

Ajax has left Sula and she has become sick is instructive in that it teaches what it means to be a black woman. The passage follows;

[Nel] You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can't act like

a man. You can't be weüking around all independent like, doing

whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don't.

[Sula] You repeating yourself.

[Nel] How repeating myself?

[Sula] You say that I am a woman and a colored woman. Ain't that

the same as being a man?

180 [Nel] I d o n 't think so and you w ouldn't think so either if you had

children.

[Sula] Then I really would act like w hat you call a man. Everym an I ever knew left his children (142-3).

What is significant in this passage is the way that Sula re-understands that to be a woman and a black woman is the same thing as being a man. Thus, Morrison is essentially targeting the fact that to be a black woman means, at least for the black community, total accountability and hardship. The image that Sula paints also conjures up the image of female slaves, women who did the work of men, people like Sojourner Truth, who with her six-foot muscular hame literally resembled a man. The image of that Sula paints also recalls the fact that women are forced by socio-economic conditions into taken on other roles.

Likewise, the difference between Sula's and Nel's vision about what it means to be a woman is significant. Nel speaks from a position that is firmly within the mainstream, taking a mother's perspective, while Sula sits on the hringe of society, Hrmly rooted in the idea of her center in the margin.

Nevertheless, both of these women make the "black woman," even though they seem to disagree about what it means to be one. Their collective identity is indicative of the inclusive nature of the black conununity, as a whole. Indeed, the Bottom, the mythical black world that Sula and Nel inhabit, represents the inclusiveness of black community, hrom the Time and a Half Pool Hall to Irene's

181 Place of Cosmetology. And everyone is included in this world: the veterans like

Shadrack, who instituted a National Suicide Day, and people like the Peace family who do not seem to follow any rules. Although Sula does not seem to be like any black woman that I know, she still defines the black woman, creates her in fact. Moreover, defining the black woman does not men pointing to Nel and saying that she is the only representation of a black woman possible, and that if any woman does not share her particular characteristics then they are not black.

To state that identity is based on arbitrary notions of culture is a great misunderstanding of the ethnopoetics of love. The reason that love, or

theoretical intimacy is a transformative narrative strategy is because it is accepting of everything and exclusive of nothing.

Likewise, in B elo ved , we also get a sense of how Morrison's love of black

culture enables her to create a sense of her own identity. In this novel the issue

of history, of roots, is foregrounded. Black women are not created here simply

by their own voices, but by the voices of their ancestors who have died in

slavery. The fact that the ancestors are central to the formation of a modem day

identity is obvious because Morrison chooses to make Beloved, who is an

embodiment of the "sixty million and more" lost in the Middle passage, the title

character. It seems that Beloved does more than anyone else in the book to

create a notion of the black woman. Her birth and death ultimately question

what it is to be a black woman, or more specifically a black mother. The idea that

182 Beloved was killed by her mother in order to save her from the horrors of slavery immediately proves that there are diHerent types of mother-love in the black community, which are bom out of oppression and desperation. Should a mother be allowed to kill her child? This is the question that we invariably ask ourselves as readers when seeing what Sethe does. It is a question that comes out of the center and the dominant notions of mother-love.

Morrison's intimate theorizing suggests that this question is not appropriate when looking at things in the margin. The better question would be; what about slavery would make Sethe kill her child? This question is culturally specific and the text provides the answer. Therefore, after readingB elo v ed v re come to understand what made Sethe into the woman that she was, a woman that could kill her child, walk to freedom with her back split open, pregnant, and with no shoes and swollen feet. Indeed, Sethe would seem to be an unusual woman. She is not, cis many of Morrison s women are not, normal, however there is something strikingly familiar about her. Perhaps it is an image that goes back to the soldier ant and her eating her young-an image association which implies Sethe's strength and the fact that she too "had no time for dreaming."

Even though women weren't "supposed to be able to do that" kill your own children, work hard, and have a two story house that she acquired without a man; Sethe accomplishes all of this oblivious to what others think she ought to do. Many black women are different from Sethe in attitude or circumstances, but

183 all of the women, even Sethe, constitute our images of our mother, grandmothers, of black women. It should never seem odd that when black people talk about their "mammas," that the stories seem to have a commonality about them, because that is the beauty of the way that black people use language, especially the way that Morrison uses language. Our words can invoke images that only truly hold power for someone who was socialized in the same manner— they have connotative power. So, if like James Baldwin, we recognize that

"writing is fighting", we are in a sense accepting the notion the novels like

Morrison's, by political necessity, will be distinctly individual in the message that they carry. Morrison's words carry our politics, a sense of black nationalism.

Therefore, how shall the idea of Sethe inBelovecPoe placed within the sense of a black nationalistic agenda, within the theoretical strategy of love, because indeed the first reaction to Sethe's killing her child is repulsion.

However, this repulsion can be explored in two ways: the first is to recognize that from our safe position, we have time to consider options, whereas Sethe did not; the second it to look at the act with the knowledge that she did not do it for anyone's approval, but because she loved her children too much to see them enslaved. The fact that Sethe was not seeking approval for her motherhood skills is apparent in the passage in which she tries to talk to Beloved about her choices:

184 This much and more Denver heard her (mother) say hrom the

comer chair, trying to persuade Beloved, the one and only person

that she had to convince, that what she had done was right because

it came hrom true love (251).

Moreover, the greater signihcance is that Morrison seems to be stating that it is

"just like a mother" to give up everything, make extreme sacrifices, for her children. Indeed, a black woman's children are a great part of herself. For example, Sethe states, "the best thing that she was, was her children" (251). In

Beloved^ôcàs issue of a black woman being a mother is central to the act of identity formation. For Sethe, being a black mother meant killing her children.

Likewise, being a black mother is vastly different from being just a mother, because not only does a black mother have to worry about the mundane things, but she also has to be concerned about protecting her children from being lynched, from getting bruised, and getting enslaved. Sethe is willing to protect her children against these things at all costs. For example she states.

Whites might dirty her alright, but not her best thing... the part of

her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the

headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sing on it was her

husband or Paul A ... She might have to work in the

slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter (251).

185 And this is what it means to be a black woman and a mother, something that

Sula called being a man.

The way in which Morrison claims a black woman's identity is inherent in the language and texture of her works. Moreover, it is not the type of self- affîrmation that is said loudly, or with black women trying to prove themselves to others. It is simply a statement of fact, of women like Ntozake Shange stating,

" someone almost walked off wid alia my stuff/ but I said this is m ine... you can't have it." Likewise, in the reclaiming of herself in the text the black woman intellectual is able to do whatever she wants. She can state that the bag lady on the comer is me; she can point to the lady in the grocery store and say that "she is me too." This claiming of one's multiple selves means remembering that "no matter what you did, the Diaspora mothers with the pumping breasts can impugn your character" {Tar Baby7S%). Finally, just as Beloved claims "I am

Beloved and she is mine," so can 1 claim that I am a black woman and Beloved is mine, Jadine is mine, Sula is mine, ad inhnitum.

186 CONCLUSION

As black American women, we are bom into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm o fshared language, references and allusions within the veil o four blackness andfemaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known. This paradox is central to what I suggest we call the Afra-American experience. ~ Joanne Braxton,Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within A Tradition

When looking at the ways in which black women create and are represented in literary texts, questions of voice vs. presence, of performance vs. polit^":s, and of private vs. public are immediately implicated. Black intellectual women have dealt with these issues consistently in attempting to make a space for themselves in American culture. Is it enough that black women are merely present as a field of study in the academy? The work of black women intellectuals seems to suggest that it is not. Is it better to be an intellectual and publish your work for the world to see, or do time and politics demand that a black woman work as best as she can firom her home, being content with struggling locally or personally? Given the range of literature examined in this

187 dissertation, it is evident that black women must create in all areas of their lives lest their spirits die.

Q uiet Brown Buddha(s): Black Women Intellectuals, Silence, and

American Culture explores black women's creativity premised on the idea that it is no longer appropriate for black women to be considered simply as "presences" in American culture. While slave women like Phillis Wheatley zmd Sojourner

Truth, early intellectuals, were given the daunting task of initiating black women into the American literary scene, contemporary black women

intellectuals are privileged to be working out of an already rich and established

tradition. Wheatley, who actually had to undergo an examination by various

Boston dignitaries in order to deem that her poems were "written by herself,"

could only publish her work after garnering authentication hrom white males.

When Wheatley wrote it was both to express her creative spirit and to combat

the ideas which were keeping her enslaved—mainly the notion that black people

did not have the ability to reason and that, therefore, they were not human.

Indeed, black women began their intellectual lives out of necessity, out of the

need to counteract a history of oppression. However, this oppression is not the

limit of what they are or can be. As Jacqueline Jones Royster argues inT races o f

a S trea m , often black women were able to break out of the bonds of racial and

gender oppression through their literary efforts:

188 Despite such constraints, however, my research indicates that

African American women's resistance to sociopolitical barriers has

been considerable and that, although their achievements may have

been devalued, they have not been thoroughly neutralized or

contained. From the beginning of their opportunities to learn,

African American women have engaged consistently and valiantly

in acts of literacy that have yielded remarkable rewards for

themselves and others (4).

The intellectual lives of black women have been rewarding lives. From Phillis

Wheatly to Toni Morrison, my research shows that African-American women have made significant contributions to the ways that people think, write, and live their lives around the world. In the works of black intellectual women, one's senses both love and striving. While it is true that black women intellectuals are trying to find a way to empower themselves and assert their voice through their literary practices, it is also true that they are offering a model of how to do this to the larger culture. Anna Julia Cooper was correct when she stated in 1892, "a stream can rise no higher than its source... a race is but a total of families. The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the characteristics of the part will determine the characteristics of the whole"{A

Voice From the South, 137). Indeed, black women's writing is a sum that is characterized by its parts-the individual voicM that simultaneously borrow from

189 each other and extend the black female intellectual tradition into the demands brought on by this new era.

Surely, this next millennium will ask black women to finally negotiate their theoretical and political differences with black men. The study of

African-American literature as a whole will become more inclusive, because it will be based on what we have learned about black women and their identity thus far. It is from this place of shared tradition that we will be able to extend the work of black women intellectuals more successfully into other arenas, that we will be able to see that all "isms" come from a singular source.

Indeed, the feminist struggle against patriarchal and hegemonic structures has often been linked to African-American or Third World resistance.

In fact, the call for Feminism is caught up in the call for racial equality because the categories of "race" and "gender" are produced out of certain material conditions implicated in capitalism and class structure. Whenever discourses on feminism, women's rights, or women's liberation are foregrounded, issues about race and class structure almost always come into play. It is no accident that race

has held a certain paradigmatic function for Western feminists, who have looked

at the struggles of blacks, for example, across the globe and found that their own call for subjectivity and cry against marginalization can be mirrored in the faces

of those who marched in Johannesburg, or "sat in" institutions across America.

Race struggles and the push for decolonization have, in effect, made feminism

190 possible, because they have constructed a language for struggle and formulated a model for hreedom that did not previously exist for women who were both oppressed by race and by gender. So, it is not an exaggeration to state that if any material changes are going to occur for or in the lives of all women, they will/ must be invested in the charge for racial equality.

Black women intellectuals have always recognized the need to fight against both racial oppression and female domination— have, in fact, recognized how these two seemingly separate concerns are intimately linked. These women have been vanguards through their literary practices-often speaking when the men could not and attempting to literally write themselves out of of oppression.

Afiican-American women intellectuals have amazingly maintained their focus in the face of strong resistance from men who believe that freedom is for "men," and from other women who have a very narrow conception of women's rights that does not encompass the black world woman's reality. It is in this contradictory space firaught with all kinds of dangers that Black women intellectuals continue to fight-continue to tell their stories.

Indeed, the stories of these women are their primary weapon. There is a certain power in autobiography, in intimate theorizing, because these "woman tales" open this space that allows a dialogue of liberation to occur. Although theorists like Sara Suleri, a Pakistani feminist and writer, find problems with autobiography and what they see as the Third World woman's function as an

191 "informant/' who tells the dominant culture about her life in order to capitalize on the current interest in "others" and the exotic; writing one's story continues to be a powerful and an empowering act. In particular, Suleri questions bell hooks' desire, as a Third World woman, to rely on the personal narrative in her essay, "Woman skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition" :

As does Trinh's text, hook's claims that personal narrative is the

only salve to the rude abrasions that Western feminist theory has

inflicted on the body of ethnicity. The tales of lived experience,

however, cannot function as a sufficient alternative, particularly

when they are predicated on dangerously literal professions of

postcolonialism (764).

What Suleri is suggesting is that for the Postcolonial woman the act of a writing a personal narrative will be little more than a "celebration of oppression," that provides the opportunity for marginalization. However, it is clear that Suleri cannot possibly believe this because she has written her own autobiography. M e a t/e ss D ays, which is simply her story of growing up in

Pakistan and how this colored her perceptions of the world. Although she would quite probably contend that her book is a deconstruction of the post colonial subject's desire to rely on autobiography, or to celebrate his or her difference, the book's merit lay in the fact that it is her story and that it brings us

192 some knowledge of a Pakistani woman's reality. Suleri states later in her essay

"Women Skin Deep:"

Allow me to turn as a consequence to a local example of how

realism locates its language within the post colonial condition, and

to suggest that lived experience does not achieve its articulation

through autobiography, but through that other third-person

narrative known as the law (766).

Suleri then goes on to show the way in which the Islamization of Pakistan has caused a dramatic threat to the lives of women in Pakistan. This discussion would seem to be a worthwhile project for Suleri, because, indeed, the law's effect on women is very important. However, this is a extremely problematic passage because it implies that the law is real, whereas the stories that women and post-colonial subjects tell are not. Suleri privileges the third-person narrative, here, without truly looking into the way in which the law and the third-person narrative are worked out through the personal, as she does herself inM e a tle ss D ays. So it would seem that the reverse of the above claim is true— that both the law and lived experience are articulated through autobiography.

The power of autobiography is no where more apparent than it is in the poems, essays, and novels of Alice Walker. 1 think that it is necessary to reclaim

Alice Walker here as a part of the "brown Buddha" tradition, because her work has truly been indispensable as a model for other intellectual women to follow. 1

193 am a great admirer of Walker's work, and returning to her, after my earlier critique of "In Search of My Mother's Gardens," will enable us to put the importance of her work in the proper perspective. Further, the circle has always been an important symbol in different "native" cultures. So 1 wish to acknowledge my nativeness and to close the circle by reconsidering Walker. I believe my grandmother would say that it is good to end where you start.

Alice Walker's fiction reveals that she does not find it is necessary to theorize or explain her position as a Third world woman, as is expected in the academy or in the American literary canon. She merely relies on her beautiful, lyrical language to create herself—to create the idea of black Southern intellectual women living in a postmodern moment. Walker's narratives are very much a part of black women's attempt to write themselves out of colonization. Walker's writing is not aimed at breaking down stereotypes that others have about her experience-an act that automatically privileges the dominant culture and leaves her experience as lacking. Instead, Walker is, as Royster maintains, attempting to "locate" herself and her narrative through the use of her personal writing.

Walker's position and experience is foregrounded, which suggests that she is not here because of the gift of oppression, but in spite of it. Moreover, she, unlike

Suleri, realizes the power inherent in her words, in her stories. Walker is able to

talk about race, class, gender, and even the law through her narratives.

194 For instance, in theTemple ofM yFamiliarVidXksr does not concern herself with the ways in which other people have made black women, she uses her unique characters and her gift for language to create them. Walker deals with both love and lies, her love of black women and the lies that others have told them. In the opening of the novel she quotes Miss Lissie: " if they have lied about Me, they have lied about everything. " It is apparent that this novel will be directed at reaching the "truth." In fact. Walker is building a temple, as the title suggests - a temple where women are stripped free of the false images of pornography, of misguiding notions of what it means to be a woman, and given

their full womanselves to recognize and to praise. For example. Walker challenges the stigma of being a "witch" that has been attached to black women

in dominant culture. Walker states:

Now woman... by hook and crook, with a strong memory

of African Eden in her batteries, kept alive some feeling for

animals, though she was reduced usually to the caring and

feeding of one small house cat. Well, there she was black,

with her broom and her cat, her hair like straw. Ever

wonder why witches' clothes are always black, and their hair

every which way (198)?

In this passage, the blackness of the witches clothes and the way in which

negative representations are linked to a black woman's visual representation

195 reveal the importance of using words to change images. Walker adds further,

"they made it seem not only natural but righteous to kill,.. any animal or dark creature that one saw" (199), which corroborates the fact that these lies have then contributed to all sorts of violence against black women, violence which was supposedly justified. Therefore, a black woman's identity is not a trivial matter, it means literally life or death.

Alice Walker realizes the importance of finding the "true" woman image.

She in fact is able to link this search to the very beginnings of history when women were goddesses. But, more importantly, she locates this time as one when women made the transition hrom being valued because of their ability to give life to the time in which they were exploited for this ability, when women were commodified. For example. Walker states:

It was during the hundred years of slave trade in Africa that

this religion was finally destroyed... There were in the

earliest days, raids on the women's temples, which existed in

sacred groves of trees, with the women and the children

dragged out by the hair and forced to marry into a male-

dominated society... The men, they had decided would be

the creator, and they went about dethroning women

systematically. To sell women and children for whom you

no longer wished to have responsibility or to sell those who

196 were mentally infirm, or had in some way offended you,

became a new tradition,... as did the idea that a man could

own many women, as he owned many cattle or hunting

dogs (64).

What Walker is saying is that there is a connection between oppression and capitalism. Therefore, what is evident in this passage is that commodification is the biggest deterrent to the formation of women's identities. It is only after the colonizers, who came in hopes of attaining riches, come that the religion which glorified the mother and upheld the women as sacred is destroyed. What this transition firom spirit and freedom to slavery also signifies is that the struggle for identity is equally a struggle for survival. Black women intellectuals have to struggle against assimilation and against commodificaton, and this is the struggle of their lives. In the end black women are hoping to reclaim their role as

"goddesses."

Walker, herself, is a goddess or a diviner in her writing, the griotte, who

through her tale is able to help her community heal itself. Her magic or her

medicine, as Trinh T. Minh-Ha states infVoman, N ative, Other'ys her story. Trinh

states: " The story is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, magical, and

religious. In many parts of the world, the healers are known as the living

memories of the people— They know everyone's story— they derive their

power firom U sten in g to the others anda b so rb in g daily realities" ( 140).

197 Indeed, it would seem that the only way for black women intellectuals to intervene in oppressive structures is through autobiography, through the story

that has always held a important place in "native" cultures. Walker, clearly does

not forget this. The Temple o fM y Familiar says as much about the law and as it

does about her grandmother, or Zora Neale Hurston. Moreover, in this novel.

Walker is establishing a theoretical model that holds allegorical possibilities,

which ultimately can lead us all towards liberation on both gendered and racial

lines.

Therefore, it is necessary for AMcan-American women intellectuals,

especially Ahrican-American women writers, to keep using their words as

weapons if we all are going to triumph. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha states,

The world's earliest archives or libraries were the memories of

women. Patiently transmitted hrom mouth to ear, body to body,

hand to hand. In the process of storytelling, speaking and listening

refer to the realities that do not involve just the imagination. The

speech is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It destroys,

brings into life, nurtures. Every woman partakes in the chain of

guardianship and transmission. In Africa it is said that every

griotte who dies is a library burned dow n.. (121).

Likewise, this resistance to the story or to the first person narration, Suleri's reticence, comes out of western ideals. It was these same ideals that told us that

198 we should privilege the written over the oral - that created the space of silence, the unknowable, that we have so fully and happily occupied. For example, Joanne Braxton states, "For the black woman in American autobiography, the literary act has been, more often than not, an attempt to regain a sense of place in the New World" (2). We cannot forget the stories because they are our grounds for fighting. So in order to be transformative in their practices, black intellectual women cannot fight in the space that white women and men have set up for them. They have to reclaim their own. They have to be like Anna Julia Cooper, like Alice Walker, like Patricia Williams, like bell hooks, and finally like Trinh T. Minh-Ha who said, " Let me tell you a story. For all 1 have is a story. Story passed firom generation to generation, named Joy" (119).

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