When the Evening Comes: a Novel and and It Begins Like
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WHEN THE EVENING COMES: A NOVEL AND AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS: ESSAYS _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by LATANYA MCQUEEN Dr. Trudy Lewis, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2017 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled WHEN THE EVENING COMES: A NOVEL AND AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS: ESSAYS Presented by LaTanya McQueen, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _______________________________________ Dr. Trudy Lewis _______________________________________ Dr. Anand Prahlad ________________________________________ Dr. Karen Piper ________________________________________ Dr. Michael Ugarte ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Enormous thanks to my Dr. Trudy Lewis, my dissertation chair, and my committee members Dr. Anand Prahlad and Dr. Karen Piper, but also, in particular, to Dr. Michael Ugarte, who offered so much support and guidance throughout this process. For this, I am grateful. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................ii On the Crisis Experience in Biracial Literature...............................1 Works Cited...................................................................................17 When the Evening Comes: A Novel…..........................................19 And It Begins Like This: Essays…..…........................................285 Vita...............................................................................................443 ON THE CRISIS EXPERIENCE IN BIRACIAL LITERATURE For the black man or woman, the experience of being seen through the eyes of another and fully understanding how one is seen can be a traumatic experience. Franz Fanon talks about such a moment in Black Skins, White Masks when a white girl calls him a Negro. With this call Fanon recognizes his own marginalization and difference. W.E.B. Du Bois theory of double-consciousness stems from a similar experience he had. In African American literature this moment often marks a pivotal moment in the protagonist’s narrative arc. Contemporary novels that feature biracial characters like Danzy Senna’s Caucasia or Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky also have such identifying moments that recall both Fanon and DuBois. This moment, defined by sociologist Everett Stonequist as the crisis experience, is a hallmarking feature of these reconfigured passing narratives, often acting as a catalyst for the protagonist to begin a self-exploration of an understanding of their identity in a world that tries to define them as being white or black, a process that forces the character to disavow one for the other. In examining further how the crisis experience operates, I will look at Matt Johnson’s Pym, specifically the book’s biracial protagonist Chris Jaynes. With Johnson’s Pym, the crisis experience sparks Jaynes’ own journey toward what he believes is an understanding of White pathology, but it’s also an attempt at discovering his own ancestral black roots. Through the character of Chris Jaynes, Johnson’s Pym is an example of a book that uses satire to deliberate target Whiteness—from the White world of publishing, white academia, and how White pathology has infiltrated every aspect of contemporary society, including the habits and expectations of the White reader himself. 1 The focus of trauma criticism has taken work from leading theorists like Cathy Caruth and others to focus on effects of trauma and how they can be realistically presented in literature, but this criticism has largely centered around psychological and physical traumas resulting large-scale events such as war, mass-murder, terrorist attacks, long-term oppression but also individual experiences like rape, abuse, sudden accidents, and the death of loved ones. Postcolonial critics have even applied the trauma theory to cultural traumas or national traumas like the trauma resulting from slavery or colonialism. While there has been work done linking the trauma of slavery to African American experience, particularly in the novels of Toni Morrison, where there’s been less exploration is the application of trauma theory to trauma that results in the everyday racism people of color experience in their daily life and how the experience of that trauma eventually comes to shape one’s sense of self and their place in the world. One critic, Ron Eyerman in Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, argues that the formation of African American identity should be explored through the history of the cultural trauma of slavery. Cultural trauma is the dramatic loss of identity and meaning, what Eyerman refers to as a “tear in the social fabric” that affects a group of people that have achieved some degree of cohesion (2). The trauma of slavery should be looked at as “not as institution or even experience, but as collective memory, a form of remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people” (1). As Eyerman explains, for African Americans, it’s the memory of slavery and its representations in speech and art that have come to ground their identity. In his book, Eyerman starts with the post-Civil War period after slavery had been abolished and discusses the ways in which the notion of a unique African American identity emerged 2 and reconfigured throughout history. “Whether or not they directly experienced slavery or even had ancestors who did,” Eyerman argues, “blacks in the United States [have] identified with and [have come] to identify themselves through the memory and presentation of slavery (14). Eyerman’s argument is useful in thinking about the link between African American identity and the traumatic experience of recognizing oneself through someone else’s gaze and seeing how they are viewed as lesser, something foreign, something Other. This experience is the culmination of years of being witness to the various cultural forms, from “books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, and radio” that have worked their way into black man’s mind (Fanon 131). These cultural forms, with their racist depictions of the black man or woman as the savage, the brute, the bad man, and the Uncle Tom for men and the jezebel, the mammy, or the welfare queen for women are examples of the type of every day racism Forter spoke of. The black man (or woman) is constantly surrounded by these cultural forms, and they “work their way into one’s mind” (131). They are, what Greg Forter identifies as being “mundanely catastrophic traumas” that over time, affect a sense of self. In thinking about trauma theory, not much attention has been made on the experience of the mundanely catastrophic. In defining it, academic Greg Forter offers this explanation: “the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of every day racism. These phenomena are indeed traumas in the sense of having decisive and deforming effects on the psyche that give rise to compulsively repeated and highly rigidified social 3 relations. But such traumas are also chronic and cumulative, so women in the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as ‘shocks’ in the way that Nazi persecution and genocide do in the accounts of Caruth and others” (Forter). It is the trauma of experiencing a hundred pinprick assaults on the psyche. These assaults can range from the constant witnessing the stereotypical representations of oneself in the cultural forms Fanon mentions, but it also can include microaggressions felt in the classroom and workplace, said by friends and peers, to the omnipresent effects of systematic racism experienced in one’s daily life. In Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks. the culminating moment of experiencing these traumas is when he relates the story of hearing the child’s words “Look, a Negro!” and through this call, he become stripped of his subjectivity. He is not an individual but an identity, an “object among other objects” (Fanon 89). I would argue here, that this “Look, a Negro” moment Fanon explains is its own type of traumatic “shock.” Fanon uses this experience to describe how the black man lives out the trauma of the recognition of his marginalization. This moment marks a shift in which he has to renegotiate his identity in relation to this recognition of difference. Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness echoes Fanon’s. In the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes a similar moment when he was made to feel his racial difference. A white girl at school cuts him by refusing his visiting-card “peremptorily, with a glance.” (15). The girl disdains him on the basis of what she sees, his skin color, and that refusal is itself expressed through a blind look that rejects Du Bois without knowing the person he believes himself to be—someone who is not different from her or anyone else. Du Bois describes this experience of alienation from white 4 society as being “shut out from their world by a vast veil” (8). His identity as an African American is dependent on how he is viewed by a racist’s society—a society that thinks it sees him even as it “veils” him. This personal experience becomes the basis of the truth of the “Negro” condition. The Negro is a: “sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity…This history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (Du Bois 8-9).