Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter II

From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:

Excavating Literature and History

Double Consciousness: “I Write Therefore I Think”

As demonstrated above, both the Enlightenment European philosophers and nineteenth century American thinkers propagate racist views by equating blacks’ inferior status with lack of cultural achievements. Striking back, African Americans critically respond to the stereotypical black image in the white mind. For nineteenth century black writers, literacy is a means of proving their humanity. One can say that their version of the Cartesian formula—I write therefore I think, I think therefore I am—accommodates new ontological definitions. They write themselves into being, through narratives that reshape their enslaved identity into a free persona. The whole process of writing slave narratives, “the process of authorship,” provides them with “a measure of authority unknown to them in either real or fictional life” (Valerie Smith 1987, 2).⁹ Gates remarks in this sense:

The recording of an authentic black voice—a voice of deliverance from the deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited to prove the absence of the African’s humanity—was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being (1986, 11-12). 

From the very beginning, slave narratives appear as hybrid genres, where black authors incorporate other texts—documents, newspaper clips, adds, and letters—in order to authenticate their own writings. They have to claim the authority of authorship by proving the truth of their own saying. This is the reason why some of these autobiographies are prefaced by white authors, mainly by famous abolitionists ready to validate the veracity of the black text. Such is the case of Douglass’ narrative prefaced by William Lloyd Garrison, or of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents prefaced by Lydia Maria Child.

In the multi-layered discourse of their eclectic genre, these black authors create a network of relations that forge their own aesthetic unity.¹⁰ Thus, they have to discover their voice by borrowing the writing tools of their masters. Moving from the prison-house of “enforced illiteracy,” they find themselves into the prison-house of white language (Stepto 1979 b, 23). They produce a double discourse written with two hands, in which a black appropriation of the white sign takes place in order to employ it for racial purposes. Slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels become genres in which black authors adapt the white forms by insisting on freedom as the sign of black literature. Hence, the black text “Signifies” upon the white discourse and re-articulates it through a mimicry/mockery gesture that does not simply copy the white original, but produces difference by carving out a space of its own (Gates 1988).

The pursuit of literacy as a means of shaping an independent self marks like a red thread black literature from nineteenth century slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, 1845, 1855, 1881) and Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, 1861), to twentieth century autobiographies by Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery, 1901), James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912), Richard Wright (Black Boy, 1945), Malcolm X (Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley, 1965), and Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970).

Suggestively, these black narratives insist on the idea of double consciousness, on self-dichotomized projections that mark African American experience. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois speaks about the “tragedy” of the black soul—the twoness—their double belonging to Africa and America that has made them guests in their own country:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself 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 strife, [of] longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self (1997, 38).

Du Bois relates this dichotomized definition to white people’s propensity to see blacks as the alien element of the population, and also to black people’s tendency to see themselves as strangers. Having a double identity—African and American—the black person undergoes the tragedy of twoness, of looking at Oneself as Another. Du Bois’ understanding of the essence of the black soul “is a perpetual and difficult struggle to overcome this conflict and self-estrangement” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii).

Du Bois’ dualism finds elaborate literary expressions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Imamu Amiri Baraka’s poetry—powerful instances of stressing double consciousness. In Invisible Man, Ellison does not simply see double consciousness as a racial product, but as a human phenomenon: “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division there is true health” (Ellison 1994 a, 499). In his turn, Baraka expresses his personal anguish regarding the duality of the black mind:

I am inside someone—

who hates me. I look

out from his eyes. Smell

what fouled tunes come in

to his breath. Love his

wretched women

(Baraka, “In Agony. As Now,” in McKay and Gates 1997, 2575).

Du Bois revises the Hegelian perspective that portrays black people on the threshold of history and argues that the black person is a sort of a “seventh son,” a latecomer to the stage of the world’s history, being part of a race that “struggles relentlessly for a recognition and a self-realization that would heal the wound of America’s double-edged tragedy” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii-xiii). Du Bois pleads for America’s recognition of African Americans, whose presence shaped the country’s destiny and that of its white inhabitants.

The idea of double consciousness is also present in Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon underscores that “the white masked black man” has a double role that allows him to keep his own place (as a slave) and also to project himself into the place of the other (as a master), without giving up his own position. He defines Blackness (Négritude) as a biological condition that is inscribed on the body, and as a cultural and social construct, so that the role of Blackness is conditioned by the social hierarchy dominated by the category of whiteness in Western culture. In this way, the paradox of Blackness manifests: “though a biological fact, it is, at the social level, a construct culturally determined by expectations coming from the opposite world, that of whiteness” (Draga 2000, 41). Fanon shows accordingly that the black person’s self-perception is initiated by “an inborn complex of inferiority,” since the black individual’s self-definition appears as a negative projection of the white man’s Other, of his shadow (1999, 324).¹¹