Co-dependency?

Black and white, white or black. However you position those two words in relation to one another there is no way around an immediate comparison of their differences. They are in fact polar opposites of each other. No one argues that, but what is often less discussed is how one would function without the other. This is where Morrison’s second essay in Playing in the Dark has led me. Romancing in the Shadow is yet again a critical look at how the role of the African has been portrayed in the literature of new America. I refer to new America loosely as the period of time when America was a relatively young country, painfully trying to assert it’s differentness from it’s European heritage. This essay has several important factors which I would like to discuss here;  the concept of the other, and the codependency a white America has on blackness in respect to it’s national identity.

Morrison begins her discussion by examining the creation of America as a nation  attempting to be independent of it’s roots, one which is trying in earnest to not behave as it’s European counterpart. Morrison goes on to explain the ideology which was behind many of the immigrants who came to this new land. The ideas of freedom and possibility in contrast to the oppression and limitations which many of the immigrants faced if they were to have stayed in their country of origin. It was of fresh starts, freedom, and clean slates which early Americans dreamed of, these beliefs created what we now know as the “the American dream”. It is this freedom of creating a new persona for oneself which is at arms with the entirely dominated slave population which enabled new American to be built. We will return to this thought briefly. First, I would like to include an excerpt from Morrison’s article in which she discusses new American author’s usage of romance. 

Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow a-historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entanglement. For young America it had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics  of the search for self-valorization and validation-above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror- and terror’s most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened. (37)

Within this description and use of romance in new America’s writers we find once again the employment of America’s black population as a tool to look at culture and society. Morrison takes a term from Herman Melville when she states that there is no romance free of “ the power of blackness”.  She discusses the slave population of America in terms which enable it to become a microcosm which could be analyzed as a surrogate self. Here once again I find her words stronger than my own to articulate this concept:

The slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness. This black population was available for meditations on terror- the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man. (37-8)

It is from this brief description of the slave population being used as a substitute for the new white population of America that one can enter into the discussion of the other, which in this essay is the keystone concept. In her discussion of the slave as a literary tool, she articulates her thoughts using the term “ the not-me”. Due to the slave populations lack of freedom and their noted difference in skin color they were capable of being used as a projection which the white population could place any number of ideas or concerns upon. It is the constant fear white Americans had of failure, lack of freedom and security that led them to need the black population in their creation of a national selfhood. Power and any of the other key thoughts associated with a new country cannot easily be discussed without a counterpart. The African population of America acted as an “ego-reinforcing presence...” (45).  Morrison’s thoughts on the other are heavily intertwined with her relationship to literature. It seems difficult at times to understand that these abstractions are not beliefs held simply in literature but that the literature of the time was actually a reflection of the populations opinions. This creation of the other is significantly noticeable when you begin to realize that even the word American connotes white. To be American is to be white, something that Morrison points out in our languages usage of the hyphen when describing African-Americans or any other notable non white population living in America.  To understand this better I want to return to Morrison’s employment of literature. In her opinion it was not expressedly the slave which enabled the American to see them as the other, it was also directly influenced by their skin color a skin color loaded with historical relationships. Morrison states: 

It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something. That meaning had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars started to investigate both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man- that is to say, human freedom... the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The point for this discussion is the alliance between visually rendered ideas and the linguistic utterances.(49)

The color of the slaves skin being so different from their white dominators enabled the whites to create a meaning for why it existed. White is light, black is dark. White is pure and clear, black is dangerous and hard to see. The American psyche set up a stark contrast of what these two colors represented. A representation that they placed upon the darker skinned black population. Morrison finishes her essay with a discussion of several areas where further research needs to be undertaken to fully understand the complexities of the black figure in American literature. She poses the questions of how the Africanist characters purpose as a surrogate or enabler works. Secondly a discussion needs to be had about how “...an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity.” (52). Finally she argues that an investigation into how the Africanist character enforces and supports the invention and suggestions of whiteness. A subject we have yet to really discuss other than how it is affected by blackness. Morrison closes the article with a brief description of the relationship shown between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A discussion that is based in the concepts discussed above. From Morrison’s words it is clear to see how an American identity and one that is solely white was and still is completely reliant on the image of the other, of the Africanist or black character. It is a relationship which does not enable the black character to be fully realized as it is used for a purpose to validate whitness. Before I finish I would like to leave you with one last passage from Morrison as it has stimulated me to begin to research from the other side; 

In that sense the book may indeed be “great” because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates an describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.(57) (Italics are my own, and the book she is referring to in this passage is Huckleberry Finn.)

I must start to look at how whiteness solidifies blackness, because certainly while this may be a bumpy road it certainly cannot be a one way street. 

One must start somewhere.

One must start somewhere, even when that somewhere does not seem like the exact place a journey is meant to begin.  I am uncertain if I am starting this research in the middle, or the end, but I am certainly not starting at it’s beginning. I could have started this blog with a post about culture, how it is created, maintained, and exactly what culture is. I would have been stuck there for weeks treading water, never getting anywhere near coherent answers to questions that large.  It is specifically for that reason I have decided to begin somewhere in between the middle and the end of all of this. Somewhere I can ground myself in the hopes that it will enable me to eventually see both the start and the end of whatever it is I am trying to find.  

    Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark is the author’s response to several questions  that were raised in three William E. Massey lectures given at Harvard University as well as a course taught by the author on American literature on the same subject matter. While I have no desire to endeavor into a subject matter as specific as American literature and it’s relationship to African and African-American characters (as well as it’s readers) Morrison, as you will see enables me to start a discussion about how culture reacts to the idea of blackness. She is speaking precisely about American literature but the ideas which arise reach much further than the written page. In this blog entry I will give a brief overview of the first essay by Morrison entitled Black Matters.

 

     Morrison begins her essay with the discussion of what she believes to be a generalized truth in the literary world. She claims that the history of American literature sees itself as “... free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans, and then African-Americans in the United states.” (4-5) She goes on to state that this presence which shaped every other aspect of the American landscape somehow has not affected American literature. She of course does not in the slightest believe this to be true. She then goes on to begin a discussion based around the phrase “American Africanism” which she has invented to categorize the “...denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify...” (6). It is here that the reader obtains and initial sense of what Morrison is driving towards in this essay. Her beliefs that African characters in American literature have been viewed as symbols and literary devices rather than actual characters. It is in this vain that American literature has not had to confront notions of race head on. Morrison explains that this phenomenon can easily be viewed in literature’s “silence and evasion” tactics of dealing with race.  This sort of ignorance of race in literature has become widely accepted by many as a graceful way of not bringing race to the forefront. Clearly, it is someone who is uncomfortable with race that openly discusses it? We live in a raceless world do we not?  Morrison closes this section of the essay with several passages which I would like to leave here: 

I assumed that because the author was not black, the appearance of Africanist characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the “normal” unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was written for black people- no more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of Africanist person is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this... Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence. (16-17)

      She goes on to establish and prove many of her earlier points in the article with the example of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (published 1940). Morrison discusses the novels plot and characters in a manner that discusses the relationship between white mistress and black female slave. She recognizes the relationship is one where the central white female character constructs an identity through the actions she imposes upon her black subjects. I do not find it at this point relevant to give a greater synopsis of Cather’s novel as I have not read it myself. Morrison uses it solely as as term to discuss her earlier ideas of blackness being used as sort of mirror on which white authors have imposed their own thoughts and biographies.

     I will leave you this question I posed earlier in the post as I need some time to ruminate on it myself before I can write a satisfactory answer. If it is true that we live in a “raceless society” , is it only people who are uncomfortable with issues of race who draw attention to them?

I will return when my thoughts on this matter are clearer.