A Morrison, X, & Fanon Lesson in Black Identity Politics

"When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else.  Not resistance to the  contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident.  I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over.  Others surrender their identity; melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack.  Most others, however, grow beyond it.  But there are some who collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it.  They are invisible."

"The origin of the novel lay in a conversation I had with a childhood friend," as written in the foreword of Morisson's novel by the author herself (the above quote is taken from the same foreword.)  172 pages of literary gold, including a foreword and an afterword, and the Dick and Jane primer pages.

When Toni Morrison started writing this story (1962) it was during a time when the black girl had no beauty aesthetic to model after.  There was only the image of whiteness and white beauty, that of Shirley Temple in particular in this novel, with her golden locks and blue eyes and a world seemingly eating from the palm of her hands due to these physical traits.  At least, that is what it seemed like to Pecola, the starring character in The Bluest Eye (1970).

The Bluest Eye, a tale of black identity, colourism, dominant standards of beauty, internalised racism, sexuality, (incestuous, psychological) rape, etc.  It is set in a communal town where the people are troubled.  Troubled not just by domestic issues but by their oppressive upbringings, troubled by the lurking shadows of colonisation and the loss or lack of an established identity.  There is adolescence.  There is the adult world and the world of the child, and that of the child leaning on the demarcation between the two, looking in on its neighboured world.  A community of friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, parenthood and the married complexities of these relationships.

Morrison presents a set of experiences, many experiences, devastating experiences.  There is no one narrator, protagonist or antagonist (not according to how I read it).  I'd say the antagonism are the issues this community deals with: the social, political and economical ills.  The detail employed to narrate some of these experiences are nothing less than abject; however, the novel would be less effective if these were written differently.

The characters often experiences bouts of rejection, ridicule, terror, hatred (from the outside and from within), resentment, nervousness, belonging and unbelonging, lots of hopelessness and helplessness, sacrifice with little reward, little redemption, and no happy ending.  

But more than the story and the undertones of racial, social, identity and whatnot politics, is Morrison's writing.  

(Also, the Dick and Jane technique is genius.  Her use of punctuation and grammatical faults in the first few paragraphs sets the mood and idea for what is to follow.  This challenges the idea of the "perfection" of the predominantly white nuclear family.  The same with the beginning 'Autumn' narration — it reveals to the reader everything they need to know, which is in contradiction to the old keep-the-reader-guessing approach, she goes against the grain in so many ways.  Just as I revere her in so many ways.)

Her sentences read like lines of poetry.  There's mastery in her lyricism.  I don't recall the source of the interview, but she mentions how she detests being called a "poetic writer;" the reasons for this owes to a linear focus to her work that ignores her full scope of writerly talent.

I've mentioned many characteristics to be found laced in novel, but I failed to mention love.  There is love.  Latent, but it is.  It's woven in the parts of the stories shared that seem to be most empty of it.  Note closely Morrison's strategic use of the seasons as themes, rather than chapters, and the seeds planted, and at which intervals, they are most revealing.

Quoting one of my favourite lines from the novel:

"Love is never any better than the lover."

Soon after I had finished the read, Sept' of last year, I happened to stumble upon Malcolm X's May, 1962 address to a congregation of black folk about their internalised hatred of the black image.  And so, I decided to add it to this post (below).  

Also, If you haven't yet, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my recommendation that you read Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952).  Toni Morrison makes no explicit reference to Fanon's work, in the novel or elsewhere that I'm aware of (if she does, please do refer me), anyway, if you've read his psychoanalytical and theoretical explanations of the Black person's experience and psyche in a White world, you can easily relate Morrison's fictional depictions to be founded in hard-truths.  Black Skin, White Masks was a life-changer for me.  It not only told me but it showed me how lost I was in my perceptions and my experience of seemingly post- so-many-issues-to-list.  It mapped out for me how latent my oppression was and how dangerously it lingered in my every day and threatened to cripple me, possibly until death, if I had not opened my eyes and ears to it soon.  (This book deserves a post of its own.  What has taken me so long to write one?  I've lent it out so many times, I hardly know where to start looking for it.)

"Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair?

Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin, to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man?  

Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose, and the shape of your lips?

Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?

Who taught you to hate your own kind—who taught you to hate the race that you belong to, so much so that you don't want to be around each other?

No, before you come around asking Mr, Muhammed does teach hate, you should ask yourself: who taught you to hate being what God gave you?"

She thinks she can warn the stars.

A writer is essentially a spy. 

Dear love, I am that girl.

                                — Anne Sexton, The Black Art

A Beauty in the Dark Soon Becomes Relentless, Wordless

i.

When I render that “I’ve run out of words” what I’m really saying is that I have nothing left in me but the feeling consuming, making full my inside.

ii.

I’m telling that there are no linguistic gymnastics my tongue can perform to speak sense of this.  I’m trying to get you to understand that you have somehow, against my good sense, seeped through my skin and you’re steadily creeping into me.  You’re jostling feelings that appear as goose pimples.

iii.

Breath-taken.  Unrestrained.  That is what I mean when I say, “I’ve run out of words.”

iv.

I put the sentence out there, bitterly hoping that you read intention into it yet crossing my fingers that you don’t see it at all.  I’m afraid of my suspicions.  I shut up.  Don’t affirm the insinuations.

v.

My mind is heavy with all that I long to say but my mouth bears a hollow vessel.  Stuck to the back of teeth – are thoughts not quite ready to face the world, therefore “I've run out of words.”

vi.

Feelings happen quickly, uninvited and unintentional.  Reciprocity needs mending, unbinding and understanding.  Two parts, one whole, three stories, four heartbreaks, five sleeplessness nights, on count six I’ve suddenly had enough.  I’m going to scrub my flesh clean of you.  I don’t desire to become familiar with seven, eight, nine, eleven because they might never come alone.  Bringing with them more numbers that would eventually add to more chaos and before long we would have lost count of the madness and no method would bring it to a sum.  “I've run out of words.”

vii.

See, my state of mind in this welcomed affliction is that your mind is out there and not consumed with enough thoughts of me.  That it’s reaching for heights more ambitious than what I have on offer.  That your head is free from the toil to forget my name, my face, my words, my intrigue.  That your own name is wandering in somebody else’s head, and they’re happy about it.  Whereas I?  I am nothing but a consumed fool whose flesh is crawling with a developing sentiment for you.  It’s all underneath my skin.  And it’s beginning to show to the world.  And my mouth won’t allow me to speak because my words are clutching onto the back of teeth that will soon start bearing scars plastered there by kisses that are meant for only another and we’re losing our sense of math and order and this entire sentence is becoming too long and unbearable, and… Maybe, I've already said too much.  Sigh.  Sob.  Sing.

viii.

I know that I've leapt and admitted to all this but there’s something crazier yet: I'm willing to risk this dialogue.  Things take crazy shape in the dark; silhouettes that would speak but can’t.  I prefer not having your lips find mine when there’s no light for us to bask under.  The dark equates to crazy shapes and stories that would not break.  I'm frightened by the dark.  It’s ugly and aggressive.

ix.

“I’ve run out of words,” will repeatedly appear to me in song sung in nightmares for as long as we allow this.  Its ugly would take shape that no dance could make beautiful.

Madness and Belonging

I've read quite a number of books in recent months.  I'm not going to share Read Reflections on each one of 'em - I may only mention them - and instead rather really opine on the ones I do review.

First up, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962).  The book's a thick read: 393 pages.  I took some time to finish it as I read it over the course of a busy schedule.  But I did finish it, and that's what counts because we tend to abandon books quite easily, especially when there's little time to devour said book plus said book makes for a tad boring read.  

Albeit, I do not abandon reads.  Well, I rarely do.  It might take me a while to start up a new read but once I've started I almost always see it through.  This could also attest to my reading for depth that goes beyond a story's plot.  I do close readings, building context as I go; I savour the brilliance of the written word, or even just the writer's unique method of story-telling - as a writer, I use every text I read as a basis for learning - every book has a quaint detail to it, and that is what keeps me reading to the very last line.  The quaintness could be a likeable detail or a not so likeable detail, depending on your reasons for reading.  As I've already mentioned, mine are many.  I'm a student of the arts, this may or may not be of influence.

I have to admit, though, Kesey's writing style is not my favoured style, nor is the narrative style he adopted.  It tends to be dreary and builds very slowly and even its climax is not much of a, er, climax.  With that said, the text as a critical reading on society is rich in insight and allows the reader to question a lot of what we have accepted as 1) normalcy and 2) insanity.  Who is the big shot that determines characteristics for either?  Who or what determines what stays and what goes?

At an even closer read you find that the text deals with many metaphors.  The setting is a mental hospital, for the most part.  The narrator, protagonist and all the other characters are constituents of this situation.  Some would read the text as a metaphor for norms, acceptance, rejection; for psychological ills; (contemporary) American society and on a greater platform for the human experience in society in general.  Kesey does a great job at not being explicit about this and at keeping the narratives based inside this asylum, where I might mention a matriarch heads.  Yup, this idea created quite the contestation in the literary/social critic parts of the world, from what I've studied.  Given that the book is published in the very early 60's before the era of pronounced feminism, and when women were largely the subordinate subjects of society; does make one wonder why Kesey set such an antagonist structure for his novel.  But again, if you ask enough questions measured against the contents of what Kesey implies within the narrative you'd come up with enough reasonable ideas as to why.  

I'm going off on a tangent...

The thing is, the text is rich.  If you love critically dissecting literature this one is a dream.  Read it along with Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation (1961) and with literature on the panoptical world.  On the ward of the hospital is a glass station where Nurse Ratched (the matriarch) stations to observe the patients - this is alluded to the panoticon in the sense of its purpose (designed for prisoners/inmates to be constantly conscious of being observed) - limiting personal freedom and constraining behaviour.
Also, the narrator suffers a history of colonial and imperial-induced violence to his identity, culture and familial community.  Read into this too, or at least pay mind to it in observing his character and narration.  The protagonist acts an an evasive character and saviour to the patients.  There are biblical and Christian connotations written to him too.  I read him as representing the instrument to anti-establishment.  He is eventually-- nah, I won't give it away, but I found his fate rather sad, given the role he had taken upon himself in this institution of social organisation, hierarchical dominance, emasculation, punishment and surveillance; of dementia and frontal lobotomies.  The other characters all represent some type of repressed identity, "otherness" - it's quite a triumphant read when you read it for a full and rich comprehension.

I'd go out on a limb and say the novel was written from an entirely masculinist perspective, rejecting all political correctness - and as feminist and womanist as my own perspective tends to be, I believe in being open to reading or hearing other narratives to make for complete reasoning of your own, allowing for measured critique or praise - views are verily misogynistic; and there is an act of sexual violation that alludes to "victory" (against turning man into machines) for the group of male patients.  The scene is violent, yet I read it as representative of all other global conquests performed the world over, in history, that was termed as the "rape" of continents or states by way of patriarchal language.

Well, I had written a much longer post than intended.  Hence I will only add one other Read Reflection, that of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951).  Holden Caulfield, what a grim character.  He really is.  Most everything is of the phony nature to him.  His narration is repetitive, exaggerated, inconsistent, and grim.  But there are reasons to all of this.  Andrew Blackman, author of On the Holloway Road, wrote a review to the book better than anything I could think up to sum up Holden and Salinger.  He really did.
Please do read it HERE.

Lessons for Africa from Africa

My concern for my Africa has grown over the last few months.  My interests span Africa's history, its current state and that of foreign involvement in the continent; all the Five W's and How reasons.  
We all know about Africa's history of relentless colonialism and imperialism and how these have affected the continent's current environment.  With a nearer gaze, we see too that Africa for the most part, has failed to derive any lessons from its past that reflect on-going and progressive expansion built on its previous cripplings.  Take industrialisation for example, it could never revolutionise because of the calculated denial to growth and development it faced under colonial rule.  However, the continent has not actualised any infrastructure to combat this, if economic growth and competitiveness is assumed to be of any concern.

All that aside, what's most visible about Africa right now is its lack of assertiveness, in leadership, governance and security.  And for this to materialise, as many experts point out, the continent needs to invest in capacity development -- this would help to actualise strategy that not only eradicates Africa's image of "needing aid" but would lead to stimulating and productive efforts in creating a collective wealth for the continent.  
Our challenges are socio-political and socio-economic, these stem from the Cold War era; and these are the very challenges that states were dealt with too post the Cold War.  Back then Africa was used as leverage for those states to pull themselves up again, is the continent going to assume this pawn-like role forever?  Africa was only ever "the plan" then - the strategic move - for the developed nation to bolster their ascendency into great-power status.

I feel that the "Third World" (I don't particularly fancy this term) is in good stead to concentrate on common development and prosperity, rising in synergy against the Western dominance that has hung heavy over them in past centuries.  Yes, globalisation is exploitative, but with a feasible framework Africa too, can derive benefits if it exceeds intelligently and strategically.  
I read about Africa's promising growth in the technology and banking sectors by new data released by the big credit rating agencies of the world.  The trade and investment avenue has the potential of scale and scope for African governments to become more pro-active risk managers, and to take a driving position. 
Loans are not the sort of change or path to growth Africa needs to employ, and it is exactly what Africa is gracefully excepting from countries like, say, China.  Rendering itself to future debt and a considerable disadvantage in the markets that have grown hyper-competitive in the face of globalisation and multilateralism.  
More than loans, Africa needs development in areas that would drive it to make use of its own resources to restore and build African economies; combat the escalating unemployment numbers; and improve conditions of living in Africa as a whole.  

What is the likelihood of this happening?  --It is possible, only if and when Africa gains the capacity to make good use of infrastructure and capital.  Which is the capitalist route of problem-solving but points as the best option for the land's current state.  The continent has an abundance of lessons it can work on solely based on its past, and that coupled with examples of other regions making good on their disenfranchised territories and environments.

something like an update

What a year!  Took up a challenge and here I am, at the end of its first year.  Another lesson to be taken, that things often seem intimidating but you'll never know your capacity for endurance and overcoming if you don't disregard the overwhelming and just decide to do.  

Also, it's not December 31 so I've little reason for being overly sentimental about the year that has passed.  I have yet to celebrate (which is not actually synonymous for partying in my case) my birthday for the year 2012.  That will happen soon though, as soon as November third.

Yesterday I borrowed a bunch of sombre books from the library.  I've never read Wuthering Heights, so that'll be crossed off of my to-read list.  I also took out biographies on Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar written by Plath herself.  Spent a great deal over the weekend dissecting the literature of Toni Morrison and Shakespeare - literature has so much depth, I wish more people would take the time to engage with it at a level deeper than mere surface reading.  I specifically looked at issues of gender and black identity.  Fun.  I'll blog more extensively upon these in the very near-near future.

:-)

Three of my favourite things at the moment:

Anne Carson's The Glass Essay,
Emeli Sandé's My Version of Events, and the narrative 
and subsequent literature of Lorna Dee Cervantes.

Love. Love. Love.  Learning, inspire/d, women.  Joy. 

 "For most of history, 
         Anonymous was a woman." ~ Virginia Woolf

The reflection of read things

Andrew Blackman, author of On the Holloway Road, invited bloggers to write a post for his blog in his absence, from all communication for a month, I responded and he reciprocated.  
That's the long and short of it.  He liked my contribution and it has since been published on his site, HERE.  
My contribution is obviously going to be about what I love most, reading and books so, my read reflection for The God of Small Things, now one of my favourite novels, is up on Andrew's site.  Check it out!  Pick up the novel, too, you'll love it.  It's an enchanting read, if, or rather, when you get the gist of Roy's beautiful and plentiful meanings in the narrative.


It was a lovely blogging experience, hoping to do more of 'em in the future!

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Something enters your life.  And for the very brief moments you shared, you were drawn nearer to them and yet, you never received near than enough to completely know them.  Or to be taken by them.  You decide to take each moment as it comes until you reach the inevitable end as you notice things drawing to a close.  Most of the time, everything is almost predictable; you are never blown away or shocked by the unravelling of events.  The time has come and it is nearly over.  And you don’t even see it coming but they draw you so close, so intimately, that you’re holding your breath because you’re in that deep.  You feel that all things are about to explode and implode heavily upon your life, or moment.  Then they release you.  Suddenly.  Your mind and body remains shaken, as you try to make sense of it.  As you try to weave together some sense.  Attempting to tie together the bundles of loose ends but your hands are shaking too much for any coherence to develop.  You realise throughout that you’ve been given the bare minimum of details only so that they could pull you hither, but you knew nothing at all, really.  In hindsight, you realise now – it was just one chapter of enticement after the other.  That most of it was fabricated.  Delusions.  And you were unknowingly invited to travel along.  Journeying in the mind of an unstable person, someone who grew unsettled by an obsession that, if thought about rationally, never derived from romantic love.  A concert of jazz and classical tunes to fool all the more, kept being played, over and over. And now that it is all over, you’re yearning for so much more.

That’s exactly how I felt when I had finished reading South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992; 1998) by Haruki Murakami.  This passage sums up for me everything I feel Murakami was getting at and hoping to achieve from the reader:

 ‘Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea.  Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it.  The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining’ (p. 213).

The novel reads average throughout, until the very last few pages when the events that had happened begin to make sense, or you realise how they don’t make any sense.  When you’re drawn into the protagonist's final thoughts, and you’re slowly developing a sense of how his mind works, his untied thoughts.  You read the final sentence and it hits that all along you’ve missed out on the clues that came clothed in the writer’s manner of foreshadowing tales that never reached closure; you don't catch on until the very end that the writer made nothing of them.  The loose ends.  The untied beginnings.  This could very well have been Murakami’s precise intention.

This was my first Murakami read (thank you to Taahir, who was kind enough to lend me his copy - it's his favourite Murakami read, by the way).  I am quite eager to measure this novel to his other works.  Riding on the feeling that swept across my literary heart as I traced the ending lines, a fan could have been born.


Read this interview by the Paris Review with Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182, conducted by John Wray about his fiction and self, about the characters he writes and their positioning.  It's all very telling.  I read it after reading this novel and it is rather revealing, adds an appreciation of sorts for some of the things I happened to overlook.  There's no mention of the novel I reflected on, though, but you get a pretty good idea of Murakami's literary work and style of writing.  What is striking from this interview are the similarities in characteristics between the writer and his protagonist in South of the Border, West of the Sun.  Enjoy!

So you want to be a writer

by Charles Bukowski

He starts off by saying, "if it doesn't come bursting out of you/ in spite of everything,/ don't do it."

It reads like a warning label, almost.  Cautions you against diving into the writing world.  The world of a writer who writes about things that don't exist, who may or may not be penning her own life onto pages for innumerable strangers to feed off of.  That world.  Where you have to tap into your innermost to create something that you will probably edit a million times over and still not be satisfied with its outcome; you eventually abandon the piece of work because you could not deal with it any longer.  The world where you doubt your capabilities most of the time and no matter the amount of compliments you receive regarding your prized pieces of writing you're still not fully convinced that you're 'cut out for this'.
It's not the easiest walk-in-the-park vocation to be consumed by.  I always maintain, whether to askers or to myself, that if I had a choice I would not write.  I do it because I don't know how not to. 
So, "unless being still would/ drive you to madness or/ suicide or murder,/ don't do it./ unless the sun inside you is/ burning your gut,/ don't do it..."