Black Women, Writing and Identity

Migrations of the Subject

Carole Boyce-Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134855223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as:
* re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings
* tourist ideologies and playful world travelling
* gender, heritage and identity
* African women's writing and resistance to domination
* marginality, effacement and decentering
* gender, language and the politics of location
Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.

1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATORY SUBJECTIVITIES: Black women’s writing and the re-negotiation of identities

I had realized that the origin of my presence on the island – my ancestral history – was the result of a foul deed… .

(Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, p. 135)

Opening migration narrative

My mother’s journeys redefine space.¹ Her annual migrations, between the Caribbean and the United States, are ones of persistent re-membering and re-connection. She lives in the Caribbean; she lives in the United States; she lives in America. She also lives in that in-between space that is neither here nor there, locating herself in the communities where her children, grandchildren, family and friends reside. Hers is a deliberate and fundamental migration that defies the sense of specific location that even her children would want to force on her. In each home place, she sets up a network of relationships based on kin, community, spirituality and a fundamental presence organized around service and disruption of the very specific norms of that community. Northern New York is home for her only when there is warmth. Her sojourns in these parts defy the false constructions of specific US suburban patterns and their noted absence of neighborliness. In the US, she calls on family members scattered in the various cities, and re-calls others. What ever happened to Cousin Vi (the spiritual/shouter Baptist mother-healer who moved to Brooklyn with the migration of her spiritual and biological children)? Isn’t it a shame that after Cousin Laura worked domestic and brought all those children up to the States, they don’t even go over and see her on a Sunday afternoon! Everybody is too busy! Of the Caribbean set at home, she says, “They only come to visit when they want something. How people get so selfish? Nobody drops by to see if you are dead or alive anymore.” Still, in the Caribbean, she calls on neighbors, friends and church members to announce that she is back home, cleans out her house, decorates it with the material acquisitions, stories and pains of her North American encounters. In suburban New York or Baltimore, Maryland, she announces to friends and neighbors that she is back home, paints rich hibiscus flowers in bright colors for her grandchildren, comments on the stench from the local sewage plant which no experts can seem to fix. “Imagine that, in a place with all this money!” In the Caribbean, she asserts in an exaggerated manner the accomplishments of her children and offers cogent critiques about the specific nature of US culture. She reflects with amazement and recognition on the vastness of homelessness in the US. She telephones from home with dreams which signify in multiple ways.

* * *

My mother belongs to a generation of women who migrated in search of opportunity.² She is one of that group of women who migrated to the US in the 1960s and worked to ensure that their children had space for growth and access to more resources than they had at home. She is also a member of a number of overlapping communities which, with each departure, are instantly hurled into a movement of exile and return which is so fundamentally inscribed in “New World” post-/modern identities.

I locate myself in the context of migrations, my mother’s experience and in the midst of this work as a necessary strategy of concretizing the question of identities. My own path has included migrations to North America, various African and Caribbean countries, Europe and Brazil. Each place shifted, re-defined and re-constituted my identities.

* * *

I resent not being able to drive an automobile more than I resent having to wear a veil.

This quote from a Saudi woman interviewed on US national TV during the Gulf War, February 1991, identified for me issues of movement, freedom and circumscribed or flattened identities. I begin with these words, the epigraph from Jamaica Kincaid and my mother’s migratory history as generating thoughts. For this unnamed Saudi woman, in the midst of multiple struggles of imperialist and patriarchal domination, movement was located within the politics of desire. Hers was an identification of the need for physical movement as fundamental. “Being able to drive an automobile” assumes some form of modern mobility as opposed to being frozen in space and time. The wearing of a veil takes second place in the chain of resentments, for one can be veiled and yet mobile. Besides, the veil in historical context has multiple significations of self-presentation and self-effacement which allow motion between identities to take place.³ Still, in the context of this double-voicedness, the veil is also resented for the ways it is used to highlight the self-presenting woman as an illegal external position. So in effect there is a layering of resentments, issues to be struggled with, one assuming – for the moment – primacy over the other.

The re-negotiating of identities is fundamental to migration as it is fundamental to Black women’s writing in cross-cultural contexts. It is the convergence of multiple places and cultures that renegotiates the terms of Black women’s experience that in turn negotiates and re-negotiates their identities. I propose to locate this discussion at the sites of those convergences. Throughout this book, I will pursue analyses of the construction of female subjectivity through literary and cultural texts. I will explore the ways in which Black women’s writing re-negotiates the questions of identity. I will also demonstrate how, once Black women’s experience is accounted for, assumptions about identity, community and theory have to be reconsidered.

This introductory chapter is organized around five central concepts, all of which concern the relations between identity and place. The section, “Re-Mapping and ReNaming: On the Ideologies of Terminologies, ” begins by unpacking the terminologies and meanings implicit in terms and identities such as “Black,” “Women,” “American.” Another section “Crossings: Re-connections and Invasions,” addresses some of the implications of studying literature cross-culturally. “Redefining Our Geography” examines how received geography limits our understanding of identities. “Tourist

Ideology or ‘Playful World Travelling’” is a play on the constructions of “tourist” and “native” in cross-cultural relationships. “Black Women’s Writing and Critical Movements” examines some of the movements and developments of critical responses to Black women’s writing.

Interspersed in different ways in this introduction is a series of “migration horror stories.” These narratives have their own separate textualities, and are deliberate attempts to break through the tiredness, fake linearity and posturing of academic discourse. Horror disrupts seamless narratives of people and place.⁴ These anecdotal breaks, deliberately written into the text, are also an attempt to mirror my own patterns of writing, which never run as unbroken, linear, discursive expositions, but are actually produced through a series of interruptions – my younger daughter Dalia’s need for a hug in the midst of a complicated thought I am trying to express, errands I have to run, teaching responsibilities, pots boiling over, washer completing cycles, my older daughter Jonelle’s impassioned inquiries about the meaning of some term, friends’ phone calls, my need to get out of the house and walk, or go to the gym or to a rap, reggae or jazz concert or poetry performance or reading.

Black women’s writing, I am proposing, should be read as a series of boundary crossings and not as a fixed, geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing. In cross-cultural, transnational, translocal,⁵ diasporic perspectives, this reworking of the grounds of “Black Women’s Writing” redefines identity away from exclusion and marginality. Black women’s writing/existence, marginalized in the terms of majority-minority discourses, within the Euro-American male or female canon or Black male canon, as I have shown in “Writing Off Marginality, Minoring and Effacement,”⁶ redefines its identity as it re-connects and re-members, brings together black women dislocated by space and time.

The writings and cross-cultural genealogy and experience of many writers represent well the inanity of limiting the understanding of Black women’s writing to United States experience or any one geographical location.⁷ In other words, there are Black women writers everywhere.⁸ Thus to identify Black women’s writing primarily with United States writing is to identify with US hegemony. If we see Black women’s subjectivity as a migratory subjectivity existing in multiple locations, then we can see how their work, their presences traverse all of the geographical/national boundaries instituted to keep our dislocations in place. This ability to locate in a variety of geographical and literary constituencies is peculiar to the migration that is fundamental to African experience as it is specific to the human experience as a whole.⁹ It is with this consciousness of expansiveness and the dialogics of movement and community that I pursue Black women’s writing.

Migration horror story 1

In the summer of 1992, in Brazil, I began a project on Afro-Brazilian Women’s Writing.¹⁰ It became a bit of an exercise in futility for me to enter bookstores or libraries and ask for Black women’s writing. On each occasion, I was taken to the section that housed the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker or directed to mainstream Brazilian writers like Jorge Amado. I was often told that there was no Black Brazilian or Afro-Brazilian writing, much less Afro-Brazilian women’s writing. This remained consistent until I met the (women) writers themselves and found out the reasons why this was so. This experience has repeated itself many times for those of us working on various versions of Black women’s writing.

RE-MAPPING AND RE-NAMING: ON THE IDEOLOGIES OF TERMINOLOGIES

People often protest any attempts to get rid of misnomers like “Third World” and “First World” because, they claim, the alternatives are too much of a mouthful. This view clearly adds insult to injury. Because it insists that in order for some people to easily identify some other people the latter should agree to have their identities truncated.

Ama Ata Aidoo¹¹

The terms that we use to name ourselves (Black, African, African-American, Black British, Minority, Latina/o, West Indian, Caribbean, Hispanic, People of Color, Women of Color, Afro-Caribbean, Third World and so on) carry their strings of echoes and inscriptions. Each represents an original misnaming and the simultaneous constant striving of the dispossessed for full representation. Each therefore must be used provisionally; each must be subject to new analyses, new questions and new understandings if we are to unlock some of the narrow terms of the discourses in which we are inscribed. In other words, at each arrival at a definition, we begin a new analysis, a new departure, a new interrogation of meaning, new contradictions.

Let us begin with the term “Black” to illustrate this point. “Black” as a descriptive adjective for people of African origin and descent, came into popular usage during the period of the Black power movements in the US, the UK, the English-speaking Caribbean and in South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. At that historical juncture, there was also a political imperative to articulate African existences in relation to white/Anglo cultures. While there was some relationship between these movements, each carried its own specificity based on geographical and political realities. What was consistent, however, was the assertion and definition of a “Black identity” globally. In most contexts, the term “Black” resonated unabashed acceptance of African identity, located in history and culture (“blackness”) as powerful or as beautiful in a world of cloying, annihilating whiteness. Black was deliberately removed from its moorings in pathology and inferiority and located in power as the Carmichael and Hamilton work Black Power¹² indicates. By contrast, in Black British contexts, the term, similarly produced by racism and resistance, has more to do with the political and racial positioning and activism of a variety of groups, and did not reside solely in African identity. Instead it incorporated that broader category of Asians, Caribbean and Latin American peoples and Africans who in the United States are often called “people of color.”¹³

Zora Neale Hurston, in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,”¹⁴ says that her identity as a “colored” person came alive when she was thrown against a sharp white background. It is that sharp, white background or “whiteness”, then, that mandates, in African-American (US) or other sharply-polarized, racially-defined contexts, the tactical assertion of Blackness. Paradoxically, the tactical assertion of Blackness in US contexts has been equated with Black manhood and therefore has been at the expense of, but also with the participation of Black women.

In parallel, in many cases, the self-assertions of Black women were often attacks on white women’s racism as in Hazel Carby’s early piece, “White Woman Listen!”¹⁵ which so self-consciously emulated the earlier “White Man, Listen” of Black nationalist formulations. In other words, the audience for Black assertion, within the conventions of the protest tradition, was initially largely white society and secondarily Black communities as in “let us assert ourselves against whiteness.” Whiteness is conceptualized, then, not primarily in skin color but in the conjunction of Caucasian racial characteristics with the acceptance of and participation in the domination of others.

But it is also here that one begins to find a construction of Black female specificity and the critique of the multiple oppression of Black women, as in Pratibha Parmar’s piece, “Gender, Race and Class. Asian Women in Resistance”, in the same collection as the Carby piece, and earlier works like Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman which identified the “double jeopardy” issue of Black female subjectivity. Other helpful work by US Black feminists (as reflected in the collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave; the work of Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman; and, later, bell hooks’, Ain’t I A Woman. Black Women and Feminism plus her more recent contributions) identified the gap between feminist assertion and Black nationalist assertion into which Black women disappeared and, paradoxically, out of which Black female specificity had to articulate itself.

Politically, the term “Black” is linked essentially and primarily with a vision of a (Pan-Africanist) Black World which exists both in Africa and in the diaspora. But “Blackness” is a color-coded, politically-based term of marking and definition which only has meaning when questions of racial difference and, in particular, white supremacy are deployed. One might, for example, compare the ways in which racism works on the Irish in England and how some of the same language, separations, criminalizations and social constructions are applied. A very important eye-opener for me has been the booklet, Nothing But the Same Old Story, ¹⁶ which provides historical information on the representations of Irish in racialized contexts and how those links are sustained by identification of the Irish with negativities associated with Africans.

In Africa, colonialism, with its emphasis on assimilation and expropriation, asserted Euro-American culture to the African peoples it sought to conquer. And in South Africa and the United States, the ideology of white supremacy reached the dangerous levels of apartheid and racial segregation. Senghor, one of the founders of the Negritude movement, asserted a certain Blackness in the context of French colonialism and deracination. Within the same context, Leon Damas in Pigments caricatured the associative pathologies of behavior identified with whiteness and colonization, and Césaire in his Cahier used nègre in multiple ways. ¹⁷ Yet, ideologies, even resistant ones, based on biology or nationality’s “imagined community” also become a kind of flirting with danger as they too have the potential of be...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• BLACK WOMEN, WRITING AND IDENTITY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRATORY SUBJECTIVITIES: BLACK WOMEN’S WRITING AND THE RE-NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITIES
• 2 NEGOTIATING THEORIES OR “GOING A PIECE OF THE WAY WITH THEM”
• 3 DECONSTRUCTING AFRICAN FEMALE SUBJECTIVITIES: ANOWA’S BORDERLANDS
• 4 FROM “POST-COLONIALITY” TO UPRISING TEXTUALITIES: BLACK WOMEN WRITING THE CRITIQUE OF EMPIRE
• 5 WRITING HOME: GENDER, HERITAGE AND IDENTITY IN AFRO-CARIBBEAN WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE US
• 6 MOBILITY, EMBODIMENT AND RESISTANCE: BLACK WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE US
• 7 OTHER TONGUES: GENDER, LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND THE POLITICS OF LOCATION