Rhetorical Healing

The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood

Tamika L. Carey

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438462448
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the Black women's literary renaissance ended nearly three decades ago, a profitable and expansive market of self-help books, inspirational literature, family-friendly plays, and films marketed to Black women has emerged. Through messages of hope and responsibility, the writers of these texts develop templates that tap into legacies of literacy as activism, preaching techniques, and narrative formulas to teach strategies for overcoming personal traumas or dilemmas and resuming one's quality of life Drawing upon Black vernacular culture as well as scholarship in rhetorical theory, literacy studies, Black feminism, literary theory, and cultural studies, Tamika L. Carey deftly traces discourses on healing within the writings and teachings of such figures as Oprah Winfrey, Iyanla Vanzant, T. D. Jakes, and Tyler Perry, revealing the arguments and curricula they rely on to engage Black women and guide them to an idealized conception of wellness. As Carey demonstrates, Black women's wellness campaigns indicate how African Americans use rhetorical education to solve social problems within their communities and the complex gender politics that are mass-produced when these efforts are commercialized.

CHAPTER 1

Are You Sure You Want to Be Well?

Healing and the Situation of Black Women’s Pain

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? … I like to caution folks, that’s all. … No sense us wasting each other’s time, sweetheart. A lot of weight when you’re well.

–Minnie Ransom in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters

Unfortunately, we cannot know exactly how the late Toni Cade Bambara would respond to the messages about Black women’s pain and wellness appearing on shows such as Lifeclass over three decades after publishing The Salt Eaters. Her 1980 novel extended a conversation she launched a decade earlier about the importance of Black women’s self-care. In her 1970 edited collection, The Black Woman: An Anthology, Bambara told women who were fed up with the racism of the women’s liberation movement and tired of the forms of sexism she and other women had encountered in Black liberation movements to turn their attentions inward. Her reasoning was simple: “Revolution begins with the self, in the self” because “the individual … must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard the next larger unit … that put the entire movement in peril.”1 For Bambara, an inward turn was crucial. Only by focusing on themselves could her readers begin to develop an “Afrafemme worldview,” or a standpoint situated in the experiences of Black womanhood.2 This was a worldview that situated “first the interiority of an in-the-head, in-the-heart, in-the-gut region of discovery called the self” and tested “the desires, the longing, the aspirations of this discovered self with and against its possibilities for respect, growth, fulfillment, and accomplishment.”3

With the cautionary tale of Velma Henry in The Salt Eaters, Bambara illustrated what could happen if Black women fail to make this inward shift and invest in this process of self-discovery in time. The novel opens with a disheveled Henry meeting Minnie Ransom, a “fabled” healer in Bambara’s fictional Clayborn, Georgia town. Ransom questions whether Velma actually “want[s] to be well” and do the work to get there given the responsibilities a healthier version of the protagonist would face. What seems like an unnecessary question makes sense as the novel progresses. In subsequent chapters, readers discover that Ransom’s concern about “wasting each other’s time” is not only an indicator of how extensive her spiritual healing ritual is, but it is also an indication of the investment Henry’s community has in her wholeness, an investment best exemplified by the twelve-member group referred to as the “Master Mind” that assembles to participate in the healing. The pathway to wellness Ransom unfolds is as multi-faceted as the forms of disillusion, mounting work pressures, threats of nuclear destruction, and emotional betrayal at the hands of the man with whom she’s been having an extramarital affair that precipitates Henry’s nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. But this is the point of Bambara’s novel. Acquiring the types of revolutionary self-knowledge that enables African Americans to address what Kimberly Nichele Brown describes as “the American diseases of ‘disconnectedness’ and double-consciousness” that likely inspired Bambara’s novel is a process.4 Healing takes time, community, and work.

Since we can only speculate if Minnie Ransom would ever be invited to participate on Lifeclass as a teacher, this chapter explores discussions of pain within Black women’s literature as a context for understanding the rhetorics of healing that have emerged in the last three decades. In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, bell hooks explains how teaching The Salt Eaters to a group of young Black women illuminated conditions that wound members of this group and revealed how their writings sometimes contain imaginative “maps to healing.”5 The number of her female students to identify with Velma Henry’s suicide attempt validated the work of “progressive” Black women writers in such texts as Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow. In these works and others, Black women writers make legible “the deep, often unnamed psychic wounding” and help readers name these forms of pain.6

What hooks describes as the transformative aspects of books such as The Salt Eaters, Patricia Hill Collins identifies as part of the consciousness-raising processes and forms of empowerment Black women have developed over time as a social theory for surviving and subverting dehumanizing contexts. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Collins outlines a variety of landscapes where Black women have developed unique epistemological standpoints, oppositional knowledges, and discursive practices for understanding, protecting, and, when necessary, healing themselves. Historically, literature and essay writing have been some of the most potent textual spaces for Black women’s self-empowerment because, as Collins explains, readers can observe women moving from states of “internalized oppression to the ‘free mind’ of self-defined, womanist consciousness.”7 These moves have not come without consequences or backlash though. Therefore, to understand how writers launch discussions of wellness that feel urgent and relevant to Black women, it is necessary to start here.

The Balm of Memory: Literature and Language as a Domain for Healing

The esteemed roles of healers within African and African American cultures and the efforts of Black women writers to recover their traditions through literature offer a fertile starting point for understanding rhetorics of healing. Historically, healers held the dual position of being their tribe’s priest and physician. Through their spiritual authority and their training in the “arts of magic” and the “science of medicine,” healers were responsible for offering religious rituals and ministering to the body and soul of the sick. According to Athena Vrettos in “Curative Domains: Women, Healing, and History in Black Women’s Narratives,” these acts helped ensure their “tribe’s coherence and communality” against outside threats.8 Unsurprisingly, the healer’s authoritative role evolved once the transatlantic slave trade brought Africans to the Americas. In this context, intentional threats to the Black family through separation and other means made tribal reformation relatively impossible. In turn, healers reinvented themselves as conjurers. Assuming the role of medicine men and medicine women, conjurers held roles of social reverence on plantations and beyond.9 When necessary, they dispensed traditional African medicines as cures for new-world ailments and as antidotes to the forms of neglect and malnutrition slaves would incur at the hands of their masters. Healers and conjurers helped preserve African Americans’ physical lives within dehumanizing conditions.

Conjurers did not work just to ensure the survival of African Americans during slavery. Occasionally, they put into practice spiritual methods such as voodoo to inflict pain on oppressive slave masters or evil individuals. Zora Neale Hurston’s discussion of Madame Marie Laveau in Mules and Men illustrates how the healing conjurer posed a direct threat to oppressive power throughout history.10 In an interview with a Louisiana native about the famed New Orleans voodoo priestess, Hurston describes the way Laveau came to study the religion, her appeal among local and visiting whites who were in awe of her power, and the fear she invoked when she reportedly walked on the waters of Lake Pontchartrain during one of her annual feasts to celebrate Midsummer’s Eve.11 This fear has obviously held its historical currency. Writers of the FX Network series American Horror Story:Coven featured Laveau as a character during the show’s 2013–2014 season. In the storyline, a set of modern-day witches cross paths with an immortalized Laveau who spends the majority of the season wreaking havoc on the witches while running her braiding shop, Cornrow City, as a front.

Hurston offers a better indicator of the healing conjurer’s day-to-day role within her respective communities through the account of a woman who approached Laveau seeking help with an “enemy” who had “tried [her]” and convinced her “loved ones” to leave her. According to Hurston’s interviewee, by the time the woman finished her plea for help, Laveau had transformed herself and was “no longer” a woman “but a god.”12 Much to the woman’s relief, Laveau responded, “Oh, my daughter, I have heard your woes and your pains and tribulations, and in the depth of the wisdom of the gods I will help you find peace and happiness.”13 Part spiritual conduit, part social worker of sorts, Laveau exemplifies one of the appeals of the healing conjurer among African Americans in this example. With their ability to tap into otherworldly resources, healers held the capacity to challenge forms of systemic authority and remedy cultural as well as material wounds. In this respect, healing conjurers posed a threat to the institution of slavery in antebellum America by offering African Americans another measure of agency in their social lives; and they provided a measure of balance within the interior lives of Black communities. In doing so, these healers resisted and repaired what Gay Wilentz calls the cultural forms of “dis-ease,” or deep emotional and sometimes physical trauma and illness that result from oppressive social conditions.14

Early- and mid-twentieth century Black women novelists seemed to pay homage to this tradition in their fiction. In such books as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, healers are women who hold integral functions within their communities. With their knowledge of medicinal treatments and spiritual remedies as well as their understanding of the relationships African Americans hold with the land even as their people have been transported to American soil, fictional healers were vehicles for the enacting and preservation of cultural traditions. In the characterization of female healers such as Bambara’s Minnie Ransom and Naylor’s Mama Day, Black women writers turned African and African American healing traditions into what Vrettos calls a “metaphor for spiritual power” by illustrating a current of resistive and restorative agency.15 The choice to adopt the genre of the novel as the venue for these stories enabled these writers to “emphasize the restorative potential” of Black women’s “own narrative acts” in “reclaiming a tradition.”16 As a result, Black women writers of this period have made historical memory a balm, seizing “the inspiration and authority to heal” their readers by “locating in language a new curative domain” of experiences, memories, and possibilities.17

The narrative landscape Vrettos identifies in Black women’s writing about healers and healing is one we must also understand as a domain of linguistic and rhetorical practice. In addition to using religious and medicinal remedies, African Americans have continually used language as a form of preventative and restorative agency. As Keith Gilyard explains in “A Legacy of Healing: Words, African Americans, and Power,” African Americans historically developed subversive counterlinguistic strategies as adaptive responses to cultures of victimization and wounding.18

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an example of the ways Black women writers portray this practice. The novel vividly depicts the dialectic between the forms of repression African Americans have had to navigate to preserve their sanity, life, and wellness and the means of expression they used in doing so. For example, as a child, Sethe, Morrison’s protagonist, suffers the unthinkable trauma of witnessing slaveholders hang her mother. The experience is made more traumatic because young Sethe had barely had time to know her mother or learn any of her mother’s traditional African language and had been taught to recognize her only by a mark on her body.19 Morrison also shows the influence of language in the experiences of those around Sethe. Fellow Sweet Home slave and love interest Paul D suffers because of the fear of African Americans’ communication and language. He is forced to wear bits that render him silent as punishment for trying to escape. Even after Sixo, another Sweet Home plantation slave, defends his act of stealing a pig with the argument that he was actually improving the owner’s property, logic and verbal skill offer him no long-term protection. Schoolteacher, the sadistic plantation overseer, still beats Sixo to teach him the lesson that “definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.”20

Through these stories, Morrison’s novel gives a historical account of the ways oppression has been linked directly to the suppression and denial of language and the consequences of African Americans’ subversive use of it. The character Sixo is brutally whipped, burned, and shot later in the novel but, in a final act of defiance, he yells out “Seven-O” to symbolize that a part of him will live on in the life of his unborn child. The act is one of several illustrations of resistance throughout the novel. Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid, two former slaves, both reject imposed names later in their lives, choosing, in the case of Baby Suggs, to retain the name that would allow her husband to find her and opting, in the case of Stamp Paid, to proclaim himself free from all debts to this world. The gestures allow them to seize a small type of salve for their wounded spirits.

These literary representations of healers offer two precedents for what Black women’s wellness should involve. As cultural histories, the depictions of conjurers and medicine women by writers such as Hurston remind readers of a tradition linking healing to spiritual practices and acts of resistance. In illuminating these additional domains of agency that readers can tap into to repair and enhance their quality of life, these Black women writers suggest that Black women’s healing and—in this instance, the healing of African Americans collectively—has to champion alternative means of empowerment and expansive visions of individual agency. Further, as writers such as Morrison portray their characters using their expressive agency and language rhetorically to move themselves closer to healing, they offer what Gilyard calls a “counterstory” to dominant and pejorative narratives about the inferiority of African Americans’ language traditions. As characters such as Sixo subvert or, as Gilyard would proclaim, “flip the script[s]” of linguistic hegemony, they expose the flawed logics upholding their condition and push those logics back in the face of their oppressors. Healing can involve verbal warfare and should result in a woman’s rhetorical agency. Among Black women writers of this period, acquiring knowledge of cultural memory and developing a command of language are steps to reclaiming and restoring th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Life Class: An Introduction
• 1. Are You Sure You Want to Be Well?: Healing and the Situation of Black Women’s Pain
• 2. I Need You to Survive: Theorizing Rhetorical Healing
• 3. I’ll Teach You to See Again: The Rhetoric of Revision in Iyanla Vanzant’s Self-Help Franchise
• 4. Come Ye Disconsolate: The Rhetoric of Transformation in T.D. Jakes’s Women’s Ministry
• 5. Take Your Place: The Rhetoric of Return in Tyler Perry’s Films
• 6. With Vision and Voice: Black Women’s Rhetorical Healing in Everyday Use
• Reverberations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover