There was a moment of some significance to me that followed the publication of Beloved and was a part of my reflection on the process of doing it. It is a moment that telescopes part of the territory to be mapped during this conference. This moment concerns the complexity inherent in creating narrative language both racially referential and figuratively logical.
Someone saw the last sentence of Beloved as it was originally written. In fact it was the penultimate sentence if one thinks of the last word—the resurrection of the title, the character, and the epigraph—as the very last sentence. In any case the phrase “Certainly no clamor for a kiss,” which appears in the printed book, is not the one with which I had originally closed the book, and this friend was startled by the change. I told him that my editor had suggested an alteration at that point, although he in no way offered a description of what the change might be. The friend railed at my editor for the audacity of suggesting a change, and at me, too, for considering, let alone admitting one. I then went to some pains to explain to him why I made the change but became entangled in what the original phrase had meant, or, rather, what the original last word of the phrase had meant to me. How long it took to arrive at it, how I thought it was the perfect final word; that it connected everything together from the epigraph and the difficult plot to the struggles of the characters through the process of re-membering the body and its parts, re-membering the family, the neighborhood…and our national history. And that this last word reflected this re-membering, revealed its necessity, and provided the bridge I wanted from the beginning of the book to its end, as well as to the beginning of the book that was to follow. As I went on with the importance of this original last word, my friend became angrier and angrier. Nevertheless, I said, I thought there was something to be considered in the editor’s objection—which was simply that, not a command. He wondered if a better word could be found to end the book because the one I had chosen was too dramatic, too theatrical. At first I disagreed with the editor about that. It was a very simple common word, but in the context of the previous sentences he believed it stood out like a sore thumb. That may even have been his phrase.
So I resisted it for a long time. A long time considering that we were in galley. Or rather late stages of manuscript, I guess. At any rate, I went away and thought about it. Thought about it every day in terms of whether to leave it the way I had originally written it or whether to change it. I decided, finally, to let the decision rest on whether I could indeed find a better word. One that produced the same meaning.
I didn’t find any satisfactory replacement for weeks. And I was eager to find something because the point that gripped me was that even if the word I had chosen originally was the absolute right one, something was wrong if it stood out that way and did not complete the meaning of the text, but dislodged it. So it wasn’t a question of simply substituting one word for another that meant the same thing—a synonym—or of trying to decide whether my original word was apt. I might have to rewrite a good deal in order to assure myself that my original last word worked.
I decided that it didn’t. I decided that there was another word that could do the same thing with less mystification. That word was “kiss.”
Well, the discussion with my friend made me realize that I’m still unhappy about it, because “kiss” works at a level a bit too shallow. “Kiss” works at a level that searches for and locates a quality or element of the novel that was not, and is not, its primary feature. The primary feature is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The feature was necessity, something that precedes love, follows love, informs love, shapes love, and to which love is subservient. In this case the necessity was for a kind of connection, an acknowledgment, a paying out of homage still due.
I was inclined to believe that there were poorly lit passages leading up to that original word if indeed it was so very misunderstood and so strongly and wrongly unsettling. I have been reading some analyses of revisions of texts out of copyright and thinking about the ways in which books get not only reread but also rewritten not only in one’s own language with the ambivalence of the writer and the back-and-forth between editor and writer, but also what happens in translation. The liberties taken that enhance; the liberties taken that diminish. And for me the alarm. There is always the threat of not being taken seriously, of having the work reduced to a primer, of having the politics of language, the politics of another language imposed on the writer’s own politics.
My effort to manipulate American English was not to take standard English and use vernacular to decorate or to paint over it, but to carve away its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions were not only available but were inevitable. That is what I thought my original last word accomplished, then I became convinced that it did not, and now am sorry I made the change. The trouble it takes to find just one word and know that it is that note and no other that would do is an extraordinary battle. To have found it and lost it is in retrospect infuriating. On the one hand, what could it matter? Can a book really fall apart because of one word, even if it’s in a critical position? Probably not. On the other hand, maybe so, if the writing of it tries for racial specificity and figurative coherence. In this instance, I settled for the latter. I gave up a word that was racially resonant and figuratively logical for one that was only the latter, because my original last word was so clearly disjunctive, a sore thumb, a jarring note combining as it did two functions linguistically incompatible except when signaling racial exoticism.
Actually I think my editor was right. The original word was the “wrong” word. But I also know that my friend was right: the “wrong” word, in this case, was the only word. As you can see, my assertion of agency outside the raced house turned into a genuflection in its familiar (more comfortable) yard.
That experience of regret highlights for me the need to rethink the subtle yet pervasive attachments we may all have to the architecture of race. The need to think about what it means and what it takes to live in a redesigned racial house and to defiantly, if erroneously, call it diversity or multiculturalism—to call it home. To think about how invested some of the best theoretical work may be in clinging to its simulacra. To think about what new dangers present themselves when escape or chosen exile from that house is achieved.
I risk charges here of escapism and of encouraging futile efforts to transcend race or pernicious ones to trivialize it, and it would worry me a great deal if my remarks and the project I am working on were to be so completely misunderstood. What I am determined to do is to take what is articulated as the elusive future and domesticate it; to concretize what is, outside of science fiction, rendered in political language and thought as permanently unrealizable dream. My confrontation is piecemeal and very slow, of course, because unlike the successful advancement of an argument, narration requires the complicity of a reader in discovery. And there are no pictures to ease the difficulty.
In various novels the adventure for me has been explorations of seemingly impenetrable, race-inflected, race-clotted topics. From the first book, where I was interested in racism as a cause, consequence, and manifestation of individual and social psychosis; to the next one, in which I was preoccupied with the culture of gender, the invention of identity, both of which acquired astonishing meaning when placed in a racial context. On to Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, where I was interested in the impact of race on the romance of community and individuality; in Beloved the revelatory possibilities of historical narration when the body-mind, subject-object, past-present oppositions, viewed through the lens of race, collapse and become seamless. In Jazz I tried to locate modernity as a response to the race house, in an effort to blow up its all-encompassing shelter, its all-knowingness, and its assumptions of control. And currently to first enunciate and then destabilize the racial gaze altogether in Paradise.
In Jazz the dynamite fuse was
lit under narrative voice. The voice that could begin with claims of knowledge, inside knowledge, and indisputable authority—“I know that woman…”—and end with the blissful epiphany of its humanity and its own needs.
In my current project I want to see whether or not race-specific, race-free language is both possible and meaningful in narration. And I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus; a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place “already made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain. Where moonlight can be counted on if the sky is clear and stars no matter what. And below, just yonder, a river called Treason to rely on.” I want to imagine not the threat of freedom, or its tentative, gasping fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness—a kind of out-of-doors safety where “a sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because whatever it was that made the sound, it wasn’t something creeping up on her. Nothing for ninety miles around thought she was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, think of food preparations, war, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and think of nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way. And if a light shone from a house up a ways and the cry of a colicky baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house and call out softly to the woman inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of them might take turns massaging the infant stomach, rocking, or trying to get a little soda water down. When the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so as not to wake anybody else.
“The woman could decide to go back to her own house then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might keep her direction and walk further down the road….On out, beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.”
The overweening event of the modern world is not its technology; it is the mass movement of populations. Beginning with the largest forcible transfer of people in the history of the world: slavery. The consequences of which transfer have determined all the wars following it as well as the current ones being waged on every continent. The contemporary world’s work has become policing, forming policy regarding, and trying to administrate the perpetual movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citizenship—is marked by exile, refugees, guest arbiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the under siege. Hunger for home is entombed among the central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the breakup of nations, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these dreams of home are frequently as raced themselves as the originating racial house that has defined them. When they are not raced, they are, as I suggested earlier, landscape, never inscape; utopia, never home.
I applaud and am indebted to scholars here and elsewhere who are clearing (theoretical) space where racial constructs are being forced to reveal their struts and bolts; their technology and their carapace, so that political action, intellectual thought, and cultural production can be generated.
The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and have already described, defined, and named the possibility of imagining race without dominance, without hierarchy as “barbarism”; as destroying the four-gated city; as the end of history—all of which can be read as garbage, rubbish, an already damaged experience, a valueless future. If, once again, the political consequence of theoretical work is already named catastrophe, it is more urgent than ever to develop nonmessianic language to refigure the raced community, to decipher the deracing of the world. More urgent than ever to develop an epistemology that is neither intellectual slumming nor self-serving reification. You are marking out space for critical work that neither bleeds the race house for the gains it provides in authenticity and insiderism nor abandons it to its signifying gestureism. If the world-as-home that we are working for is already described in the race house as waste, the work this scholarship draws our attention to is not just interesting—it may save our lives.
These campuses where we mostly work and frequently assemble will not remain alien terrain within whose fixed borders we travel from one kind of race-inflected community to another as interpreters, native guides; or campuses resigned to the status of segregated castles from whose balustrades we view—even invite—the homeless; or markets where we permit ourselves to be auctioned, bought, silenced, and vastly compromised depending on the whim of the master and the going rate.
The distrust that race studies receive from the authenticating off-campus community is legitimate only when the scholars themselves have not imaged their own homes; have not unapologetically realized and recognized that the valuable work they do can be done in no other place; have not envisioned academic life as neither straddling opposing worlds nor as a flight from any. W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation is a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure. Beyond the outside/inside double consciousness, this new space postulates the inwardness of the outside; imagines safety without walls where we can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the expression, world, “already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”
Home.
Black Matter(s)
I HAVE BEEN thinking for some time now about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This “knowledge” holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, it assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are removed from and without relationship to the presence of black people in the United States—a population that antedated every American writer of renown and was perhaps the most furtively radical, impinging force on the country’s literature.
The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated to the margins of the literary imagination. It may be that American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in reference to this unsettled and unsettling population. I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation—are not acute and ambiguous moral problematics, but in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence. The coded language and purposeful restriction by which the newly formed nation dealt with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart are maintained in its literature, even through the twentieth century. A real or fabricated Africanistic presence has been crucial to writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.
My curiosity has developed into a still-informal study of what I am calling American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanistic presence was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using “Africanism” as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as
the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes. It is important to recognize the lack of restraint attached to the uses of this trope. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition favored by American education, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, the formation and the exercise of power, and ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.
The Source of Self-Regard Page 15