Be it enacted, that all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach, or cause any slave or slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe in any manner of writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write; every such person or persons shall, for every offense, forfeith the sum of one hundred pounds current money.
Learning to read and to write, then, was not only difficult, it was a violation of a law.
As early as 1705, a Dutch explorer, William Bosman, had encased the commodity function of writing and its relation to racial and economic alienation in a myth which the Africans he “discovered” had purportedly related to him. According to Bosman, the blacks
tell us, that in the beginning God created Black as well as White men; thereby . . . giving the Blacks the first Election, who chose Gold, and left the Knowledge of Letters to the White. God granted their Request, but being incensed at their Avarice, resolved that the Whites should for ever be their masters, and they obliged to wait on them as their slaves.9
Bosman’s fabrication, of course, was a claim of origins designed to sanction through mythology a political order created by Europeans. But it was Hume, writing midway through the eighteenth century, who gave to Bosman’s myth the sanction of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning.
In a major essay, “Of National Characters” (1748), Hume discusses the “characteristics” of the world’s major division of human beings. In a footnote added in 1753 to his original text (the margins of his discourse), Hume posited with all of the authority of philosophy the fundamental identity of complexion, character, and intellectual capacity:
I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity. . . . In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning [Francis Williams, the Cambridge-educated poet who wrote verse in Latin]; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.10
Hume’s opinion on the subject, as we might expect, became prescriptive.
In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant elaborates on Hume’s essay in section 4, entitled “Of National Characteristics, So Far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.” Kant first claims that “so fundamental is the difference between [the black and white] races of man, . . . it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.”11 Kant, moreover, is one of the earliest major European philosophers to conflate color with intelligence, a determining relation he posits with dictatorial surety:
Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty treatment toward his wives, answered: “You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad.” And it to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.12
The correlation of “black” and “stupid” Kant posits as if it were self-evident.
Hegel, echoing Hume and Kant, claimed that Africans had no history, because they had developed no systems of writing and had not mastered the art of writing in European languages. In judging civilizations, Hegel’s strictures with respect to the absence of written history presume a crucial role for memory, a collective, cultural memory. Metaphors of the childlike nature of the slaves, of the masked, puppet-like personality of the black, all share this assumption about the absence of memory. Mary Langdon, in her novel Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible (1854), writes that “they are mere children. . . . You seldom hear them say much about anything that’s past, if they only get enough to eat and drink at the present moment.”13 Without writing, no repeatable sign of the workings of reason, of mind, could exist. Without memory or mind, no history could exist. Without history, no humanity, as defined consistently from Vico to Hegel, could exist.
Ironically, Anglo-African writing arose as a response to allegations of its absence. Black people responded to these profoundly serious allegations about their “nature” as directly as they could: they wrote books, poetry, autobiographical narratives. Political and philosophical discourse were the predominant forms of writing. Among these, autobiographical “deliverance” narratives were the most common and the most accomplished. Accused of lacking a formal and collective history, blacks published individual histories which, taken together, were intended to narrate in segments the larger yet fragmented history of blacks in Africa, now dispersed throughout a cold New World. The narrated, descriptive “eye” was put into service as a literary form to posit both the individual “I” of the black author as well as the collective “I” of the race. Text created author; and black authors, it was hoped, would create, or re-create, the image of the race in European discourse. The very face of the race was contingent upon the recording of the black voice. Voice presupposed a face, but also seems to have been thought to determine the very contours of the black face.
The recording of an authentic black voice—a voice of deliverance from the deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited to prove the absence of the African’s humanity—was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being. So central was this idea to the birth of the black literary tradition in the eighteenth century that five of the earliest slave narratives draw upon the figure of the voice in the text—of the talking book—as crucial “scenes of instruction” in the development of the slave on the road to freedom.14
These five authors, linked by revision of a trope into the very first chain of black signifiers, implicitly signify upon another chain, the metaphorical great chain of being. Blacks were most commonly represented on the chain either as the lowest of the human races or as first cousin to the ape. Because writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human, these writers implicitly were signifyin(g) upon the figure of the chain itself. Simply by publishing autobiographies, they indicted the received order of Western culture, of which slavery was to them the most salient sign. The writings of James Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Ottabah Cugoano, and John Jea served to criticize the sign of the chain of being and the black person’s figurative “place” on the chain. This chain of black signifiers, regardless of their intent or desire, made the first political gesture in the Anglo-African literary tradition “simply” by the act of writing. Their collective act gave birth to the black literary tradition and defined it as the “Other’s chain,” the chain of black being as black people themselves would have it. Making the book speak, then, constituted a motivated and political engagement with and condemnation of Europe’s fundamental sign of domination, the commodity of writing, the text and technology of reason. We are justified, however, in wondering aloud if the sort of subjectivity which these writers seek through the act of writing can be realized through a process which is so very ironic from the outset: how can the black subject posit a full and sufficient self in a language in which blackness is a sign of absence? Can writing, with the very difference it makes and marks, mask the blackness of the black face that addresses the text of Western letters, in a voice that speaks English through an idiom which contains the irreducible element of cultural difference that will always separate the white voice from the black? Black people, we know, have not been liberated from racism by our writings. We accepted a false
premise by assuming that racism would be destroyed once white racists became convinced that we were human, too. Writing stood as a complex “certificate of humanity,” as Paulin Hountondji put it. Black writing, and especially the literature of the slave, served not to obliterate the difference of race; rather, the inscription of the black voice in Western literatures has preserved those very cultural differences to be repeated, imitated, and revised in a separate Western literary tradition, a tradition of black difference.
We black people tried to write ourselves out of slavery, a slavery even more profound than mere physical bondage. Accepting the challenge of the great white Western tradition, black writers wrote as if their lives depended upon it—and, in a curious sense, their lives did, the “life of the race” in Western discourse. But if blacks accepted this challenge, we also accepted its premises, premises which perhaps concealed a trap. What trap might this be? Let us recall the curious case of M. Edmond Laforest.
In 1915, Edmond Laforest, a prominent member of the Haitian literary movement called La Ronde, made his death a symbolic, if ironic, statement of the curious relation of the marginalized writer to the act of writing in a modern language. Laforest, with an inimitable, if fatal, flair for the grand gesture, stood upon a bridge, calmly tied a Larousse dictionary around his neck, then leapt to his death. While other black writers, before and after Laforest, have been drowned artistically by the weight of various modern languages, Laforest chose to make his death an emblem of this relation of overwhelming indenture.
It is the challenge of the black tradition to critique this relation of indenture, an indenture that obtains for our writers and for our critics. We must master, as Jacques Derrida writes in his essay in this collection, how “to speak the other’s language without renouncing [our] own.” When we attempt to appropriate, by inversion, “race” as a term for an essence—as did the négritude movement, for example (“We feel, therefore we are,” as Leopold Senghor argued of the African)—we yield too much: the basis of a shared humanity. Such gestures, as Anthony Appiah observes in his essay, are futile and dangerous because of their further inscription of new and bizarre stereotypes. How do we meet Derrida’s challenge in the discourse of criticism? The Western critical tradition has a canon, as the Western literary tradition does. I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures. Alice Walker’s revision of Rebecca Cox Jackson’s parable of white interpretation (written in 1836) makes this point most tellingly. Jackson, a Shaker eldress and black visionary, claimed like Jea to have been taught to read by the Lord. She writes in her autobiography that she dreamed a white man came to her house to teach her how to interpret and understand the word of God, now that God had taught her to read:
A white man took me by my right hand and led me on the north side of the room, where sat a square table. On it lay a book open. And he said to me. “Thou shall be instructed in this book, from Genesis to Revelations.” And then he took me on the west side, where stood a table. And it looked like the first. And said, “Yea, thou shall be instructed from the beginning of creation to the end of time.” And then he took me on the east side of the room also, where stood a table and book like the two first, and said, “I will instruct thee—yea, thou shall be instructed from the beginning of all things to the end of all things. Yea, thou shall be well instructed. I will instruct.”
And then I awoke, and I saw him as plain as I did in my dream. And after that he taught me daily. And when I would be reading and come to a hard word, I would see him standing by my side and he would teach me the word right. And often, when I would be in meditation and looking into things which was hard to understand, I would find him by me, teaching and giving me understanding. And oh, his labor and care which he had with me often caused me to weep bitterly, when I would see my great ignorance and the great trouble he had to make me understand eternal things. For I was so buried in the depth of the tradition of my forefathers, that it did seem as if I never could be dug up.15
In response to Jackson’s relation of interpretive indenture to “a white man,” Walker, in The Color Purple, records an exchange between Celie and Shug about turning away from “the old white man” which soon turns into a conversation about the elimination of “man” as a mediator between a woman and “everything”:
You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall. Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug.16
Celie and Shug’s omnipresent “man,” of course, echoes the black tradition’s epithet for the white power structure, “the man.”
For non-Western, so-called noncanonical critics, getting the “man off your eyeball” means using the most sophisticated critical theories and methods available to reappropriate and to define our own “colonial” discourses. We must use these theories and methods insofar as they are relevant to the study of our own literatures. The danger in doing so, however, is best put by Anthony Appiah in his definition of what he calls “the Naipaul fallacy”:
It is not necessary to show that African literature is fundamentally the same as European literature in order to show that it can be treated with the same tools; . . . nor should we endorse a more sinister line. . . . the post-colonial legacy which requires us to show that African literature is worthy of study precisely (but only) because it is fundamentally the same as European literature.17
We must not, Appiah concludes, ask “the reader to understand Africa by embedding it in European culture” (“S,” p. 146).
We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us. We must determine how critical methods can effectively disclose the traces of ethnic differences in literature. But we must also understand how certain forms of difference and the languages we employ to define those supposed differences not only reinforce each other but tend to create and maintain each other. Similarly, and as importantly, we must analyze the language of contemporary criticism itself, recognizing especially that hermeneutic systems are not universal, colorblind, apolitical, or neutral. Whereas some critics wonder aloud, as Appiah notes, about such matters as whether or not “a structuralist poetics is inapplicable in Africa because structuralism is European,” the concern of the Third World critic should properly be to understand the ideological subtext which any critical theory reflects and embodies, and the relation which this subtext bears to the production of meaning. No critical theory—be it Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist, Kwame Nkrumah’s “consciencism,” or whatever—escapes the specificity of value and ideology, no matter how mediated these may be. To attempt to appropriate our own discourses by using Western critical theory uncritically is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another. To begin to do this in my own tradition, theorists have turned to the black vernacular tradition—to paraphrase Jackson, they have begun to dig into the depths of the tradition of our foreparents—to isolate the signifying black difference through which to theorize about the so-called discourse of the Other. . . .
By allowing me to dedicate “Race,” Writing, and Difference to Dominique de Menil, Critical Inquiry gracefully departs from previous practice. It does so for good reason. Dominique de Menil, born in Paris in 1908, has been for over five decades a central influence in the development of contemporary art. As the guiding force in assembling one of the world’s great collections of art (soon to be housed in its own museum in Houston), as a highly regarded professor of the history of art, and as a patron of artists and scholars, Dominique de Menil has shaped, as much as has any individual, the direction of modern art an
d the lives of those who make it.
I wish to dedicate this special issue of Critical Inquiry to her, however, for still another reason. As the president of the Menil Foundation, for the past twenty-five years she has funded a project entitled “The Image of the Black in Western Art.” This project, nearing completion, has produced three copious volumes of color reproduction and sophisticated historical commentary addressing the figure of the black person in Western art from 2500 B.C. to the twentieth century. Among other startling conclusions about the representation of the black Other in Western culture are the facts that black people and Europeans seem to have remained in fairly constant contact since Greco-Roman antiquity and that blacks were depicted in formal art in extraordinarily various ways—from gods, saints, and kings to devils, heathens, and slaves. Her support of liberal political causes, her early stand against racism and de jure segregation in the South, her antipathy toward apartheid, and her creation of the Truth and Freedom Awards for those whose humanitarian politics often led to imprisonment and death—all these are fitting analogues to her commitment to art.
It is for her consistent stand against those who would limit the human mind and spirit, for her concomitant affirmation of the nobility of the human spirit, for her philanthropic generosity, and for her example of the life of the mind well-lived that I dedicate “Race,” Writing, and Difference to Dominique de Menil.
NOTES
1.Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, intro. to The History of English Literature, in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate, enlarged ed. (New York, 1970), pp. 503–4.
2.Ibid., pp. 504, 505.
3.Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Michael P. Banton, The Idea of Race (Boulder, Colo., 1978), p. 1.
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