Читать книгу Masculinity Under Construction - LaToya Jefferson-James - Страница 3

Like every other burgeoning American academic, I would like to claim total authenticity for this text. I would like to say that this text is new, exciting, and an unmistakable radical revision of my entire theoretical field—Black masculinity in anti/postcolonial texts. While it is true that I have been thinking on this subject matter and reading these canonical texts for well over a decade, I did not arrive at any of these conclusions as a lone, American (rather African American) academic. To the contrary, many of my observation have been influenced by the works of Una Marson, James Baldwin, Raewyn Connell, Michael Kimmel, Maryse Conde, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Aime Césaire, J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant, A. Benitez-Rojo, F. Abiola Irele, Adetayo Alabi, C. L. R. James, Honor Ford-Smith, Alison Donnell, Gail Bederman, El Hajj Malik Shabazz, Sembene Ousmane, Walter Rodney, Elsa Goveia, Wole Soyinka, Mariama Ba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Lorraine Hansberry, Patricia Hill Collins, Patricia Williams, Chinua Achebe, George Lamming, Bessie Head, and Earl Lovelace. This is not an exhaustive list, but my dear Reader, I feel you understand by now.

While I am ultimately proud of the work that I am putting forth, I am also saddened by some of the things that I was not able to include. For example, I did not include any poetry. Poetry, by its nature, is deserving of its own book-length study and certainly not a single chapter in this one. Because I decided to end this text at some point in some time, I excluded several equally deserving authors. For instance, I did not include Merle Hodge, I missed including the subversive laughter of Maryse Conde, and Peepal Tree Publishers recently reprinted two early plays of Una Marson that are in need of analyzing for the gender dynamics and representations of the African Diaspora included in both of these early twentieth century productions. And while I have attempted to de-essentialize the African American experience as the Black experience, I have not included Black Hispanic writers. It was not for carelessness that I omitted these writers—rather it is out of my nervousness surrounding the nature of this project. Admittedly, most of the theoretical and primary writers who inform my thought are overwhelmingly Anglophone or Francophone both in the Caribbean and Africa. Perhaps Black Hispanic writers will appear if there is an updated edition?

Dear Reader, with all of the aforementioned deletions, I do not aim to make you feel that reading (and hopefully teaching) this text is a waste of time. First, as much as I would like to claim the clear objectivity of a seasoned academic, this text is as much a product of lifelong, unanswered questions and a conscientious objection of certain concepts as it is the product of an insatiable intellectual curiosity about literature and aesthetics. This text was prompted by several events that occurred during my turbulent, American adolescence. As junior high school students, we were all told by Black teachers that Black males would be extinct by our twenty-fifth birthdays and we would have no one to marry. Because Black males were “endangered species,” we would not be future wives and mothers; therefore, we would be left unfulfilled as people. Well, I laughed and informed my equally overwhelmed friends that God had created a veritable rainbow of men and they were all there for my choosing. I would marry who I wanted, I declared, regardless of skin color. But, the impression those assemblies left upon me were real. Where were our teachers receiving such dire, animalistic pronouncements about the collective doom of Black men, and why did they feel that lifelong singlehood was a threat to women? I did not see it as a threat: I knew several Black women who never married or who were widowed long before I was born. Some had children and some did not, but all of these women were seemingly whole people who led full lives—without husbands.

Once again, in high school, the subject of Black males as endangered species was introduced to us via an assembly in the school gymnasium. Once again, I said more than a few things that should have landed me in the principal’s office. I asked someone, “If Black males are ‘species,’ where are the nature reserves, tracking tags, and computer programs that would study them? Who is trying to help them repopulate?” When we were in elementary school, we learned about all of these efforts to save the American bald eagle: where were the efforts to save the endangered Black male? In my adolescent words, which were the result of my adolescent anger and reasoning, I was simply trying to articulate a scientific fact rather than a sociological construction: Black men are not animals. While I understood that we were at the height of a crack epidemic and the homicide rate of Black men by Black male perpetrators was sky-rocketing in a way that many African Americans had never witnessed before, I still did not and do not understand what purpose these assemblies served. The young men sitting next to us in class were mostly silly and a little arrogant, but they were not animals. While many of my male classmates consumed gangsta rap at the time, it was strictly a form of entertainment. We knew a few who had dropped out of school and were engaging in the street pharmaceutical occupation, but most of them still attended church. In those days in my rural town of Centreville, Mississippi, the Black churches of our community still wielded a strong influence and a particular glance from a community grandmother could evoke cooperation from even hardened criminals. Everybody knew everybody and even if a criminal were disrespectful to some sister, she would simply call his grandmother and right the situation.

Geographically, these assemblies and the depiction of Black men through popular media were equally troubling to me. While popular culture screamed at us that “urban” and “Black” were somehow synonymous, we simply did not live that reality. We lived in a small town with yeomen farmers and loggers. We did not even have a traffic light. As “country” students, we were far removed from the innercities of the North, East, and Midwest as were rural Southerners, and we did not understand the urgency or anxiety manifested by our educators. The whole scenario simply irritated me until I began to see the situation as absurdly comical. Because most of us were pet owners or the children of small farmers and avid hunters/fishermen, we understood that Black men are not animals. Period. Again, I was left wondering where this language in reference to people who were my grandfather, father, brothers, uncles, and a plethora of cousins and fictive brothers and cousins was originating. Many of the men in my family were veterans, but they were not animals. Some of them could be stern disciplinarians, but they were not animals. Yes, I admit this: some of the men in our neighborhoods struggled with various addictions, but they were people in need of help and not animals. The boys in our families and neighborhoods were rough and tough—creating new adventures outdoors that sometimes landed them in the emergency room—but they were not animals. They deserved life and life abundantly and not this toe-tag, numerical inventory type language that was being hurled at us from somewhere.

Second, this project is a product of some things I found lacking in my college education. As a college student, this language—the Black man as an animal—whether it stemmed from racism masquerading as a quantitative social science study or misguided (but well-meaning) Black elders and/or even Black academics, continued to irritate me at the least and prompt me to exit class/lecture/events at the most. As a young woman who had seen some of her childhood homies locked away in the penitentiary, who had witnessed domestic abuse, and who was enrolled in college classes with many Black men who were working two jobs, sending money home to help their single and married mothers with younger siblings, I began to internally scream: “Where was this animalistic language coming from and why do we keep repeating it?” I became exhausted by the images of dysfunctional, disrespectful Black men who were deadbeat dads and abusive husbands. I am not negating the fact that there are bad actors in respective Black communities. Yes, there are and those men should be held accountable for their destructive behavior. What makes me cringe, however, is the attention—both academic and popular—these bad actors always receive. At the time, outside of two television shows (created by someone who will not be named here because I do not want the backlash), there were no images like the ones I saw every day. Where were the films and documentaries about regular Black men in college? Those two shows were no longer in production (even their reruns had seemingly disappeared) by the time of my college enrollment: Where were the replacements? Where were the films about my grandfather who had fought in the South Pacific then came home to a life of segregation in the United States, then managed to raise a sizeable family on poor wages? There was Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (1997), by Neil R. McMillen, but I somehow did not feel that Black men were the focal point of that text—only victims. Where was my PaPa’s story? Why was dysfunction the default when speaking of Black men, even if those writers and lecturers were themselves Black men? We read about how the hegemonic discourse (a word I learned by my senior year of college) says about Black men. What did Black men say about Black men?

As an English major, I fell in love with anticolonial/postcolonial texts. As the language of nationalism, regardless of geography, is almost always masculine, I discovered through literature that masculine identity, even subordinate masculine identities, are as nuanced as feminine identity. Whereas social science continued to bestialize Black men one way or the other, writers, particularly creative writers, humanized them. Whereas social scientists used complicated statistical analysis and showered their theories and projections of a world without Black men with infallible “proof” through numbers, the creative writers simply told the stories of what the world was like for Black men and anchored many of their texts with historical allusions and signification. Whereas social scientists accepted the normative nature of Northern European derived, white middle-class masculinity, the creative writers declared that men of color had their own multiplicities of identities and did not always seek to simply mimic white patriarchal supremacy. They were more than, say, mimic men, I discovered. And while I have been greatly influenced by the works of Kimmel, Connell, and Messerschmidt (who are all non-Black), I rejected/reject any notion of masculinity, even Black masculinity, as less than human with all of the complexities and paradoxes that accompany human identity. Not every Black man encountered in the literature is Bigger Thomas.

As a graduate student, I continued to read and study the nuanced portrayals that Black men presented of themselves across all genres of writing: fiction and nonfiction. In reading the secondary literature about Black men, I found it to be rehashed stereotypes of the paramount chief-plantation-chicken-thief-Black beast-nigger-Bigger masqueraded, time and time again, as objective study with only a few stylistic changes as the decades demanded. Very few of these studies took into account the things that Black men had to say about themselves and how Black men painstakingly attempted to define themselves discursively. From Douglass, who used the word “man,” or one of its derivatives eleven times in one paragraph to Roger Mais, whose work is always being analyzed for its violence and not the fact that Mais’s characters felt they were entitled to a certain amount of violence if they were “real” men, to Ishmael Reed who used a voodoo aesthetic to define gender and racial identities in Mumbo Jumbo, to Ousmane who questioned the overtly masculine-leaning interpretation of the Qu’ran in Senegal, Black men were and are concerned with how they are presented and re-presented in texts. The conversation is not only Hegelian with Euro-American men, but intertextual among themselves as they converse locally, regionally, and globally about their identities.

As far as the text that you now hold in your hand or are reading on screen, dear Reader, I would like to say that graduate school classes or research inspired this realization. I would like to credit a wonderful, eccentric graduate school professor. I would like to tell you, Reader, about that moment in class that changed my life. I can tell you about Verner Mitchell, who was always nudging me to publish, even after I left the graduate degree program at his home institution, but I cannot tell you that my epiphany, which birthed this text, was received in the grand ivory tower. A migraine headache produced it. Lying there flat on my back with the tiniest aperture of my Venetian blinds allowing bright, Southern sunlight to exacerbate the pain, I turned my head slightly to the left. On my coffee table was a pictorial history of the long Civil Rights Movement, Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle (2002), edited by Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood. On the cover of this book, which spans from slavery to the late 1990s, one picture signifies the entire centuries-long struggle for African American equality. In fact, this one picture or the words contained on the poster of this picture, graces the cover of many narratives about the African American protest tradition. Reader, you know the one. It is that iconic photograph of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike. The men are holding white posters that read simply: “I AM A MAN.” Questions flooded my mind: Why that picture? Why not a picture of Harriet Tubman? Why not Frederick Douglass? Or Fannie Lou Hamer? And what does economic inequality have to do with manhood? I am sure that the women these men loved knew they were men at home: obviously, these signs did not target women. So, who were these signs targeting? What was the conversation there? Rather, who was on the other end of this one-sided, pictorial representation of a Hegelian dialect?

As a heterosexual African American woman, personally, I married a Black man. His occupation and employment status had nothing to do with my choice: only his character (and being over six feet tall did not hurt, either). I am the only daughter in a house with three (now two, unfortunately) brothers. My maternal grandmother died several years before I was born, so my grandfather was right there to guide my passage from childhood to adulthood. And he was a man. Since he retired by the time I was born, I personally could not see a link between a job and manhood or a quality of manhood. And if Black men were tired of being called “boy,” why was not it considered equally insulting for white women to refer to Black women, who were sometimes ten or twenty years their senior, as “gal”? As a second-generation Civil Rights Warrior (this is the title I have given myself), I KNOW that Black women participated in the protests, were hosed and jailed, and sometimes they were beaten beyond recognition. Why should not a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer leading spirituals at a rally be just as iconic as the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike? What about all of those women who stayed off the buses and walked to work in someone else’s kitchen on tired feet? And where was Claudette Colvin’s story?

As the headache increased in intensity, I guess, dear Reader, you can say that I had an epiphany: From North America to the Caribbean to Europe to Africa, Black men seemed enthralled with the same questions of masculinity. Regardless of language, location, or even religion, it seemed as if the question of masculine identity was centrality to questions and struggles of freedom. Often, masculine identity was discussed as the identity and debates ensued as to how to best portray the identity of a people.

Reader, here is how everything, came together for the project that you now read: the Euro-American nations used the labor of Black males in order to transition from feudalism to capitalism; their presence as earnest competition after enslavement/colonization was considered threats both sexually and economically that must be eradicated legally and extralegally (sometimes, preemptively); race-based capitalism DEMANDED exploitation of Black male physical labor which required subservient behavior; the means whereby this seemingly paradoxical binary of functioning body/paralytic brain were both repressive and ideological; after the firm establishment of capitalism as a viable global economic system, Black males were essentially viewed as obsolete machines or as parts that were no longer needed as the world’s superpowers transitioned from mercantile to late capitalism. Encoded in the language of Black nationalism all over the globe was a rage against the inhumane discursive practices that aimed to reduce men, particulary Black men, to machines.

However (and this is a huge however), men were not the only human beings oppressed, repressed, enslaved, and colonized. The lively debates were often punctuated by a deafening silence, an absence, a void of the voice of the feminine. There were some men who noticed the void and the silence. These authors attempted to correct their masculine cohorts through a process of signification as described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his watershed text, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literature (1988). Still, other Black male writers attempted to differentiate masculine identities. Last (but certainly not least), Black women writers in no way remained silent about the obscurity of their voices or even the strident misrepresentations that they endured from the pens of Black male writers. They began to critique the masculine as the representation of national identities. First, it is true of women across the African Diaspora that they are well-versed and do verse-well, the same feelings of powerlessness that Black male writers express. Second, they write the kinds of narratives that resist characterization within the academic, white-male dominated power dynamic, and sometimes leave complicated problems unresolved. Third, when writing of struggles for freedom, Black women writers caution Black men about struggles of hierarchy. If we only changed the color of the faces controlling institutions within systems of oppression, could we really call that change? The oppression would simply be replicated within interpersonal relationships, community dynamics, regional dynamics, and maybe even global movements. Fourth, Black women writers tell the kinds of stories that include the notion of gender complementarity—not as an uneven binary as it has been articulated by some male writers, social scientists, and critics—but as different, but equal components of gendered life. Women contribute to the well-being and survival of Black people. Period. Gender differences, according to Black women writers, should not mean gender inequality with patriarchal Black men benefitting from the replicated injustice they perpetrate on the people who love them the most. Fifth, Black women writers use their texts to ask the tough questions: Why does equality imply sameness? Why does equality, at times, tend to DEMAND sameness? How many linguistic/sociological twists and turns have feminists played in order to somehow “prove” that women and men are no different and are therefore deserving of equal treatment? Many African cultures, that were considered “primitive” could respect women as women/different from men and afford them respect and autonomy simultaneously. In some cultures (not all), the imposition of European gender standards caused uneven gender binaries. This is something that writers such as Achebe and Ousmane explore, but their exploration of gendered, colonized bodies is often ignored in favor of a particular political analysis of their texts.

Black women writers ask other questions of anti-colonial struggles. What good is struggle if there is no subsequent change? It is a revolution without, well, evolution. And the systems of inequality that always already suppress women would never change. And while many Black male social scientists, historians, and literary critics decried feminism as something “imported” to Black women from without respective Black cultures, what of their notions of masculinity? Where did they learn patriarchal oppression? Surely, claiming some kind of primordial African heritage did not give license to men to treat others unfairly. Did it?

Reader, all of these questions and observations led to this project, which began as a seminar paper (which is filled with typos and rage) for an independent study that was conducted by the late Professor Reginal Martin. He was kind enough to allow me to read African literature as a Master’s degree student. My program did not have it at the time, and all I had had was an undergraduate course taught by Professor Adetayo Alabi. Later, as a graduate student, I took a class of his that focused on the continuities and divergences of Black autobiography. Rather than teach just African or African American or Afro-Caribbean autobiography, he linked all of the points of the African Diaspora that were part of the global slave trade. While the class certainly was not comparative in the traditional sense of reading in the original languages, we understood the value of looking at these cultures comparatively. It fed my obsession with this topic and eventually turned into a dissertation.

The dissertation, with a name as long as a paragraph, contained a hyperbolic amount of polysyllabic words and footnotes as I was nervously attempting to convince a very skeptical committee that my comparative reading of these texts, in the Irele sense (not always in the original language, but juxtaposed in order to gauge the continuity of respective cultures), was actually a contender for graduation and could withstand the peer review process for publication. Later, as the field of masculinity studies began to grow—particularly Black masculinity studies—I took out this project, dusted it off (in my mind), reviewed, and revised it.

I present this text to you here now, Dear Reader, as a labor of love. Read it, not as a complete text about masculine identity as a continuity within the African Diaspora, but as an introductory text of comparative studies of masculinity within the literatures of the African Diaspora. Do not read the text as one that privileges the African American fact of blackness, but the fact of blackness as something global and heterogenous with various cultural continuities. And one of those cultural continuities is a multiplicity of masculine identities.