Black Women's Writing Revisited

by Sabine Broeck, University of Bremen, Germany

1      One of the claims in the call for papers for this issue of Gender Forum was to document the blurring of distinctions between writers, in the sense of a strictly literary production, and theorists, philosophers, critics engaged in epistemological production (and vice versa) - a diffusion which has become something like a hallmark of black women's cultural production ever since Angela Davis', Alice Walker's, Toni Cade Bambara's, Audre Lorde's, June Jordan's or Sylvia Wynter's earliest interventions, as well as Hooks', Morrison's, Williams' or others in later years. Black Womanism, in Alice Walker's term, brought forth writer/critics who have created a web of creative and critical theoretical contributions to contemporary theory within cultural studies in the widest sense. All of these authors have been taking black women's cultural production beyond the field of literature in a narrow sense, and thus their wok should have been received beyond the academic discipline of literary criticism much more stringently, as Barbara Christian so trenchantly argued in her "The Race for Theory". (1987)

2      The still palpable legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, and New World Slavery became one of the crucial concerns the more those black women writers stepped up their critical inquiry of the entanglement of racism and sexism, and argued for the overdue critical examination of this nexus in two directions, both with the black liberation and the white feminist movements of the 1970s, and subsequently with their academic successors in the 1980 and 1990s. In this context, the publication of Beloved (1987) the Nobel Prize award and the novel’s subsequent mainstream success must be marked as a watershed moment in that it put slavery, as well as the black woman’s plight resulting from it, on the public agenda to a hitherto un-witnessed extent. The novel's impact on US literary history, as well as on cultural studies' discourses (within and beyond academia) in terms of a reckoning with slavery as one of the haunting United States traumata, of a discussion of cultural memory, and of an acknowledgement of the long term effects of enslavement on the public psyche has been extensively documented in what amounts to a veritable school of Beloved - scholarship, now active for 20 years (see for example Broeck 2006).

3      When Toni Morrison published Beloved in 1987, she created not only the most widely publicized, translated, received and criticized literary representation of slavery and its aftermath - next to Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to which the novel entertains obvious revisionist intertextual relations - she also rather purposefully created a want. In her Nobel Prize winning novel, the Middle Passage itself, the voyage the enslaved Africans were forced to undergo as movable property, as things, by the terroristic rules and conditions of the slave trading economic and cultural machine, becomes the literary space of a telling narrative void. Those passages in Beloved which directly engage the trauma of the slave trade, remain urgent language fragments, arranged more like a dazed and always already collapsing chant than the swift and artful narrative stridency characteristic for the novel. At the point where the reader awaits a narrative recollection of the Middle Passage, any syntax has collapsed; any clear indication of a narrative perspective has disappeared into a litany of stumbling passages the origins of which remain lost to the reader; the verbal register has become reduced to desperate repetition. As if in an echo of Adorno's dictum, Beloved seems to forbid itself any narrative after, and of the Middle Passage; instead, the text dares the reader with the ambiguous morality of textually accommodating the devastating loss of human lives by way of Beloved's lapse in, and loss of a novelistic storytelling capacity. (Broeck 1999) In Beloved, it is the very void of story which gestures towards an ethically, and linguistically impossible representation.

4      This void is articulated as well in the publication, in the very same year, of Hortense Spillers' "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,: An American Grammar Book" (I will be using the essay here as reprinted in (2003) in which she lays out the skeleton of a theoretical framework to reconsider the dubious role of gender as a modern western paradigm from the enslaved Africans' points of view. Spillers' groundbreaking essay corresponds to Morrison's novel in intricate ways: both are concerned with the particular position of Black women in the orbit of slavery, and its aftermath, and both focus on the violence and abuse directed against Black human "flesh'"- Spillers' direct use of the word here appears quite in tune with Morrison's images of her protagonists' scarred back, branding marks, violated mouths and genitalia, and stolen milk; as well as with Baby Suggs mournful celebration of "black flesh" - to raise the question if 'gender' (and the adherent notions of self definition) might have the epistemological function to further add to black people's abjected position in the modern world, since they cannot access gendered subjectivity. The limitation of access to a system of human binarisation functioned so as to arrest African-origin humans in the flesh, as well as to endow white Euro-American human beings with the property of engendered selves:

To that extent, the captive female body locates precisely a moment of converging political and social vectors that mark the flesh as a prime commodity of exchange. While this proposition is open to further exploration, suffice it to say now that this open exchange of female bodies in the raw offers a kind of Ur-text to the dynamics of signification and representation that the gendered female would unravel. (220)

My intervention here means to follow Spillers' provocative insight in juxtaposing it with the feminist credo of "we shall not be slaves" which originated with early modern feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, enabling white women until today to discuss gender as a privilege of the subject whose pretense to universality has by now been thoroughly critiqued by postcolonial studies. Spillers put this point on the agenda in 1987, clearly pointing towards the implications of her argument for white gender studies:

Indeed, we would go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that sexuality, as a term of implied relatedness, is dubiously appropriate, manageable or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the master's family to the captive enclave. Under these circumstances, the customary aspects of sexuality, including "reproduction," "motherhood," "pleasure," and "desire" are all thrown in crisis. (221)

5      In a series of novelistic and essayistic texts writers have since then engaged to fill that void with feats of the imagination, to counter the oppressive silences of the historical record. Cultural critics like Spillers herself, but most recently, and prominently Hartman have pushed the issue of returning slavery to the postmodern moment of critical theory, over and against either sheer forgetfulness, or relegation to a sub-discipline of history. This return serves to raise critical awareness of modern western societies' genealogies in the transatlantic system of thingification that is, the most extreme commodification, from a black feminist perspective. In this venture, Hartman's second book, Lose Your Mother (2008), mobilizes the rather effective device of creating a narrative first person of essayistic inquiry as a veritable time traveler who is able to transcend the distinction between Hartman's autobiographical present and the historical archives' past. At the same time, her persona in the text becomes a listening membrane for black memory in whatever fragmented form it might be sought out, or encountered. Autobiography, historical documentation, poetic narrative, philosophical meditation, pamphlet, travel journal, oral history - all these subgenres thus aggregate and form a distinct kind of textual reflection.