Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter VI

1.     See Michael Awkward’s book, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels (1989).

2.     Thadious M. Davis compares Walker’s Southern experience with that of Ernest Gaines: “Like Louisiana native Ernest Gaines, Walker grounds her fiction and poetry primarily in the experiences of the South and Southern blacks” (1989, 25).

3.     The Color Purple was published in 1982, the year that also marks the publication of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Ntozake Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo. Since its publication in 1982, The Color Purple has been reprinted many times: 1983 (three times), 1984 (five times), 1985 (five times), 1986 (three times), 1987 (three times), 1988 (twice), 1989, 1990 (three times), 1991 (three times), 1991 (three times), 1992, 1993, 1994 (twice), 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000.

4.     This phrase refers to Morrison’s idea of the importance of “claim[ing] ownership of that freed self” (Beloved 95).

5.     Jacqueline Bobo remarks that Walker’s novel has generated controversy since its apparition. She also stresses that Walker’s text is circumscribed by two imperatives much discussed in public media: the necessity of positive images for black people in the media and the ability of African American writers to reconstruct these representations (1989).

6.     Several writers have adopted and expanded the term “womanist.” See Katie G. Cannon, in her Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988) and Emilie M. Towers, with In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).

7.     In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie’s granddaughter, Fanny disseminates “The Gospel According to Shug,” a series of twenty-seven maxims that contain the ethics of love, generosity, laughter, as well as resistance, subversion, and divergence from imprisoning rules.

8.     The title of Walker’s essay, “Saving the Life that Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life,” significantly echoes Flannery O’Conor’s story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The essay was published in Walker’s collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.

9.     For nearly thirty years after its publication, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was forgotten by the literary audience. Being one of Hurston’s most ardent admirers, Walker strove to secure a place for Hurston into the African American canon. Walker went to the South to search for Hurston’s unmarked grave and wrote on it: “Zora Neale Hurston/A Genius of the South.” Walker also edited a book on Hurston: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… And Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Feminist Press, 1979).

10. See Dianne F. Sadoff’s “Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston.”

11. Both Michael Awkward (in chapter “The Color Purple  and the Achievement of (Comm)unity” in Inspiriting Influences) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (in chapter “Color Me Zora: Alice Walker’s (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text” in The Signifying Monkey) offer complex intertextual readings of Hurston and Walker.

12. Even if Hurston’s novel was harshly criticized by outstanding writers such as Richard Wright who found no theme and no idea in the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God contains some of the main motifs explored during the Harlem Renaissance, such as marginality and alienation, the emancipation of women, the use of the African American folk and blues tradition. Moreover, the merit of the book consists in its moving beyond the themes cultivated during the Harlem Renaissance, thus acquiring a universal quality.

13. Bernard W. Bell includes Walker in the neorealist tradition together with John Oliver Killers, John Alfred Williams, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayl Jones, but he acknowledges that The Color Purple appears as an exception, a novel that is not “historical and mimetic” (1987, 268).

14. One must also notice that Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple have been either criticized or praised for various reasons. Some of the “manifest flaws” of the novels consist in their failure to achieve realist fiction (Hite 1989, 103), their romantic atmosphere and happy endings. Hazel V. Carby stresses that Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is an unrealistic novel, in which the black people are represented as “happy and healthy” (1990, 90). Criticizing Walker, Lauren Berlant notices in the novel the gap between the “aesthetic” and “political” discourses, harshly concluding that the author highlights “individual essence in false opposition to institutional history” (1988, 868). In the same direction, bell hooks strenuously objects to Walker’s focus on the main character’s personal oppression and lack of focus on the collective sufferance of African American people—a fault that can be traced in Hurston’s text as well (1990). However, other critics have raised their voices to re-evaluate these (mis)readings of Hurston’s and Walker’s texts. Berlant’s and hook’s observations about the distance between the personal and the political in Walker’s text are reconsidered by Linda Selzer who argues that Walker is able to combine the “domestic perspective” with “an extended critique of race relations” (1995, 68). The same note is struck by John F. Callahan when he discusses Their Eyes Were Watching God as “a thematic fusion of intimacy and immensity, personal and impersonal reality,” “lyrical imagery” and critical approach to “the limitations of the community” (1989, 116, 121).

15. In this direction, Mae Henderson remarks that “Walker creates a new literary space for the black and female idiom within a traditional Western and Eurocentric form” (1987, 18).

16. Hurston has been criticized for not allowing her main character to narrate her story in the first person, in a novel in which the quest for an authentic voice is primordial. I would say here, echoing Gates, that Hurston’s alternation of narrators and her use of free indirect style are part of her complex narrative technique. Thus, the main character’s inner development is reflected through the mixture of various discourses.

17. Celie may be easily compared to Samuel Richardson’s character, Clarissa, who is raped by Lovelace and later dies. Like Celie, Clarissa writes letters—her means of communication with the external world—letters that become incoherent after her rape, thus rendering the dramatic changes of her traumatized psyche. Still, unlike Clarissa, Celie is able to transcend her traumatic experience and find in writing a means of survival.

18. One could argue that Walker reconfigures the Augustinian tradition of Soliloquia (dialogues in solitude with God) from an African American female perspective.

19. The theme of abuse and rape circulates in several African American novels. Not only is Celie psychologically maimed by rape, but also Morrison’s Pecola is inescapably driven into madness, Angelou’s Marguerite retreats into silence, and Naylor’s Lorraine becomes both insane and unable to speak. Unlike in Morrison’s and Naylor’s pessimistic texts, in which there is no healing for the protagonists’ wounds, Walker’s and Angelou’s novels present characters who learn how to grow inwardly and assert their own independence in the end. By enabling Celie to write, Walker skillfully reconsiders Philomela’s myth recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. In the ancient myth, Philomela is raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, who also silences her by either cutting her tongue (in some versions) or imprisoning her in a tower (in other versions). In spite of Tereus’ attempt to silence her, Philomela manages to weave a tapestry depicting her story, which is sent to her sister, Procne, who “reads” its message. A common point between the myth of Philomela and Walker’s story should be found in the bond of sisterhood established between Philomela and Procne, on the one hand, and Celie and Nettie, on the other hand—a relationship that enables the protagonists to express themselves. In both Ovid’s myth and Walker’s text the same pattern is present: violation—silencing—disclosure. But while the ancient Philomela remains speechless, Walker’s heroine acquires a powerful voice “that successfully resists the violent patriarchal inscription of male will onto a silent female body” (Cutter 2000, 163).

20. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. identifies “the trope of the talking book” “in the mystical writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, with whose work Walker was familiar. Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795-1871) was a freed black woman, a religious leader who created a Shaker sisterhood in Philadelphia in 1857 (241). In Gifts of Power, Jackson pointed how her brother who taught her how to read and write also corrected her words. As she did not want her brother to gain control over her text, she told him “I don’t want thee to word my letter” (Jackson 107, in Gates, 1988, 241).

21. Many critics have noticed how Frado’s psychological autonomy is reinforced by her acquisition of literacy (47).

22. See Krista Walter, note 14, Chapter IV.

23. The last phrase in the novel is relevant for Iola’s mission: “From threads of fact and fiction I have woven a story whose mission will not be in vain if it awakens in the hearts of our countrymen a stronger sense of justice and a more Christlike humanity in behalf of those whom the fortunes of war threw, homeless, ignorant and poor, upon the threshold of a new era” (1893, 290).

24. In an intertextual reading of Harper’s and Walker’s novels, McDowell convincingly highlights their main difference: “Iola’s energy is invariably directed outside of herself, and the narrative’s action is correspondingly social and public in emphasis. Celie’s energy, on the other hand, is primarily directed inward, and the narrative action of The Color Purple is correspondingly psychological, personal, and intimate in emphasis” (1995, 43).

25. To overcome their state of utter loneliness, both Celie and Frado turn to God for moral and religious support. Frado’s readings from the Bible and Celie’s writing to God undermine the white people’s authority or the male power. Frado finds refuge in the Christian community and the Christian religion, which is forbidden to her by her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont: “She felt herself capable of elevation; she felt that this book information supplied an undefined satisfaction she had long felt, but could not express. Every leisure moment was carefully applied to self-improvement, and a devout and Christian exterior invited confidence from the villagers” (124-5). In the same way, Celie tries to seek support in the Christian religion during a situation which she considers worse than death: “It’s worse than that, I think. If I was buried, I wouldn’t have to work. But I just say, never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along” (18). It is significant to notice that Celie’s religious attitude will later change, as discussed in the next section.

26. Walker continues: “This is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to encounter That Which Is Beyond Loving and to say: I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place” (1).

27. In addition, Walker complicates the perspective upon religion, since she introduces in the novel the sections about Africa. Nettie’s letters record the African myths, which are various means of relativizing a monolithic understanding of religion. The Olinka population tells us that the Biblical story should not be read only from the white man’s point of view: the first man was black, while Adam is just a naked version of the original black man; even Christ Himself was black. The African section of the book sheds an ironic light over the missionaries’ efforts to present to the Olinka people the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. As in the Olinka language the word for “naked” is “white,” so “anybody looking at a white person can tell they are naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white” (232).

28. For a detailed analysis of Walker’s pantheistic convictions, see Pamela A. Smith. Smith points how Walker received the image of an inhibiting God from the Methodist church of her mother, and how she strove to rethink it. Smith draws our attention to the way Walker “redefines the role of Christ and places the historical Jesus not in the unique role of only-begotten Son but as one among many beloved children, though a distinctly enlightened one. A gifted child, he is worthy of worship. But so are our present brothers and sisters, our ancestors, wisdom figures, and the many spirits in the world” (1998/99, 476).

29. Here Celie resembles Hurston’s Janie who is also silenced by her second husband, Jody Starks who just “wanted her submission” (67). Similarly to Mr. ______, Jody places Janie at the same level with children and animals, on a dependent position: “Somebody got to think for women and chillun and chickens and cows. I god, they sho don’t think none theirselves” (67). Like Celie who makes herself wood, Janie’s face becomes a mask beyond which her husband cannot guess her real thoughts: “The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face” (72). Like Celie who writes to God, Janie prefers to keep her most intimate thoughts for herself and the only answer to her husband’s remarks is her silence. Later, there is a significant change in Janie’s and Celie’s attitude, since they learn how to defy their husbands verbally.

30. Awkward constructs his analysis on Walker’s novel by linking the textual manifestations of Celie’s self-awareness with “Walker’s figuration of the written Afro-American text as a shared communicative act” (1989 a, 151).

31. At a textual level, quiltmaking can be symbolically seen as an artistic version of écriture feminine, which, through the piercing and stitching techniques, conflates both the pen and the needle: “A knowledge of piercing, the technique of assembling fragments into an intricate and ingenious design, can provide the contexts in which we can interpret and understand the forms, meanings, and narrative traditions of American women’s writing” (Showalter 1986: 227).

32. Emerging on the stage in the 1920s, both Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker were famous singers of the time between the wars. Coming from the South, Smith “combined the rural southern blues singing style with the sophistication of the city.” Even if she was popular, she was not universally acclaimed by those “black elite longtime residents of northern cities” for whom “she seemed to personify the most disturbing characteristics of the black southern newcomers. Generations of northern middle-class blacks had wrapped themselves in a cloak of respectability to shield themselves from white intolerance, and they were more likely to approve of black success in more classical forms of music in the 1930s” (Horton and Horton 2001, 240).

33. Even if Josephine Baker was famous in Europe and around the world, she was also subject to racial prejudices in America. “In the United States, she once complained: ‘they would make me sing mammy songs.’ In Europe she sometimes played on racial stereotypes that saw her as ‘La Sauvage,’ but she never suffered the abuse in Europe faced by even the most popular black stars in the United States. She was never completely comfortable on her few American tours, never feeling fully appreciated by white American audiences” (Horton and Horton 2001, 238).

34. There is another resemblance between Sula and Shug: both of them have affairs with their closest friends’ husbands, Wiley Wright and Mr.______.

35. Squeak reverses Sofia’s destiny: if Sofia moves from independence to subjection, Squeak evolves from helplessness to autonomy.

36. Notice also the onomastic similarity between the two sisters’ names that rhyme.

37. McDowell makes the difference between the oral quality of Celie’s text and the literary quality of Nettie’s text: “While the majority of Celie’s letters can be said to represent the private paradigm of the African American female tradition in the novel, the majority of Nettie’s letters can be said to represent the public paradigm” (1995, 47).

38. Nettie also disseminates another idea: way in which the Africans sold their own brothers and sisters, and made them slaves in order to get more money. Notice that this idea is also present in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.

39. One of the first impressions that Nettie documents is the racial superiority of the white missionaries. Her description of Monrovia points to a colonial space that replicates the Western scenario. As the relationship between the white people and the Olinka population are extremely tensed, Nettie’s letters suggestively portray the danger embodied by the white people’s desire of dominion exemplified in the approaching road they construct. To use Leo Marx’s emblematic cultural metaphor in The Machine in the Garden, the whites’ so called civilization is an illustration of the machine in the pastoral landscape, of the potential damage brought by the road to the Edenic black community.

40. Because they do not want to educate their daughters, they are compared to the white people who do not want the black people to learn (133). Nettie also draws a comparison between her father and the African men, who silence their women. In this context, Tashi’s case is significant, as she is not allowed by her family to study (Tashi becomes the main protagonist in Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy).

41. Moreover, Linda Selzer considers the effacement of another opposition: the one between races. She insists on two instances present in the novel: Miss Eleanor Jane (the white woman raised by Sofia) coming to work for Sofia, and Alphonso's decision to employ white people in his store. However, Selzer concludes that even if the novel “suggests that feelings of racial identity can transcend national boundaries, the novel provides no such reassurances that the boundaries between races can be successfully negotiated” (1995, 76).

42. Derrida remarks in Of Grammatology: “The logic of supplementarity, which would have that the outside be inside, that the other and the lack come to add themselves as a plus that replaces a minus, that what adds itself to something takes a place of a default in the thing, that the default as the outside of the inside, should be already within the inside“ (1976, 215).

43. Gates, 1988, 239.

44. McDowell, 1995, 46.

45. In Walker’s most anthologized short story, “Everyday Use,” quilting is a creative traditional process that is transmitted from generation to generation.

46. The aim of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye “is to forge a new aesthetic criterion of racial beauty by relating it to an ethical background that has the function of making the audience aware of its inner racism. It is significant to notice here that the time when Morrison wrote her novel, between 1965 and 1969, was a time of great social changes in the life of African American people, when most stereotypes were undermined” (Criºu 2003, 11).

47. In addition, when her stepfather dies, Celie inherits a lot of money, that will enable her to run her own business in her own house. The situation in itself is ironical, since Celie’s stepfather—her cruel oppressor—offers her post mortem the financial means to be independent.

48. Notice here that the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine sphere was also reduced in Spielberg’s adaptation of the book to his 1985 movie The Color Purple. Carol Dole analyzes the changes Spielberg operates to the book, as his main point was to create equilibrium by cutting certain scenes of the novel or adding new ones. Dole shows how a mainstream white male director adapted “Walker’s feminist, matriarchal novel about the Southern rural black experience” by “softening both Walker’s celebration of female culture and her harsh portrayal of male culture” (Dole 1996, 12-13).

49. Adventure, from Lat. advenire, to arrive.