The last point to which I wish to direct attention is the one with which I began: that much of this business of imagining Africanistic people has to do with the careful, consistent construction of an American who gets his or her distinction in asserting and developing whiteness as a precondition to Americanness.
Three Lives centers on two immigrant women and one black woman who is never given a nationality, although she is the only natural-born citizen among the three. When a minor character in the Good Anna section visits Germany, her mother’s birthplace, and becomes embarrassed by Anna’s peasant manners, her remark is that her cousin is “no better than a nigger.” Miss Stein, fascinated with her project The Making of Americans has indeed delivered up to us a model case in literature: (1) build barriers in language and body, (2) establish difference in blood, skin, and human emotions, (3) place them in opposition to immigrants, and (4) voilà! The true American arises!
Sandwiched between a pair of immigrants—her aggression and power contained by the palms of chaste but restraining white women—Melanctha is bold but discredited; free to explore but bound by her color and confined by the white women on her left and her right, her foreground and her background, her beginning and her end, who precede her and follow her. The format and its interior workings say what is meant. All of the ingredients that have an impact on Americanness are on display in these women: labor, class, relations with the Old World, forging an un-European new culture, defining freedom, avoiding bondage, seeking opportunity and power, situating the uses of oppression. These considerations are inextricable from any deliberation on how Americans selected, chose, constructed a national identity. In the process of choosing, the unselected, the unchosen, the detritus is as significant as the cumulative, built American. Among the explorations vital to the definition, one of the strongest is the rumination of Africanistic character as a laboratory experiment for confronting emotional, historical, and moral problems as well as intellectual entanglements with the serious questions of power, privilege, freedom, and equity. Is it not just possible that the union, the coalescence of what America is and was made of, is incomplete without the place of Africanism in the formulation of this so-called new people, and what implications such a formulation had for the claims of democracy and egalitarianism as far as women and blacks were concerned? Is not the contradiction inherent in these two warring propositions—white democracy and black repression—also reflected in the literature so deeply that it marks and distinguishes its very heart?
Just as these two immigrants are literally joined like Siamese twins to Melanctha, so are Americans joined to and defined by this Africanistic presence at its spine.
Hard, True, and Lasting
“MANY STRANGERS TRAVERSE our land these days. They look on our lives with horror and quickly make means to pass on to the paradises of the north. Those who are pressed by circumstances and forced to tarry a while, grumble and complain endlessly. It is just good for them that we are inbred with habits of courtesy, hospitality, and kindness. It is good that they do not know the passion we feel for this parched earth. We tolerate strangers because the things we love cannot be touched by them.” That’s a paragraph from a short story called “The Green Tree” by Bessie Head, and I print all of it for you just to get to that one sentence: We tolerate strangers because the things we love cannot be touched by them. It suggests to me an attitude and a position that might be necessary for any artist and writer who finds himself not only in an alien culture, but vulnerable to it, and in some ways threatened by it.
There is nothing new or special about this condition of separateness—it is generally the first impression that an artist or a writer feels when he is compelled to write. And it may be even out of that feeling of separateness that he writes at all. The questions that all writers put are questions of value: identifying the values they feel worthy of preservation; or identifying the values they believe detrimental to some freer, or finer, or, at the least, steadier life.
Early national literatures all over the world concentrated on describing and, by implication, supporting the cultures that the writer found himself in. (The sagas, the lieder, the myths when they were recorded were precisely that.) Just as the early literature of expatriates, immigrants, or people in some form of diaspora concentrated on, and, frequently, condemned the new or alien culture the writers found themselves in. And the most assimilationist of them all brought something from his own culture to that assimilation. It is still rare to find massive flowerings of Joseph Conrads and Pushkins in national literature anthologies.
More recent literatures by both natives to and aliens in a culture are equally preoccupied with the problem. Indeed “alienation” became the password, the general catchall word for practically all post–World War II literature in the Western world. The writers view their own culture as alien: middle-class writers betrayed their own class and aspired toward the leisure-class values or the values of classes beneath them; working-class writers deplored the limitations of their own class; upper-class writers found inspiration among the poor, the “noble,” the innocent, the untutored peasant; postwar writers separated themselves from everybody except veterans and war victims. Of course there were and are writers who felt something quite the opposite: that things were pretty much all right the way they were and their suspicion of feeling alien came not from too little change, but too much, and too soon, which is to say before they were ready for it.
That the world is an exquisitely unpleasant place is a familiar ode to writers. And it is usually just at the point of reconciliation to the world, just at the moment when it becomes probably a comfortable enough place, after all that the writer is confronted with the Last Great Isolation—the one that minces every other alienation he has known: and that is the premonition of his own death. Under the shadow of that wing, even the most hostile of alien cultures is preferable.
But both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of this country and as an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I’d like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separateness from the culture that pervades the country I live in. The remarks I have to make are applicable to probably every group that has ever existed. And I paraphrase Miss Head to say that I can tolerate the overweening culture that is not mine because the things I love cannot be touched by it. It sounds hostile, I know, and unsharing, I know; and ungenerous and defensive. I know that. But I am nevertheless convinced that clarity about who one is and what one’s work is, is inextricably bound up with one’s place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture. I am not suggesting a collection of warring cultures, just clear ones, for it is out of the clarity of one’s own culture that life within another, near another, in juxtaposition to another is healthily possible. Without it, a writer lives on whatever pinnacle he achieves in loneliness and whatever road he walks on is finally a cul-de-sac. It is vital, therefore, to know what “the things we love” are, in order to care for and to husband them.