“It's
a Family Thang”
Growing up in my own little sociocultural
niche, I began to notice, in grocery stores, shopping malls, schools and other
places, primarily African-American people wearing t-shirts printed with sayings
(like the title of this essay) and names. “The Washington Family Reunion” would
be printed over a graphic of a tree or a heart, and there would be a place and a
range of dates. From seeing pictures and hearing stories, I knew that sometimes
hundreds of people would gather, wear these t-shirts, pose for pictures and
attend family geneaology seminars detailing the 3rd cousins, the
twice-removeds, the by-marriages and the begats.
I didn't understand why people had any compulsion to print identical
t-shirts and spend long weekends with virtual strangers, growing up as I had in
relative family privilege. Considering the course objectives involved with race,
family, and identity has led me to a deeper understanding of these t-shirts as
documents of resistance, solidarity, and self.
African people brought as slaves to the United
States were dehumanized by a variety of systemic practices, but the term of
dehumanization is one that may not be as effective as another:
decontextualization. Humans obviously don't form identity solely in response to
place; the idea of self also comes from one’s interactions with others.
Additionally, the relationships that people form as children influence
personality. Olaudah Equiano opens his narrative with an elaborately detailed
description of the setting of his life prior to his enslavement. These details
of place and relation establish his individual identity as a member of “a
nation of dancers, musicians and poets.”
His freedom of
movement and expression are violently disrupted by his capture, but so is his
identity as a member of the number who are so free. His family and people
“implanted” nuanced social/cultural
details and practices” in Equiano with “great care” and their “impression”
persisted in him, despite his young age, and formed aspects of identity that
servitude could not completely dissolve. As would become standard practice in
the American system of chattel slavery, Equiano was separated, and eventually
lost contact with any people who knew his language—this complete alienation
created a situation in which a
person would become literally voiceless, without choice, agency, or a stable
grounding on which to develop an independent identity.
Frederick Douglass also writes about the pain of
separation and the callous regularity of the practice of removing enslaved
people from one another. Very early
on in his narrative, he relates his removal from his mother as part of a
widespread strategy employed by slaveholders in order to “hinder the development
of the child's affection toward its mother, and to . . . destroy the natural
affection of the mother for the child.” This done, the children of slaves were
halfway orphaned, and as in Douglass' case, the child of rape perpetuated by
white male slaveholders had no acknowledged father. The slaveholder’s job of
orphaning and dehumanization was completely done. This destabilization made
slavery, rather than family, the central aspect of the young enslaved person's
life, and made “slave”/object one's primary identification. Despite being
removed from his own family, Douglass demonstrates the development of
situational and alternative family groups in response to the social limitations
slavery imposed on its victims. He refers to fellow-slaves as his “brethren”
throughout his narrative. The enrichment that his soul finds in teaching other
slaves to read and write corresponds to the richness of their association, their
common purpose and their common position.
He similarly refers to the group of men with whom he plans his first
major attempt at escape as his family. Both family groups, as with Douglass’
genetic/biological family, were disrupted by outside forces; however, Douglass’
struggle for a larger, vastly extended family continued once he was outside of
slavery; the dedication in his Appendix cites his desire that his narrative do
something to bring “deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds.” This
extended familial language also represents the idea of responsibility to the
broader community that reveals itself in the literature; this statement puts
both the narrative and those still suffering under slavery into context.
The narrative of Harriet Jacobs/Lynda Brent provides
some insight into the mindset of the child born into an intact family unit who
only learns of her status as slave as an older child. She painfully matured into
an enslaved parent who saw the destabilization of families around her, a
frustrated bride unable to wed the free man of her choice, and a mother who used
strategy to the best of her ability to protect her potential offspring. Jacobs
experienced extended family relations, as she was able to remain close to her
grandmother, but even this relationship is not without difficulty. Jacobs
represents the trouble of the family tie; she acknowledges openly that family
affection could impede one’s bid for freedom, putting the human tie of loyalty
and love at a crossroads with the desire for independence and agency.
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, as a work of
fiction, obviously represents family in a different way than the slave
narratives do; however, there are overlapping concerns of identity and family.
The nuclear Dead family is presented as stable and outwardly successful, but the
main character, Milkman, does not find his true identity within the four walls
on Not Doctor Street. Sharing some features of the coming of age narrative,
Song presents the immediate family as a unit of control and domination, but
in an exploration of his extended family—the roots of his ancestors—Milkman
discovers family and familial context as a source of identity.
Milkman journeys to find an inheritance, which his father interprets as
gold and his aunt interprets as bone. What he finds along the way, however, are
the origins of “Macon Dead” as a conceptual being. His namesake, “Macon Dead,
also known as Jake somebody” does not give Milkman his socially recognized name,
and the orginal Macon Dead once had an original name, and familial standing as
either one of the original 21 children of Solomon, or the “only son of Solomon.”
These are stripped from him, as well as his descendants, by the drink-addled pen
of a careless white Freedmen's Bureau clerk. Compellingly, both the first Toni
Morrison interview from the class presentation and Song of Solomon itself
directly invoke family and identity. The novel's dedication page reads simply
“Daddy,” and in the interview, Morrison discusses her grief over her father's
death. Of course she misses him, but the bigger point that she makes is that his
death killed his version of her. The death of a loved one as a severance of an
avenue to self/identity is a compelling argument for the notion of the
connectedness of family and identity.
Family is complicated and complex; in the case of
enslaved people in the United States, the notion of family was manipulated by
strong cultural forces as well as the whims of empowered individuals. These
complications troubled one source of identity and created multiplicity in the
notion of family as well, which gives rise to a host of family types and issues:
acknowledged family, unacceptable family, genetic family, chosen/circumstantial
family, and the extensive family networks of ownership and relation through
which slaves lived. Serious ironies, to say the absolute least, are presented
when the boundaries of slave and slave-holder are crossed “in the family way,”
and they have had continuing effects on individuals as well as the culture at
large.
No Country for Old Women
The elder female is all but invisible in the modern
dominant United States culture in terms of social power. Current popular
understanding, evidenced by the Wikipedia chart of literary stock characters (a
page I chose deliberately to exemplify a popular, rather than specialized or
academic discussion) reveals consideration of the crone as inherently malicious.
Other roles listed for elder women include that of the hag,
as in Hansel and Gretel, and that of the sexually rapacious widow, who
may make a fool of herself in pursuing her desires (her desire is foolish
because she is no longer sexually desirable or fertile). Therefore, in terms of
minority, elder women are excluded due to a combination of sexism and ageism.
Western European cultures
have a figure, called the crone, who represents the elder woman; a subquestion
may be whether or not it is appropriate to overlay this concept to figures from
other cultures.
However, exclusion is not monolithically the case:
minority American literature presents places for older women in terms of social
influence and, in some cases, mythic/mystical powers (or a blend of the two).
Toni Morrison's Pilate, and Anaya's Ultima seem to balance these two aspects of
power, while Harriet Jacobs' grandmother represents more literal social power.
I intend to investigate the roles available to elder women in minority
fiction and memoir/personal narrative in order to shed some light on the
omissions of mainstream/dominant culture, to suggest additions to the modern
canon of literary characters, and to develop a conference proposal and
presentation.More notes on that as it comes...
Choice bite from my web reviews:
It may only be an issue of wording, or a concern about the concept of competitive suffering, but I think that the biggest difference between “modern literature,” the slightly older Song of Solomon, and the much older slave narratives (Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs) is that modern writing depends much less on coding, much less on double language, and much more upon making the point very clear to the reader. I fear that diminishing the gratuity of historical sexual oppression and the multifold oppression that double (or multiple) minorities have faced leaves too much room for the willful ignorance of the legacies of rape culture, abuse culture, racist culture, and misogynist culture that make up the broader dominant culture of the United States, and that we all still face.
