BLACK FEMINIST CRITICISM AND BLACK WOMEN WRITING
Pranjali Bandhu
Feminist literary criticism as an academic discipline in the U.S. is linked up with the emergence of Women’s Studies programmes set up in the 1970s in various universities, with the women’s movement at the grass roots level. Black Studies had also evolved around the same time, or may be earlier, in the background of the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Enormous numbers of black women participated in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and to some extent, in the women’s movement also. However, black women felt their voices and interests were inadequately represented in these movements as well as in the academic disciplines of Black Studies and Women’s Studies. This resulted in the setting up of Black Women’s Studies Programmes in some universities.
The Black Movement historically, but particularly the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, was primarily concerned with the oppression of women as a marginalized group, but it was dominated by white, middle class women and almost always confined itself to, or defined and concentrated upon issues in a way as to benefit them only, and was thus irrelevant as far as the majority of black women was concerned. Black women experience both forms of exploitation.
The position of black women in racist, sexist and classist North America was most clearly and colourfully articulated by Zora Neale Hurston in her novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching Gawd”: “Honey, de white man is the ruler of everything as far as Ah been able to find out… So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up because he have to, but he don’t take it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world.”
Black Feminist Criticism
The black feminist approach, according to one of its earliest and leading exponents, Barbara Smith, embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of black women writers; that their writings constitute an identifiable tradition that has to be worked out.
The positive achievement of black feminist criticism and scholarship has been research into black history and foregrounding of the role and contributions of black women intellectuals, political activists and writers, like Ann Petry, Hurston and others, who had often been dismissed, misunderstood or neglected due to male biases in historiography and literary criticism. Black women’s literary and intellectual production, along with political activity, has been very much present right from the beginnings of an Afro-American oral and written literature and history. In fact, according to black poet, Mari Evans, they are the founding mothers of Afro-American literature with their work songs, lullabies and spirituals. Their literary output experienced quite an impetus in the 1960s and continues. As black women have struggled to define and liberate themselves they have and continue to make substantial contributions to black literature. Associated with it are the attempts at developing a black feminist literary criticism, at formulating a tradition for black women writing.
However, to my mind, black feminist criticism has failed to delineate a coherent, continuous and separate tradition of black women writing within black literature. It has not sufficiently taken note of or analyzed differences among black women writers, historically or even within the same historical period. There is a difference in outlook and approach, for example, in the work of Ann Petry and Zora Neale Hurston, between Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, between Mari Evans and Michele Wallace, differences in their world views reflected in their writing and style which cannot be accounted for within the terms of feminist criticism. The uniformity of black women’s oppression and their response to it, contemporaneously and historically, cannot be taken as a given because black women too are divided by class and outlook. Apart from this, there have to be criteria which help in distinguishing ‘good’ art from ‘bad’ or ‘mediocre’, or useful art from diversionary or cathartic art. The appropriation of feminist theory and criticism by black women academics, even if it is expanded into the broader category of “womanist” (Alice Walker), does not help in this.
Limitations of Feminist Theory
To overcome these deficiencies or limitations in feminist literary criticism we have to be clear about the limitations of feminism as a political agenda, which demands equality of women with men within the framework of bourgeois democracy. The progressive intent in this is not subject to doubt. However, because it fails to incorporate the crucial elements of empire, race and class, like bourgeois democracy, it remains Eurocentric and elitist in essence. It fails to acknowledge that political democracy in the West is based on the subjection and exploitation of the majority of nations in the world. White middle class women seeking liberation as human beings from oppressive roles would have to take recourse to a more holistic ideology than that offered by feminism. Even the development of socialist feminism and eco feminism has not been able to do away with Eurocentric and petty bourgeois biases.
When black women, or third world women for that matter, take over the theory of feminism, they may try to shape it to fit their needs and reconstruct it in terms of black feminism and third world feminism, but they cannot rid it of its reformist edge. They cannot do away with the fact that it does not offer a holistic theory of liberation, for men, women and children, but remains separatist and anti-male in orientation, and in essence argues for female superiority as a retort to male domination. Hence it has to be understood as a way out for the petty bourgeois oriented women in the black community and in the third world countries. It offers them a space, a refuge, without analyzing and helping to do away with systemic and structural causes of their multi-dimensional oppressions and sufferings.
Black Women Writing and the Black Aesthetic
Black feminist criticism came up in the background of the Black Nationalist movement in the arts, culture and polity, a major criticism of which was its male orientation and leadership. Black women who participated in this movement reacted to this black male domination in a variety of ways.
Michelle Wallace in her book, “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” (1979), much publicized by the big media and the feminist press, has utilized this drawback of the Black Power Movement, among others, to malign the movement as a whole. There is no scientific analysis in her book, only a denunciation of the beautiful men and women who made the movement, who sacrificed and struggled for it. Without the background of that powerful movement, which had threatened the power structure of the U.S. to such an extent that it was found expedient to arrange for the assassination of leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to incarcerate many others like George Jackson and Angela Davis, there would not have been any motivation to use her as a puppet, and thus cater to her sensationalist and careerist appetites.
In contrast, there are other black women writers and poets (like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde), who have maintained their roots and get their nourishment as writers and artists from the black community and from the black aesthetic, and yet simultaneously assert their identities as women. To quote Mari Evans: “Black women have brought into the literature a special knowledge of their lives and experiences that is as different from the descriptions/portrayals of women by men, as the vision of black writers in the 1950s and 1960s differed from that of whites writing on black subjects… They braved the ideological strictures of the 1960s and freed themselves from the roles assigned to them in the writings of their male counterparts, where, depicted as queens and princesses, or as earth mothers and idealized Big Mountains of superhuman wisdom and strength, they were unrecognizable as individuals.” (Evans (ed.) 1984: xxiv).
The Black Power or the Black Nationalist movement, in its most fundamental sense, stood for the principles of self-definition and self-determination. The Black Arts movement linked with it was primarily concerned with the cultural and spiritual liberation of Black America striving to create a new value system around which to shape the political movement.
But the black community in the U.S.A. is not homogenous and is divided into classes or strata: the black middle classes, the black student youth, the black city youth, and the black farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, mostly in the agrarian areas of the South. Correspondingly, though not in a one to one equation, we cannot hope to find any uniformity in outlook among black people. Among black women writers, too, we find examples of what can be termed as black bourgeois feminist writing, with all the implied ambiguities. Alice Walker’s well known novel, “The Colour Purple” can be used as an illustration for this contention.
Bourgeois Feminism and Social Realism
In an interview with Mary Washington (in: G.T. Hull et al (ed), 1982: 212) Alice Walker outlined her view of the historical development of black women: From being totally victimized by society and men women are growing and developing in a way that allows them to have some control over their lives. Overcoming the tendency for assimilation, black women are now in the cycle of searching for meaning in their roots and traditions. They are struggling to reclaim their past and to re-examine their relationship to the black community. If men correspondingly shed their male supremacist approach the possibility of reconciliation opens out.
“The Colour Purple” paints this movement in the development of a black woman’s consciousness from victimization to a measure of control over her life, to reconciliation with her man.
However, this control that she gains over her life is a very partial one. It is in terms of independence, economic independence and self-assertion. Her man is left to slowly adjust to and accept her in the new role she has defined for herself. The resolution of the conflicts in the novel is rather solipsistic. The black community may be having its own roots, traditions and being self-contained up to a point, particularly in parts of the South, or in the ghettos of the North, but it is definitely influenced in its relationships – political, economic, male/female by the overall social and political system in the U.S.A. Celie’s “emergence” is within the limits and framework set by white society and corporate America. Not allowing for serious and sustained confrontation between these two worlds so as to attain control over all aspects of one’s life and that of one’s community, means to submit to the level of control possible in petty bourgeois existence. The fact that ownership of property is the base for Celie’s emergence cannot be denied. And how many blacks in the U.S. have property? What about those who don’t and cannot even hope to. They are the section that has become expendable, who only have the options of either destroying the society they live in, or being destroyed by it. Gwendolyn Brooks has described them thus:
There they are
Thirty at the corner
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
That do not want to heal.
(In the Mecca)
Celie’s struggle, even though she has the aid of a woman friend, Shug, is personalized and individualized. It is not a collective struggle. That is why the exposition of the history, African roots and traditions of the black community in North America remain externalized in a formal stylistic sense, as well as to the extent they inform Celie’s day to day life. The aesthetics of the novel is that of identification and catharsis. To young black women who are torn apart and suffer from severe identity crisis and inferiority complexes in racist and sexist society it offers a balm, a consolation, a false sense of redemption, inadequate solutions, and they grab.
The bourgeois terms of reference in “The Colour Purple” can be seen in sharper relief if we contrast this novel with the social realist novel, “The Street” by Ann Petry. Dating from around the same period – the 1940s – as Richard Wright’s “The Native Son”, Petry’s novel is woman-centred, unlike Wright’s novel. The negative biases against women in the character of Bigger Thomas in “Native Son” cannot be generalized to the entire output of Richard Wright, least of all to Wright himself (as is evident to anyone who reads his autobiography “Black Boy”), as black feminists are sometimes wont to do. He could be criticized for portraying too negative a picture of Negro man for the sake of his political programme, which cried for assimilation of blacks into white America. But he was absolutely realistic in depicting the roots of fascist and criminal violence in Negro male personality in the social and familial conditions of sections of the Blacks in Northern and Southern U.S. Ann Petry complemented this picture by showing the rage and frustration of a woman, Lutie Johnson, under similar conditions of a racially and class oppressive milieu, but with the added burden of sexist oppression and exploitation, not only by white men, but by black men also. Like Bigger Thomas Lutie is formed in the tradition of the anti-heroine.
Toni Morrison’s “Magic Realism”
Finally, I would like to touch upon the inadequacy of feminist literary criticism as a tool to approach the novelistic oeuvre of Toni Morrison. She herself has expressed reservations about the feminist approach in general and as a literary critical mode as being too narrowing and limiting. Also, against all the efforts of the big media and establishment literary critics to place her within a “universal” literary mould and American literary tradition, she places herself quite firmly within the Afro-American community and literary tradition. In some of her theoretical articles and interviews she has indicated elements in her work which link her with and place her within that tradition: the community as participant and commentator, the narrative structure with its story telling and mythical elements, the ways in which the ethos of the blues informs the work. Morrison’s artistic intentions are far removed from those cited by the Nobel Prize Committee in 1993, that she “delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race.”
Though her work avoids sloganeering and easy solutions her novels fulfill the basic concepts of a Black Aesthetic: they are collective, committed and functional. Far from “liberating language from race” their central theme is an affirmation and maintenance of the sense of identity of the black people. Despite the tragedy of dying, literally and figuratively, as a minority at the margins of North American society “Song of Solomon” affirms that the blacks “…live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this country, right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in the rock, don’t you see… if I got a house you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on.” (pp. 237-38).
And the way in which Toni Morrison, as her people’s writer, tries to pass it on, is not through a simple affirmation of the past, but through a reinterpretation and reevaluation of its myths, its stories, its history. We find in her works a trying out, a playing with, a reinvention of the various myths among the black people: the myth of the evil woman (Sula); the myth of the incestuous father (Cholly in “The Bluest Eye”), the deserting husband (Jude), the modern liberated woman (Jadine in “Tar Baby”), the violent black militant (Guitar) and so many more typical characters of black reality (the spoiled son, the prostitutes, the domestics)…. The form of the novels, the so-called ‘magical realism’, which in reality embodies folk imagination, should not distract from the fact that she is dealing with real problems and conflicts within her community and between blacks and whites. The obvious and essential problem she is dealing with is the problem of identity, the affirmation of black identity against the longing to be white. This ranges from wanting the bluest of blue eyes like Pecola in her first novel to the model Jadine in “Tar Baby”, who has got fully assimilated into the materialistic value system of white society.
“Tar Baby” is on one level also the turning upside down of the typical romantic love story. In this and in other works she attempts to posit the idea of women’s liberation in a way different from feminism. Through the character of Pilate in “Song of Solomon” Morrison has indicated a direction for women who think in terms of liberation. Liberation is not emasculation of men, a reversal of male domination, it is not possession of men, claiming them wholly, wanting to be the world for them. Women have to turn away from this illusory romantic ideal, which is an affirmation of the master-slave relationship, and become full, complete, and claim the world for themselves also. The models for this, indicates Morrison, do not lie in the present, but in the past, in women who knew how to nurture and survive. The answer is not in having one’s way and being free of responsibilities (i.e., in selfishness and careerism like Jadine, who is not willing to take on the responsibilities of her aunt and uncle who have helped her and sacrificed for her). The figure of the black mammy, maligned and discarded, is for Morrison a possible role model “ a woman who was a healer, who understood plants and stones, who could nurse, chop wood…anything… those women were terrific.” (Anne Koenen Interview with Morrison, 1985, pp. 219-220).
In Morrison’s world we are very far away from the contemporary black feminist understanding, the linear and mechanical understanding as put forward by Alice Walker cited earlier. In Morrison’s work, which is more open-ended, stylistically and contentwise, where art is a play with ideas, with various role models, there is plenty of space for the imagination, speculation, play of the reader/listener as well. (Her works are written with a view to be read out also). Things/events don’t go click, click, click into place as they tend to do in the case of Walker’s “Colour Purple”. Here there is no Hollywood reminiscent “masala” plot where chance rules and happy coincidences and reconciliations take place. One does not discover with relief that after all it was not one’s father who had violated oneself, but one’s stepfather, the socio-psychological nuances and ramifications of which Morrison explores.
In her work masculine/feminine are eternal possibilities in a state of flux, contention and fusion; they are not mechanically separate entities - one good, the other bad - never to meet, like in some feminist fiction. In her work, all things are available, all is possible, and we are grateful for that.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes were Watching Gawd. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 (c. 1937)
Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.
______ : Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
_______ : Song of Solomon. New York: New American Library, 1977.
________: Tar Baby. London: Chatto and Windus, 1981.
________: Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
________: Jazz. London: Picador, 1992.
Ann Petry: The Street. Boston: Houghton, 1946.
Alice Walker: The Colour Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Secondary Sources
Toni Cade (Ed.): The Black Woman. An Anthology. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Patricia Hills Collins: Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1980.
Gisela Ecker (Ed.): Feminist Aesthetics. London: The Women’s Press, 1985.
Mari Evans (Ed.): Black Women Writers (1950-1980). A Critical Evalution. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
Addison Gayle Jr. (Ed.): The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Woodie Kind and Earl Anthony (Eds.): Black Poets and Prophets. The Theory, Practice and Esthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revolution. New York: Mentor Books, 1972.
Anne Koenen: The One Out of Sequence. An Interview with Toni Morrison, New York, April 1980. Revised by Toni Morrison in 1983 and published in:
History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture, edited by Lenz Gunter, Frankfurt Campus Verlag, 1985.
Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith (Eds.): All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of us are Brave. New York: Black Women’s Studies,
Feminist Press, 1982.
Dorothea Drummond Mbalia: Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness. London: Associated Universities Presses, 1991.
Alice Walker: In Search of our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt: San Diego, 1983.
Michelle Wallace: Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Dial Press, 1979.
Mary Helen Washington (Ed.): Black-Eyed Susans. Classic Stories by and about Black Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1975.
_________(Ed.): Invented Lives. Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. New York: Anchor Press, 1988.
Journal Articles
The Black Sexism Debate, The Black Scholar, Nos 8-9, May-June, 1979.
Norris Clark: Flying Black: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon, Minority Voice 4,2, Fall 1980.
Thomas LeClair: The Language Must Not Sweat. Interview with Toni Morrison. New Republic, 21 March, 1981.
Toni Morrison: What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib, in: The New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971.
_________: Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 1989.
Mary Helen Washington: Black Women Image Makers, Black World 23, No. 10, August, 1974.
(Unpublished paper written in April 1994)