ACL 1001 |
Lecture 10 |
This week I will be lecturing on the idea of black writing, before briefly touching on a novel by one of the pre-eminent black writers, Toni Morrison. What is black? What is writing? Writing is a term which covers a vast range of practices. From the highly functional to the outer reaches of the aesthetic or the creative. If I asked any of you to define writing you would have a great deal of trouble doing it succinctly.
Now black I think is an even harder term to define, as I will argue; and when conjoined with writing . . . Black Black, however, is the term which first animates us today. It is one with a wide range of meanings, connotations and symbolic associations. At its most literal level black denotes a colour. A black dog; a black car, eg. or perhaps, more accurately, an absence of colour or light -- and already the symbolic associations start to encroach. An absence of light is only a short step symbolically from an absence of enlightenment, an absence of civility, an absence of rationality, an absence of humanity. Yet this is how black people have been seen in the world view of so many non-blacks throughout history. A while back Matt Shirvington did well in the 100 metres final at the Commonwealth games. Much was made of his being the second fastest white man ever. The obsessive focus on this was bad enough. The commentator made the telling slip "Shirvington is only .03 of a second away from becoming the fastest man (errr white man) ever". The whole history of consigning black people to the realm of inhumanity was re-articulated in one thoughtless slip-up. But it is not just television commentators who project these unconscious or conscious racist views. Literature, that body of work which is sometimes thought to represent 'the finest writings by the finest minds', is suffused with racism. Chinua Achebe makes the following point about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, one of the touchstones of the English canon: It
Not only are blacks and Africans the other to civilisation; they are a bestial and perhaps vital other to the intelligence and refinement of Europeans. Heart of Darkness uses a whole series of symbolic associations and oppositions that are regularly used across cultures derived from English. One of the most interesting is p 121 where Son accuses Jadine of acting ‘White’. But there is an inversion of the value system. There are other associations that we might identify with blackness and whiteness as well black
white
Slim Dusty captured these oppositions particularly well in a song he wrote about an Aboriginal stockman called Trumby. One of the verses goes:
There's a few of riders on all of this however. We can't forget the cultural specificity of this series of oppositions. Some cultures use white as a symbol of death. Even within Australia white is not always the positive symbol.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming historical use of black in Australian, British and American cultures as the negative pole in these symbolic oppositions must be emphasised. For a person who identifies as black or is designated black in a culture which symbolises black in such a negative way, this whole state of affairs can be a deep problem. And you hardly need to be reminded that black people around the world have agitated on these very grounds. In every colonial country in which Europeans have come to dominate, racism has flourished. In these racist cultures, there have always been those, from both dominated and dominant sections, who resist racism. This has sometimes involved agitation over or thinking about language use and the role that language and even literature has in propping up oppression. In the 1960s there was an increasing focus on the use of the term black. Rather than reject the term, however, many groups resuscitated the term in a positive way.
Much like the way more recently terms like wog, queer, dyke and even white trash have come to represent terms of pride. Sometimes invoking characteristics that stem from the series of oppositions I used earlier, Black groups remade the term black to connote:
And while this could be seen to buy into a whole series of negative stereotypes, we have to remember the age in which these terms were used – each was seen as a positive. Son, I think, has many if not all of these characteristics. Black also became a term around which many disparate cultures around the world could organise and find commonality, inspiration and support.
Unlike the situation in South Africa where people were divided along spurious gradations of colour The end of the 1960s and early 1970s saw the development of a strong black movement with figures like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in America. In more recent times the term black has come to be in part replaced by terms which are more specific to region, group, and nation. The fragmentation of grand narratives in postmodern frameworks has also occurred in relation to black politics. People of colour
An important part of the whole black movement was, of course, the development of black writing as a means of expressing and representing black realities and aspirations.
Need to be careful about what we mean when we talk about black writing. What do we really mean?
Compare with these ideas:
Is Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo black writing? Does the group's relationship to language and literacy have anything to do with it? In the term black writing is the term black adjectival or is it something else. Suzanne Scafe, Teaching Black Literature. Virago, 1989. Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. 3rd ed. Ed Robert Kimbrough. Norton, 1988. Biography of Toni Morrison Toni Morrison's birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford. She was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931 into a black working class family. Education
She is the author of nine major Novels –
Toni Morrison has been championed by Oprah Winfrey as an important writer, especially for Black Americans. In the 1990s Jana Wendt nterviewed her on the ABC. She asked one of the most stupid questions ever asked on Australian television. Interview with Jana Wendt - 1998
Toni Morrison on her motivation for writing So much for the factual details: This offers some background to her writings How does this background impinge on her work? "I am from the Midwest so I have a special affection for it. My beginnings are always there [Ohio] ... No matter what I write, I begin there ... Ohio also offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither plantation nor ghetto." "I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger." “I look very hard for black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of black work. We've had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people.” Tar Baby Organised around the figure of the tar baby: fable. Who or what is the tar baby? Who is Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit? Morrison has constructed a story around the interaction of stereotypes in order to undermine them. Unlike the process whereby a writer might employ stereotypes to generate narrative quickly
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