Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form [1 ed.] 0367189283, 9780367189280

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“Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers is original and at the leading edge of a developing interest in this topic. It could potentially be one of the key texts of this field. It is outstanding in its engagement with appropriate theory.” —Helen Cousins, Newman University, Birmingham, UK

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U.S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. Jean Wyatt is Professor of English at Occidental College, U.S.A. Sheldon George is Professor of English at Simmons University, U.S.A.

Narrative Theory and Culture Series Editor: Dr. Christopher González Utah State University, USA

This new series will focus on bridging the scholarly gap between narrative theory and cultural studies and addressing the disconnect. The study of narrative is one of the pillars of the study of literature and one of its foremost movements. However, narrative theory has generally missed opportunities for examinations of culturally located narratives, just as cultural studies has tended to look past issues of narrative form and design. This series aims to put these areas of study into conversation with one another. Books considered for this series will appeal to a variety of levels of academics in the field, with some books being geared to the upperlevel researchers and others designed to be used in the undergraduate classroom. Research monographs, which are written with the specialist in mind, should aim to provide the reader with cutting-edge research on emerging areas of interest, or new perspectives on well-established areas. Books that are aiming to reach a broader audience, and perhaps be used in the classroom, should be written in an inviting style that will engage readers at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Narrative Machine The Naturalist, Modernist, and Postmodernist Novel Zena Meadowsong Contemporary Native Fiction Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance James J. Donahue Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers Race, Ethics, Narrative Form Edited by Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Narrative-Theory-and-Culture/book-series/NTAC

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers Race, Ethics, Narrative Form Edited by Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-18928-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19927-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC This project was supported by a grant from the Simmons University Fund for Research.

Contents



Introduction: Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers

1

SHELDON GEORGE AND JEAN WYATT

PART 1

African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form13   1 At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology: Disidentification in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

15

CATHERINE ROMAGNOLO

  2 “She Was Miraculously Neutral”: Feeling, Ethics and Metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

33

JENNIFER TERRY

  3 Disabling Racial Economies: Ableism and the Reproduction of Racial Difference in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

52

MILO OBOURN

  4 “When We Speak of Otherness”: Narrative Unreliability and the Ethics of Othering in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Home

69

HERMAN BEAVERS

  5 Learning to Listen in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

88

STEPHANIE LI

  6 Maternal Sovereignty: Destruction and Survival in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones NAOMI MORGENSTERN

104

viii  Contents   7 Narrating the Raced Subject: Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Literature of Modernism

122

SHELDON GEORGE

PART 2

Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form141   8 Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s Aesthetic of Active Ambivalence

143

DAPHNE LAMOTHE

  9 Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd: A Social Vision Represented through Humor

161

SARAH ILOTT

10 Buchi Emecheta: Storyteller, Sociologist and Citizen of the World

178

PAMELA S. BROMBERG

11 “Where Are You (Really) From?” Transgender Ethics, Ethics of Unknowing, and Transformative Adoption in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Toni Morrison’s Jazz

196

PELAGIA GOULIMARI

12 White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

215

AGATA SZCZESZAK-BREWER

13 “Civis Romana Sum”: Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and the Emancipatory Poetics of (Multi-) Cultural Citizenship

233

DEIRDRE OSBORNE

14 Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics

254

JEAN WYATT

Notes on Contributors272 Index277

Introduction Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt 1.  Collection Overview How do novels by African American and Black British women writers use formal structures to express ethical dilemmas connected to race? This fundamental question drives our collection. In order to think through answers to it, we have assembled fourteen contributors who provide close readings of a particular text while engaging the three framing elements of the collection: race, ethics and narrative form. Our collection builds upon a newly emergent focus in narrative theory. Theorists of the twenty-first-century novel often emphasize the ways that aesthetics and ethics work together to produce ethical change in readers. As early as 2007, Dorothy Hale was able to outline “a common theory” in the scholarship that tied the “literary value” of the contemporary novel form to its “function as an agent of the reader’s ethical education” (“Restriction” 189). However, it is only recently that ethical issues of race have begun to focus narratological inquiry. As James Donahue argued in 2017, narrative theory is “the one major literary critical tradition that, as yet, has not fully explored issues of race and ethnicity” (2). Donahue’s own collection, Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the United States (2017), and Paula Moya’s The Social Imperative (2016), have opened up a capacious new space for formalist approaches to the study of race in literature. Donahue’s collection is a pioneering study that attempts to orient scholarly interest toward race and narratology, an attempt that we supplement here through our focus on narrative and ethics and on African American and Black British women writers. And Moya’s work, rooted in critical race theory and cultural studies, is evidence of the growing interest in fields other than narratology in using formalist approaches toward minority literature to study the workings of race. Our collection extends this growing field, taking it in new directions with our distinctive focus on a cross-Atlantic context for works by African American and Black British women. This collection of essays engages narrative theory to demonstrate how form in various literary texts by contemporary African American and

2  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt Black British women writers urges readers toward ethical reevaluations of race. Reading Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narratology that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. Essays focus on narrative form, race and ethics in works by African American authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine and Jesmyn Ward and by Black British authors Buchi Emecheta, Bernardine Evaristo, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Helen Oyeyemi and Zadie Smith. The scholars we have assembled explore how narrative form in these authors’ texts expresses ethical positions on race and gender and works on readers to push them toward a reexamination of their own racial ethics. And they reveal the authors’ distinctive understandings of the ways that identity is structured for women and peoples of color, offering a framework and a grammar for the use of race and gender in self-analyses of one’s own relations to power. Some of the essays also trace links among the works of black women writers, showing how, for example, Jackie Kay in writing Trumpet riffs on Toni Morrison’s model of an unreliable narrator in Jazz or how Morrison’s “Recitatif” borrows a page from Nella Larsen’s Passing. Texts by women of color in the United States and Britain draw from one another and from traditional folk cultural practices to represent nuanced complexities of identity that make room for commonly ignored categories of race and gender. And authors rely upon one another to learn formal techniques that enable them to produce “racial literacy” in their readers— that is, in Paula Moya’s words, an understanding of “the systemic and institutional nature of race” that also includes its “individual and interpersonal” effects (32). This need for broad, systemic understanding drives our analysis of works that bridge the Atlantic to function as intertexts for each other, providing formal frameworks for audiences to decipher the operations of race. Narrative Form and Race In asking contributors to begin their analysis from a close reading of narrative form and structure, we realize that we are building on a tradition of scholarship—New Criticism—that, even as it purported to establish universal values of literary form, excluded writers of race. As African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues, the signature New Critical conception of tradition that emerged from T. S. Eliot—defining the artist as someone who writes not “merely with his own generation in his bones” but with a “historical sense” of the “whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” to “his own country” (Eliot 115)—was for

Introduction 3 writers of color the “literary equivalent of the ‘grandfather clause’ ” in Jim Crow legislation (Gates 4). The call for tradition built racial and gender restriction into the very laws of aesthetics that defined New Criticism. Scholars like Terry Eagleton have shown that New Criticism was indeed invested in silencing non-traditional voices. Championed by figures like Allen Tate, author of “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” and Robert Penn Warren, author of “Founding Fathers, Early-Nineteenth-Century Style,” New Criticism, according to Eagleton, was “the ideology of an uprooted, defensive intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not find in reality,” building lost Southern values into what they claimed to be a universal poetics (Eagleton 40). Rejecting the opposition between formalism and historical contextualization as a false binary, contributors to the collection pay close attention to the literary form and style of a particular text but also remain attentive to its historical and cultural context. For instance, Herman Beavers reads Toni’s Morrison’s Home and Jazz as formal attempts at advancing an ethics of the oppressed. While stressing the challenges to black subjecthood embedded in the American legal system, which once defined blacks in its very Constitution as three-fifths human, Beavers examines the novels’ structuring of their characters’ ethical responses to their life situations. Analysis of form is continuous with an alertness to both the ideologies that inform a text and the social and historical location of the author. Indeed, contributors recognize that a writer’s social positioning is often reflected in textual idiosyncrasies or idioms. In the essay by Naomi Morgenstern, for example, Jesmyn Ward’s use of Hurricane Katrina as the setting of Salvage the Bones provides an entry into Morgenstern’s analysis of idiomatic usages of “weathering” as a term for the wear and tear done to racialized bodies in contemporary America. Her contribution marries form to national political climate in a way that is emblematic of our focus as a whole. Contributors display attentiveness to environment and context in different ways. Focused on the U.K., Agata Sczceszak-Brewer shows how Andrea Levy’s narrative strategy of competing and often self-deceiving narrators in Small Island subtly exposes several racist discourses circulating in contemporary Britain. Pamela Bromberg’s essay describes Buchi Emecheta’s efforts to carve out a feminist writing style free of technical complexity and the “elitist” perspective championed by male luminaries like Chinua Achebe. She details Emecheta’s preference for multicultural London over the gender restraints imposed by Igbo culture in Nigeria. Cultural critic Paula Moya best articulates the critical perspective embraced by this collection as a whole: a critic can practice “a heightened attention to literary language and form in a way that acknowledges the shaping force of culture and society on a text’s development and expression” (10).

4  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt Narrative Form and Ethics What narrative techniques can provoke ethical thinking in a reader? How can narrative form itself—independent of content—bring a reader to ask herself questions about her own convictions on race—and perhaps change them? The effects of a literary work on a reader, as Jane Tompkins says, “are essential to any accurate description of its meaning, since that meaning has no effective existence outside of its realization in the mind of a reader” (ix). In some of the black women writers’ texts studied in this collection, there is a distinctive link between race and reader response: ambiguities or gaps in the text spur a reader to examine her own relationship to the ethical dilemmas raised but not resolved by the text. These ambiguities link narrative form and race in a particular way that allows us to extend current thinking on ethics and form. Contemporary scholarship on ethics in the novel has recently focused on the capacity of a novel to confront the reader with alterity. Martha Nussbaum stresses that reading novels develops in one the ability to care for persons unlike oneself; because of the intimacy of knowing another through sharing a character’s consciousness for an extended time, reading expands a reader’s range of empathy and teaches care (Nussbaum calls it “love”) for others who are different from oneself. Similarly, Paula Moya praises the “world-traveling” that literature affords a reader by allowing her to occupy the position of someone subjected to different circuits of power. A good work of literature can enable a reader to perceive, over the extended period of time that novel-reading demands, “the way race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality actually matter—in the sense of . . . becoming materialized in individual lives” as constraints on “characters’ bodies, behaviors, and ideologies” (Moya 36, 35). Even closer to our concern with the relation of narrative form to ethics is Dorothy Hale’s suggestion that many contemporary scholars of the novel “not only take for granted the achievement of alterity as the novel’s distinctive generic purpose but also understand it to be accomplished through novelistic form” (“Aesthetics” 900). The authors we study in this collection go further: they lead readers not just to confront alterity but to also reexamine their own ethical views on alterity, particularly in regard to race. For example, gaps and ambiguities in the work of Toni Morrison summon a reader to supply missing information, to interpret creatively and, where sense and meaning are altogether lacking, to speculate freely on a range of possible meanings. In Morrison’s novel Jazz, a reader is forced by the narrator’s veering from one literary mode to quite a different one, and from a standard plot of African American suffering to a plot influenced by the improvisations of jazz, to fill in what the narrator leaves out, to create her own meaningful transitions from one plot to its opposite and to ultimately meet the narrator’s challenge to improvise her own version of the story. According

Introduction 5 to Sheldon George’s reading, Morrison’s newly created jazz-inflected narrative form can bring an actively receptive reader to adopt a new ethical stance on race and racialized subjects. Of course, the cultural and raced position of any particular reader necessarily inflects her reading. What appears as enigma to a white reader, for example, may offer a marginalized reader a path into her own cultural traditions and identities. Depending on the subject position of the reader, these texts may suggest new and different ways of knowing, and thus an enigmatic route into alterity—or they may chart a path into the self. Networks of Literary Influence Through focusing upon the three terms that structure this collection’s investigations of African American and Black British women writers— race, ethics, narrative form—our contributors chart connections across the literary works of these contemporary authors. Some of the essays in the collection explicitly show contemporary black women writers signifying on stylistic traits of the women writers who have come before. Milo Obourn argues for a literary linkage between Nella Larsen’s 1920s novel Passing and Toni Morrison’s 1990s short story “Recitatif.” Both texts play with oscillations between knowing and not-knowing in relation to issues of race, and both dramatize the costs of a racialized identity. Pelagia Goulimari writes that the unreliable narrators in Jacki Kay’s Trumpet are inspired by the unreliable narrator of Morrison’s Jazz, and she traces the origins of Kay’s concentric narrative form to the spiral form of Jazz: in both texts, a discordant, disconnected scene is at the center of the novel, and its ideas radiate out in a multitude of variations on that enigmatic central scene. Stephanie Li and Naomi Morgenstern, working separately and without knowledge of each other’s thinking, have each threaded references to Morrison’s influence on Jesmyn Ward through their essays. Morgenstern, in her chapter on Ward’s Salvage the Bones, thinks through the ethical choices about maternity that Esch, the soon-to-be teenage mother in the novel, must make in a “state of nature”—where there are neither the protections of social law nor any range of options to choose from—by comparing Esch’s situation with the ethical wasteland in which the slave mothers in Morrison’s A Mercy and Beloved must make life-and-death choices about their children. In Li’s essay on Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, references to Morrison’s essays on the aesthetics of African American novels form a running commentary on the ethical education that oral storytelling provides for Jojo within the novel and on the ethical dialogue between reader and author that Ward demands of her reader. It makes sense that women writers would find the literary forms of their forebears useful. People in particular subject positions have to deal

6  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt with issues specific to that subject position. If Morrison has found ways to express the difficulties of being a black female subject in a United States organized by racist and sexist hierarchies, and Kay occupies a structurally similar subject position in the U.K., she may well discern in Morrison’s work not just a representation of similar race and gender issues but also literary strategies that allow her to express and (perhaps) deal with these issues. Thus, a diasporic network of literary influences begins to form, based not on imposed ideas of tradition, periodization or the chronological succession of generations, but on the felt needs of writers for modes of literary expression adequate to capture the ethical dilemmas of specific raced and gendered subject positions. We are looking at bodies of work from two different cultures, of course. African Americans often trace the inspiration for their writing to the oral traditions coming out of U.S. slavery. Black British writers are influenced by an ancestral past of colonization, different for each writer but involving shared themes of colonization, slavery and migration. Women writers on both sides of the Atlantic, however, can and often do draw on literary forms inherited from African and Caribbean oral traditions. Jean Wyatt’s essay in this collection describes how Helen Oyeyemi, in White Is for Witching, enlivens her re-invention of the nineteenthcentury British Gothic novel by mixing traditional Gothic features with elements drawn from her several cultural legacies. Born in Nigeria but living in the U.K. from the age of four, Oyeyemi adapts Yoruba spiritual beliefs and West African participatory storytelling to her narrative purposes. Like others in the current generation of young Black British women writers, however, Oyeyemi’s cultural vocabulary is not limited to British and Yoruba traditions but draws from a larger diasporic mix of cultural legacies. For example, the figure of the vampire is central to Oyeyemi’s narrative, but oblique references to the archetypal Victorian Gothic vampire Dracula receive far less narrative space than the Caribbean folktale figure of the soucouyant, an old woman who leaves her skin behind to fly around in a ball of fire seeking children to eat. Thus the literary form itself bespeaks its multiple cultural and historical formations. Indeed, the global connections of some of the authors studied here push the boundaries of our neat categorical division between African American and Black British writers. For example, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose work is discussed in the section “African American women writers,” was born and raised in Nigeria. However, she moved to the United States at the age of nineteen to be educated at Eastern Connecticut State University, Johns Hopkins and Yale. Most of her novels and short stories were written in the United States. But several are set in Nigeria, and even in the novels and short stories that take place in the U.S., the characters are often Nigerian. She lives in the United States but divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria. Helen Oyeyemi similarly occupies several geographical locations. Born in Nigeria, she emigrated

Introduction 7 to Britain in childhood, was educated at Cambridge University and holds a British passport. But she has also lived (briefly) in the United States and now resides in Prague. Like Adichie and Oyeyemi, many of the black women authors included here—especially the Black British authors—write out of multiple cultural heritages and occupy multiple geographical locations. For purposes of providing a logical and helpful structure, we have placed them in two groups—African American and Black British—according to the passport they carry, their place of education and the location where they have written most of their works. Our interest, however, is less in pinning them to a location than in exploring their formal connections. Linked through narrative form and stylistic techniques, the writers studied in this collection do not seek to find in one another and in their progenitors an ancestral line, a maternal genealogy to ground them in tradition and link them to the past. Unlike the mode of a former generation of black women writers—Alice Walker’s search for her literary mother in Zora Neale Hurston’s work, for example—these twenty-firstcentury writers are learning from one another strategies for how to survive in the present, in the contemporary race-infused world. They also learn from each other formal strategies for communicating to readers an understanding of how systemic and institutionalized racism works and what its effects are on individuals—formal narrative strategies for teaching “racial literacy,” in Moya’s phrase. And because this linkage among black women’s texts is based not on literary ancestry, but on strategy and technique, this literary borrowing can result in more expansive ethical investigations that move toward the understanding of new subject constructions. African American and Black British Historical and Cultural Backgrounds While such transatlantic linkages are evidence of continuities between African American and Black British writers, significant differences in cultural heritage exist between the two groups in ways that affect their writing. In the United States, both white and black social identities derive from 400 years of slavery, based on a system of contrasts that defined whites as full human subjects in opposition to black people defined as subhuman—animals or things—whose inferiority justified white ownership and mastery. In the U.S., as Ta-Nehisi Coates says succinctly, “Racism precedes race” (xi). Beginning with a law passed in Virginia in 1662, slavery became legally connected to people of African descent; the child’s race was determined by the condition of the mother, so that Black Americans were born into slavery. From the nation’s beginnings, then, racism and race were woven into legal and social systems that define people’s identities. As Moya elaborates, “race is foundational (having been

8  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt inscribed in the U.S. Constitution), systemic (having been structured into our social, political and economic institutions) and flexible (constantly adapting to both support, and mask, financial and power relations)” (Moya 32). The historical legacy of Black British subjects is more diverse and multifaceted. Deirdre Osborne warns, in her essay on Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, that it is historically inaccurate to think of the Black British presence in Britain in terms only of colonization and postcolonial immigration. By making her black protagonist Zuleika a freeborn Roman citizen whose family migrated from a sub-Saharan colony in Africa (the present-day Sudan) to Londinium (then a far-flung colony of the Roman empire), Evaristo makes the case for the existence of free black Britons in Britain already in the second and third centuries A.D. Through this “ancient world setting,” Osborne writes, Evaristo purposefully exerts an imaginative reach back beyond what have become totalizing parameters around modern thinking about black people’s history: enslavement and colonization, and the hierarchies of colourism that have often overwritten the understandings of race and status in the ancient world. (234) Confirming a basis in historical reality for Evaristo’s imagining of a free Black Roman Briton in the third century A.D., advances in forensic science have enabled archaeologists to establish that indeed Roman citizens of Northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa settled in England in this period (Olusoga 29–33). In Elizabethan times, persons of African descent were among the sailors in England’s voyages of discovery. David Olusoga’s voluminous history of Black Britain shows that “black people were not only continually present in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards but also . . . played a role in many of the pivotal moments of British history” (19). However, British colonial and postcolonial history remains pivotal, and the policies and cultural shifts that most directly impact the experiences of the contemporary authors studied here emerge in the middle of the last century. After World War II, the large numbers of immigrants from former British colonies began to change the demographics of Britain. In the late 1960s, the British government responded to the effects of accelerated immigration by instituting a policy of multiculturalism, as articulated by then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins: “I do not regard [integration] as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. . . . I define integration as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” (Jenkins 267). However, even at the state level, such an embrace of diversity was not universal in the 1960s. Conservative M. P. Enoch Powell, a strong public voice of that decade, advocated a “clean break” from

Introduction 9 the colonial past, allowing England to return to the “deep inner core of the English character and the essential nature of England’s national institutions” (Olusoga 11). Characterizing the thousands of black people already established in Britain as an “immigrant-descended population” who could not be considered British but forever African, “West Indian or Asian,” despite their British citizenship, Powell suggested a policy of “re-emigration” (in plain terms, expulsion) (quoted in Hansen 188; Olusoga 14). For Powell—and for the many who rallied to his support—to be British was to be white. The opposition between support for multiculturalism and a renewed white nationalism enunciated in the public policies of these two 1960s politicians has continued into the present day. The Labor Government of Tony Blair in the 1990s embraced multiculturalism as state policy. However, in the new millennium, support for multiculturalism has waned and racism increased. Attachment to whiteness as the defining property of a British identity has increasingly replaced acceptance of the legitimacy of multiple British identities. In this collection, Sarah Ilott traces the changes in Zadie Smith’s deployment of humor in the sequence of her novels from 2000 (White Teeth) to 2012 (NW), claiming that Smith is responding to shifts in the political climate from the celebration of multiculturalism in 2000 to the steadily increasing British hostility toward racial and cultural difference in the following decade. In response to these changes, Ilott says, Smith moved from the satirical humor of White Teeth, which targeted the misunderstandings of people actually living in multicultural communities and exposed the power relations underlying the ideal of liberal official multiculturism, to, in NW, a use of humor intended to increase empathy for the cultural other and to critique the kind of satirical humor that belittles or even dehumanizes its target. Ilott describes a steadily increasing xenophobia in the British population in response to the terrorist attacks in 2005 (in London) and 2001 (in the U.S.) and to the economic austerity measures put into place after the global financial crisis of 2007–8, which exacerbated class and racial social divisions. These diverging histories have affected the literature produced by the black women writers of the two nations and their understanding of the terms of race used to define their identities. In the U.S., African Americans have been urged to stake a position relative to race as a category that externally defines them, with W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, prominently arguing for “conservation” of the concept of race as a source of political unity. Contemporary African American women authors question the epistemic value of race. They turn to written language in efforts to manage the very real implications of social fictions of race. Toni Morrison writes that she aims to “eliminate the potency of racist constructs in language” (“Home” 4) through writing that is “race specific yet nonracist” (5). Language itself has become an agential mode

10  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt for managing racism. According to Jennifer Terry’s reading of Adichie’s Americanah, artistic manipulation of novelistic language and plot direct readers’ emotional and ethical responses to race. Terry turns to recent theoretical work on affect by Judith Butler and Sarah Ahmed to demonstrate how emotion determines social norms, influences perceptions of bodies as other or the same, and establishes alliances or disidentifications. The authors studied in this collection use their novels to structure a shift in emotional responses, shaping language to realign readers’ orientation toward racialized others. In a similar negotiation of the language of identity in the U.K., the term that has come to designate British citizens of African descent, “Black British”—originally a descriptor of Britain’s community of Caribbean immigrants—was expanded by British cultural theorist Stuart Hall to signify “the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain” (27). In Hall’s vision, “Black British” was a capacious term that accommodated various black cultures and identities, so that “the margins” offered a creative space of “productive negotiation” among different groups, inspiring “cultural, social, and political change” as well as catalyzing new, hybrid artistic forms (Stein 13). Our contributors highlight this creative negotiation of identity, emphasizing the complexity of contemporary black subjectivity in the U.K. In her reading of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Daphne Lamothe brings a number of theoretical perspectives to bear on Smith’s depiction of black female subjectivity as a dynamic and ongoing process of change—a continual state of becoming. The essay presents a phenomenological approach to blackness, focusing on blackness as a lived experience, not an abstract ontological state of being. Theorists of jazz, in particular, enable Lamothe to specify the ways that Smith’s protagonist learns to swing between the poles of expressive individual agency and a critical consciousness of living as black within a racist social order. However, attention to the historical conditions of Black women’s lives has often overdetermined the critical analysis of works by black female authors. While black identity politics has provided a site of collectivity and resistance against racism in both the U.S. and the U.K., it has also led to a tendency to overlook the aesthetic dimension of texts by black women authors in favor of treating them as sociological documents that offer a window onto the perspective of “raced” subjects—of interest because the literary documents describe the everyday living conditions of subjects outside the mainstream. Our own approach to these texts runs parallel to the body of scholarship by Black Feminist critics like Madhu Dubey and Cheryl Wall, who pointed out in 1989 and 1994, respectively, that the widespread treatment of novels by black women as little more than documentary evidence of black lives places works by women of color in a different category from “literature.” That is, “literary texts” deserve rigorous formal analysis, while black-authored texts are treated

Introduction 11 as little more than social texts (Wall 9). Accordingly, these scholars call for literary critics to attend to the formal achievements of literature by black women writers. The present collection is, then, continuous with this body of Black Feminist critique in its insistence on making a rigorous analysis of literary form the bedrock of contributors’ analyses of culture, race and ethics. It also refocuses narrative theory by making texts by black women prime objects of narratological inquiry. Just as (according to Sheldon George’s argument) Toni Morrison’s Jazz shows that the narrative forms of the modernist literary canon are inadequate to capture the complexities of black subjectivity, and also devises a new fictional form that better expresses racialized subjectivity, so the study of black women writers’ fiction can bring new perspectives and new vocabulary to narrative theory. Catherine Romagnolo’s essay, for example, argues that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen employs “disidentification,” a term introduced by José Muñoz to mean the exposure, rejection and revision of the preferred messages of the dominant culture. Romagnolo expands the term to include the effort of black women writers to resist and rewrite dominant narrative structures. Thus, adding the element of race to narratological inquiry does not merely add a new body of literary texts as objects of theoretical scrutiny; it may also reveal gaps in established narrative theoretical frames and even suggest new narratological categories of analysis.

Works Cited Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Foreword.” Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others. Harvard UP, 2017, pp. vii–xvii. Donahue, James J., et al., eds. Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Ohio UP, 2017. Du Bois. “The Conservation of Races.” W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, edited by Dan Green and Edwin Driver. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980, pp. 238–49. Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Waste Land, edited by Michael North. New York: Norton, 2001, pp. 114–19. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986, pp. 1–20. Hale, Dorothy J. “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, May 2009, pp. 896–905. _____. “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel.” Narrative, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2007, pp. 187–206. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Black Film, British Cinema: ICA documents 7, edited by Kobena Mercer, 1988. 27–31.

12  Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt Hansen, Randall. Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000. Jenkins, Roy. Essays and Speeches. London: Collins, 1967. Morrison, Toni. “Home.” The House that Race Built, edited by Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Moya, Paula. The Social Imperative. Stanford UP, 2016. Olusoga, David. Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Macmillan, 2017. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Ohio UP, 2004. Wall, Cheryl. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 1989.

Part 1

African American Women Writers Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

1 At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology Disidentification in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen Catherine Romagnolo Over the last few decades, scholars have called for a “critical race narratology,” a concept we can define as the study of the ways sociohistorical context and racialized subjectivities impinge upon the formal and structural features of narrative. In 2011, Analyzing World Fiction, A Collection, edited by Frederick Aldama, began to move the field of narrative studies in that direction. And, the more recent collection Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by James Donahue, Sue Kim and Shaun Morgan, extends the work of the 2011 volume. Moreover, many contemporary scholars of African American literature (such as Madhu Dubey, Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall)1 have sought to analyze the ways Black writers, through both the form and content of their narratives, illuminate the intersections of narrative and racialized/ gendered subjectivities. Reading at the crossroads of form, content and ideology is not a simple task, these critics argue, but it must be accomplished if we are to challenge historically limiting ways of reading literature by writers of color. As Dubey asserts, Recognizing that form is not the ideology-free domain of pure literature is the first step toward challenging the division between art and ideology. An ideological analysis of form should be particularly useful for black feminist criticism, for it questions the notion of real, nonideological literature that undergirds the formation of dominant literary traditions. (8) Despite these calls from the fields of African American literature and narrative studies, the consideration of race as a category of narratological analysis still resides on the margins of the discipline. The work of displacing a narratological criticism that assumes a white, male, Euro/American subject remains largely undone. 1 See Deborah McDowell, The Changing Same; Cheryl Wall, Worrying the Line; and Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic.

16  Catherine Romagnolo Perhaps the persistent whiteness of the field can be attributed in part to a kind of illegibility through the lens of traditional narrative theory of the narrative strategies of many minoritized writers. In order to adequately address this problem, we must revisit the question Susan Lanser asked years ago: “[U]pon what body of texts, upon what understandings of the narrative and referential universe, have the insights of narratology been based?” (“Toward” 612). In James Donahue’s words, we need to face up to the “many ways narrative theory still appears to be ‘race/ethnicity’ blind” (Donahue 4–5).2 I would suggest that a first step on this path is to acknowledge that the central tenets of narrative theory, which continue in large part to rely on notions of ideology-free narrative structures, occlude the ideological implications of form in narratives by writers of color. I assert that a notion of “narrative disidentification” can offer an alternative heuristic through which to view these formal strategies. José Muñoz defines disidentification as narrative subject formations that expose and recircuit the encoded messages of the dominant culture in order to “account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (6). It is subjectivity produced “at the point of contact between essential understandings of self (fixed dispositions) and socially constructed narratives of self” (Muñoz 6). This conception is one that is fluid, not static; it is not normatively gendered, and it does not posit a restrictive essentialist conception of minoritized identity in opposition to its socially constructed inferiority. Disidentification works as a process of narrative subject formation that “exposes the [dominant culture’s] encoded message[s], [its] universalizing and exclusionary machinations” (31). Muñoz elaborates extensively upon the role played in disidentification by queer narrative performativity, but I would like to suggest that his description of the ways that the “process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text” also provides a sharp lens through which to view specific formal strategies utilized by texts and writers invested in the production of radical Black subjectivities. By shifting the interpretive framework of formalist analysis, my hope is that the lens of disidentification can bring into focus the formal narrative strategies of Black U.S. writers who intervene in conventional narrative constructions that often provide the scaffolding for restrictive notions

2 I wish to avoid any position that tends to essentialize narrative form by implying that narratives utilizing particular techniques (linearity, sequentiality) are inherently either hegemonic or counterhegemonic. These essentializing theories posit a monolithic view of narrative, which occludes the many writers who strategically utilize so-called conventional forms to disrupt hegemonic effects. Moreover, as Molly Hite has argued, this view also has a tendency to elide the “distinction between the . . . writer’s deliberate attempts to create innovative and disruptive narrative structures or styles—to write other-wise— and the otherness that a [hegemonic] culture posits and expects” (Hite 14).

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 17 of social identity. Perhaps this notion of “narrative disidentification” can open up a space for the production of knowledge about forms that are “unable,” or perhaps unwilling, “to fully identify . . . [because] of the ideological restrictions implicit in an identificatory site” (Muñoz 7). Expanding and adapting the lens of disidentification to account more explicitly for narrative form, I assert that through the form as well as the content of their texts, Black writers often forge disidentifying, intersectional subjectivities that represent modes of resistance to dominant narrative structures. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen provides a salient example of the ways this process of narrative disidentification might work in a text that is both formally complex and deeply concerned with the construction of racialized and gendered subjectivities.

Intersections Citizen, published in 2014, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Despite the fact that Rankine has subtitled her text An American Lyric, it has been described in much more expansive terms as a hybrid collection of lyric, visual, critical and narrative fragments. Though it might not immediately present itself as a narrative, it possesses a kind of dynamic, emergent narrativity that the lens of disidentification can bring into focus. This dynamic form mirrors and enables the text’s representation of disidentificatory constructions of raced and gendered subjectivity. Although most reviewers and critics rightly home in on the racialized experiences represented in Citizen, it is apparent from the beginning that Rankine is also closely attentive to how race intersects with other subject positions. This intersectional understanding of identity can be viewed as a kind of break with “feminist strategies of identification and counteridentification,” a disposition Muñoz describes as an example of “disidentification as political strategy” (Muñoz 22). Rankine’s attentiveness to intersectionality exemplifies Muñoz’s notion that disidentification is the space in which “binaries finally begin to falter” and what might be termed intersectional forms emerge (Muñoz 20, 25). Citizen’s focus on intersections is apparent throughout the text’s descriptions and intimate narrations of the micro-aggressions that aggregate to depict a powerful, palpable understanding of minoritized experiences in the U.S. Race is the most apparent positionality indexed in the text, but the more subtle ways in which gender, for example, plays a role are visible through Rankine’s representation of a collision of multiple subject positions in contemporary experiences of oppression. Looking briefly at the section entitled “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” we can see how Rankine depicts disidentificatory Black masculinity and the manner in which it is often performed in contemporary society. It begins, “My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The

18  Catherine Romagnolo prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait” (89). Here, the speaker juxtaposes the ordinariness of her literal and metaphoric brothers’ quotidian existence with the violence always looming, a violence her brothers must vigilantly await and avoid. It is a violence that constructs a prison of “no place” and every place, a violence that “accumulate[s] into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us. Its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through” (90). Rankine displaces the spurious white supremacist representations of Black men as violent with the material violence perpetrated daily by white people against real Black citizens. She illuminates the subject position in which Black men regularly find themselves. As Michael Eric Dyson explains, You [white people] make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment, a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough. (Dyson) Citizen reveals this impossible situation: how, even if an individual Black man has not experienced the physical violence so prevalent in our society, he awaits it, until the history of “plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy” descends upon him with all the weight of American history (Rankine 89–90).3

Visual Narrativity Rankine’s representation of intersectional subjectivity is mirrored by the intersections of form in the text. She often utilizes a hybridity of textual and visual narrative fragments to construct a story of gendered and racialized subjectivity. Reflecting Muñoz’s understanding of disidentification, Rankine describes her visual narrative strategy as “signs” [that] are meant in part to destabilize the text so both image and text would always have possibilities, both realized and

3 While Rankine and Muñoz are primarily concerned here with a type of resistance that might be described as passive, neither excludes the possibility or the efficacy of a more active resistance to racialized violence and microagression. Instead, they both mark and distinguish the ways in which disidentificatory resistance is often not figured as resistance at all.

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 19 unimagined by me, beyond my curating powers. . . . I wanted to create an aesthetic form for myself, where the text was trembling and doubling and wandering in its negotiation and renegotiation of the image, a form where the text’s stated claims and interests would reverberate off the included visuals. (Berlant) Her use of visual narrativity is simultaneously reinforced and destabilized by the written narrative, evoking a notion of narrative disidentification. In one instance, she utilizes this strategy to portray the experiences of the Olympic champion tennis player Serena Williams. Within the text, Rankine inserts a photograph taken during a San Paolo exhibition match between Caroline Wozniacki and Maria Sharapova. Wozniacki, who is white, is captured mocking the shape of Williams’s body. In the image, Wozniacki has stuffed towels in her skirt and bra, ostensibly to mimic Williams’s body shape. She is caught using her hand to draw attention to her rear, in a pose that evokes a kind of knowing sexualization. Recalling historical representations of Black women’s bodies as hyper-sexualized and non-normative, Rankine’s use of this photo calls up the microaggressions endured by people of color and the dominant cultural narratives about Black women’s bodies. As bell hooks describes, these cultural narratives are built upon the commodification and sexualization of Black women’s bodies during slavery and beyond. These representations “were part of the cultural apparatus of 19th-century racism and . . . still shape perceptions today. . . . [B]lack female bodies [have] become ‘icon[s] for deviant sexuality’ ” (2). The image evokes this history, while the text that follows represents a “remaking or rewriting of this dominant script” (Muñoz 23): “Caroline Wozniacki . . . imitates Serena by stuffing towels in her top and shorts, all in good fun, at an exhibition match. Racist? CNN wants to know if outrage is the proper response” (36). CNN and other media outlets focused on the supposed friendship between the two women, attempting to minimize the racist impact of the “joke.”4 Rankine’s text neither denies nor reinforces the truth of Williams’s and Wozniacki’s friendship. Instead, its “negotiation and renegotiation” documents the symbolic violence perpetrated upon Black women’s bodies in the media and public discourse (Berlant).

4 Despite its racist implications, the vast majority of major news outlets dismissed this incident as “not racist,” citing the fact that Serena herself claimed to take no offense to the joke. See CNN, Essence and ESPN for just a few of these dismissals. Some commentators saw clearly how problematic this “joke” was, especially in light of the ways Serena had been stereotyped, essentialized and mocked by sports writers and commentators in the past. For example, Ms. magazine’s Anita Little “linked the sexualization of Williams’ physique to the legacy of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ an African woman whose real name was Saartjie Baartman, who was displayed before European audiences as a freak show attraction in the 1800s” (Desmond-Harris).

20  Catherine Romagnolo Citizen highlights the ways in which the narrative put forth by CNN and other mainstream outlets undermines the perspectives of those, especially people of color, who see the racist implications of this “prank.” As a writer for Ebony pointed out at the time of the incident, [Williams has] been the subject of great derision for her shape. She’s been likened to a primate for no other reason other [sic] than she’s a Black woman with a stunningly chiseled body in a world where the average star is blonde and lithe. There is nothing funny about such a person who meets the desired “standard” for tennis player aesthetics mocking Williams’ curves. (Arceneaux) The dialogic work performed by Rankine’s text and image reveals the ways in which the mainstream narrative refuses to acknowledge either the personal or the national history surrounding the incident. It uncovers what Robin DiAngelo refers to as the effects of “white fragility.” According to DiAngelo, White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves [by white people]. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. (DiAngelo 57) Rankine marks this display of white fragility. She wrests “the power to choose when, how, and to what extent racism is addressed or challenged” away from the dominant cultural narrative (DiAngelo 109). The intersection of the visual and textual narrative fragments form Rankine’s satirical challenge to the mainstream narrative that casts Wozniacki’s actions as a friend’s “good-natured” ribbing. We can read this as an example of what Rankine calls the “battle between the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self.’ . . . [S]ometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning” (14). The image and text expose how a white-supremacist culture taints even so-called friendly interracial relationships. They illuminate the position of disidentifying subjects, those who “neither opt to assimilate within . . . a structure nor strictly” oppose it (Muñoz 11). Finding themselves repelled from seemingly benign social structures, such as friendship and kinship, these subjects instead occupy positions of disidentification. In another use of photography, Rankine recalls and disrupts the function of historical violence and terror enacted on Black communities. In order to facilitate this work, she alters an image with which many are

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 21 familiar. The original black-and-white photograph taken by Lawrence Beitler in 1930 depicts the horrific image of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. In it, the white perpetrators of this violence look directly at the camera, some even smiling, unashamed to be participating in such an act of terrorism. The viewer’s eye is drawn to a white man whose finger points upward toward the horribly burned and disfigured bodies hanged from a tree. Like many such photographs, the original attempted to warn other Black citizens not to step outside of prescribed boundaries; it also performed a dehumanizing effect on the Black subjects of the violence.5 The lynchings, as well as the photographs of them, served to interpellate both Black and white viewers into the ideology of Black inferiority and criminality. They also performed a kind of normalizing function, casting as quotidian the extreme violence enacted on Black bodies. As Leon Litwack explains, the photographs and public documentation served to reinforce the perception of blacks as less than human. . . . The use of the camera to memorialize lynchings testified to their openness and to the self-righteousness that animated the participants. The photographers capture not only the execution itself, but also the carnival-like atmosphere and the expectant mood of the crowd. (Litwack 10–11) These documented events transformed the Black subject into an object—a spectacle intended to arouse hatred and disgust in the viewer, not for the violence enacted, but for the victims of this violence. In response to this intent, Rankine, with the help of John Lucas, alters the photograph, removing the disfigured victims of the lynching, leaving only an emptiness in their place. The result is a recognizable but revised photo, a transformed narrative. The white people in the photo still bear witness to their own inhumanity, but the re-visionary photo refuses to participate in the spectacle of Black pain. Instead, it creates a new and contemporary narrative of Black resistance. The presence of this revised photograph rejects its dehumanizing purposes, but it also challenges the ways in which it, and other photos like it, have been appropriated for anti-racist purposes. Photographs and postcards of lynchings have been utilized by activists in the early twentieth century, as well as by contemporary anti-racism efforts, in order to bear witness to the statesanctioned brutality against Black citizens.6 One might argue, however, that despite the activists’ laudable intentions, circulation of such

5 See Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which documents the many photos and postcards that were created as “souvenirs” of the lynchings. 6 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, along with its accompanying video, is one example of such use.

22  Catherine Romagnolo photographs continues to participate in Black pain and suffering, to cater to “voyeuristic appetites and [perpetuate] images of black victimization” (Litwack 33). Indeed, this argument has been made in response to the digital circulation of contemporary videos and images that bear witness to wanton violence against Black men and women. As an article in Boston Review points out, many African American journalists, including Adreanna Nattiel, Jamil Smith, Phillip B. Williams, and Charing Ball, have wondered whether the amassing of such images is simply another form of consumer “entertainment,” a way “to be able to pull up a seat and watch the lynchings take place over and over.” (Balthaser) Anti-racism activists have become further concerned about the effect such images have on Black viewers. As Shawn Ricks, Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem University, argues, for Black viewers, [w]atching, and re-watching, videos where black people have been killed or harmed can result in vicarious traumatization—meaning, the trauma of that event, even though it did not happen to you, will resonate within you on a mental and physical level. (Johnson) Rankine’s inclusion of the revised photograph subverts these effects. The insertion of this new image may be viewed in light of a narrative strategy of repetition, akin to Muñoz’s notion (extrapolated from Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhaba) of a performative practice “that repeats and cites, with a difference, the generic fictions of the . . . Other” (80). Rankine subverts the performative process of the historical photograph, revealing fissures in its de-humanizing discourse. She utilizes repetition in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s sense of signifying, a “repetition of formal structures” with difference. Like Gates’s description, Rankine’s revised photograph does its work by “repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft discursive act” (Gates 286). It repeats the form of the historical photo but, through context and revision, reverses the original intended effect, as well as the unintended consequences of its subsequent use as anti-racist propaganda. Indeed, Rankine’s revised picture reveals the ways in which the original always already contained the seeds of its own deconstruction.7 Most important, the photo represents repetition

7 As Trinh Minh-Ha has explained, “repetition as a practice and strategy” calls attention to itself as repetition. “It reflects on itself as repetition, it constitutes this doubling back movement through which language (verbal, visual, musical) looks at itself exerting

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 23 in Muñoz’s sense of disidentification, which he relates to Butler’s notion of “citation,” an “action that echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (Butler 227). As Muñoz asserts, this “repetition with a difference” is not “innately politically valenced” (128). Instead, it is a narrative strategy that can take on the work of disidentification.

Disidentifying Genre With its use of visual narrativity, text and lyric, Citizen’s genre is a topic of much discussion and debate. As already mentioned, Rankine claims the title of lyric on her cover page, but she constructs a significant portion of the text as a series of prose poems, short narrative vignettes or lyrical essays. This claiming of the title lyric serves to draw attention to the text’s occupation of the space between genres, “this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong,” the space of narrative disidentification (Butler 219). Its uneasy status vis-á-vis genre and mode calls into question the lyric’s historical preoccupation with the exploration and representation of the American self. As theorists have explained, the lyric form has historically been classified based upon its subjective mode. Typically in the first person, it has been understood as “the subjective form, with drama and epic as . . . the objective and mixed forms” (Culler 2). As the genre of “personal expression” and emotion, the lyric in the U.S. has been historically implicated in the construction of the ideal American self (Burt 423). Rankine, however, describes herself as attempting to “pull the lyric back into its realities” (Chiasson). According to one reviewer, Citizen points out the incongruity of a concept like the personal in a time and place where some citizens cannot be safe in their own bodies. . . . No poem can be properly lyric, perhaps, that is written in and of American history. (Phillips 2) Rankine lifts the lyric out of the realm of the ideal, positing disidentification in place of its conventional idealism. Like its disidentificatory take on the lyric, Citizen is also ambivalent about its status as narrative, embracing a narrativity connected to memory and a flexible construction of subjectivity but rejecting its traditional boundaries, wanting instead “something wild” and “vandalizing” (Rankine 2).

power, and, therefore, creates for itself possibilities to repeatedly thwart its own power, inflating it only to deflate it better . . . The element brought to visibility is precisely the invisibility of the invisible real” (191).

24  Catherine Romagnolo It interrogates the role traditional narrative form has often played in hemming subjects into restrictive constructions of social, cultural and racialized identities. It destabilizes the repetition of discursive ideological practices, which tend to concretize constructions of identity. As Louis Mirón and Jonathan Inda suggest, “Narrative works performatively to constitute the subject itself and only acquires a naturalized effect through repeated or reiterative naming of or reference to that subject” (86–7). Where one of the traditional purposes of the lyric form is to express emotion, Rankine’s speaker interrupts the subject-constituting power of narrative, supplementing it with a more fluid narrativity of memory, lyric and emotion:8 You like to think memory goes far back / though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world’s had a lot of practice. No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild/vandalizing whatever the skull holds. (2) Here the speaker evokes the way in which the memories “you” wish to convey occupy the spaces between the lyric and narrative forms. As the preceding passage suggests, Rankine’s narrative fragments often transform into lyrical fragments—fragments that convey emotion and personal experience more than fact. The fragments that narrate the stories of microagressions, of violence, eventually give way to the realm of feeling. This hybridity, then, resists the historical boundaries constructed by either the narrative or the lyric forms. The section entitled “Stop-and-Frisk” begins in a narrative mode, telling a story in first person of being stopped by police without cause: I know whatever was in front of me was happening and then the police vehicle came to a screeching halt in front of me like they were setting up a blockade. Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew. (Rankine 105) A second fragment, filling in details of the story, follows: I left my client’s house knowing I would be pulled over. I knew. I just knew. I opened my briefcase on the passenger seat, just so they could see. Yes officer rolled around on my tongue, which grew out of a bell 8 “The central content of lyric poems is not the story or the interaction between characters; instead it is about the poet’s feelings and personal views” (“Narrative, Lyric, and Drama”).

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 25 that could never ring because its emergency was a tolling I was meant to swallow. (Rankine 105) These passages set up a story to which we know the end. The specific facts of the story are unimportant. Instead, in order to perform the work that Rankine begins in narrative, the facts must slide into lyric, memory and emotion: This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong. You need to close your mouth now. This is what it looks like. Why are you talking if you haven’t done anything wrong? And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. (Rankine 108) The narrative begun in first person becomes a lyrical account of the anxiety, fear, denial and anger of the “guy” who is “always . . . fitting the description” (108). Similarly, the section entitled “Making Room” begins as a secondperson narrative about a man of color who sits alone on a train. As white people come and go, no one is willing to take the seat next to him:9 On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station. The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it. (Rankine 131) The narrator (“you”) does not directly address this obvious microaggression but instead defiantly takes the seat next to the man: You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within. (Rankine 131)

9 The text does not directly identify the sitter as a man of color or the stander as a white woman. The fact that even the most casual reader knows the racialized identities of these characters despite the fact that they are not identified subtly belies any attempt a white audience might make to minimize the racism expressed by this event.

26  Catherine Romagnolo This small act of taking a seat exposes the irrational fear directed at bodies of color as well as the symbolic violence enacted in the name of that fear. The microagression performed by the standing passengers attempts to transform the minoritarian subject (the man) into an object of fear. The narrator’s actions push back against these attempts, restructuring the narrative so the reader is prompted to see the man not as an other but as kin: It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family. (Rankine 133) Like Muñoz’s disidentifying subject, the narrator here is negotiating the “historical trauma and systemic violence [through] tactics that enact” and affirm “minoritarian subjectivity” (Muñoz 161). The narrator interrupts that interpellative act with her own body, claiming kinship with the man of color. Just as the processes set in motion in this scene are interrupted by the narrator, so is the narrative fragment itself interrupted by a list of names of people of color who have been unjustly murdered: In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis In Memory of Eric Garner In Memory of John Crawford In Memory of Michael Brown In Memory of Laquan McDonald . . . (Rankine 134) This list becomes an elegiac form of the lyric for the young people of color named. As the names continue, the type fades to a paler and paler gray until eventually it is impossible to read. Like the narrator’s action in the preceding narrative fragment, this list interrupts the historical violence to reassert the humanity of the victims. The fading conveys to the reader the ongoing nature of the violence enacted upon individuals. In fact, each new edition of Citizen adds names to this list, creating an ongoing documentation of the violence inflicted upon bodies of color. The page that follows this list closes the hybrid story/ list/poem with what is both a three-line lyric poem and a part of the narrative: because white men can’t police their imagination black people are dying (Rankine 135)

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 27 This passage concludes the narrative fragment that tells the story of the man on the train. It summarizes the consequences of an inability of the white imagination to move beyond fears and stereotypes, while simultaneously conveying the speaker’s anger about these consequences. The hybrid form suggests neither narrative nor lyric are sufficient for conveying these experiences. Instead, this hybridity allows the text to shuttle back and forth between emotion/memory and story, occupying the space of disidentification.

Second-Person Perspective Citizen’s occupation of a disidentifying generic position prepares the reader for its jarring use of perspective, as in the second-person point of view of the opening passage: When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. (Rankine 5) In narrative fiction, the use of second person is associated with the experimental techniques of modern and postmodern writers. Indeed, in Unnatural Voices, Brian Richardson defines second-person narration as “one of the most important technical advances in fictional narration since the introduction of the stream of consciousness” (35). But Citizen is not merely a narrative. Its occupation of the space between genres casts its use of second-person perspective as truly disruptive. As Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin explain, the second-person perspective occupies the spaces between traditional narrative representations: Its inherent referential ambiguity is a special case . . . [that] causes readers to reposition the referent of the “you” flexibly between virtual and actual, between intra- and extradiegesis, and between protagonist, characters, narrator, narratee, implied, and actual reader. (313–14) And while many critics have indicated that “the new lyric studies” have destabilized the old lyric paradigms, use of the second person in lyric forms is still exceedingly unusual. As John Michael explains in his article on the history of the lyric form, “Traditionally, lyric has been understood to be a genre committed to the expression of an individual subjectivity, a

28  Catherine Romagnolo single speaking ‘I,’ whose words are overheard—not heard—by a reader whose presence is mostly ignored” (265). Rankine flouts this tradition by utilizing a perspective that occupies the margins of lyric conventions. At first, the reader might think that the second-person pronoun of the beginning narrative fragment refers to the speaker or author herself, a kind of autobiographical “you” that places distance and time between the contemporary and past self. The text, however, explicitly rejects a reading that simply translates the “you” into “I.” The speaker reflects on the inability of the “I” to hold and express the self: Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. / This makes the first person a symbol for something. / The pronoun barely holding the person together. / Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn’t win. / You said “I” has so much power; it’s insane . . . / you should be scared, the first person can’t pull you together. (Rankine 72) To the speaker, the “I” is “Ill-spirited, hell on Main Street, nobody’s here, broken-down” (72). The first-person blocks a coming together, prevents a “sit[ting] alongside” (71). Alternatively, the “you” attempts to “drag that first person out of the social death of history” and re-claim kinship with its fellow “yous” (72). The “I” is static, without ambiguity; the “you” is shifting in reference and meaning, marking and foregrounding the instability and disidentification of the marginalized self. The “you” links the reader, writer and speaker simultaneously in a circle of we, one in which the modern notion of the individual self is rejected and a disidentifying self is embraced (72). Even as we note that the use of second-person is often a way to mark and collectivize the “I” of the lyric, it quickly becomes clear that the speaker, at times, also narrates specific experiences of individual subjects. The text opens with a narrative fragment that locates the “you” in the past, in a specific location, relaying a precise memory: “You smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road” (5). As the narrative fragment develops, other experiences the speaker relays also reveal themselves to be specifically racialized and gendered:10 [T]he girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is 10 Narrative theorists, such as Susan Lanser, Mieke Bal and Monika Fludernick, have explored the ideological importance of narrative perspective, especially for female writers. I would argue that the intersection of race and gender makes analysis exponentially more complex.

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 29 in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can’t remember her name: Mary? Catherine? You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person. (5) We might argue that this positioning of the narrative fragment allows white readers to put themselves in the “other’s” shoes. However, we must also consider the possibility that this perspective immediately creates dissonance, even dissociation, with a portion of the audience that identifies as white. They cannot legitimately identify as the speaker, but, presumably, the racism of the Mary/Catherine character and the other white subjects in the text repels the reader from identifying with them. Therefore, white readers must shuttle back and forth among the possibilities available to them if they wish to continue reading. It is likely, however, that Black members of the audience can identify with many of the narrated experiences. This dichotomy of identification prompts the white reader not only to empathize with the Black subject but, more important, to experience a kind of disidentification in a text that casts the Black self as the central subject and the white reader as outsider. In “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Sara Ahmed describes whiteness as a historical “orientation” that “puts certain things within reach” and structures the world around it to be “ready for [white] bodies” (154). Citizen constructs alternative spaces in which Blackness is the orientation that puts “certain things within reach,” that contours the world around it for Black bodies. Citizen demands that its white readers see and apprehend the consequences of their willful ignorance, their complicity with racism and the effects of refusing to see what George Yancy refers to as the “differential experiences of raced bodies” (Yancy 12). This orientation asks white readers to develop a “form of [white] ‘double consciousness,’ ” to “see themselves differently through the experiences of black people and people of color” (Yancy 12). Citizen’s perspective shuttles among an autobiographical “you,” a “you” that seems to refer to the many subjects or characters who experience the incidents described in the text and an addressee who may or may not identify with the perspective being relayed.11 The ambiguity of this viewpoint mirrors the instability of the disidentifying subject, asking all

11 Marc Conner in “Leaving the Territory” suggests that this type of shifting meaning is not uncommon in second-person narratives. Often, “the apparently simple line between teller and tale and narrator and character is blurred in second-person narrative” (115). Monika Fludernick, however, points out that most second-person-perspective narratives begin in ambiguity but are eventually resolved. Here, that ambiguity is sustained throughout the text, possibly enabled by the hybridity of genre.

30  Catherine Romagnolo readers to occupy the interstices between subject positions, unable “to fully identify . . . [because] of the ideological restrictions implicit in [this] identificatory site” (Muñoz 7). The you of Citizen insists on an intersection among the speaker, the reader and the author, whoever those subjects are, performing a kind of interpellative disidentification, which insists that in order to be fully apprehended (and the stakes are high that it must), the perspective of Citizen’s hybrid lyric must be one of disidentification.

Conclusion In Citizen, gendered, raced, visual, narrative and lyric forms intersect at the juncture of disidentification. Elucidating these intersections uncovers important work performed by representations of Black disidentifying subjectivities. The form of Rankine’s text must be understood as integral to an apprehension of the production of identity, which occurs at a point of negotiation “between a fixed identity disposition and the socially encoded roles” available (Muñoz 6). This negotiation mirrors the struggle between resisting conventional narrative/lyric forms and working within a legible structure. For writers such as Rankine, narrative form contributes in fundamental ways to the political and identificatory implications of their texts. As Anthony Reed asserts, form in narratives by Black writers can be a “kind of content . . . which pushes at the ruling order’s ideological coverage and disciplines of knowledge, [and] provides an important, positive disruption” (2). At the level of form, these narratives advance an aesthetic that “can spur new thought and new imaginings, especially the (re)imagining of collectivities” and subjectivities (Reed 2). The disconnect between the concerns of narratology and the ideological focus of many Black writers must be bridged. In failing to make such linkages, we bound and limit new and more relevant ways of reading and apprehending the work performed by these writers.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 1 Aug. 2007, pp. 149–68. doi:10.1177/1464700107078139. University of Texas Press, 2011. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory.” 1st ed. Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture Series. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Bal, Mieke, and Jane E. Lewin. “The Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Narrative.” Style, vol. 17, no. 2, 1983, pp. 234–69. Balthaser, Benjamin. “Racial Violence in Black and White | Boston Review.” Accessed 29 July 2019. http://bostonreview.net/editors-picks-us/ benjamin-balthaser-racial-violence-black-and-white. Banks, Adam J. Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. SIU Press, 2011.

At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology 31 Bell, Alice, and Astrid Ensslin. “’ I Know What It Was. You Know What It Was’: Second-Person Narration in Hypertext Fiction.” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 3, October 2011, pp. 311–29. Berlant, Lauren. “Claudia Rankine” BOMB Magazine.” Accessed 13 Mar. 2019. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/claudia-rankine/. Burt, Stephen. “What Is This Thing Called Lyric?” Modern Philology, vol. 113, Feb. 2016, pp. 422–40. doi:10.1086/684097. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 2014. Chiasson, Dan. “Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’ | The New Yorker.” Accessed 13 Aug. 2019. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/ color-codes. Conner, Marc. “Leaving the Territory: Ralph Ellison’s Backward Glance.” Modernism and Autobiography, edited by Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman, Cambridge UP, 2014. Desmond-Harris, Jenée. “Despite Decades of Racist and Sexist Attacks, Serena Williams Keeps Winning.” Vox, 28 Jan. 2017. www.vox.com/2017/1/28/14424624/ serena-williams-wins-australian-open-venus-record-racist-sexist-attacks. DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018. ———. “White Fragility.” The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, no. 3, 16 May 2011. http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249. Donahue, James J., et al. Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Ohio State UP, 2017. Dubek, Laura. “ ‘Fight for It!’: The Twenty-First-Century Underground Railroad.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 41, no. 1, 2018, pp. 68–80. doi:10.1111/jacc.12841. Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Indiana UP, 1994. ———. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dyson, Michael Eric. “Opinion | Death in Black and White.” The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2017, sec. Opinion. www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/ sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html. Fludernik, Monika. “Introduction: Second-Person Narrative and Related Issues.” Style, vol. 28, no. 3, 1994, pp. 281–311. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives. Cornell Press, 1989. Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Princeton UP, 1981. ———. “Toward a Feminist Narratology.” Style, vol. 20, no. 3, 1986, pp. 341–63. Litwack, Leon. “Introduction.” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Twin Pines Publishers, 2000, pp. 8–36. McDowell, Deborah E. “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Indiana UP, 1995. Michael, John. “Lyric History: Temporality, Rhetoric, and the Ethics of Poetry.” New Literary History, vol. 48, no. 2, July 2017, pp. 265–84. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2017.0013. Mirón, Luis F., and Xavier Inda Jonathan. “Race as a Kind of Speech Act.” Cultural Studies: A Research Volume, 2000, pp. 85–107.

32  Catherine Romagnolo Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, 1 June 2002, pp. 1–15. “Narrative, Lyric, Drama.” Accessed 29 Jul. 2019. https://csmt.uchicago.edu/ glossary2004/narrativelyricdrama.htm. Olney, James. “ ‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature—Olney_iwasborn.pdf.” Accessed 2 Apr. 2018. https:// deceivingmemories.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/08/olney_iwasborn.pdf. Phillips, Siobhan. “Change of Address: Siobhan Phillips on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen” Artforum, vol. 53, no. 6, Feb. 2015. www.artforum.com/print/201502/ claudia-rankine-s-citizen-49793. Punjabi, Rajul, and George M. Johnson. “The Constant Images of Racial Violence on Social Media Are Slowly and Subtly Destroying Me.” Vice (blog), 18 Jan. 2019. www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kp9g3/what-constant-images-ofracial-violence-on-social-media-are-doing-to-my-body-and-mind. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Reed, Anthony. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. JHU Press, 2014. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2006. Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford UP, 1999. Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. UNC Press Books, 2005. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Cirencester: Echo Library Ltd, 2005. Print. Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday-Penguin Random House, 2016. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

2 “She Was Miraculously Neutral” Feeling, Ethics and Metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Jennifer Terry Introduction This chapter examines the entanglement of politics, ethics and feeling as explored in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel, Americanah, published in 2013. Ostensibly, Americanah offers a dual third-person narrative focus on the mirroring and contrasting migrant lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, and Adichie discusses how she draws on realist traditions in crafting a romance plot between the two characters. Yet, in order to shape her world of stratified, intersectional black identities, global migrant economics and invidious gender protocols—a world of compromise, false positions, entitlement and precarious self-realization—Adichie has made a more complex use of frame narrative, point of view and narrative alignment than previously recognized. Indeed, attention to the text’s narrative contours and metafictional aspects allows a new understanding of its modeling of ethical reorientation and, as part of this, inquiry into emotion’s constitutive part within socio-political orders. This opens the possibility of approaches to ethics and literature that are reinvigorated and reimagined via ideological and narratological awareness. Two self-reflexive moments about novels and reading, both drawn from Americanah’s frame narrative, serve as my springboard. Chapter One sets up the novel’s interest in attitudes toward emotion. Here we meet Ifemelu on her way to the hair salon, carrying with her a copy of Jean Toomer’s Cane to pass the time: A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels . . . sure that she . . . would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by . . . youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness . . . they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory. (11–12)

34  Jennifer Terry Here the focalization of Ifemelu’s thoughts establishes her reading preferences as different from her ex-boyfriend Blaine’s but also conveys his “forbearing” surety about—his position of ultimate adjudication on— which are “superior” novels. The passage describes how Ifemelu is less drawn to fiction written by young men and “packed with things” and, by extension, rejects a hierarchy in which “emotions” are relegated. This both signals Ifemelu’s, and potentially Americanah’s, value system and initiates the novel’s metafictional thread. Patricia Waugh describes “metafiction” as a term “given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact,” and this foregrounding is extended in Americanah to the discussion of literary reception, evaluation and limiting categories or interpretive frames (Waugh 2). Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion as cultural practice aids the extrapolation of further dimensions from this extract involving Ifemelu and Blaine. With an emphasis on process, Ahmed sets out to consider “the processes whereby ‘being emotional’ comes to be seen as a characteristic of some bodies and not others” (Ahmed, Emotion 4). For example, on anti-immigrant rhetoric of “the nation” as a “soft touch,” Ahmed writes, The use of metaphors of “softness” and “hardness” shows us how emotions become attributes of collectives, which get constructed as “being” through “feeling.” Such attributes are of course gendered: the soft national body is a feminised body, which is “penetrated” or “invaded” by others. (2) This relates to a longstanding hierarchical and gendered opposition of emotion and reason, one that Americanah’s metafictional literary references infer and Ifemelu recalibrates. Yet what underpins Ahmed’s approach, and my utilization of her work, is recognition of the constructedness, the production of emotion (here soft vulnerability) and stances of rationality (hardness), with both involving emotional narratives. Assumptions about that deemed emotional and that deemed somehow unemotional relate to not only a gendered binary but also racial hierarchy and positioning within and without the First World. Ahmed asserts, “Attention to emotions allows us to address the question of how subjects become invested in particular structures” [original emphasis] (Ahmed, Emotion 12). Americanah works to uncover some of these investments in the second of my textual departure points. When the start of Chapter Eighteen returns to the hair salon frame, Ifemelu is drawn into a discussion of literary representations of Africa with a fellow customer, a white liberal American, Kelsey, who is about to go traveling on the continent. Ifemelu challenges the woman on her celebratory reading of the “honesty” of V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: “Kelsey looked startled; she had not expected a mini lecture. Then, she said kindly, ‘Oh, well, I see

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 35 why you would read the novel like that.’ ‘And I see why you would read it like you did,’ Ifemelu said” [original emphasis] (190). This metafictional exchange stages two clashing perspectives on the same novel yet, significantly, also examines the white liberal’s assumption of impartiality and attribution of a more subjectively invested reading to Ifemelu, as elaborated by Ifemelu’s riposte to “this girl who somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally” [emphasis added] (190). In microcosm of much of the novel, this interaction operates to reveal how invested those who claim “neutrality” are and how emotional narratives play a part in the production of social structures. Drawing on Judith Butler, Ahmed elucidates how “it is through the repetition of norms that worlds materialise, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced,” a process of iteration and naturalization that other parts of Americanah will further bear out (Ahmed, Emotion 12). It is in this exploration of emotion, investedness and establishment of norms that the novel refutes concerns that a focus on ethics in literary inquiry constitutes “retreat from a politics of social transformation to privatism” (Buell 12). Indeed, Americanah can be said to exemplify the “better synthesis” of the intersubjective with “social and/or political ethics” anticipated by Lawrence Buell (16). The preceding passages from Adichie’s novel reflect an engagement with feeling that is inseparable from both the ethical and the political, and metafictionally gesture toward texts as part of affective economies. The judgments of Blaine and assumptions about neutrality and subjective investment from Kelsey, related as they are to acts of reading, demonstrate one metafictional avenue. However, Americanah also engages other questions of reception via its metafictional aspects, including restrictive frames. As Yogita Goyal highlights, Americanah “centers reading and questions of literary form . . . insisting that African literature (like all literature) can’t be reduced to a blueprint . . . for change, nor can it be read only for ethnography or testimony” (Goyal xvi). Other scholarship has also explored the novel’s address to such limited approaches and, via African migrant experience, its focus on global contexts in its examination of the workings of race.1 Considering social conventions 1 Katherine Hallemeier focuses on class, capital and “private” life to argue for Americanah’s intervention “into ongoing debates about the function and failures of the representation of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’ in Euro-America” (Hallemeier 231). Mindful of reductive assumptions, Aretha Phiri poses that Adichie “problematiz[es] blackness as a uniform and shared cultural condition,” looking at “Americanah’s Afrodiasporic inflection” in particular (Phiri 125–26). Shane McCoy initiates discussion of how Americanah employs “tropes of the ‘old’ African diaspora while crafting a narrative of the ‘new’ African diaspora” (McCoy 279). Meanwhile, Goyal notes U.S.-based reviewers’ hailing of Americanah as the next great American novel, before examining how it “stages a selfconscious debate about print culture” (Goyal xvi).

36  Jennifer Terry and institutions, Waugh identifies that metafictional texts “focus on the notion that ‘everyday’ language . . . sustains such power structures through a continuous process of naturalization whereby forms of oppression are constructed in apparently ‘innocent’ representations” (Waugh 11). Americanah exposes various naturalized “everyday” assumptions and processes, thus supporting the claim that “metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly ‘written’ ” (18). As we will see, in Americanah, metafictional modeling also helps unpack racialization in relation to the intersubjective circulation of affect. Ahmed’s thought on the work of emotion and Judith Butler’s on relational identity and ethical responsibility will provide a dual lens for the rest of my engagement with Adichie’s novel.

Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed: The Politics of Intersubjectivity and Emotion Bearing in mind my case for Americanah’s posing of ethical relations, feeling and social position as entwined, Butler’s work on recognition and answerability, alongside Ahmed’s unraveling of the investment of subjects in structures, heightens our sensitivity to the novel’s inquiry. In Precarious Life (2004), Butler advances a model of interdependency that can help us understand recognition (and non-recognition) of others and the fine-grained exploration of such encounters in Adichie’s fiction.2 Butler draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the face and ethics of alterity. Levinas writes, “It is my inescapable and incontrovertible [exposure and] answerability to the other that makes me an individual ‘I’ ” (Levinas and Kearney 27). Here, any self is relational vis-à-vis the other and defined not by “autonomous freedom” but vulnerability and “heteronomous responsibility” (27). If here alterity is the condition for ethicality, Butler extends from Levinas to explore different relations to familiar others and unfamiliar others, and our potential, through acknowledgment of precariousness and grief, “to forge new ties of identification” (Butler 38). While, for Levinas, responding to the “face” involves registering its simultaneous communication of precariousness and demand, Butler additionally probes why certain faces fail to elicit such a response, with the aim of combatting how forms of humanity and “normative schemes of intelligibility” have operated destructively, arbitrating “what will and will not be human, what will be a liveable life, what will be a grievable death” (Butler 146). Butler’s model of intersubjectivity compels us “to take stock of our interdependence” and attempt to reimagine connection beyond the divisive criteria for normative humanity, reaching for “some keener sense of the value of life, all life” (27, xviii). While the claim that

2 My use of Butler is indebted to the doctoral work on relationality and feminism of Ayesha Siddiqa.

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 37 recognition of our own vulnerability can lead to “a consideration of the vulnerability of others” may seem too straightforward, Butler’s wish for “insight into the radically inequitable ways that . . . vulnerability is distributed globally” reemphasizes the socio-political in ways that will be useful to my analysis (30). Ahmed’s approach, looking closely at contact between subjects in a decentered form of intersubjectivity, shifts the emphasis from Butler’s interdependence and shared precariousness toward a sense of the contingency and circulation of emotions, and the related shaping of boundaries and therefore groups. Ahmed’s attentiveness to process in examining the movement of emotion and alignment with collectives aids in further unpicking the telling dynamics of Americanah’s migrant interactions. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Ahmed focuses on “how relations of othering work through emotions; for example, othering takes place through the attribution of feeling to others, or by transforming others into objects of feeling” (Ahmed, Emotion 16, ftn 3). Her initial case study of language about the nation and asylum seekers from an early twenty-first-century British National Front poster shows how such discourses “work by aligning subjects with collectives” via emotional narratives (1–2). This affective positioning anticipates Obinze’s fear and marginality within a post-September 11 climate of hostility in the U.K. In Ahmed’s earlier Strange Encounters (2000), she poses that “we can examine differentiation as something that happens at the level of the encounter, rather than ‘in’ the body of the other with whom I am presented” (Ahmed, Strange 145).3 Adichie’s novel, I will argue, dramatizes such processes of differentiation in a way that foregrounds modes and histories of encounter as well as the role of feelings. Ahmed further offers “an account of how we become invested in social norms,” how these are effects of repetition and how “norms appear as forms of life only through the concealment of the work of this repetition” (Ahmed, Emotion 12). This will help elucidate a purposefully iterative pattern to Adichie’s narrative in the accumulation of othering encounters. It also aids in the exposure of naturalized norms, something already seen in Ifemelu’s debunking of Kelsey’s invested assumption of neutrality or universality in opposition to her designation of Ifemelu’s view as emotional and subjective. A key element of Ahmed’s inquiry into emotion as cultural practice is attention to the effect of such social norms and discourses on those who are othered. For example, she asks, “What happens to those bodies that are encountered as objects of hate, as having 3 In Strange Encounters, Ahmed references Levinasian ethics more directly, questioning the idea “that we should simply love the stranger as a basis for an ethics of alterity” (Ahmed 4). Here, her sense of how “the other,” too often abstracted, should not be cut off from the “modes of encounter,” “the particular and worldly encounters in which beings are constituted in and through their relationship to one another,” is borne out in, and helps our understanding of, shifting constitutions of identity in Americanah (143).

38  Jennifer Terry the characteristic of ‘unlikeness’?” (57). Her questioning of “a tendency to think of hate . . . from the point of view of those who hate rather than those who are hated” is taken up via inversion in the central focus of Americanah’s narrative (57). Like Butler’s Precarious Life, Ahmed’s 2004 book arises in response to a context of post-September 11 nationalist discourse. Adichie’s novel, published nine years later, also takes this period as a decisive backdrop and similarly examines ongoing processes of boundary formation and alignment.

Othering Encounters In parallel with Butler’s discussion of norms and allocations of humanity and Ahmed’s starting point of the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the British National Front, both Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s stories involve race and racism as defined in a context of hostility toward those seen as foreigners. Faced with a lack of opportunity, both Adichie’s protagonists leave Nigeria, first Ifemelu, who enters the U.S. on a student visa, and then Obinze, whose shorter and soon undocumented stay in the U.K. coincides with a post-September 11 growth in aggressive nationalism—and both experience othering forms of contact. Often, this is encapsulated in memorable face-toface encounters where the third-person narrative’s focalization of the protagonists centers—and aligns the reader with—the perspective of she or he who is othered. Such successive encounters accumulate across the accounts of Ifemelu and Obinze’s migrant lives, exploring intersectional matrices of difference and reenacting the repetition that produces social norms. This viewpoint and focus contribute to Americanah’s framing of the political, the ethical, the intersubjective and the emotional as mutually informative. Obinze’s time in the U.K. is dominated by fear—linked to his status as illegal—and desperate efforts to make his move a success; we learn “he live[s] in London . . . invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch” (257). The scene is set via one of many acts of reading foregrounded in the narrative: “He . . . only skimmed the British newspapers, because there were more and more articles about immigration, and each one stoked new panic in his chest. Schools Swamped by Asylum Seekers” [original emphasis] (256). The novel’s inclusion of early twenty-first-century media language illustrates the work of emotions such as fear and hate in constituting others. As Ahmed writes, “Such narratives work by generating a subject that is endangered by imagining others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject” (Ahmed, Emotion 43). The others generated within this relation of danger, the invaders, are invariably racialized and aligned together. He sat . . . opposite a woman reading the evening paper. Speak English at home, Blunkett tells immigrants. He imagined the article

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 39 she was reading . . . The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody . . . and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past. (258–9) Here, Obinze’s thoughts capture the current language of fear and infection, with the rhetoric of British politician David Blunkett providing an immediate context.4 The headlines are entangled with Obinze’s own anxiety on public transport, suggesting a movement of feeling along the lines of Ahmed, from the emotion-fuelled media narrative of threat to Obinze’s affective response. However, unlike the newspaper articles, Obinze does connect the colonial “past” and the “present,” noting that “the influx into Britain of black and brown people” is “from countries created by Britain” (258–9). Here, Americanah also reflects an affective asymmetry as the discourse of the dominant “we” fails to recognize the full lives of others, while Obinze, transposed for a moment, sees the “non-white foreignness of this scene through the suspicious eyes of the white woman on the tube” (259). In parallel, Ifemelu’s life in the U.S. involves her experience of “becoming black,” learning of her context-related blackness amid what she calls the American tribalisms of race, ideology and region (290). A complex web of social relations produces this process of racialization, but it is most vividly illustrated in several encounters where the protagonist is brought face-to-face with her otherness. One such encounter comes when she registers for college, demonstrating the intersection of her designation as non-American with her race. Addressed slowly and simply as if a child by a white woman because of her “foreign accent” and presumed deficiency, Ifemelu is shaken: “I speak English,” she said. “I bet you do,” Cristina Tomas said. “I just don’t know how well.” Ifemelu shrank. In that strained, still second when her eyes met Cristina Tomas’s before she took the forms . . . She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school . . . she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. (133–4) Here, a meeting of eyes leads not to recognition—and Butler’s ethical answerability—but an enforcement of superiority and inferiority and a

4 David Blunkett served as U.K. Home Secretary within the Labour government 2001–4, a role involving responsibility for immigration and citizenship as well as internal affairs.

40  Jennifer Terry learning of difference. Soon after, Ifemelu begins to “practise an American accent,” only later choosing to “return . . . her voice to herself” (134, 180). Ahmed examines how fear of the foreign figure moves from the threatened white body to that of the one produced as foreigner, and this bears on my reading here: “the fear signified through language and by the white body does not simply begin and end there: rather the fear works through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects” (Ahmed, Emotion 62). In this process, “The black body is drawn tighter . . . enclosed by the fear, and comes to feel that fear as its own, such that it is felt as an . . . uninhabitable body” (62). In the metaphor of Ifemelu shrinking like a leaf, and the repetition of “shrank,” we find something of the black body drawing “tighter,” after the attribution of unlikeness, becoming “uninhabitable.” The emotions that work within Cristina Tomas’s hostility slide and stick onto Ifemelu, and, experiencing fear and reduction in parallel with Obinze, she subsequently attempts Americanization. Americanah features other encounters that address the intersection of race and gender and/or race and class, building a picture of racialization as non-uniform and context-dependent. For example, introduced to Curt’s old college friends at a wedding as his girlfriend, Ifemelu is met with surprised looks and expressions that ask “Why her?” (292). This puzzlement at the choice of a “black girl,” and not one that is “lightskinned . . . biracial” at that, reveals internalized race-based assumptions about femininity, desire and value (292). Initially, Ifemelu is amused: She had seen that look before, on the faces of white women, strangers . . . who would see her hand clasped in Curt’s and instantly cloud their faces . . . It was not merely because Curt was white, it was the kind of white he was . . . the smell, around him, of money. (292–3) But, repeatedly subject to this reaction, “her amusement curdled into exhaustion . . . She was tired even of Curt’s protection, tired of needing protection” (293). It is the cumulative nature of the “Why her?” looks that leads to exhaustion, looks that necessitate behaviors and feelings from Ifemelu and Curt in response, which Ifemelu experiences as depleting. Thus, this wedding party models the iterative dimension of devaluing and othering, borne out in the multiple such encounters incorporated in the novel, and demonstrates the reopening afresh of “histories of association” linked to race and gender (Ahmed, Emotion 54). The imbrication of race and class is further elaborated upon when Ifemelu works as a childminder for a wealthy white couple during her studies. Answering the door to a carpet cleaner, Ifemelu is once more aligned with threat and attributed as the source of feeling on being mistaken as the homeowner: “He stiffened when he saw her. First surprise flitted

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 41 over his features, then it ossified to hostility . . . she was not what he had expected to see in this grand stone house with the white pillars” (165–6). Not only does the white man not expect a wealthy customer to be black, but emotions such as fear and hate materialize as hostility in response to a perceived undermining of historical orders, orders in which he is invested. Only when Ifemelu gives away her employment status does the cleaner’s aggressive countenance change, for he then recognizes a more familiar other: “It was like a conjuror’s trick, the swift disappearance of his hostility. His face sank into a grin. She, too, was the help. The universe was once again arranged as it should be” (166). Later Ifemelu will write a blog post, “Sometimes in America, Race Is Class,” based on this incident (166). Indeed, in addition to the third-person narrative focused on Obinze and Ifemelu’s experiences, her first-person blog entries contribute further to the impression of accretive othering interactions. While these almost always involve the reader in the perspective of whoever is being constituted as other, I will later return to a parallel example from the frame narrative that handles this differently and further advances Americanah’s inquiry into the work of emotion in (re)producing regimes of difference and the possibility of ethical relation.

False Positions Americanah’s engagement with migrant experience, global and local socioeconomics, and inter- and intraracial faultlines extends through a preoccupation with characters taking, or being placed in, what I term “false positions.” This concern is not part of a clear-cut narrative scheme of ethical evaluation but, instead, a complex questioning of complacency and privilege in various forms and an exploration of contingency and ethical response. An episode that develops this avenue is Ifemelu’s exchange of sexual intimacy for money when struggling financially as a student. Following an initial meeting that Ifemelu finds frightening and sordid, her desperate return to accept the white tennis coach’s offer seems a straightforward situation of exploitation. Indeed, the experience leaves Ifemelu traumatized and even more lost in her new life in the U.S.: “She felt like a small ball, adrift and alone . . . wishing she could . . . yank out the memory of what had just happened” (154). Yet, while it constitutes another othering encounter involving gendered objectification and resting on migrant economic vulnerability, the incident also becomes the means to examine a layered sense of failure that is bound up with affective flows and obligations. The narrative details not only Ifemelu’s shame at this sexual interaction, and her ensuing dissociation (“Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap”), but also a “self loathing” and shame linked to her failure or inability to tell anyone and to tell Obinze in particular (156, 158). It is Ifemelu’s response of breaking off communication that

42  Jennifer Terry ruptures their long-distance relationship and leaves the romance plot on hold for much of the novel. Following Ahmed, we can connect this to the movement of feeling; Ifemelu’s shame at the sexual exchange migrates to become shame at her shutting out of Obinze: “At first, she gave herself a month . . . But a month passed and still she kept Obinze sealed in silence . . . She felt shamed; she had failed” (159). Ifemelu feels hers is a false position due to a kind of lack of honesty with, and thus a betrayal of, Obinze. The intimation of a breakdown of answerability in Ifemelu’s relationship with Obinze signals how Americanah keeps in play a complex sense of the protagonists’ ethicality vis-à-vis others. Yet Ifemelu’s understanding is also shaped by a sense of migrant failure at not succeeding in America, having to resort to a compromising interaction that, in her assessment, diminishes her. The unfolding of the limited options open to her, and her shame at failure, further reveals the inseparability of social (dis)advantage, self-estimation and interpersonal bonds. The novel’s attention to emotion and shifting circumstances means it is able to sketch difficult and contingent ethics. In the narrative of Obinze’s experiences, the interrelation of historical asymmetries with migrant feelings of failure and falseness is laid out more clearly. Reflecting on people like himself, who migrate “hungry for choice and certainty” rather than because of disaster or atrocity, he limns the “dissatisfaction,” initiated by colonialism, of those “conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else” (276). Obinze’s shame and sense of being an imposter, resulting from not matching up to aspirations of success and belonging in the U.K. or America, resonates with Ifemelu’s self-loathing after her encounter with the tennis coach. Yet Adichie again presents a personal betrayal layered with this socio-politically shaped situation. Thinking about how his mother assisted his entry into the U.K., Obinze “knew that truth had indeed, in their circumstances, become a luxury. She lied for him . . . and he got the six month visa . . . and he felt, even before he left, like a failure” (234). This quotation indicates the shortfall Obinze perceives in having “made nothing of himself” while abroad but also introduces honesty and falsehood as dependent on context; with circumstances in Nigeria and post-September 11 visa difficulties meaning truth has “become a luxury” they can no longer afford (234). Yet, as with Ifemelu’s silence toward Obinze, entangled with the contextual understanding we additionally find shame at his scrupulously honest mother lying on his behalf and at his subsequent self-imposed estrangement from her, sharing only “a few . . . strained conversations” while gone (234). The paragraph continues, “when he returned home, he would feel disgusted with his own entitlement, his blindness to her, and he spent a lot of time with her, determined to make amends,” further revealing a sense of culpability—a different failure—on an interpersonal level (235). Just as the narrative of Americanah outlines a conceptualization of

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 43 truth as not absolute but contingent and sometimes a form of privilege,5 so it also complicates failure and shame as distributed unequally and constituted within a nexus of personal relations and historical, social and economic locations. Adichie’s novel addresses false positions in another way through its critique of complacent privilege. Obinze’s focalized narrative uses the word “entitlement” in describing his withdrawal from his mother, yet this word features more frequently in relation to white assumptions and socioeconomic advantage. Americanah’s narrative often links positions of entitlement with a kind of graceful surety, charity, and naturalized claims to neutrality or universality, all of which are problematized by migrant perspectives and, in some instances, satirical treatment. In an interview contemporaneous with Americanah’s publication, Adichie discusses being struck by “how lacking in the knowledge of the other” those in positions of white privilege and power are in the U.S. (Smith n.p.). The novel tellingly opens with Ifemelu admiring Princeton’s affluent ease and “air of earned grace,” musing that here “she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American Club, someone adorned with certainty” (3). Such certainty is directly coupled with Americanness and, by extension, whiteness. When younger, Ifemelu is “fascinated” by her American roommates’ “assumption of certainty,” and she later forges a more critical view of her wealthy, white boyfriend Curt as “entitled in the way a child was: blindly” (128, 210). Entitlement based on advantages of race, money, nationality and so on is revealed not as blessedness, inherent worth or earned but rather as constructed within an order that disadvantages others, and in this sense, falseness is attached to the complacency and blinkeredness that accompanies privilege. The interrogation of entitlement is furthered through representations of charity in particular. Working for wealthy and philanthropic Kimberly, Ifemelu discovers something new, “charity towards people whom one did not know,” and she speculates, “perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow” (169). This kind of charity is firmly linked with those “who have” and, it is implied, both rests on and further reinforces the assumptions of privilege rather than being founded on redistribution of benefit. This is more sharply defined in terms of global inequalities when Ifemelu is seized by a wish “to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore . . . afford copious pity and

5 This notion recurs in a disagreement between Ifemelu and Blaine in which he believes “in unbending, unambiguous honesties” and she speculates rather “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context” (320).

44  Jennifer Terry empathy” (170). Here, not just truth but “pity and empathy” become luxuries; dispositions toward others are revealed as inextricable from social hierarchies and, in the process, the novel punctures First World complacencies and good deeds. Looking at both those who can “afford” pity and those who cannot, and are therefore aligned with the pitied, Americanah recalls Ahmed on the work of feeling as well as Butler’s sense of asymmetrical precariousness, even within an ethical model of shared answerability. We might also perceive lines of connection back to the prerogative of universality of the “kindly” white liberal Kelsey, about to go traveling in Africa and instructed about her privilege and subjective investment by Ifemelu in the frame narrative (190). Consideration of the false positions adopted by Obinze and Ifemelu later in their stories sharpens our view of the novel’s interrelation of ethics and location. After returning to Nigeria, Obinze finds quick wealth via dealings with a powerful patron, becoming “bloated from all he had acquired—the family, the houses, the cars, the bank accounts” (21). Obinze is uncomfortable with his new life and perceives a disconnect, a fraudulence, in his inhabitation of it: “This was what he now was, the kind of Nigerian expected to declare a lot of cash at the airport . . . he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be” (27). Now occupying a position of privilege, we learn through focalization, he feels as if his “life [has] become this layer of pretension after pretension” (432). This extends to a representation of dissatisfaction in his marriage, marked by self-aware complicity, as he believes he should never have married Kosi. Although without the wealth of Obinze, Ifemelu’s present-day social position with a green card, fellowship at Princeton and lucrative blog is also, to some extent, linked to a feeling of falseness. In particular, her blog “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” initiated to share frank commentary on race in the U.S., brings compromised success. Not only does the blog lead to invitations to deliver diversity talks where “They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence” (305), but Ifemelu also begins to doubt her voice and motivation in the posts themselves: All those readers . . . Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like “reify” in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people’s stories for something she could use . . . Sometimes not believing herself. The more she wrote, the less sure she became. Each post scraped off yet one more scale of self until she felt naked and false. (5)

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 45 Ifemelu’s likening of herself to a vulture suggests her questioning of the ethics of her activity. The erosion of belief in what she writes, and the unusual combination of the terms “naked and false,” indicate an evaluation of her writing as both revelatory and, in a way, dishonest and predatory. If we consider the blog as one of the metafictional elements of Americanah, in how Ifemelu’s posts are increasingly shaped with awareness of imagined readers, we find a probing of reception influencing production. That is to say, once in the position of having a voice, might Ifemelu’s striving to “impress” her audience take us back to black burdens of representation, cultural hierarchies and limiting frames of literary expectation? The sense of disclosure, but also performance, is reinforced by dinner party scenes where Ifemelu recounts stories about race and racism to guests, eagerly listening “as though she was about to give up a salacious secret that would both titillate and implicate them” (291). These aspects of Ifemelu’s present life and writing are, however, subject to critical self-scrutiny and not accompanied by the surety of the privileged. While their metafictional character potentially gestures toward the racial and global politics of the book trade, Ifemelu’s reflection and reaching for self-knowledge regarding her work and role brings something else, too. If the earlier migrant experiences of Obinze and Ifemelu establish a form of falseness and shame linked to the “failure” of the disadvantaged, their later acquisition of certain forms of privilege is unfolded along with another, different awareness of pretense and compromise. Indeed, the narrative focalization captures their self-questioning (something that in Ifemelu’s case leads to the closure of her blog), a questioning related to ethical life and perspectives brought by their former marginalized positions, never witnessed in complacent white figures of entitlement.

Frame Narrative or the Mariama African Hair Braiding Salon While the inclusion of Ifemelu’s blog posts has received some critical attention (for example, see Goyal, McCoy, Phiri), Americanah’s frame narrative, another significant formal feature, has been neglected and opens up further important aspects of the novel’s ethical inquiry. In the narrative present (soon after Barack Obama’s first election as president in 2008) and at the start of the novel, Ifemelu prepares for her intended return to Nigeria by having her hair braided. The hair salon setting introduces Americanah’s concern with beauty politics and examination of the stratifications within black and immigrant groups and racially structured U.S. society more broadly. The first 40 chapters (of 55) unfold the protagonists’ past lives, but this retrospective narrative is punctuated by returns to the “present” salon scene at the beginning of Chapters Three, Nine, Eighteen and Forty-One after it is introduced in Chapter One. In a

46  Jennifer Terry marked shift, from Chapter Forty-Two on, the frame is dispensed with, as Ifemelu leaves the salon and learns of her cousin Dike’s attempted suicide, news that disrupts both her mental health and her departure for Lagos. The remaining narrative follows the changing situation in the U.S. and Nigeria, with movements and renewed communication between Obinze and Ifemelu adding to a new sense of immediacy. In plot terms, the frame narrative creates suspense about their possible reunion, yet its significance is not limited to these parameters. The work of the frame also develops Americanah’s engagement with the emotional dynamics and ethical implications of recognition and non-recognition, privilege and connection. I propose that in Ifemelu’s frame narrative interactions with the hairdresser Aisha, Americanah amplifies concerns with othering and ethical relation that reverberate through the rest of the novel. In Chapter One, Ifemelu views the rundown salon with distaste: “the room was thick with disregard, the paint peeling” (9). Later, noting “its stuffy air and rotting ceiling,” she poses, “Why couldn’t these African women keep their salon clean and ventilated?” (363). Here, her judgment and phrasing (“these African women”) distances her and signals Ifemelu assuming the position of American insider vis-à-vis the hairdressers. Focalized through Ifemelu’s perspective throughout, her salon conversations and views are often marked by her own feelings of migrant superiority, having been in the U.S. for thirteen years, and current class privilege. This recalls Ahmed explaining “how identifications involve dis-identification or an active ‘giving up’ of other possible identifications” (Ahmed, Emotion 52). However, at the same time, the narrative conveys Ifemelu’s insecurity about perhaps not being considered still African, one of themselves, by the women. On the cusp of return migration, she appears sensitive about their potential evaluation of her. In Chapter Three, her response to a question about speaking Igbo is “defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her” (40). Ifemelu’s outlook in the frame is thus established as part entitled and part anxious about belonging, and these orientations once more recall Ahmed’s detailing of processes of investment in social structures and alignments that unite and divide. To her braider, Aisha, a migrant from Senegal, in particular, Ifemelu has a reaction of dislike verging on repulsion, seeking to “curtail the conversation” that might occupy “the six hours it would take to braid her hair” (15). The narrative relays that Aisha has “a skin condition, pinkishcream whorls of discoloration on her arms and neck” (10). This is put to symbolic work, as Ifemelu, exhibiting fearful boundary formation, believes it “look[s] worryingly infectious” (10). The initial threat of contagion, ostensibly linked to Aisha’s skin complaint, escalates when Aisha assumes a level of intimacy, talking to Ifemelu about her boyfriends. Ifemelu seeks to resist being drawn into commonality with Aisha, and her

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 47 response enacts a process of differentiation and alienation: “Aisha was almost whispering . . . and in the mirror, the discoloration on her arms and neck became ghastly sores. Ifemelu imagined some bursting and oozing . . . She looked away” (15). This vision dramatizes the attribution of unlikeness, or Butler’s non-recognition, in startling terms. In Ifemelu’s distorted mirror view producing “ghastly sores,” we witness her insecure and emotion-driven reaction to Aisha and the graphic materialization of foreignness on the body. As Ahmed points out, “fear does something; it re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface” (Ahmed, Emotion 63). The frame narrative here plays out the process of constituting the other and the part of emotion in dis-identification. Further, aligned with Ifemelu through narrative focalization, readers join in the othering of Aisha. This represents a compelling inversion of the positioning found in the multiple othering encounters in the rest of the narrative, for example perspectives from within Ifemelu’s own diminishing experiences as a migrant and as a black woman. Throughout Americanah, moments of face-to-face encounter are used to crystallize the operation of America’s hierarchies and exclusions; here, in the frame narrative, something similar happens within a group of African migrants, pushing further the examination of feeling, socioeconomic location and dehumanization as interrelated matters. With returns to the frame punctuating the first three quarters of the novel, we shift between Ifemelu and Obinze’s learning of their difference and marginality, and the hair salon’s echo and reversal of such differentiation. Discussing metafictional scenes, Goyal writes, “Adichie reflects back to American readers their own prejudices and defamiliarizes their sense of themselves as the norm” (Goyal xii). I would add, the critical narrative movement between being othered and othering not only undermines a universalized white perspective, but also engages all readers in a defamiliarizing enactment of how we align ourselves against as well as with others. In Chapter Forty-One, the last involving the frame narrative, Americanah significantly develops the encounter with Aisha, moving from Ifemelu’s self-distancing to recognition, temporary compassion and potential for ethical responsibility. This shift occurs in the salon narrative present, but after the conclusion of the retrospective accounts of Obinze and Ifemelu’s prior experiences. When Aisha asks, “How you get your papers?,” appealing directly to Ifemelu as a fellow African immigrant, Ifemelu starts to envisage connection rather than distinction: “Suddenly, Ifemelu’s irritation dissolved, and in its place, a gossamered sense of kinship grew, because Aisha would not have asked if she were not an African” (363). While Ifemelu sees an “augury of her return home,” this tentative “new bond” also has wider importance for the novel’s engagement with ethics (363). A further sense of closeness comes when Aisha shares that when her father died, she did not go back to Senegal “Because of papers,” her lack

48  Jennifer Terry of U.S. legal security (364). The accompanying physical manifestation of grief conveys Aisha’s precariousness and moves Ifemelu to respond differently: “suddenly . . . Aisha began to cry. Her eyes melted, her mouth caved and a terrifying thing happened to her face: it collapsed into despair” (364). This reinforces understanding of the affective dimensions of Aisha’s disempowerment, as economic and legal vulnerability, separation from family, embodied life and the powerful work of emotion are all interrelated. Thinking of her own ease of international travel and imminent reunion with family, that is, her current privilege, Ifemelu is prompted to offer to intercede with one of Aisha’s Igbo boyfriends to secure her a green card. The shifting scene, and Ifemelu’s offer of help, represents an acknowledgment of another’s grief, of answerability, and of shared even if unequally constrained life. To return to the thought of Butler, here the formation of “a point of identification with suffering” allows the beginning of a new sense of interdependence and responsibility (Butler 30). In a chapter that by staying with the frame narrative restores its prominence, to use Ahmed’s phrase, “something gives” between Ifemelu and Aisha, offering up a suggestive model of reorientation (Ahmed, Strange 154). The breakdown of the boundary—the dis-identification—formerly produced in Ifemelu’s interaction with Aisha, and the movement of Ifemelu by Aisha’s loss, anticipates the knowledge of Obinze’s mother’s death and Dike’s near death that follows in the narrative soon after. Butler writes, “grief . . . bring[s] to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing . . . ethical responsibility” (Butler 22). This frame narrative encounter is also connected to the representation of love in the very last chapter where, reunited with and then apart from Obinze once more, Ifemelu experiences the separation keenly, recalling Aisha’s bereavement: “Each memory stunned her . . . Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss . . . Love was a kind of grief” (473). Reeling from the news about Dike, Ifemelu does not speak to Aisha’s boyfriend on her behalf before leaving the U.S., meaning there is no assured follow-through from the “gossamered sense of kinship.” However, notwithstanding asymmetrical access to power, the recognition of another and of common vulnerability indicates new awareness of an interdependence that involves ethical commitment (363). Although complicated and interrupted, Ifemelu and Obinze’s subsequent reunion brings them a much-missed sense of understanding and belonging. Because of love, loss, mutual trust and Obinze’s capabilities as “an intense, careful listener,” Ifemelu is finally able to tell of her encounter with the tennis coach, finding “a silence in which she is safe” (449, 439). This reference back to the protagonist’s earlier shame allows a kind of resolution, suggesting the conditions for overcoming a personal estrangement and false position borne of migrant struggle. A further charting of a revised ethical disposition appears late in the novel with a new blog by Ifemelu. She begins “The Small Redemptions

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 49 of Lagos” several months into her return with satire of aspects of contemporary Nigerian culture, reveling in “the liveliness of it all, in the sense of herself at the surging forefront of something vibrant” (422). This seems to echo the revelation and “falseness” of her former blog, yet a difference is soon marked out. After a critical piece on “the expensive lifestyles” of young women in Lagos who are supported by wealthy, married men, Ifemelu is challenged by her old friend Ranyinudo: “And who are you to pass judgement? . . . How did you get your job in America? . . . Stop feeling so superior” (422–3). Reminded that her green card followed only after Curt assisted her in getting a job, Ifemelu recognizes her “self-righteous[ness]” or judgment arising from entitlement (425). Ranyinudo’s remonstration invokes Ifemelu’s past difficulties, resonating with Aisha’s thwarted efforts to obtain security via marriage. By calling out Ifemelu’s superior stance in the blog, Ranyinudo returns us to both the complacency of the entitled and the ethical compromises of the disadvantaged. When Ifemelu apologizes for betraying her friend’s personal trust and confronts her co-option and judgment of others’ lives, we can track a recalibration from the metafiction of the blog addressing the expectations held of black and African writing, to the blog as a device now used to foreground questions of our ethical answerability to one another. It is intimated that future posts will prey less on others, and hence we find, if nothing conclusive, then a gesture toward change and recommitment to self-questioning. The narrative closes on Ifemelu achieving fresh selfrealization, regardless of whether Obinze will ultimately join her or not: “The pain of his absence did not decrease with time . . . Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being” (475). This rests on her new knowledge about vulnerability and grief and sense of possible connection with, and ethical responsibility for, others.

Conclusion I have contended that Americanah’s exploration of racialization and othering encounters based on race, nationality, gender and class is also a sophisticated engagement with the work of emotion and the processes by which boundaries and social norms come into being. The thinking of Ahmed and Butler has aided in drawing out the novel’s complex examination of asymmetrical modes of contact, historical yet evolving structures, and the affective and ethical dimensions to such schemes. For example, the text probes positions of complacent entitlement and contingent truths, as well as elements of failure and learning in interpersonal relationships, in order to show the imbrication of feeling, ethical disposition toward others and location within social formations.

50  Jennifer Terry Narrative construction and metafictional aspects are integral to Americanah’s ethical and political inquiry, with the narrative shaping an iterative pattern of differentiating incidents and the reader’s alignment with focalized point of view helping to enact the dynamics of identification and dis-identification. Indeed, in the frame narrative’s foregrounding of Ifemelu’s interactions with Aisha, we find a modeling of othering followed by the possibility of connection and commitment, wherein recognizing vulnerability and loss can lead to alertness to our responsibility toward each other. Waugh poses that metafiction helps us to understand how our everyday realities are also scripted (Waugh 18). While the novel’s literary references self-reflexively call up debates about the framing of black and African literature, I have argued that metafictional developments— such as Ifemelu’s exposure of Kelsey’s belief that “she was miraculously neutral” in her reading—also advance Americanah’s interrogation of naturalized investments and the unspoken power of alignment with and against others. If here narrative proves sufficient to the difficult task of exploring the interrelation of the politics of race, ethics and affect, then also made evident is the scope to reimagine approaches to ethics and literature by combining narratological and ideological awareness.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Fourth Estate, 2013. Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000. ———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA, Ethics and Literary Study, vol. 114, no. 1, 1999, pp. 7–19. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Goyal, Yogita. “Africa and the Black Atlantic.” Research in African Literatures, Africa and the Black Atlantic, vol. 45, no. 3, 2014, pp. v–xxv. Hallemeier, Katherine. “ ‘To Be From the Country of People Who Gave’: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 47, no. 2, 2015, pp. 231–45. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney. “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.” Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen. State University of New York Press, 1986, pp. 13–34. McCoy, Shane A. “The ‘Outsider Within’: Counter-narratives of the ‘New’ African Diaspora in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 11, no. 3, 2017, pp. 279–94. Phiri, Aretha. “Expanding Black Subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.” Cultural Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2017, pp. 121–42. Siddiqa, Ayesha. Relational Identities and Politics in African-American and Postcolonial Pakistani Women’s Literary Counter-Narratives. Doctoral thesis, Durham University, 2017.

“She Was Miraculously Neutral” 51 Smith, Zadie. “Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith on Race, Writing and Relationships.” Recorded at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2014, New York Public Library Podcast #75, 2015, www.nypl.org/blog/2015/08/25/podcast-chimamandangozi-adichie-zadie-smith. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Methuen, 1984.

3 Disabling Racial Economies Ableism and the Reproduction of Racial Difference in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” Milo Obourn This essay reads Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929) and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983) against each other to uncover a set of shared themes related to the cost of racialized subjecthood in the United States. Read together, these texts highlight the ways in which white supremacy in the United States reproduces itself via a racialized symbolic that functions, in part, through ideologies of ableism and inequitable distribution of accommodation and access. I choose to focus on Passing and “Recitatif” not only as canonical representations of the complexities of racial formation and signification in the twentieth-century United States but also because the texts share several characteristics and can be productively read against each other to highlight connections that might otherwise go unattended. Both Passing and “Recitatif” address race as a psychical object and set of cultural signifiers in a way that complicates our common understandings of race as a (fixed) identity position. In so doing, they challenge the reader to recognize an unknowability around racial identification and interpersonal desire—an unknowability that can become psychically threatening. Passing explores the relationship between the threat of instability and/or unknowability of racial identity and psychic destabilization via Irene’s complicated psychological response to Clare, whose racial embodiment challenges the laws of white supremacy as Irene has internalized and performed them. “Recitatif” also explores the psychic destabilization that results from an unstable relation to racialized memory and racial signifiers. Morrison explores the uncanny effect of the racial destabilization on the characters, who cannot remember the race of a woman from their childhood. Morrison also creates what I term a narratological racial uncanny for the reader, who does not know the racial identities of the main characters. Both texts also foreground the experiences of characters whose entrance into what we may call the Lacanian racial imaginary and symbolic have been disrupted. In Passing, Clare moves from a Black household to a white one, where she is forbidden to speak of racial Blackness. The main characters

Disabling Racial Economies 53 in “Recitatif” move from their Black and white homes, respectively, into a multiracial orphanage as children. In both cases, the characters experience a psychic renegotiation in relation to the laws of the racial symbolic. Finally, both texts reveal how ableism structures and upholds white supremacist racial economies in the United States. In “Recitatif,” Morrison represents Maggie, the story’s ultimate site for racial unknowability, as a person with multiple disabilities, in order to call the reader’s attention to ableism’s involvement in replicating the violence of raced subjectivity within U.S. white supremacist culture. In Passing, Larsen uses representations of physically accessible and non-accessible racially coded spaces to draw attention to ways in which access to a legible Black subjectivity and a stable (if oppressive) relation to whiteness for Black subjects demands able-bodied status in a white supremacist environment. While this last set of connections between whiteness and ableism may not be explicitly centered in the texts, or even necessarily a conscious part of the texts’ creations, reading Morrison and Larsen alongside and against each other allows the reader, much like the analyst, to perceive structural and often culturally unconscious relations between the ways our symbolic binaries white/black and non-disabled/disabled intersect and reinforce each other. Larsen and Morrison reveal, through subtle attention to the circulation of race as a set of psychic drives and identifications, that ableism underwrites and reinforces the white supremacist racial symbolic, while also pointing to its psychic costs.

“Everything Comes at a Price”: The Cost of White Relationality in Passing Passing tells the story of Clare Kendry, a light-skinned Black woman socially passing as white. Clare grew up poor and, after the death of her biracial father, went to live with white aunts, where she was treated as a servant and forbidden to speak of her Black past or Black friends. Her circumstances prompt Clare to find a white man, Jack Bellew, to marry as an escape from the aunts and her position as an unpaid domestic servant. As a married adult and parent, Clare finds herself missing Black people and Black community and uses her connection to her childhood friend Irene to make a place for herself in Harlem’s Black and mixed-race social circles. The novel is focalized through Irene, an upper-middle-class Black woman who is deeply embedded in the racial uplift politics of New York and who passes only “for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that” (70). Irene appears on the surface to be a reliable narrative lens. She thinks of herself as more ethical and more committed to racial justice than Clare because she does not pass socially, is married to a Black man and has Black-identified children, at least one of whom is too dark to pass. Over the course of the novel, Irene begins to

54  Milo Obourn feel threatened by Clare, even coming to imagine that Clare is having an affair with her husband, Brian. When Irene runs into Jack with one of her visibly Black friends (thus socially outing her as Black), she does not tell Clare, ultimately leading to Clare’s fatal fall from a sixth story window when Jack tracks her down at a party in Harlem. Irene is presented as a character who has internalized a class-based idealized womanhood that has its origins in the construction of white femininity—the possession of leisure time, a position of managerial motherhood, a desexualized marriage, upper-middle-class status and a good amount of social capital. Irene’s code word for her drive to attain and maintain an acceptable and coherent embodiment of womanhood under white supremacy is “safe.” This sense of safety is tied directly into a politics that aims to lift Black folks up to middle- and upper-middleclass status, where they and their children can be safe from the racial violence in the early twentieth-century United States. Clare brings something into Irene’s life that is “not safe,” and the closer she gets to Irene, the less safe Irene believes herself to be (58). What Clare’s existence and presence reveals is the cost Irene has paid for her safety and Black middleclass subjecthood, as well as the suggestion that that price was not inevitable. Clare is a subject who appears to defy the law of white supremacy that Irene spends much of her time negotiating a livable relation to. Irene negotiates this livable relation in part by identifying with a whiteapproximating self-image while situating herself clearly within the social category of racial Blackness. Jacques Lacan’s categories of the imaginary and symbolic are useful here to parse the psychic cost of subjecthood under white supremacy for Irene. We can think of the imaginary as the realm of a fantasized relation to oneself, which is always actually a relation to an other or an image of oneself that is external, and the symbolic as the realm of the law, social categories, norms and ideas. As Alan Sheridan states in his translator’s notes to Lacan’s Ecrits, the symbolic register entails the “relation between the subject . . . and signifiers, speech, language,” while the imaginary is the dimension of relations “between the ego and its images” (ix). Lacan suggests that the imaginary and the symbolic are frequently in conflict within any individual subject. Larsen highlights the ways in which Irene, as a Black person navigating a self-image in relation to the laws of white supremacy, experiences an exacerbated and more psychically harmful conflict between imaginary and symbolic. She is navigating an imaginary relation to the idealized image of whiteness, which dictates her values and sense of propriety. This imaginary must somehow align with a symbolic in which she is identified as, and herself identifies with, the social category of racial Blackness—a category that challenges her access to a respectable subject position with the values and sense of propriety she professes. Irene’s relation to whiteness as a Black subject is then managed via a white-approximating imaginary selfimage or imago, alongside a conscious symbolic self-understanding as

Disabling Racial Economies 55 Black under the laws of racial circulation in the U.S. Such a negotiation is revealed to be precarious when Clare reenters Irene’s life as someone with a Black-oriented imago (wanting to see herself in and be near other Black people) but with the social capital of whiteness. Clare fundamentally shakes Irene’s sense of safety in a world that has forced Irene to trade in her desire in exchange for that safety. While also maintaining a functionally stable relation to both her sense of self (imago) and her “safe” relation to white supremacy (symbolic), Irene is neither able to name her desire for Clare1 nor to recognize the price of her privilege. Because Irene is the story’s focalizer, to name the psychic cost, conflict and shame of her relationship to the racial economy of the United States would be Irene’s psychic undoing and thereby the undoing of the narrative itself. Thus we only have access to these alternate psychical possibilities in moments where what is stored in Irene’s unconscious threatens an eruption into her conscious mind, a state that Freud defines as the uncanny. Clare herself is represented in the novel as an uncanny rupture— something unnerving, both familiar and alien, something that “ought to have remained hidden and secret, yet comes to light” (Freud 129). The letter from Clare that opens the novel is described as both “alien” and immediately recognizable (Larsen 5). When Irene first sees Clare, the narrative focalized through Irene describes her as having “an intangible something, too vague to define, too remote to seize, but which was, to Irene Redfield, very familiar” (12). The look Clare gives Irene after Irene’s first encounter with Clare’s racist husband holds something “for which she could find no name,” but “for an instance a recrudescence of that sensation of fear which she had while looking into Clare’s eyes touched her. A slight shiver ran over her,” which Irene likens to “somebody walking over [her] grave” (33). For Irene, part of what is uncanny about Clare is that she evokes not only the price of Irene’s racial subjecthood, but also hints to Irene that maybe she did not have to pay this price. Early in the novel, Clare tells Irene that she believes passing was “worth the price,” a claim against which Irene’s “instinct wholly rebelled” (20). It is not simply Clare’s claim that the price of passing might be worth paying that upsets Irene. Irene has clearly thought about passing and has a sense of its possible costs. In fact, Irene wonders almost immediately upon reconnecting with Clare if she can ask her about “this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another (not entirely friendly)—environment” (17). What Irene reacts against is Clare’s self-satisfaction, which indicates that Clare has not paid

1 Many critics read Irene as expressing sexual desire for Clare. For the foundational version of this argument, see Deborah McDowell, “Introduction” to Quicksand and Passing.

56  Milo Obourn the same price that Irene has. Irene has internalized both colorism and a social code that tells her not to love anyone with less access to a whiteapproximating middle-class Blackness than herself2 and ultimately is not satisfied with herself or her life. Clare, however, retains the ability and desire to connect with Black people across lines of class and color and is, with the exception of not being able to socialize with Black folks (a situation she remedies via her relationship with Irene), relatively satisfied and comfortable with herself. Clare is disrupting the socio-psychic structures of race, and therefore of white supremacy, by acting as though she can access privilege under white supremacy while retaining a Black-coded imago as well as desire for and community with Black people, including dark and working-class Black people. One reason that Clare represents a psychic model that defies the white supremacist racial symbolic is that she comes into the racial symbolic without access to the social norms of a Black immediate-family structure. Thandeka has argued that coming into racial subjectivity under white supremacy involves developing a psychic relation to whiteness via being shamed by one’s family community into not loving those Blacker than oneself and then repressing that shame and the fear of the loss of familial and communal love that might come from expressing that love. This is what Thandeka refers to as the “costly” induction of the child into white supremacy (19). Following this logic, developing a racial imago and identity within the symbolic would require not only the “unwritten race laws” of one’s society but also the presence of a raced family within a white supremacist culture (Thandeka 23).3 After Clare’s alcoholic and possibly abusive father dies, she goes to live with her white aunts, who control Clare’s racial symbolic. They “forbade [Clare] to mention Negroes to the neighbors, or even the south side” (19). Though Clare’s imago is formed in relation to Black community and a poor Black parent, her symbolic comes to be structured in a way that allows her access not only to passing but also to whiteness as a social identity. Irene’s imago is formed in relation to a respectable middle-class family with a “dear sweet” father and enough money to afford “all the things [Clare] wanted and never had” (19), thus approximating an idealized white middle-class identity, and her symbolic is structured though an assignment of Blackness not only by the larger society, but by the racial uplift ideologies that make racial identity feel like it “bound and suffocated her.” Clare’s presence highlights the ways Irene is “caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself [with a white-approximating imago and desire for

2 This includes not only Clare, but anyone who is poorer or darker than Irene—evidenced in the emotional and physical distance Irene keeps from her maids. 3 Hence the threat of miscegenation, which produces families that do not as a unit have single, fixed or clear relations to whiteness as power.

Disabling Racial Economies 57 safety]. Her race [what her racial symbolic dictates as her social identity and responsibility]” (69). Thus, Clare destabilizes Irene’s relation to an imaginary whiteapproximate self-image and her symbolic relation to Black respectability. When Clare asks Irene upon their meeting at the Drayton, “Tell me, honestly, haven’t you ever thought of ‘passing’?” Irene answers “promptly” and “disdainfully” that she has not (20). On an unconscious level, however, her relation to whiteness is in constant flux. Irene cannot explicitly and consciously enact or embody whiteness in the symbolic, such that it becomes clear that whiteness is a performance and position that is both always available to her and never available to her. Though she finds Clare’s passing “abhorrent,” she also finds herself compelled by it, so compelled that in staring at Clare’s posture, hair and face, she suddenly says to herself, “Ah! Surely! Those were Negro eyes! . . . There was about them something exotic” (21). Here Irene resorts to internalized racism and what she herself calls the “ridiculous” physical markers that “stupid” white people think they can use to tell someone’s racial identity (10–11). One minute, Irene is oppressed by and in conflict with whiteness—she has no part of it when she thinks it will be used to kick her out of the Drayton, and the next, she must align herself with it to restabilize herself after Clare suggests that maybe she, too, is a person who passes and thus has a less stable relation to whiteness than she lets herself consciously believe. This movement between the imaginary and the symbolic is particularly destabilized at moments of looking at Clare’s face—representing both the Black imago and the subject that rejects the law of the U.S. racialized symbolic. As the novel progresses, and Irene’s relationship to Clare deepens, the price that Irene has paid for her own relation to whiteness threatens more and more to be remembered by her conscious mind. In Chapter Three of Part II, during which Clare begins her Harlem socializing, the narrator speaks in anaphora: six of the first nine paragraphs begin,: “She [Irene] remembered” (53–4). The psychic discomfort caused by Clare’s more consistent presence and the threat of Irene’s remembering leads Irene to conclude that Brian and Clare must be having an affair. In the moment Irene decides the affair is the cause of her suffering, she notes that “her voice . . . had gone queer” and experiences “a hardness from feeling, not absent, but repressed. And that hardness was rising, swelling” (62). In her recognition of Clare and Brian being “capable of heights and depths of feeling that she, Irene, had never known,” a hardness starts to arise directly in relation to repressed feelings (47). Irene, in fact, has known these feelings, but they have had to be cut off to meet the rules of a livable subjecthood under white supremacy, or so Irene has believed until she sees otherwise in Clare. The phallic imagery in this scene suggests a return of repressed desire that she may have had access to before entrance into a white supremacist symbolic, including the social codes of racial uplift she has inherited to negotiate space for herself within that symbolic.

58  Milo Obourn It is useful here to parse what this return threatens for Irene. An awareness of these repressed feelings does not free her from her sense of “the race” as something that “bound and suffocated her” but rather strips her momentarily of subjectivity, suggesting the depth of her psychological reliance on the reality this repression has created (69). In the scene just after her voice “goes queer,” Irene is sitting at her vanity when “the face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind. Impossible for her to put it immediately into words” (63). Irene proceeds to cry in “rage” and “shame” (63). When she is done and her image returns in the mirror, she reapplies her white-oriented imago by “dust[ing] a little powder on her dark-white face” (63). In the following scene, it appears for a moment that Irene might be able to disrupt the power of her internalized white-oriented imago, possibly allowing room for her repressed desires to emerge through and with her rage and shame, when she smashes a white teacup “belonging to the charming Confederates” on the rug, allowing some “dark stains” to emerge (66). I read this as an externalization of the unconscious desire to break through internalized ideologies of white supremacy inherited from explicitly racist national origins. Irene is not, however, able to fully bring this realization to consciousness. It is the “mahogany-colored” maid, Zulena, who “gather[s] up the white fragments” and thus serves as a reinforcement for Irene of a more stable relationship to whiteness, which she forms in part specifically by hiring her dark maids (66). Rather than allowing her repressed desires and memory to emerge, Irene instead decides she must destroy Clare, the marker of possibilities beyond the economy of the white supremacy under which her racial imago and social identity have been formed and thus a threat to her cohesive sense of self.

“HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?”: Disrupting White Internalization in Morrison’s “Recitatif” If the narrative logic of Passing replicates that of racial subject formation under white supremacy in that it can neither remember nor speak its own cost, Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” makes the readers themselves players in this drama of silence and dis-remembering. “Recitatif” not only represents characters who, like Irene, are unable to remember and name, it also positions readers so that they cannot know race in the way in which they are accustomed and are thus destabilized in relation to their cultural racial symbolic as they read. While Larsen uses a third-person narrator who focalizes through the unreliable Irene, Morrison’s narrative is limited to the first-person narration of Twyla and focalized through her memories and cultural ideologies. In addition to this narratological limitation on the reader’s knowledge, Twyla keeps from the reader a piece of information one might consider key for textual interpretation—the racial

Disabling Racial Economies 59 identity of the two main characters, Twyla and Roberta. While Twyla tells us on the first page that Roberta was from “a whole other race” and refers to the two of them as Black and white throughout the story, she never tells us which character is white and which character is Black (243). Throughout the story, then, the reader is made aware of an instability in their interpretive capacity, for in the symbolic of the United States, understanding a character’s relationship to whiteness is one way in which we stabilize our interpretive processes and make narratives intelligible to us. Twyla and Roberta meet at “St. Bonny’s,” a children’s shelter, where they room together and bond over being “state kids,” not “real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky” (243–4). Over the course of the story, which spans several decades, they run into each other intermittently as they grow up, get married, have children and ostensibly escape the fates of their mothers by accessing a normative middle-class and upper-middle-class life, respectively. Much like Clare in Passing, Twlya’s and Roberta’s indoctrination into normative racial subjecthood is disrupted. They are removed from a family where racial identity (a racial imago formed in relation to family of the same race) and ideology (a relation to the symbolic that would teach each girl how to behave and identify as a white or Black girl/woman) would be reproduced. They enter a replacement family structure that is interracial—the girls live together, eat together, sleep together and depend on each other for emotional support. Additionally, their environment is unable to re-create the racial separation dictated by white supremacy. St. Bonny’s provides a different kind of racial economy than that of hegemonic U.S. culture in the 1950s. In the shelter, the girls get the same food and the same treatment. There is no social or material segregation—“All kinds of kids were in there, Black ones, white ones, even two Koreans”—and thus neither class nor race is lived or internalized here as it would be in the outside world (244). The first movie they see when they get there, contingent on their getting over any antagonism toward each other, is The Wizard of Oz—a film that symbolizes their shift from a black/white world into one where there are a range of colors. Their interracial and multicultural family dynamic within St. Bonny’s has temporarily replaced their raced families and communities that would otherwise be teaching them the rules of white supremacy. It is not that the girls have not learned about racism. Twyla’s first response at having been placed with Roberta is “My mother won’t like you putting me in here” (243). She knows the rules and even feels “sick to [her] stomach” when first introduced to Roberta. But she has not internalized them so deeply that they cannot almost immediately be trumped by “the way [Roberta] understood things so fast,” so that soon “it didn’t matter that [they] looked like salt and pepper” (244). Through the reflected image of the mother, racial difference determines inability to love—i.e., my mother wouldn’t like you so I can’t either. Through

60  Milo Obourn the reflected image of each other as temporary developmental caretakers, racial difference “didn’t matter.” There is, however, a place that disrupts this relative safety from the dominant symbolic—the orchard, where the older girls, or “gar girls” as Twyla and Roberta call them, dance. The gar girls represent the intrusion of power, the symbolic and adult subjectivity, into St. Bonny’s. They “play radios and dance,” and thus bring in both the literal outside world of language through the radio and metaphorically the adult world in which someone might “dance all night.” Twyla dreams repeatedly of the orchard and the gar girls, though she insists at first that “nothing all that important” happened there (244). As Sandra Kumamoto Stanley argues, the fact that Twyla dreams about the orchard situates it as “a repository of meanings that haunt her; a site of original trauma” (75). Shanna Greene Benjamin figures the orchard as a site of “the emotional comingof-age that Twyla and Roberta experience” throughout the story (93). The orchard is the site of an experience that has been repressed, which I will argue is a foundational experience for the adult racial subjectivities of both Twyla and Roberta. It is the site of something that happened to Maggie—a woman presumed to be mute who works in the kitchen at St. Bonny’s and cuts through the orchard in an attempt to catch her bus home. Either Maggie fell in the orchard, or she was pushed. Either Roberta and Twlya participated in harming her, or they did not. Either Maggie was Black or she was not. Maggie’s race and the source of the harm done to her are the central questions of Twyla and Roberta’s memories and relationships, as well as the scene of recurring dreams, suggesting that the coming-of-age or originary trauma that the story returns to is related to the ways in which race and violence circulate in their relationship and their psyches. This central “fall” in the apple orchard is, as its symbolism suggests, a site of knowledge acquisition. In this case, it is not forbidden knowledge but knowledge that is harmful enough to their own psyches that it must be repressed and thus only traces of it can return in dreams and in fragments of conversations between Twyla and Roberta. As was the case with the focalization in Passing, the narration in “Recitatif” prevents the reader from knowing what happened to Twyla, Roberta and Maggie in the orchard because we only have access to what Twlya, with the help of Roberta, can recall. Maggie is, as Stanley has argued, a condensation of multiple psychic experiences. She is also, I suggest, a projection of Twyla’s own trauma onto another. Morrison makes this projection clear when Twyla identifies Maggie as someone who wouldn’t scream, “just like me,” and again when Roberta describes her impression of Maggie as “crazy” because she was brought up in an institution “like I thought I would be too” (261, italics mine). Maggie is the projected memory of the girls’ marginalization and lack of agency and social power. I read the fact that both Maggie’s and the girls’ races are unknown/ unknowable as Morrison’s way of suggesting a narrative and psychic

Disabling Racial Economies 61 parallel between them. Maggie represents the place in the girls’ psyche onto which they displace the violence done to or threatened to be done to them. Maggie is also a condensed memory of both girls’ experiences, one coming into the racial symbolic as white and the other as Black, at a time when they rely on each other for family. This is another reason her own race cannot be fixed. Morrison reinforces the idea that the orchard is a site for Twyla’s and Roberta’s entrance into dominant racial symbolics via color-coded imagery. The orchard trees are described as “empty and crooked like beggar women when [Twyla] first came” (244). The orchard thus begins as a site in metaphoric and imagistic alignment with a character like Maggie, whose “sandy” color is close to that of bark and who is herself “crooked” in that she has “legs like parentheses” and “rocked when she walked” (245). At the end of Roberta and Twyla’s time together, the orchard trees are “heavy and white” (248), indicating the weight of their entrance into the symbolic realm under white supremacy and the altering of their memory of Maggie by the psychic density of that whiteness. Like Clare’s triggering of a racial uncanny for Irene, Twyla and Roberta are triggers for each other, bringing up traces and prompting discussion of a repressed memory. Roberta’s suggestion when the women meet in a grocery store that Maggie “didn’t fall” but rather “was pushed” has “messed up [Twyla’s] past,” Twyla says, insisting that she “wouldn’t forget a thing like that” (225). Years later, when Roberta tells Twyla that she “is the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady,” Twyla insists, “She wasn’t black” and calls Roberta “Liar!” (258). Twyla believes she didn’t kick Maggie but “was puzzled by [Roberta] telling me Maggie was black” (259). Maggie is a condensed memory of knowledge of the law of racial difference and the violence it did to them. It is something familiar and unfamiliar, something that should have remained hidden but did not and thereby is a source of confusion that “messe[s] up” Twyla’s sense of her past. Throughout the story, it is not only the characters who are continually drawn back to the question of racial identity and responsibility for violence, but the reader as well. Not knowing the racial identities of the characters creates a reading experience in which signifiers are both interpretable and not interpretable at the same time. The narrative positions readers so that their access to the imaginary and symbolic is disrupted, much like that of the characters themselves. The reader does not know which characters stand in an imaginary identificatory racial relation to them and which do not. And the racial symbolic, while retaining its categories and laws, cannot be applied with certainty to individuals. One might describe this as a kind of narratological racial uncanny because race as a concept or set of significations circulates for the reader in ways that are both familiar and unfamiliar and triggers a desire to access something that has been repressed, whether by the characters (Maggie’s racial identity) or the narrative structure itself (Twyla’s and Roberta’s racial

62  Milo Obourn identity).4 Race circulates not as an identity within a symbolic that (over) determines its meaning but rather as a set of signifiers with shifting and unstable signifieds: a giant cross, tight pants, food choices, popcultural capital, political ideologies and so on. When Twyla and Roberta find themselves on opposite sides of a protest about bussing, and Twyla sees Roberta’s sign that says “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO,” she first responds with a sign that says, “SO DO CHILDREN***” followed by one that says, “HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?” The signs are important because they stress the relationality of meaning at the center of the text. Twyla’s signs, as she notes, “didn’t make sense without Roberta’s,” just as the readers’ interpretation of events shift in relation to how they imagine the characters to identify and be identified. The signs also point to and highlight the importance of childhood experience and question whether, as adults, we can possibly know or access that experience. These “brilliant screaming posters” that couldn’t be made “heads or tails out of” gesture toward the shared experience the girls had at St. Bonny’s before entrance into a racial symbolic, an experience that is no longer legible within the “sign system” of the bussing protests of the 1970s. The story itself, then, draws attention to signifiers as relational rather than fixed and as becoming, like Twyla’s signs, “crazier each day” when they cannot be incorporated into a dominant linguistic or political norm (258). “Recitatif” does not resolve these shifting and relational meanings. If the movement for the girls was from an empty orchard associated with the sandy-colored Maggie to a white orchard heavy with the burden of adult subjecthood within white supremacy, the story itself moves from a more fixed relation to whiteness and knowledge about race to a reckoning with unknowability, which is coded sandy-brown, the color of Maggie. At the end of the story, the reader has not discovered the racial identities of Twyla, Roberta or Maggie and is left, along with Twyla and Roberta, with the unanswered question, “What the hell happened to Maggie?” (261). In terms of imagery, the story ends with Twyla waiting for the “sand trucks” to come to cover the snow, thus moving from whiteness back to the color of sand to suggest that the reader and the characters are left in a precarious or unstable relation to their racialized symbolic.

Disability and Racial Formation in “Recitatif” and Passing This final section applies a disability studies lens to representations of the developmental cost of racialized subjecthood in “Recitatif” and Passing.

4 Thank you to Tuesday Obourn for helping me think through “Recitatif” ’s narrative relation to the uncanny.

Disabling Racial Economies 63 In both texts, acknowledgment of the cost exacted for a psychically and materially stable relation to racial identity under white supremacy is associated with physical, emotional and/or psychological impairment. Both texts also suggest that while entrance into racial subjectivity under white supremacy limits love and restricts desire and connection, the possible loss of that racialized subjectivity threatens mental stability, social subjecthood and the safety of the physical body. Howard Sklar and Sandra Kumamoto Stanley have taken up the representation of disability that lies at the center of “Recitatif.” Both critics read Maggie as a figure who invokes but moves beyond functioning as a “narrative prosthesis,” i.e., a character whose disability is not represented as a complex lived part of her identity but rather exists in the text to engage the reader’s emotions and forward the plot for other nondisabled characters.5 Sklar notes that even as a “prosthesis [Maggie can] serve to advance the interests of the disabled rather than detract from them” (152). And Stanley notes that Maggie resists being only a prosthesis in that her story remains open, making her irreducible to a parenthetical metaphor. As both Sklar and Stanley note, Maggie is overdetermined as a disabled character. Although Twyla and Roberta assume she is mute, she may be deaf, and her gait may indicate a mobility or other physical impairment. Sklar interprets her as having an intellectual disability based on her representation as developmentally child-like. Maggie is disabled in Twyla’s and Roberta’s memories, where she functions as a condensation of multiple violences and a screen memory that covers and potentially provides access to unconscious parts of racialized development. As a site of possible emergence of the repressed into consciousness, Maggie is a marker of the possibility of knowing the cost of entrance into racialized subjecthood and thus a possible site of resistance to it. But she is also the constant threat of socially marked disability. Twyla’s final sign at the bussing protests, “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?” echoes a continual return throughout the story to the idea of sick mothers and connects the site of racial formation for the girls to an ableist culture that institutionalizes people with mental illness. It is the social interpretation of the illness of the mothers as making them “unfit” that creates a disruption in the girls’ entrance into the racial symbolic. The orchard, which marks the psychic and narrative site of this entrance, is also where the girls start to take on a violent symbolic to protect their projected image of themselves as not vulnerable like Maggie and their mothers. They start by collecting “a good list of dirty names” to yell at the gar girls because they “were scared of them . . . but neither of us wanted the other one to know it” (244). They then turn this

5 For more on the concept of “narrative prosthesis,” see David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.

64  Milo Obourn knowledge on Maggie. Ostensibly worried that Maggie can’t speak but hoping she can hear, they “call to her”: “Dummy! Dummy!” and “Bow legs! Bow legs!” Later they say that they didn’t hurt Maggie, only wanted to. But here we see them using explicitly ableist and harmful slurs. Morrison, via Twyla’s narration, also plays on ableist rhetoric and humor in a way that both reinforces and reveals the narrative’s own ableism when Twyla says of Maggie’s “stupid little hat” that “Even for a mute, it was dumb” (245). Juxtaposed against the slur “Dummy,” this “joke” equates muteness with lack of intelligence, even as it calls attention to the ways ableism works by playing on the multiple cultural meanings of “dumb.” The orchard is where the girls learn to use ableist signifiers in the service of a violence that puts Maggie’s body in the social and psychic position of absorbing the violence done to themselves. Maggie’s fall is not just the violence done to Twyla and Roberta that they couldn’t stop; it is also their active participation in shoring up their able-bodied privilege and doing violence to the parts of themselves that identify with Maggie. Maggie stands in in the girls’ memories for a time when they shared an almost intuitive connection as “two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions” (253). That is, they know how not to enforce the racist, classist, sexist, symbolic law of proper family and the shame that keeps it in place. Maggie’s fall happens just after their mothers visit and just before Roberta leaves and thus marks the shift from “the old days in the orchard when . . . if one of us fell the other pulled her up and if one of us was caught the other stayed to kick and scratch” to an adult argument about bussing when Twyla’s car is rocked by protesters and she reaches out for Roberta but “no receiving hand was there” (257). For Twyla and Roberta, something/someone has to become the site to hold this loss, and that someone is overdetermined by signifiers of disability. The uncanny structure of the narrative threatens a not-knowing or a return of knowledge around racial subjecthood that threatens to be disabling to the reader’s own access to the racial symbolic. Like Twyla and Roberta as children, the reader might not be able to “remember what [they] read” or might even lose access to the ability to “read at all” without having racial markers as part of their relational symbolic order (244). The narrative relies on the reader’s immersion in an ableist symbolic to understand Maggie as a symbol or a psychic object that holds the discomfort of unknowability produced by the text. That is, it is an ableist sign system that would equate her disability with a site of loss or victimization that symbolizes something about the girls and functions as a repository for racially coded violences. The characters’ lack of fixed racial identities produces the psychic destabilization of the reader; then the reader’s ability to read the story requires the psychic prosthesis of the disabled Maggie. Disability in “Recitatif” marks the site of coming into a racialized symbolic, the threat of falling out of a stable or legible

Disabling Racial Economies 65 relation to it and the site of possibility for a connection across racial difference. If “Recitatif” suggests that ableism is linked to racial subject formation in the U.S., Passing suggests that U.S. culture uses ableism and differential access to accommodations to reinforce compliance to racial subjectivities that reproduce white supremacy. In Passing, neither white subjects nor Black subjects who are able to find a space of some privilege in relation to whiteness can consciously assimilate the knowledge of the price paid for their subjectivity under white supremacy. This inassimilability creates a threat to Irene’s sense of self so strong that it leads her to murder (whether we interpret that as not telling Clare that Jack knows she is passing or actually physically pushing Clare out the window) and then to disassociate to protect her fragile relation to whiteness. The threat of losing the ability to integrate the racial symbolic of white supremacy is not marked culturally as a disability, even though it threatens psychic harm, because it is accommodated, at least for some, by a culture invested in reproducing white supremacy. Larsen shows us this accommodation metaphorically via her consistent marking of accessible and inaccessible racially coded spaces. The Drayton, where Irene and Clare reconnect, is a site that accommodates the fiction of white racial purity and the fantasy of a stable relation to the racial symbolic. Part of being able to access the roof of the Drayton is the successful performance of whiteness. It reproduces whiteness as purity and property by being a “white-only” space, while also accommodating the complexities of how the white supremacy maintains its power by making space for Irene and Clare so long as they support racial segregation and colorism. By spending their money at the Drayton, they are explicitly paying into an economic system that exploits the labor of and refuses to serve Black bodies. The Drayton is also a physically accessible space. It is explicitly described as having “wide doors” and an elevator that felt like being “wafted upward on a magic carpet” (8). A white or white-passing subject can be on the verge of collapse, as Irene was, and make her way without barriers to a comfortable place to recover. Larsen also explicitly notes that Gertrude and Irene take the elevator down from the Bellews’ apartment when they visit Clare for tea. This is another location in which Irene passes as white and secures some safety from doing so; however, she also suffers here from “seething . . . anger, mortification, and shame.” It is also the site of Jack’s confusion about his relation to Blackness: he both “hate[s]” Black people and lovingly calls his wife “Nig” (31, 29). Jack and Clare’s home, then, is a site that accommodates whiteness and the psychical distress and confused relation to racial knowledge that it requires. If the Drayton and the Bellews’ home are represented as white-coded sites of accommodation and access, spaces marked by racial Blackness are not. Irene’s home in Harlem has three levels accessible only via stairs: the family bedrooms above the main floor and the kitchen, where Zulena

66  Milo Obourn and Sadie work, below. Here the class and color differentiations needed to sustain Irene’s Black upper-middle-class personhood are not accommodating. Zulena and Sadie must remain able-bodied to keep employment in this space, just as Irene, as an upper-middle-class Black subject, must remain able-bodied to climb above those poorer and darker. Nirmala Erevelles argues that the marginalization of people who are both Black and disabled functions as a “ ‘new’ eugenics” (118) and that bodies “located perilously at the interstices of race, class, gender, and disability [are] constituted as non-citizens and (no)bodies” (98). Erevelles’s formulation helps to explain why Black bodies in the novel must perform ablebodiedness for fear of losing access to subjecthood altogether. Ableism was a component of the racial uplift politics of the early twentieth century for this very reason. The logic of racial uplift, as Stephen Knadler has argued, was founded in a belief that “African Americans [would] gain rights once they [had] achieved self-sufficiency and bourgeois respectability” by “transcending the racialized body” and “recorporalizing the strong healthy body as necessary to and proof of determination, character, and industry” (italics in original, 110). The ableist mentalities associated with racial uplift were in large part a response to representations of the Black body as disabled or weak and therefore not worthy of full citizenship.6 Thus in Black-coded spaces in Passing, one can be neither disabled nor accommodated. This spatialized racialization and its relation to accessibility provides a new interpretive lens for the final scene of the novel, which takes place not only in an apartment without an elevator or wide doors but one that is located up six flights of stairs and must be accessed by, as Brian calls it, “N***** power,” reinforcing the novel’s association of Blackness with able-bodiedness (77). Larsen draws attention to the inaccessibility of the space when Clare says the last time she walked up that far was in “the good old days before every ramshackle flat had an elevator” (77). Brian reinforces the necessity for able-bodiedness in this space, teasing the women, “mind . . . you don’t fall by the wayside before the fourth floor. They absolutely refuse to carry anyone up more than the last two flights.” To which comment, Irene, who must keep repressed her awareness of the price for entrance into racialized subjecthood and her precarious relation to disability, snaps back, “Don’t be silly!” (78). It is in this Black-coded space which, unlike the Drayton and the Bellews’ home, does not accommodate white-approximating or white-identified relations to white supremacy, that Irene experiences what we might call a racial trauma. She loses her ability to psychically assimilate her feelings toward and about Clare into a coherent sense of herself and her world.

6 See also Jennifer James, “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation.”

Disabling Racial Economies 67 Whatever happens at the moment of Clare’s fall, a literal figuration of the cost of Irene’s safety under white supremacy, Irene must repress and “never afterwards allow herself to remember” (79). The novel ends with Irene herself falling: “Her quaking knees gave way under her. . . . Through the heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. Then everything was dark” (82). It is hard not to read the end of the novel as a sinking down into the heaviness of the unconscious. Irene, at first, remains dimly aware of being “lifted up,” representing the racial uplift which has formed her racial symbolic, but then sinks down, possibly accessing a state at the end of the novel outside the laws of her racial symbolic. But here she is also figured as disabled: she cannot stand, see or speak in a context that demands these physical abilities as part of her legibility, cohesion and safety as a Black subject.7 The fall/push of Clare from the walk-up, I argue, is also the fall/push of Maggie in the orchard. Both mark the denial and repression of knowledge around coming into being as a racialized subject; yet, they also trigger an uncanny eruption of that knowledge. This eruption is disabling to the psyches of characters in both texts, producing cultural fears about becoming marked as disabled and requiring an ableist ideology to stabilize subjecthood. Both are falls that cannot be perceived in their full reality and consequences by the characters or readers; they therefore leave readers in a space of interpretive precarity, never knowing what the hell happened to Maggie or to Clare.

Works Cited Benjamin, Shanna Greene. “The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 87–106. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion. New York: Harper, 1958. James, Jennifer. “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation.” Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall. Bloomington, Indiana UP, pp. 136–58. Knadler, Stephen. “Dis-abled Citizenship: Narrating the Extraordinary Body in Racial Uplift.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 3, 2013, pp. 99–128. Larsen, Nella. Passing. Norton Critical Edition, edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Norton, 2007.

7 Some versions of the novel leave Irene in the unconscious, while others conclude with the final two sentences in the original printing in which a man says, “Let’s go up and have another look at that window,” thus suggesting a need to further explore the inaccessible space from which Clare fell.

68  Milo Obourn McDowell, Deborah E. “Introduction.” Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, edited by Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986, pp. ix–xxxv. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2000. Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Amina Baraka. New York: Quill, 1983. Sheridan, Alan. “Translator’s Note.” Écrits: A Selection. Jacques Lacan. New York: Norton. 1977, pp. vii–xii. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies.” MELUS, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011, pp. 71–88. Thandeka. Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America. New York: Bloomsbury, 1999.

4 “When We Speak of Otherness” Narrative Unreliability and the Ethics of Othering in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Home Herman Beavers 1 Despite being published twenty years apart, Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) and Home (2012) are companion texts because they demonstrate, in ways that are alternately parallel and divergent, that unreliability in her novels can serve as a method for problematizing the reader’s belief in the sanctity of innocence. Since innocence has much to do with our inclination to privilege truth claims that inspire a sense of absolute certainty, Morrison’s novels dramatize our vulnerability to acts of textual subterfuge in works we deign to be above reproach. My interest in these particular works stems from my sense that both novels present narrators whose narrative misbehavior points us to what Adam Zachary Newton calls narrative ethics, where “narrative [functions] as relationship and human connectivity . . . as claim, as risk, as responsibility, as gift, as price” (7). Newton’s characterization raises important questions. Does Toni Morrison’s use of unreliable narration compromise the works’ ability to participate in the anti-racist project? Further, does the fact that characters in both of Morrison’s novels commit murderous violence that is never punished invalidate calls for accountability? And if this be so, are the novels’ respective commentaries on the vicissitudes of white supremacy nullified? These questions are relevant because Jazz features a narrator who moves in and out of the foreground and whose hubris mingles with intimate knowledge of the principle characters to generate a narrative that ultimately signals it is the narrator’s shortcomings and not those of the characters that require attention. By contrast, Home’s instances of narrative unreliability are revealed via disputes between protagonist and narrator, negatively affecting the reader’s sense of narrative fiction as a source of unimpeachable truth claims (Zerweck, 168–70). Narrative volatility notwithstanding, these novels are proof that unreliability need not be a source of ethical foreclosure. Indeed, their respective plots evidence the manner in which narrative unreliability complicates what “ethical” behavior means. As J. Alexander Bareis points out, the ethical dimension of unreliable narration “can be best described as an extremely

70  Herman Beavers complex interplay between different criteria located in and in-between the author, the reader, and the narrative itself” (55). Bareis concludes that “ethical issues are the most powerful reasons for attributing unreliability to narratives” (55). Hence, ethics informs how we read Jazz’s opening page, featuring the novel’s memorable first sentence, “Sth, I know that woman,” and concluding with the story of Joe, Violet and Dorcas being related in a single paragraph (3). In the second paragraph, the narrator states that the community is unsure of Violet’s whereabouts and continues, “But like me, they knew who she was, who she had to be, because they knew that her husband Joe Trace was the one who shot the girl” (4). By providing the necessary background that seems on its face to be accessible only to a select few, this declaration has the secondary aim of establishing the narrator’s credibility. While its primary motivation is to rationalize the narrator’s initial response to the sight of Violet Trace walking by on the street, the narrator’s tone “colors” these observations of Violet so that the narratee is given to understand that to know Violet is also to know that she is a troubled soul married to a man whose “spooky” love for another woman is the reason for all the fuss (3). But the world the narrator describes also presents ethical dilemmas. Consider the sentence that follows the previous description, where we find that there was never anyone to prosecute him because nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything. Besides, she found out that the man who killed her niece cried all day and for him and for Violet that is as bad as jail. (4, my italics) Despite Joe Trace’s violence and, later, Violet’s failed attempt to cut the face of his victim during her funeral, the ethical crisis these acts occasion is contained within a communal narrative where most everyone in the neighborhood, it seems, knows what has happened and who is responsible. Interestingly, none of this misconduct falls under the aegis of due process. So that when Alice Manfred concludes that Joe Trace’s tears are “as bad as jail,” she reaches that conclusion via an ethical calculus in which the solitary wounding of black bodies is the most insistent variable, rendering ethics moot because the law falls silent when it comes to making individual residents of Harlem whole. But an ethics that collapses for the solitary Harlemite seems recoverable through the community itself. Contrast this focus on the solitary against that moment when Alice stands on Fifth Avenue and notices from curb to curb, came a tide of cold black faces, speechless and unblinking because what they meant to say but did not trust

“When We Speak of Otherness” 71 themselves to say the drums said for them, and what they had seen with their own eyes and through the eyes of others the drums described to a T. The hurt hurt her, but the fear was gone at last. (54) In the midst of a community expressing its collective hurt through the sonic realm of music, Alice’s fear vanishes. The trope of the solitary wound explains the journey of Home’s Frank Money back to his sister. Frank begins the novel trying to recall how he came to be knocking on the door of the parsonage of A.M.E. Zion with only an army jacket, pants and his army service medal, “a barefoot escapee from the nuthouse” (11). His answer to the question posed by the wife of Reverend John Locke, “What’d they pull him in for? The police, I mean” (15), is a simple one: “I must have been acting up. . . . Something like that” (15). Frank cannot remember the exact details of what motivated the police to incarcerate him in a mental hospital, but he recalls that as soon as he departed from his lover’s house “his anxiety became unmanageable,” and he recognizes the return of “the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault. And the memories that had ripened at Fort Lawton, from where, no sooner than discharged, he had begun to wander” (15). While these details are important aspects of Frank’s backstory, we come to understand at the beginning of Chapter Two that they are subordinate to his actual motivation for escaping from the hospital, which turns out to be a letter consisting of only two sentences, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry” (8). His answer to Reverend Locke’s question, “Where exactly you headed, brother?” is simply, “Georgia, sir. If I can make it” (14). However, the reply to the question is once again framed by an earlier moment in the narrative related to us via a twenty-year flashback to when Frank is only four years old and he and his family, along with the residents of the neighboring fifteen houses, receive orders to leave town from white men, “both hooded and not,” in twenty-four hours. Being “outside” certainly pertains to Frank’s immediate situation and the dangers associated with being charged with vagrancy, but the roots of his fear issue from his knowledge that being outside wasn’t necessary for legal or illegal disruption. You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your family, your neighbors to pack up and move—with or without shoes. (9) The novel oscillates temporally, moving forward from Frank leaving the hospital, back to his family being displaced from their home by racist white men, forward to his arrival at Reverend Locke’s house, subsequently back to what led to his hospitalization, only to be taken further back in time, a year earlier, to his return from the Korean War. What

72  Herman Beavers guides this oscillation is Frank’s struggle with isolation. After the war, Frank opted against letting people in his hometown know he is back Stateside concluding, “His easy breath and unscathed self would be an insult,” making him subject to the resentment from the families of his deceased friends (15). Instead, he takes consolation in the fact that he hates Lotus, with “[i]ts unforgiving population, its isolation, and especially its indifference to the future,” conditions he cannot endure in the absence of his dead buddies (15–16). These scenes are suggestive of the ways that citizenship in the American body politic takes shape in local environments in which Morrison’s characters are faced with ethical dilemmas that threaten to overwhelm them. Confronting the question of how to seek justice for her dead niece, Alice Manfred recognizes how the law’s inability to relinquish racial bias leads to the establishment and maintenance of criteria that determine which subjects can make legitimate claims as American citizens, whose bodies are read as authentic and deemed worthy of legal redress and, subsequently, whose are not. Standing outdoors in his bare feet, Frank Money does not need to be told that it is racial difference that ensures different characteristics are applied to bodies that are “raced,” leading to radically divergent outcomes within the legal arena. An indigent white man in a state such as his is likely to be viewed as being worthy of compassion and assistance once he announces that he is a military veteran. While he, as a black veteran whose presence cannot be explained, is deemed to be vagrant, viewed as a threat, prosecuted and institutionalized. Frank’s personal history has taught him that whiteness is synonymous with the power to strip him of all his belongings at a whim, a conclusion confirmed by scholars working at the intersection of critical race studies and literary studies who tie whiteness itself to notions of property and ownership. For example, in the Introduction to her book Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature, titled “Bound by Law,” legal and literary scholar Karla F. C. Holloway describes how the “critical exchangeability between citizenship and personhood became a foundational principle of the nation’s body politic and eventually composed a critical facet of its literary fiction” (9). Holloway’s remarks echo those of legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris, who asserts, Whiteness as property assumes the form of the exclusive right to determine rules; it asserts that, against a framework of racial dominance and unequal power, fairness can result from a property rule, or indeed any other rule, that imposes an entirely externally constituted definition of group identity. (1766) Here whiteness is an owned property that itself grants the legal rights and social access that elude isolated African Americans like Frank. Morrison

“When We Speak of Otherness” 73 drives this point home when Reverend Locke looks at a near-frozen Frank, surmises he is “from down the street” at the hospital and says, “You lucky Mr. Money. They sell a lot of bodies out of there (12). Though Frank’s surname is the very symbol of capital, Reverend Locke informs him that the business of the “hospital” is the commodification of human flesh. Citing the argument proffered in Harris’s canonical essay, “Whiteness as Property,” Holloway notes, “the nomination of whiteness as a tangible thing like property invests it with an inevitability and control that was fundamentally proprietary. This value came to direct legal resolutions that protected claims made on behalf of white citizens” (13). Holloway’s and Harris’s arguments about property prompt me to see the dangers resulting from identifying narrative in purely grammatical terms, where the salience of describing narration in either Jazz or Home as first- or third-person narration is a product of which pronoun is used. Indeed, one cannot assume that black personhood is verified simply because grammatical protocol equates the pronoun “I” with a specific individual. Holloway makes visible the “metaphysical knot” confronting African Americans, whereby their “capacity for autonomous acts,” including acts driven by ethics, is “dependent on personhood” but perception of their personhood is “contingent upon their “constrained” autonomy (12–13). As a purely grammatical phenomenon, first-person narration has proven to be fraught with a nagging conceptual slippage since black bodies were originally imagined in the U.S. Constitution as being only three-fifths human. In light of the persistence of racial inequality and systemic racism that challenge black personhood, we must acknowledge that the very documents we consider to be foundational to claims of individual sovereignty are highly unreliable. We therefore have to acknowledge the inadequate role grammar plays in the construction of notions of belonging, where, as Holloway suggests, the pronouns “our,” “we” and “people” are rendered suspect as descriptors of black subjectivity in the U.S. body politic. Hence, Morrison’s fiction provides an occasion for readers to think about how characters forced to navigate a racist body politic endeavor to belong in a space where grammatical convention and expressions of personhood are incommensurate. This incommensurability is evidenced through narration in Jazz, where the narrator invests the City with a malicious and seductive power that both grants characters delusions of self-control and preempts their capacity to make ethical choices. In this regard, we might characterize the narrator’s relationship with the City as one that reflects a wholesale identification with capitalism’s coercive zeal. The narrator is the City’s most insistent and persuasive advocate, stating, I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it. I see them all over the place, wealthy whites, and plain ones too, pile into mansions decorated and redecorated

74  Herman Beavers by black women richer than they are, and both are pleased with the spectacle of the other. (8, my italics) Although the scenario the narrator describes contains a subtle inversion of New York’s racial hierarchy, we need to understand that a circumstance in which black women are “richer than” whites nonetheless exists in a market-driven economy in which their abilities as interior designers are for sale. Recalling that the events in Jazz occur in the year 1926, the novel is set in a moment when stocks are soaring, wealth is growing and there is mounting consensus that it will last forever. But as the stock market crash three years later will demonstrate, equivalencies like autonomy and prosperity or beauty and longevity are illusory. Despite the narrator’s claim that “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy either. What it is is decisive.” (8), the indeterminacy that besets both Joe’s and Violet’s lives prior to their departure from the South reflects the City’s most redeeming quality, because it induces in them the belief that acting on one’s whims is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The very idea of ethical behavior itself becomes suspect when it is the City that is decisive. Whether the characters’ actions take the form of murdering a lover or slashing a dead girl’s face to see if it is filled with straw, There, in a city, lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves; their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like—if they ever knew, that is. (33, my italics) Gone is the sense that contentment comes from a light found within the self, that external sources of light are specious and transient. Internal ethical determination is replaced by a new protocol that privileges deception, accompanied by the desire to be deceived. Because what the City offers, as Baudrillard’s simulacrum reminds us, is a constantly shifting landscape animated by acts of s[t]imulation (1–3). It is important to note here Morrison’s declaration that her writing career has been shaped by her desire “to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of [her] books.”1 The point I wish to make is not that the narrator’s identification with the City constitutes a capitulation on Morrison’s part. Rather, consider how the narrator’s professed love of the City is remarkable in its uncritical acceptance of the

1 Toni Morrison, Charlie Rose, January 19, 1988.

“When We Speak of Otherness” 75 confusions it engenders and the way that acceptance privileges a gaze easily affiliated with whiteness, even as the novel’s title proposes that events in the novel are best explained within the sonic realm of jazz music. As a geography containing mechanisms both material and symbolic, the City involves its inhabitants in emotional entanglements (and disentanglements) where emotional investment is just as quickly transmuted into divestment. Situated in a realm in which the tangibility of pleasure is confirmed within the space of human sensation, the narrator’s unreliability is commensurate with the rhetorical flourishes used to describe the City’s relentless sublimity and intelligence (Shaw, 1–4): The City is smart at this: smelling good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own. (64) Though the passage refers to signs indicating the forms accessibility (or the lack thereof) can assume, the absence of punctuation demonstrates a revised grammar of personal autonomy. If the City is the instantiation of the white gaze, the narrator’s wholesale endorsement of the gaze, as viewpoint, bespeaks the pleasures that inhere in the absence of ethical restraints (de Certeau 152).

2 In an essay titled “The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children,” Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby proposes “to take up . . . how one should live under conditions of serious societal injustice” and finds that he is “particularly concerned to understand how members of oppressed groups ought to live when the prospects for overcoming their oppression are uncertain or dim” (513). “Answering the question of how the oppressed ought to live,” Shelby writes, “is not limited to specifying their moral obligations. It also entails explaining what a life well lived in the face of oppression would involve” (513). Shelby asks, “What would constitute a morally responsible and dignified response on the part of the oppressed to intractable, oppressive conditions,” an endeavor he refers to as the “ethics of the oppressed” (514). His query intertwines two strands of thinking— racial oppression and ethics—and therefore requires that we, on the one hand, acknowledge the persistence of U.S. racism and, on the other, work to speculate on African American writing’s integral role in the generation of an anti-racist ethos. Jazz and Home dramatize moments when the civil rights and dignity of Morrison’s characters fall under figurative (if not literal) assault, where racial injustices committed against their personhood

76  Herman Beavers are legion. While the offenses Morrison describes do not necessarily assume drastic forms, they nonetheless emphasize how racism, whether in the form of racial microaggressions or overtly violent acts, becomes an insidious presence in the everyday lives of her characters. For example, Jazz’s Alice Manfred goes through a period when she thinks of New York City’s “Fifth Avenue [as] being ‘the most fearful [place] of all’ ” because it is where “whitemen leaned out of motor cars with folded bills peeping from their palms,” and women, who spoke English said, “Don’t sit there, honey, you never know what they have.” And women who knew no English at all and would never own a pair of silk stockings moved away from her if she sat next to them on the trolley. (54) As a survivor of the East St. Louis race riot, in which her husband, sister and brother-in-law had been murdered by mob violence, Alice realizes in the aftermath of such trauma that she has been “frightened for a long time” (54). Similarly, in the early pages of Home, Frank Money flashes back to when an elderly man named Crawford “sits on his porch and refuse[s]” to accompany his fleeing neighbors (10). After he is beaten to death with rifles and pipes by members of the Klan, some of the neighbors sneak back to untie him from “his beloved magnolia” and relate how his eyes have been gouged out (10). In the novel’s prologue, Frank describes being with his sister, Cee, as they hide in tall grass as white men dispose of the body of a black man in a shallow grave. Each of these scenes point to the necessity for the oppressed to develop a resistant posture toward injustice, which means in turn that injustice cannot be allowed to preempt their dignity (514). Hence, Shelby’s ethics of resistance offers a heuristic for investigating Morrison’s approach to narrative as an “effort to imagine, in all [its] variety, the inner thoughts, emotions, and experiences of . . . African Americans who have been silenced in history [which] is undoubtedly an ethical, as well as a political undertaking” (254). However, even as Shelby’s ethics of the oppressed offer a way to engage the question, “What would constitute a morally responsible and dignified response on the part of the oppressed to intractable, oppressive conditions,” his inquiry stops short of imagining what the end of oppression might look like or what sort of healing should emerge in its wake (514). But the “intricate mechanism” of narrative, ethics and aesthetics needs to be considered in light of what Adam Zachary Newton deems to be a central concern, namely that narrative ethics can be construed in two directions at once—on the one hand, as attributing to narrative discourse some kind of ethical status, and on

“When We Speak of Otherness” 77 the other, as referring to the way ethical discourse often depends on narrative structures—makes this reciprocity between narrative and ethics appear more essential, more grammatical, so to speak, and less the accident of coinage. (8) Newton proposes we see narrative acts “as ethics, the ethical consequences of narrating a story and fictionalizing a person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process” (10–11). Hence, ethics in narrative “signifies recursive, contingent, and interactive dramas of encounter and recognition,” in which the reader’s subjectivity takes “the form of responsibility toward an Other,” requiring us to see that the “logic that binds narrative and ethics . . . is really a pragmatics, implying an interactive rather than a legislative order,” situating the “intricate mechanism” within a web of metaphysical relationality and performativity (27–8). Thinking further on the ways ethics and narrative form intersect in Toni Morrison’s fiction (2003), Mariangela Palladino observes how they delineate “a problematic portrait of human experience in African American history” and thereby advocates “an urgency to consider ethics” (334). She further elaborates, “Her fiction urges us to consider the interactive mechanisms of ethics, narrative, and aesthetics. Driven by the necessity to forge a suitable aesthetics to narrativize the African American experience, Morrison inscribes the ethical in narrative forms” (334). These “interactive mechanisms” are integral to Morrison’s writerly practice, and they go a long way to explaining, following Catherine Rainwater, why her “narrators consistently try to formulate or adopt a system of values appropriate to African American experience” (96). As Shelby would have it, Morrison’s approach to parsing an ethics of the oppressed makes her “narrators and characters . . . the locus of various kinds of uncertainty that become a subject of her fiction” (96). According to Rainwater, “A key element of Morrison’s authorial identity derives from her apparent need to expose and eradicate the ‘sin’ of ‘innocence’ ” since it derives from the naïve assumptions about one’s ability to know the truth. In its most insidious form, such innocence allows a person to refuse responsibility for ‘misreading’ a situation, as when in Tar Baby (1981) Valerian Street realizes without sufficient guilt that he had ignored the signs of Michael’s suffering. (97) Morrison’s use of internal focalization (259), while providing important plot details, often leads her to undercut “or problematize . . . point of view by presenting its alternatives” (97). Hence, rendering her narrators—and indeed, the very notion of narrative itself—unreliable has the effect of

78  Herman Beavers “reiterating her thematic message that there is no reliable ground or ‘mooring’ from which to know or tell the ‘true’ version of any story” (97). Rainwater’s observations, first, that Morrison’s “narrators consistently try to formulate or adopt a system of values appropriate to African American experience” (96), and, second, that “Morrison’s narrators and characters (not the author) are the locus of various kinds of uncertainty that become a subject of her fiction” (96), insist that the complexity of narrative management is suggestive of how Morrison’s fiction challenges basic assumptions about aesthetics as a trustworthy epistemological category. Her novels are strategic attacks on “innocent” readers who assume that art (or any form of human communication) carries reliable messages to or from the obscure territory of the inner self. (96) In the wake of such a comprehensive assessment of Morrison’s fictional project, the question arises as to how to test the validity of Rainwater’s assertion. One of the great achievements of Jazz is that its narrative problematizes the issue of trustworthiness by constantly disrupting the belief that truth is deductively derived from a chain of facts. Truth in Jazz exists within a more speculative, tactical grammar that presents an illusory rhetoric of analysis but which is really an extended version of what if. By contrast, Home moves between chapters rendered through a heterodiegetic narrator and chapters whose words are italicized, denoting that it is Frank speaking homodiegetically. This diegetic oscillation reveals an increasingly contested narrativity. For example, in Chapter Three, Frank states, You don’t know what heat is until you cross the border from Texas to Louisiana in the summer. You can’t come up with words that catch it . . . Trees give up. Turtles cook in their shells. Describe that if you know how. (41, italics in original) Frank’s doubts in the narrator’s ability to employ language capable of outstripping his description creates a partial rupture in the narrative’s heterodiegetic gloss, which grows into an outright rupture when Frank disputes his “interviewer’s” integrity (69). Early in his journey, traveling by train to Chicago in order to pick up a train going South, he awakes from a sleep “so sound he missed the beginning of [a] riot, but not its end” (24). The narrator relates, He woke to the sobbing of a young woman being comforted by white-jacketed waiters. One of them nestled a pillow behind her

“When We Speak of Otherness” 79 head; another gave her a stack of linen napkins for her tears and the blood pouring from her nose. Next to her, looking away, was her silent, seething husband—his face a skull of shame and its partner, rigid anger. (24) Frank does not dispute these events, or the underlying backstory, which involves the husband entering a store in a western town called Elko, being kicked out by angry whites and being “knocked . . . down and kicked some more” (24). And as the waiter explains, “when his lady came to help, she got a rock thrown in her face” (25). After a shot of whiskey, his gaze turns to the “abused couple,” who sit whispering to each other, “she softly, pleadingly, he with urgency” (26). In what follows, note how Frank’s thoughts are reported in a way that reflects the conventions of omniscient narration: He will beat her when they get home, thought Frank. And who wouldn’t? It’s one thing to be publicly humiliated. A man could move on from that. What was intolerable was the witness of a woman, a wife, who not only saw it, but had dared to try to rescue—rescue!— him. He couldn’t protect himself and he couldn’t protect her either, as the rock in her face proved. She would have to pay for that broken nose. Over and over again. (p. 26, my italics) Jumping to Chapter 5, which once again features Frank speaking homodiegetically, we come to a moment when Frank corrects the narrator’s misguided assessment: Earlier you wrote about how sure I was that the beat-up man on the train to Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn’t think any such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her but didn’t want to show how proud he was to the other men on the train. I don’t think you know much about love . . . Or me. (69, my italics) Though Frank never makes clear whether his interlocutor is sitting in front of him, writing down what he says, or if he has gained access to pages produced at a later point in time, he is ultimately able to see what the narrator has written in order to discern the inaccuracy. Taking issue with thoughts the narrator has attributed to him, Frank concludes that that narrator’s idle speculation reveals the narrator/author’s breach of ethics, the decision, for the sake of creating narrative tension, to ignore Frank’s actual thoughts and replace them with ideas deemed to be more provocative.

80  Herman Beavers This moment signals Morrison’s willingness to call her own novelistic authority into question. For what are we to make of Frank’s declaration that the narrator/writer “doesn’t know much about love”? Morrison’s tactic reveals the implied author as someone whose relationship to ethics is tenuous, which insinuates that novelists have little commitment to the truth. By featuring a character who openly questions the narrator’s judgment, Morrison makes the reader aware that an ethical violation has occurred. The process of impaling novelistic license de-legitimizes heterodiegetic narration as a technique whose figurative distance from events is somehow synonymous with innocence. This is confirmed by Morrison’s insistence that, as imaginative acts, a novel’s epistemology is, to quote Rainwater, “bereft of certainty” (97), leading to the conclusion that the only defensible position she can assume with any integrity is that just as novels are ineffectual sources of ontological truth, we should subsequently not bet the farm on what they know.

3 Like Jazz’s Joe Trace, Home’s Frank (a.k.a. Smart) Money is a character who literally “gets away with murder,” killing a Korean girl without suffering any consequences despite being bound by the U.S. Army’s code of military conduct. In both instances, black men have murdered young girls with an impunity that requires the reader to ruminate on not only the acts of violence themselves but as well on the larger context in which to situate that violence. Not, as we might expect, for the purpose of rationalizing away the violence by citing Joe’s and Frank’s victimization at the hands of racism and white supremacy but rather as vehicles for revisiting Shelby’s concern for how those who belong to the ranks of the oppressed deal with their condition. Jeremy Hawthorn’s and Jakob Lothe’s observation that “Without choice, there is no ethics” (6), gains credence from Adam Zachary Newton’s prescient comment that like “persons, texts present and expose themselves” (22), obligating us, as readers, to recognize that the “very act of reading . . . like prayer or casual looking, permits things to happen” (23). Joe Trace and Frank Money are men whose ever-present traumas in no way inhibit their sense of entitlement. But they are also to be understood as men whose behaviors are scripted, choreographed so tightly that their violence comes to be the product of inevitability rather than choice. Hence, whether we approve or disapprove of Joe Trace’s and Frank Money’s acts of willful violence, the nature of U.S. racism is such that in order to avoid becoming co-signatories of its social schemas, we are required to ascertain the specifics of their actions. That is, by electing not to investigate the circumstances underlying the violence, we risk allowing the facile dismissals of racism that emerge from the rhetoric of a post racial society to hold sway, and we deny ourselves the opportunity to

“When We Speak of Otherness” 81 re-contextualize Joe’s and Frank’s homicidal acts within the larger history of the United States. But as Holloway observes, Instead of a post racial society in which the difference matters less, race, the infamous Du Boisian color line, entrenched separatisms located in matters of embodied differences, identity politics, [are] at least as serious a facet of twenty-first century life as they had been in the life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (1) Because the post-racial narrative turns on assertions that inequality results from failures of individual initiative or character, when blackness is deemed synonymous with mindless violence, it partakes of the kind of essentialist notions driving Dr. Beau’s experiments on Frank’s sister, Cee. What this means is that patriarchy’s coercive power is underwritten by violence that assumes a variety of forms, shifting its shape until it takes the form of black men adopting agential postures aimed at the hostilities that beset them at every turn. Hence, viewing Joe and Frank within the aegis of racist violence, we must shift discussion away from the singular goal of determining whether individual ethics should occupy the discursive foreground and resituate their violent events within what James Phelan describes as “multidimensional purposive communication,” where narrative functions, not as a linked sequence of events, but “is itself an event” (90). We cannot accomplish this, however, unless we think about how both Jazz’s and Home’s use of interdiegetic narration disables our desire for straightforward solutions to ethical dilemmas. In each case, innocence is rendered irrelevant because neither character can distinguish altruism from violence. Narration that should therefore sustain the conceptual distance between symbolic and literal, intention and accident, and proportionality and excess collapses these strictly delineated binaries and produces unreliability. Returning to the idea that narrative “permits things to happen,” Jazz dramatizes the manner in which what we wish would happen is in direct opposition to our desire to know what happens. For example, when Joe uses the tracking skills he learned as a youth to search for Wild, the woman he believed to be his wayward mother, and to hunt down his eighteen-year-old lover, Dorcas, the narrator merges the two “hunts,” which occur nearly thirty years apart. As Joe “stalks through the City,” he is thinking about Dorcas, but the interdiegetic narration seamlessly merges the two distinctly different moments in his life (181, 183–4). Between the sentence that begins, “Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it” (173) and the one stating, “Joe is wondering about all this on an icy day in January” (180), the reader has traveled a mere twenty-eight paragraphs (seven pages) in real time, but when the narrator poses the question—ostensibly still speaking

82  Herman Beavers via internal focalization from inside Joe’s consciousness—“But where is she?” (183, italics in original), the question concerns Dorcas’s whereabouts, not Wild’s. The next chapter, like the next verse of a song, picks up as Joe spots Dorcas at the party. It would be improper to suggest that the narrator’s intimate knowledge of events reveals her as a collaborator in Joe’s disastrous quest. However, the implied reader is powerless to caution the narrator against conflating two different moments in Joe’s life in a way that suggests his hunting skills need to be repurposed for use in the City. As with Joe, Frank’s violence is sanctioned because he conflates the desire to rescue his sister with that moment at the start of the novel when he and Cee are hiding in the high grass of a field as white men bury a black man killed in a “man-treated-like-dog fight” where a father and his son were forced to fight to the death (138). “She was the first person I ever took responsibility for,” Frank relates. “Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself—a strong good me tied to the memory of those horses and the burial of a stranger” (104). He concludes by stating, “In my little-boy heart I felt heroic and I knew that if they found us or touched her I would kill” (104). In the chapter that follows, Frank talks about his sister, Cee, his “only family,” and tells his interlocutor When you write this down, know this: she was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine. Who am I without her—that underfed girl with the sad, waiting eyes? How she trembled when we hid from the shovels. I covered her face, her eyes, hoping she hadn’t seen the foot poking out of the grave. (103, italics in original) Just as Joe’s conflation of the symbolic murder of Wild with the actual gunshot that leads to Dorcas’s death is linked to his physical journey from Virginia to Harlem, similarly, Frank’s “heroic” act of traveling southward from Seattle to Lotus to “rescue” his sister is synonymous with his failure to save his friends (Montgomery, 330). Hence, the actual object of his quest is the “strong good me” he has figuratively stored inside Cee. For like Sethe’s belief that her children are her “best thing,” Cee fuels his sense of purpose, casting an ethical gloss over his crime. Having murdered a little Korean girl who reminded him of Cee, Frank must imagine Cee as lacking agency because the little girl’s agential offer of oral sex is what precipitates her death. A turning point in the narrative comes when Cee sees a “toothless baby smile” (132), first, in a green pepper, a cloud, and subsequently “all through the house, in the air, the clouds” (131). But that which, for his sister, is a symbol of the child she cannot bear, Frank sees as being symbolic of the child whose life he took. Frank’s interiorized doubling of his sister and the Korean girl is disabled by Cee’s vision

“When We Speak of Otherness” 83 of her never-to-be-born child. Once this occurs, he can confess to his murderous violence: I have to say something to you right now. I have to tell the whole truth. I lied to you and I lied to me. I hid it from you because I hid it from me. I felt so proud grieving over my dead friends. How I loved them. How much I cared about them, missed them. My mourning was so thick it completely covered my shame. (133, italics in original) Frank’s confession is made possible by two things: Cee tells him she cannot bear children, but even as she “know[s] the truth, accept[s] it, [she keeps] on quilting” (132) and ironically, the narrator/writer’s unethical handling of his story earlier in the narrative. Cee’s barren womb notwithstanding, the fact that she sits “sorting and re-sorting quilt pieces” while periodically wiping “her cheeks with the heel of her hand” means that she is configuring and re-configuring representations of her history in spite of her sadness. Unlike a manufactured blanket, quilting involves piecing together disparate and mismatched pieces that differ in dimension, shape and texture, all brought together in a way that eliminates the kind of hierarchical arrangement of facts where one part of the archive achieves prominence over another. The arrangement and subsequent rearrangement of the quilt pieces symbolizes Frank’s need to grieve for the dead Korean girl alongside his dead friends. He cannot move on from their deaths unless her life achieves equal importance, which can only happen if he owns his role in her death. The baby’s face, whether it represents a child destined never to be born or a child “already dead,” is finally the shared symbol of Cee’s and Frank’s path to healing (133). The ethical clarity they assume at the novel’s end, when they wrap the dead man’s bones in Cee’s first quilt and re-bury it with a headstone that states, “Here Stands a Man,” cannot be achieved individually (145). Compare the collaborative posture Cee and Frank embody with that assumed by the narrator in Jazz, who admits, I break lives to prove I can mend them back again. And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don’t I. Of course. Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But it is another way. I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false. What I wonder would I be without a few spots of blood to ponder? Without aching words that set, then miss, the mark. (219, my italics). In a moment of clarity, the narrator states, “I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false” and then declares, “I ought to get out of this place” (220). But this raises the question as to whether the narrator refers to the physical environment of New York City or the ethically compromised space

84  Herman Beavers occupying the majority of Jazz’s pages. In the space of the preceding brief passage, we see the narrator’s constancy of purpose dissolve, overwhelmed by an uneasiness borne out of inauthenticity. “It was loving the City that distracted me,” the narrator proffers, “Made me think I could speak its loud voice and make that sound sound human. I missed the people altogether” (220). Like a ventriloquist whose illusion of silence is pierced, the narrator comes to understand that what is imagined to be strength bestowed by the City is nothing more than “helplessness” (220). What the narrator has believed was a self-derived narrative capable of anticipating the predicate of the sentence turns out to be the product of a counterfeit grammar that confuses “I” and “it.” Though the narrator has believed “one would kill the other,” endeavoring to “[wait] for it” and then “describe it” (220), Morrison’s Jazz dramatizes the sustained tension formed by individual and collective effort (Ellison 234). In the wake of Joe’s infidelity and violence, Violet’s rage and sadness and Felice’s sense of loss and betrayal, the newly formed triumvirate replicates Alice Manfred’s experience listening to the drums on Fifth Avenue, demonstrating that damage notwithstanding, they are “busy being original, complicated, changeable—human” to the point the narrator has “missed the obvious” (220). The ensemble superintends the unethical solo performance.

4 In light of these developments, Jazz and Home represent narratives whose ethical dilemmas are not so much resolved as they are internalized and integrated as essential parts of the self. The question remains: is Morrison’s use of unreliable narratives an effort to abdicate responsibility for manifesting an ethics of the oppressed? One answer may lie in Margaret Urban Walker’s concept of moral repair, in which she declares Morrison’s Jazz features “a man who gets away with murder” (110). Walker argues that Joe’s violence must be understood within the context of transgenerational history: The histories Morrison unfolds for these [characters] shows how love, loss, and violence echo within lives and down generations, for these histories are knotted with the violence of racism from slavery times on . . . These histories do not explain these characters to us. Instead they make them more vivid and yet more opaque to us, and to themselves, in the ways real people can be. But they show the incalculability of the wages of violent and englobing racism and of our inabilities or refusals to pay them. Where, and to whom, does the equation that fits a crime to punishment apply here? (111–12)

“When We Speak of Otherness” 85 Hence, moral repair enters the breach created by murderous violence and long-standing trauma to undertake “a familiar and unavoidable task human beings face” in which the community needs “to decide how to respond to wrongdoing, whether to ourselves or to others, and whether by ourselves or by others” (112–13). Looking across the breadth of Morrison’s oeuvre, the ethical considerations of unreliable narrative are ultimately bound up in the aim to reimagine otherness as a shared language manifesting what I am calling an ethics of otherness. In Beloved, the shared language of otherness takes the form of the thirty women searching for “the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words” (261) or the forty-six men in Alfred, Georgia, who “got through” because they “sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood” (108). In Morrison’s Nobel lecture, the old woman imagines a bird symbolizing collaborative forms of narrative and states, “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together” (102, my italics). In the book The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, sociologist Arthur W. Frank talks about a postmodern self in which the “self is understood as coming to be human in relation to others, and the self can only continue to be human by living for the Other” (15). In light of how trauma shapes their respective narratives, Jazz and Home offer poignant examples of Frank’s “wounded storyteller.” In Frank’s account, we find a narrator who eschews the solitary wounds often equated with modernity whereby “changing the self” is prioritized within modernist forms of storytelling that privilege diagnosis, in favor of a postmodern ethics of the body in which the “truth of stories is not only what was experienced, but equally what becomes experience in the telling and its reception” (22, italics in original). Or, as Nathaniel Mackey argues, we need to make it clear that when we speak of otherness we are not positing static, intrinsic attributes or characteristics. We need instead to highlight the dynamics of agency and attribution by way of which otherness is brought about and maintained, the fact that other is something people do, more importantly a verb than an adjective or a noun. (265, my italics) Mackey proposes that an ethics of othering “has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive” (265). Viewed within the tactical space created by the ethics of othering, Morrison’s unreliable narrators invite us to journey from noun to verb, where words like community, personhood or healing can take on their fullest meaning.

86  Herman Beavers

Works Cited Abadi-Nagy, Zoltan. “Narrational Consciousness as an Intersection of Culture and Narrative (Case Study: Toni Morrison’s Jazz).” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 21–33. Bareis, J. Alexander. “Ethics, the Diachronization of Narratology, and the Margins of Unreliable Narration.” Narrative Ethics, pp. 43–55. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Booth, Wayne C. “The Struggle to Tell the Story of the Struggle to Get the Story Told” Narrative, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 1997, pp. 50–9. ———. “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple.” in Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Cultural, and Literary Theory, pp. 16–29. Brax, Klaus. “The Age of Scientific Racism: Internal Focalization and Narrative Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Narrative Ethics, pp. 253–67. Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Cultural, and Literary Theory. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia Press, 2001. de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During. London/New York: Routledge, 1993. pp. 151–60. Ellison, Ralph. “The Charlie Christian Story.” Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1967, rpt. 1972. p. 234. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1995. Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106. no. 8. June 1993, pp. 1710–91. Hawthorn, Jeremy, and Jacob Lothe. Narrative Ethics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Holloway, Karla F.C. Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Montgomery, Maxine. “Re-Membering the Forgotten War: War, Memory, History, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s Home.” CLA Journal, vol. 55, no. 4, June 2012, pp. 320–34. Morrison, Toni. Home. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. ———. Interview with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose. Jan. 1998. 19 Jan. 1998. https://youtu.be/-Kgq3F8wbYA. Accessed July 30, 2019. ———. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1992. ———. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Speeches, Essays, and Meditations. New York: Knopf, 2019. Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Cultural, and Literary Theory, pp. 59–82. Olsen, Greta. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative, vol. 11, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 93–109. Palladino, Mariangela “Aphrodite’s Faces: Toni Morrison’s “Love” and “Ethics.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 2, Summer 2012.

“When We Speak of Otherness” 87 Phelan, James. “Reliable, Unreliable, and Deficient Narration: A Rhetorical Account.” Narrative Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 89–103. ———. “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Cultural, and Literary Theory, pp. 93–109. Rainwater, Catherine. “Worthy Messengers: Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 96–113. Ramirez, Manuela Lopez. “The Shell-Shocked Veteran in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Home”/“El Veterano conneurosis de Guerra en las novelas de Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’ y ‘Home’. Atlantis, vol. 38, no. 1, June 2016, pp. 129–47. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Singing the Blue/Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, June 1998, pp. 147–63. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. Shelby, Tommie. “The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 3, Spring 2012, pp. 513–32. Walker, Margaret Urban. “Moral Repair and its Limits.” Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Cultural, and Literary Theory, pp. 110–27. Zerweck, Bruno. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style, vol. 35, no. 1, Themes and Means, Spring 2001, pp. 151–76.

5 Learning to Listen in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Stephanie Li

Jesmyn Ward’s award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) is organized as a series of alternating chapters narrated by three different characters: thirteen-year-old Jojo, his drug-addicted mother, Leonie, and Richie, the ghost of a boy who died at Parchman prison decades earlier. This unusual narrative form challenges a stable understanding of truth as the trio offer sometimes contradictory perspectives on events. New chapters effectively revise previous ones with additional character details providing insight into various plot developments. Ward’s book can be understood as a dynamic dialogue in which characters are seen to relate to events and one another in diverse ways. Such rich novelistic discourse stands in stark opposition to the fact that, in many cases, these characters do not speak or communicate with one another directly. Leonie cannot see much less speak to Richie, and Jojo harbors profound resentment and suspicion toward his mother who has both neglected and physically abused him. These gaps in communication position the reader as a kind of mediator who finds commonalities and parallels where the characters misread, ignore or silence one another. While Jojo never clearly confronts his mother with his anger and frustration, he matures enormously over the course of the novel. His growth is at the heart of the book, which beneath its complex narrative and temporal layers operates as a fairly conventional bildungsroman. However, rather than present a cathartic climax between mother and son that might mark Jojo’s maturation, Ward charts his development through his increasing ability to listen to the stories of others. More than coming to voice himself, Jojo comes to absorb and appreciate the voices of others. This trajectory parallels the reading experience of the book in which we must create order and meaning amid the diverse and at times competing perspectives of the text. Though Jojo is a highly expressive young man, Ward reminds us that ethical behavior begins less with the articulation of individual voice than with the assimilation and understanding of other perspectives. Jojo matures not through an explosive exchange with his mother but by learning to listen carefully to his family’s stories and coming to recognize his place within them. These stories guide his actions,

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 89 delineate important values and affirm his connection to a deeply rooted family and community. As Jojo comes to read the people and world around him, we, too, organize the music of Ward’s song. Despite the conspicuous absence of direct, meaningful exchange between parents and children—between Leonie and Jojo as well as between Leonie and her parents—Sing, Unburied, Sing is a book fundamentally concerned with the effects of discourse and how language shapes individual choices. In this way, it has much in common with what Mikhail Bakhtin termed the polyphonic novel. Writing about the discursive effects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction, Bakhtin identified sustained dialogue as paradigmatic of this narrative form: “What matters to him most of all is the dialogical interaction of the discourses, whatever their linguistic particularities. The main object of the representation he constructs is discourse itself, and especially meaningful discourse” (quoted in Todorov 66). Meaningful discourse for Dostoevsky involves a constant affirmation of “someone else’s ‘I,’ ” not as an object, but as another subject—this is the principle governing Dostoevsky’s worldview (quoted in Dentith 43). Rather than emphasizing absolute philosophical or social tenets, the polyphonic novel is focused on the recognition of multiple perspectives. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky achieved this effect by producing strong, distinct characters who express their philosophical and moral positions through extensive dialogue as well as through significant actions that respond to earlier discussions. The novel is the site of heteroglossia, in which a variety of individual narratives converge on a single thematic discourse mediated by the author. Polyphony produces an arena of layered dialogue that creates a necessary tension for the articulation of individual voices. While Dostoevsky created polyphonic texts through an omniscient narrator and the use of extensive scenes of actual dialogue between characters as in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) and The Idiot (1869), Ward fashions in Sing, Unburied, Sing a series of voices that vie for our sympathy and understanding. In this way, she asks readers to reassess our conceptions of characters throughout the novel. The sometimes discordant perspectives offered in Sing, Unburied, Sing place a significant onus on readers who must tease out a truth that lies between these individual vantage points. The multiple voices of the text demand the kind of participatory reading that Morrison identified as foundational to Black literature. In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” she traces this dynamic relationship between author and reader to African American religious practices. Referring to Black literature, she explains, It should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or

90  Stephanie Li to change and to modify—to expand on the sermon that is being delivered. (59) Morrison’s comments remind us of the ethical and moral stakes in her conception of the black novel. She explains, “the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before” because of the absence of collective cultural storytelling. She reflects, We don’t live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has to get out, and there are several ways to do it. One is in the novel. (58) For Morrison, novels are necessarily didactic, establishing boundaries of ethical behavior and clarifying the nature of one’s individual responsibility to a broader collective. Ward’s novel responds to Morrison’s mandate by exploring the nature of caretaking and the relationship between listening and ethical development. Critical to its vision is the presence of a collection of strong, nurturing male figures. Sing, Unburied, Sing departs from literature by black women that emphasizes the role of powerful mothers.1 Instead, the most supportive and loving characters are not females but males. The text’s two primary maternal figures, Jojo’s grandmother, Mam, and Leonie, are, for very different reasons, unavailable to their children; Mam dies from cancer in the novel’s final pages while Leonie is more focused on Michael, her recently released white boyfriend than on their two children.2 In the absence of a strong maternal presence, Jojo and Pop, his elderly grandfather, become the central caregivers of the novel. One might simplistically conclude that Ward presents these characters as male othermothers to celebrate and affirm the tenderness possible in men.3 However, Ward’s expansive descriptions of Jojo, Pop and Pop’s deceased son, Given, suggest a rupture in the primary association between mothers and care. These figures are less substitute mothers than foundational contributors to the network necessary for Kayla’s future. Just as gender is not

1 Examples of such texts include Linda Brent in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Sethe from Morrison’s Beloved (1984). 2 Leonie refers to her mother as Mama, but I will refer to her as “Mam,” because this is what Jojo calls her, and his development is the central focus of this essay. 3 Patricia Hill Collins describes the important impact of non-kin women on the development of Black children through the term “community othermothers” (See Black Feminist Thought, p. 129–32).

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 91 a salient category in Morrison’s understanding of the ancestor, these male caregivers stand as equal partners in the development of Black children.

Listening to the Ancestor In the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jojo describes the importance of listening carefully to his grandfather. While helping Pop slaughter a goat, Jojo recalls how he learned to always wear shoes out in the dirt: “ever since Pop whipped me when I was six for running around the pen with no shoes on, I’ve never been barefoot out here again. You could get worms, Pop had said.” Jojo initially suggests that the whipping was what caused him to follow Pop’s directive but later adds, Later that night, he told me stories about him and his sisters and brothers when they were young, playing barefoot because all they had was one pair of shoes each and them for church. They all got worms, and when they used the outhouse, they pulled worms out of their butts. I don’t tell Pop, but that was more effective than the whipping. (2) The whipping is not the reason Jojo listened to Pop’s warning to always wear shoes; it was the story of his grandfather’s poverty that leads to the visceral image of the children’s bodies infested with worms. Unlike Pop, Jojo has a pair of shoes of his own, but his family’s earlier destitution is critical to his ability to remember to wear them. Pop’s story demonstrates how a family’s history is encoded in simple directives and how listening well is to be aware of the experiences of others and, in particular, those of the past. This passage, like many of those narrated by Jojo, highlights how the boy has internalized Pop’s words; Pop’s dialogue appears as italicized both when Jojo remembers him speaking and when he is speaking in real time. Notably, Pop does not narrate any of the book’s chapters. Jojo’s absorption of the older man’s speech implies a shared voice between them—not that Jojo and Pop are one, but rather that the boy is in the process of assimilating his grandfather’s speech into his own. It is also significant that Jojo does not tell Pop that the most effective part of his story is the image of the children pulling worms from their behinds. As Jojo demonstrates repeatedly throughout the novel, listening well does not necessarily mean speaking; instead, it is best displayed by a change in behavior—in this case, Jojo always wearing shoes in the yard. In addition to teaching Jojo how to listen, Pop instructs his grandson in activities that are typically understood as female. As Pop cooks for the family, Jojo admires his grandfather’s care with the food before preparing a plate for bedridden Mam: “When Pop plates it, the liver smells, but the gravy he made to slather on it pools in a little heart around the

92  Stephanie Li meat, and I wonder if Pop did that on purpose.” These are tasks identified not as male or female but by the importance and necessity of the love they provide. Unprompted, Jojo then brings the plate to his grandmother. Finding her asleep, he returns it to the kitchen “where Pop drapes a paper towel over it to keep it warm” (11). As Jojo narrates these small details, he demonstrates how he is listening to Pop even in silence. He is reading love in every gesture, recognizing how food is a primary means of demonstrating care. By contrast, Leonie appears to scoff at Jojo’s attempts to cook and warns him against following Pop’s example too closely. The first time the boy remembers his grandparents leaving him in his mother’s care, Leonie watches as he prepares a meal for himself. Jojo narrates the scene: it felt weird to sit across the table from Leonie and make a fried potato sandwich while she stared off into space and crossed her legs and kicked her feet, let cigarette smoke seep out of her lips and wreathe her head like a veil, even though Mam and Pop hated when she smoked in the house. (12) Though still a young child, Jojo cooks for himself while his mother explicitly disrespects her parents with her smoking. Looking at his sandwich, she declares, “That looks disgusting.” Jojo replies, “Pop eat them like this,” demonstrating how he is following the model of the man he admires and loves most. To Leonie, such mimicry is to be avoided, and she asks, “You got to do everything Pop do?” With this question, Leonie suggests that Jojo needs to be his own person, apart from Pop’s way of being. She urges him to think for himself rather than act like his grandfather. While such an individualistic approach may echo with an American ethos to create one’s own destiny, it disregards the wisdom of elders, whom Morrison calls the ancestor. In reply to his mother’s question, Jojo “shook my head because it seemed like what she expected of me. But I liked most of the things Pop did” (12). Jojo is simply too young to forge his own way of being, and even when he appears to concede Leonie’s point, he only does so to follow her lead, not because he is truly thinking for himself. Even as a new teenager (the book opens on his thirteenth birthday), Jojo needs guidance rooted in the wisdom and stability of figures like Pop and Mam. Pop acts as Jojo’s most significant ancestor in Sing, Unburied, Sing. According to Morrison, the ancestor is foundational to African American literature: “these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom” (62). Pop teaches Jojo how to care for and kill the animals on their farm, how to tend to Kayla and Mam, and, perhaps most important, how to listen.

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 93 He explicitly links listening to functioning constructively in the world. Reflecting on the difference between himself and his mentally disturbed brother Stag, Pop notes, I listened. I always listened. But Stag ain’t never listen. . . . I think Stag felt dead inside, and that’s why he couldn’t sit still and listen, why he had to climb the highest cliff when we went swimming at the river and jump off headfirst into the water. (18) According to Pop, to be alive is to be sensitive to other voices while death connotes a solipsism that turns inward and cannot absorb any perspective but its own. Often prompted by his grandson to tell him stories of his past, Pop revisits key scenes from his childhood and the time he spent at Parchman prison. Jojo notes that Pop often repeats himself, but both find comfort in the ritual of their storytelling: This is what Pop does when we are alone, sitting up late at night in the living room or out in the yard or woods. He tells me stories. Stories about eating cattails after his daddy been out gathering them from the marsh. Stories about how his mama and her people used to collect Spanish moss to stuff their mattresses. Sometimes he’ll tell me the same story three, even four times. Hearing him tell them makes me feel like his voice is a hand he’s reached out to me, like he’s rubbing my back and I can duck whatever makes me feel like I’ll never be able to stand as tall as Pop, never be as sure. It makes me sweat and stick to the chair in the kitchen, which has gotten so hot from the boiling goat on the stove that the windows have fogged up, and the whole world is shrunk to this room with me and Pop. (17) Even the brief outline of Pop’s stories contains important messages about Jojo’s family and the expectations of what it means to be a father. Young Pop eats the cattails brought by his father, affirming how men are to provide for their children. The collection of Spanish moss demonstrates both the family’s poverty and their efforts to create a modicum of comfort in their lives. Moreover, for Jojo, listening is a visceral experience. The impact of the stories is less in the visual images they conjure than in the tenderness they nurture in Jojo. He is empowered and comforted by Pop’s voice, his self-doubt assuaged by stories that seem to attest to his own abilities, not just to the creativity and resilience of his ancestors. Jojo’s response recalls the participatory exchange Morrison envisions for readers of African American literature—a novel should “make you feel something profoundly” (59) and through that feeling change your

94  Stephanie Li individual behavior. In this way, Jojo provides a model for how to read the book as a whole. The novel is meant to be empowering for Black youths like Jojo who are then able “to stand as tall as Pop” and “be as sure” as this key ancestral figure. In contrast to Pop’s reassuring presence, Leonie continually undermines her son. While Pop tacitly embraces domestic duties and sees no threat to his manhood in cooking and caretaking, Leonie feminizes Jojo for taking on such tasks. She observes of her son, “Sometimes when Jojo’s playing with Michaela or sitting in Mama’s room rubbing her hands or helping her turn over in the bed, I look at him and see a hungry girl” (95). For Leonie, caretaking is not only emasculating, but it demonstrates a fundamental neediness—a hunger that reflects immaturity rather than generosity. Leonie is unable to understand Jojo’s caretaking as a sign of manhood that, for her, is largely defined by Michael’s physical power and violent tendencies. Although Jojo awakens to the smell of Michael cooking bacon the morning after they return to their home in Bois Sauvage, the boy quietly notes his father’s clumsiness in the kitchen. Jojo observes that Michael twice lets oil drip on the floor and he overcooks the bacon into charred curls of meat. But worst of all, when Kayla refuses to sit for breakfast, Michael slaps her repeatedly on the thigh. Exasperated, Michael proclaims, “Y’all don’t listen” but as “he punctuates each word with a slap,” Kayla is too afraid to hear anything he says. Jojo is right to counter to Michael, “You ain’t” when he asserts, “I told her” (228). There is no possibility of listening to anyone amid such violence. Michael lacks all of Pop’s gentleness, and though he does share some personal stories with Jojo, they are often disturbing and leave the boy unable to understand how he fits into them. Michael’s reflections on his past have the opposite effect of Pop’s and leave Jojo confused and alone. Before serving his time in prison, Michael worked on the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig that exploded and led to the largest oil spill in U.S. waters. Jojo recalls Michael describing the devastation caused by the disaster as the two sit on a dock during a fishing trip: I actually cried, Michael told the water. . . . And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals. And the way he looked at me that night told me he wasn’t just thinking about any humans; he was thinking about me. I wonder if Michael thought that yesterday when he saw that gun, saw that cop push me down so I bowed to the dirt. (226)

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 95 Jojo does not understand these reflections as a specific address to him; rather he understands that Michael “told the water,” as if he is peripheral to the information related here. Jojo struggles to find meaning in his father’s words, wondering if he is like the devastated animals, fated to “die for unexpected reasons.” This conclusion positions Michael as a passive bystander to Jojo’s pain, much like the scene in which Michael does nothing as Jojo is handcuffed by the police officer on their way back from Parchman. Michael effectively presents himself to his son as someone who watches but cannot prevent the seemingly inevitable death of his own child. Jojo listens carefully to the story, trying to do what he does with Pop’s narratives, that is, to find a place for himself within them. However, Michael does not provide clear, loving guidance for Jojo, leaving the boy uncertain if he is as helpless and doomed as the animals caught in the oil spill.

Leonie’s Failure to Listen It might be easy to disregard Leonie as a dangerous drug addict, especially given Jojo’s anger and even outright hostility toward her. However, by offering multiple perspectives on the same event, Ward demonstrates the nuanced motivations and limited opportunities that structure the behavior of her characters. The text’s polyphony resists a simplistic judgment on any single scene or action. During the first night of their journey to Parchman, Leonie prepares a tea for her ailing two-year-old daughter, Kayla. Concerned that his mother will unintentionally harm Kayla because she lacks his grandmother’s healing skills, Jojo remembers how his mother refused to buy food for his pet fish. He concludes, “Leonie kill things” (108). By contrast, Leonie’s chapter describing this scene attests to her desperation to do something constructive for her daughter. Keenly aware that Kayla prefers the presence of her brother over her mother, Leonie does what she can to soothe her daughter’s pain: “He rubs her back and she rubs his, and I stand there, watching my children comfort each other. My hands itch, wanting to do something. I could reach out and touch them both, but I don’t” (101). Leonie recognizes that both her children have usurped her role as mother. Though she considers embracing them, she does not, perhaps worried that she will be rejected, or worse, that her gesture will provide no comfort at all. There is no obvious place for her within Jojo and Kayla’s close bond, even as her neglect fostered the depth of their connection. Though Leonie may indeed have killed Jojo’s fish, she does not mean to harm her children and instead tries in her limited, if often deeply misguided, way to help them. Leonie resolves then to follow her own mother’s advice and make a tea from available plants to soothe Kayla: “Mama always told me that if I look carefully enough, I can find what I need in the world” (102). Here Leonie attempts to use her mother’s wisdom, but as she tries to remember Mam’s lessons and find the milkweed plants that might soothe Kayla, she

96  Stephanie Li admits, “I wish I’d listened more carefully. I wish I could remember more than the fact that it has pinkish-purple flowers” (103). Here and elsewhere in the text, Leonie comes to be defined by her failure to listen—to remember her mother’s advice, her father’s warnings, her brother’s story. This inability to listen stands in sharp contrast to Jojo’s growing appreciation of the voices of others. Much of Leonie’s destructive inwardness derives from her consuming passion for Michael. After Leonie first introduces him to her parents, Mam notes, “It ain’t healthy . . . All you hear, all you see, is him” (153–4). Though Leonie tries to refute Mam’s claim, she “knew she was lying, because when I woke up in the morning, I thought of Michael’s laugh, of the way he flipped his cigarettes before he lit them, of the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me.” Leonie recognizes that her obsession with Michael is tied to her grief over the death of her brother, Given. The preceding passage is immediately followed by her reflection: “And then I remembered Given. And the guilt I felt when I realized it” (154). However, by focusing so intently on Michael, Leonie blocks out the familial voices that might guide her. She becomes unable to listen to her parents and is continually haunted by an apparition of her brother that she calls “Given-not-Given.” This spectral presence appears most often when she is high, but notably, it never speaks, as if aware that Leonie has lost the crucial ability to listen. Despite this failure, Leonie remains emotionally attached to her children and eager to compensate in some way for her rampant neglect of them. After she fails to find milkweed, she decides that a blackberry plant might make a suitable replacement for Kayla. She mixes a strange brew dyed with food coloring and spiked with sugar that Jojo eyes suspiciously and considers knocking from his sister’s hand. Despite the worrisome concoction, Leonie is no malicious killer but rather just a wildly inept mother who, at least in this scene, is doing the best she can. Though Jojo is presented as the most sympathetic character in the novel, true to the polyphonic contours of the narrative, his judgment is not inviolable. Instead, he, like the readers Morrison envisions in “Rootedness,” is in the process of understanding the ethical responsibilities and consequences of his actions. After watching Kayla ingest a significant amount of Leonie’s blackberry tea, he worries that she will become sick. He thus awakens the sleeping child, takes her to the bathroom and forces her to vomit. This disturbing scene is one of the most violent in the novel: I carry Kayla into the bathroom and stick my finger down her throat and make her throw up. She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words, but I do it three times, make her vomit over my hand, hot as her little body, three times, all of it red and smelling sweet, until I’m crying and she’s shrieking. (118)

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 97 While Leonie’s tea was certainly questionable, is Jojo right to force Kayla to vomit? Even as he acts out of love and concern for her well-being, the encounter requires an unsettling degree of physical domination. Jojo had wanted to “grab that sippy cup and throw it” when Leonie first gave it to Kayla, and his earlier failure to act results in this horrifying scene. The episode reminds us that despite his maturity and fierce dedication to his sister, Jojo is still a child. Alone before Leonie, he lacks the strength to stand up for himself and his sister. Instead, he hides all evidence of Kayla’s vomit, cleaning the bathroom so that his mother will never know what he did. This scene also attests to the lack of communication between Jojo and Leonie. They both act without hearing the other. Jojo assumes that Leonie is a threat to Kayla while she views her son with jealousy and scorn. This inability to understand one another culminates in Mam’s death scene. Unwilling to endure her physical suffering, Mam asks Leonie to bring on her death. Leonie reluctantly agrees by constructing an altar of stones and calling upon Maman Brigitte, the “Mother of all the Gede.”4 In one of the most dramatic scenes in the book, Mam wails with pain and slaps her daughter, demanding “Baby. Please.” Importantly, it is not the slap that prompts Leonie to begin the litany that will allow the ghost of Given to usher their mother away. Instead, as she explains, “It’s the word baby that makes me jump off the bed. Because I hear her say it now and I’m her baby again, soft-gummed and wet-eyed and fat, and she is whole and sweet-milked” (267). If only for a moment, Leonie can hear her mother by recognizing herself in her cry. When Jojo asks what Leonie did, she explains that Mam wanted to die. Jojo refuses her answer until Pop admits that Mam “couldn’t bear that pain.” This realization transforms Jojo. Leonie observes that at once “Jojo gains what Pop’s lost of his bearing. First, a brace across his thighs, all the bowlegged softness of his preadolescence dissolved to a granite stance” (270). Here, Jojo becomes an ancestral figure in his own right: able to hear and bear his family’s most difficult stories. Recognizing the pain and love that went into Leonie’s decision, Jojo sees his mother as never before. She observes, “And then he’s looking at me and he’s hard as Pop and soft as Mama. Censure and pity. I’m a book and he can read every word. I know this. He sees me. He knows it all” (271). This passage explicitly identifies Jojo as an ideal reader: one who understands his mother with both “censure and pity”; he recognizes her failures, and the result is less condemnation than sadness. Despite her many weaknesses, Leonie acted out of mercy as her love led her to a deed that was not “a choice” but a necessity. Mam’s death also finds an important parallel in Jojo’s decision to force Kayla to

4 Maman Brigitte is a spirit from Haitian Vodou practices. The Gede are a family of loa or intermediaries who communicate between the Supreme Creator and humanity.

98  Stephanie Li vomit. In both cases, a kind of physical violence becomes a necessary act of love. These scenes prefigure the revelation concerning Richie’s death— Pop’s murder of the boy to save him from a rabid mob—challenging readers to consider the ethics of care under excruciating conditions.

Parchman in the Past and Present In addition to describing various anecdotes from his childhood throughout the novel, Pop, whose actual name is River, tells Jojo a fragmented story about his time at Parchman. He and his brother Stag were sent there after Stag was involved in a bar fight and the police picked up both boys. Pop’s description of this experience appears in Jojo’s sections as italicized first-person accounts that are then interrupted by events in the book’s main plot. This narrative approach affirms how Jojo assimilates Pop’s voice into his own consciousness and points to his maturing perspective on others. Pop’s memories become key to how Jojo processes events in the present. This overlay of stories also suggests important points of comparison between Pop’s experience and that of Jojo. Pop recalls of his time at Parchman, “I was fifteen. But I wasn’t the youngest noway, Pop says. That was Ritchie.” This line is immediately followed by a return to the present time of Jojo’s thirteenth birthday: “Kayla wakes up all at once, rolling over and pushing up and smiling” (19). The juxtaposition of these lines reminds us that just as Pop becomes Ritchie’s guardian at Parchman, Jojo watches over Kayla. Both teenage boys bear responsibility for the well-being of another, acting as a surrogate parent to a younger child. The parallel between the Pop/Richie and Jojo/Kayla relationship clarifies what it means for Jojo to become a man. The next section of the Parchman story ends with Pop reflecting on how Ritchie views him. I could tell in the way he leaned forward, in the way he watched me after he finished talking, like he was waiting for my approval. I knew I couldn’t get rid of him then, especially because he was following me around and sleeping in the bunk next to me. Because he looked at me like I could give him something nobody else could. (24) This description could easily apply to Kayla’s relationship to Jojo. The two sleep together, and throughout the novel she looks to him for comfort and approval. This section ends with Richie joking about the irony of his name (“Cause I be stealing. So I’m rich?”). Pop finds no humor in the pun but nonetheless “gave Richie what he wanted. He was just a boy. I laughed.” Pop’s observation suggests that, unlike Richie, he considers himself less a boy than a man. Though Pop is still an adolescent, his relationship to Richie matures him as he comes to recognize both the needs of another and how he can satisfy those needs. To be a man is to put the

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 99 boy’s desires over his own, to indulge his humor and foster a growing intimacy between them. Jojo similarly understands his relationship to Kayla as built upon the necessity of giving her what she wants and needs. It is especially telling that the subsequent break back into the present moment begins with Jojo reflecting on his mother: “Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I’ll ever understand Leonie.” He then describes how Kayla has developed a habit of pinching his ear. Although it “almost hurts,” he allows this because “Mam says she does it for comfort because she never breast-fed” (25). Jojo endures the small pain of Kayla’s pinching because he recognizes a need left over from Leonie’s inadequate parenting. Like Pop, he indulges the younger child, sacrificing his own comfort for hers. While Kayla’s basic needs are readily apparent to Jojo, he cannot fathom the workings of his mother who often ignores or dismisses her daughter’s cries. The simple expectation that a child’s needs must be fulfilled is disrupted for Leonie by her personal instability and drug addiction. After she watches Kayla fall into Jojo’s arms once she vomits in the car on the long drive to Parchman, Leonie recognizes that “part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine.” But, unlike Jojo, who “doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms,” Leonie admits that “my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant” (98). Where Jojo has the capacity to focus exclusively on his sister, Leonie is too distracted by her own needs and frustrations to provide stability and comfort for her children. Rather than listen to Jojo and Kayla, she ends this chapter so exasperated that she closes herself off from others: “Wipe my eyes, smear dirt across my face, and make myself blind” (105). Though she does not explicitly prevent herself from hearing or listening to others, Leonie is so resigned that she willfully limits her ability to respond to her children. After the family retrieves Michael from Parchman, Jojo begins to draw explicit parallels between himself and Richie. While earlier the text posits a similarity between Jojo and his grandfather, this new comparison reminds readers that Jojo is approximately the same age as Richie when he died. As he struggles to swallow his lunch in the hot car, Jojo think(s) of Richie and wonder(s) if this is how he felt in them dusty rows, how they must have stretched to the end of the earth before him, how this place must have gone on forever. But even as I’m gulping to swallow past the food, to breathe easier, and another hiccup shakes through me, I know it must have been worse for the boy. (128) Like Richie, Jojo feels trapped by the landscape around him. However, the cause of his confinement is less overt than with Richie. Prior to this

100  Stephanie Li reflection, Jojo is put off by Michael’s comment to “ ‘Take your time, son.’ ” “He says it so easy. Son.” Despite their biological connection, Jojo has little affection for Michael, whom he treats with wary skepticism. “Son” is a word he enthusiastically earns from Pop, striving to emulate and understand the older man. By contrast, Michael’s casual use of “son” undermines that careful cultivation of a bond that does not devolve upon a simple blood tie. Jojo also compares Michael’s comment to how Mam used to hold his neck while out shopping “to remind me that we was in the store, around a whole bunch of White people, and that I needed to mind my manners. And then: she was behind me, with me, loving me” (128). Mam’s gesture comforts and supports even as it also seeks to exert some control over Jojo’s behavior. The two are united through touch. This memory additionally serves to expose the racial difference always at play in Jojo’s relationship with Michael. Just like the white people in the store whose presence requires Jojo to mind his manners, Michael’s presence requires that Jojo behave well. This sense of constraint without the accompanying assurance of love causes him to compare his situation to that of Richie. He too is trapped and without protection. Just as Richie arrives in Parchman friendless, Jojo fears that no one—neither his mother nor father— will keep him from harm. However, Jojo quickly recognizes that Richie’s condition was far worse than his own. The comparison suggests multiple ways in which his experience both coincides and diverges from that of Richie. Both boys encounter a literal loss of air at Parchman that reflects their unique sense of desperation and deprivation. When Richie enters the novel as a narrator, joining the family’s car ride back to Bois Sauvage, he immediately identifies Jojo as belonging to River: He is River’s child. . . . I know it by the way he holds the little sick golden girl: as if he thinks he could curl around her . . . He protects as River protects. I want to tell him this: Boy, you can’t. But I don’t. (133) Richie’s narrative disabuses the reader of any simple parallel between him and Jojo. While he watches the living boy sleep, Richie observes that “Jojo is innocent” for he does not know “that metal shackles could grow into the skin” or “that seeing my siblings starving could hollow out a different part of me, too” (185). These reflections follow Jojo’s violent encounter with the cop who pulls Leonie and Michael over on their way home. Here, Ward traces the shifting legacy of racial injustice from Richie’s incarceration to Jojo’s experience with police brutality. During the conflict that follows, Leonie ingests a baggie of drugs, and Jojo is handcuffed and thrown to the ground while he watches Kayla wail for him. Though Jojo has not yet faced the kind of immediate long-term abuse

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 101 that would allow skin and shackle to merge, his experience is hardly one of child-like innocence. Kayla’s desperation at seeing her parents and brother handcuffed is not the kind of physical hunger Richie describes but nonetheless testifies to a profound condition of lack. These departures from Richie’s characterization remind us of the fallibility of any single narrative voice. Richie’s experience is grounded in a brutal physicality that has no easy parallel for Jojo and Kayla. Nonetheless, Ward’s twentyfirst-century characters remain entangled in a legacy of oppression that profoundly structures their life experiences. Although Richie is dead, like Jojo, he, too, is on a journey of selfdiscovery. He explains that he is in search of his home, not the specific place where he grew up but instead the earth where “it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart.” Riding with Jojo back to see River, he aims to find “A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be a part of the song” (183). Specifically, Richie wants to know how he died, hoping that with such knowledge he can enter a more peaceful afterlife. He returns to Bois Sauvage with Jojo who prompts Pop to finish the story of his time at Parchman at last. Pop explains that following a severe whipping, Richie decided to escape after another inmate named Blue rapes a woman and demands they leave together. In what follows, the novel overtly signifies on the central conflict in Morrison’s Beloved and suggests that enslaved mothers were not alone in making ethical decisions with life-or-death consequences. Pop is also subject to the kind of fierce, desperate love that leads Sethe to try to slay all her children. He kills Richie before a blood-thirsty search party finds the escaped boy. Ward echoes Sethe’s murder of her infant Beloved, an act which saves the child from a lifetime of suffering, in Pop’s recognition that despite Richie’s innocence, the angry mob will treat him like Blue “and cut him piece from piece till he was just some bloody, soft, screaming thing, and then they was going to string him up from a tree” (255). Pop cannot prevent his death, only save him from the slow horror of the mob’s sadism. Pop kills Richie for the same reason Sethe did: to “put my babies where they’d be safe” (193). Similarly, Pop promises, “Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home” before cutting his throat. Although rationally Pop’s decision is a necessary act of mercy, it exacts a brutal toll on both Pop and Richie. The boy ghost is caught in a purgatory that prevents him from joining those who die peaceably, and Pop is haunted for the rest of his life by his actions. Like Beloved, Sing, Unburied, Sing asks difficult ethical questions. Was Sethe right to kill Beloved? Should Pop have killed Richie? The ghostly existence of both Beloved and Richie suggests an unsettled reckoning. In a conversation with Jojo before her death, Mam explains that ghosts of the dead wander the Earth when the dying’s bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God

102  Stephanie Li can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water. (236) Unlike others who die quietly, as Mam explains, and wait “on the other side of the door. With everybody else that’s gone before” (236), Richie remains earthbound, unable to cross over like Mam and Given. He joins a tree full of other ghosts who died violent deaths. The book ends with Kayla singing to them until they speak: “Home, they say. Home” (285). These dead remain with us, visible to Kayla and Jojo, who hear their voices as part of their own story. In this way, Ward suggests that the ethics of Pop’s decision is less critical than the way in which these characters make space for the dead trapped by the violence that destroyed them. When Jojo reencounters Richie after Mam’s death, he is “mad as shit” because “when I see him, part of me know it ain’t never going to be Mam, never going to be her sitting on a tree trunk, a rotten stump, waiting for me” (280). Instead of Mam’s reassuring presence, Jojo has Richie, forever reminding Jojo of Pop’s anguish and the boy’s own tragic death. Just as Morrison’s characters must wrestle with the unsettling legacy of Beloved, Jojo and Kayla must confront the angry, resentful ghosts of their history. Having assimilated his grandparents’ ancestral presence into his own self, Jojo is now able to hear more painful voices. The culmination of his ability to listen well is to listen to the most wrenching stories of black injustice. In the final pages of the novel, Jojo looks up at the ghost tree and hears their awful tales: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to my babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night and they hung me they found I could read and they dragged me to the barn and gouged my eyes. (282) By first learning to listen to his grandparents, Jojo becomes able to hear all the voices of his history. Hearing these stories is both his ethical obligation and his familial inheritance. Listening is the only way to recognize the impossible choices his ancestors confronted and embrace those who both survived and perished. Sing, Unburied, Sing extends Morrison’s call for transformative Black literature by enjoining readers to bear the painful stories of the past. Jojo remains standing before the tree absorbing the words of the ghosts until the sun sets and Pop, holding Kayla, comes to find him. Together the three return home with Kayla in Jojo’s arms, saying, “ ‘Shh’ like I am the baby and she is the big brother” (285). With this final gesture, Kayla

Listening in Sing, Unburied, Sing 103 promises that she, too, will become an ancestor for this family. She and Jojo have heard the stories of the ghost tree and will make their home amid these voices. The dead are not to be feared or shunned but listened to. Jojo and Kayla’s ethical education begins with the violent histories of their ancestors.

Works Cited Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. Routledge: New York, 2000. Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. First Vintage International Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. ———. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 56–64. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.

6 Maternal Sovereignty Destruction and Survival in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Naomi Morgenstern Maternal Mortality and the Weather The rate at which women in the United States die in childbirth or following childbirth is comparable—recent accounts in the media tell us—to rates in Mexico and Uzbekistan. But this is only part of the story. To quote a recent report on NPR, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers, one of the widest of all racial disparities in women’s health. Put another way, a black woman is 22 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes.1 This crisis might and should disorient us (if it is not all too familiar) when we learn that even relatively well-off black women die at significantly higher rates. A New York City study conducted from 2008–12 found that “black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were far more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.”2 As Raegan McDonald-Mosley, the chief medical director for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, asserts, It tells you that you can’t educate your way out of this problem. You can’t health-care-access your way out of this problem. There’s

1 See Nina Martin’s special series for Propublica, “Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the U.S.,” and Annie Waldman’s contribution in particular (“How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers”). Also see Martin and Renee Montagne’s 2017 NPR story, “Black Mothers Keep Dying After Giving Birth: Shalon Irving’s Story Explains Why,” and Linda Villarosa’s April 2018 story for the New York Times Magazine: “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis. 2 This study is discussed in Martin and Montagne’s NPR story, “Black Mothers.”

Maternal Sovereignty 105 something inherently wrong with the system that’s not valuing the lives of black women equally to white women. (Martin and Montagne) While it is of the utmost importance, of course, to locate the specific forms that this injustice takes, one could almost argue that systemic racism, along with its extra-systemic effects, functions like a natural force, like a cataclysmic storm, like the weather. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe writes, “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate” (106), and, similarly, Arline Geronimus coins the term “weathering” for a kind of wear and stress on the body that takes its toll even at a molecular level.3 “It’s chronic stress that just happens all the time,” comments Fleda Mask Jackson, an Atlanta researcher who focuses on birth outcomes for middle-class black women. “There is never a period where there’s rest from it. It’s everywhere; it’s in the air; it’s just affecting everything” (Martin and Montagne). Drawing on the figurative language of these critics and researchers (who make clear to us that figurative language may come as close as possible to telling the truth about material embodied experience), I’d like to turn to Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel, Salvage the Bones, in order to read its unique account of the unstable relationship between the social and the state of nature. By “state of nature” I mean to refer not to a wild or savage “before” but to those sites within the social—or at its apparent margins—where collective organization appears to break down, sometimes catastrophically and sometimes with a sense that alternative ways to give shape to human and nonhuman life are coming into view. To this end, Ward deploys the slippage between “salvage,” “savage” and “sauvage”—the words are etymologically linked—to invoke “the state of nature” as a vexed category both bound up with racist ideology and open to alternative interpretations and understandings. “Savage” is important for its associative linking (or assemblage) of animals, plants, places and persons: isolated, remote (of a place), naturally growing, wild, uncultivated (of a plant), wild, undomesticated (of an animal), uncivilized, rude, coarse, badly adapted to life in society, violent, cruel, brutal, regarded as primitive, difficult to tame or control (of a person). And “salvage” calls our attention to disaster and survival (“to save or salvage from shipwreck, fire, etc.”), as well as to “waste material . . . suitable for recycling” and even to a suggestive critique of property relations: “salvage” as “[a] payment or compensation to which those persons are entitled who have

3 See, for example, Geronimus’s 1992 article, “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of African-American Women and Infants: Evidence and Speculations.” For more on Geronimus’s work, see Ryan Blitstein, “Racism’s Hidden Toll,” Pacific Standard (June 15, 2009).

106  Naomi Morgenstern by their voluntary efforts saved a ship or its cargo from impending peril or rescued it from actual loss.”4 In other words, Ward’s title also invokes the double valence of the “state of nature” as at once a place of extreme exposure and vulnerability and, potentially, the site of revolutionary renewal or reinvention. Early in Ward’s novel, Randall, the brother of the protagonist, and his friend, Manny, argue about the weather report and news of an impending major storm (Hurricane Katrina). Manny asserts, “News don’t know what they talking about. . . . Everytime somebody in Bois Sauvage get arrested, they always get the story wrong.” Randall replies, “That’s journalists. Weatherman’s a scientist.” But the reader is probably with Manny on this one when he responds, “He ain’t shit” (6). In other words, this moment signals to the reader by calling our attention to the need to resist an easy separation between “nature” and “culture,” between biased racist reporting and the truth that is “the weather.” This inseparability of nature and culture was staged, unforgettably, by the widespread representations of Katrina’s forceful impact and aftermath. This supposedly “natural” disaster proved to be profoundly enmeshed with socioeconomic forces, with years of failed and inadequate policy and its material legacy. And yet, while it came as a “shock” to many, for most of those directly impacted and intimately acquainted with the infrastructural political crisis, this apparent deconstruction of a binary opposition (between “nature” and “culture”) was no shock or even surprise. Henry A. Giroux writes, Katrina revealed a biopolitics in which the social contract has become obsolete and democratic governance dysfunctional. It also made visible many of the social mechanisms that render some populations disposable, spatially fixed, and caught in a liminal space of uncertainty that not only limits choices but prioritizes for such groups the power of death over life itself. (30)5 In Ward’s novel, an African American family is exposed to “the weather” in both a brutally apparent and a more complex sense, as 4 “Savage, adj. and n.1.” and “Salvage, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, Web, March 22, 2019. 5 For further discussion of the causes and impact of Katrina, see Dimock; Marotte and Jellenik; Johnson; Wailoo and O’Neill; and Tuana. “Poverty leaves its effect in the bodies and psyches of those it touches,” writes Tuana. “This material-semiotic interaction should come as no surprise to anyone . . . But the poverty that Katrina forced us to witness came as a ‘shock’ to the nation as it watched news coverage of Katrina’s wake. This serves as an interesting lens for considering some of the ways that ignorance is materialized, and the various institutions and motives that have a stake in the production and maintenance of ignorance” (203).

Maternal Sovereignty 107 they are offered little to no protection from a sustaining social structure beyond their immediate kinship relations. Salvage the Bones tells the story of the Batistes, a poor family in rural Mississippi, who prepare for and ultimately survive Hurricane Katrina. The story is narrated by fifteen-year-old Esch, who is pregnant and lives with her father and three brothers who do not know her secret (“Two lines means that you are pregnant. You are pregnant. I am pregnant” [36]). Esch is a motherless wild child on the verge of becoming a mother herself. Her mother, who once protected and nurtured the family, died giving birth to her youngest son (“She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again” [2]). Formally, Salvage the Bones is a “hermetic” narrative, one that transports its readers into what is in some senses a wild space set apart, as well as a private familial space and an intense and lyrical interior space: Esch is a narrator whose silent words—nobody within the story hears most of what she thinks—conjure a world.6 This world of destructive quasi-human and non-human mothers (the sorceress Medea, the hurricane named “Katrina” and the pitbull called “China”) encodes a melancholic response to the loss of Esch’s own mother while simultaneously figuring the catastrophe of social abandonment—the violent return of and to a “state of nature.” In this way, Salvage the Bones, I will argue, articulates a theory of maternal sovereignty, and it does so by posing several pressing questions: Do mothers have the power of life and death in relationship to their children? Is such a power a terrible one? Does one only have such power when one is powerless, when, as Toni Morrison writes in another context, “there is no protection” (A Mercy 195)?

Maternal Omnipotence/Maternal Choice Salvage the Bones is suffused with the loss of a mother several years after her death (“I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom” [22]) and by a striking array of destructive mothers, both fantastic and real. Esch, whose resources are markedly limited, encounters Medea and Addie Bundren in the summer reading assigned to her by her English teacher—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Her brother, Skeetah, owns a pitbull, the fierce China, who gives birth at the beginning of the novel, repeating for Esch the scene in which her own mother gave birth. “I’ve never seen her [China] so gentle,” Esch marvels. I don’t know what I thought she would do once she had them: sit on them and smother them maybe. Bite them. Turn their skulls to bits

6 For Salvage the Bones as a “hermetic” narrative, see Jellenik, 227.

108  Naomi Morgenstern of bone and blood. But she doesn’t do any of that. Instead she stands over them, her on one side and Skeetah [Esch’s brother] on the other like a pair of proud parents, and she licks. (17) Finally, there is the hurricane, herself. Esch’s father works doggedly through the first part of the novel to protect his family from the storm, telling his children, “The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina” (124). So there is a riddle here: if Esch loses her beloved, gentle and nurturing “good” mother, why does the mother return with such threatening and potentially infanticidal “bad” force? Or perhaps this is not such a riddle: literary and psychoanalytic readers are certainly well-versed in reversal (for the primer to this approach, see Freud on “reversal into the opposite”). But Ward’s novel, I will argue, supplements and displaces any merely psychological account (as if there were any such thing) and thus more profoundly problematizes the relationship between fantasy and the real, while gesturing toward a posthumanist ontology: the world, not composed of discrete beings in a hierarchical structure of power relations, but the world [as] intra-activity in its differential mattering. . . . Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. (Barad 135, 140) If the association of black human beings with nature as animality and materiality threatens to merely inhabit and repeat racist ideology, “posthumanist” thought and Ward’s novel ultimately suggest an alternative understanding, and a decidedly critical position in relationship to neoliberal humanism.7 Psychoanalysis has many stories to tell about omnipotent mothers. In a chapter called “The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality,” Jessica Benjamin outlines these tales. Her own contribution emphasizes that “omnipotence” is not a “real” stage but

7 There are, of course, many versions of “posthumanism” in circulation in contemporary critical discourse. My emphasis follows critics like Wolfe and Haraway in being “posthumanist” and not “posthuman.” I see feminist materialist scholarship as being in continuity with poststructuralist thought that does not favor or choose the cultural over the natural (as many accounts of “the linguistic turn” would suggest) but precisely deconstructs, and thus displaces, this opposition. Of particular interest and importance in this context is the relationship between constructions of race, experiences of racialization and posthumanist discourse. For useful recent discussions of these intersections, see Jackson, Harris and Ellis.

Maternal Sovereignty 109 always only a projection backward, both by the subject and by psychoanalytic discourse itself (“it is necessary to analyze how the deeply rooted cultural bifurcation of all experience under the poles of heterosexually organized gender attenuates recognition of the mother’s subjectivity and perpetuates the fantasy of omnipotence” [85]). Benjamin challenges versions of psychoanalysis that invoke a scene involving an absolutely powerless infant and an all-powerful mother in order to account for certain pervasive fantasies of the maternal. What Benjamin suggests instead is that there is always already a glimmer of recognition between mother and child and that the infant experiences a series of developmental, but never wholly resolvable, crises of intersubjective recognition. These are crises of what D. W. Winnicott has called “destruction” and “survival.” The destructive infant needs the mother to survive its destructiveness, providing evidence and an experience of the mother’s reality beyond the infant’s fantasy: if she survives, she can be encountered, experienced and therefore “used” as an “other” that exists beyond the child’s fantastic/ subjective control.8 The mother who either “retaliates” or “gives way” in this theoretical narrative conversely fails to survive, precisely by conforming to the terms of the infantile fantasy; she is all powerful or powerless (the omnipotence “belongs” to the mother in the first instance and to the child in the second). But, crucially, omnipotence (according to Winnicott and Benjamin) is not ever something to be developmentally overcome. Instead, it remains in play, and thus the developmental story is not just a developmental story. If we could overcome fantasies of omnipotence, we could never be in “love” or be “held”—and who would want that! Benjamin writes, Winnicott’s concept can be seen as a paradigm for the ongoing oscillations between omnipotence and recognition throughout life rather than as a strictly sequential notion, in which the infant begins in omnipotence and moves out toward reality in a unilinear fashion . . . We do not suppress our fantasy that the other could perfectly meet our wishes, but we acknowledge it as fantasy, tolerate its distance from reality. (91) On the one hand, then, Salvage the Bones aligns very much with a feminist psychoanalytic account such as the one offered by Benjamin.

8 See Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications”: “It is generally understood that the reality principle involves the individual in anger and reactive destruction, but my thesis is that the destruction plays its part in making the reality, placing the object outside the self. For this to happen, favourable conditions are necessary” (91).

110  Naomi Morgenstern It is precisely because Esch’s mother does not “survive” or survive that she cannot be “good enough” and orchestrate the work of separation in time. She thus returns as an awesome infanticidal force, split into “good” and “bad” manifestations. Or, to put it a slightly different way, one sees in Salvage the Bones how the work of mourning is blocked by melancholia (the beloved object, narcissistically inseparable from the subject, is lost too soon), and this melancholic atmosphere is represented in the text by way of the destructive maternal figures: “The alternative to a defensive fantasy of omnipotence is the labor of mourning,” writes Benjamin, “which requires the solidarity of the witnessing other” (113).9 And what is more, I would argue, Salvage the Bones intensifies this melancholic structure and affect via Esch’s pregnancy, which poignantly literalizes the already literalizing feel of melancholia.10 Benjamin’s understanding of the labor of mourning as an alternative to the defensive fantasy of omnipotence presents itself as a socio-political critique of patriarchal and heteronormative ideology and the corresponding ideals of family formation: “How does one challenge such a myth [of a totally englobing mother]?” Benjamin asks. “Not by defending the paternal function and heterosexuality as Kristeva does, but by grasping the real ambivalence of the maternal relation, and thus of the paternal relation as well” (99). However, when juxtaposed with a text like Ward’s, Benjamin’s insight reads as if it were confined to a context that it simultaneously strains against. What I mean by this is that Benjamin’s critical apparatus seems to rely on a secured opposition between fantasy and reality, even as her theory questions the stability of this relation precisely: the “real” world must be relatively safe (“good enough”) even if the psychic terrain is perilous. Ward’s novel, in contrast, exposes the limitations of such theoretical narratives and asks us to rethink certain paradigms when they are pushed to their limits. Are “destruction” and “survival” terms to be understood figuratively or literally? Or, are we not so sure, anymore, that this opposition holds water? Not only does Esch’s mother   9 One trajectory offered by Salvage proceeds from Esch’s intense and lyrical isolation to the promise of a witnessing community; her fatherless child will have “many daddies” (255). 10 Here, I am drawing particularly on Freud’s foundational essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud suggests that melancholia is akin to mourning but also has a more regressive component that results from the pre-mature loss of a love object. In addition, melancholia involves far more ambivalence and a markedly destructive component. An extensive literature on mourning and melancholia reverses or otherwise complicates the relationship between Freud’s terms. A full discussion of this literature is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that I am not interested in making a hard, fast opposition between the terms; indeed, I am more struck by the ways in which they inhabit one another. Freud writes that melancholia “borrows some of its features from mourning and others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism . . . the loss of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love relationships to make itself effective and come into the open” (259–60).

Maternal Sovereignty 111 “fail” to survive but the “world” Esch inhabits is itself in danger and is indeed destroyed: there is nothing but mangled wood and steel in a great pile, and suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it. (251) So while Salvage the Bones’ depiction of destruction is of the utmost psychological significance, it also suggests a profound ontological rupture that psychoanalytic discourse characteristically fails to address. I have suggested that destructive figures in Salvage the Bones simultaneously encode Esch’s psychic turmoil and the experience of social abandonment that undoes the very opposition between culture and nature. But destruction, in Ward’s novel, reveals yet another layer of figurative significance. In Maternal Thinking, Sarah Ruddick contemplates the strange power of mothers and does so, in part, by suggesting that all mothers are adoptive. And this is a surprisingly complex point. Ruddick denaturalizes maternity (motherhood as maternal instinct), and this serves the purpose of disrupting the ideological equation of woman with mother: “In any culture, maternal commitment is far more voluntary than people like to believe” (22). But Ruddick’s fascinating formulation goes deeper, as it also suggests that maternity requires an ethical supplement; any woman must “adopt” her maternal responsibility: “Even the most passionately loving birthgiver engages in a social, adoptive act when she commits herself to sustain an infant in the world” (51). And this is precisely what we witness in Ward’s narrative; Esch may not have “chosen” to become pregnant, yet all the same, she will choose to take up her maternal identity, and this decision requires the temporal interval—the time of decision—that forms the narrative, even as there is simultaneously no time for decision. On a certain level, indeed, the decision—if one can call it that—takes the form of the very destruction of the world that Esch inhabits; “apocalypse” becomes a way to represent the madness of maternal decision and what it means to assume sovereign power over another human life: the mother as fierce pitbull, the mother as infanticidal Medea, the mother as sublime Katrina. Any decision, it would seem, to make more life, to nurture life, decides again on survival and thus constitutes a form of founding violence (an affirmation without transcendental guarantee), and this affirmation, without a doubt, takes on a particular significance in reference to African American life and literature; it says, “Black Life Matters.”11 11 For one approach to ethics without transcendental guarantee, see Arendt. Arendt’s interest in the category of natality makes her work of particular interest for thinking

112  Naomi Morgenstern The figure of the mother as infanticidal Medea recalls, of course, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or more pointedly, Stanley Crouch’s infamous review of that novel. Writing in the New Republic in October of 1987, Crouch claimed that Beloved set out to prove that “Afro-Americans are the result of a cruel determinism,” a determinism that is also “responsible for the character of Sethe, the earth mother heroine who might be called Aunt Medea.”12 But Ward’s novel, in taking on this comparison (between the enslaved or impoverished black mother and Medea), both signals that Beloved is a crucial intertext and reclaims the figure of Medea for a reconsideration of maternal sovereignty. A reader who follows Esch into Edith Hamilton’s Mythology will find, too, that Medea is something other than monstrous and in fact could be seen as a figure for Ruddick’s maternal ethics.13 Medea makes the “dreadful” decision to kill her children because, as Edith Hamilton writes, There was no protection for her children, no help for them anywhere. A slave’s life might be theirs, nothing more. “I will not let them live for strangers to ill-use,” she thought—“To die by other hands more merciless than mine. / No; I who gave them life will give them death.” (180) Esch’s identification with Medea is immediate and passionate (“it grabs me by the throat” [38]), even as, for the reader, this identification signals the limitations of what Esch is able to conceptualize—limitations produced and reproduced by racial inequality. Dorothy Roberts has written extensively on the entwinement of racial inequality and reproductive rights advocacy in the United States: “Racism has stunted Americans’ imagination of reproductive policies that would benefit everyone,” writes Roberts (Killing 311): The primary concern of white, middle-class women centers on laws that restrict choices otherwise available to them, such as statutes that make it more difficult to obtain an abortion. Black women, on the about contemporary representations of maternity: “It is in the very nature of a beginning,” writes Arendt, “to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space” (206). 12 Behind Sethe, of course, lies the historical figure of Margaret Garner. 13 The figure of Medea also circulates, somewhat notoriously, in the comic plays and films of Tyler Perry. Spike Lee, for one, has referred to Perry’s Madea character as an example of “coonery buffoonery.” Perry’s Madea is a hyperbolically aggressive but also, significantly, protective mother.

Maternal Sovereignty 113 other hand, especially those who are poor, must deal with a whole range of forces that impair their choices. (Roberts, Killing 300) In this context, an easy opposition between prolife and prochoice constitutes its own form of violence. It comprehends only the opposition Christian/conservative vs. liberal/secular/feminist and in so doing merely reinforces reductive notions of both life and choice. While the destruction of Katrina is no mere allegory for Esch’s maternal predicament, then, it is also an allegory for Esch’s maternal predicament. Esch chooses even as she has no choice (“These are my options and they narrow to none,” she thinks, when contemplating the means of obtaining an abortion). Salvage the Bones is a peculiar bildungsroman in which a wild child will come to anticipate recognition for herself in the role that has been foisted upon her.14

Social Abandonment and Feral Mothers The day before the hurricane hits, the family receives a recorded phone call from the state government that goes out to everyone in the area: A man’s voice speaks; he sounds like a computer, like he has an iron throat. . . . When Mama was living, she picked it up. . . . Randall has answered since we lost Mama; he lets it play at least once each summer. Skeetah answered once and hung up. . . . Junior has never picked it up, and neither has Daddy. I picked it up for the first time yesterday. . . . Mandatory evacuation. Hurricane making landfall tomorrow. If you choose to stay in your home and have not evacuated by this time, we are not responsible. You have been warned. And these could be the consequences of your actions. There is a list. And I do not know if he says this, but this is what it feels like: You can die. (217) “We are not responsible,” says the recording, the computer voice, suggesting only a responsibility for its declaration of non-responsibility. 14 Elsewhere, I have explored writings in which disempowered subjects encounter their relationship—perversely enough—to sovereignty or absolute responsibility (see my Wild Child). Toni Morrison is the obvious example that comes to mind, and I read Ward as very much in continuity with the set of ethical questions that Morrison has asked us to take on. It is as if Ward’s girl/mother survives an encounter with the slave mother who must decide whether or not to kill or abandon her own child. A range of contemporary narratives (that are not so obviously about disempowered subjects) also figure the parent as sovereign in a post-apocalyptic world akin to a Hobbesian state of nature. See, for example, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, and Matt Palmer’s film, Calibre (2019).

114  Naomi Morgenstern Social abandonment here means that no human subject, individual or collective, remains to occupy the position of protection and authority. The Batiste family is abandoned, not just because they are “motherless” (“When Mama was living, she picked it up”); they are clearly abandoned by the state, too. This is the crucial context in which Esch experiences her subjecthood, and “formally,” this experience is both visible and nearly invisible. The text is Esch’s passionate and lyrical voice, and this makes our witnessing of her father’s care and the intense relations in the Pit and among Esch’s siblings and extended family possible. Yet, the very ground the Batistes stand on is undermined and ultimately saturated with the forces that render their lives precarious (literally and figuratively). Esch, for example, tells the story of her grandfather, who allowed the white men he worked with to dig for clay on his property. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted in exchange for cash, Esch explains, until he thought the earth would give under the water, that the pond would spread and gobble up the property and make it a swamp. . . . He died soon after from mouth cancer, or at least that’s what Mother Lizbeth used to tell us when we were little. (14) Esch’s limited perspective on these events reminds us of the precariously unprotected state that African Americans like her grandfather find themselves in when they enter into private contractual relations with whites. Contracts between black and white men—even those who work together—are not equal (the contract is not enforced by a sovereign state in whose eyes all persons would ostensibly enjoy the same standing). But what Papa Joseph’s story also suggests is that a failure to comply with the terms of the “contract,” on the part of the black subject, may result in extrajudicial fatal violence (even if, as in this case, complying would amount to consenting to one’s own destruction—the loss of home and land). Esch’s grandmother offers “care” to the children in the form of the fiction of an invasive fatal illness; telling this story about Papa Joseph, she spares the children: cancer is the good option. This brief episode thus manages to condense racial inequality, environmental crisis, the failure of social protection and maternal care, and short-hand for this inter-related set of concerns is the term “privatization.” Dorothy Roberts glosses privatization as “the transfer of services from the welfare state to the private realm of family and market,” a process that, she argues, links women across class and racial divides (“Privatization” 1344). Surely, it is this same structure of “privatization” that is encoded in Ward’s novel by way of the complete absence of any visible health care. The novel powerfully registers the continued impact of stratified reproduction in the United States and suggests that what “privatization”

Maternal Sovereignty 115 means, for the most disenfranchised of subjects, is abandonment to a “state of nature” that is, in turn, largely produced by neoliberal privatization. “What holds families or societies together in neoliberal regimes,” asks Wendy Brown, “when neoliberal reason casts each human, positively and normatively, across every domain of existence, as self-investing entrepreneurial capital, responsible for itself and striving to appreciate its value vis-à-vis other capital entities?” How, she continues, “does this comport with the need-based, explicitly interdependent, affective, and frequently sacrificial domain of family relations?” (102).15 Salvage the Bones depicts the coincidence of a singular psychological subject and a larger imagined engagement with an ethics of maternity in just such an atrophied social context. For Esch and for the novel, these personal and social crises of protection, as I have argued, call up striking figures of destructive maternal sovereignty—Medea, China and Katrina—that effectively overlap with one another as they participate in the same fantastic constellation. In the following passage, for example, Katrina, “the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered” becomes Medea becomes China becomes Katrina: Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother, who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. . . . She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. (255) At such moments, birth itself is indistinguishable from abandonment, testifying to both the psychological work of destruction and survival and the particularity of impoverished black life, life that is exposed to what we might call “a state of nature.” To invoke a state of nature condition is to recall the particular role of the mother in Thomas Hobbes’s foundational political philosophy. In Leviathan, Hobbes suggests that, in the absence of any legal or contractual structure, dominion over the child is “in the mother”: Again, seeing the infant is first in the power of the Mother, so as she may either nourish it or expose it; if she nourish it, it oweth its life

15 See Brown’s consideration of “the Gender of Homo Oeconomicus” (104) in this same study, as well as Bonnie Honig’s provocative suggestion that “neoliberalization” may be its own Winnicottian form of “reality testing”: “acting out the urge to destroy public things, while needing them to survive so as to learn limitation and finitude” (56).

116  Naomi Morgenstern to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other; and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers. (140) Approaching the mother as a sovereign figure in the state of nature suggests why we might want to follow Sara Ruddick in thinking about the place of a certain founding violence in the maternal relation (“Both maternal work and the thinking that is provoked by it are decisively shaped by the possibility that any mother may refuse to see creatures as children or to respond to them as complicated, fragile and needy” [Ruddick 22]). But both Hobbes and Ruddick also remind us of the significance of what we might call a founding fictionality, or faith, that is inseparable from the work of nurturing life (note Ruddick’s use of the minimal word “as” in the preceding). To recognize the other as one worthy of care, one who demands care, always involves a certain performative supplement (“see[ing] creatures as children”). This maternal ethic demands what we might call, for all its problematic history, the fiction of humanization. Indeed, Ward’s story helps us to see why these two aspects of maternal sovereignty—the violence and the fictionality—are indissociable.16 In the midst of the hurricane, Esch both imagines a “whole” idea of a baby and figures the force of the baby’s own performative utterance: “I lie awake and cannot see anything but that baby, the baby I have formed whole in my head, a black Athena, who reaches for me. Who gives me that name as if [italics added] it is mine: Mama” (219). For Esch, the loss of her mother and the abandonment by the state means that she finds herself in a contemporary state of nature, which she interprets through her reading of Greek myth and her subsequent processes of classical identification and cross-species recognition. Esch experiences a certain invisibility when out in the world that is not the world of the Pit: “I am small, dark: invisible. I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen” (28). But she also recognizes herself in the at once vulnerable and powerful figure of Medea: Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by the throat. . . . She has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in hard wind; makes her double in two. I know her. (38) 16 In his discussion of the relationship between the mother and the victor in Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty, Thomas J. Lewis also invokes this performative aspect of sovereign (maternal) power: “If conquerors were to treat the defeated as if they had a right to consent, conquerors may be able to replace the misery of war with the benefits of peace. If mothers fail to treat their children as if they had a right to consent, they could expect to raise enemies” (57, italics added).

Maternal Sovereignty 117 And, while the novel does not close with any assurance of a newly constituted, non-precarious social order, it does imagine an alternative form of recognition, a precise alternate to the patriarchal recognition classically thought to grant legitimacy to a subject, via, for example, the father’s name. Salvage the Bones tells a story in which survival requires not only materialized sustenance but also a kind of psychic and social viability. To survive, to be, Esch “knows,” for all the potential self-destructiveness of her passion, is to be recognized: “To make them know.” These are precisely Skeetah’s words to his dog, China, when she fights Kilo: “Make them know make them know make them know they can’t live without you, Skeetah says. China hears. Hello, father, she says, tonguing Kilo. I don’t have milk for you” (175). If Esch recognizes herself in Medea, then, she ultimately experiences herself as recognized by China. Indeed, the relationship between Esch and China is the most challenging one to think through and think about. The novel opens with China giving birth to her puppies, and this scene repeats and displaces the scene of Esch’s mother’s death after giving birth to Esch’s younger brother, Junior. China is also depicted in a fight-asprimal-scene battle with Kilo, the “father” of her puppies, and Esch repeats this scene when she attacks Manny: I hit his Adam’s apple with the V where my thumb and pointer finger cross. He chokes. . . . This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood. (204) Esch is Medea and China. Most significantly, the novel ends with an anticipation of the missing China’s return in the wake of the storm’s violent ravages, and it is that closing scene of non-human recognition that I want to turn to by way of conclusion. Why, I want to ask, does this novel about social survival close by associating futurity and maternal sovereignty with inter-species recognition? Salvage the Bones is written, for the most part, in the present tense (“Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies” [1]), but it ends with a vision of the future. The family has survived the hurricane and they are left to salvage, to make their world again; they are “the wild things of Bois Sauvage”: I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. (255)

118  Naomi Morgenstern But China has been lost, and the devoted Skeeter has returned to the Pit to await her return. Esch and the others return to be with him. This is how the novel ends: He [Skeeter] will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving. China. She will return standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence. She will know that I am a mother. (258) Salvage the Bones ends with a recognition (China’s recognition of Esch) that is simultaneously anticipated and fulfilled at a fantastic level. This will happen. The grammatical structure conveys a kind of performative faith required for survival and for the re-constitution of a world; it partakes of prophesy (“He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire”). The figures with whom Esch identifies, I have argued (Medea, China, Katrina), are suggestive of both a posthumanist ontology (a touch of the divine, the animal, the weather) and of what it means to be taken to the edge of existence, to be radically exposed.17 In depicting Esch’s desire to seek recognition and sisterhood from an “animal,” from China, Ward also engages (again recalling Morrison) a densely knotted set of familiar questions about gendering and racialization. In a recent article on Beloved, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson writes of Morrison’s take on racialization as animalization: “Instead of performing a straightforward rejection of racially oppressive imagery,” Jackson writes, “[Morrison’s] text exposes the complexity and contradictions that produce blackness and animality as proxies, not through the refutation of bestial imagery but rather through its magnification and deconstruction” (108). A related case could certainly be made for the “magnification and deconstruction”

17 To be seen by the “animal,” Derrida writes, is to be seen as one to whom “everything can happen . . . I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself” (12). Derrida deploys the slippage between Je suis (I am) and the verb suivre, “to follow,” throughout this text. This formulation obliquely registers Esch’s relationship to what I am calling maternal sovereignty.

Maternal Sovereignty 119 of blackness and (human) femaleness as animality in Salvage the Bones. In Ward’s novel, we do not encounter an Adam who will name his fellow beasts but rather a liminal child/woman who will be named, summoned into being, sustained in her being, by a fierce fellow mother-animal (“what happens to the fraternity of brothers,” Derrida asks, “when an animal appears on the scene?” [12]). For Derrida (in The Animal That Therefore I Am), the animal gaze is like the gaze of (a) God: “the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human,” (66) and in a scene that we might juxtapose with Ward’s, Derrida describes his female cat seeing him naked in the bathroom in the morning. This mundane scene prompts Derrida to reflect on a crucial distinction within the tradition of Western philosophy: In the first place, there are texts signed by people who have no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal. . . . Their discourses are sound and profound, but everything in them goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked by an animal that addressed them . . . That category of discourse, texts, signatories . . . is by far the one that occurs most abundantly. (13) The other “category of discourse” is far more unstable and is found, Derrida writes, “among those signatories who are first and foremost poets or prophets . . . men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them” (14). In the doubleness of this Western tradition, we recognize epistemology (the human attempt to master the animal) working to disavow ontological instability. Salvage the Bones participates in what Derrida refers to as the prophetic (and poetic) mode, and thereby imagines a new world that unsettles; China’s promise to recognize Esch disrupts patriarchal humanism with its offer of an alternative myth but without any easy affirmation. When China recognizes Esch, Esch “decides” to become a mother, but the complicated temporality here suggests that the decision both will happen and is forever suspended in a perpetual future. The gift of recognition is foreseen by one for whom social recognition is hardly forthcoming, and this is the recognition of an overwhelming force, of mother as protector with the power of life and death over her child. How will she weather this awesome responsibility?

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1963.

120  Naomi Morgenstern Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 120–54. Benjamin, Jessica. “The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality.” Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Blitstein, Ryan. “Racism’s Hidden Toll.” Pacific Standard, 15 Jun. 2009. https:// psmag.com/social-justice/racisms-hidden-toll-3643. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Crouch, Stanley. “Aunt Medea: Beloved by Toni Morrison.” New Republic, 19 Oct. 1987, pp. 38–42. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. Dimock, Wai Chee. “World History According to Katrina.” Differences, vol. 19, no. 2, 2008, pp. 35–53. Ellis, Cristin. Antebellum Posthumanism: Race and Materiality in the MidNineteenth Century. New York: Fordham, 2018. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by and Trans. James Strachey, vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 237–58. Print. Geronimus, Arline. “The Weathering Hypothesis and the Health of AfricanAmerican Women and Infants: Evidence and Speculations.” Ethnicity and Disease, vol. 92, no. 2, Summer 1992, pp. 207–21. Giroux, Henry A. Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Biopolitics of Disposability. New York: Routledge, 2014. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. [1942] New York: Grand Central, 1999. Haraway, Donna. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge UP, 1996. Honig, Bonnie. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. New York: Fordham, 2017. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism.” Feminist Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 669–85. ———. “Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 25, no. 1/2, Fall/ Winter 2016, pp. 95–136. Jellenik, Glenn. “Re-shaping the Narrative: Pulling Focus/Pushing Boundaries in Fictional Representations of Hurricane Katrina.” Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity, edited by Mary Ruth Marotte, and Glenn Jellenik. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, 227. Johnson, Cedric, The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Lee, Spike. “Spike Lee on Our World with Black Enterprise.” www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dK8ibYjciMc. Lewis, Thomas J. “Recognizing Rights: Hobbes on the Authority of Mothers and Conquerors.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 36, no. 1, 2003, pp. 39–60.

Maternal Sovereignty 121 Marotte, Mary Ruth, and Glenn Jellenik, eds. Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Martin, Nina, et al. “Lost Mothers: Maternal Care and Preventable Deaths.” Propublica.org. www.propublica.org/series/lost-mothers. Martin, Nina, and Renee Montagne. “Black Mothers Keep Dying After Giving Birth. Shalon Irving’s Story Explains Why.” All Things Considered (NPR), 7 Dec. 2017. www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dyingafter-giving-birth-shalon-irvings-story-explains-why. From the NPR.org series, “Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the U.S.” www.npr.org/series/5439283 89/lost-mothers. Morgenstern, Naomi. WildChild: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018. Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Vintage, 2008. ———. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1994, pp. 368–98. Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. Print. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2019. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. “Privatization and Punishment in the New Age of Reprogenetics.” Emory Law Journal, vol. 54, no. 3, 2005, pp. 1343–60. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2009. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham NC: Duke UP, 2016. Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina” Material Feminisms, edited by in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008, pp. 188–213. Villarosa, Linda. “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-orDeath Crisis.” The New York Times Magazine, 11 Apr. 2018. www.nytimes. com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality. html. Wailoo, Keith, and Karen M. O’Neill, eds. Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America. New York: Rutgers, 2010. Waldman, Annie. “How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers.” Propublica. org. 27 Dec. 2017. www.propublica.org/article/how-hospitals-are-failing-blackmothers. Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Winnicott, D.W. “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications.” Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 86–92. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2009.

7 Narrating the Raced Subject Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Literature of Modernism Sheldon George

Toni Morrison’s Jazz aims to constitute in readers an ethical cynicism about literary representations of race. The novel implements this aim through a narrator who gets everything wrong about its racialized characters—the plot of their story, their nature as characters. Narration, tied to a storyteller capable of seeing characters as “exotic,” obstructs readers’ acceptance of narrative omniscience and reliability (Jazz 221). The novel undermines representational authority by emphasizing a narrative voice that not only wishes characters harm—“so that I can describe it”—but also revels in the literary prerogative to “break lives to prove I can mend them back again” (219). Jazz indicts its narrator in order to convey a broad critique of narrative representations of race, in particular, the representations of raced subjectivity in Modernist novels. The narrating voice admits of the characters, “It never occurred to me that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of” (221). Through a narrator who confesses to having “missed the people altogether” (220), Jazz both highlights the limitations of literary knowledge of race and brings to readers’ attention ethical issues of narrative representation and authority. Scholars of the novel like Dorothy Hale have pointed to the ethical and “aesthetic effect” of contemporary “novelistic subjectivity” upon readers, suggesting that the realism of today’s novels allows us to experience each character as if she is a real “person” while also recognizing her “as artistic instrument” controlled by a narrating or authorial authority (904). Contemporary narrative form itself, argues Hale, leads us to decry the “abuse of representational power” in the novel, which makes “alltoo-visible” the “incarceration of subjectivity by aesthetic form” (903). Narration can be felt not just as what Hale calls “a potential encroachment on the existential freedoms of characters,” but as an active assault on the lived experiences of represented groups (903), especially if the represented character is racialized. Flawed narrative representation in Jazz produces for readers a heightened awareness of not only the narrator’s hegemonic relation to characters but also the text’s existence within a larger contextual frame that

Narrating the Raced Subject 123 is both literary and social. Situated in the 1920s, Toni Morrison’s Jazz refutes conceptions of racial subjectivity that surface in the Modernist literary canon of that period. Jazz marshals this critique through its literary allusions, offering in the narrator’s voice a coalescing of certain racial views emblematic of the Modernist canon itself. Through foregrounding a narrator who misses the people by uncritically echoing descriptions of alienation, pain and race found particularly in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, Morrison suggests this canon is impoverished in its representations, lacking the adaptability necessary for proper rendering of complex racialized subjectivities. Reorienting our routine understanding of Modern subjects as newly fragmented by the horrors of World War I, Jazz indicates that all modern subjectivity is racialized subjectivity, rooted in a fragmented sense of self that emerged out of the atrocity of slavery. The novel affirms Morrison’s explicit assertion in her prose writings that modern life “begins with slavery,” which restructured identities and forced upon subjects, before the Modernist 1920s, “certain kinds of dissolutions, the loss of and need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability” (quoted in Gilroy, 221). These dissolutions involved not only a racialization of identity but also a remapping of cultural origins. Jazz signals this remapping through characters’ pursuit of maternal forebearers. Allusively tying the absence of textual female progenitors to a broader historical forgetting by Western civilization of its hybridized cultural origins, Jazz suggests these origins are ultimately Afro-Asiatic Egyptian. The novel’s epigraph signals such origin through the primogenitive figure of Thunder, Perfect Mind—the Coptic goddess whose hybridity suggests a route toward reconciling the fragmented subjectivity plaguing the Modern subject. But Jazz emphasizes an image of the Modernist canon as a wounded body. In the figure of Golden Gray, it symbolizes this canon as an injured amputee subjected to its own racially inspired dismemberment. This chapter combines formalist understandings of literary and historical allusion with reader response insights into the operations of texts. Describing Jazz’s efforts to specify and challenge Modernist misrepresentations of racialized subjectivity—through the novel’s contextualizing allusions to history, Morrison’s own previous texts and the writing of 1920s African American author Jean Toomer—, this chapter addresses the ethical impact of Jazz upon audiences primed for retreat from the flawed descriptions of the novel’s narrator. Ultimately, it displays Jazz’s redirection of its audience toward a new liberatory mode of reading. Contrary to the readings of the contemporary novel highlighted by Hale, this liberating mode of reading depends upon Jazz producing interpretive freedom within the social and literary restrictions that shape narrative form. Embracing a particularly improvisational narrative style modeled after the artistry of jazz music, the novel presents itself as a consistent structuring frame for narrative interpretation but rejects the power of structure

124  Sheldon George to restrain meaning for active readers. Functioning like the percussive rhythm through which a jazz band synchronizes with the flourishes and departures of a lead performer’s musical inventions, Jazz models a reading process that is as distinctively liberatory and communal as the collective improvisation of a jazz performance.

Allusion, Irony and Context Jazz is a highly allusive text, insisting that interpretive meaning and ethical understanding emerge through contextual awareness. The novel unsettles any expected epistemics of race through an interplay between the text and the reader, who must review and ethically revise both her racial knowledge and the contextual frames that grant race its meaning. This sort of insistence on allusive context seems at odds with other works centered upon the Modern and with the formalist or New Critical approaches that grew out of scholarly analyses of Modernist authors. Inspired by the calls of Modernists like T. S. Eliot for an “extinction of personality” in the created art work (117), seminal New Critics like Monroe C. Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt insisted that the creation of art must be seen as “an action of the mind which cuts off roots” and “melts away context” to produce universal meanings (12). But Eliot’s insistence on literary allusions in his own poetry forced Beardsley, Wimsatt and particularly New Critic Cleanth Brooks toward a conceptualization of context that proves useful for thinking about Morrison’s work. Brooks came to emphasize the significance of context in his description of irony as a central principle of literary structure, one in which “the meaning of any particular [textual] item is modified by the context” in which it is presented (730). Brooks’s explanation of how the “total meaning” (740) of the artistic work depends upon the “thrust and counter thrust” between its formal literary elements and their contextual presentation suggests an unexpected New Critical frame for reading Morrison’s artistry. When text and context are in balance, argues Brooks, the artwork takes on a synthesized coherence and solidity reminiscent of an arch, in which the “very forces which are calculated to drag the stones to the ground actually provide the principle of support” (733). The work of art, for Brooks, can only “come to terms with itself” when it is able to “fuse” elements that seem “hostile” or “irrelevant and discordant” with each other (732). Through allusive context, I suggest, Jazz emphasizes its discordance with prior meanings that themselves must be rewritten to create a synthesized, coherent understanding of racial subjectivity. Jazz begins this rewriting with its narrator’s utterance of an epistemic assertion: “Sth, I know that woman” (3). Through the speakerly and polysemic word “Sth,” the novel delimits the interpretive context available to its readers. This “Sth” functions as part of what reader response theory calls the text’s blueprint—the structure that guides our reading. It is a distinctive “verbal symbol” or textual element of the literary

Narrating the Raced Subject 125 work that would normally activate “particular associations or feelingtones created by [the reader’s] past experiences” in “actual life or in literature” (Rosenblatt 11). Seeming, at first, to evoke the sense of a disclosure among intimates already expressed in Morrison’s earlier works— particularly in the opening words of The Bluest Eye: “Quiet as it’s kept”—, the novel’s initial address arrives to our ears as a hail to join the narrator in vicarious enjoyment of its scandalous tale. The woman of whom the narrator speaks is Violet, a fifty-year-old denizen of Harlem whose husband, Joe Trace, shot the teenage lover with whom he had an affair. Our lack of familiarity with this word, “Sth,” also makes of it what reader response theory would identify as a uniquely “indeterminate” element of the text, one whose meaning can only be precisely framed by the narrative itself (Iser 24). Reread in the context of the novel’s title, Jazz, the “Sth” evokes the scenery of the jazz club, emulating the percussive sound of cymbals that may mark the beginning of a jazz number. The narrator and voyeuristic reader are positioned at a distance, situated as observers of a racialized protagonist about whom the narrative professes to hold intimate knowledge. Jarring us from our expected intimacy, the word “Sth” reframes narrative disclosure as the gossip of a distant viewer. The performance that is thus spotlighted is the narrator’s own fantastical recitals about race and identity. By drawing our attention to the narrator’s performance, Jazz encourages us to experience its narrative as “an event in time,” the final meaning of which emerges through an active transaction between the reader and the text (Rosenblatt 12). In this transaction, contextual meaning brought to the text from the reader’s own experiences makes it possible for the text itself to revise both the reader’s understanding of what she reads and the preconceptions that guide her. As Stanley Fish argues, where readers “make [the] meaning” of any literary text, they do so by relying upon “culturally derived interpretive categories” (Fish 1030). These “publically available systems of intelligibility” furnish us with “categories of understanding”—such as race—that make us “products of patterns of social and cultural thought” (1028). Literature itself contributes to such thought, reinforcing and, in the case of Morrison’s Jazz, questioning our categories of understanding. In the reading process, the text’s function as blueprint makes it capable of readjusting elements of our projections that are either irrelevant or cannot be coherently integrated into its foregrounded meaning (Rosenblatt 11). Through such foregrounding, however, Jazz orders for readers a self-correcting encounter with both its literary world and the external world upon which it draws to make meaning.

Speaking Back to Woolf and Faulkner The poet and spokesperson for Modernism, T. S. Eliot, described the “mature” artist (117) as rooted in a “historical sense” of the artistry

126  Sheldon George that came before him or her (115). No contemporary writer exemplifies this historical sense better than Morrison. Eliot claimed that the created work of the mature artist modifies both the existing understanding of artistry and the course of future artistic productions. Morrison’s novel allows for such modification. Jazz revises Modernist racial sensibilities articulated in the writings of Woolf and Faulkner and echoed in the narrator’s interpretation of Jazz’s tale (903). It presents the narrator’s selfawareness and understanding of the novel’s characters as impeded by the kind of isolationist introspection that grounds the Modernist subjectivity of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. While isolation figures as a mode of coping with the Modern world in Woolf—as a paradoxical means for the inner self to manage the alienation it confronts externally—Morrison links isolation to a further fragmenting of her characters’ identities. The isolated subject lacks contextual awareness, and, particularly through allusion to Faulkner’s texts, Jazz presents such a lack as the source of false desires, projected onto racial others, that can only be maintained through a privileging of whiteness. While Faulkner’s characters reject what is referred to in Light in August as the black “primogenitive” mother—the image of an originary maternal other—Morrison’s novel insistently focuses on the absence of female ancestors as the source of characters’ experiences of alienation and psychic fragmentation. What is most pronounced in the narrator of Jazz is not just a conviction that characters are entirely knowable but also a reluctance to be known by others. The narrator remanifests Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway’s opinion that she “knew people almost by instinct” (Woolf 9); Mrs. Dalloway’s feeling that she is “outside,” “far out to sea and alone” but simultaneously “looking on” upon the alienated world around her (Woolf 9), is accentuated in the desire of Jazz’s narrator to “watch everything and everyone and try to figure out their plans” (Jazz 8). By remaining closed “off in places” (Jazz 9) and reluctant to display “public love” (229) for any “partner” who may leave “you standing” in wait for their “attention” (9), Jazz’s narrator recalls and exaggerates not just Mrs. Dalloway’s “sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown” (Woolf 11) but also her belief that “there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife, a gulf” that “one must respect” (120). It is this solitary gulf between the narrator and characters of the book, and among the varied characters themselves, which makes Jazz’s critique of Woolf’s Modernist subject possible. Jazz signals its rejection of this isolating gulf through its oblique reference to Woolf in its description of the “private cracks” that develop in Violet even before her husband cheats on her (23), cracks she attempts to hide by speaking “less and less” to Joe (24). The narrator explains, “I call them cracks because that is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light of the day,” the light that “holds and bathes each scene” of her actions as they appear in her own mind (23).

Narrating the Raced Subject 127 Here, the text modifies the symbolism of the “globe” that scholars like Dorothy Brewster have identified as a “recurrent image in both [Woolf’s] diaries and her novels” (79). Brewster explains that in Woolf’s work, the globe is life itself, which characters seek to take in their hand and turnabout in their fingers (80). Managing the globe in their hand represents a controlled interplay between “the internal and the external,” a momentary balance when the “Self and Not-Self, are in brief harmony” (81). But, far from managing the globe, Violet experiences the world as a distant externality lit by a globe light that only frames a limited view of reality. She sees “well-lit scenes” with things being done, “food things, work things,” but she “does not see herself doing” them (Jazz 22). Beyond the light, where it “stops,” there is no solid foundation, and within the ambit of its illuminations are “ill-glued cracks and weak places” (23). These cracks both represent the fragility of Violet’s psyche and highlight the flaws in the Woolfian mindset to which this imagery alludes, the imperfect bonding of outside and inside generated by Clarissa’s limited contextual awareness. Woolf roots Mrs. Dalloway’s Modernist subjectivity in isolation and an ethics of perseverance that insistently discards racial and historical understandings of the self. The discarded racial history that births the Modern subject is intimated in Woolf’s novel through Peter Walsh’s return to the colonizing England from his stay in India; it is again notable when a passing car, perhaps belonging to the queen, grazes “something very profound” in viewers, causing them to think “of the dead; of the flag: of Empire” and urging a “Colonial” to insult the House of Windsor (18). However, this history, and indeed any extended past, is not incorporated into the mind of Clarissa Dalloway. Elizabeth Abel has argued that the true “absence that haunts Clarissa” is the death of her mother (Abel 42), who is only passingly referenced when a party guest’s comment about Clarissa’s resemblance to her mother causes Clarissa to walk away crying (Woolf 176). Clarissa pushes aside this past, focusing only on a single “well-lit” scene of her younger days when she gives up a possible future with Peter and abandons her affections for Sally Seton in choosing to marry Richard Dalloway. Her ability to restrict her relation with the past to one specific moment in time starkly contrasts what we see with characters in Jazz. More explicitly than in Woolf, maternal absence drives the action of Jazz, producing cross-generational effects tied to slavery and racism. Violet hangs a picture of the dead Dorcas—her husband’s teenage lover—at the center of her apartment because she sees in Dorcas a face that could have belonged to “the daughter who fled her womb” (109). The flight of this daughter is the direct result of Violet’s mother’s decision to drown herself at the bottom of a well after her husband is driven off by white racism. Violet’s unarticulated feelings about this death constitute the gulf that both isolates her from Joe and houses her repressed maternal desires.

128  Sheldon George Her mother’s death taught Violet to “never have children” (102), and this determination urged her to subject her unborn to abortive “mammymade poisons and mommy’s urgent fists” (109); yet Violet finds herself stealing a baby on the streets of Harlem. Brewster explains that Woolf’s characters “feel the globe in [their] hands” during “fleeting revelations” that manage the alienating confusion and chaos of the external world, the feeling that the individual character is “on one side and life [is] on another” (81). In literally taking in hand this little life form, this stolen baby, Violet seeks a “brightness that could be carried in her arms,” one capable of distributing light “into places dark as the bottom of a well” (22). However, Violet’s pursuit of this light does not insinuate a unifying of the external and internal but rather displays the proliferated selves that remain alienated from her consciousness. Violet’s unmourned loss of her mother causes her eventual psychic fragmentation into “that Violet”— the stronger version of herself that she believes her mother would love— and another self called “Violent” by the community, which manifests her simultaneous longing for and hatred of Dorcas, the lost daughter and rival she stabs in the face on the occasion of Dorcas’s funeral viewing. This fragmenting of Violet’s psyche through maternal loss and the violence of racism belies the self-perseverance exemplified by Clarissa’s character. To the end, Clarissa continues to seek balance for her inner and outer world through her parties, which she views as “life,” as that which grants her power, even in her isolation, to “combine, to create” a continuity between the experiences of people she “brought together” (Woolf 122). In ways that are significant to an understanding of Jazz’s narrator, this sense of continuity is what causes Clarissa to find the city “absolutely absorbing” (Woolf 8), its people, its “life; London” (4). Jazz echoes this obsession through a narrator who is “crazy about this City,” who finds in New York a city that brings people together as they go “in and out, in and out the same door” or as “on trolleys and park benches,” they “settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too” (Jazz 117). The ability of the city to produce such continuity is tied for the narrator to its insistent control of its inhabitants, which makes it so that “you can’t get off the tracks a City lays out for you” (120). Whatever happens, believes the narrator, the tracks bind you to a bleak nostalgia, so that “whether you get rich or stay poor” you “always end up back where you started: hungry for the thing everybody loses—young love” (120). This nostalgia, to a narrator echoing the perspectives of Modernist authors, designates the plight of the Modern subject.1 Jazz’s narrator regurgitates this readymade reading of the subject in self-assuredly

1 In the quintessential novel of American Modernism, The Great Gatsby, it is nostalgia that propels the financial successes of Jay Gatsby, rooting them in amatory longing for Daisy Buchanan.

Narrating the Raced Subject 129 describing Joe Trace as falling “for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad he shot her just to keep the feeling going” (4). This reading, and indeed the novel as a whole, has a particular resonance with the Modernist writings of Faulkner.2 Joe’s presumed desire to keep the sad feeling going echoes the motivation of Quentin in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, who is appalled by his sister Caddy’s act of fornication and unreasonably wants to bind her to himself in an afterlife of everlasting punishment. Rejecting any notion of “finitude,” Quentin, in the extremes of his nostalgia for his sister’s lost purity and the social order it signified, longs for “an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind” becomes eternal, divine, because he cannot “bear to think that someday” his losses “will no longer hurt” the way they now do (112). Jazz’s narrator expects African Americans in particular to be “pinioned” to desires for this apotheosis of eternal pain and “misery,” seeing it as a paradoxical source of “pleasure” for them (228). Such expectation in the narrator seems justified by the tales of “spooky love” that are so central to African American musical forms like the blues. As African American author and musician Ralph Ellison describes it, the blues expresses “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness” (103). But the narrator’s reading of Joe also suggests the dangers of applying pre-established narratives to explanations of motivations, especially when they are rooted in racialized descriptions. Erroneously asserting at the start of the novel that the only thing that could turn out different by the novel’s end is “who shot whom,” the narrator aligns the novel’s characters, and particularly Joe Trace, with the impulsiveness and transgressive desires that characterize Faulkner’s Joe Christmas in Light in August (6). Christmas, like Trace, is abandoned as a child, and believes he’s part black. He rejects this blackness but—seemingly like Trace—embraces its dark impulses as a source of pleasure, eventually murdering his adopted father in an excited effort to be “free at last of honor and law” by putting behind himself “the Shalt Not” of white paternal authority (207). However, Jazz rejects this Modernist reading of black subjectivity. Where Faulkner’s characters become lost without the structured identity supplied by the white father, Joe Trace seeks after a mother who went off without a trace, the woman they call Wild. He takes on the identity of the trace she leaves behind by embracing it as his last name, becoming 2 I do not focus on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Weinstein has established important connections between Jazz and Absalom, Absalom, but his reading of Jazz as “the novel in which we seem most clearly to hear Morrison speaking,” where we “hear the writer’s own voice,” seems to conflate Morrison with her narrator and does not capture the novel’s relation to Faulkner’s other works or to other Modernists’ (149). Rubenstein similarly highlights a relation only to Absalom, Absalom.

130  Sheldon George an alienated subject driven by her absence. It is this lost mother’s tracks he encounters in the pimpled “hoof marks on [Dorcas’s] cheeks” (133). After Dorcas leaves him for a boy of her age, Joe trails her the same way he trailed his “mother in Virginia,” with the same focused insistence that no one would “take my little hoof marks away” and “leave me with no tracks at all” (130). In the end, Joe will not let even Dorcas herself take from him the means through which he fantasizes a return to his mother, choosing to kill Dorcas before losing her. Joe’s search highlights a greater narrative desire for the mother that far surpasses his own. In Light in August, Joe Christmas’s momentary passage through an African American neighborhood causes him to feel oppressed by a thick blackness in the air that convinces him he horrifically “had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female” (115). Far from seeking a preserved apotheosis of pain, it is a narrative retrieval of just such a primogenitive female that Jazz articulates. One way the novel manifests this primogenitive figure is through an intertextual frame that collapses Joe’s mother, Wild, with the ghostly figure of Beloved drawn from Morrison’s previous novel. Where Beloved ends with a description of the disappearance of its eponymous spectral protagonist, who leaves in her wake footprints so “familiar” that “should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they would fit” (275), Jazz signals the return of Beloved through its opening focus on Violet running in snow “so windswept she left no footprints” (4). Suggesting Beloved’s trek out of one novel and into another, the footprints that “come and go” in Beloved (275) embody the abiding loss that lingers in the psyches of the descendants of what that novel’s epigraph calls the “sixty million and more” slaves of the middle passage. It is not only Violet who traces Beloved’s path. If Wild is Beloved, then Beloved is also mother to Joe Trace, making Joe the son of Paul D, who impregnates Beloved when she forces him to touch her “on the inside” and “say” her name (Beloved 117). Here, the “disremembered” Beloved remains nameless, wild and alienated (274). She emerges in Jazz as a ghostly “vision,” a haunting past tied to slavery that is not integrated into the lives of characters and their world (Jazz 145). However, Jazz aims precisely at this integration. Wild’s presence in Jazz conveys an insistence that the past not serve only as an incidental backdrop to identity as it does in Modernist texts like Mrs. Dalloway. Beloved closes with an assertion that its story is not one to “pass on” (275). The dualism in this phrasing suggests that it is by actively claiming this maternal ancestor, and not casually passing her by, that we prevent the trauma of the past she represents from passing on into future generations.3 We see this when, unlike Clarissa Dalloway, Violet begins to achieve a true

3 For a full reading of Beloved, see my book Trauma and Race.

Narrating the Raced Subject 131 integration of self and other, inside and outside, through her ability to cry out “oh mama” in the presence of Alice, Dorcas’s aunt (111). Violet turns to Alice in search of “something real” (110) because everybody Violet “grew up with is down home” (111). Through their discussions of the past, and of anything else on Violet’s mind, Alice makes “stitches” in Violet’s psyche that “are invisible to the eye” (111). These stitches mend the imperfections of the globe light, causing Violet to not only start noticing events in the outer world “at the same moment as that Violet,” but also to pursue with Joe a love that exceeds the balance between inside and outside conceptualized in Woolf’s work (114). Developing a selfacceptance that ensures she and her husband do not have to look externally “at themselves anymore,” Violet and Joe become, instead, “inward toward the other” (228).

Rethinking Racial Identity Jazz models for readers an integration of the ancestral past into not just our self-narratives but also the narratives of our literary canon. Morrison charts throughout her novels—beginning in The Bluest Eye with Pecola’s obsession with whiteness—the destructive psychic impact of flawed cultural representations of race.4 Violet explains that when she was a child, her grandmother, Rose Dear, filled her head with stories of a beautiful young man called Golden Gray, whose white image came to live “inside” her “mind. Quiet as a mole” (208). It is this image of white beauty that causes Violet to “mess” up her life, to “Forget it was mine” and “run up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else” (208). Golden Gray symbolizes the Modernist canon in need of rewriting, the canon that intrudes upon and reshapes self-identities by imposing harmful narratives of racialized subjectivities. Golden Gray’s appearance in the text manifests the canon’s antagonistic rejection of racial blackness. After discovering he is mixed-race, Golden Gray seeks out his black father, Hunter’s Hunter, to murder him, and in the process encounters, unconscious on the ground, the “berryblack woman” Wild, whose presence provokes in him only “nausea” (144). Ascribing to Golden Gray the same fear of breathing in the air of a primogenitive black female that Joe Christmas exhibits, the narrator describes Golden Gray as “holding his breath against infection or odor or something” that “might touch or penetrate him” (144). This image of a character untouched by figurations of race reflects back onto the narrator, who, in an exaggerated reference to Mrs. Dalloway, has “lived a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind” (9). Through the mind of the narrator—who will now function as the changing voice of the

4 See my discussion of Pecola’s psyche in “The Body that Race Built.”

132  Sheldon George canon—Jazz rethinks both the novel’s own renderings of racial subjectivity and the disabling narratives of blackness that the canon seeks to insert into the minds of readers.5 Modeling a rearticulation of the canon and its racial subjects, the narrator reflectively ponders Golden Gray: “How could I have imagined him so poorly?” (161). After Golden Gray finds his father, the narrator finally recognizes that he had been scarred by his father’s absence. Golden Gray himself describes this absence as a lost arm and starts to feel the pain of the “surgery” for the first time upon encountering Hunter’s Hunter (158).6 His description recalls Morrison’s critique in her essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” where Morrison presents the American literary canon as producing an “orphanization” of blacks from its writings (209), a kind of “surgical removal of legs so that the body can remain enthroned” but also “immobile, static” (212). Golden Gray embodies the static Modernist canon as a wounded amputee, a canon whose fragmented narration must be rewritten for full recognition of its hybrid racial status. He emphasizes this hybridity himself by expressing his desire to “freshen the pain” of his loss, to “point it” in the same way the novel points to lacks in the canon (158). Suggesting a reimagined, racially hybridized canonical body, Golden Gray visualizes a time when “the arm will no longer be a phantom, but will take its own shape, grow its own muscle and bone” so this racial father can become a “part” of him and they can “both be free, arm entangled and whole” (159). Amputated from the canonical body, Jazz suggests, is a “phantom” lineage that ultimately encompasses both the black father and the beloved mother, a historical primogenitive source erased from all Western identity. Morrison indicates this source through her epigraph, which quotes words spoken by the Coptic goddess Thunder, Perfect Mind: “I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name. / I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division.”7 Articulating a symmetry between language and what it names that seems impossible in a Modernist world marked by alienation and psychic fragmentation, Thunder, Perfect Mind embodies the very “division” that has allowed for such alienation. Originally recorded by Egyptian Gnostic Christians in the ancient collection of syncretic religious texts now known as the Nag Hammadi library, Thunder, Perfect Mind’s words were transcribed in the Afro-Asiatic Coptic form of writing, which expresses the Egyptian language in the Greek alphabet (Robinson 13). Her words voice a critique of both early

5 My reading diverges from Wyatt’s interpretation of “the narrator as the city itself” (45) while affirming her understanding of the novel as a “dialogue . . . between text and reader” (44). 6 For an expanded interpretation of the phantom arm, see Wyatt. 7 Here I concur with Bouson that the epigraph is not to be identified with “the godesslike power of the narrator, as some commentators have suggested” (184). One such commentator is Rodrigues.

Narrating the Raced Subject 133 Greeks and the Western society that would root itself in Greek culture: she laments, “Why then have you hated me, you Greeks? / Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians? / For I am the wisdom [of the] Greeks / and the knowledge of [the] barbarians” (273). Thunder, Perfect Mind points to an alternate Afro-Asiatic genealogy for Western civilization that Morrison directly references in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”: here, Morrison highlights historical efforts to “eliminate Egypt as the cradle of civilization and its model” (her emphasis 206). The result of this process, Morrison recognizes, was that “Greece lost its own origins and became itself original,” thereby severed from its Afro-Asiatic roots (206). This rejection of a multiracial source for Western civilization results in the development of a particular religious understanding of the self and its relation to sin and pain that Jazz’s narrator pins primarily to African Americans but finds endemic in the Modern world. James Robinson, a scholar of the Nag Hammadi library, argues that one of the few components of Coptic religious Gnosticism that continued into the Greco-­ Christian lineage was a “darkened” outlook on life (4): what had originally presented itself as a belief that the “evil that pervades history is a blight, ultimately alien to the world,” is transformed into a notion that “the very origin of the world” can be “attributed to a terrible fault,” such that evil is now “given status as the ultimate ruler of the world” (4). This perspective is what is echoed and questioned in the words of Jazz’s narrator: “I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure” (228). Just as the Gnostic conviction that evil rules the world led followers to embrace an alienating “mystical inwardness,” causing the Nag Hammadi’s transcribers to live in monastic isolation, “undistracted by external factors” (Robinson 4), the narrator of Jazz retreats into anonymity as “precaution” in a world that offers no way to “defend” oneself (Jazz 8). This “withdrawal to inwardness and despair” (Robinson 6) is what “swept through late antiquity and emerged within [the] Christianity, Judaism, [and] Neoplatonism” that would root Western culture (9). It helped produce a Western worldview that is ultimately purged of the Gnostic synthesis of opposites and rooted, instead, in recognition of omnipresent sin and pain. In the 1920s, such a worldview reinforced Modernist notions of subjective fragmentation by severing the civilized mind from the fallen body driven to sin and war. Harlem and its music were viewed as the den of sin in the era, and in Jazz, Alice Manfred represents this view through her conceptualization of black music as a call to the masses to unleash the violent passions of the body. Having lost her husband to another woman, whom she dreams nightly of running “down under four iron hooves” of a horse (86), Alice hears a “complicated anger” in the music, “something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction” (59). What she hates most is the music’s “appetite,” a “kind of careless hunger for a fight,” and she seeks to contain her own violent passions by ensuring

134  Sheldon George that the “heart” remains “ignorant of the hips” and “the head” is “in charge of both” (60). But Jazz ultimately rejects this mind/body split that plagues Modernism, celebrating an altered vision of the fragmented subject that is manifested in the music itself. As Alice walks through Harlem convinced that the music explains all unfurlings of uncontained passions, Harlemites march in protest against white violence to the beat of “drums that describe to a T” what “they meant to say but did not trust themselves to” (54). While the narrative throughout describes the failures of language, presenting a Modernist world in which “words [are] connected only to themselves” (23) and narration misses the mark of its descriptions, the music grants expression to both the body and the mind, inviting marchers to move “slowly into the space the drums were building for them” (53). Allowing a symmetry that recalls the meeting of sound and name, object and word, suggested in the epigraph by Thunder, Perfect Mind, the drums delineate a premodern sensibility foreclosed in Modernism but re-manifested in jazz music. Through the evocation of this music, Morrison’s novel refuses Modernism’s separation of mind from body. Music critic Stanley Crouch explains that what jazz music emphasizes in its performers are cognitive processes that then “send tasks” to “muscles that must be executed so swiftly that all functions of mind and body come together with intimidating speed” (18). This coming together, characteristic of a jazz performance, functions as a uniquely adaptive and improvisational response to the play of others, relying upon the performer’s capacity to “hear what is played” by “fellow performers” before being “inspired to inventions of [his] own” (18). Such a power to hear and adaptively respond to others is what the narrator finally comes to experience upon recognizing Golden Gray’s pained and amputated loss, fueling the narrator’s desire to become “the language that wishes him well,” the changing voice of a canon now able to “contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it” (161). Crouch asserts that jazz music privileges the “aesthetic dignity” of the performer, who must be responded to by each band member with an adaptive improvisation that rejects “stereotypical changes” (17). It is just such celebration of improvisation over stereotypical racial presentations that Jazz centralizes.

Returning: Jazz Music, Liberation and the Canon Morrison’s centralizing of jazz supplies the musical form itself as a new interpretive context for understanding the racialized subjectivities of modern individuals, particularly African Americans. The music grants revisionary insight into thematic concerns with African Americans’ relation to pain, the past and the restrictions they confront within both the real world and the literary canon that purports to represent it. Jazz’s music-inflected vision of African Americans’ freedoms and restrictions

Narrating the Raced Subject 135 contextualizes Morrison’s earlier presentation of a character like The Bluest Eye’s Cholly Breedlove, who commits unspeakable violence and rapes his daughter for reasons “only a musician would sense” (159). Jazz encourages a musical sensibility in readers to convey the paradoxical existence of a salubrious freedom within manifest restraint, ultimately transforming African Americans’ musical artistry into a model for liberatory reading practices. What a musician can recognize, says The Bluest Eye, is that “Cholly was free. Dangerously free” (159), because he dwelt in near solitude outside of established social structures, “alone with his own perceptions and appetites” (161). Cholly exercises a freedom unsettlingly close to the transgressive blackness represented by Faulkner in Joe Christmas’s rejection of the “Shalt Not” that curtailed his passions. But Jazz’s narrator suggests that even when restrained within established structures, African Americans are drawn to dangerous freedoms exercised through violence: the narrator frames Dorcas’s murder with the comment that though Joe Trace is “bound to the track” that “pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record,” he feels “free to do something wild” (120). Jazz distinguishes such wild freedoms—which, when embraced by Cholly and Joe, render the “love” of these black men “fatal”—from the jazz musician’s own freedom within restraint, his ability to move willfully along tracks already laid out for him (Bluest 206). As a narrative drawn to a racially restrictive past re-conjured through Beloved’s return as Wild, Jazz itself models the musician’s approach to pain and freedom. The narrator divulges “an affection” for pain, a “kind of sweettooth for it” (219), admitting to seeing “the past [as] an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack” because “no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle” (220). But returning to the past is not the same as repeating a stuck record of pain in Jazz, or in African American culture. James Snead’s scholarly work on black music and the function of what he calls “the cut” allows this insight (69). Snead explains that while Western culture is broadly focused upon notions of overcoming and progress—the very progressive overcoming of the past we see in Mrs. Dalloway—African American “culture highlights the observance” of “repetition, often in homage to an original generative instance or act” (65). Expressing a “notion of progress within cycles” (65), African American culture approaches the past not as something to be avoided but as something always “there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it” (67). This willful coming back offers an altered view of individual freedom and the restraints of a structuring past. As Snead explains, “in jazz improvisation, the cut” is “the unexpectedness with which the soloist” can “depart” from the “tune’s accepted and familiar primary beat,” the consistency of which within the communal performance of the band allows for his seamless return (69).

136  Sheldon George Through its literary allusions, Jazz not only engages conceptions of subjectivity present in Modernist authors like Woolf and Faulkner, but also cuts back to African American literary articulations of identity aligned with the novel’s liberatory musical sensibility. One such articulation is Jean Toomer’s Cane, which the novel subtly references through Wild making her home in the cane fields (174). In particular, Jazz invokes Cane’s “Song of the Son,” a poetic rendering of Toomer’s own return to the South in search of his ancestry. In the poem, the returned son finds that, “now just before an epoch’s sun declines” on “a song-lit race of slaves,” their “plaintive soul soon gone” has been captured in an “everlasting song,” in one “plum” that was saved for him on “a signing tree” (14). This tree gives fruit to an artistry rooted in the souls of the slaves. Morrison’s text recalls Toomer in the white-oak tree, “huge” and “isolated,” that “grew in unlikely soil” outside Wild’s cave (178). Just as Toomer returns to the past, the “roots” of this oak tree “grew backward,” as though now, “having gone obediently into earth and found it barren, retreating to the trunk for what was needed” (182). The everlasting song Toomer sought visibly blossoms in Jazz, resounding through the instruments of men on Harlem rooftops “playing out their maple-sugar hearts, tapping it from four hundred-year-old trees” that first sprouted in the days of American slavery (197). These music men, we are told, wanted to let the maple “run” slow, “if it wished, or fast, but a free run” (197). They express an indulgence that, the text highlights, some may see as wasteful “because they didn’t have a bucket to hold it” (197). They represent an unrootedness that is generative—a personal indulgence that may exist within the confines of external restraints. By tapping into the pain of the past, these men find a vivifying, liberatory art form. Through the music, they achieve a state that the narrator longs for and associates finally with Wild’s cave, “that home in the rock” (221). Conceptualizing a freedom and a home that may exist within the unyielding rockiness of the American landscape, the narrator imagines Wild’s cave as a “place already made for me, both snug and wide open” (221). The dream the narrator articulates is to “close myself in the peace left by the woman who lived there” (221). Having once echoed the voices of a canon capable of aligning blackness with nausea, the narrator foregoes isolation for a feeling that Wild, “hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand” (221). No longer bound to stereotypical expectations and mental preconceptions affirmed by the Modernist canon, the narrator is “released” by the embrace of Wild, the figured primogenitive exclusion that resides restrictively at the boundaries of canonical storytelling. This release, emerging through a freedom found within restraint, offers fresh narrative possibilities for both the narrator and the novel’s reader. It refocuses the narrator’s alienating isolationism as the source of a newly

Narrating the Raced Subject 137 communal process of literary interpretation modeled on what we can describe after Ralph Ellison as the frequent anonymity of jazz performers. Ellison explains that some of the best jazz musicians are “unrecorded artists” who “often have their most original ideas enter the public domain almost as rapidly as they are conceived, to be quickly absorbed into the thought and technique of their fellows” (35). In anonymously modeling for us a process of rereading race and its implications in literature, the narrator of Jazz stylistically frames our reading practices, exemplifying interpretive techniques readers can responsively absorb and actively enact. Meaning most fully emerges in Jazz through this individually empowering interpretive process, in which readers bring their own understanding to the text, but are also guided by the text itself. The narrator’s patently flawed performance restrictively directs readers’ attention to allusive contexts that become the expanded blueprint for new, emancipatory meanings of the novel. The reader’s participation in the task of reconstructing a canon plagued with “poor” imagination is actively beckoned by a narrator who urges readers to “make me, remake me” (229). In indicating that we are “free to do it and I am free to let you” because “look where your hands are,” the narrator joins the hand of the reader holding the book to the hands of Wild, whom the narrator has now embraced and who, we are told, occupies in her cave a “domestic” space that has incorporated Golden Gray’s belongings (184). This multiracial domestic space signals a new identity for the canon. The text not only speaks with the voices of the Modernists but here juxtaposes a young man whose hair is the golden gray color of his name with a woman whose skin color and hair, a “skein of black wool,” is a “regular jolt” to all who “see the two of them” (167). By jolting us with these juxtaposed voices and images of identity, Jazz jolts us also of our preconceptions about race and the canon, opening space for newly contextualized meanings. In describing irony as a process in which meaning is supported by context, Cleanth Brooks states that art achieves its synthesized meaning when the weight of its particular textual representations grounds its universality, when this weight serves like the tension along a kite string that holds it steady against “the thrust of the wind” (741). Here, it is the weight of new representations of racial subjects that balances the fantastical imaginings presented as universal truths of human subjectivity by the Modernist canon. In binding this canon to revised understandings of racial identity, Jazz provides its own racial vision as counter-thrust to narrative renderings that leave the canon untethered from its own racial hybridity. Through this reasserted hybridity, Morrison images a newly liberated canon, one that finds the freedom to soar because it is bound to the restraints of its racial history.

138  Sheldon George

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Bouson, J. Brooks. “Quiet as it’s Kept”: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. Brooks, Cleanth. “Irony as a Principle of Structure.” Literary Opinion in America: Volume II, edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Brewster, Dorothy. Virginia Woolf. New York: Routledge, 2018. Crouch, Stanley. The All-American Skin Game, or, the Decoy of Race. New York: Vintage, 1997. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Waste Land, edited by Michael North. New York: Norton, 2001. Ellison, Ralph. Living With Music. New York: Random House, 2002. Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage, 1985. ———. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Norton, 1994. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. George, Sheldon. “Approaching the Thing of Slavery: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Analysis of African-American Identity. Texas: Baylor UP, 2016. ———. “The Body that Race Built: Shame, Trauma and Lack in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child.” Shame and Modern Writing. Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh. Routledge UP, 2018. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Hale, Dorothy J. “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century.” PMLA. vol. 124, no. 3, May 2009, pp. 896–905. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1978. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. ———. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1993. ———. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994. ———. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Toni Morrison: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999. Robinson, James M. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. “Experiencing Jazz.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3&4, Fall/Winter 1993, pp. 733–54. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. Rubenstein, Roberta. “ ‘History and Story, Sign and Design’: Faulknerian and Postmodern Voices in Jazz.” Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, edited by Carol A. Kolmerten et al. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. Snead, James A. “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture.” Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Routledge, 1990. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Norton, 1988.

Narrating the Raced Subject 139 Weinstein, Philip M. What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Wimsatt, W.K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Noonday P, 1954. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981. Wyatt, Jean. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. Georgia: U of Georgia P, 2017.

Part 2

Black British Women Writers Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

8 Swing Time Zadie Smith’s Aesthetic of Active Ambivalence Daphne Lamothe

In Swing Time (2016), Zadie Smith invokes black musical traditions, specifically swing music and jazz, in order to represent blackness phenomenologically.1 Rooted in jazz history, “swing” refers to both musical tradition and the artist’s capacity for adaptation and innovation as she makes time bend to her imagination. Through a series of meditations on the perception and performance of racial identity, often filtered through the lens of music and other expressive forms, the novel’s protagonist achieves a critical consciousness about race that is dynamic and complex.2 According to Michelle Wright, the phenomenology of blackness is largely about these two things in that it is “made up of moments of performance in which performers understand their bodies as Black.”3 Smith’s unnamed narrator gradually achieves self-awareness in moments of reflexivity that take into consideration her environment. According to Wright, phenomenology puts the focus on “when and where [blackness] is being imagined, defined, and performed and in what locations, both figurative and literal” (3). In a similar vein, Sara Ahmed links consciousness to spatiality by foregrounding questions of perception and relation. Specifically, she emphasizes the ways that individuals deal with disorienting experiences by reorienting themselves. First, she argues, one must experience disorientation in order to “notice orientation as something we do not have” (6). From this noticing, or “mode of disorientation,” we might begin to wonder, “What does it mean to be orientated? How do we begin to know or to feel where we are, or even where we are

1 I am indebted to Lisa Armstrong, whose intelligence, insight, and friendship guided me through my work on this chapter. 2 Phenomenology as a philosophical tradition is primarily invested in a subject’s experiences from his or her first-person point of view. 3 In part, Wright arrives at this definition of phenomenological blackness in conversation with the work of E. Patrick Johnson on racial performance and performativity in Appropriating Blackness. Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2015), 3.

144  Daphne Lamothe going?”4 Together, these insights inform my analysis of Swing Time and its exploration of its protagonist’s understanding of selfhood as the product of a myriad of life experiences. “Disorienting” best describes Smith’s approach to storytelling because, though the narrative at first appears to be a conventional bildungsroman, it disrupts many of the expectations and assumptions readers bring to the form. Typically, a coming-of-age story moves its protagonist through sequential stages of becoming before arriving at an eventual, and often inevitable, state of maturation. In contrast, Swing Time foregrounds questions of relation in order to imagine black female subjectivity as a dynamic and ongoing process, a state of becoming. The narrative uses first-person point of view to explore black female consciousness, striving to comprehend the objects and others that coexist in the spaces and places she inhabits and that help to shape her sense of “self.” Smith’s use of the coming-of-age narrative form allows her to explore and imagine aesthetic and ethical realms capacious enough to accommodate the conflicts and contradictions within notions of “blackness” and to expand its meanings. The novel traces the trajectory of its narrator, a black girl born of an interracial marriage in twentieth-century London, from childhood to adulthood. Despite Smith’s use of first-person narration, the character remains a cipher who possesses no clear values or core sense of self. Though she appears at first to conform to the alienated mulatta archetype, readers quickly ascertain the impossibility of her (re)connection with a racial community. Moreover, if such a thing as a coherent and unified racial collective actually existed, it does not accurately reflect her familial or social spheres and thus offers no true resolution. Born and raised in multicultural London in the era of globalization, the narrator’s experiences confuse or refuse the logic of racial bifurcation. Thus, achieving a critical consciousness requires the use of an interpretive framework organized around questions of multiplicity and intersecting identities and affinities. These matters center on more than questions of representation; they are in fact about ethics as well. Typically, the ethical refers to moral dilemmas that call for some sort of resolution or restoration of order. At its core, Swing Time posits the historical traumas of dislocation wrought by slavery, or being “shaken out of time,” as the root cause of its character’s struggles. According to Kaitlyn Greenidge, this dislocation produces a series of dilemmas and questions: “How do we reconcile, what are the lies and myths we tell ourselves, to try and reclaim our time? And when do those lies hurt us and when do they help us find our footing again?”5 In the face of this quandary, the narrative evinces a commitment to irresolution that demands a radically different orientation to its

4 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 6. 5 Kaitlyn Greenidge, “Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 93, no. 1, 2017, 196.

Swing Time 145 characters and their predicaments. The lack of narrative closure links implicitly to the protagonist’s lack of resolution in the face of conflict and ultimately to the concept of “active ambivalence.” Smith describes the latter as an awareness of “the experience of blackness, which causes all kinds of consequences, political, social and personal,” while at the same time retaining the ability or will to claim the “extreme particularity” of the individual self. “Active ambivalence” offers a generative framework for understanding subjects as they navigate social and spatial geographies that call forth the sometimes-conflicted performance of personal and social identities. It also aptly characterizes the existential challenges faced by subjects as they grapple with questions of how “to be” in an anti-black world. Jazz studies scholarship that explores the connections between aesthetic and ethical dimensions helps elucidate the novel’s concerns with experiences of blackness and identity, particularly as they intersect notions of the human. In Jazz as Critique, Fumi Okiji builds on Theodor Adorno’s theories of the ethical dimensions of the aesthetic realm to argue, Black music is sociomusical play. It is not so much that it represents black life or an alternative human future; rather it demonstrates to us how to acquit ourselves toward blackness (and toward another world). It shows us how we might go about dispositioning ourselves, so that we might know how it feels to be a conflicted subject—both human and inhuman.6 This observation pulls our attention in two intertwined directions. First, it views in art an invitation to imagine alternative ways of being and doing in the world. Second, it looks to blackness and the black aesthetic for habits of being that develop in response to binary oppositions so ingrained in Western thought that they refuse reconciliation. Honing in on the phenomenon of swing in jazz performance to illustrate this point, Okiji identifies “a musical manifestation of specific conditions of black modern being—as a suspension of the resolution between contradictory but twinned positions” (46). Swing Time’s reckoning with irreconcilable dualities centers primarily on race, though a myriad of other dichotomies appear. Okiji’s analysis highlights how such oppositions function to equate whiteness with being and blackness with its absence: nonbeing.7 Ontology tethers blackness to nonbeing, offering a philosophical basis

6 Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited, (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2018), 4. 7 Afro-pessimist theories have played an influential role in elucidating the significance of race to the development of ontology and notions of “the human.” I am thinking, for example, of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern formations of racialized blackness in which she focuses on modernity’s equation of “Human” with Western bourgeois, male subjects (i.e., Man 1 and Man2), thus providing a justification for the enslavement and

146  Daphne Lamothe for “the experience of blackness, which causes all kinds of consequences, political, social and personal.” At the same time that Swing Time grapples with the hierarchies and inequities embedded within racial formations, it also works to disrupt racial and other categories of identity by prioritizing subjectivity, thereby representing blackness phenomenologically. The effect is an obligation to read “blackness” as a reckoning with the totalizing force of ontological erasure created by processes of racialization, as well as with the “totality” of black subjectivity.8 In other words, Swing Time holds the idea of black non/being in active suspension, suggesting that the most ethical orientation is one in which these states of being, in all their irreconcilability, coexist. Reading through this narrative ambivalence produces a cognitive dissonance resonant of the perspective of “the black” subject who lives with dislocation and contradiction. Ahmed frames the perspective produced by dislocation as a migrant orientation, or “the lived experience of facing at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home” (10). As I’ve suggested, a destabilized perspective underscores the spatial dimensions of social relations. Specifically, the ambivalence of black subjectivity points to a consciousness taking shape and finding meaning through relationality, as in self-other orientation. According to Ahmed, we ought not consider disorientation solely a burden, because it creates the conditions for individuals to reassess their place in the world and to imagine other ways of being. “The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we ‘find our way’ but how we come to ‘feel at home’ ” (7). Such questions drive the narrator’s experiences; moreover, the aesthetic realm functions as the imaginative ground for this exploration. Throughout, black art (music, dance and, yes, fiction too) evoke the disorienting effects of ambivalence in order to engage ethical problems and questions particular to late twentieth-century existence.

Forms of Life-Writing and the “Wide Horizon” of Blackness In many ways, the trajectory followed by Swing Time’s protagonist conforms to the typical conventions of the bildungsroman, as well as to colonial subjugation of those designated sub- and non-human (i.e., Amerindians and Africans). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 257–337. 8 I am referring here to Glissant’s intertwined notions of opacity and totality, which suggest a wholeness that cannot be reduced to its parts and therefore resists transparency. “In Relation,” he states, “the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity” (191–2). Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997).

Swing Time 147 tropes found in black literature. Her journey compels a reckoning with what it means to be a fully realized subject in society’s eyes, as well as with the significance of racial identity. Many of the characters, with the exception of the most socially disaffected, like Tracey’s mother, follow a classic coming-of-age trajectory in which change leads to personal betterment. According to Taiye Selasie, the characters climb from one existential tree branch to another (presumably higher): from brown student with promise to pop star’s right hand (the narrator); from provincial Aussie girl to mega-celebrity (Aimee); from activist without degree to member of British government (the narrator’s mother); from Willesden wild child to West End dancer (Tracey). On the face of things, it’s the more tragic characters who end where they begin.9 Selasie astutely takes note of the fact that the novel “asks us to reconsider” the definitions of success and well-being premised on the social mobility narrative. As the preface sets up the narrator’s identity conflict, it prompts readers not to expect the closure associated with a subject’s assimilation into the social order. Instead, we experience a temporal disruption, as the preface marks not the beginning but the end of the protagonist’s journey. She reveals that it ends in failure, because she has returned to London in disgrace: “I’d lost my job, a certain version of my life, my privacy” (4). Black literature tends to frame the formation of the subject in terms of the development of a racial consciousness. Valerie Smith argues, for example, that Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison’s characters share the same fundamental inner journey as the heroic subjects of nineteenthcentury slave narratives. Each individual’s psychological development corresponds to her or his movements toward literal or symbolic destinations that signify the acquisition of greater self-knowledge. She describes Ellison’s Invisible Man as having “constructed the tale of his development from ignorance to knowledge of both the meaning of [racial] identity and the proper relation to the power elite.”10 Because of Smith’s focus on

 9 Selasie counts the narrator’s white father and Jamaican uncle and Tracey’s mother amongst the tragic figures who remain stuck in place. “Swing Time by Zadie Smith Review—A Classic Story of Betterment,” Guardian, November 13, 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/13/swing-time-zadie-smithreview. 10 In earlier texts, the representative hero of the slave narrative “moves from the idyllic life of childhood ignorance in the country into a metaphoric wilderness, in this case the recognition of his status as a slave. His struggle for survival requires him to overcome numerous obstacles, but through his own talents (and some providential assistance), he finds the Promised Land of a responsible social position, a job, and a wife” (33). Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), 120.

148  Daphne Lamothe nineteenth- and twentieth-century life-writing, her analysis reveals that these narratives maintain a stable understanding of black identity, even after the period when that “stability” stemmed from laws that equated “black” with “slave.” Throughout time, the black subject’s psychological development has hung on his or her confrontation with the significance of racial difference and racism. Undoubtedly, the psychological and material effects of racial categorizations and hierarchies persist into the present, but Zadie Smith’s positioning as a twenty-first-century writer shapes her imagination in that the text actively troubles assumptions of a coherent and cohesive “blackness.”11 We can locate this impulse to trouble blackness not only in the characters’ racial hybridity, but also in the story’s depiction of black culture/music as a contact zone full of conflict and cross-fertilization. The novel assumes an anti-essentialist approach to narrating black life, akin to Margo Crawford’s definition of the project of “black post-blackness.” In other words, recounting the narrator’s self-discovery/self-making leads readers to “a wide horizon of shaping and unshaping blackness.”12 This raises the question: what does selfhood mean in a coming-of-age narrative that possesses a “simultaneous investment in blackness and a type of freedom that broke the boundaries of blackness” (Crawford, 4)? Being “in relation,” especially with Tracey, the girl with whom she will form a life-long, complicated friendship, enables the narrator’s exploration of these metaphorical boundaries, as it gives her the impetus to trace the border between “self” and “other.” Their similarities and differences draw them together. Both grow up in neighboring council estates in working-class London; they share the same brown complexion and height and they are the progeny of interracial unions. Yet the dutiful protagonist often finds herself fascinated and scandalized by her more rebellious friend. Their differences extend beyond temperament to include their home environments. The narrator is raised by an attentive father and an intellectually ambitious, politically engaged mother who “dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive” (10). In contrast, the narrator describes Tracey’s mother as “white, obese, afflicted with acne”; she tries and fails repeatedly to “get on the disability” (10). As the narrator matures into adulthood, she sets off on a trajectory that includes university and a professional life, amplifying their differences. Tracey stays geographically close to their London home

11 My analysis is influenced by Bertram Ashe’s discussion of characteristics of the postsoul aesthetic, and in particular, the notion he posits of “troubling” racial categories as a form of “blaxploration.” “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction,” African American Review, Vol. 41, no. 4 (Winter 2007), 609–623. 12 Margo Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-FirstCentury Aesthetics (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press) 2017, 2.

Swing Time 149 throughout her life, while the narrator’s job as the personal assistant to a celebrity named Aimee leads to international travel, from London to New York and an unnamed African country where she supervises the building of a school, which is one of Aimee’s philanthropic projects. These various settings reinforce the lessons of her early years: that “blackness” is not a monolith. Valerie Smith’s analysis of race and gender in her examination of lifewriting and blackness proves trenchant here, because she emphasizes the failure of the heroic archetype to accommodate the particular contours of black women’s lives. “By mythologizing rugged individuality, physical strength, and geographical mobility, the narratives [written by Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass] enshrine cultural definitions of masculinity” (34). Narratives focused on the lives of black women, like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she argues, place less emphasis on the “triumph of the individual will” and more on the “triumph of self-in-relation” (34). Appropriately enough, given that the definition of “freedom” becomes less clearly defined in the post-civil rights, postcolonial era in which Swing Time is set, the narrative ends in a way that fails to register triumphantly. Nevertheless, commensurate with Valerie Smith’s analysis, because the narrative unfolds from the vantage point of a black woman, it privileges questions of “self-in-relation.” Lindsay Gibson’s description of Smith’s casting of the protagonist in “a succession of sidekick roles” resonates in that it underscores the production of a narrative “I” that is dialogical.13 The narrator’s friendship with Tracey, a relationship in which, Selasie argues, the girls function for each other as a kind of “homing device,” inspires larger, metaphysical questions of relation and orientation, the affective terrain from which feelings of belonging take shape. Swing Time’s preface depicts the narrator’s encounter with works of art in order to weave these thematic concerns together with those having to do with art and the imagination. From the beginning, the narrative links her desire for an autonomous and coherent sense of self to notions of aesthetic transcendence (i.e., art for art’s sake). In an effort to avoid facing her feelings of shame over having been recently fired, the protagonist wanders into a lecture on film at the Royal Festival Hall, where she finds “a seat in the gods, in the very back row” (3). The hall’s evocation of Western empire and classical (i.e., European) artistic traditions conveys the sentiments of a protagonist who wishes to avoid the conflicts and confusions of society by rising above them. That said, the temporariness of her placement “in the gods” suggests that this desire for transcendence is myth and not reality. Neither the film she settles down to watch, nor

13 Lindsay Gail Gibson, “Kinetic Joy,” Dissent, vol. 64, no. 1 (Winter 2017), 137.

150  Daphne Lamothe her lived experiences, suggest the possibility, or perhaps even desirability, of a self impervious to the needs, influences or projections of others. The narrator’s description of the film functions as a sort of metatextual commentary on the novel itself, gesturing toward a host of Western ideals (universalism, individualism, transcendence), only to refuse them. An Austrian film director delivers a lecture on Swing Time, a film in which Fred Astaire performs a tap routine in blackface accompanied by three shadow figures who mimic his movements. For the director, the film offers an opportunity to meditate on form and abstraction: “the interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time” (3). For the narrator, the pleasure of watching resides in the ability of dance and art to evoke an emotional response in the viewer, knitting the performer and audience to each other. As she loses herself in the elegance of Astaire’s movements, she thinks, I’d lost my job, a certain version of my life, my privacy, yet all these things felt small and petty next to this joyful sense I had watching the dance, and following its precise rhythms in my own body. I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a distant point, hovering over it. (4) Her focus deviates from the director’s privileging of aesthetic abstraction, foregrounding instead the feelings of intimacy and identification created by art that (from a certain vantage point) transcends cultural differences.14 That said, the narrator’s ecstatic reaction depends on her misrecognition of the fact that Astaire dances in blackface. Her obliviousness to the performance of racial objectification, a signifier of her own abjection, calls into question the initial impulse to place value solely in the affective or aesthetic registers of a work of art. Only later, when she pulls up a YouTube clip of the scene to share with her Senagalese lover, Lamin, does she recognize this other, contradictory, truth about the power of art. In the company of another black person, she sees the performance anew, this time from a black perspective, and finds herself dismayed, not just by “the rolling eyes, the white gloves, the Bojangles grin,” but also by her previous inability or unwillingness to see it clearly (5). This second

14 In a related moment, the narrator describes learning from the piano accompanist at her weekly dance lessons that the measure of true artistry lies in a singer’s ability to get “just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it” (119). The emphasis on emotional expressivity as the measure of artistic value encourages her to “turn inwards” while singing and to focus her attention on listening deeply to the piano’s “voice.” The effect is the creation of spaces of intimacy, not only between performer and audience, but also between the artist and her expressive instruments.

Swing Time 151 encounter undercuts the longing for transcendence and universalism conveyed during her first viewing of the film. She closes her laptop saying, “I felt very stupid” (5). In addition, the chapter ends on a final note of judgment: the narrator reads a message on her phone with the title “WHORE” and a single sentence in the body: “Now everyone knows who you really are” (5). Obliquely, this ending suggests an ethical lapse in her inclination to privilege the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the dance. As a framing device, the preface foreshadows the ultimate failure of the protagonist to achieve a coherent and cohesive sense of self, and it ends with an assertion that is anything but a “triumph of the self.” These prove to be more than mere questions of art and representation, for they have material and psychological consequences, including having profound implications for a character we will come to recognize as in search of a moral compass. Nonetheless, rather than completely disavowing the narrator’s first response to Astaire’s blackface performance, elsewhere the narrative returns to and celebrates the profundity and beauty of artistic and cultural forms of expression in ways that suggest a reluctance to subordinate aesthetic sovereignty to the political and sociological relevance of artistic and cultural texts.15 Moreover, there are passages that suggest parallels between conceptualizations of blackness and art and blackness and subjectivity. For example, when the protagonist describes her first place of employment at an MTV-like cable station named YTV, she obliquely links the multiplicity of artistic interpretations to the heterogeneity of “blackness.” It begins with her recollection of a majority white office in which she and her boss, Zoe, the only other black female employee, are “viewed as interchangeable” (89). She implicitly resists her coworkers’ tendency to reduce them to their race by offering a litany of comparisons: Zoe is “recklessly bold,” while she is cautious; Zoe is an “ardent ‘Thatcherite,’ ” whereas the narrator holds more liberal political opinions; “she was a cokehead, I wasn’t” and so on (89). Even when Zoe expresses feelings of racial solidarity, viewing them as “sisters, two brown girls with a duty toward each other,” the narrator resists the collapsing of subjective boundaries: “For some reason she ‘saw herself in me.’ I admired her grit, but did not see myself in her. . . . She liked me anyway” (89). Rather than resolving the tension expressed between these competing ideas of individualism and racial affiliation, the passage ends somewhat abruptly with a meditation on music when Zoe sends the narrator to accompany Whitney

15 My analysis resonates with Darby English’s argument for expanding the boundaries of “black representational space” by juxtaposing questions of artistic freedom and autonomy to traditional notions of black art that privilege its political meaning and assume an obligation to the artist’s racial community. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

152  Daphne Lamothe Houston to an awards show. During a rehearsal, she has yet another aesthetic encounter that produces an emotional response as powerful as the joy she describes feeling while watching Astaire’s elegant movements. She states, I never really liked her songs—but standing in that empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions. (90) Not incidentally, this encounter takes place during a rehearsal, when Houston, unaware of her single observer, sings as if no one were listening. The effect is to highlight the expressive capacity of the individual voice as the embodiment of self-authorization. Yet the moral of this story, which involves both self-expression and active listening, remains ambiguous because it does not fully authorize the narrator’s longing to have her individuality affirmed. For one thing, the performance dissolves the invisible border separating the listener from a performer whose music she professes to dislike. This implicitly validates the feelings of affinity and empathy that resonate in Zoe’s invocations of “sisterhood” in the workplace. In addition, Houston’s mixed reputation also offers no resolution to the narrator’s identity conflict. After all, the iconic Houston represents both tradition (descended from black musical royalty in the form of her mother, Cissy Houston; cousin Dionne Warwick; and mentor Aretha Franklin) and assimilation in that her record label distanced her from R&B and Gospel music in order for her to achieve crossover success on pop music charts. On the subject of her “monumental” voice, the passage unequivocally celebrates its sonic potency and expressiveness. On the subject of race and identity—and related questions of affiliation and difference that have just preceded it—the meaning of the passage remains opaque. The narrative refusal to be proscriptive is deliberate. In her collection of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith has stated, “ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.”16 Noting the overlap between the author and her narrator’s inclination toward ambivalence, Gibson asserts, Over the novel’s length, we watch as she sharpens her several sections: retro-, intro-, and circum-. She traces a slalom course between poles of opinion, resisting the stronger positions of those closest to her and wending her way toward her own with a nuance she and Smith share. (139) 16 Zadie Smith, 2009. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin), xi-xii.

Swing Time 153 Even as the narrator propels herself toward the development of a critical consciousness—Gibson describes this arc as Swing Time’s “central form of maturation”—the narrator’s assessments of art and culture remain inconsistent. Questions of the ethical move from subtext to the foreground when the narrator enters adulthood and is hired to be the personal assistant to a globetrotting Australian pop star named Aimee, whose statements and actions epitomize a “post-racial” worldview that ultimately does little more than reinforce European/white power and privilege. In comparison to post-blackness, which seeks to stress notions of racial essentialism and authenticity, post-racialism offers the false possibility of racial transcendence. Of all the characters, Aimee most embodies a post-racialist ethos that is ultimately unethical because it is simultaneously unhinged from reality and capable of wreaking havoc on those who lack her social status and power. We see an example of this when the narrator expresses unease over Aimee’s advocacy of individual philanthropy over governmental intervention to address societal needs. As they work on a promotional video for the school that Aimee funds, in which the celebrity appears with “large spade in hand,” Aimee insists, “And so if we want to see real change in this world, . . . we ourselves have to be the ones to do it, yes, we have to be the change we want to see” (125). The narrator remains skeptical. By “we” she meant people like herself, of financial means and global reach, who happen to love freedom and equality . . . It was a moral category but also an economic one. And if you followed its logic all the way to the end of the revolving belt, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness—or potential for goodness—a person possessed. (125) The non-white, working class narrator’s relative lack of privilege allows her in this instance to recognize the illogic and immorality of the postracial worldview. Similarly, when explaining to Aimee her reluctance to have children because “[she] saw what it did to [her] mother,” the celebrity insists that women require only individual will and desire to strike a life-work balance. The protagonist thinks, “this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality” (111). These views live too closely to the myth of individualism problematized elsewhere in the narrative. Unlike in the artistic realm, the narrator recognizes their material consequences. Aimee’s privilege compels the narrator to reckon with the simultaneity of her need for some kind of solidarity and the tenuousness of kinship claims based on social identity. For example, later in the novel, Aimee somehow manages a speedy, probably fraudulent, adoption of an African

154  Daphne Lamothe baby because her wealth, whiteness and Englishness free her from traditional bureaucratic oversight. The audacity of her unencumbered privilege sends the protagonist looking for companionship with another of Aimee’s employees who, coincidentally, shares her Jamaican heritage. As she tries to awkwardly bond with Estelle, the baby’s immigrant nanny, the narrator notes in a self-reflexive moment, “In the ten or so years we had both worked for Aimee, this was the longest and most intimate conversation we’d ever had” (420). The labels “employee” and “Jamaican” fail to compensate for the differences in citizenship and class status that prevent the two from connecting before this point. Moreover, the notion of racial solidarity premised on a shared identity and the commonality it presupposes offers a tenuous sort of refuge from the problems of racism and nationalism.

Swinging Time and Living with Contradiction The narrator’s appreciation of black music functions as the primary vehicle for Smith’s exploration of the multiple dimensions to and meanings of “blackness”—as subjectivity, sociocultural formation, political identity and object of commodification and consumption. For example, the narrator implicitly asserts her blackness when she asserts her preference for a roster of jazz icons who represent both racial and aesthetic authenticity: “I guess I like a lot of the older stuff, like Billie Holiday? Or Sarah Vaughan. Bessie Smith. Nina. Real singers” (97). Of course, her appearance betrays her racial confusion. She is dressed in an outfit full of dissonance: “nostalgic and futuristic, hip-hop and indie, rrriot girl and violent femme” (92). Sensing an implicit judgment, Aimee dismisses these remarks as naïve and outmoded: “my voice is this time. If it sounds to you like a computer, well, it’s right on time” (98). Of course, Aimee’s postmodern perspective relies on a willful historical amnesia and structural inequality that makes cultural theft possible. Greenidge equates cultural appropriation with a kind of dislocation akin to the temporal and geographic ruptures instigated by the triangular slave trade and its inauguration of “New World blackness.” She describes the disorienting effects of a dance being moved from a bedroom, club or drag ball to entirely different contexts. It can suddenly be transmitted everywhere, much, much faster, the movements that used to describe a group, an attitude, a community, suddenly shaken out of time, to be collated into the latest trend piece on memes, reduced to disposable internet content.17 (198)

17 This framing resonates with Baraka’s discussion in Blues People of the corrupting (Greenidge might say decontextualizing) influence of whites and other non-black peoples on black musical traditions.

Swing Time 155 Though hardly supportive of Aimee’s position, the narrative makes no effort to reconcile the narrator’s skepticism of her employer’s racial politics with her own vacillating point of view. She never lands on a single position but rather swings between nostalgic appreciation for authentic sounds of blackness (e.g., jazz standards) and assertions of the “timelessness” of great art that implicitly validates Aimee’s views by imagining it to transcend sociohistorical contexts and cultural differences. For example, elsewhere, viewing Michael Jackson’s Thriller video prompts her to think, “a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him” (38). Music repeatedly fails to provide a model for racial unity, cohesiveness or coherence. Only when filtered through time, distance and the mechanisms of the film industry can it satisfy the narrator’s longing for wholeness and stability. She admits as much when describing a dream: One night I dreamed of the Cotton Club: Cab Calloway was there, and Harold and Fayard, and I stood on the podium with a lily behind my ear. In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me. . . . None of our people ever swung by their necks from a tree, or found themselves suddenly thrown overboard shackled, in dark water—no, in my dreams we were golden! (100) The implication is that her preference for cabaret acts and musicals from the thirties is a “fantasy” in which she seeks “the kind of information I was looking for, which I felt I needed to shore myself up” (99–100). Passages such as this lead to the conclusion that Smith’s protagonist must learn to “swing time” as a mode of inhabiting the contradictions of black life. This concept builds on the cultural historical framework provided by Amiri Baraka in his groundbreaking study, Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Baraka introduces the collection with a description of the inspiration found in the music-lined library of his professor, poet Sterling Brown. This music, Brown told them, was a portal into their past: “This is the history. This is your history, my history, the history of the Negro people.”18 Baraka describes his encounter with black aesthetic genius (in the form of Brown and his record collection) as the genesis of his decision to narrate African American history through the blues and jazz. In many ways, Smith picks up where Baraka’s exploration ends by building on and departing from his discussion of racial assimilation and cultural appropriation. Given her anti-essentialist and

18 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Perennial, 1963 (1999 reprint), viii–ix.

156  Daphne Lamothe transnational framing of “blackness” and her focus on racial and cultural entanglements, it is both ironic and fitting that she prioritizes swing, which Baraka represents as the most bastardized and deracinated form of jazz.19 In contrast to the blues, which Baraka describes as “inviolable” because “there was no clear way into it” without having lived the “peculiar social, cultural, economic, and emotional experience of a black man in America,” jazz was more porous, more subject to exposure to and (implicitly) contamination by the other (147–8). He states, “Jazz made it possible for the first time for something of the legitimate feeling of AfroAmerican music to be imitated successfully” (148). As a subgenre of jazz, he argues, swing epitomizes this phenomenon because it was popularized by the middle-class, often white, musicians who dominated the big band era and codified black sound with musical scores and arrangements. The title of his chapter, “Swing—From Verb to Noun,” gestures toward the transformation that occurred when white musicians who popularized swing music transformed it into a commodity. These same musicians, Baraka argues, lacked the ineffable quality called “swing,” as in the phrase, “that guy sure can swing,” uttered in response to the rhythmic dynamism characteristic of black musicianship. If the development of swing music (noun) is linked to the objectification and commodification of “blackness,” the phenomenon of swing (verb) describes actions taken in the context of black musical performance that evokes the “spontaneous impulse” and “human element” of black life.20 Swing Time’s imagining of black subjects and cultures foregrounds this kind of dynamic performance of culture and identity, even as it grapples with the social encounters and engagements that, in the context of Blues People, makes blackness “impure.” In that sense, the narrator’s self-reflexive exploration of social, cultural and personal contradictions makes her “right on time” for those invested in the complexities of blackness and black life in the present era. 19 The notion of “swing” proves especially evocative not only because it gestures toward the racial and cultural hybridity that led to the creation of dances like the Lindy Hop and Charleston and big band era swing music in the 1930s and 1940s, but also because it is a phenomenon that has a well-documented history as a hermeneutic for exploring power, exchange and hybridity in American race relations. 20 My analysis is strongly informed by Nathaniel Mackey’s brilliant analysis of the relationship between social and artistic othering. Mackey states, “when we speak of otherness we are not positing static intrinsic attributes or characteristics. We need instead to highlight the dynamics of agency and attribution by way of which otherness is brought about and maintained, the fact that other is something people do, more importantly a verb than an adjective or a noun.” Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Representations, No. 39 (Summer, 1992), 51.

Swing Time 157 Okiji’s identification of contradiction as a constitutive aspect of “blackness” resonates. She writes, Within the general social field, black humanity is an aberration, a contradiction in terms. And genuine expression [like jazz or poetry] emerging from such life . . . should not be possible. This contradiction is not an irregularity but rather a peculiarity of black (American) subject formation. (18) From this vantage point, one more concerned with subjective experiences of blackness than with a project of affixing or naming black identity, black people “swing time” by negotiating the complexities of living with and within the contradiction of being “human enough for governance but too black for admittance to the ‘household of humanity’ ” (Okiji, 4). This contradiction encompasses both the vitality, dynamism and agency of individuals and the racial abjection and sociopolitical marginalization that the “political mind” pulls into focus.

Art, Space, Time Framing this debate in terms of “swing” allows Smith to maintain an open-ended, exploratory approach to representing “blackness.” In that sense, the narrative imagines and performs the kind of aesthetic invention that David Wondrich characterizes as “the swerve.” He states, “the swerve is what makes life possible—without it, all is static, permanent, sterile.”21 “Swerve,” like “swing,” names a musician’s ability to play with dexterity: to convey a sense of drive and establish a groove by adapting to the music’s changing tempos and making its rhythms bend to her imagination. It celebrates all that deviates from the known and codified. It is improvisational, unruly energy, created by the human impulse to act freely and to shape a self, as well as one’s environment. Greenidge locates this very sensibility in the narrator’s meditations on the dancers she admires: In them, Smith suggests, exists another way—a way to play with time, to move off time, to recognize all of the incongruities and historical rhythms of the last century and this strange, destabilizing new one, and to respond by turning it all into dance. (198)

21 David Wondrich, Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843–1924 (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 5.

158  Daphne Lamothe What Greenidge frames as the dancer’s mastery over time, Wondrich describes as experimentation resulting in “that glorious ‘mistake,’ the crazy unexpected note kicking out sideways to let us loose again no matter what you call it” (my emphasis, 6). Although “mastery” and “mistake” appear on the surface antithetical, both place the emphasis on the agency and imagination of the artist, as well as on the fugitive will to freedom. The narrator’s meditation on her personal relationship to art-making invites further consideration of the connections between “blackness,” subjectivity and objecthood. Singing, she suggests, allows her to inhabit a space-time continuum that exceeds the limitations of social categories. Singing allows her to feel free—“I could turn time into musical phrases, into beats and notes, slowing it down and speeding it up, controlling the time of my life”—even from the dislocations of race and racism (137).22 Wary though the narrative may be of the protagonist’s attraction to ideas of artistic transcendence, it remains receptive to the “gloriousness” of unexpected discoveries and expressions, made possible when artists tap their ability to swing time and “create a real feeling” (120). “Active ambivalence” proves central to negotiating the divide between individual agency and the dislocations tied to collective experiences of “blackness.” Two minor characters in an interracial, same-sex relationship, who appear briefly in the latter part of the novel, exemplify this thought: James and Darryl are “two people creating the time of their own lives, protected by love, not ignorant of history, but not deformed by it” (433).23 The idea of James and Darryl “creating the time of their life” echoes the earlier description of the narrator “controlling the time of [her] life” as she sings. The resonance equates the imaginative act of making art with that of making a life. Like the descriptions of performers who bend time in order to imbue a musical phrase with invention and authentic feeling, this passage describes people striving to live authentically, even as they are subjected to historical and sociopolitical forces beyond their control. The narrator describes them as one of the few models of happiness at her disposal (433)—perhaps because they embrace the 22 Gibson astutely links the narrator’s first-persona narration to the artistic sovereignty associated with song and dance, stating, “The narrator’s power to ‘swing time’ in storytelling offers subtle tribute to—and vies, even more subtly, with—Tracey’s own” (138). 23 The language here mirrors almost exactly Smith’s description of her friend, the novelist Darryl Pinckney, whom she described as “a model of . . . active ambivalence.” To Smith, Pinckney embodies the capacity to move between being politically conscious of the ramifications of being marked “black” in a racist society and being “radically existential,” which she characterizes as a claim to “the freedom of just being Darryl, in all his extreme particularity.” Jeffrey Eugenides, “The Pieces of Zadie Smith,” NY Times Style Magazine, October 17, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/zadie-smith-swing-time-jeffrey-euge nides.html.

Swing Time 159 ambivalence that Okiji, citing Hortense Spillers, argues “does not flatten social antagonism or ontological contradiction” (45).24 As the protagonist moves across time (past and present) and space (Europe, America and Africa), in pursuit of a coherent self that will ultimately prove to be elusive, she traverses artistic and subjective realms, approaching each as a field of exploration. We might describe these fields as the space-time of art and subjectivity. Rather than privileging linear movements (e.g., the conventional trajectory of the bildungsroman), she learns to swing in the face of change and unpredictability, contradiction and conflict. The aesthetic and the ethical are inherently and inevitably intertwined in the story because her desire for and admiration of aesthetic freedom is fundamentally challenged, and fueled, by the unfreedom of blackness. These insights infuse the final pages of the novel, which present the narrator in an anticipatory moment of reunification with Tracey. By this point, the two now former friends have followed strikingly divergent trajectories of social mobility (Tracey’s career as a dancer eventually stalls due to drug use, sexual abuse and single-motherhood). They are no longer friends but spiritually yoked together. The narrator moves toward her “other,” in pursuit of a “self-in-relation”: Tracey’s tower came into view, above the horse chestnuts, and with it reality. . . . I almost turned back, like someone who has woken abruptly from a sleepwalk, except for an idea, new to me, that there might be something else I could offer, something simpler, more honest, between my mother’s idea of salvation and nothing at all. . . . I was about to enter the stairwell when I heard music, stopped and looked up. She was right above me, on her balcony, in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing. (453) This image of a family united in ecstatic movement embodies notions of relation; yet communion exists only in the imagination. By withholding what the protagonist says or how Tracey responds, Swing Time offers instead only a glimpse of future possibility. This lack of finality suggests a state of being engaged in an ongoing process of becoming, without insisting on a particular destination or point of arrival. Whether depicting black women dancing, singing or narrating the self, Swing Time represents art and imagination as spaces of freedom from the obligation to pin down what, or how, black women should “be.”

24 Okiji alludes to such a conclusion when she asserts that black life “cannot but help be lived as critical reflection” (26).

160  Daphne Lamothe

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Ashe, Bertram. “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction.” African American Review, vol. 41, no. 4, Winter 2007, pp. 609–23. Crawford, Margo. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and TwentyFirst-Century Aesthetics. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2017. English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Eugenides, Jeffrey. “The Pieces of Zadie Smith.” T: NY Times Style Magazine, 17 Oct. 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/t-magazine/zadie-smith-swingtime-jeffrey-eugenides.html. Gibson, Lindsay Gail. “Kinetic Joy.” Dissent, vol. 64, no. 1, Winter 2017, pp. 137–41. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. Kaitlyn Greenidge. “Shaken Out of Time: Black Bodies and Movement in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 93, no. 1, 2017, pp. 196–9. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Perennial, 1963 (1999 reprint). Mackey, Nathaniel. “Other: From Noun to Verb.” Representations, no. 39, Summer, 1992, pp. 51–70. Okiji, Fumi. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2016. Selasie, Taiye. “Swing Time by Zadie Smith Review—A Classic Story of Betterment.” The Guardian, 13 Nov. 2016. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ nov/13/swing-time-zadie-smith-review. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. New York: Penguin, 2009. ———. Swing Time. New York: Penguin, 2016. ———. “Zadie Smith: ‘I have a very messy and chaotic mind’ ” The Guardian, 21 Jan. 2018. www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/21/zadie-smith-you-askthe-questions-self-doubt. Wondrich, David. Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843–1924. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003. Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2015. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257–337.

9 Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd A Social Vision Represented through Humor Sarah Ilott Academic criticism of Zadie Smith’s oeuvre is frequently defined by a failure to take the role that humor plays in mediating her account of multicultural Britain seriously, treating it as an accidental addendum or dismissing it as a distraction from the serious business of her thematic engagements, rather than the very mode of engagement. Following John McLeod’s timely advice with reference to the example of White Teeth, “that in engaging with significant literary texts, at times we need to attend closer to what they seem to say, rather than what we might want them to say” (43), this chapter closely examines Smith’s use of narrative humor as a vehicle for interpreting her social vision and, in particular, her contested relationship with multiculturalism. I argue that whilst Smith might be Britain’s chronicler of multiculturalism, her humorous treatment of the subject functions to highlight the power relationships defining a racist and unequal nation, to foreground alternative perspectives through the code switching required for joking exchanges and to satirize the liberal ideal of corporate or official multiculturalism that governs responses to diversity. Her comedy is celebratory only inasmuch as it revels in the chaos of miscommunication that defines her characters’ transcultural interactions. Yet, by exposing the empathy gap often necessary for comedy to function, her narrative humor also calls for a consideration of systemic power and the complicity of readers and is, as such, an important vehicle for reflecting on the state of the nation. Reading Smith’s use of narrative humor as central to her engagement with British multiculturalism guards against the kind of divorce of form and content that suggests studying texts “without the comic elements that cushion the effect of disturbing messages” (Jakubiak 203). It also avoids the description of humorous strategies as if they are an unfortunate mistake, suggesting that it is “difficult to see these characters as anything more than the caricatures they represent. Fortunately, these characters are juxtaposed against other female characters that defy . . . stereotypes” (my italics, Walters 137). By taking humor seriously, I recognize with Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein that “laughter is a central element, humour [sic] a key feature, disrespect a vital textual strategy of

162  Sarah Ilott postcolonial cultural practice” (1). In so doing, I attempt to counter the “curious reluctance” to engage with the strategies of humour that Reichl and Stein identify among postcolonial critics (2). Because humor is such an ambivalent medium—the tool of superior laughter and conservative derision at deviation from social norms as often as it is the tool of radical critique and celebration of the incongruous—it is crucial to recognize humorous treatment of subject matter as an important formal and ethical decision. It is the form that the humor takes that variously informs readers’ interpretations of the subject matter through its interpellation of readers into specific subject positions in relation to the material as insiders or outsiders, superior to or allied with the targets or subjects of jokes. It is the fact and manner of framing of a subject as humorous that determines the position constructed for readers toward it, and therein lies the ethical responsibility of the author. It is for this reason that when it comes to analyzing Smith’s oeuvre, it is important to recognize, with Peter Childs and James Green, that it is her “attempt to reconnect ethics and aesthetics, drawing on comic and social realism” that is her significant “contribution to the twenty-first-century novel” (n.p.). As Smith herself asserts in relation to her reading (and others’ misreadings) of E. M. Forster’s style, “The truth is, surely, that every variety of literary style attempts to enact in us a way of seeing, of reading, and this is never less than an ethical strategy” (Smith “Love, Actually”). This chapter engages with humor on macro and micro levels—from individual joking exchanges to comic structures that defy conventional narrative logic through the intervention of the absurd—as a means of interpreting the formal, political and ethical nature of Smith’s engagement with British multiculturalism. Heralded as the voice (and often the face) of multicultural Britain, Smith’s representation of British multiculturalism nevertheless often deviates from that of those who would try to co-opt her for marketing or political purposes. Part of the problem with discussions of Smith’s representation of multiculturalism (and of discussions of multiculturalism in the British frame more broadly) is a slippage between descriptive, reflective and ideological uses of the term that are rarely clarified by those employing them (Fortier 3). As such, whilst Smith undeniably engages with the fact of cultural diversity (“multiculture”) in her North London settings, the means by which this fact of diversity is “put to work” or “mobilized to produce desires, identities, anxieties, and so on” (Fortier 3) is far more complex. Indeed, both in interviews and in her literary output, I would argue that she resists, as have many postcolonial authors and critics, the discourse of official multiculturalism as something that stands at odds with anti-racist activism. This chapter is concerned with discussion of Smith’s three predominantly British novels: White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002) and NW (2012). Each novel has a different relationship to British multiculture as the political climate has shifted from the celebratory (if corporate)

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 163 attitude toward cultural diversity that defined Tony Blair’s New Labour government, particularly in the period prior to 9/11, to David Cameron’s Conservative post-crash “austerity” Britain in which economic insecurity provided the crucible for increased xenophobia. In Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, the fact of lived multiculture is reflected in the ethnically and culturally diverse cast of characters. Yet the novel’s attitude toward multiculturalism varies from biting satires of liberal ideals to a carnivalesque chaos of miscommunication that arises from aspects of cultural difference. The Autograph Man shares with its predecessor a multi-ethnic cast of characters and a concern to categorize and find meaning, in which the unfortunate habit of reading situations according to the dictates of popular films combines and conflicts with interpretations of the world through more traditional identity categories, to humorous effect. The narrative exposition is akin to stand-up comedy, as the narratorial presence retains a wry distance from characters. NW is more conservative in its measure of humor than Smith’s early works, critically reflecting on the empathy gap that joking often requires whilst retreating from caricature. Identity, in NW, is drag of varying degrees of inauthenticity: “Daughter drag, Sister drag, Mother drag, Wife drag, Court drag, Rich drag, Poor drag, British drag, Jamaican drag” (278). The systemic inequalities of Smith’s North London settings are more apparent than in her previous works, and the humor wanes as the necessity for empathy across lives so radically divided by circumstance takes center stage. Yet it is often precisely through a reflexive approach to humor—establishing positions of superiority through joking exchanges only to reveal complicity and engender introspection—that empathy is foregrounded.

Comic Timing as Alternative Historiography In an influential work on narratology, Peter Brooks describes plot as “a structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed through temporal succession, the instrumental logic of a specific mode of human understanding” (12). Enriching formalist accounts of plot with psychoanalytic ones, Brooks contends that plots are “intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving” (12), through which “we engage the dynamic of memory and the history of desire as they work to shape the recovery of meaning within time” (36). This reading of plot centers on the ability of the reader to make sense of the world with which they are presented, driven by desire for the proper resolution that will accord meaning and significance to what has come before. Comedy, however, operates according to a different kind of logic, in which desire is frequently thwarted. Comic narratives may offer closure of a kind, but they also disrupt any illusion that the world they have created can be interpreted through the application of logic and the satisfaction of desire.

164  Sarah Ilott As Glen Cavaliero argues, “Comedy . . . draws attention to, and thrives upon, the factor of surprise, that element of sheer chance which upsets all sense of the dependability of foreseeable predestination. It does not resist, but welcomes, disruptive incursions” (4). So it is with Smith’s narrative worlds, in which moments of farce represent narrative rupture and a loss of control that points both to the absurdity of the contemporary world and to those (characters and readers) who would lay a claim to comprehending it. The desire for a satisfying resolution is parodied and made ridiculous through the inclusion of characters such as Jehovah’s Witnesses Hortense Bowden and Ryan Topps, whose desires in White Teeth for apocalypse as it is foretold are repeatedly thwarted and fail to appear with comic regularity. Philip Tew accurately summarizes the comic narrative arcs that define Smith’s fiction, in which “Coincidences combine with the dominant comic perspective to radically disturb dominant historiography” (46), thereby introducing a “notion of improbable causality” (51). Introducing such “improbable causality” (Tew 51) challenges the repeated recourse to historical roots as a source of meaning as exemplified by White Teeth’s older characters Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, who are described as “daddy long-legs” with “one leg in the present, one in the past” (80). Yet the alternative logic of this comic narrative simultaneously frustrates the fashioning of new modes of identity and meaning that may provide hope for the future. In White Teeth, the younger generation’s ludic experiments with identity that may otherwise represent hope for the future are routinely frustrated. Irie Jones’s “sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-through-able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe” (273)—its hyperbolic description through the use of free indirect discourse burlesquing from the outset Irie’s desires—promptly falls out in clumps before her love interest has even set eyes on it. Millat Iqbal’s involvement with the radical Islamist group “Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation” is made ridiculous through its acronym— KEVIN—and the group’s aims and objectives are neither agreed upon nor realized. The earnestness with which Joshua Chalfen immerses himself in the work of an animal rights group named FATE (Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation) is undermined by its narrative framing as an example of teenage angst and unrequited romantic desire. Finally, Magid Iqbal’s devotion to the familial code dubbed Chalfenism alongside the pursuit of scientific discovery is cut short when the genetically enhanced mouse that he has been collaborating on with Marcus Chalfen is released during the novel’s improbable climax. While characters are lampooned for looking to history for answers, they are not represented as agents of their futures either, as the introduction of comic rupture and chance situates characters as the butts of jokes, their narrative trajectories forming punchlines rather than the satisfaction of meaning or desire. The utopianism of multiculturalism as an ideal that euphemistically replaces race

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 165 with culture in a simultaneous recognition and flattening of diversity accompanied by the suppression of systemic inequality (historical and contemporary) is referenced in Smith’s parodic representation of characters at once unmoored from historical roots yet unable to find any viable routes into the future. Character arcs conform to narrative jokes on a macrocosmic level in White Teeth. The withholding of the most important plot detail—the unexpected survival of war criminal Dr. Sick, whom Archie had been dispatched to assassinate forty-four years previously—has the effect of reducing history to the punchline of a joke, a moment of comic and narrative surprise that provides the catalyst for the novel’s farcical denouement. The reason for Dr. Sick’s survival—Archie’s submission to chance in tossing a coin to determine the eugenicist’s fate—adds a further layer of comic implausibility. Archie furiously questions the doctor as to why he had picked up the gun as Archie retrieved the tossed coin: “For fucksake, why did you do that? . . . It’s tails. See? It’s tails. Look. Tails. It was tails” (540). Archie’s frustrated repetition frames the utterance as humorous, as if submission to the random, to chance, when there is the opportunity (represented by the gun) to take one’s life into one’s own hands, is only natural. The pressing weight of half a century of history is reduced to the flip of a coin, thereby exposing and refuting the realist narrative illusion that characters may exercise something resembling agency over their futures. Smith’s comic narratives provide a timely reminder that lives are determined not by some essential quality but how that quality is narratively framed by those with the power to do so. To borrow words from Smith’s first novel, her protagonists are entangled in “an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else” (White Teeth 526). To recognize this is to acknowledge the powers acting on individuals’ lives in, for example, celebrating cultural diversity because it is economically expedient to do so as articulated in the Demos Report of 1997 (Leonard) and then, just a few years later, bemoaning its failure or crisis in the post-9/11 period as a justification for tightening security and immigration regulations.

Humor, Perspective Switching and Miscommunication Much of Smith’s narrative humor derives from incongruities arising from incompatible truths and perspectives wherein characters are made ridiculous when their worldviews are implicitly challenged through juxtaposition with other characters’ worldviews or through the narrative framing. Jeroen Vandaele details the specific workings of narrative humor as arising when readers are interpellated through the narrative framing to commit to a particular intentional perspective “with a view toward creating (or promoting) or changing incongruity and superiority relations among the

166  Sarah Ilott intentional participants (author, narrator, audience)” (“Narrative Humor [II]” 83). Crucially, for a postcolonial and antiracist project such as Smith’s, narrative humor is invested in relationships of power and questions of normativity, as the deliberate shifts between intentional perspectives that humor requires confront readers with conflicting worldviews and truth claims. This, in turn, foregrounds the individual and social power at work in constructing positions of superiority and normativity. For Cavaliero, it is the very function of comedy to make apparent “alternative visions of the truth” (9); for Vandaele, humor shows us that “knowledge is revisable” (“Narrative Humor [II]” 64). I would argue that this is where comedy is most readily distinguished from tragedy, the latter of which revels in the solipsism of singular worldviews in order to render the tragedy tragic from the singular perspective that audiences are interpellated to align themselves with. It is for this reason that I read Smith’s humor as central to her social vision rather than a flippant addendum to otherwise serious subject matters; humor, in its very workings, enables paradigm shifts, challenges norms, exposes power relationships and engenders sentiments of productive vulnerability and uncertainty in readers in ways not possible in more serious or realist accounts of British multiculture. A collision of worldviews is presented in Smith’s oeuvre not as a source of fear—as is the case with Samuel Huntington’s notorious polemic on The Clash of Civilizations—but as a source of humor. That such contradictory truths and worldviews function humorously is largely because the characters are not portrayed as representatives or spokespeople for wider cultural or ethnic groupings. In White Teeth, for example, each member of the Iqbal family (and various other Muslims that make up the cast of characters) has their own interpretation of Islam, which has the effect that when humor is derived from their utterances in conflict with others or with the narrative framing, it is not by virtue of their Muslimness but by virtue of their individual contradictions. Framing oppositions as the source of humor is also an important political statement when fear is so often used as the tool of governance when it comes to the management of British multiculturalism. The purported “self-segregation” of Muslim communities, for example, has been constructed as instrumental to riots, terrorism and ghettoization (Phillips and CCRT). Meanwhile, the slow trickle of refugees arriving on Britain’s shores has been described in dehumanizing and apocalyptic terms as a “swarm” (former Prime Minister David Cameron), “marauding” (former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond) or a “flood” (Daily Express/BBC) (Shariatmadari). Contradictory means of interpreting the world are instead juxtaposed to humorous effect through explicit framing devices in Smith’s early oeuvre. Her first two novels contain frequent inset sections, bordered and thus set apart from the main body of the text, which reframe the subject matter of the primary narrative overtly. Taking The Autograph Man as an example, short pop quizzes related to the unwritten laws governing social interactions provide a metacommentary on the novel’s main action. They

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 167 are entitled “Halachah,” relating to the Jewish religious laws derived from the Torah, but this formal designation is bathetically reduced by the parenthetic clarification that follows: “(Pop Quiz #2)” (138). This particular “Halachah” relates to the “law concerning the man who is very stoned and the man who is not as stoned as he” (138), inset into a section in which protagonist Alex and his friend Adam find themselves negotiating these positions. The reframing functions to foreground the humor of the interaction and to diffuse through humorous release the tension from the subsequent moment of conflict—“I’ll tell you exactly what your problem is” (138)—as the simple fulfilment of a social requisite. The crucial role of the mediator in positioning subjects and subject matter as funny or otherwise is foregrounded through such framing devices. In The Autograph Man, every chapter is doubly framed, as the main topics of each chapter are summarized before moving on to the body of the chapter proper. Chapter Eight is rendered thus: Wisdom · Three rabbis · Something is like a coin · Where the dead live · The wisdom of Lauren Bacall · Walking to the centre · Description of a struggle / The defence · Virginia Woolf was Jewish · Suicide dos and don’ts · Real prosperity. (163) This precis points to its own status as parody of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts through its inclusion of senseless statements (“Something is like a coin”), demonstrating the impossibility of understanding when a subject is stripped of detail. There is also a humorous juxtaposition with the actual content of the chapter: Virginia Woolf was not Jewish in the common sense of the word; the summary “Virginia Woolf was Jewish” refers in the context of the chapter to Alex’s arbitrary classification of the world into things Jewish and things Goyish. Suicide of the nature of Virginia Woolf’s is classed as Jewish, ergo, through the circuitous logic parodied by the chapter precis, “Virginia Woolf was Jewish.” The novel’s repeated refrain of classifying things as Jewish or Goyish functions more widely as a parody of the inclination to interpret individuals with reference to decontextualized labels and points to the shifting nature of such labels depending on the frame of reference. In a more somber moment of White Teeth, Smith includes italicized parenthetic asides as a means of drawing attention to the framing of racial violence in contemporary Britain: the parenthesized sound effects interpellate readers to respond to this passage as a humorous one. The narrator describes the instances of violence and theft inflicted upon Mo Hussein-Ishmael at the hands of white racists three times a year over the period of eighteen years that he has run a halal butcher store: Mo had been knifed a total of five times (Ah), lost the tips of three fingers (Eeeesh), had both legs and arms broken (Oaooow), his feet

168  Sarah Ilott set on fire (jiii), his teeth kicked out (ka-tooof) and an air-gun bullet (ping) embedded in his thankfully fleshy posterior. Boof. (472) The parenthetic asides reframe the violence as a source of humor, the juxtaposition of serious violence with cartoonish sound effects functioning as a means of representing Mo as a comic character. Comic characters are, for Susan Purdie, those for whom “other characters’ responses are not in measure with their intended effects; all their signification is inappropriate,” and this, crucially, “incites the Audience to notice the disjuncture between the ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’ of the text” (81). The cognitive dissonance created by this disjuncture foregrounds processes of interpellation and resists strategies that might cause readers to suspend disbelief. For Jakubiak, this passage provides evidence that “the world we are observing is virtual; the characters, despite their ‘real’ appearance, never experience pain. . .; everything, including our reaction, has been prerecorded, and thus all our choices are a priori limited” (207–8). This comic rendering of violence is another means of resisting the naturalization of particular representations through the foregrounding of the mediating effect of narrative positioning—an amplification of the “perspectival tension” created by free indirect speech (Vandaele “Narrative Humor [I], 771)—that determines the status of the subjects of representation.

Satirizing Corporate Multiculturalism Defamiliarizing effects enabled through humorous reframing and perspectival juxtaposition are a crucial means of highlighting, and thereby satirizing, the kind of corporate multiculturalism that capitalizes on ethnic diversity for financial gain whilst framing it in patronizing terms evocative of the lie of colonialism’s “civilizing mission.” At Joyce Chalfen’s suggestion that Millat and Irie join Joshua Chalfen for a study group as a punishment for being found with drugs, the headmaster’s approach is a parody of corporate multicultural discourse: “And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guineapig project for a whole range of programmes,” said the headmaster, thinking aloud. “Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football, et cetera. We could get funding.” At the magic word funding, the headmaster’s sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids. “Shit, man,” said Millat, shaking his head in disbelief. “I need a fag.” (Smith White Teeth, 308)

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 169 The headmaster’s response is satirized through his orgasmic response to the prospect of financial recompense for his efforts and through Millat’s pronounced disinterest despite his status as the supposed benefactor of this emergent programme. The headmaster’s statement is emblematic of the “corporatized version of multiculturalism” that critics such as Kavita Bhanot suggest not only “assumes a neutral point from which ‘others’ are ‘diverse’ ” but frames and manages this diversity in terms of helping white institutions “make more money” (n.p.). As the title of Bhanot’s article (“Decolonise, Not Diversify”) suggests, such an approach to multicultural diversity does nothing to challenge existing hegemonies, ideologies or normativities. It does nothing to challenge the power dynamics that place white people as donors and minorities as recipients, a power dynamic that is darkly mirrored in the entitlement of the aforementioned white racists who abuse Mo Hussain-Ishmael with disturbing regularity. The implicit imperialist tendencies of such approaches to diversity are further satirized through Smith’s representation of Joyce Chalfen, White Teeth’s bearer of white middle-class values: (Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term “middle class”. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it’s hard to say.) (435) The swift move from something resembling free indirect discourse to describe Joyce’s class pride to more explicit narratorial commentary— “Where they got this idea, it’s hard to say”—foregrounds and challenges the cultural imperialism of Joyce’s project to enrich the lives of her young, brown-skinned protégés, Millat and Irie. By describing the Chalfens from Irie’s perspective, Smith refuses to play the diversity game in which cultural hegemony and the status of the normative subject (usually white, male, able-bodied, middle class) is maintained. The imperialist impulses behind Joyce’s actions in the assumptions that she makes about the children’s family lives and the unwavering belief that her way is best, coupled with the patronizing allowances that she makes for Millat and Irie, but not for her own children, are parodied and exposed through the description of Irie’s detached observation of middle-class life as conducted in the Chalfen household: During this exchange, Irie tried to concentrate on Oscar, now creating an ouroboros from a big pink elephant by stuffing the trunk into its own rear end. She’d never been so close to this strange and beautiful thing, the middle class, and experienced the kind of embarrassment that is actually intrigue, fascination. It was both strange

170  Sarah Ilott and wondrous. She felt like the prude who walks through a nudist beach, examining the sand. She felt like Columbus meeting the exposed arawaks, not knowing where to look. (321) The use of technical language to describe mundane events (the creation of the elephant ouroboros) mimics ethnographic writing, while the exoticism with which this commonplace instance of white middle-class family life is discussed harks back to European travel writing’s Orientalist tendencies and the “touristic guilt” (Brouillette 7) that it is the postcolonial author’s lot to negotiate. Irie’s gaze is framed as an imperialist one through reference to Columbus, and the defamiliarizing function of reversing the power dynamics inherent in the colonial gaze exposes and satirizes the normative status usually afforded to white, middle-class perspectives. Smith’s humor, then, is used to challenge the power structures that the corporate agenda of official multiculturalism would seek to elide, recentering questions of race, racism and colonialism that euphemistic and ahistorical references to “multiculturalism” function to screen. Reichl and Stein liken “communities of laughter” to Stanley Fish’s notion of interpretive communities that share interpretive strategies and determine the nature of what is read, rightly noting that “Laughter, too, presupposes shared worlds, shared codes, and shared values” (13). This is applicable to Smith’s use of humor, through which she invites readers to reflect on the codes and values defining group allegiances, exposes the power structures that remain unchallenged in corporate approaches to diversity and queers normative perspectives. To understand Smith’s approach to British multiculturalism is to read deeper than the existence of cultural difference in her cast of characters and to examine instead how the narrative frames the ways in which these interactions across lines of cultural power are represented or managed. The perspective switching engendered through the destabilizing effects of narrative humor allows readers the critical distance necessary to reflect on the power relations affecting the (mis)management and (mis)representation of British multiculture. As I have suggested, Smith’s representations of British multiculturalism critique the model of “corporate multiculturalism” that Paul Gilroy described in 2000 as the simulated celebration of difference, or blackness, only when the “culture industry” renders it in a “user-friendly, housetrained, and marketable ‘reading’ or translation” (242). The paradoxical situation created through the corporate discourse of British multiculturalism, in which diversity is identified and celebrated only when it conforms, assimilates and becomes a recognizable singularity, is expressed in White Teeth as “Zeno’s Paradox”: (a) first establish multiplicity, the Many, as an illusion, and (b) thus prove reality a seamless, flowing whole. A single, indivisible One. (466)

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 171 It is the narrator’s assertion that “the world is Many” (466) and that caricatures such as Mr. Schmutters and Mr. Banajii, who are imagined to “weav[e] their way through Happy Multicultural Land,” “happy and willing to leave their difference at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree,” do not match up to the diegetic realities of her characters (465). Schmutters’ and Banajii’s utopian situation is dismissed with narratorial sarcasm: “Well, good for them” (465). For Smith, the relationships among her multicultural characters are not so readily consumed, and her novels present to humorous effect chaotic miscommunication and loss of order as characters repeatedly talk at odds and misinterpret words and actions in their encounters with each other. It is this aspect of Smith’s humor that critics such as Helga Ramsey-Kurz read as celebratory: “Comedy, by definition, does not deplore such confusion, but celebrates it” (84). Chaos is, in the works of Smith, Kureishi and Rushdie, constructed “as an inevitable but not necessarily deleterious corollary of cultural diversification. For them, the flexibility and freedom that chaos permits is more conducive to cultural regeneration than the continuity secured by order” (RamseyKurz 84). Smith’s humor parodies identity politics by ridiculing the idea that individuals can be understood through the labels that are assigned to them. In White Teeth, Smith parodies what critics of multicultural ideology, such as Colin Mooers, have termed “the fetishistic logic of multicultural citizenship” that “distorts social relations,” ultimately occluding “capitalism’s concrete social relations” (33). Poppy Burt-Jones is the character through whom Smith parodies the reification of difference that defines such a fetishistic logic. Her exchanges with Samad (with whom she has a brief affair) and with the Parent Teacher Association of Glenard Oak School are undermined with comic regularity, parodying the ways in which she insists on reading Samad through his assumed difference, attributing all of his actions to his Bangladeshi or Muslim identities. When Poppy praises Samad’s “incredible act of self-control” that “We just don’t have . . . in the West” (160), readers are party to the dramatic irony that Samad’s barely sustained illusion of self-control is enabled through frequent bouts of guilty masturbation. Furthermore, Samad’s immediate response to this praise—to “kick[] the stool from under him like a man hanging himself, and [meet] the loquacious lips of Poppy BurtJones with his own feverish pair” (160)—bathetically undercuts Poppy’s misinterpretation and portrays their interethnic relationship as premised upon mutual misunderstanding through deference to identity labels. The repetition of Poppy Burt-Jones’s full double-barrelled name functions to reify her middle-class whiteness and construct her as a caricature—as a parodic mirror for her treatment of ethnic minorities through recourse to stereotype and exoticism. This, by extension, functions as a wider critique of the (il)logic of multiculturalism.

172  Sarah Ilott

Humor and the Empathy Gap To conclude, I turn to Smith’s most recent predominantly London-based novel, NW. Written at a very different political moment in Britain amidst increasing xenophobia and nationalism fueled by the ongoing “War on Terror” and the austerity measures exacerbating social divides following the global financial crisis of 2007–08, the approach to both humor and multiculturalism in this novel is markedly different. In relation to the changing context, sociologists Alana Lentin and Gavin Titley argue that in the post-9/11 period, politicians and the media alike have “increasingly drawn on narratives of the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ to make sense of a broad range of events and political developments, and to justify political initiatives in relation to integration, security and immigration” (2). This represents a very different approach from the celebration of diversity (however cynical and market-driven its aims) that defined the first years of Blair’s prime ministership at the height of “Cool Britannia,” and it necessitates a different approach to representation. In an introduction to Smith’s work that predates the publication of NW, Tew rightly argues that in her early novels, “The comedy remains largely an authorial and readerly experience, a position of knowingness, of judgement” in which “the characters laugh very little. They do not share humor among themselves. They suffer, seeing a world verging on the tragic” (48). This analysis highlights that Smith’s early narrative humor creates distance from the characters in order to function: readers are not interpellated into a Bakhtinian carnivalesque in which everyone is implicated but are called upon to judge characters and to inhabit a position of superiority in relation to the world presented, even if the purpose of this is to satirize, parody and critique. Comedy critics point to tragedy, which “asks us to be sensible of human suffering,” as oppositional to comedy, which “allows us to stand back and look upon human misfortune from an emotional distance, sometimes even deriving great pleasure from it” (Stott 12). For Vandaele, the reduction of empathy is a logical result of narrative humor: “mildly or radically nonempathic with the incongruous object, the experiencing subject now concentrates on his or her own feeling and . . . on his or her bond with the humorist” (“Narrative Humor [II]” 76). This comes back to the basic triadic relationship formed by joking, wherein the collusion between the Teller (narrator) and Audience (reader) of jokes is confirmed through the exclusion of the Butt (the object of humor). I argue that it is this recognition of nonempathy and its effects in an increasingly divided nation that prompt the less satirical and more reflective and empathic approach to humor in Smith’s later works, in which complicity in relation to upholding power relations through joking is exposed and challenged. NW, a novel of ideas, is explicitly concerned with questions of empathy. Leah Hanwell muses in the early pages on “the bastard in that first class,

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 173 sniggering” at her naïve mispronunciation of philosophers’ names at the outset of her degree. This is followed immediately by “I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it” (33). Presented without explanation according to the stream-of-consciousness style of this section of the novel, the emphatic statement appears as an unmediated response to the empathy lacking in derisive laughter exemplified by the “sniggering” bastard. Empathy is formally engendered through the removal of inverted commas to denote speech in the first section of the novel, closing the gap between narrator and character and forcing readers into closer proximity with characters without presuming fully to have access to their inner lives. The focalization shifts repeatedly in Leah’s opening section, allowing readers to see the world from her perspective and her from others’. In this markedly more somber novel that is principally concerned with Leah and her childhood best friend, Natalie (Keisha) Blake, there is, nevertheless, a short and more comical interlude devoted to a day in the life of Felix Cooper, a recovering drug addict whose lofty intentions toward his newfound love are held up for scrutiny to humorous effect during a visit to his ex-lover, Annie. This comic hiatus functions as a means of reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of humor as, ambivalently, a step toward greater understanding or a bar to empathy. Felix attempts to convey to Annie why it is serious with Grace: “We’ve got a lot in common, like . . . just a lot of things.” “Long walks in the country, red wine, the operas of Verdi, GSOH . . .” Annie held her arms wide and put her fingers together as in a yogic chant. “She knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.” Annie looked at him oddly: “That’s setting the bar rather low, don’t you think? I mean, bully for you she’s not in a coma . . .” Felix laughed and spotted her grinning gummily with pleasure. “Politically conscious, racially conscious, as in she gets it, the struggle. Conscious.” “She’s awake and she understands.” Annie closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Bully for you.” But some flicker of imperiousness in her face tipped Felix over. He started shouting: “All you know how to do is take the piss. That’s all you know. What you doing that’s so amazing? What you getting accomplished?” Annie opened one startled eye. “What am I—what on earth are you talking about? I was joking, for God’s sake. What exactly am I meant to be getting accomplished?” “I’m talking about what are your goals? What do you want for your life to be like?

174  Sarah Ilott “What do I want for my life to be like? I’m sorry, grammatically I’m finding that question extremely peculiar.” “Fuck you, Annie.” She tried to laugh this off, too, and reached out for his wrist, but he pushed it away. “Nah, but there’s no point with you, is there? I’m just trying to tell you where I’m going with my life and you’re just taking the piss. Pointless. You’re pointless.” It came out more brutal than he’d meant. She winced. “I think you’re being very cruel. I’m only trying to understand.” (154) Annie’s response here is telling as a reflection on humor: by provocatively misunderstanding Felix, testing absurdities and pointing out incongruities, Annie represents her intentions as a means of finding a way of understanding. According to her formulation, humor functions as a means both of exposing the absurd and thereby correcting misunderstanding and of redrawing the lines of inclusion and exclusion, as she attempts to draw Felix into collusion with her by encouraging him to laugh at himself (wherein he would become both the audience and the butt of her jokes). Yet her explanation of her intention is narratively framed as disingenuous as she attempts to disavow the seriousness of her message with the “only joking” defence that critics such as Dennis Howitt and Kwame Owusu Bempah rightly note is a strategy that “passes the responsibility for the conversational difficulty to the challenger for not having a sense of humour [sic]” in a manner that “effectively releases the joke teller from an obligation to consider the offensive nature of the ‘jokes’ ” (48). The way that Felix’s responses register a tonal shift to the serious mode, in a way that denies collusion with Annie’s attempts at humor, exposes the means by which such jokes punch down through their performance of superiority. NW frequently reflects in this manner on position-taking in humor, setting up joking scenarios only to challenge the dehumanizing effects of positioning another as the butt of the joke, as when Natalie realizes “that the young man she had turned into a comic anecdote to be told at dinner parties was in many ways himself a miracle of self-invention, a young man with a tremendous will, far outstripping her own” (194). This reflection encourages readers themselves to take a more considered approach to humorous representation before aligning themselves too readily with a position of superiority over the represented. The comic distance that narrative positioning creates between readers and characters in Smith’s earlier work is closed in NW, as readers are forced to question complicity in humor’s potentially dehumanizing effects. The lack of empathy required to caricature is highlighted when Natalie cannot categorize Leah into her schema of “Caldwell people” and “Non-Caldwell people” when it comes

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 175 to advice for handling her new baby, “as it’s hardest to caricature the people you’ve loved best in your life” (270–1). I do not suggest that Smith’s earlier use of humor was unethical, as context is always a key frame for interpreting humor. What this reflexive turn in Smith’s humor represents, I would argue, is a sensitivity to the changing political and discursive context of British multiculturalism. As Sarita Malik rightly states in relation to visual media, “Since images don’t simply operate in a social or political vacuum, the context in which they are seen and the timing of their production is just as important as the types of images which are produced” (12). For Smith, the nature of her representation of British multiculture is bound up with the formal techniques of humor she deploys, and it is for this reason that it is of tantamount importance to bring the contexts, strategies and subjects of Smith’s representation into dialogue. Though Smith may well be one of the primary chroniclers of British multiculturalism, an examination of her humor reveals that the power dynamics and strategies of governance informing multicultural ideologies are the subject of critique more often than of celebration. The role of Smith’s humor is to challenge the centre of privilege maintained in the discourse of diversity agendas through the perspective switching enabled in joking exchanges and through the juxtaposition between characters’ representations of themselves and those of other characters or the mediating narrative voice; it is to satirize the commercialization of diversity for profit through her white, middle-class caricatures; it is to inject the absurd into narrative logic as a means of questioning individual agency in the context of the dominant discourse that mediates and frames minorities; it is to question the complicity of readers in allowing themselves to be interpellated into specific subject positions in relation to the represented by laying bare the mechanics of joke-work. In sum, narrative humor provides Zadie Smith with the ethical toolset for politically critiquing the discourse of British multiculturalism.

Works Cited Bhanot, Kavita. “Decolonise, Not Diversify.” Media Diversified, 30 Dec. 2015, https://mediadiversified.org/2015/12/30/is-diversity-is-only-for-white-people/. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. London: Harvard UP, 1984. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cavaliero, Glen. The Alchemy of Laughter: Comedy in English Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. CCRT (Community Cohesion Review Team). “Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team, Chaired by Ted Cantle.” 2001, http:// resources.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Publications/Documents/Document/DownloadDocumentsFile.aspx?recordId=96%26file=PDFversion.

176  Sarah Ilott Childs, Peter, and James Green. Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels: Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Ebook. Fortier, Anne-Marie. Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation. London: Routledge, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000. Howitt, Dennis, and Kwame Owusu-Bempah. “Race and Ethnicity in Popular Humour.” Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, edited by Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009, pp. 47–64. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London: Free Press, 2002. Jakubiak, Katarzyna. “Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of White Teeth.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays, edited by Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 201–18. Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. London: Zed Books, 2011. Leonard, Mark. “Britain™: Renewing Our Identity.” Demos, 1 May 1997, www. demos.co.uk/files/britaintm.pdf. Malik, Sarita. Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. London: Sage, 2002. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004. Mooers, Colin. “Multiculturalism and the Fetishism of Difference.” Socialist Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2005, pp. 33–54. Phillips, Trevor. “After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation.” Jiscmail, 26 Sep. 2005, www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A3=ind0509&L=CRONEM&E= quoted-printable&P=60513&B=%EF%BF%BD%E2%80%94_%3D_ NextPart_001_01C5C28A.09501783&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=iso8859%E2%80%931&pending=. Purdie, Susan. Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Ramsey-Kurz, Helga. “Humouring the Terrorists or the Terrorised? Militant Muslims in Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi.” Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, edited by Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 73–86. Reichl, Susanne, and Mark Stein. “Introduction.” Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, edited by Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 1–26. Shariatmadari, David. “Swarms, Floods and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the Migration Debate.” Guardian, 10 Aug. 2015, www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/aug/10/migration-debate-metaphors-swarms-floodsmarauders-migrants. Smith, Zadie. “Love, Actually.” Guardian, 1 Nov. 2003, www.theguardian.com/ books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith. ———. NW. Penguin, 2013. ———. The Autograph Man. Penguin, 2003. ———. White Teeth. Penguin, 2001. Stott, Andrew. Comedy. London: Routledge, 2005.

Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd 177 Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Vandaele, Jeroen. “Narrative Humor (I): Enter Perspective.” Poetics Today, vol. 31, no. 4, 2010, pp. 721–85. ———. “Narrative Humor (II): Exit Perspective.” Poetics Today, vol. 33, no. 1, 2012, pp. 59–126. Walters, Tracey L. “Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels.” Zadie Smith: Critical Essays, edited by Tracey L. Walters. New York: Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 123–39.

10 Buchi Emecheta Storyteller, Sociologist and Citizen of the World Pamela S. Bromberg

Introduction: The Sociology of Narrative Form In this chapter, I will trace the arc of Buchi Emecheta’s growth as a writer from early autobiographical fiction to her final novel, Kehinde. My focus is on the development of narrative structures and stylistic innovations that articulate her experience and understanding of hybrid identities forged first in the postcolonial metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria, and subsequently in London, the seat of colonial power and authority. I will argue that while the early works employ a straightforward “sociological” prose and simple narrative chronology, Emecheta grew as a stylist who learned to incorporate concepts and language from her Igbo roots and diasporic, multi-ethnic London community that aligned with her emerging political sensibility as a feminist. The critical assessment of Emecheta has ignored her craft, focusing mainly on the political content of her work by emphasizing its feminist and postcolonial perspectives, with debates about her dual cultural identity.1 Scholars have stressed the mimetic value of her fiction: vivid accounts of the struggles of Igbo immigrants in London and moving stories of the tragic impact of rapid social change and physical and psychological displacement caused by British colonialism in Nigeria. Accordingly, the laudatory obituaries and tributes published following Buchi Emecheta’s death on January 25, 2017, all tell the remarkable story of her improbable journey from her childhood in Nigeria to life as a struggling single mother of five young children in London and then to sustained literary success that enabled her to move her family into middle-class comfort. They assess Emecheta’s work for its depiction of women’s lives as they are shaped by the intersection of patriarchal structures in traditional West African culture with Western colonial institutions and ideology, and then

1 John Hawley addresses her dual identity in “Coming to Terms: Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde and The Birth of a Nation.” Chinua Achebe’s remarks in Home and Exile articulate a nationalist critique.

Buchi Emecheta 179 by the sexism and racism encountered by immigrants in London.2 However, there is little attention in either the obituaries or the scholarship to Emecheta’s craft as a writer.3 Jane Bryce, writing in Wasafiri states rather critically that “She was not a stylist, nor was she interested in inventing new forms or breaking literary conventions” (par. 2). At first glance, then, formalist analysis of the simpler forms and style of Emecheta’s fiction may not appear to be a good fit. However, in her 1986 essay “Towards a Feminist Narratology,” Susan Lanser makes a compelling case for combining the contextual and historical lenses of feminist criticism with the technical precision of narratology. She observes that “[t]raditionally, structuralist narratology has suppressed the representational aspects of fiction and emphasized the semiotic, while feminist criticism has done the opposite” (344). Lanser calls for a “radical revision of theories of plot” that recognizes how often for women writers, especially those whose voices have been silenced, the telling of the story is the plot. Lanser’s analysis explains why so much of the critical commentary on Buchi Emecheta’s fiction includes detailed plot summary. This “sociological” fiction, especially the early works, is almost entirely mimetic, not semiotic. Furthermore, its autobiographical nature conveys the representational authenticity of personal testimony. This analysis also helps to explain in part why Emecheta’s work has been devalued by the Nigerian literary establishment. In interviews and autobiographical work, Emecheta recognized the literary limitations of her work. She presents a modest view of her literary talents, stressing the importance of earning money, the role of sociology as a discipline shaping her work, the challenges of writing in English, her central concern with women’s lives and gender barriers faced by women writers. In an interview with Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock in 1992, Emecheta does not defend herself from the “Nigerian critics [who] say that the language in my books is very simple, too simple, in fact” (86). In response to Jussawalla’s pointed observation that Chinua Achebe has been praised for his inclusion of Igbo proverbs and oral tradition (implying that Emecheta’s writing lacks those syncretic elements), Emecheta acknowledges his greatness and distinction as “the father of our English literature.” But she suggests that reading Achebe demands that “you want to study it as literature” and argues that his high literary style “is not for the common people” (86). She goes on in the interview to call for the use of a more contemporary, vernacular English and claims 2 Obituaries by Margaret Busby in the Guardian, William Grimes in the New York Times, Fred Obera in AllAfrica, Adekeye Adebajo in the Guardian (Nigeria) and Onookome Okome in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature are representative. 3 Ernest N. Emenyonu traces Emecheta’s development as a stylist through her three African novels, focusing on her use of figurative language and irony, but not on narrative form.

180  Pamela S. Bromberg that the Nigerian literary establishment looks down on Amos Tuotola or on “writers like me, who try to write the way we speak now” (89). In this interview and others, Emecheta defends her use of a colloquial, accessible style of English both as an ethical and pragmatic choice and as a cognitive necessity, explaining that she works by translating Igbo, her “emotional language” into English (Jussawalla, 98). She also addresses the larger postcolonial issues of the place of the English language and the appropriate standards for critical evaluation of African literature, joining a conversation that was led a generation earlier by Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. While Ngũgĩ took the position that language carries culture and power, rejecting the colonial tongue of English to write in Gĩkũyũ as an assertion of Kenyan nationalism, Achebe argued for English as a “world language” that transmits history and that he could fashion syncretically into a tool to tell the story of the impact of colonialism on the Igbo people. Emecheta, informed by the politics of her experience as a woman oppressed by traditional patriarchal Igbo culture, identifies defiantly with British culture and language, positioning herself as a more accessible writer whose English-speaking audience is global and for whom the high British literary tradition embraced by Achebe would be alienating. Proudly regarding herself as “a fiction writer who is a sociologist” in a 1990 interview, Emecheta says that her college degree has helped her to “divide and channel the works” so that “they become quasi-academic,” each story built around a concept such as population control or tradition (Fraser interview, 15). In an interview with Buchi Emecheta conducted in 1986, Adeola James asks whether she believes that living in England has made a difference to her as a writer, and Emecheta replies decisively, “Yes it has. I am much more forthright” (38). As she continues to articulate her gratitude for this empowered voice and the “freedom of outlook” she has gained from British society, Emecheta moves into controversial criticism of the Anglophone writing coming out of Nigeria, comparing it unfavorably to the language written by native English speakers and then to her own increasing fluency. Don’t forget, also, that my vehicle is the English language and staying in this society, working in it, you master the nuances. Writing coming from Africa, from Nigeria . . . sounds quite stilted. . . . Even if you remove the cover you can always say who is an African writer. But with some of my books you can’t tell that easily any more because, I think, using the language every day and staying in the culture my Africanness is, in a way, being diluted. My paperback publisher, Collins, has now stopped putting my books in the African section. (39) I quote this passage at length because Achebe also cites it extensively in the second essay in his Home and Exile collection, “The Empire Fights

Buchi Emecheta 181 Back.”4 After referencing this passage from Emecheta’s interview, Achebe speaks with scathing sarcasm of the “much advertised” but unnamed author who dared criticize “her fellow writers toiling away in Nigeria” as one of the “dispossessed,” those whose stories have been taken away from them by colonialism (71). While Achebe conceives of his own work in Things Fall Apart as a revisionist project of “re-storying” a people who had been “knocked silent by the trauma of . . . dispossession” (Home and Exile, 79), he casts Emecheta as a victim of the shame and embarrassment fostered by the British Empire in its colonial subjects. Once again, Achebe refuses to identify her by name when he returns to Emecheta in the third essay in Home and Exile, “Today, the Balance of Stories.” There he sardonically cites “the good Nigerian lady . . . who actually writes novels” as a contemporary example of the “badly damaged sense of self” that dispossession by the British has created over the decades (81). Achebe’s denunciation of Emecheta is part of an eloquent nationalist plea for the new stories that will “fight back” and “balance” the Eurocentric narratives of canonical British literature and its depictions of Africa. However, one suspects that Achebe’s condescending animus against “the good Nigerian lady” also originates in resistance to the feminist revision of Emecheta’s three African novels. Beginning with The Bride Price (1976) and continuing through The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Emecheta “balances” Achebe’s elegiac and masculinist vision of traditional Igbo culture by giving voice to women’s stories and lives within the problematic confines of traditional culture. Emecheta counters the heroic tragedy of Achebe’s Okonkwo with “enslaved” female protagonists whose lives are tragically shaped by traditional patriarchal Igbo institutions and ideologies. She depicts the damaging psychological pressures of polygamy and reproduction, the double burdens of child care and work in the colonial world of Lagos and the high cost of failure for women who are insufficiently fertile. Those are the novels that have established Emecheta’s lasting reputation as a major African writer. Emecheta was keenly aware of the gender politics that influenced her reception by African colleagues and animated criticism of her writing style. She does not disagree with Jussawalla’s suggestion that “Nigerian literature . . . has been dominated by a kind of Western-educated, male establishment” that “have not let . . . women writers . . . get ahead” (89). She adds that, in her view, social class has combined with gender politics as a critically important factor influencing publication and critical stature in Nigerian literature. She believes that she could not have succeeded as a writer if she had stayed in Nigeria because of her humble social

4 Presented in 1998 as the McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University and published in 2000.

182  Pamela S. Bromberg background, telling Jussawalla that “You have to belong to a certain class to break through. . . . Achebe and the other writers are very middle class. His father was a preacher, something high in Nigeria in those days. My father was only a moulder on the railways” (91). In Head Above Water, she presents this picture of her social class: “I was the daughter of scantily educated parents who came right out of their innocent and yet sophisticated bush culture, ignorant of the so-called civilized world” (18). When asked by Jussawalla about contemporary writers she thinks are doing important work, Emecheta chose to see herself as part of a larger transnational group of women. She named Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker, evidence of her identification with an international set of black feminist novelists rather than a primarily male nationalist roster of Nigerian writers. How, then, can we assess Emecheta’s work as both an aesthetic and ethical project? She has not been celebrated for the development of distinctive narrative techniques and forms. She writes in a straightforward style that speaks to an implied reader who may lack the elite educational backgrounds of Achebe’s readers, but who will recognize in her stories widely shared experiences of racial, class and gender discrimination. And she conceives and structures her novels with sociological concepts, producing novels that have served as powerful testimony voicing previously untold stories. Accordingly, we may not look to Emecheta’s work for examples of formal innovation, self-reflexive narrative structures or poetic language that draws attention to itself at the semiotic level as a syncretic medium of cultural representation. However, a formalist lens applied to Emecheta’s work illuminates a clear arc of stylistic and technical sophistication as she incorporates Igbo and Yoruba concepts and language as central narrative elements in her later novels. This chapter presents her earliest autobiographical fiction as the stylistic ground and political launching pad of her writing career. Second Class Citizen points the way toward her late work Kehinde as a novel whose direct style retains the democratic ethical standards articulated and defended in her interviews while attaining a mature level of artistic complexity in its narrative form. At the center of all of her work is the personal struggle to forge identity at “the crossroads of cultures.”5 Emecheta wrote her stories with the limited aesthetic tools that were available to her, given her socio-economic and educational background in Nigeria and her status as an overburdened African immigrant woman raising five children and supporting her family single-handedly as the sole breadwinner. She began her career as a writer with her own story, told simply and straightforwardly with the specificity, detail, and transparency that made

5 Chinua Achebe’s geographical metaphor (Achebe, “Named for Victoria,” 119) serves well to describe the multiple perspectives that he and Emecheta share as Africans whose lives have been profoundly shaped by the colonial export of English culture and language.

Buchi Emecheta 183 it credible and powerful. However, though her English prose style may have remained more sociological than poetic in its diction and cadences, as she continued to write and to move from her own experiences as an immigrant in London to the stories of her ancestors in Nigeria and then back to the diasporic communities of London, Buchi Emecheta developed a more confident, nuanced and crafted narrative technique, with multiple points of view and subplots. She takes on syncretic narrative techniques, repeating and refining over the course of her career her deployment of the Igbo concept of “chi,” or personal god, as a kind of inner voice that guides her protagonists on a life path.6

Becoming a Novelist: Second Class Citizen Emecheta’s 1974 autobiographical novel, Second Class Citizen, both chronicles the conditions under which she was able to launch her writing career and reflects the limited degree of literary sophistication that such conditions would foster. It is organized chronologically by protagonist Adah’s driving plot of ambition met with setbacks and continued determination and struggle. There are no subplots or stylistic variations; characterization of the protagonist’s family, including her husband, Francis, and five children, is perfunctory and limited. Most of the novel consists of detailed accounts of the daily struggles to balance child care and work, pay the rent and feed the family, with little to no support from Adah’s perennial-student husband. The novel fully conforms to Ashley Dawson’s classification of Emecheta’s early autobiographical work as “documentary fiction” that “offers important insights into the way in which the political and theoretical priorities of black feminism emerged from the quotidian concerns of diasporic women in Britain” (98). In a direct, prosaic writing style, the novel’s opening chapters present Adah as a female child in Lagos, Nigeria, whose birth is a disappointment to her Igbo family and the larger tribe that expects a boy, already second class because of the cultural premium on masculinity. Emecheta highlights Adah’s ambitious dream of pursuing education, ascending into the Igbo elite and journeying to the United Kingdom with one of the novel’s few metaphors. Adah’s dream is personified at the end of the opening chapter: “It lived with her, just like a Presence” (16). That dream and its Presence constitute the earliest version of the inner voice that Emecheta will later identify with the Igbo concept of chi and serve repeatedly in the novel as a metaphor highlighting key turning points in Adah’s story. The Presence symbolizes the inner drive that moves Adah forward

6 In an essay titled “Chi in Igbo Cosmology,” Chinua Achebe states that the term is “often translated as god, guardian angel, personal spirit, soul, spirit-double, etc.” and comments, “Chi is . . . more concerned with success or failure than with righteousness and wickedness.”

184  Pamela S. Bromberg despite the many “setbacks” detailed in the narrative and may be seen as a structural metaphor for the novel’s plot. Her academic talent and determination overcome her family’s resistance, and she earns a “scholarship with full board to the Methodist Girl’s High School” (23). But the dream of attending Ibadan University to study classics is beyond her reach. Her marriage to Francis, which will be the central subject of the novel, is presented without emotion as the practical next step. There is no courtship story and only the sparest description of Francis as a young man studying to be an accountant. Francis continues to be seen in the novel from only Adah’s limited point of view, making him a flat and unsympathetic character, “not . . . the husband of her dreams, but . . . an enemy” (122). After Adah migrates with Francis and two small babies to London, the confident voice of the Presence is silenced; the naïve images of her dream fade as she experiences the realities of an abusive husband, pervasive racism, discrimination from competing immigrant groups and poverty. The narrative moves chronologically and mimetically, supplying vividly told anecdotes of hunger, social isolation and the psychological internalization of her new identity as a “black” immigrant woman. Adah does not hear the ambitious voice of her Presence again until the novel’s final two chapters when she regains the determination to succeed as she makes new friends, discovers new writers—including James Baldwin—and finally convinces Francis to find a clerical job so that she can care full-time for her four children. At this point, Adah recalls her old interest in storytelling, buys a copy of Teach Yourself to Write and writes the draft of The Bride Price as she nurses the infant. The completion of her manuscript of The Bride Price leads to the climactic closing episode in Second Class Citizen. Emecheta notes the pleasure and excitement of creation: “The words, simple not sophisticated at all, kept pouring from her mind” (165). Notwithstanding her critical recognition that this first effort was unskilled and “over-romanticised” (164), Adah found encouragement from friends at the local library where she had worked and recognized that this half-serious effort might be a stepping-stone toward the realization of her dream of becoming a writer. Emecheta has her protagonist explain that she must write in English despite her lack of vocabulary—“she could not write those big long twisting words” (166)—and that she must move beyond her own memory to find a “purpose,” “a pattern” and acquire more knowledge about people through the study of an academic discipline such as psychology, sociology, anthropology or history. This early fictional protagonist dramatizes Emecheta’s understanding of the ways in which social class, racism and gender have shaped her own growth as a writer. The fate of Adah’s novel, a story based closely on events in Emecheta’s life,7 serves as a powerful

7 See Head Above Water, p. 34.

Buchi Emecheta 185 dramatic metaphor for the social forces arrayed against Emechta, including Achebe’s masculinist critique of her work. When Adah shares her excitement over the manuscript with Francis, he laughs at her, reminds her of her “second class status” as a black woman in London and speaks derisively of her as a woman: “The white man can barely tolerate us men, to say nothing of brainless women like you” (167). He calls her story “rubbish” and initially refuses to read it, but a week later, Adah returns to her home to see Francis feeding the pages of her manuscript into the stove after reading it and judging it unacceptable by his traditional family’s standards (168). This brutal act determines Adah’s decision to leave the marriage, though both she and her author would suffer one additional unplanned pregnancy before the end. This episode stands as such an exemplary instance of the silencing impact of British racism and traditional patriarchal culture on a West African diasporic woman writer that it seems merely fictional, when in fact it took place. For Emecheta, it became the turning point in what would become her successful career as a feminist novelist who would inspire a whole generation of writers and countless readers to pursue their own dreams. To continue writing and then to choose to tell her own story was an assertion of self and possibility against multiple forces of social injustice. In Second Class Citizen, Adah’s heroic struggle to gain the emotional, educational and material conditions for telling the story is the central plot; in the words of Susan Lanser, “the narrative act itself becomes the source of possibility” (357).

The “Intrusive Inner Voice” of Chi in Kehinde Kehinde, Emecheta’s penultimate novel, published in 1994, returns to London as its setting to tell the diasporic story of the eponymous protagonist who moves back to her Nigerian homeland after twenty years in London; she then discovers that she prefers her hybrid and problematic identity as a black woman in the racist, multi-ethnic world in Britain to that of a traditional Igbo woman in a polygamous marriage. Kehinde dramatizes many of the issues that Emecheta has confronted in her own journey; in fact, Emecheta places her protagonist within her own historical and cultural frameworks. Kehinde Okolo’s life mirrors her author’s in certain important ways: born in 1943, a year before Emecheta’s birth, she grew up primarily in Lagos but visited family in Ibusa and left for London as a married woman at the age of 18. However, Kehinde’s life in London as a wife and mother and her return twenty years later to Lagos depart radically from Emecheta’s story; although Kehinde reaches a point of self-definition similar to Emecheta’s by the end of the novel, the fictional character takes a very different route in her journey. Emecheta locates some of her own plot as a single mother raising a large family in London in the secondary character of Mary Elikwu and uses Kehinde’s

186  Pamela S. Bromberg evolving attitude toward Mary as one gauge of her shifting subjectivity and cultural identity. Kehinde is far more formally complex than her early works, including multiple plots, a variety of sociolects and the Yoruba ibeji myth about twins as a dramatic and narrative element.8 The novel structures her choice of identities, countries and homes with two intertwined central plots that trace the dissolution of the Okolo marriage and Kehinde’s emergence as an independent single woman; that second, dominant plot is articulated through Emecheta’s re-configured, feminist version of chi as Kehinde’s rebellious inner voice. The novel’s central events comprise the story of the Okolo family’s return to Nigeria after twenty prosperous years as immigrants in London, a plot that is shaped by traditional patriarchal ideology. The action in this narrative is driven by Albert Okolo’s desire to replicate his father’s traditional life of male privilege, which positions Kehinde as a subservient Igbo wife. The second plot is shaped by a vision of global women’s empowerment; it presents Kehinde as a sister, both literally and metaphorically, telling the backstory of her secret identity as a twin and the development of a new diasporic identity, fostered through the help of her Nigerian birth sister and women friends in London. This plot of sisterhood traces the arc of the disruption and restoration of her close friendship with Moriammo and includes illustrative subplots of secondary female characters, such as Mary Elikwu and Kehinde’s Nigerian sister Ifeyinwa. These subplots also provide exemplary instances illustrating the tradeoffs that Kehinde faces as she chooses whether to stay in her marriage and country of origin or to return to London. The braided plots serve as structural foundations for the central theme of healing the division in her identity by choosing a unified self as a black English woman. Kehinde’s central struggle may be seen as both psychological and political—whether to adhere to Igbo cultural norms and beliefs or to break free from that cultural identity to forge a new self in the multicultural world of London. The novel emphasizes the emotional pressure of navigating these competing identities with episodes of fragmentation and depression. Emecheta primarily employs a thirdperson narrative but includes first-person sections that take the reader into Kehinde’s mind and memory. The novel opens with a detailed, room-by-room account of their “typical East mid-terrace house,” noting that the two upstairs bedrooms are reserved for renters who bring in extra income (2). There is cultural tension around the ownership of this house; Albert recognizes that Kehinde earns more than he does and that their mortgage has benefited from her

8 Brenda Berrian’s essay presents a detailed explanation of the Yoruba ibéji-orisa myth about twins and West African beliefs about the spirit world.

Buchi Emecheta 187 job in a bank, employment that reflects the economic opportunity for African immigrant women in England. However, the narrator explains, “In Nigeria, the home belonged to the man, even if the wife spent her entire life keeping it in order” (4). Thus, the reality of her socioeconomic power in London conflicts with her role as a “good” Nigerian woman. At the beginning of the novel, both Albert and Kehinde navigate the marital stress created by these cultural tensions by giving lip service to each other’s self-images. She speaks of “your house,” while he diplomatically refers to “Our house.” The opposing pronouns represent their mutual recognition that they are fluent in two separate cultural discourses. Albert, however, has decided to return to Nigeria, “to go home and show off his new life style, his material success” (6). When Kehinde’s unintended pregnancy threatens this plan, Albert insists on an abortion, a choice that is motivated by the economic burdens of an additional child in the urban economy of London, but that is deeply antagonistic to the traditional Igbo belief in children as wealth. Emecheta uses the central Igbo concept of chi—the belief in a personal god—as an organizing motif to articulate Kehinde’s confusion as a woman negotiating her subjectivity among conflicting cultural and gender frameworks. For Western readers, chi is an instance of what Bill Ashcroft explains as a “metonymic gap,” in which “the dialogic situation of reading” encounters a “different cultural reality” (278). Chinua Achebe addresses that linguistic gap in his 1975 essay, “Chi in Igbo Cosmology,” introducing chi as “a concept so central in Igbo psychology and yet so elusive and enigmatic” (159). He explains that the Igbo believe in a spirit world that is a “double and counterpart” to the world in which we live; a person’s chi is “his other identity in spiritland” (160). He writes, “a person’s fortunes in life are controlled more or less completely by his chi” and that “a man receives his gifts or talents, his character—indeed his portion in life generally—before he comes into the world (165–7). However, while each person’s unique chi has great power over his or her destiny, both Achebe and anthropologist Christopher Ejizu quote a popular Igbo proverb that conveys the belief that “through sheer determination and hard struggle” people can secure the support of their chi (Ejizu, 386): “Onye kwe chie ekwe—(If a man agrees, his chi agrees)” (Achebe, 164). Ejizu glosses this proverb as balancing “the belief in destiny . . . with the idea of personal achievement through hard work and enterprise,” an idea that Achebe explores in Things Fall Apart through the central plot of Okonkwo’s rise and fall. Though Achebe sees the Igbo belief in chi as a form of individualism, he adds that the individual is curtailed by “the will of his community” (168), a point echoed by Ejizu, who explains that the protection of chi and other spirits is dependent on adherence to socially approved behavior and adherence to traditions and norms (387–8). After its early appearance in Second Class Citizen as Adah’s Presence, chi appears in Emecheta’s later novels as an explicitly Igbo concept but

188  Pamela S. Bromberg in a distinctively feminist form. In place of Okonwo’s male plot of hard work, personal achievement and fear of failure, the female plots of Emecheta’s three African novels center on the protagonists’ lack of agency and restricted possibilities for happiness and self-realization. In The Joys of Motherhood, for example, Aku-nna’s chi is identified at her birth as the reborn spirit of a slave woman brutally sacrificed during her mistress’s burial ceremony. Slavery then becomes the central metaphor defining Aku-nna’s life as a traditional Igbo woman trapped by the oppression of gender norms that have become dysfunctional in the rapidly changing social and economic conditions of the urban postcolonial world of Lagos in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria. Chi takes a yet more complex and nuanced meaning in Kehinde, as Emecheta refigures this concept in a subversive form that challenges traditional Igbo beliefs about twin births and syncretically calls on Yoruba cosmology to forge a hybrid West African identity for her protagonist’s spirit double. Emecheta structures the second narrative of female empowerment around the myth of Kehinde’s unborn twin sister, Taiwo, as her personal expression of chi. Emecheta explains that the Yoruba names Taiwo and Kehinde refer to the birth order of twins; Taiwo means “the one who tasted the world first” and Kehinde, “the twin who follows behind” (18). Taiwo enters the text as Kehinde’s inner voice—the self in dialogue with the self—after Kehinde reluctantly agrees to the abortion, “the same voice she often heard when she was lonely or confused” (17), and is the voice that articulates feelings that conflict with the demands made on her by others. In a series of flashbacks triggered by Kehinde’s guilt, we learn the story of her birth, which cost the lives of her mother and of a twin sister who died in utero. In a traditional Igbo culture that regarded all twin births as taboo, bringing “bad luck,”9 Kehinde’s violent twin birth by Caesarian section resulted in the death of their mother and then abandonment by their father. Speaking of her birth family, Kehinde says to herself, “Nobody wanted me” (18). The unwanted, taboo infant was rescued by her foster mother, Aunt Nnebogo, who took her away from Ibusa, the rural home village, to the melting pot of Lagos, “where the Yoruba people believe that twins bring luck, and give them special names; Taiwo and Kehinde,” that signify their birth order (18). The opposing views of twinship articulated in this birth narrative establish doubled cultural perspectives and identity division as fundamental conditions of Kehinde’s subjectivity, shaping the novel’s overarching action and plots.10

  9 In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, twin births must be left in the Evil Forest to die, a practice that disturbs their mothers and Okonwo’s son Nwoye, who are then among the first to convert to Christianity, the new religion that preaches against this practice. 10 Brenda Cooper notes “the metonymic gap” made by the extensive use of Yoruba words in this chapter and reads Emecheta’s use of material objects as a gendered metonymic

Buchi Emecheta 189 The Igbo rejection and Yoruba embrace and naming of Kehinde adumbrate her adult journey away from the traditional culture of her birth family and Igbo husband, Albert, toward the hybrid society of black immigrants in London, a second foster family to Kehinde. The brief story of good luck that the adoption of Kehinde brings to her aunt also foreshadows Kehinde’s own plot of personal empowerment: “They say as soon as I came into Aunt Nnebogo’s life, her fish business flourished. . . . She became independent” (19). Because of the Igbo taboo against twins, Kehinde is not told the story of her birth as a child or that Aunt Nnebogo, who has given her the Christian name of Jacobina, is not her mother. But long before she learns of her identity, the child mysteriously intuits that she, too, once had a twin sister. As a toddler, she began dividing her food into two portions and leaving one behind for her chi. Emecheta gives a detailed account of the miraculous moment when, at the age of five, the sight of an iyabeji, a Yoruba mother of twins with her infants, causes Kehinde to cry out her knowledge that she, too, once had a twin sister. After this dramatic event, Aunt Nnebogo proclaims that Jacobina’s stillborn twin sister is her chi. She then renames her Kehinde, removing her Christian name and shifting her identity to a syncretic West African form that combines Igbo belief in chi with Yoruba celebration of twins (21). Though the phrase “haunted by my past”—describing Kehinde’s intuition of her twinhood—suggests a supernatural element, Emecheta does not elucidate this turning point as cosmology (21). However, readers with knowledge of the widespread West African belief in spirit beings— both Igbo and Yoruba (Ejizu, 380)—may view the source of Kehinde’s knowledge as her twin spirit double.11 From that point on, Kehinde “grew into a child who would not let her identity [as a twin] die” (21). Her Igbo father’s rejection of Kehinde as a twin is the earliest instance in which traditional culture and masculine authority deny Kehinde’s human value. Aunt Nnebogo, in contrast, is the first of a series of female characters who defy traditional beliefs and supply Kehinde with support and nurturance. Taiwo, the dead twin, becomes for the adult Kehinde a palpable presence as her chi, the mischievous voice of rebellion and resistance against acculturation as a proper Igbo wife, obedient and subservient to her husband. Taiwo speaks early in the novel when Albert insists on the abortion because, while “children are a necessity” in Nigeria, they are a luxury in England and an expense that would interfere with his plan to return home (15). The novel’s sixth chapter narrates a dream induced by the anesthesia administered for her abortion. This nightmare illustrates the psychological trauma of her twin birth and the attendant loss of both her

language that she argues represents feminist resistance to the Oedipal model of the Symbolic order. 11 See Berrian.

190  Pamela S. Bromberg birth parents, through the mother’s death and the father’s abandonment. Kehinde relives her childhood discovery that she has a father in Ibusa whom she has never met and glimpses a vision of her dead mother and sister, who block her from reunion with her father. This dream may be seen both as an Igbo voyage into the spirit world and a Western journey into the unconscious. Awaking from the dream, Kehinde associates her guilt over the abortion and the loss of the unborn child with the unconscious memory of that infantile trauma, believing that the fetus was her “father’s chi, visiting me again” (32). She blames Albert for causing her to lose the opportunity to have her father return to her as the chi of the male fetus, linking the patriarchal authority of both men with traumatic loss and the failed opportunity for healing inner division. Emecheta develops the plot of empowerment and identity symbolized by the new syncretic meaning of chi through Kehinde’s relationships with her husband and with a series of female characters who serve as friends and foils. She interweaves the central story with chapters that dramatize Kehinde’s friendship with her work colleague Moriammo, a Nigerian Muslim whose friendship dates back to their girlhoods in Lagos. In intimate conversation conducted in pidgin, the multicultural lingua franca of Nigerian immigrants in England, the two women talk about their husbands, marriages and families. In the second chapter, they gossip critically about Mary Elikwu, a “townwoman of ours” with six children who has left her abusive husband and now lives in “one of those dangerous and filthy” council flats, not unlike those inhabited by Adah and her family in Second Class Citizen (11). Kehinde confides in Moriammo about her pregnancy and Albert’s plan to go home to Nigeria. Emecheta does not translate their Nigerian pidgin, which includes a good deal of vocabulary unfamiliar to Western readers.12 Its stylistic presence in the novel underscores the reality of the multicultural public sphere of London, a point made again in the next chapter, which takes place at Albert’s workplace and parallels Kehinde’s conversation with Moriammo. There, in standard English, Albert discusses his wife’s pregnancy with colleagues who are identified as Jewish, Catholic and Pakistani Muslim. Emecheta’s use of pidgin has ethical as well as sociological import; while she tells the reader that Kehinde and Albert speak in Igbo to keep conversations private from their children, she does not include Igbo vocabulary in the novel, choosing to locate Kehinde’s linguistic hybridity as part of a larger multi-ethnic community. Pidgin also marks the social class positions of these two women who lack college educations but have found work that enables them to own homes. And, most important, in the novel, the

12 Cooper also sees the inclusion of Pidgin as marking women’s intimacy, another instance of “the concrete language of the metonymic” that resists the metaphoric discourses of imperialism and patriarchy (152).

Buchi Emecheta 191 passages in pidgin convey the open, honest communication of two immigrant mothers with shared experiences at work and in their homes. Neither has found in her marriage a comparable level of intimacy and trust. After the abortion, Kehinde initially resists Taiwo’s voice as she tries to align with her husband’s views and desires. But, as an isolated single woman, left behind to sell the house after Albert and then their children, Joshua and Bimpe, have departed for Nigeria, Kehinde again hears “that intrusive inner voice” articulating her loneliness, “her feeling of being marginal to everyone else’s lives and her fear that in the year since his departure, Albert has found a new woman (45–6). At this point in the novel, the plot of sisterhood has failed for Kehinde. Her best friend Moriammo’s focus on her new baby and husband ruptures their friendship, and Kehinde’s social status as a separated wife isolates her. The voice of Taiwo expresses Kehinde’s growing alienation from a traditional culture that now devalues her because her husband has left her. As a single African woman in London, she is deserted by many of her old friends, treated as “a half person” (59) and judged a “fallen woman” (61). Unable to silence her insistent inner voice, “Kehinde sometimes felt she was on the verge of madness” (46). Kehinde responds to the pressure of this identity fragmentation by deciding to join Albert and her two children in Nigeria, despite her awareness that she will lose the financial independence she has enjoyed in London. This decision silences the voice of Taiwo, which has expressed her dissatisfaction with marriage to Albert and the pressures of her traditional Igbo role. The journey to Lagos proves to be even more dislocating to Kehinde’s identity than she had feared. Crossing this cultural boundary reminds her of her childhood trip to Ibusa and first encounter with her father, a comparably bewildering encounter with new rules and confused family relationships. This time, Kehinde discovers that she has been displaced in her own formerly Western-style nuclear family. Albert has chosen polygamy, taking a young second wife, Rike, who is already pregnant with their second child, and his widowed older sister has moved into the household and established herself as the powerful Mama Kaduna, or “the mother of them all” (73). These two traditional women align with male authority, serving as rivals rather than sisters to Kehinde. It is noteworthy that the two Igbo patriarchs who “own” Kehinde, her father and Albert, have both abandoned their responsibility for her—her father because she was an unwanted, taboo twin and Albert because he has no use for her once he moves back to Lagos and has chosen a second, younger, college-educated trophy wife, as well as a mistress. As long as Kehinde remains bound by her traditional culture and its rules, she is powerless and again “relegated to the margins” (97). But she rebels against her traditional role, choosing to return to London and an identity there as an independent, Westernized and single woman. In Chapter Fourteen, Emecheta uses the epistolary device of Kehinde’s letter to her friend Moriammo to include a pivotal first-person narrative

192  Pamela S. Bromberg that expresses disillusionment over her marginal situation in Lagos while reestablishing her intimate connection with Moriammo and serving as an implied call for her friend’s help. Kehinde recalls the last day that the two friends spent together and then links that day with the voyage they took together as young women migrating to London. She speaks of Moriammo as a sister, even linking her with the missing twin: Sometimes, I even used to mistake you for my Taiwo, who left a vacuum which was only filled when I met you, nineteen years ago when we were both nervous young girls preparing to go to Britain to join our future husbands. (92–3) In this way, the figure of Taiwo is imbricated with the broader theme of women’s friendships and community. In the letter, Kehinde reminisces about their last visit together and pointedly tells her friend that it took place in “my house” (92). She insists, “I call it my house, because that is exactly what it is going to be, my house, not our house,” the space that represents her economic and social power as a black woman in London (92). However, Emecheta juxtaposes this declaration of independence with painful accounts of the reality of Kehinde’s status as a traditional wife. She has become like her older sister Ifeyinwa, imprisoned in a polygamous marriage. She suffers humiliation as an unemployed co-wife, dependent on Albert for housekeeping money and replaced in his estimation and affection by Rike, who has higher status, signified by a PhD, a job as a lecturer, a car of her own, a twelve-month-old son and a second pregnancy. Moriammo’s letter includes the generous gift of plane fare back to England and news of Mary Elikwu, the single mother whom Kehinde viewed derisively before leaving for Nigeria. Kehinde has learned through her own oppression to recognize in Mary a role model for economic success through education and activism. When Kehinde arrives back in London and opens the door of her house, she hears the voice of Taiwo, who has been silent throughout her stay in Nigeria, saying, “Home, sweet home!” (108). Kehinde rebukes the voice, insisting that “Nigeria is my home,” but she realizes that she is deceiving herself (108). Taiwo speaks as the voice of her Westernized subjectivity, and this chapter marks the integration of Kehinde’s divided self as she then takes down the “for sale” sign and declares, “This house is mine” (108). Ownership of the home now symbolizes Kehinde’s independence and self-determination. This climactic event concludes the plot of Kehinde’s empowerment as a woman who rebels against tradition, expressed metonymically through home ownership and the integration of identity symbolized by Kehinde’s acceptance of “Taiwo’s voice as a permanent part of her consciousness” (135).

Buchi Emecheta 193 The novel does not, however, end on this note of triumph. Emecheta’s sociological framework requires the completion of Ifeyinwa’s and Moriammo’s subplots and a coda that takes the reader beyond the provisionally happy ending of Kehinde’s integrated identity with a sobering account of the painful realities of discrimination that she faces as a black woman in London. The novel’s final three chapters comprise the coda, taking place three years after Kehinde’s return. We learn in a letter from her daughter, Bimpe, who has remained in Lagos, that Kehinde has earned a college degree while Albert has become unemployed, an ironic judgment on his old dream of prestige and wealth as a “been to.” Kehinde also faces loss of economic power in London as a result of increasing racial discrimination; despite her new sociology degree, she has been unable to find another bank job and works as a hotel chambermaid. Her work colleague Duro, a fellow Nigerian immigrant, articulates the impact of racism: “An educated black person in a responsible job is too much of a threat. White people don’t feel comfortable in their presence” (125). Even that job becomes untenable after Kehinde is sexually propositioned by an Arab guest at the hotel. Finally, after another cleaning job, she finds better employment as a social worker, and in one of the two final plot points, Kehinde embraces her sexuality as a single English woman and takes Michael Gibson, her Caribbean lodger, as her lover. In the novel’s last chapter, entitled “The Rebel,” Kehinde, now 45 years old, refutes patriarchal privilege, offering her son, Joshua—just arrived from Nigeria—friendship in place of traditional motherhood and asserting her right to her sexuality and ownership of the house. The novel ends with Kehinde’s declaration of her full humanity; as she sips a cup of tea, “the living Kehinde” declares “‘Now we are one’ . . . to the spirit of her long dead Taiwo” (141). This closing passage proclaims Kehinde’s achievement of an integrated subjectivity, the healing of her divided self and the embrace of her distinctive chi. She has reached the successful culmination of a journey that has taken her across successive cultural borders worked out in the doubled plots of her cyclical movement from tradition to hybrid diasporic identity. In telling her story, the novel Kehinde demonstrates Emecheta’s own integration of her divergent cultural experiences. Complex narrative forms drawn from central West African cosmological beliefs and vivid stylistic and mimetic material drawn from her life experience come to define the integrated artistry of Buchi Emecheta.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “Chi in Igbo Cosmology,” from Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1975. Reprinted in Things Fall Apart, edited by Francis Abiola Irele. Norton, 2009, pp. 159–69. ———. Home and Exile. Random House, 2000.

194  Pamela S. Bromberg ———. “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” from Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1975, pp. 114–24. ———. “The Politics of Language,” from “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature.” FILLM Proceedings, edited by Doug Killam. Guelph, Ontario: U of Guelph, 1989. Excerpted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006, pp. 268–71. ———. Things Fall Apart. 1957. Norton. 2009. Adebajo, Adekeye. “Tribute to an African Woman of Courage.” The Guardian (Nigeria), 31 Jan. 2017. Ashcroft, Bill. “Language and Transformation.” Excerpted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006, pp. 277–80. Berrian, Brenda F. “Her Ancestor’s Voice: The Ibéji Transcendence of Duality in Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde.” Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Marie Umeh, Africa World Press, Inc., 1996, pp. 169 –84. Bryce, Jane. “A Sort-of Career: Remembering Buchi Emecheta.” Wasafiri, International Contemporary Writers. 10 Feb. 2017. www.wasafiri.org/article/ sort-career-remembering-buchi-emecheta/. Busby, Margaret. “Buchi Emecheta Obituary.” The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2017. www. theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/buchi-emecheta-obituary. Cooper, Brenda. “Banished from Oedipus? Buchi Emecheta’s and Assia Dejebar’s Gendered Language of Resistance.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 38, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 143–60. Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. U of Michigan P, 2007. Ejizu, Christopher. “Chi Symbolism as a Potent Mirror of Igbo Indigenous Worldview.” Anthropos, vol. 87, no 4, 1992, pp. 379–89. Emecheta, Buchi. Head Above Water. Collins Publishing Group, 1986. ———. In the Ditch. 1972. Heinemann, 1994. ———. Kehinde. Heinemann, 1994. ———. Second Class Citizen. Braziller. 1975. ———. The Bride Price. Braziller, 1976. ———. The Joys of Motherhood. Braziller, 1979. ———. The Slave Girl. Braziller, 1977. Emenyonu, Ernest N. “Technique and Language in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price, The Slave Girl, and The Joys of Motherhood.” Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Marie Umeh. Africa World Press, Inc., 1996, pp. 251–65. Fraser, C. Gerald. “Writer, Her Dream Fulfilled, Seeks to Link Two Worlds.” The New York Times, 2 June 1990, p. 15. (The New York Times Archive) Grimes, William. “Buchi Emecheta, Nigerian Novelist, Dies at 72.” The New York Times, 10 Feb. 2017. Hawley, John C. “Coming to Terms: Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde and the Birth of a ‘Nation.’ ” Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Marie Umeh. Africa World Press, Inc., 1996, pp. 333–48. James, Adeola. In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. Heinemann, 1990.

Buchi Emecheta 195 Jussawalla, Feroza and Reed Way Dasenbrock. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. UP of Mississippi, 1992. Lanser, Susan. “Towards a Feminist Narratology.” Style, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1986, pp. 341–63. Obera, Fred. “Nigeria: Remembering Nigerian Literary Icon Buchi Emecheta.” AllAfrica, 26 Jan. 2017. Okome, Onookome. “Obituary: Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017).” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 52, no. 2, 2017, pp. 401–8. Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. “The Language of African Literature,” from Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1981. Excerpted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.) The PostColonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2006, pp. 263–7.

11 “Where Are You (Really) From?” Transgender Ethics, Ethics of Unknowing, and Transformative Adoption in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Toni Morrison’s Jazz Pelagia Goulimari In Trumpet, Jackie Kay takes Toni Morrison in as Kay’s fictive mother by adopting and adapting the formal and ethical patterns of Morrison’s Jazz. Kay opens up and connects questions of gender transition, migration and (cultural) adoption by replaying variations of Morrison’s project of an ethics of unknowing, cognitive improvement and transformative adoption. Formal innovations—such as narratorial unreliability, gaps and disjunctions of perspective—are indissociable from Kay’s and Morrison’s respective ethical and reconstructive projects. Starting with protagonists in scandals redolent of tabloid journalism, Kay and Morrison endow them with a groundlessness that promises cognitive and ethical perplexity and complexity—a singular, atypical perspective that is surprisingly the very condition of possibility for transformed connection. Trumpet and Jazz share a concentric form: revolving around a middle section, they radiate outward from a formulaic riff toward waves of variations—and from the seemingly singular and atypical toward implicating other characters and readers in call-and-response. Turning to Kay and Morrison is particularly fruitful in addressing renewed public anxiety around the seemingly unrelated issues of trans identity, immigration and belonging.

Gender Transition, Migration, Adoption In Trumpet (1998; 2016), Joss Moody, famous mixed-race Scottish musician, is pronounced female at death, and a media circus ensues. The doctor certifying his death “peel[s] off” the bandages binding his breasts (43), followed by a mortician, who once again “unravel[s] the whole length of bandage” (109), exposing “female body parts” (114). The Escher-like concentric figure of the unravelling spiral of bandages—see M. C. Escher’s “Rind” (1955)—recurs in repetitions and metonymic variations throughout the novel. Joss’s white Scottish-English wife, Millie,

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 197 who has been wrapping his bandages every day of a long and happy marriage, and his adopted mixed-race son, Colman, who is not familiar with his father’s female body, both fall into an existential spiral. But what is at the bottom of this spiral? Tabloid journalist Sophie Stones, commenting that the 1990s are “obsessed with . . . scandal, sleaze, perverts” (169), considers Joss the perfect fit and sets out to ghost-write Colman’s biography of his father. But is Joss really (and scandalously) a woman and a deceiver, as the tabloid press would have it? Transgender theorist and trans woman Talia Bettcher has usefully theorized what she calls “reality enforcement” and the false dilemma of “false pretender” or “evil deceiver.”1 “Reality enforcement” equates gender identity with body parts and licenses the violent exposure and verification of trans bodies. A trans body is read, scandalously and moralistically, either as a false pretender failing to pass or as an evil deceiver passing successfully but in deceit and is thus existentially annihilated. What, then, would cognitive improvement entail? Is Joss’s gender identity a matter of body parts, chromosomes and hormones, or a matter of self-identification? Is it a question of gender assigned at birth—a question of where he comes from—or a question of transformation or another question altogether? Kay’s novel is a series of improvisations performed by a number of soloists—some brief, others protracted and ongoing—on the riff of Joss’s gender identity. “I liked the idea that Trumpet would have a jazz structure, riffs and solos, and that some characters would appear and let rip and then disappear coming in and out of the focus like jazz,” Kay has said.2 Improvisations form chapters of widely varying lengths, some as short as a paragraph, whose titles are almost exclusively newspaper and magazine rubrics to indicate the pervasive framing role of the media. In a novel almost entirely set in the immediate aftermath of Joss’s death, Millie and Colman perform the most protracted solos. Both of them give voice to an experience of disorientation and unreality by replaying the spiral trope. Millie, in the novel’s first paragraph, announces, “I look unreal . . . I feel strange now” (1). She later adds, “my legs scrambling about as in mid air, trying to find the rung of the ladder” (32), and yet again, “It is like walking slowly down endless steps in a dark cellar, round and round” (82). Colman echoes Millie, describing “[s]piral stairs that crumble underneath him” (260). They are falling down a spiral stairwell, not knowing if there is a bottom or if they can return to the surface. They are following a DNA helix they do not own. They are unreliable narrators and focalizers, in the sense that their ordinary, normal perception of reality is suspended, defamiliarized, queered, leading them to

1 See Bettcher 2007, 2009 and 2014. See also Bettcher and Goulimari 2017. 2 Kay 2016a.

198  Pelagia Goulimari question the nature of reality and truth. In the second half of the novel, this disorientation—this experience of unknowing—gives way to an ethical and cognitive reorientation. In understanding this disorientation and reorientation, let me turn to Sara Ahmed’s theorization of orientation in Queer Phenomenology. Very briefly, Ahmed notes Merleau-Ponty’s attention to queer moments, when the world appears “slantwise” and “off center” (Merleau-Ponty quoted in Ahmed 65) because one’s normative perspective on reality, orientation toward reality and direction of one’s existence is interrupted. But these moments don’t last—this queer world is “reorientated” (Ahmed 23), one’s orientation is straightened.3 However, I argue that Millie and Colman’s reorientation is not a straightening; it doesn’t direct them back to a normative orientation—it has a different direction. They experience a disorientation that harbors critical and transformative virtualities, a vortex of possibilities, and undergo an open-ended transition. By contrast, the aptly named Sophie Stones undergoes no transformation and remains wedded to a hypocritical, prurient morality and an objectivist, monological model of truth. In this sense, Sophie Stones is also an unreliable narrator and focalizer. Her pursuit of Joss’s “reality” and “facts”—from “the real reason” of his transition (128) to his “exact cup size” (127)—rather than getting to the bottom of Joss, kills him off. Sophie simply assumes that Joss is “freakish” (266) and seems to be one of those ghostwriters who believe themselves to be “the real authority on their subject” (262), pronouncing on Joss’s motives for his transition, “It turned her [Joss] on”; “she [Joss] liked the power” (263). Sophie is equally convinced of “how well” (266) she understands Colman, yet she expects Colman’s account of Joss to fit a script, exclaiming, “He’s grasped the plot” (123). But Sophie’s pronouncements hold a mirror only to herself—she is the one aiming to pass as a powerful woman with a wardrobe bought in “classy boutiques” (232). She hasn’t grasped Joss’s and Colman’s plot after all. Like the famously unreliable narrator of Morrison’s Jazz, Sophie is very surprised when “something is wrong” (211) and Colman does not play his part in the script and ends their collaboration. But Jazz’s narrator, belatedly, has an experience of unknowing, admitting, “It never occurred to me that they were . . . putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of” (Jazz 221). Sophie, however, has no such experience, no cognitive improvement, and continues to write the wrong book regardless, still stubbornly wrong until the very end of her last solo (266). 3 See Ahmed 2006, 23, 65–6, 79, 90–1, 101–6. See also Merleau-Ponty 2001, 248–51, 285, 287, 293. Merleau-Ponty argues that phenomena such as dreams and delirious states but also aesthetic perception are “not linked to their meaning by a relation of sign to signified”; their meaning is “not a notional meaning, but a direction of our existence” (285, my italics).

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 199 What are the elements of Millie’s and Colman’s disorientation and reorientation? In brief, their solos connect gender transition to the seemingly unrelated phenomena of migration and (cultural) adoption. This allows Kay to think of transphobia, misogyny, racism and xenophobia in tandem and intersectionally. Formally, gender transition and migration intersect in the parallel between Sophie Stones’s hunt for Joss’s “real” gender identity and Colman’s formula for British racism—where are you (really) from?—which assumes that only white Englishmen are properly British. People are always coming up to me and asking if I’m from Morocco, Trinidad, Tobago, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica . . . Hey, are you from Hawaii? . . . [T]he next fucker that asks me where I come from, I’m going to say, yes, I come from . . . any place they ask. (58) Compare this to comments made by Kamilah McInnis, 24, in a 2018 BBC article: “I never say I am just British by itself, just because I identify as being Black British and also when you say British a lot of people go ‘but where are you really from?’ and that’s very annoying.”4 In addition, compare to Kay’s own story, told more than once: I went to sit down in this chair in a London pub and this woman says, “You cannae sit doon in that chair—that’s ma chair.” I said, “Oh, you’re from Glasgow, aren’t you?” and she said, “Aye, how did you know that?” I said, “I’m from Glasgow myself.” She said, “You’re not, are you, you foreign-looking bugger!” . . . I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from. (Kay 2002) In relation to adoption, Trumpet intertwines divergent meanings of it.5 Trumpet then connects familial adoption, cultural adoption and migration, alluding to several historical layers. Within a British colonial layer, which only emerges in the “Last Word” chapter (271–7), there is the transatlantic turn-of-the-century informal adoption, by a white Scottish family, of Joss’s black father, John, sent by his own father to “give him some sort of education” (274). John (original name unknown) is renamed John Moore by the Scottish family, works as their servant, teaches himself

4 See Sandhu 2018. Compare also to the stories of Black British women, Julia Ogiehor (Taylor 2019) and Anneka Davis (BBC July 2019). 5 Adoption: “legally or informally taking a person into any relationship; esp. . . . a minor who is not one’s offspring”; “being adopted”; “taking something up or embracing it as one’s own”; “being taken up and accepted” (OED).

200  Pelagia Goulimari to read, culturally adopts Scottish folk songs, has his portrait painted by a Scottish artist—the portrait’s embedded title, Mumbo Jumbo, signaling his social unintelligibility (276)—and dies prematurely.6 Within a postWorld War II, postcolonial layer of migration to Britain from colonies and former colonies and the Windrush generation, Millie’s white English mother migrates to Scotland and culturally adopts Scotland from a position of privilege (85). By contrast, Colman, as a mixed-race baby up for adoption, is an undesirable adoptee. His adoption alludes to 1950s and early 1960s adoptions notoriously forced on British single mothers, especially mothers of mixed-race babies, and the social shaming of interracial relationships, particularly between black men and white women, who were read as oversexualized white Jezebels.7 Habitual British selfcomparisons to the legally embedded and “overt” racism of the southern U.S. were complacent and blind to “implicit” racism and “insidious forms of discrimination” in Britain (Webb 112, 124). While Kay seems to allude to innovative 1990s scholarship by Lewis et al., Colman, now in his thirties, seems painfully unaware of it. “What caring mother chucks her baby out. . . ?” (58), Colman asks about his biological mother. Joss, Millie and Colman move from Glasgow to London when Colman is seven and Colman adopts a Cockney accent in a failed attempt to fit in: “I got rid of my Glasgow accent. Well, almost . . . I came home with my cockney accent” (50–1; my italics). But the social assumption of his foreignness continues, and he suffers from “chronic depression” (49); “I didn’t feel Scottish. Didn’t feel English” (51). Colman lives out Homi Bhabha’s well-known logic of colonial mimicry, “almost the same, but not quite.”8 David Eng’s concept of the “racial melancholia” of transnational migration and adoption, explicitly developing Bhabha’s logic, is useful here.9 The racially melancholic subject—Colman, but also Joss Moody (as his chosen surname hints) and John Moore—is cut off from his “origins,” required to assimilate yet not counted as “one of us.” Millie, despite her anti-racist past—recollected only by Colman in his “longest” childhood memory, one of Millie confronting a racist on the bus in Glasgow and calling him “pig ignorant” (54)—is ill equipped to deal with Colman’s racial melancholia. She has been unable to reach him ever since “as a boy he would disappear into these moods” (153). Caught between unavailable points of origin and destination, the racially melancholic subject occupies an impossible position similar to Bettcher’s trans

6 Kay is here summarizing tropes both in African American slave narratives and in postcolonial literature. 7 See Lewis 1997; Lewis et al. 1998. See also Webb 2017; Roberts 2013; Johnston 2018. 8 Bhabha 1984, 127; see also 130, 132. 9 See Eng 2003.

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 201 subject, caught between the unlivable alternatives of false pretender and evil deceiver.10 However, Trumpet also outlines a more positive and transformative version of adoption, for example in its description of the social potential of jazz spaces. The Glasgow jazz scene is described as a virtual heterotopia of sorts. Joss’s adoption of jazz and relationship with Millie become possible and even successful in this context of racial mixing and political radicalism. Big Red, Joss’s close musical collaborator, is a white Scottish communist. In his brief solo, he expresses his love for Joss. We can call this process making imaginary families or making “fictive kin,” a term Patricia Hill Collins uses to describe, not Black Nationalism, but historic traditions of alternative, non-nuclear families in the AfricanAmerican community, such as othermothering and elective kin.11 We can also call this making “rhizomatic” connections or “assemblages,” using the language of Deleuze and Guattari to describe a heterogeneous, nontotalizable multiplicity in open-ended, continuous variation.12 Or, we can call it a “making kin” that is a sympoiesis as Donna Haraway does.13 Sympoiesis—συν- + ποίησις—means “making with.” Or we can call it “intra-action,” as Karen Barad does, when outlining her agential realism: “The neologism ‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. . . [D]istinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (2007, 33). Or, we can call it queer kinship. What we are trying to avoid is the danger of fascism and the politics of “security if not invulnerability” (xiii) that Paul Gilroy identifies in Between Camps: “fascistic conceptions of . . . sameness” (xi); “hypersimilarity” (x); tokenistic “shortcuts into solidarity that racial and ethnic absolutes provide” (xi); “cheap racial solidarity and empty nationalist causes” (xiv). He calls for the “de-naturing of ‘race’ ” and other absolutes (xiv). We will be returning to invulnerability and ethical vulnerability shortly.

Ethics of Trans, Unknowing, Cognitive Improvement In the middle of Trumpet, without any structural preparation or justification, there is a surprise solo by Joss. Trumpet’s concentric form (structure) revolves around this middle chapter entitled “Music.” Joss is literally in the midst of a public jazz improvisation, which is otherwise

10 On racial melancholia, see also Muñoz 2006 and Halberstam 2014. 11 Collins 2000, 178–9. 12 In A Thousand Plateaus, continuing their project of outlining alternatives to fascism, began in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013a, 2013b). 13 Haraway 2016.

202  Pelagia Goulimari unplaceable. Is this event single or iterative? Is he in a jazz club in Glasgow or London, young or old, alive or a posthumous ghost, anticipating or looking back on his “deathday” on a mortician’s table and in a coffin—or all of the above (133)? Improvising on the concentric figure of his unravelling bandages, and Millie and Colman’s fall down a spiral stairwell, he describes going/getting down to the music as a maelstrom of possibilities in which he is nothing and everything, where the adult man, Joss Moody, and the young girl, Josephine Moore, can coexist. The emphasis is on transformation: invent your ancestors, make up your kin. Earlier, Colman had recollected Joss’s injunction: “you make up your own bloodline” (58). Now, in this queer atemporal moment, Joss is “out of this world” (131), experiencing a “bottomless ground . . . falling without ever stopping” (134). “It all falls off. . . . To be a girl. To be a man” (135). He “unwraps himself with his trumpet . . . being nobody coming from nothing” (135). He is “Scotland. Africa. . . . He is a girl. A man. Everything, nothing” (136). This is a practice and ethics of trans as “continuous variation”14 or “continuous transition.”15 In call-and-response mode, this more fructifying version of unravelling and undoing the self is elliptically and proleptically announced and anticipated, early on, by Millie’s recollections—from the depths of her disorientation—of her lived experience, many years ago, as a member of the audience in the Glasgow jazz scene. She describes falling into a spiral that rhythmically vibrates with energy, and where darkness/night/blackness is a creative force. In her disorientation in the present, her “hand . . . shaking” (4), she transports herself to one night in a jazz club when “all heads shake and shudder,” ready to go to “the deep dark place” (17)— “I have gone inside the music. It’s a strange feeling. . . . We look like people that have just been created out of the night” (18). These positive variations of unravelling announce Millie’s and Colman’s reorientation in the second half of the book. This reorientation involves both cognitive improvement and what we might call an ethics of unknowing. The feminist philosopher, Pamela Sue Anderson, provides us with additional conceptual support. Anderson (2020) outlined her critique of willful ignorance and invulnerability and advocated “ethical” vulnerability in her last work before her untimely death. Anderson’s starting point, in thinking about speaker vulnerability and an audience’s willful ignorance, is bell hooks. hooks has analyzed the systemic silencing of black women by privileged audiences who refuse to see them as legitimate knowers— from Sojourner Truth delivering her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to an audience who do not count her as a proper woman to hooks’s own

14 Deleuze and Guattari 2013b, 95. 15 Halberstam 2018, 95.

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 203 unsuccessful defense of her PhD viva. Anderson argues that this “speaker vulnerability” hinges on an audience’s “active disavowal” and “wilful ignorance” of their own vulnerability as living beings and as knowers and their projection of this vulnerability onto certain groups. In Trumpet, Sophie Stones is an example of the invulnerability of selfdeceptive knowers; she is both convinced she knows the plot and incapable of cognitive improvement. So is Jazz’s narrator initially, in his/her conviction that he/she knows the characters. In Trumpet, the Scottish artist who titled his portrait of John Moore Mumbo Jumbo projected his own ignorance onto a lack of intelligibility inhering in John. Anderson argues that “[s]triving for invulnerability”—for example, as “the man with a gun for ‘self-protection’ or the philosopher with an argument for his shield against his vulnerability”—“puts us at a serious human risk” (2020). In Trumpet, Sophie’s portrait of Joss is harmful. For Colman and Millie, there is a degree of cognitive improvement. They begin to reflect on Joss’s gender transition, and they do so in tandem with migration and adoption. They also begin to reflect on their own experience of gender transition, migration and adoption—an invitation to the reader to reciprocate. Colman’s misogyny and transphobia in the first half—“My father didn’t have any balls” (61)—gives way to “Must take quite a lot of balls to pull that off” (183). In the closing lines of Colman’s last solo, he can hear Joss differently: “I’ve pulled it off,” Joss says (270). Richardson argues that Colman comes to a “terrified recognition of the fragility and social femininity of black manhood” (2012, 363). Not only are “black genders . . . nonnormative,” “unstable” (368) and incoherent but also “the ideal of the heteropatriarch, which is based on assumptions of an impenetrable black manhood that he thought his father embodied,” is a harmful “melancholic attachment” (375). Colman’s dream of leaving the flooding cellar, up the spiral stairwell, with young Josephine “on his back” (260) suggests that Colman, having understood this, reorients himself toward “recuperat[ing] the female part of his paternal heritage” (374) and “integrating queerness into his sense of self” (375). I would add to Richardson that Colman’s “symbolic turn to the (black) maternal” (374) is enabled by his visit to his white grandmother, Edith, and in turn enables his visit to his mother. For Colman, Edith, Josephine and Millie become rhizomatically connected. Millie’s cognitive improvement centers on the avowal of feelings of “rage” (199), “hatred” and “guilt” (153) toward Colman: “I feel all guilty” (200). Millie explicitly connects these feelings to Colman’s intractable “moods” (153) and “sulky ways” (199), but they have a way of triggering other questions: “What do I know about his [Joss’s] life really? What do I know about my own life? . . . No doubt they will call me a lesbian” (154). Having evaded the press that outed and, in her eyes, fox-hunted them (157), Millie now defends her decision to keep Joss’s secret—“I managed to be loyal” (206)—but declares, “I will be ready

204  Pelagia Goulimari for them. I will tell them all about being Joss Moody’s widow” (207). However, argues Wächter, her guilt toward Colman suggests she is now considering that not telling Colman “may have been seriously harmful” to him (2017, 91). A fox is both prey and predator, thus pointing to her ambivalence (87). Using James Phelan’s distinction between “underreporting” and “underreading,”16 Wächter argues that Millie has been underreporting to Colman and asks whether this constitutes unreliability and intentional deception. On the one hand, when a trans person’s self-identification is respected, they can no longer be considered “evil deceivers” (see Bettcher earlier), and in this case, divulging rather than withholding their “secret” might be considered complicit in “cissexism and transphobia” (Wächter 83). On the other hand, Millie might be seen to be protecting Joss’s masculinity and her heterosexuality in a manner that is complicit with “heteronormativity and cissexism” (91). However, Wächter is wrong to claim that “their family life itself was conservative with clearly allocated heteronormative gender roles” (90). There is as much evidence of their heteronormativity as there is of their non-conformity. Trumpet’s readers are asked not to be “pig ignorant,” to follow allusions and do some cultural literacy work pertaining to gender transition, migration and adoption.17 But they are also asked to suspend reflex judgements and do some thinking, hence the need for an ethics of unknowing. Complementing cognitive improvement, Trumpet proposes an ethics of unknowing emanating from Joss and recollected by Colman, “His trumpet told stories, he used to say. . . [H]e would never say what the stories were exactly. You tell me, was what he said” (214). This ethics of unknowing is repeated formally in gaps and disjunctions in the text which invite the reader—in call-and-response—to step in and elucidate or to step back and respect (for example, the inconclusive question of whether Joss and Millie are heteronormative). The oscillation between cognitive improvement and ethics of unknowing is itself a gap that the reader is invited to attend to. This reorientation also involves the possibility of new assemblages and making kin. Colman breaks with Sophie and meets Joss’s white, working-class Scottish mother, Edith, for the first time. Millie welcomes a letter from the newly formed women’s band, The Joss Moody Memorial Band, which Joss might not have liked (268). There is promise of improvement in Millie and Coleman’s life-long fraught relationship. 16 See Phelan 2014. 17 For example, Trumpet alludes to the Highland Clearances and enforced Highlands migration (14); black immigration to Scotland and the UK, going back to the court of James IV of Scotland (99; see further Fryer, esp. 2–4); institutional racism in the police (162, 224), subject of the 1998 Macpherson public inquiry, in response to the 1993 murder of Steven Lawrence in London (Macpherson 1999).

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 205 In sketching an alternative to self-deceptive invulnerability and systemic willful ignorance of others, Anderson advocates “a new reliance on collective work” that promises “a new rationality, in which a relationship to the unknown and to the unthought is at every moment reintroduced” (2020). This would involve not the necessity but the precarious opportunity of “ethical” vulnerability: speaker and audience “mutual vulnerability,” as reciprocal openness to affection, affecting and being affected. Anderson draws inspiration from Michèle Le Doeuff, but also from bell hooks’s long career as a thinker and teacher: bell hooks avows herself; that is, she accepts her vulnerability as a speaker and as a black woman who wants to change both her life and the lives of those others around her. So, she continues, struggling with (her) speaker vulnerability in classrooms and in her writing life. We might say that she looks for mutual affection in vulnerability. (2020) Let me add to Anderson that African American traditions of call-andresponse and black feminist thought enabled hooks. When Colman knocks on Edith’s door in Glasgow, the warden of Edith’s sheltered accommodation asks Colman where he comes from and decides against offering him a cup of tea (225). But Edith, who is completely unaware of who he is, finds him “oddly familiar” (227): “Come this way, son” (228). In response to this welcome into making kin, his “hands shake” (230), reenergizing the spiral. In “Last Word,” Joss returns in the form of a letter addressed to Colman, written in his final days. The reader is given full access to the letter and shares in the “you” address. But instead of finally revealing “the real reason” for his transition, Joss sketches his father, John, their love for each other and shared love of music, in a manner offering both cognitive improvement and unknowing. Almost all the information about John emerges in this section. “I’ve changed my mind” (271), Joss announces. Joss’s earlier formula, “make up your own bloodline” (58), has been incorporated into a larger, more nuanced, more oscillating position. The question of where John came from is left unanswered, but we get to hear of John’s gifts for music and language and the racism he encountered. The Mumbo Jumbo title of John’s portrait makes Joss “more angry than anything” (276). Joss then choses to point Colman to his birth certificate as Josephine Moore but refrains from explaining his transition. The period between the age of 11, when Josephine’s father died, and the age of 30, when Joss meets Millie, is a gap in the text that cannot be filled— one gap of many. But also, returning to all the variations of the concentric figure of the spiral, one of the final sentences of Joss’s last solo and of the book is that “The present is a loop stitch” (277).

206  Pelagia Goulimari

Jackie Kay Adopting Toni Morrison18 Trumpet is looping back to Toni Morrison’s Jazz by replaying variations of Jazz’s formal, figural, thematic, narratorial and ethical patterns. Jazz begins as a jazz-era, 1920s Harlem scandal: the love triangle of Joe (Joseph), his wife Violet and his “bold” (61) young lover Dorcas. Joe shoots Dorcas; then Violet “trie[s] to kill” the “dead girl” in her coffin with a knife (79, 94). The scandal is exemplary of the headlines and front pages of the black New York tabloid press of the 1920s, for example the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, both mentioned twice in Jazz (80, 199),19 just as “pervs” and “trannies” are exemplary of the London 1990s tabloid press in Trumpet (126). Both Jazz and Trumpet take the tabloid press and a formulaic tabloid story as their point of departure. Both novels undo their formulaic tabloid story through the improvisations of narrators replaying it differently, in a direction of cognitive improvement and ethical unknowing. In Jazz, this formulaic story, this riff, briefly stated in the very first paragraph, is replayed throughout the novel in improvisations performed by a number of characters and an impossible narrator who defies narrative and narratological conventions and whose gender and racial identity remains unknown. These improvisations unravel the sensationalist love triangle into a story of historical African American grief. This is a story of African American forced migration—trauma-bearing, grief-stricken orphans and adopted children, their voluntary migration from the rural South to the Promised Land of the urban North, and their New Negro transition, interrupted by a return of death, loss and grief. Numerous historical allusions invite readers to improve their literacy in African American history. Jazz and Trumpet develop two ostensibly unrelated formulaic stories into variations of a common history of black migration, grief, orphans, adoption and transition. Just as Trumpet takes place in the aftermath of Joss’s death and traces Millie and Colman’s disorientation, Jazz’s diegetic present is the aftermath of Dorcas’s death. Joe and Violet are in the throes of disorientation, mental illness and racial melancholia, which is intricately connected to an

18 Kay has often discussed her “fantasy” family of black and especially African American writers, musicians and activists, and her interviews on Trumpet are no exception (Kay 1999, 55; also 53). She acknowledges her debt to Toni Morrison (Kay 2016a), and Ali Smith confirms this (Smith 2016, x). Among critics, Eckstein (2016) has discussed Trumpet with some reference to Morrison. Whitehead (2004) compares Trumpet and Jazz in a chapter of Trauma Fiction, arguing that “Kay Signifies on Jazz” (157); his analysis focuses on trauma, narrative and healing. 19 See also Knadler 2004. Another historic intertext for Jazz is James Van Der Zee’s 1920s photo of a dead girl, killed by her lover, in his The Harlem Book of the Dead, for which Morrison wrote the Foreword.

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 207 unspeakably catastrophic racial history, translated in narrative terms to the irretrievable unavailability of their parents, particularly their mothers. Dorcas herself turns out to be an orphan whose parents died in the East St. Louis white race riots of 1917 (60). Jazz’s orphans are ancestors for Trumpet’s orphans: John, Joss and Colman. The concentric figures of the spiral and falling down a stairwell in Trumpet are variations of concentric figures in Jazz. To figure the disorientation and groundlessness of histories and identities—“dark as the bottom of a well” (22) and with “No foundation at all” (23)—Jazz uses tropes such as falling down a well, a cracked record repeating itself, a spiraling tree and a well-like rock house. Rose Dear, Violet’s mother, facing forced migration, went crazy, and her young children “put one foot on the other” (98) to ground and support themselves; she then “jumped in the well” (99). Violet, caught in a loop that precedes and exceeds Dorcas’s death, “collapses” (24), “going crazy” (97) in her middle age: “I am having trouble with my head” (80). After Dorcas’s death, Joe himself falls again into “the inside nothing” (37) of his orphaned childhood, a “strange sight” of a man “crying so openly . . . month after month” (118), “all day and all night,” leaving his job and good for nothing (205). For Violet and Joe, “the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack” (220). The grooves of a record form a single spiral along which the needle moves. A scratch will cause the needle to jump from the groove in which it has been moving to another groove, another part of the spiral. If the needle is caused to jump backward, it will encounter again and again the scratch that causes it to jump—the needle thereby being trapped in an endless loop. Abandoned at birth, Joe is rumored to be the child of Wild, a “crazy” (174), psychotic woman who is “too brain-blasted” (179) for language and society. Morrison herself has suggested that Wild “could be Sethe’s daughter, Beloved,” having crossed from Ohio into Virginia, pregnant with Paul D’s child (2008, 96), and so returning in Jazz after her disappearance in Beloved, Morrison’s preceding novel. Joe conjectures that Wild lives by the river on “unlikely soil” (178), on “ground” that “was as porous as a sieve. A step could swallow . . . your whole self” (182). Called Treason (221), this might be the Ohio River, historic border between South and North, crossed by fugitive slaves such as Sethe in Beloved.20 Wild lives by a spiraling tree “entwined in its own roots” (178): its “roots grew up its trunk”; they “grew backward as

20 The Ohio would be called Treason both because of the Butt conspiracy but also because Joe feels betrayed by Wild. The location could be in the border state of West Virginia. Joe lives in Vienna and close to Palestine. In West Virginia, there is a Vienna very close to the Ohio River as well as a Palestine in proximity.

208  Pelagia Goulimari though, having gone obediently into earth and found it barren, retreating to the trunk for what was needed” (182). She takes refuge in a welllike space, a “sheltering rock formation” (176), whose tunnels lead to a “stone room” with an “open air” top: “It was like falling into the sun” (183), says Joe. I argued elsewhere, focusing on the spiraling tree, that Joe turns a memory trace into a figure through which to understand his condition. In the absence of a solid foundation, the past has to be actively reconstructed in the present to be made available for improvisation, and, in this sense, the trunk feeds the roots. The search for roots is an act of the imagination reconstructing the past (Goulimari, Toni Morrison 97–8). It is as if Joe becomes Wild’s ancestor, foundation and mother, just as Joss calls on Colman to “make up” his “own bloodline” (58) and just as Colman dreams of carrying young Josephine on his back up the spiral staircase of the flooding cellar. Rotating in a vortex in a state of disorientation, Joe and Violet then reorient themselves toward Felice, Dorcas’s grieving closest friend, and the narrator predicts a repetition of the love triangle, but the narrator turns out to be unreliable and their confident prediction wrong. Felix (gen. felicis) in Latin means happy—but also lucky, fortuitous, successful—and Felice promises happiness. Joe’s “sobs” are “quieter now” (197), and indeed Felice claims that Violet is “not crazy at all” (202).21 Similarly, Trumpet’s characters also move from disorientation to reorientation, surprising Sophie Stones. Jazz’s unidentifiable narrator—like Sophie, the ghostwriter believing herself to be the real authority on Joss Moody—assumes a formulaic version of truth and reality: a scandalous and lethal love triangle in which someone must be killed. But Violet—Joe—Felice turn out to be non-normative adoptive kin, a rhizomatic assemblage that works, forged out of the maelstrom. Their triangle opens out to include Dorcas’s adoptive mother (and aunt), Alice, and others. Similarly, in Trumpet, Joss—Millie—Colman—Big Red—Edith—John Moore, and so on are non-normative but viable adoptive kin, even while their rhizome and the question of who they are, where they come from, and where they are going needs to remain open and underdefined. This ethics of unknowing avoids too narrow and prescriptive a definition, but also draws the reader in. Narratorial unreliability, gaps and disjunctions of perspective serve this ethics of unknowing. For example, see the disjunction and antiphony between the narrator’s perspective on Joe (120ff.) and Joe’s own self-perception (123ff.) or the narrator’s perspective on Felice (198) and Felice’s statements (204). 21 Jean Wyatt (2017) describes this reorientation as an Epicurean “swerve” from the straight line (57–8, 200 n.8), a clinamen. This is a swerve from a Western “love-death plot” to a “new and surprising” form of love (64) but also a swerve from “Western literary tradition to African American literary tradition” (68).

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 209 While Jazz is full of elliptical allusions to a traumatic African American history, inviting the reader’s cognitive improvement,22 its call-andresponse ethos also requires a form of unknowing. This oscillation between the two is adopted and adapted in Trumpet. Wyatt summarizes the “peculiarities” in the narrative structure of Morrison’s later novels as “gaps, discontinuities and surprises” (2). She argues that “ambiguous discourse,” “conundrums” (11) and “enigmas” (12) are integral to Morrison’s call-and-response ethics, inviting the reader to co-make the text. Wyatt outlines Morrison’s “variation on the tradition of call-and-response central to African American art forms,” along the following lines: “engag[ing] the reader in a dialogue between his ethical convictions and the structures of the text that call them into question . . . to draw out and expose the reader’s values and beliefs and then provoke a reevaluation” (16). In the middle of Trumpet, Joss’s sudden and unplaceable jazz improvisation is the hinge from disorientation toward transformative reorientation. Jazz has a similar structure; in the middle of the book (137–62), the narrator abruptly turns to a singular and atypical ante-bellum Southern romance between a black man and a white woman and their mixed-race son, Golden Gray, who, raised as a white gentleman, returns to meet his father, encounters Wild and stays on. In telling the story of Lestory, Vera Louise Gray and True Belle, her black slave and Violet’s grandmother, the narrator is constantly foregrounding his or her unreliability and impossibility but also his or her presence. For example, the narrator says about Golden Gray: “I want him to stand next to a well . . . and from down in it . . . some brief benevolent love rises from the darkness” (161).23 This chapter then announces Violet and Joe’s reorientation. Trumpet’s final pages also parallel the structure of Jazz’s final chapter. In “Last Word,” Joss returns and addresses the reader, just as the narrator returns and addresses the reader in Jazz’s closing pages. Jazz’s narrator addresses the reader as “you,” calling for the reader’s co-operation. The narrator also adopts the inaccessible Wild as an ancestor, announcing, “I am touched by her” (221), just as in “Last Word,” Joss imagines John by his bed, singing (277). The narrator re-envisions Wild’s rock house and Rose Dear’s well, but Wild’s rock house is now a “chamber of gold . . . both snug and wide open” (221), while Rose Dear’s well has a “sunlit rim” (225).24

22 On cognitive improvement, see Morrison 2019. 23 On Golden Gray and the well, see Wyatt 2017, 62. 24 Elsewhere, I have outlined the use of “singularities” in Morrison’s fiction, including the invention of paradoxical or “impossible” solutions mixing the two sides of a binary opposition. One of these inventions is Morrison’s open home, having a dual—sheltering and life-threatening—potential. Reappearing in all of Morrison’s novels, rich in variations, it takes the form of the “sheltering rock” home in Jazz (Goulimari 2006, 192).

210  Pelagia Goulimari Kay adopts and adapts Morrison’s figural, formal and ethical patterns and innovations in Jazz to build Trumpet, even while highlighting the differences in the U.S., British and Scottish contexts and her differing priorities, especially in the midst of the Scottish devolution referendum of 1997 and the ongoing debate on Scottish independence. For example, if British racism has been taking the “implicit” form of “where are you (really) from?”—i.e., the troping of minorities as perpetual foreigners who might be asked to go back home at any time—U.S. racism has been taking both the intractable form of national amnesia and the explosive form of police deaths and mass incarceration. Another example: while the shuttling back and forth between North and South in Jazz is replicated in the back-and-forth movement between Scotland and England in Trumpet, its role is different, as is the “outsider within” position of Scotland in the U.K. The two novels share a concentric form in a variety of ways. They revolve around a middle section rather than progressing. They radiate outward from the formulaic riff of a scandalous story toward waves of variations but also from the seemingly singular and atypical toward implicating everyone in the diegetic world—and by extension the world of readers. In Trumpet, Joss might initially appear singular, but in a novel where everyone is passing, migrating, adopting and transitioning, he becomes exemplary. Similarly, in Jazz, the seemingly atypical Joe and Violet end up being rhizomatically connected to the seemingly ordinary Alice and Felice.25 While Jazz is not the only intertext for Trumpet,26 I have argued that Trumpet has been enabled in its response to Jazz’s call. In replaying Jazz’s formal and ethical patterns, Trumpet has, in turn, illuminated Jazz in new ways. Why have I chosen to turn to Trumpet and Jazz now? In opening up the intersection of (gender) transition, migration and adoption, they are particularly good to think about in the midst of the vertiginous Brexit crisis in which I have been writing this piece—a British identity crisis and constitutional crisis specifically affecting the U.K.’s relation to Scotland and Northern Ireland—dominated by the issue of immigration.27 In the U.K. and U.S., precarious progress has been made in not automatically equating gender identity to gender assigned at birth. There is a degree of acceptance that gender identity might not be a question of where one is (really) coming from. By contrast, in relation to migration, the Brexit 25 I discuss this pattern in Morrison’s novels in Goulimari 2006. 26 Another intertext is the story of Billy Tipton as told by the media and by Tipton’s biographer, Diane Middlebrook (1998). See Halberstam (2000), esp. 68–9. 27 See Rogers 2018, 2019. “As for the Prime Minister’s proposed model, the entire EU knows that where we have now reached derives from her putting the ending of free movement of people [within the E.U.] well above all other objectives” (Rogers 2018).

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 211 maelstrom is bringing implicit racism and xenophobia to the surface. In opening up the question: “Where do you (really) come from?” in relation to (gender) transition, migration and (cultural) adoption, Morrison and Kay suggest that an ethics of unknowing, cognitive improvement and transformative adoption might be required on the part of the reader.28

Acknowledgments An early version was delivered at the University of Glasgow on March 23 in the context of “Theory Now: A Symposium on Theory and its Futures,” March 22 and 23, 2019. I have benefitted from conversations with Jean Wyatt in Michaelmas Term 2018, while she was a visiting scholar at the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and editorial comments by Wyatt and Sheldon George. Conversations with Kate Guariento, my Scottish graduate student, in Hilary Term 2016 helped me better understand Trumpet in relation to debates on Scottish national identity and Caledonian antisyzygy.

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28 On my part, having lived in the U.K. for decades, this is my first piece from a position of dual nationality. I am grateful to Kay and Morrison that I am able to think about my immigrant status and new British nationality in their company.

212  Pelagia Goulimari Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28, “Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis.” Spring 1984, pp. 125–33. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Rev. 2nd ed. New York; London: Routledge, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013a. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013b. Eckstein, Lars. “Performing Jazz, Defying Essence: Music as a Metaphor of Being in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.” University of Potsdam, 2016. https://publishup.unipotsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/8557/file/eckstein_kay. pdf. Eng, David L. “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas.” Social Text 76, vol. 21, no. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 1–37. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. Foreword by Gary Younge; Introduction by Paul Gilroy. London: Pluto, 2018. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. New ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Goulimari, Pelagia. “ ‘something else to be’: Singularities and Scapegoating Logics in Toni Morrison’s Early Novels.” Angelaki, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 191–204. ———. Toni Morrison. London: Routledge, 2011. Halberstam, Judith. “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2000, pp. 62–81. Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland CA: U of California P, 2018. ———. “Wildness, Loss, Death.” Social Text 121, vol. 32, no. 4, Winter 2014, pp. 137–48. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC; London: Duke UP, 2016. Johnston, Jenny. “Decades of Haunting Loss, Love and Rage.” Daily Mail, 22 Jun. 2018. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5871897/Decades-haunting-losslove-rage.html. Kay, Jackie. “Ali Smith Interviews Her Friend Jackie Kay on the Publication of the Picador Classic Edition of her Novel Trumpet.” 10 Mar. 2016a. www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/picador/ali-smith-interviews-jackie-kay. ———. [Interview with Libby Brooks.] “Don’t Tell Me Who I Am.” The Guardian, 12 Jan. 2002. www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jan/12/fiction.features. ———. “Interview: Jackie Kay in Conversation to Maya Jaggi and Richard Dyer.” Wasafiri, vol. 14, no. 29, March 1999, pp. 53–61. ——. Trumpet. New ed. Introduction by Ali Smith. London: Picador Classic, 2016b [1998]. Knadler, Stephen. “Remaking the Record in Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ and Toni Morrison’s ‘Jazz’.” African American Review, vol. 38, no. 1, April 2004, pp. 99–118. Lewis, Jane. “Lone Mothers: The British Case.” Lone Mothers in European Welfare Regimes: Shifting Policy Logics, edited by Jane Lewis. London: Kingsley, 1997.

Ethics in Kay’s Trumpet and Morrison’s Jazz 213 Lewis, Jane et al. Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Macpherson, William. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Feb. 1999. Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/277111/4262.pdf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Middlebrook, Diane. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billie Tipton. London: Virago, 1998. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Picador, 1988 [1987]. ———. Jazz. London: Picador, 1993 [1992]. ———. [Interview with Angels Carabi.] “Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison Speaks about Her Novel Jazz.” Toni Morrison: Conversations, edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 91–7. ———. “The War on Error.” The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. New York: Knopf, 2019. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs, vol. 31, no. 3, March 2006, pp. 675–88. Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Record of the English Language. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010—[electronic resource]. Phelan, James. “Narrative Ethics.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Dec. 2014, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/108.html. Richardson, Matt. “ ‘My father didn’t have a dick’: Social Death and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 18, no. 2–3, Jan. 2012, pp. 361–79. Roberts, Yvonne. “Forced Adoption: The Mothers Fighting to Find Their Lost Children.” The Guardian, 27. Oct. 2013, www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ oct/27/forced-adoption-mother-and-child-reunited. Rogers, Ivan, Sir. “Sir Ivan Rogers on Brexit” [Nine Lessons in Brexit], https:// news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/12/13/full-speech-sir-ivan-rogers-on-brexit/. 13 Dec. 2018. ———. “Where Did Brexit Come From and Where Is It Going to Take the UK?” www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/news/2019/jan/sir-ivan-rogers-brexit-lecturetext-and-video. 23 Jan. 2019. Sandhu, Rajdeep. “Should BAME be Ditched as a Term for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic People?” BBC, 17 May 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-politics-43831279. Smith, Ali. Introduction. In Kay 2016b. viii—xviii. Taylor, Harry. “ ‘Where are you really from?’—Muswell Hill Councillor Racially Abused on Northern Line Opens up about Discrimination She Faces Daily.” Ham & High, 22 Jun. 2019. www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/crime-court/muswellhill-councillor-julia-ogiehor-racially-abused-on-northern-line-1 - 6120481. Van Der Zee, James. The Harlem Book of the Dead. Foreword Toni Morrison. New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1978. Wächter, Cornelia. “Loyalty or Complicity?: The Moral Assessment of Silence in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.” Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique, edited by Afxentis Afxentiou. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, pp. 83–97.

214  Pelagia Goulimari Webb, Clive. “Special Relationships: Mixed-Race Couples in Post-War Britain and the United States.” Women’s History Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2017, pp. 110–29. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Wyatt, Jean. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. U of Georgia P, 2017.

12 White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy’s Small Island Agata Szczeszak-Brewer

Reviewers hailed Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island, published in 2004, as a tradition-breaking narrative about “our shared history on a planet that is increasingly small” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis). Levy’s novel, however, defies such facile labels, as it reflects post-Windrush England in a cracked narrative mirror of two black Jamaican characters, Hortense and Gilbert, and two white English characters, Queenie and Bernard. The novel’s narrative cacophony of four voices serves to underscore the epistemological disruption of the official stories not only of the empire but also of white resistance against white supremacist systems. Though all the characternarrators display some kind of cognitive dissonance, I will focus in this paper on Queenie’s hypocritical claim to white allyship and Hortense’s counternarrative to that claim. It is in the discursive gaps between their perspectives on race and racism in post-World War II England that we can glimpse uncomfortable truths about the construction of race and the hypocrisy of the so-called anti-racist allies. Queenie has often been described by critics and reviewers, including Laura Albritton, Emily Johansen and Bruce Woodcock, as a flawed but essentially open-minded white ally in the fight against racism. Her scripting of race, however, in the absence of everyday encounters with non-white people and nuanced education about world cultures, has two major sources: Hollywood and the official colonial discourse of the British Empire. Both sources, as I will explain in this essay, frame blackness within the context of property. Her construction of race and the hypocrisy of her claim that she is not racist come to a sharp focus when Hortense’s and Gilbert’s accounts contradict Queenie’s. It is through these contradictions, possibly because of the presence of four unreliable narrators, that we discover how self-congratulatory Queenie’s supposed antiracism is and how complicit she is in constructing and perpetuating racist narratives in post-Windrush England.1

1 The Windrush Generation is a term generally applied to some 500,000 immigrants from the Caribbean who arrived in England between 1948 (when MV Empire Windrush

216  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer I acknowledge the paradox of centering a white character in my discussion in order to make a claim about race and narrative in the novel. To a large extent, however, interrogating whiteness is the way to expose how whiteness is discursively constructed and centered and how false claims to anti-racist alliance are perpetuated, consciously and unconsciously, in culture and in the real world. The voices of critics and some of my students praising Queenie’s integrity and open-mindedness contribute to the “not all white people” chorus that misplaces our energies from learning about racism to excusing racism and patting ourselves on the back for being “woke.” Steve Biko called out this attitude in his essays about race in South Africa. Robin DiAngelo and Barbara Trepagnier identified and described white fragility and silent racism in the Western world to encourage the so-called white allies to critically interrogate their own racism. It is true that for mid-twentieth-century England, Queenie’s behavior seems progressive and nonconformist. When, in 1948, the SS Empire Windrush arrived in England carrying about 500 settlers from Jamaica, many of whom had fought for Great Britain in World War II, England’s ongoing debate about what it meant to be British intensified, and the relationship between race and citizenship became a contested subject in those debates. Although the Evening Standard featured a photograph of the ship on its front page in anticipation of the ship’s June 22 arrival at Tilbury, headlined paternalistically “Welcome Home!” and calling the migrants “sons of Empire,” numerous historical records, including letters, newspaper reports and oral history projects indicate a sustained, intensive racist campaign among the country’s landlords, business owners, teachers and other professionals who had a direct impact on black people’s access to quality housing and affordable services.2 In Small Island, Queenie’s self-proclaimed open-mindedness clashes with her narrative’s echoes of Joseph Conrad’s infamous metonymical descriptions of black bodies in Heart of Darkness and the fetishized images of the mammy figure in the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Her scripting of race also relies on products of imperial consumerism—chocolate, jewels and bicycle tires—as well as some of the means by which colonial officials transported the goods extracted from the colonies—the train system. In imagining the lives of the black people she encounters, Queenie reveals a perception of race fueled by colonial travel narratives, orientalist images, imperial consumerism and popular culture’s sanitization of slavery. These influences are particularly visible when Queenie’s narration clashes with those of Hortense and Gilbert,

docked at Tilbury) and 1971 (when the Immigration Act was passed limiting the influx of migrants) as Great Britain struggled with labor shortage after World War II. 2 Denise Richards for the Evening Standard, June 21, 1948.

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 217 two Jamaican character-narrators whose stories stand on their own but also fill in the discursive gaps in Queenie’s story and whose own narratives display complex and problematic understandings of racial identity. Small Island offers a destabilized narrative, discursive gaps and multiple points of view. Levy’s departure from the literary tradition of the univocal and chronologically narrated historical novel emphasizes the importance of authorship and race in ostensibly objective histories. The fragmentary texture of the narrative mirrors the complexity and vulnerability inherent in post-1948 identity formation among the colonizers and the colonized. This fragmentariness also allows readers to recognize distorted claims made by characters, such as Queenie’s claim that she rejects the racism of post-Windrush England.

Queenie’s Claim to White Allyship White allyship has been defined as a process during which white allies in the fight against systemic racism acknowledge their own biases and privileges and actively confront white supremacy, even if this confrontation comes at a cost of losing their own privilege. Recent books on white allyship, like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility or Barbara Trepangier’s Silent Racism, stress the importance of the ongoing work that white allies need to do on their own to understand systems of oppression and racist rhetoric. The concept, however, is not new; nor is the charge that white allies, while professing their allegiance to the anti-racist world, themselves espouse racist sentiments and uphold racist structures. From white abolitionists and social reformers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the liberal opponents of apartheid in South Africa, to white supporters of the Black Lives Matter and Fees Must Fall movements, the allies have been charged—more vigorously and vocally in this century— with hypocrisy and virtue signaling. For example, Steve Biko criticized the South African Student Organization as an entity that on the surface promoted social justice but in reality served to center whiteness and allow white liberal “allies” to congratulate themselves for not being racist (4–5). He warns against “artificial and token nonracialism”: artificial not in the sense that it is natural to segregate but rather because even those involved in it have certain prejudices that they cannot get rid of and are therefore basically dishonest to themselves, to their black counterparts and to the community of black people who are called upon to have faith in such people. (17) Such “allies” perpetuate “the old approach, where the blacks were made to fit into a pattern largely and often wholly determined by white

218  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer students” (18). His essay “Black Souls in White Skins?” further explains his thoughts about the so-called white allies, or “do-gooders,” who “argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s ‘inhumanity to the black man’ ” (20). He criticizes them for insisting on the kind of integration that “is a one-way course, with the whites doing all the talking and the blacks the listening” while at the same time enjoying “privilege at the expense of others” (20) and engaging in protests that are “directed at and appeal to white conscience” (21). As a result, says Biko, the white ally “moves around his white circles . . . with a lighter load, feeling that he is not like the rest of the others” (22). Thus, allyship becomes a performance that ultimately benefits only the performer. In the same essay, Biko warns against integration if it means “a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and code of behaviour set up and maintained by whites” (24). Biko continues, “I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that)” (24). In “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” Biko insists that the liberal is in fact appeasing his own conscience, or at best is eager to demonstrate his identification with the black people only so far as it does not sever all his ties with his relatives on the other side of the colour line. (65) He adds that “total identification with an oppressed group in a system that forces one group to enjoy privilege and to live on the sweat of another, is impossible” (66). Queenie, married to a virulent racist who went missing in World War II, does take in black lodgers at the time when most of them were turned away from rental properties. More, she shows Hortense around the neighborhood, and as we learn later from her narrative that transports us back to wartime London, she has an affair with a Jamaican RAF man, Michael Roberts, and eventually births their baby. During the war, she also becomes a close friend to another Jamaican soldier, Gilbert, and defends him during a film screening at a theater filled with American GIs. Superficially, these plot points could indicate that Queenie is indeed a progressive ally. However, when we look closely at the way Levy crafts Queenie’s descriptions and then juxtaposes them with Hortense’s and Gilbert’s, Queenie’s small-minded and self-congratulatory pattern of behavior comes to light. Barbara Trepagnier defines silent racism as “the racist thoughts, images, and assumptions in the minds of white people, including those that by most accounts are ‘not racist,’ ” and points to the danger of silent racism “precisely because it is perceived as harmless” (1). She discusses two forms of silent racism—stereotypical

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 219 images and paternalistic assumptions—that underlie systemic racism (6). Queenie engages in both, but the reader often needs Hortense’s and Gilbert’s perspectives on the events in the novel to catch some of these microaggressions. Hortense recalls Queenie’s professed act of kindness when she takes her Jamaican lodger to the shops: “I paid no mind that this woman believed I could not tell that the place before me, with its window of food displayed, was a shop” (273). Queenie, says Hortense, “was a punctilious teacher. The shop with meat in the window she tell me is a butcher. The one with pretty pink cakes is the baker. And each time she tell me she want me to repeat the word” (275). She also instructs Hortense “on what she assured me was good manners. I, as a visitor to this country, should step off the pavement into the road if an English person wishes to pass” (277). Queenie’s well-meaning paternalism obscures the fact that she assigns Hortense and her other Jamaican lodgers to the black underclass, infantilizing them and therefore rendering them inferior. Queenie’s claim to anti-racism rests in her refusal to turn away black lodgers, despite her neighbors’ objections. However, the conversation in Gilbert and Hortense’s room between Queenie and Hortense reads like a comedy of errors, with much miscommunication and misreading of each other’s intentions (188–9). In fact, we can understand their relationship more by searching for the gaps between their perceptions than by immersing ourselves in their own narratives. While Queenie derives selfrighteous satisfaction from being friendly with her black tenants, they themselves feel that their privacy is being invaded. Hortense says, “Pushing her nose into corners, she walked the room as if inspecting some task she had asked of me” (188). After inviting Hortense to “go to the shops,” Queenie touches her arm in an intimate gesture and whispers, “It’s all right. I don’t mind being seen in the street with you. You’ll find I’m not like most. It doesn’t worry me to be seen out with darkies” (191). Queenie’s position here is self-congratulatory magnanimity. However, we are immersed in Hortense’s narrative, and so we are privy to Hortense’s perception of these words: Now, why would this woman worry to be seen in the street with me? After all, I was a teacher and she was only a woman whose living was obtained from the letting of rooms. If anyone should be shy it should be I. And what is a darkie? (191) Ignoring for a moment Hortense’s own internalized racism and class superiority—as she says on numerous occasions that she is proud of being light-skinned—the significance of Hortense and Queenie’s miscommunication lies in the unspoken context of these narratives. E. R. Braithwaite, in his exposition of racism in post-war Britain, says that the dark-skinned

220  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer immigrant “is a constant reminder to Britons of his earliest relationship with them—slave to owner, subject to sovereign, conquered to conqueror, and man to master” (496). Initially, he says, racism “operated actively against West Indians in nearly every social and economic situation during this period of West Indian immigration into Britain,” but “it was generally cloaked in self-conscious evasions and excuses, expressed in vague, inconsistent terms, and even denied when challenged” (500). Gradually, though, the motto “Keep Britain White” became widespread (500). He reminds us that even though the opponents of the strict immigration law proposed in 1961 England “argued that its passage would give the green light to every racist interest and element in the country,” such proclamations were “in sharp contrast to the conduct and attitude of the vast majority of Labour Party supporters” (502), whose “claims to brotherhood and unity were not borne out nor supported where they mattered most, at the grass-roots working level” (502–3). Braithwaite illustrates his point by citing Ben Tillett, who said to a West Indian member of his audience, “Yes, you are our brothers, and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not come to this country” (qtd 503). Similarly, Queenie, while professing her willingness to be seen in public with Hortense, foregrounds Hortense’s racial difference and subscribes to white supremacist ideology that advances the myth of white superiority. Gilbert’s perspective proves that Queenie, though well-meaning, is at best naïve about—and in truth participating in—structural and individual racism he and other Jamaican soldiers face. Queenie is oblivious in the cake shop episode, when Gilbert fears for his life as the white American GIs close in on him (149). She is clueless, again, in the movie theater scene, when Gilbert is directed to sit with black American soldiers in the back of the auditorium and away from his white companions. “I wanted so to be pleased that this sweet Englishwoman was speaking up for me. But, come, Queenie’s good intentions were entirely missing the point” (153). Gilbert is too concerned about everyone’s safety to call Queenie out on her desire to explain racism to black people and to tell them how it should be fought. The readers, however, get his perspective on Queenie’s misguided attempt to help. As Gilbert says, referencing the plot of Gone with the Wind, the film they came to watch, “These US comrades buttoned into the same green uniform for a fight against foreign aggression were about to start their own uncivil war” (157). In the gap between Gilbert’s and Queenie’s perspective is the context of the colonial script featuring a white savior of the black other. Benevolent paternalism is not anti-racism. Like one of her teachers, who “had us all knitting blankets and scarves for missionaries and starving black babies” (201), Queenie approaches her black tenants, her Jamaican lover and her biracial baby not as human subjects but as objects to be explored, tasted, molded, directed and—if necessary—discarded. They are there to make her feel good: by paying rent, by being the objects

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 221 of her colonialist desire to instruct and explore the exotic Other and by letting her microaggressions slide because, let’s face it, they rely on her support.

Queenie’s Metonymical Racism Queenie’s understanding of race comes from two main sources: official narratives of the capitalist, genocidal empire and popular culture, particularly film. Her metonymical and synecdochic racism is foreshadowed and foregrounded on the first pages of the novel, in “Prologue.” The book begins with Queenie’s words: “I thought I’d been to Africa” (1). A teacher, a patriot supporting the empire, corrects her: “you merely went to the British Empire Exhibition, as thousands of others did” (1). Queenie’s father took his family to the exhibition as part of a Butchers’ Association trip—a profession that stands in for the unspoken and unspeakable violence to the colonized people of Africa, Asia and elsewhere. As they sit on the train, the adults talk about “the bother of humane killing over the poleaxe” (2), a possible reference to the Humane Slaughter Association’s campaign aimed to replace the pole-axe with more humane mechanical stunners in the process of killing farm animals for meat. The British Empire Exhibition took place between April 1924 and October 1925, and it coincided with the Humane Slaughter Association’s 1920s campaign against cruelty during animal slaughter. The implied irony in the discussed attempts to treat butchered animals in a more “humane” way emerges from the absence of worry about the inhumane treatment of the people colonized by the empire glorified in the exhibition. This concern is absent from the anti-pole-axe campaign’s narrative but also from the fictional representation of the conversation about the campaign, which significantly takes place on the way to an event celebrating the empire responsible for genocide. The Amritsar Massacre, the atrocities committed during the Mau Uprising, concentration camps in South Africa and Kenya, and the non-interference in Indian and Irish famines resulting in millions of deaths, as well as what Caroline Elkins describes as “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead” (Imperial Reckoning, xvi) are the unspoken savagery of the empire absent from the sanitized and commercialized exhibit, ironically contrasted with the butcher’s gory business that now has to reinvent itself to be more humane. The British butchery of the colonial minions is absent from the exhibition and from the official colonial narratives, but Levy subtly inserts reminders of the British genocide in the gaps within Queenie’s jingoistic narrative. The gore of the empire is subtly embedded in seemingly innocuous conversations about the business of killing animals at home. The commercial interest of the imperial conquest is on display at the exhibition, and this interest will shape Queenie’s understanding of the

222  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer empire and its construction of race. Queenie, we learn in this chapter, mistakes the circus-like display of foreign cultures for the real thing and the lone black man she sees for a prototype of “Africanness.” The metonymical design of the exhibition was underscored by King George V’s description of the event as “the whole Empire in little” (2). Queenie’s words summarizing the exhibition—“Practically the whole world there to be looked at” (3)—are significant in that they employ the passive voice, which suggests ownership and entitlement, as the structure misses indications of agency. The world, one quarter of the global landmass and one-fifth of global population, exists as the object of her white gaze. The visitors to the exhibition learn to associate Burma with “different woods,” the Malaya with “big-game trophies” (2), Jamaica with coffee, Barbados with sugar and Grenada with chocolate, as Queenie’s narrative takes us on a walk through the exhibit via her mother’s disinterested responses to the presence of the plunder of the empire: wood, animals and luxury condiments harvested by slaves. The exhibition consists of “building after building that housed every country we British owned” (3). Queenie inserts the first-person pronoun “we” into this narration, emphasizing her pride and complicity in imperial conquest and butchery. White spectatorship resurfaces when Queenie tells us, “I had to struggle to the front to get a good look. I pressed my face close to the glass and Mother came and dragged me back” (3). Queenie’s simultaneous repulsion and fascination with the exotic will culminate later in her life in her affair with a Jamaican lover.

Queenie’s Exotic Others At the exhibition, Queenie wanders into “Africa,” lured by “the syrupybrown smell of chocolate” (4), foreshadowing her later fascination with dark-skinned men and her framing of blackness within the proprietary colonial presence of the British overseas. She first sees “a woman with skin as black as the ink that filled the inkwell in my school desk. A shadow came to life” (4). Levy makes Queenie echo Conrad’s racist portrayal of the people of the Congo basin as “black shadows of disease and starvation,” or “vague forms . . . leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent” (Conrad 11), “black fellows” with “the whites of their eyeballs glistening” and “faces like grotesque masks” (Conrad 30), gesturing toward similarities in white people’s perception of racial difference across several decades. Here, Queenie makes a reference to what she knows well as a schoolgirl, ink—pigmented liquid used to inscribe stories on blank surfaces. Within these stories, including the travel narratives about distant colonies, stands the dumb colonized figure: “They are not civilized. They only understand drums,” Graham says to Queenie (Levy 5).

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 223 Queenie wants to leave, but she is suddenly mesmerized by the sight of a man: “An African man. A black man who looked to be carved from melting chocolate. I clung to Emily but she shooed me off” (5). Again, Queenie’s fearful fascination is filtered through the materialist lens of a colonial product, as she clings to Emily in fear. A monkey man sweating a smell of mothballs. Blacker than when you smudge your face with a sooty cork. The droplets of sweat on his forehead glistened and shone like jewels. His lips were brown, not pink like they should be, and they bulged with air like bicycle tyres. His hair was woolly as a black shorn sheep. His nose, squashed flat, had two nostrils big as train tunnels. And he was looking down at me. (5) Queenie’s fear comes partly from the fact that the man is gazing back at her instead of being purely the object of her own white gaze. Moreover, he looks down, asserting a physical dominance over her slight figure. Her own description of the man consists of a series of similes comparing him to everyday objects: mothballs, sooty cork, jewels, bicycle tires, wool and train tunnels. Again, some of these objects are the result of colonial plunder, especially jewels and rubber tires, or the means of transporting that plunder, as the empire built a train system overseas primarily to carry cotton, iron ore, coal and other loot. Against this loot is a normative phrase, “like they should be,” indicating the man’s degeneracy and difference. Graham and Emily tease Queenie to kiss the man. “I could feel the blood rising in my face, turning me crimson,” says Queenie, as he smiled a perfect set of pure blinding white teeth. The inside of his mouth was pink and his face was coming closer and closer to mine. He could have swallowed me up, this big nigger man. But instead he said, in clear English, “Perhaps we could shake hands instead?” (5) Here, Queenie experiences a fascination with a taboo, a pull by the forbidden force, a desire that will eventually draw her close to Michael Roberts during the war. After she shakes the man’s hand, her father speculates whether he was a chief or prince in Africa: Evidently, when they speak English you know that they have learned to be civilised—taught English by the white man, missionaries probably. So Father told me not to worry about having shaken his hand because the African man was most likely a potentate. (6)

224  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer The working-class, undereducated daughter of a butcher is only justified in her direct contact with a black man if his status is that of wealth and privilege. Otherwise, the contact would have been deemed inappropriate within the framework of the dichotomy between drumming and speech, itself established by colonial narratives, as I prove elsewhere.3 After all, as her father says at the end of the chapter, “You’ve got the whole world at your feet, lass” (6), a perceived entitlement based purely on her white skin color, as her class and sex would place her rather low on the social hierarchy in England. When almost two decades later Queenie sees Michael Roberts, she compares him to that black man she first saw: “I was lost in Africa again at the Empire Exhibition, a little girl in a white organza frock with blood rising in my cheeks turning me red. He was coloured” (240). Sander L. Gilman, in his study of white iconography of black sexuality, discusses the white fascination with the taboo of blackness, its “illicit sexual activity,” and the comparison in colonial culture between blackness and concupiscence (79). Black men and women were “an icon for deviant sexuality in general, almost always, however, paired with a white figure of the opposite sex” (81), the supposed black hypersexuality serving as contrast to white chastity. When one of the neighbors warns Queenie against her black tenants’ “animal desires” (97), Queenie confesses that one of her lodgers, Winston’s brother, was an “Animal, like Morris warned” (97). However, Queenie’s attitude to black bodies is more complex, more akin to what Conrad once called “the fascination of the abomination” (20). Her interactions with the “African man” and then with Michael Roberts follow the colonial script of the conquest of black bodies. She perceives Michael through the prism of artifacts—first, the exhibit, then a movie: “His face awakened to smile a grin so broad and white you could have projected a film on it” (240). Michael, “the coloured one,” gives her “his picture-house smiles” (241). As a consumer of popular culture, including film, Queenie uses movies as a frame of reference in her interactions with Michael and, later, Hortense.4 Two movies that were a hit in Great Britain and defined black bodies as animal-like and inferior were Birth of the Nation and—a film that Levy mentions several times in the novel— Gone with the Wind. Queenie’s fetishism and silent racism surface when Michael produces a bar of American chocolate and an orange as he begins his flirtation with Queenie. She begins reading his exotic body and interpreting the signs, wondering whether they are common in “his kind” (244–5). She remarks

3 Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce, U of Florida Press, 2010. 4 When she later imagines herself through Michael’s eyes, she says, “This woman was as sexy as any starlet on a silver screen” (248).

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 225 about his skin color, comparing it to a chestnut, an object British children play with and keep handy in their pockets: Michael was the color of a conker—not ruddy and new from the shell but after it had dulled in your pocket for a bit. As he leaned forward to pick up a card his shirt gaped to show that dark skin all over his chest. Would you know he was naked when he was undressed or would he look like he was clad all over in leather? (245) She continues, “Did his hair feel like hair or something you’d scrub a pan with? Would it chafe against your skin or would it brush gentle as an angora jumper?” Her list of similes goes on, as this butcher’s daughter tries to make sense of difference: “The inside of his mouth was pink as a powder puff. His lips plump as sausages—would you bounce off them or would they soften when kissed?” (245). Eventually, when she remembers their lovemaking, she recalls the “zebra of their legs,” “his buttocks” rising and falling, “a wooly-haired black head,” “a foot with five nigger toes,” and her wild abandon: “It wasn’t me,” she says of that moment, referring to herself as “this woman” several times within one paragraph (248–9). David Ellis reminds us that colonial discourse has “always contained the black Other within the psychic realm of the physical/sexual” (230). Queenie posits that she knows black women, “with backsides as big as buses” (93), thus echoing another race script, that of Saartje Baartman, popularized as “Hottentot Venus” and displayed across Europe as a token Other and an example of steatopygia discussed in pseudo-medical literature. In another episode, she again associates black femininity with buttocks. After Mr. Todd tells her about an incident his sister was involved in on the sidewalk, when two black women refused to “step off the pavement when an English person approaches” (99), Queenie imagines the two women: “I knew the type—black as filth with backsides the size of buses” (99). In this projection, she showcases an attitude of detached objectification, common among self-professed white allies who announce their anti-racism while participating in racist parody, caricature and iconography. In Black Looks, bell hooks describes this attitude when her white academic friends burst into laughter at the sight of “gigantic chocolate breasts, complete with nipples,” not realizing the connection between this play on the black mammy stereotype and the more open racism hooks experiences a moment before, when she has the n-word hurled at her at the entryway to the restaurant (61). “They do not see this representation of chocolate breasts as a sign of displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price” (61–2). She compares this attitude to the “racialized fascination” with Saartje Baartman’s buttocks in

226  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer the nineteenth century (63). Levy foregrounds Queenie’s fascination with Michael’s buttocks and his dark skin as well as her declared knowledge of black women’s anatomy in a white woman’s narrative that contains both commodification of the black body and anti-racist proclamations. When Queenie is accused of “taking in all the flotsam and jetsam off the streets” (94) and listens to concerns that the black lodgers “would turn the area into a jungle” (95), her attitude is that of gentle amusement. As she is not the object of these attacks, she can afford to be entertained by them. It would be erroneous, though, to claim that she takes in her black lodgers out of a goodness of her heart. When Gilbert shows up at her door, she takes him in not as a gesture of anti-racism but because she “knew Bernard would never have let” her (97). “And if Bernard had something to say about it he’d have to come back to say it to my face” (97). So the gesture is, in fact, part revenge against her absent husband and part a ruse to bring her missing spouse back home.

Hortense, Queenie and Gone with the Wind The British Empire Exhibition is not the only cultural artifact that Queenie mistakes for the real thing. She also wants to enact race relations in Gone with the Wind, the screening of which she attended with Gilbert. We learn about this desire from Hortense’s narrative, as Queenie seems oblivious to the racism underlying the film and to her reenactments of it in real life. The 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, directed by Victor Fleming, with original screenplay by Sidney Howard, won ten Oscars. The film opened in England on April 18, 1940. Melvyn Stokes reminds us that the context of the World War II and of the British Empire ruling over dark-skinned people at the time of the movie’s international premiere is crucial to our understanding of its reception in England. The film centers on “a struggle for survival on the part of Scarlett and the old plantation class” (Stokes 192), which appealed to the British audience at the time of another world war weakening their country and the imminent decline of its empire. Film critics did show some “awareness of the social realities underpinning the ante-bellum South,” noting the nostalgic portrayal of slavery in the movie (192–3). These critics, however, belonged to a different social stratum than Queenie, with her limited education, with the influence of a father who naively praises the empire’s civilizing effect on other parts of the world and with other family members cautioning her that dark-skinned women might be contagious, as Small Island’s Prologue indicates. Neither Hattie McDaniel, who won the Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy, nor Butterfly McQueen, who plays the simpleminded slave Prissy, could sit with the other cast members at the movie’s premiere in Atlanta because of Jim Crow laws. This is the movie Gilbert, Queenie and Arthur go to see; this is the background to the deadly fight over segregation between white GIs and Gilbert; this is, finally, the film

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 227 Queenie mentions while she delivers her mixed-race baby, assisted by Hortense. Most important, this is the film that helps Queenie formulate her racial sensibilities. The film’s glorification of slavery and sanitization of the antebellum South was called by some African American critics and viewers a “weapon of terror against black America” (Lupack 56). It is significant to my argument that both narratives, Gone with the Wind and Queenie’s portion of Small Island, are told through the gaze of a privileged white woman who is clueless about the white supremacist system elevating her despite some real obstacles. It is from Hortense that we learn about Queenie giving birth to Michael’s child. After locking her husband out, Queenie does not realize that Hortense is concerned about “incarcerating myself with this writhing woman.” Queenie disregards Hortense’s pleas to call a doctor, snapping, “just do as I say” (394). Hortense admits, “It was not in my experience, giving birth” (395). She continues telling the reader about Queenie’s labor: Her pain subsiding, she spoke through a panting breath, “Don’t worry, I know what to do.” She struggled with a little giggle, “It’ll be like Gone With the Wind. You know the scene . . .” before a contraction blurred the words into screeching. I knew the scene very well and I did not care for the comparison. What doubt was there that she was the prosperous white woman? So, come, did she think me that fool slave girl? Dancing in panic at the foot of her bed? Cha! I am an educated woman. . . . Gone With the Wind! (396) Hortense is familiar with the movie, where Prissy, a house slave, helps Scarlett deliver Melanie’s baby. Played by Butterfly McQueen, her most memorable line in the movie comes from this scene, when she cries out, “Oh, Miss Scarlett! I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!” Hortense has no desire to be compared to the intellectually challenged comicrelief slave character in a film mythologizing slavery and Reconstruction, a film infamous for what bell hooks now calls “cinematic racism—its violent erasure of black womanhood” (210). Watching film “with an oppositional gaze,” says hooks, black women “were able to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as the object of a phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator” (213). In Levy’s contrapuntal narrative, the existence of four autonomous narrators—two of whom are black Jamaican immigrants—underscores the importance of what bell hooks calls “the oppositional gaze,” or a rebellious urgency to look and describe one’s reality. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.” Even in the worse circumstances

228  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. (208) She adds, “Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional” (208). In her writing, hooks often focuses on film and mass media in general as “a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy” (208). hooks describes “moments of ‘rupture’ when the spectator resists ‘complete identification with the film’s discourse’ ” (209). For Hortense, the moment of rupture is when she refuses to be inscribed into the role of a simple-minded slave from a Hollywood movie that perpetuates the myth of the Confederacy and presents slavery as a benevolent system.

Race and Narrative in Small Island Although “Prologue” belongs to Queenie and introduces the theme of the empire, the first chapter is narrated by Hortense. She tells us that Queenie’s first words directed to her as she arrives from the dock with her heavy trunk are “I hope you’re not bringing anything into the house that will smell?” (16). The question, Hortense admits, is offensive. It draws on olfactory stereotypes present in colonial narratives about the dark Other. William Tullett, who analyzes texts printed in eighteenth-century England, traces the link “between racial difference and foul odour” (307). Smell, says Tullett, “blurs the line between body and culture,” and as such, it was often invoked as a site of otherness in travel narratives and writings on physiognomy (308). Jonathan Reinarz says in his book Past Scents that smell is “associated with the perceived corruption caused by outsiders” (85) and that “in the irrational world of racist politics, foreigners would always stink and possess the potential to contaminate” (111). Whereas in “Prologue,” Queenie narrates her white working-class family’s pride in the empire and construction of racial Other as either threatening or dumb, and she foreshadows her fetishization of the black body, Levy quickly follows with Hortense’s perspective that elucidates the mechanism of marginalizing dark-skinned immigrants. Hortense’s chapter is followed by Gilbert’s perspective, after which we return to Hortense—Queenie’s voice already fading in the background and Bernard’s not even introduced yet. In fact, Bernard will speak half-way into the novel’s length, his white male perspective relegated as secondary to the other stories. Thus, Chapters One and Fifty-Nine, first and last, belong to Hortense, whose voice frames the entire novel, while Queenie’s “Prologue” delineates the historical underpinnings of systemic and individual racism experienced by Hortense and Gilbert.

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 229 The characters’ identities are formed in a constant tug-of-war of voices, a multifaceted story of a nation in decline, afraid of the influx of racial others and unwilling to let go of the vestiges of power. Cynthia James analyzes the recurrent questions in the novel, such as “Do you understand English?” (471) and “Is this the way the English live?” (22) to understand the intersections of language, parody and the West Indian identity formation in Small Island. Language, she says, “is the main battleground on which British and West Indian cultures and identities clash and make accommodations”; parody “is one of the ways in which the novel exposes these clashes and accommodations” (46). The book is both a tribute to and parody of West Indian experience, channeling “diaglossic encounters,” characters “talking at cross purposes, setting their identities at loggerheads” (51). Parody is one of the many ways in which the hypocrisy of Queenie’s white allyship is exposed, as is the number of narrative gaps in this multivocal text that, in turn, point to the novel’s concern with unacknowledged racism among white allies. Therefore, it is the relationship between Queenie and her environment, but also the relationship between the reader and the text, that points to the misalignment between her proclamations of allyship and her thoughts steeped in racist propaganda. Why does a narrative of post-Windrush England have to be multivocal and disjointed? On the one hand, the “narrative deracination” from the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition mirrors the cultural deracination of Small Island’s Jamaican characters and the sense of loss among the British citizens that stems from the changing culture.5 Invoking Derrida, Lacan, Bhabha and Spivak, David Ellis discusses “a dialogic potential for resistance and subversion within the apparently monologic discourse of empire” (215). In post-1948 immigration discourse, the myths of Empire persisted, and non-white immigrants were framed via a “lascivious and pornographic” lens as representatives of “unrestrained, primitive sexuality” (218). Ellis talks about “Britain’s reassessment of the Other” as part of a “discursive readjustment” (220) after the war but also the immigrants’ own “reactions to the British in a reality far removed from the Imperial scripts of their colonial upbringing and education” (220). James claims that Small Island “parodies the concept of Empire—the way in which the Empire is scripted for the English as well as West Indians” (46). This parody would be impossible without the multiplicity of disjointed voices. The history of the empire “has shaped very dissimilar identities, and spawned so many mutual misconceptions, that when the English and West Indians meet, the scripts that underlie

5 “Narrative miscegenation” is Alex Vernon’s term, which he uses in his essay on William Faulkner and generic hybridity to denote a “cross-breed of several literary forms” like the naturalist novel, biography and the oral tale (155).

230  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer their reading of each other are humorously juxtaposed” (49). James claims that In using a variety of language registers as identity performance through first person narration in all sections of the text, Levy addresses many narratological problems at once. For one, she is able to present the Windrush era in naked culture clash and identity confrontation without the filter of an omniscient narrator. (54) I want to add that, if an insight into race relations in post-Windrush England is possible in this novel, it is not found exclusively in the narratives themselves but in the discursive gaps, in absences, in miscommunication.6 The dissonance between Queenie’s scripting of allyship and her covert racist rhetoric, including her fetishization of the black body, still resonates in transatlantic white liberal narratives about anti-racist sentiments, propelled by “slacktivism” on social media and imagined narratives of solidarity with movements such as Black Lives Matter or #feesmustfall.7 In post-Brexit Britain, celebrations of Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry go hand in hand with the sharp spike in racism and hate crime, whereas Black Lives Matter U.K. events have increasingly been dominated by white voices.8 The hollow gesture of wearing a safety pin—a symbol of white allyship with the victims of racist attacks—will not in itself eradicate racism or redirect privilege to, say, descendants of the Windrush generation, who are now being detained and threatened with deportation from Great Britain.9 Levy’s Queenie, despite her good intentions, perpetuates white supremacy in subtle ways that nevertheless entrench racist assumptions in superficially anti-racist struggle. After

6 Although Elena Machado Sáez does not analyze Small Island, she lists some “novels that structurally mimic the amnesiac condition of the public sphere while identifying key historical moments in the diasporas’ decontextualization as ethnic minorities,” including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao, and she discusses at length Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant as texts that “articulate a Caribbean diasporic market aesthetics by encoding the silences of decontextualization within their stylistic structure” (46). These novels, she says, “encourage the reader to adopt the perspective of the first-person narrator and to embark on a search for silenced histories about the character’s family and diasporic community” (46). 7 Kate Essig of St. Louis Public Radio defines slacktivism as “giving token support for a cause, like wearing a pin or ‘liking’ something on Facebook, without being willing to engage in more meaningful support, like donating time or money.” 8 See, for example, the Guardian’s “What Role Should White Allies Play in the Black Lives Matter UK Movement?,” featuring the voices of Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff and Kehinde Andrews. Andrews, in particular, discusses attempted “co-option(s) of the movement by well-meaning white allies.” 9 David Lammy’s speech denouncing these threats of deportation can be found at www.dav idlammy.co.uk/single-post/2018/05/29/Speeches-on-the-Windrush-crisis-in-Parliament.

White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance 231 all, in Paulo Freire’s words, “the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle” (47). It is in Queenie’s interest to maintain the status quo. “Any attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity,” says Freire (44). To have “the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity,’ the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity,’ which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty” (44). Levy makes it clear that Queenie’s perception is flawed by embedding two Jamaican-authored narratives within the structure of the novel and countering Queenie’s portraits of blackness as a collection of buttocks and lips, as a source of thrill and a target for her benevolence, with Hortense’s and Gilbert’s voices—distinct, human, vulnerable and demanding dignity.

Works Cited Albritton, Laura. Review of Small Island. Harvard Review, no. 29, 2005, pp. 235–37. Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, 1st ed. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Braithwaite, E. R. “The ‘Colored Immigrant’ in Britain.” Daedalus, vol. 96, no. 2. Color and Race. 1967, pp. 496–511. Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie and Kehinde Andrews. “What Role Should White allies Play in the Black Lives Matter UK Movement?” The Guardian, 7 Sep. 2016. Web. 25 Jul. 2019. Condé, Mary. “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind.” The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 26, Strategies of Reading: Dickens and after. Special Number 1996, pp 208–17. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Penguin, 1995. DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018. Ellis, David. “ ‘The Produce of More than One Country’: Race, Identity, and Discourse in Post-Windrush Britain.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 31, no. 2, Summer 2001, pp. 214–32. Essig, Kate. “Activism or Slacktivism? How Social Media Hurts And Helps Student Activism.” The Gateway: St. Louis Public Radio Podcast. 2 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 Jul. 2019. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. “Gone With the Wind Tops Film List.” BBC News. 28 Nov. 2004. Retrieved 1 Mar. 2019. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. ———. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. “How Did the Empire Windrush Change London?” Museum of London Docklands. 18 Jun. 2018. www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/how-did-empirewindrush-change-london-docklands. 23 Jul. 19.

232  Agata Szczeszak-Brewer Humane Slaughter Association: History Factsheet. www.hsa.org.uk/downloads/ related-items/history-factsheet.pdf. Web. 25 Jul. 2019. James, Cynthia. “ ‘You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language’: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s ‘Small Island’.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 18, no. 2, Where Is Here? Remapping the Caribbean. April 2010, pp. 45–64. Johansen, Emily. “Muscular Multiculturalism: Bodies, Space, and Living Together in Andrea Levy’s Small Island.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 56, no. 4, 2015, pp. 383–98. Web. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2019. Lammy, David. “Speeches on the Windrush Crisis in Parliament.” David Lammy. 29 May 2018. www.davidlammy.co.uk/single-post/2018/05/29/Speeches-onthe-Windrush-crisis-in-Parliament. 26 Jul. 2019. Levy, Andrea. Small Island. New York: Picador, 2004. Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Oscar Micheaux to Toni Morrison. U of Rochester P, 2002, pp. 209–11. Machado Sáez, Elena. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. U of Virginia Press, 2015. Marx, Lesley. “Race, Romance, and ‘The spectacle of unknowing’ in Gone with the Wind: A South African Response.” The Civil War as Global Conflict, edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis. U of South Carolina P, 2014, pp. 253–74. Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2014. Richards, Denise. “Welcome Home!” The Evening Standard. 21 Jun. 1948, p. 1. Soyinka, Wole. “Telephone Conversation.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., Norton, 2012, p. 2736. Stokes, Melvyn. “Europeans Interpret the American South of the Civil War Era: How British and French Critics Received The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind” (1939). The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg. U P of Kentucky, 2013, pp. 181–203. Szczeszak-Brewer, Agata. Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce. U of Florida P, 2010. Trepagnier, Barbara. Silent Racism. 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Tullett, William. “Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture.” Cultural and Social History, vol. 13, no.3, 2016, pp. 307–22. Web. Turnipseed, Joel. “Four Lives, Many Cultures Reshape ‘Small Island.’ ” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, April 3, 2005, p. F15. Vernon, Alex. “Narrative Miscegenation: Absalom, Absalom! As Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 31, no. 2, Summer 2001, pp. 155–79. Woodcock, Bruce. “Small Island, Crossing Cultures.” Wasafiri, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 50–5. Web.

13 “Civis Romana Sum” Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and the Emancipatory Poetics of (Multi-) Cultural Citizenship Deirdre Osborne Introduction Bernardine Evaristo is one of the most formally and thematically imaginative novelists of her generation. A British-born woman of Nigerian (Yoruba), Brazilian, white English, Irish and German descent, who terms herself “Anglo-Nigerian,”1 Evaristo has engaged with the multiple ethno-cultural frameworks that contour Black British literature to alchemize a distinctively self-fashioning and emancipatory poetics. Her tour-de-force literary recalibrations of socio-cultural history retrieve and represent the lives of those groups omitted from or denigrated in dominant cultural memory. Evaristo’s second major work of fiction, the novel in verse, The Emperor’s Babe: A Novel (2001), comprises an unambiguously “graphic” herstory in terms of its explicit, uncompromising and grapholectic features. Appositely prefaced by Wilde’s aphorism, “the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it” (n.p), The Emperor’s Babe is a tragic tale charting the misadventures of one individual, a spirited young Nubian-Roman woman, Zuleika (incidentally the name of the biblical Potiphar’s wife), from her childhood to her death—only weeks before she turns 19. Born in third-century Londinium in the province Britannia, Zuleika is the daughter of parents who migrated from another region of the Roman Empire, today’s Sudan, to improve their prospects. The reader follows Zuleika’s experiential trajectory from sexual innocence to violation in marriage (at 11 years of age) to Senator Lucius Aurelius Felix three decades her senior, from poverty to wealth, from semi-literacy to high culture, and after her lover the emperor’s death, she is murdered on Felix’s instructions. As Barchesi identifies, The Emperor’s Babe is “the first English novel in verse set in a London that is simultaneously 211 A.D. Londinium and turn-of-the-millennium multicultural South 1 Back cover leaf Girl, Woman, Other. McConnell notes “Evaristo is frequently categorized as ‘black British’ or a ‘postcolonial’ writer, despite her own hesitation about such designations” (104). In 2019 Evaristo made history as the first Black British woman to win the Booker Prize, for Girl, Woman, Other.

234  Deirdre Osborne London” and describes it as “a witty story of race and gender transgressions” (153). However, it is Evaristo’s memorializing of the untrammelled longevity of patriarchal violence toward women that marks the strongest thematic connection with contemporary culture—rather than race. Her book provocatively deconstructs the dominance of race as anything but a stable signifier in the context of ancient Roman rule as the physical and epigraphic evidence from today’s archaeological excavations has increasingly proven.2 Evaristo’s imaginative de-conceptualization problematizes reading her text through a racially deterministic lens, even though this remains a resilient critical practice. There are skin-deep reminders of Zuleika as others view her: “Illa Bella Negreeta” (3), “little aubergine” (12), “a bleck” (59), “a dusky bird” (99), or as she describes herself, “a dusky maiden” (75), with “my shiny, black, shimmering arse” (174), and after her death, she is “obsidian” (Epilogue, n.p.), but these do not function as derogatory descriptors, they indicate her noteworthiness in the novel’s context of ancient Britain. In a world where “A husband could do what he liked / and many an errant wife ended up / in an unmarked grave outside the city wall” (242–3), the gendered abuse and nullification of Zuleika’s worth because she is female is central to the tale. With its confronting subject matter (rape within marriage, transgender lives, female as commodity), Evaristo herself confirms this intention: The Emperor’s Babe is not about race; although race underpins it. The idea of a black girl in Roman Britain is a revolutionary idea because it challenges notions of Britain and its history. But the story itself is about many things. In fact gender is more important to the novel than race. (Hooper 12) The Emperor’s Babe is unique in the genre of historical fiction penned by Black British authors. By choosing an ancient world setting, Evaristo purposefully exerts an imaginative reach back beyond what have become totalizing parameters around modern thinking about black people’s history: enslavement, colonization and hierarchies of colorism that overwrite understandings of race and status in the ancient world.3 While Veronelli fears that perhaps “there is no way out of coloniality

2 Recent excavations in London revealed a “cache of forgotten and junked tablets . . . the largest ever recovered from a non-military context in northern Europe” (Marchini). See Eckardt et al. 3 McConnell cites the classicist Frank M. Snowden, “there was no equation of black skin color with slavery in antiquity” (11).

“Civis Romana Sum” 235 from within modern categories of thought,” (405) The Emperor’s Babe creatively intervenes into such stranglehold thinking. Evaristo’s textual techniques deny the exact reproduction or absolutes that coloniality imposes and de-systematize, destabilize and decenter claims of fixed origins in both history and the literary canon, as traced from antiquity. Her representation of Roman Britain disturbs and revises the obduracy of the “known narratives” of post-Renaissance periods (enslavement, colonization, post-World War II migration) as all-defining and inevitable flashpoints and motifs for Black British writers. Evaristo comments on the persistent rigidity of perceptions. I’ve even come across people who have not read the book assume Zuleika must be a slave, and . . . people who have read the book and think she is too. But she’s not. She’s a free Roman girl/woman who is imprisoned within her marriage. (Collins 1200) Her use of poly-generic writing techniques entwines literary traditions and history, to reorientate British literature along canonically unfamiliar, black-woman-centering routes, thereby launching the historical novel into new formal territories and decisively flexing what Waldrop describes as “the liberating effects of constraints” (197). Evaristo writes from a location of historical marginality and even omission from mainstream British culture. The corpus of her creative work tackles this occlusive legacy by exerting self-authorization—the writing of herself and her subject matter into, against and beyond the constraints of white-male-myopic, Eurocentric traditions. While T. S. Eliot might appear to be a curious source by which to initiate engagement with Evaristo’s textual self-determination, he proposed that tradition relies upon the instinctual acknowledgment of This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the temporal and timeless together, [which] is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. (42) Furthermore, Eliot’s definition of tradition is a relevant one in mapping the literary genealogy of Black British literature.4 Post-war black writers of the migratory/arriviste/settler generations paved the way for their British-born successors, fostering a distinct tradition of diasporic literary

4 Makoha’s manifesto for the Black Metic Poets acknowledges Eliot’s “Metic.”

236  Deirdre Osborne heritage through articulating a poeticized politics and a politicized poetics from within Britain. Their work formed a powerful counter-aesthetic, an antidote to imperial canonicity and its pervasive valorization in colonial education. Indigene generation writers, such as Evaristo, inherit this literary activist and aesthetic impetus. Additionally, Evaristo’s work augments and consolidates the matrilineal legacies provided by twentieth-century, British-based, women writers of African and Caribbean descent (including Una Marson, Beryl Gilroy, Joan Riley, Barbara Burford and Buchi Emecheta) whose literature was historically neglected in the (male)strom of published work centralizing men’s diasporic experiences. Through her arresting experimental writing that places a black female consciousness at its core, The Emperor’s Babe continues the (now) recognized impact of literary foremothers upon Anglophone literature and post-war British culture.5 Having indicated the importance of a capacious, contextual sense of the literary-history relationship, this chapter’s primary focus is to examine The Emperor’s Babe on and in its own terms, attuned to its poetic and narrative strategies. While leaving the critical door ajar to its social resonances, Evaristo crafts and grafts genre and form for particular aesthetic purposes. The discussion will navigate The Emperor’s Babe as “an enriching site of aesthetic experience” (Mercer, 71) offering an alternative to analytical-explanatory-driven views of her novel as invariably constituting an index to multi-ethnic, post-war British society and culture. Evaristo’s consciousness of writing beyond expected history is ratified by her centralized black female protagonist as the sole conduit for representing the patriarchal, martial world of Britannia—of which there are no first-hand accounts by Roman women of any ethnicity. Zuleika’s “voice” (through which Evaristo focalizes social and personal narratives) is composed via features of “inter-textuality” (Frow) and “poeticity” (Jakobson)6 that court alertness to its “soundings” (Bernstein)7 and sustain a “resistant orality” (Mullen)8 within the writing. Attuned to these interlocking features, conducting a “close listening” to what is on the page is derived from “the sounding of the writing” [italics in

5 Joan Anim-Addo, Denise DeCaires Narain, C. L. Innes, Susheila Nasta, Suzanne Scafe and Alison Donnell spearheaded this recognition in Britain. 6 “Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality” (Jakobson, 378). 7 Bernstein argues that words exist in readiness for their sounding: “in sounding language we ground ourselves as sentient material . . . we sing the body of language.” (21) 8 Mullen coins “resistant orality” to foreground the creative voices of African American women’s slave-narrative writing, voices decipherable through the muting mediations of white transcription (1992).

“Civis Romana Sum” 237 original] (Bernstein, 13) in conjunction with the watchful eye/I of Zuleika as a “black flânuese” whose Londinium pedestrianism personalizes the autonomies and antinomies of subaltern street liberties. Readers inhabit Zuleika’s inner thoughts and are party to her conversations and interactions without ever forgetting that the verse novel is “first and foremost a poem” (Addison, 30) delivered in the stylized artifice of a vernacularized idiolect. Evaristo observes, “As a writer I have to give myself the freedom to break out of any traditional narrative boxes” (Hooper, 7). Noting her liberties with a wide range of literary techniques, traditions and topics, the chapter will explore how the novel’s trans-generic and form-flexing properties decisively deliver an emancipatory poetics.

“Textuality: Form, Genre” The Emperor’s Babe imaginatively revivifies an ancient context of colonization—Britannia as dominion of the Roman Empire—through which Evaristo filters the contemporary consequences of Britain’s own later 400-year empire and of which she is a post-imperial product. With this technique of historical displacement expressed through an unambiguously contemporary sensibility and diction, The Emperor’s Babe produces a compelling cross-talk, linking ancient classical and contemporary voices to the effects of imperial conquest and occupation—whether Roman or British. Evaristo’s facto-fabulation of Londinium showcases its intertextuality that, as Frow suggests, “requires that we understand the concept of text not as a self-contained structure but as differential and historical . . . shaped by repetition and the transformation of other textual structures” (45). In the novel’s sweep of identities, categories, contexts and literary strategies, Evaristo incorporates textual nods to various ancient Roman writers (Horace, Juvenal, Catullus, Plautus, Tacitus, Ovid, Apuleius, Virgil, Pliny and Sappho) and engages with a broad range of poetic, dramatic and prose fiction heritages. Thus, the work implicitly responds to Frow’s argument that all literature is in some form “made out of cultural and ideological norms; out of the conventions of genre; out of styles and idioms embedded in the language; out of connotations and collocative sets; out of clichés, formulae, or proverbs; and out of other texts” (45–6). The body of the text fuses novelistic and dramatic forms with its Prologue, ten chronologically ordered chapters or scenes (featuring dialogue and internal monologue) and an Epilogue. Embedded within this structure are various poetic arrangements. As Lennard identifies, “Poets wishing to retain overtly poetic structure at novel-length usually build sequential volumes or individual poems (deploying whatever internal forms) into a larger structure” (63). Evaristo’s maior pars in textus is transmitted poetically through primarily enjambed, unrhymed, open couplets. Annexes containing poems in various styles are interpolated,

238  Deirdre Osborne such as the lyric poem “CUMULONIMBUS (or, It’s That Time of the Month Again)” (Evaristo, 109), which is of sonnet length but constitutes an uncharacteristic elegiac lament to menstruation and a memoriam to the children Zuleika will never bear. Gestures toward concrete and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry techniques (redolent of avant-garde writing) demonstrate Evaristo’s use of modernist and postmodernist poetic inheritances, notably turning language in on itself to deform and reform it. As DeKoven identifies, women’s experimental writing traditions have long served a transformative purpose requiring readers to upend expectations of form, genre and expression and to apprehend “the world through a lens that would subvert, at their linguistic-perceptual root, habits of consciousness comfortable with predominant cultural givens” (13). While radical (re)writer ntozake shange’s choreopoems inspired Evaristo’s stylistic genesis, Evaristo employs capitalization rather than a preference for lowercase letters as her riposte to patriarchal grammar. In a context where “silentium mulieri praestat ornatum / silence is a woman’s best ornament” (Evaristo 143), the use of capitals instigates a particular form of “resistant orality,” as though shouting back to the oppressor, proclaiming her authorial virtuosity with canonized literary forms. Each chapter title or heading (capitulum) is capitalized, often with source attributions, translations or epigrams—“CAPISTRUM MARITALE (The Matrimonial Halter)—Juvenal” (67)—offering a commandeered significance. This highlights the printed text’s appearance, implying a shared joke with those who can spot the references. In analyzing Horace’s Carmen saeculare, Barchiesi identifies a similar dynamic: “on the face of it, it looks like a private code or a hyper-formalistic joke, similar to the Alexandrian tradition of carmina figurata” (157). Evaristo infers the carmen figuratum’s resonance with concrete poetry techniques, as “seen” in her right-margin-justified poem “POST-COITAL CONSCIOUSNESS” (135) and sarcophagus-shaped “VALE, FAREWELL, MY LIBYAN” (234). Similarly, the “Contents” pages (ix–xi) are typographically contrary, employing lunulae in a contrasting font style and size (Times Roman—a visual pun, as is her use of “roman” numerals) to offer a wry aside, alternative afterthought or clarification. VI Post-coital Colloquium 139 The Language of Love (I)  151 The Language of Love (II)  159 Amari Aliquid (Some Touch of Bitterness)  160 (x) The text’s separation into numerically sequenced books composed of titled sections, within which are sub-sections of numbered poem sequences, iterates the method by which Roman poets constructed the balance of their poetic form. The self-conscious poetic practice on display

“Civis Romana Sum” 239 is further consolidated in the “poet within a poet” conceit of Evaristo’s creation Zuleika wishing to become one. Through allusion, homage, imitation, direct translation and mimicry of Latin classics, Evaristo’s bricolage of references produces a “linguistically Luddite” text, defying the constrictions of linguistic structures. It is also “ludic” through its “playfulness” in taking liberties with English and Latin grammar (Osborne 163). The irreverent mixing of vernacular and slang, “after all, one don’t want one’s glorious stola / trailing in the dirt no more, innit” (Evaristo 91), parodies gentility and pretention— ventriloquizing the socially elevated (but unprepared) Zuleika—while offering a meta-textual provocation of the “Anglo-Nigerian” “woman” author satirically trespassing on hallowed classical territory. From the doggerel of Zuleika’s poem “OBSESSION” (115) to an ekphrastic evocation of phonetically spelled, text-speak abbreviations describing tattoos on biceps— I luv Mei Ling Zindiwe IV Me Yazmin, Mi Numero Uno Futuo Doris: Mi & Tu: IV Ever II Gether (104) Evaristo’s basilectic articulations provide a dissonant contrast to associations of “Learned Latin”—a direct result of writing (Ong, 110)—as being the province of elitist, hegemonic culture and invoke Latin’s oral lingua franca origins. Notably, Evaristo learned Latin when it was still taught in England’s state-sector schools.9 She frolics with the etymology of modern English (80 percent is derived from Latin roots) to performatively disinter a dead language that is no longer spoken. In using the fundamental elements that any English speaker can grasp, Evaristo adds suffixes of Latin declensions by which to keep words strange: “she was so very benevola” (16); “You are very benignus gentleman” (17)—combining a spoof-like Latin usage within standard English syntax. This maintains defamiliarization and appreciation of her wordplay, provoking new relationships in cultural competence with vernacular and its resonances with Londoninflected, estuary English and Latin. The novel becomes a lesson in what lies beneath the great colonizing and neo-colonizing language English, by means of its ancestor of the same magnitude, Latin, which is nowhere spoken but is everywhere embedded in what is heard and read.

9 After its 1960 abolition as an Oxbridge university entrance requirement, Latin was no longer compulsory at secondary school. By the 1970s, Forrest notes, “non-linguistic Classics courses were taught in less than a quarter of the schools” (64).

240  Deirdre Osborne Moreover, Evaristo’s textual dissonance toward hegemonic traditions clearly derives from a cognizance of her “postcolonial” positioning in relation to them. Ramchand notes of migrant-generation writer Selvon, “[he presents] the spectacle of the West Indian writer trying to invent an orthography for the dialect while paying service to the notion that he must somehow show that he knows what the ‘correct’ English would have looked like” [italics added] (97). Evaristo’s novel takes this selfconsciousness even further in using Latin to execute a dual canonical corrective to cultural expectations. The non-rhyming couplets interrupt anticipated associations with rhyme. This organizing principle offers form and structure to articulations of frequently disturbing content. The reader is to follow the page’s typographical choreography, directed by punctuation and interpolated double-spacing. Although one might read in defiance of these parameters, they remain inescapably there, disrupting expectations of paragraphs or blocks of prose text, typical of “a novel” (the book’s subtitle). Creating these unexpected juxtapositions lifts words off the page and invites pronunciation—either aloud or silently—to get one’s head around the sounding of the text and its often distressing subject matter. This poeticity illustrates Jakobson’s “feeling” of the word, rather than “indifferently referring to reality” (378). Enjambment, caesura and direct speech are crucial to the distinctive architectronics. Enjambment is utilized to drive reading forward over the visually twinned couplets, yet enforces space between them. Even if the utterance leaves readers wishing to pause at a line end, they must move into the next. The momentary spatial interruption (without marking changes in thematic direction) functions differently to the caesura, which pauses readers in a moment of transition or emphatically marks closure. Both techniques suspend disbelief—the expectation of a smoothly conclusive sentence ending—and play with poetic devices, a volta or abrupt stoppage in the middle of the line. As Armstrong argues, The syntax the caesura performatively creates, a physical distance between sentences and ideas, performatively creates the temporality of the now. New connections have to be made after it. (136)

“Poesiae et Mulieres Violentiam” No matter their class, women are in a state of inescapable vulnerability to male proclivities for sexual violence and domination. The Prologue establishes Zuleika’s constant precariousness as prey. Although the register is deceptively light-hearted, the voyeuristic and objectifying lens through which male eyes view her is unmistakable. When Felix came after me, Dad was in ecstasy, father-in-law to Lucius Aurelius Felix, no less.

“Civis Romana Sum” 241 I was spotted at the baths of Cheapside, just budding, and my fate was sealed (4) Book I reveals ever more menacing indicators of predation in the heroine’s world—initially from a child’s viewpoint—but one in whom an instinct for survival is evolving. With “Lucan Africanus, the baker of Fenchurch. / I was the daughter he never had, he said // (though his eyes spelt wife)” (11) or “the off-duty soldiers” who were everywhere, watching for lumps on our chests. . . plucking at me in the market, Is our little aubergine ready? ‘No I’m not you stinking pervs,’ I’d growl, skedaddling hotfoot out of their reach.’ (12) The persona intuits the potentially unsafe circumstances she faces as a female, but she is unschooled as to the full extent of the salacious context in which mothers are unnervingly complicit facilitators. Zuleika’s mother’s italicized mantra, “I have suffer so too you will have suffer” (20) conveys inescapable pain passed on, reinforcing how marriage sanctifies male sexual aggression. Episodes of heightened emotion (suffering to ecstasy) and specific moments of shock or peripeteia are rendered in poems. As Addison notes, the verse novel’s distinctive modus operandus is that the writer can “bring out the stanza’s memorializing force at any time . . . which most of them do at moments of emotional importance” (11). Connections between sex and death, conquest and annihilation unfold in one such sequence of six five-stanza poems, “TILL DEATH DO US,” a vulgarism negating any noble sentiment toward marriage vows. The opening poem, “The Betrothal”—as inverse of an epithalamion—emphasizes the unequal, coercive and sacrificial aspects of an adult marrying a child—“I am level/ with his beige linen // abdomen”—and foreshadows her conjugal abuse. His pupils are soaked in desire, float in a crisp January sky, show no mercy, even as mine plead innocence. (22)

242  Deirdre Osborne The innocuousness of the first line is undercut by the sinister implications of the second in each two-line grouping. The misleading sibilance /S/, a voiceless alveolar fricative, conversely evokes dread. Poems I to VI lead readers from Zuleika’s disorientation to disembodiment to desecrated bride. Ominous clues foreshadow her fate. IV’s bloodthirsty, “The haruspex ripped out the guts of a pig, / blood ran down his arm” augurs the portentously italicized “I would soon be alone with him” (28). V’s “Felix had to wrest me from Mum’s / loving embrace (what a performance)”—in the light of her mother’s previous caveat—offers a doubled sense of the mother either pretending or truly not wanting to relinquish her daughter. In VI, Evaristo establishes her motif of flames, stabbing, impalement and extinguishing of self by which to represent rape and anguish. Zuleika’s fate is prophetically alliterated: “Flames flickered by the marital bed” (29). The full stop applies a brake to the customary momentum of open unrhymed couplets. With forensic and disturbing diction, Zuleika’s ignorance is juxtaposed with Felix’s purpose. Without explanatory realism, the image of fire ignites, “until flames/tried to exit my mouth as a scream.” The use of “tried” is disconcerting, reinforced by the text’s double-spaced, typographical separation, as though forcing a space between couplets—until the repellent coup de grȃce—“but his hand was clamped over it. I passed out.” This double caesura both narrates the horror and recollects it simultaneously, as present and past align character and omniscient standpoints. While the poem closes with the apparent finality of “it was my first night / in the Kingdom of the Dead” (29), any finality is a ruse as Zuleika re-experiences the consequences for the entire book. From this place of annihilation closing Book I, an unsentimental, even jauntily practical tone opens Book II. Martius: doctor recommends months of recuperation each time his sewing is undone, this becomes my world, to adjust to married life, . . . whereas for Felix, rape is merely a trade-off,  . . . stop the tears, my love, accept your grand new status. . . (33) While Burkitt (2012) reads this episode as evincing female genital mutilation practices, such literal-realism reduces the metaphorical power and recurring symbolism of Zuleika’s abjection. In Book III’s “CAPISTRUM MARITALE,” the consequences of Felix’s damage to her adolescent body are again represented in a triple poem sequence of three two-line stanzas, transmitting versified violence,

“Civis Romana Sum” 243 “it is your size (and shame), you tore me unformed, drew blood before eggs ripened. . . . “to the wash bowl, your dead sons trickling down my legs.” (67) This technique never lets readers forget the cost to female autonomy and anatomy and the tragedy of harmed bodies in history, reprised in the oxymoronic “when I was newly-wed. I was a child” (71). The fundamental verse-poetry tension destabilizes expectations of prose as intrinsic to novels and productively serves the high-low cultural registers by which Evaristo imaginatively represents Zuleika’s life. She recalls, “It was going to be just one poem but it grew into a novel-inverse” (Hooper 10). The genre has been a vehicle particularly adapted for representing female sensibilities and perspectives. As Addison traces, Almost from the beginning, for example, a thread of feminist or, at least, woman-oriented verse novels can be traced. . . [which] . . . sympathetically anatomise the situation of specific women characters in social settings of their times, often focusing in radical ways on female sexuality in the process. (3) Although predominantly governed by this genre, additional elements from the bildungsroman and picaresque also influence the narrative arc through the rollicking adventures of its flawed, feisty protagonist’s social rise and personal fall. Moreover, in evoking women’s lives discarded and forgotten in patriarchal history, The Emperor’s Babe is responsive to Woolf’s hypothesis of “Shakespeare’s sister”: “What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment” (A Room 56). This imaginatively inventive strategy also strongly connects to Morrison’s mission of re-memory in recognizing the power of African American presences in American literary history.10 Evaristo’s revivifying project also bears hallmarks of another medium: theatre. “My background was originally in writing for theatre, except my plays were written in verse. [italics added] . . . what I loved about writing was embedded in poetry” (Collins, 1199). As Cuder-Domínguez notes of Zuleika, Alba and Venus, “the three friends’ dialogues and witty repartee 10 Morrison’s novel Beloved inaugurated literary “re-memory” as an authorial process where the imagination fleshes out the full capacity of histories erased in post-Renaissance enslavement and its aftermath—racism and indentured labor.

244  Deirdre Osborne have the kind of oral freshness and immediacy that one encounters in the theatre much more often than in fiction” (182). The text is replete with performativities of nineteenth-century dramatic monologues and their continuity in spoken-word poetry and monodrama—to which Black British writers have innovatively contributed.11 Evaristo profiled writing solo drama as a key vehicle for “aspirant actors . . . emerging from the pale, hallowed halls of drama schools where usually the only Black character on offer is the bard’s traumatised Moor,” as much “a powerful assertion of Black culture as a flowering of creativity” (“Going It” 14).12 Her own implicit tackling of Othello’s legacy occurs when Severus relates his life story to Zuleika, which echoes Othello’s courtship of Desdemona through storytelling, as travelogue on his route to power. While Severus and Othello share a North African heritage, they serve distinctive authorial visions contoured by specific historical contexts. Severus of 211 was emperor; Othello conceived of in 1604 becomes diminished and degraded. A comparative reading of these different cultural perspectives indicates how the sticky labels of stereotyping can become unstuck in a trans-historic, creative interruption. As Ahmed argues, “If the performative opens up the future, it does so precisely in the process of repeating past conventions, as to repeat something is always to open up the (structured) possibility that one will repeat something with a difference” (93). Critical reception can perpetuate a “pre-text” rather than respond to the “text.” When Cuder-Domínguez suggests that “Understandably enough Zuleika falls in love with the only other African in Londinium, the Emperor himself, Septimius Severus, for she feels close to him, coming from the same place” (181), she overlooks “Lucan Africanus” (Evaristo 11) and the fact that Londinium-born Zuleika does not share the experiences or understandings of the continent Severus describes, even as her migrant parents might. Zuleika’s initial eroticized awareness of Severus occurs as much from the aphrodisiac of knowing the powerful emperor’s eyes are upon her at the amphitheater (signaling opportunities to elevate her situation and status) as in an intuitively shared African identification—as she affirms, “Civis Romana sum. It was all I had” (54).

“Flâneurie” In an act of literary flânerie, Evaristo polysemically draws together the standpoint of “I” in the service of poetic social critique through Zuleika’s 11 Monodramas include Mojisola Adebayo (Moj of the Antarctic), Malika Booker (Absolution), Michaela Coel (Chewing Gum Dreams), debbie tucker green (random), Cush Jumbo (Josephine Baker and I), Urielle Klein-Mekongo (Yvette), Nicôle Lecky (Superhoe), Natasha Marshall (Half Breed), Valerie Mason-John (Brown Girl in the Ring), Yolanda Mercy (Quarter Life Crisis), SuAndi (The Story of M) and Selina Thompson (Salt). 12 Joseph’s monodrama Sancho; An Act of Remembrance evolved from his wish to act in a historical play, however, “I was born in the wrong skin. So, I thought I’d better find a route in for myself” (2015).

“Civis Romana Sum” 245 appraising “eye” and an omniscient, non-intrusive authorial presence. Tacitus’s Annals record that as a region of Britannia Superior, Londinium was one of the largest towns, renowned for its considerable wealth, trade and commercial traffic. Setting The Emperor’s Babe in “this far-flung northern outpost of empire” (41), and in particular its major port city Londinium, Evaristo represents internationalism derived from Roman conquests of Africa, Europe and Britain, spanning “Roma, Neapolis, Alexandria, / Antioch, Carthage, Jerusalem” (238) as well as a portal to local life Thameside: the (now submerged) rivers Fleet, Westbourne and Walbrook; and the cartography of Roman roads, such as Watling Street, which remain thoroughfares today. To articulate this topography, Evaristo offers a portrait of a black flâneuse, centralizing what falls outside the sightlines of creative vision in relation to the dominant paradigms of literary modernism—reworking the white privileged flâneur articulated by Baudelaire, Conrad, James, Benjamin and Eliot. In postcolonial writing, the male author as linguistic urban cartographer constitutes a particular strand of Black British writing heritage. Evaristo revises Selvon’s 1950s male immigrant urban mobilities in The Lonely Londoners, where protagonists rename areas, streets and London landmarks in their own territorializing terms. “He and Cap uses to coast Bayswater Road, from the Arch to the gate, nearly every night” (39), and Adebayo’s, Newland’s, Wheatle’s and Thompson’s 1990s novels, which continue Selvon’s literary counter-territorialization but from British-born perspectives. A rarely recognized presence in literary criticism, a black flâneuse offers a provocative dimension to gendered pedestrianism. An antecedent is located in Jamaican writer and feminist Una Marson’s 1930s London-based poetry. Marson’s speakers’ flânerie is shaped by anxieties extra to the traditional gendered-class readings of women in London’s streets by their “viewing public.” As oppositional to the scopophiliac and locational prerogatives of white male writers or acts of renaming by black male writers, Marson’s personae confirm the racial limits of a black woman’s pedestrian acts and convey the dangers of being looked at, as haunted by the backstory of black bodies as commodity in white economic history upon which London’s institutions were founded. In Zuleika’s ambulatory escapades, Evaristo enunciates the scope of Londinium from bath house to riverside, wharf to commercial street life, brothel to amphitheater, emperor’s residence to gladiatorial arena. Zuleika operates in the mode of Woolf’s sentient “eye” in “Street Haunting” (1930), observing and experiencing both connection and disembodiment—“We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by” (2). For Zuleika, the environment outside her parents’ home and Felix’s villa constitutes temporary respite from a social definition as submissive wife-object. With Alba as “the wild girls of Londinium” (9), there was no prohibited territory. “Some days we’d tour the tenements/Of

246  Deirdre Osborne Aldersgate” or “we raced towards / the slums, swarming with immigrants // freed slaves and factory workers (usual suspects)” (10). One street episode features a reflective flâneuristic technique—solvitur ambulando— solving a problem through walking in Zuleika’s innate flight response following her father’s sale of her to Felix. The comprehension of her destiny presents a narrative quandary. no words could form yet. I ran until I reached the sloping banks Of the River Fleet, far away from the docks, And then I screamed at the water . . . I knew I had to accept my fate. I could throw Countless tantrums, I was an expert, But it would go ahead, regardless. (18–19) Having been spotted and acquired by Felix and later by Severus, Zuleika clearly understands the terms of male power circumscribing her life and subjectivity. She symbolizes the transhistoric commodification of women’s bodies as the currency in reproducing patriarchal empires (Roman and British), “embodying // the very ethos of empire: to conquer” (168), where rape is a method of controlling, punishing and humiliating women domestically and a weapon of war and imperial rule.

“Imperial Peril” A haunting heaviness contours the text’s sparky, resilient pluck to which critics have mainly responded. Zuleika lives in unceasing imperial peril, evoking Butler’s observation that “Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed” (25). Blackman’s psychology concept of “embodied hauntology,” as Atkinson recognizes, “also grafts onto literary . . . modes of production” (125). For, as Atkinson cites Blackman, it “involves a ‘mediated form of perception, which is simultaneously somatic, psychic, technical, and historical, and which can animate, stage and, importantly, allow one to ‘see’ what might usually exceed conventional modes of perception’ ” (125). This is exemplified by Zuleika’s gladiatorial games visit. “NULLI SECUNDUS” charts a series of reality checks beginning with Zuleika’s impossible desire to be publicly acknowledged and elevated by Severus, which is denied. “Mistress Invisibilis was seated // with the other women in the dress circle / exactly ten rows behind The Severus” (172). Her expectations are further reduced: “I had expected the famous

“Civis Romana Sum” 247 Uber-hunks // with pumped-up biceps and sex-packs, / the preening super-tarts” (175), whereas the gladiators are from the ranks of old slaves, convicts, Christians, prisoners of war and the poor making a bid for solvency and stardom. These were men whose cheeks and bare chests had long ago caved in, and boys who had not the years (176) The narrative wends its way to a grimly epiphanic self-reckoning through Zuleika’s re-experiencing of her own abject agony, triggered by the mutilation of pregnant women, “as what had been human became chunks” fed to lions, eaten alive, “bloody meat on the bone, / clumps of hair sticking out of their mouths” (178–9). As Gunning notes, it becomes “increasingly dreadful” (174). The comparison between pregnant women representing life and continuity and the fate of these women as fodder for depraved, titillated spectatorship makes uncomfortable reading. Zuleika re-experiences her marital rape and implied miscarriage resulting from Felix’s irreversible physical damage to her pre-pubescent body. She and the pregnant captives share truncation of their maternity by male brutality. The bloody games ratify to Zuleika a female’s social function—consolidated by the domestic sphere—of the empire’s intractable power. Notably, the actual Severus ordered the execution of the writer of the only probable surviving female-authored Latin prose work.13 Vibia Perpetua, a highborn woman, was fed to beasts with her pregnant slave Felicity in the gladiatorial amphitheater (Heffernan). The gory communitas of cruelty and death Zuleika views also implicates her in the imperial project and its displacement of consequences, “we knew what we wanted, hungered after it. / Now I understood it all, oh beautiful terrible pain, // to witness you without my personal suffering, / let us know that we live, let us live!” (182). It is a moment of LaCapra’s “empathic unsettlement” that Craps describes as “feeling for another without losing sight of the distinction between one’s own experience and the experience of the other” (191). While childbearing is necessary for maintaining the empire, male violence poses a threat to it. Evaristo collapses this into the personal (Zuleika 13 Plant describes, “An autobiographical prose work is attributed to Perpetua, a Christian martyr, put to death in Carthage during a persecution under Septimius Severus in AD 202–03” (164).

248  Deirdre Osborne cannot conceive) and the public (the pregnant women’s maternity has no value apart from bloodthirsty sacrifice for mass spectacle). Although not wishing to diminish the horror of the plantocratic and colonial abuse of black women’s bodies, Evaristo’s Roman-era setting imagines a context pre-dating those systems ratified by racist ideology, to pose a challenge to readers who impose such legacies upon her work. Zuleika’s bodily identification with the devoured pregnant women is her “Pandora’s box” (180) of repressed memory, unleashed through witnessing the gore and experiencing the mass hysteria. Gunning argues, “Evaristo artfully plots the limits to which her free-flowing prose [despite the fact it is verse] can depict a situation of oppression . . . Zuleika is struck dumb by the horrors” (175). Actually, Gunning’s example of non-narratable suffering or the perceived shortcomings of language is acutely rendered in a poem of culpability where the typographically separated final three lines articulate her internalization. they live inside me now all that was contained has come undone. (184) While reading follows the visual lead of the words on the page, it also offers scope to create voices in one’s head and can aurally project tone and sounds onto a literally silent text, to make readers pay attention to the “means” of the narrative as they attempt to glean “meanings” from it. However, Jonathan Holloway’s radio dramatization of the novel dispensed with the first-person poetic voice and introduced a cast of characters to play Zuleika, Alba, Felix, Valeria, Tranio and Severus.14 The book therefore became a forty-five-minute “afternoon play” rather than a serialized “book at bedtime” as adapted for radio, implying that the medium of a performed solo voice does not hold its own on the air. The whole point of Evaristo’s novel is that a female voice and consciousness carry the work. The literalizing of the characters (and censorship of the taboo material) constructed an entirely new work and disempowered the original text. While the novel displays its performativity, its radio version was performatively diminished. Thus, artistic paternity replicates the familiar exclusions for minoritized writers.

“Alter Ego: Ars Longa Vita Brevis” In the messy intersections of Zuleika’s fluctuating social experiences, Evaristo positions the reader as both within and outside Zuleika in her 14 The Emperor’s Babe, BBC Radio 4 Extra, adapted by Jonathan Holloway, directed by Mary Ward-Lowery, May 23, 2013.

“Civis Romana Sum” 249 unfolding destiny. We learn about Zuleika as Zuleika learns about herself, drawn into her consciousness through a narrative of disclosure and embodiment. Her construction as a highborn wife creates estrangement from her own body: “Someone watches me in the mirror” (28). In Book IV, “A QUIET BEDTIME VOICE,” the objectifying poetic voice engenders a porosity between first- and second-person pronouns, outside and inside Zuleika’s self-anatomizing awareness, “Her head / comes apart in two sections” then, “she // can see Zuleika now” to “I am the deepest // of them all, / my amber necklace // is unclasped” [italics added] (107). To survive and thrive within her milieu (and meta-textually as a minoritized writer constructing fictitious personae) is to negotiate an experience of looking outward as well as understanding internalization, as Stuart Hall famously observes: “the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’ ” (225). Zuleika’s simultaneous insider-outsider perspective is precisely what Hall charts as resulting from regimes of representation formed under imperial rule. While endowing her central character with defiance, survival against the odds and insights into her circumvented existence, Evaristo also decisively extinguishes her. She is non-productive: unable to bear children or produce noteworthy poetry and, ultimately, is corporeally absorbed by the Epilogue’s unidentified poetic speaker. A melancholic rather than triumphal ending occurs with Zuleika’s murder by poison disguised in delicious food, so she ingests her own demise. What should have nourished and cossetted Zuleika (marriage to a highborn man, wealth, status, luxury) has the reverse outcome. Yet in the Epilogue (surprisingly neglected in critical articles to date), there occurs the power of the symbolic transference from Zuleika to the unidentified persona that corresponds with Blackman’s idea that “Hauntologies might start with a feeling that there is something more to say, and with a feeling of being unsettled or wanting to unsettle” (26). While Evaristo unsparingly exposes the reader to Zuleika’s life, juxtaposing suffering and jouissance, she closes her text in an enigmatic way that ultimately protects her invented protagonist. The “I” of Zuleika is merged with the “I” of the Epilogue’s unnamed speaker. Evaristo does not allow whiteness or maleness to be re-centered in the Romans in Britain story. The Epilogue’s revenant-like speaker glides to Zuleika’s dead body and inhabits the corpse in a poeticized act of transubstantiation: I slip into your skin, our chest stills, drains to charcoal. You have expired Zuleika, and I will know you, from the inside. (251) The image of charcoal evokes blackness as color; it is a noun for burnt remains (carbon) and the means of creativity in drawing and carbon

250  Deirdre Osborne copies; the implication is that something will rise from these ashes. As the mysterious speaker osmotically enters Zuleika’s body to share the space— “our chest stills”—the conjoined image closes down further access to interiority. The doubleness and layering creates a mise en abyme effect alluding to the (en)crypted stories sedimented beneath official heritage. Thus Evaristo’s experimental writing produces an intriguing and unique representational aesthetic where the experientially unfamiliar (in relation to mainstream culture) functions as a catalyst for revising cultural expectations in how to read and experience contemporary poetry, historical novels and fictional biography. Johanna Drucker’s evaluation of Illia Zdanevich’s experimental poetry holds true for Evaristo’s work: “a gauntlet thrown down against the possibility of amnesia, of historical erasure, eclipse, and forgetting, but also marks, by its bid to establish a historical record an exhaustion of certain possibilities, their passing into history and out of practice” (148). The largesse of historical fiction is that it fashions imagined interactions, conversations and témoignages of events (public and personal) to forge an invented continuity, simulating person-to-person connections across historically separated periods. While classics scholar and public intellectual Mary Beard has cautioned against viewing and judging Roman society through contemporary mores and behaviors, her affirmation that Roman Britain was an international, multi-ethnic location resulted in a barrage of online opprobrium, decrying the plausibility of this heterogeneity—despite indisputable radio-isotopic proof.15 Configuring a background (or reverberation) through to these earlier multi-ethnic populations in Britain creates a tenuous synthesis between present-day acts of retrieving the past and imagining it. Evaristo is careful to ensure that recognition does not equate with valorization. She encapsulates the tragic but houses it in a comic register—even up to Zuleika’s dying decree to Alba—“ ‘Your miserable face is making this worse. // Go home’ ” (250). The Emperor’s Babe can be viewed as artistically prescient, at the vanguard of what Steven Blevins terms the “new public imaginaries in postimperial Britain” (5) and its diverse constellations. Modern-day excavations of women’s graves in Roman Britain catalogued by names such as “The Ivory Bangle Lady” and “The Beachy Head Lady” sustain anonymity and object status. As confined by the nomenclature “Lady” (and all this signals) rather than “woman” (and all that entails), there is a problematically subtle link to a world where men conquered, ruled and wrote themselves into perpetuity, while women’s roles in social participation were habitually unrecognized or diminished.16 Evaristo constructs a wry counterpoint

15 “[O]ne third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare hgA1 Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.” It is unclear if this was before the Roman presence (King et al.). 16 “The case of the ‘ivory bangle lady’ contradicts assumptions that may derive from more recent historical experience, namely that immigrants are low status and male, and that African individuals are likely to have been slaves” (Leach et al.142).

“Civis Romana Sum” 251 to the “Lady” graves. Zuleika will never be accepted as a lady (and is constantly admonished in the novel for this shortcoming), despite her elocution, education and grooming. Yet she will be buried ennobled in “violet damask dalmatica / with gold thread . . . my hair // done in beautiful elaborate braids” (248), “and don’t forget my jet afro pick, // tweezers and nail file” (249) to have the hypothetical last laugh about any future interpretations archaeologists would make about her remains. Evaristo antagonizes the proclivity to read her work only as a cipher of black people’s lives in Britain today. Through her harnessing and intermingling of vastly separated socio-cultural periods, moral codes and customs, she catalyzes new and pluralized meanings of both. It is worth noting Barchesi’s observation that perspectives upon classical culture can be transformed by contemporary creative works—in a reversal of the customarily didactic purpose that the classics have served as foundational literature, as learning from the past. A classical scholar “may stand to learn from the whole postcolonial atmosphere something that has a bearing on the cultural history of the Roman empire” (154). The Emperor’s Babe engenders awareness of dual subaltern standpoints in an emancipatory poetics of cultural citizenship— micro-textually through a female poet’s literary evolution—and metatextually when we consider the conditions inflecting Black British writers’ literary production, its critical reception and prospects for longevity within the surrounding dominant culture’s “white noise”— be this critical reception or canonical acceptance. Black writers are not minorities in British literature’s majority language—English—but they are minoritized in the cultural opportunities available for exerting and sustaining mainstream presences that lead to cultural legitimation and longevity. What Evaristo reaffirms is that Black British writers are just as much inheritors of Britain’s aesthetic cultural legacies as their white peers, while also frequently offering the unique perspective of African diasporic influences, shaped within and by a British context. The Emperor’s Babe remains a unique literary treatment of African diasporic heritage, a novel in the service of irretrievable history—or as Evaristo’s project is clearly, herstory—in a context where cultural opportunities for black women’s creativities are still hard won.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion [2004], 2nd ed. U of Edinburgh P, 2014. Armstrong, Isobel. “Hegel: The Time of Rhythm, the Time of Rhyme.” Thinking Verse 1, 2011, pp. 124–36. Atkinson, Meera. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Barchiesi, Alessandro. “Lane-Switching and Jughandles in Contemporary Interpretations of Roman Poetry.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974–2014), vol. 135, no.1, 2005, pp. 135–162.

252  Deirdre Osborne Bernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford UP, 1998. Blackman Lisa. “Researching Affect and Embodied Hauntologies: Exploring an Analytics of Experimentation.” Affective Methodologies, edited by Britta Timm Knudson and Carsten Stage, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 25–44. Blevins, Steven. Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2004. Collins, Michael. “ ‘My Preoccupations Are in My DNA’: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo.” Callaloo, Cutting Down “The Wrath-Bearing Tree”: The Politics Issue, vol. 31, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1199–203. Craps, Stef. “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood.” Studies in the Novel, edited by Craps and Gert Buelens, vol. 40, nos.1 & 2, 2008, pp. 191–202. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Ethnic Cartographies of London in Bernardine Evaristo and Zadie Smith.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 173–88. DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. The U of Wisconsin P, 1983. Drucker, Johanna. “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text.” in Bernstein, 1998, pp. 131–61. Eckardt, Hella, Gundula Müldner, and Mary Lewis. “People on the Move in Roman Britain.” World Archaeology, vol. 46, no. 4, 2014, pp. 534–50. Eliot, T.S. [1917] “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen and Co., 1920, pp. 39–49. Evaristo, Bernardine. “Going It . . . Alone: Solo Performers—The Art and the Ache.” Artrage, Nov. 1994, pp. 14–15. ———. The Emperor’s Babe: A Novel. Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Forrest, Martin. “The Abolition of Compulsory Latin and its Consequences.” Greece & Rome, vol. 50, 2003, pp. 42–66. Frow, John. “Intertextuality and Ontology.” Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Judith Still and Michael Worton. Manchester UP, 1990, pp. 45–55. Gunning, Dave. “Cosmopolitanism and Marginalisation in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe.” Write Black Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, edited by Kadija Sesay, Hansib Publications Ltd., 2005, pp. 165–78. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by John Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–37. Heffernan, Thomas J. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Oxford UP, 2012. Hooper, Karen. “On the Road: Bernardine Evaristo Interviewed by Karen Hooper.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–16. Jakobson, Roman. “What is Poetry?” Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, The Belknap P of Harvard University, 1987, pp. 368–78. Joseph, Paterson. “On Sancho, the First Black Briton to Vote.” The Guardian, 14 Sep. 2015, www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/sep/14/paterson-joseph-sancho18th-century-black-british-author-actor.

“Civis Romana Sum” 253 King, Turi. E., Parkin, Emma. J., Swinfield, Geoffrey et al. “Africans in Yorkshire?: The Deepest-Rooting Clade of the Y Phylogeny with an English Genealogy.” European Journal of Genetics, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, pp. 288–93. Leach, S., Eckardt, Hella., Chenery, C., Müldner, Gundula., and Lewis, Mary. “A Lady of York: Migration, Ethnicity and Identity in Roman Britain.” Antiquity, vol. 84, 2010, pp. 131–45. Lennard, John. The Poetry Handbook. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Makoha, Nick. “Black Metic Poets.” https://nickmakoha.com/portfolio/blackmetics/ Marchini, Lisa. “Letters From Londinium: Reading the Earliest Writing From Roman Britain.” Current Archaeology, vol. 17, 2016. www.archaeology.co.uk/ articles/features/letters-from-londinium.htm. McConnell, Justine. “Crossing Borders: Bernadine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe.” Callaloo, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, pp. 103–14. Mercer, Kobena. “ ‘Diaspora Didn’t Happen in a Day’: Reflections on Aesthetics and Time.” “Black” British Aesthetics Today, edited by R. Victoria Arana. Cambridge Scholars P, 2007, pp. 66–78. Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig and Beloved.” The Culture of Sentiment, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 244–64. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. [1982] Routledge, 2007. Osborne, Deirdre. “Resisting the Standard and Displaying Her Colours: Debbie Tucker Green at British Drama’s Vanguard.” Modern and Contemporary Black British Theatre, edited by Mary Brewer, Lynette Goddard and Osborne. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 161–77. Plant, Ian. M. “Perpetua.” Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology. U of Oklahoma P, 2004, pp. 164–8. Ramchand, Kenneth. “West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality and Periodization.” Callaloo, vol. 34, 1988, pp. 95–110. Veronelli, Gabriela. “A Coalitional Approach to Theorizing Decolonial Communication.” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 2, 2016, pp. 404–20. Waldrop, Rosemarie. “Entry.” Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Poets Select and Comment on their Poems, edited by David Lehman, Macmillan, 1987, p. 197. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth, 1929. ———. Street Haunting. The Westgate Press, 1930. Wuyts, Ann. “Evidence of ‘Upper Class’ Africans Living in Roman York.” The Independent, 2 Mar. 2010. www.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/history/evidenceof-upper-class-africans-living-in-roman-york-1914553.html?action=gallery.

14 Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics Jean Wyatt In a recent essay, Brenda Cooper identifies the emergence of a new genre among the current generation of Black British writers of African descent born in Britain, a genre she names a “diasporic feminist fantastic.” These writers re-create canonical British literary genres by switching back and forth among genres and by mixing traditional generic conventions with elements from their ancestral African written and oral traditions. “Genres that they mix, manipulate, and rearticulate include realism, the gothic, magical realism, poetry, and the fantastic” (Cooper 142). They engage in formal experiments with a freedom and fluency enabled by their multiple cultural legacies.1 Helen Oyeyemi—whom Cooper mentions—is surely an exemplary model of this inventive play with traditional British literary genres. One of her techniques involves taking apart elements of a familiar genre (fairytale, Gothic novel, Doppelganger [double] tale) and developing each separately. White Is for Witching makes use of traditional Gothic features—a large old Victorian house with secret rooms; a beautiful, innocent young girl; a vampire figure—but these characters do not keep their traditional places; they slide unnervingly toward new and disturbingly complicated identity positions. As in Cooper’s “diasporic feminist fantastic,” Oyeyemi mixes elements drawn from her several cultural legacies with standard tropes of British Gothic novels to give a variety of new perspectives on the vampire figure and on mothers and mothering. Thus allusions to the Caribbean soucouyant, a woman who can leave her skin behind and fly around in a ball of fire seeking children to eat, compete with allusions to British vampires like Dracula. And spectral mothers like the shadowy maternal figures

1 Other names recently proposed by postcolonial feminist critics for this cohort of young Black British women writers are “Yoruba Gothic” (Helen Cousins) and “Postcolonial Gothic” (Sarah Ilott).

Reinventing the Gothic 255 in Gothic novels coexist with mothers, like the Yoruba housekeeper Sade, imbued with Aje, a spiritual force that enables some older Yoruba women to use magic maternally, so to speak—to protect and guide those who come within their circle of care. At crucial points, Oyeyemi adapts traditional Yoruba beliefs to her narrative purposes: West African participatory storytelling, in the stories that Miranda and Ore exchange; the traditional Yoruba belief that twins share a single soul, in Eliot’s desolation after his twin, Miranda, disappears; and a Yoruba woman’s link to the maternal powers of Aje, in the words and actions of Sade. Cooper coins the phrase “the epistemology of genre” to signify that knowledge is embedded in genre. Allusions to the Gothic novel, and in particular the vampire novel of the late nineteenth century, bring into the text knowledge of the historical background of present-day racism in Britain. In particular, Oyeyemi’s use of Dracula as a reference point imports into her text the historical context of the 1890s, when Bram Stoker and other authors were reflecting the guilt about colonization and the fear of the colonized invading the metropolis that beset the British public as the British Empire declined. While the house in White Is for Witching, with its secret rooms and hidden mysteries, recognizably belongs to the Gothic tradition, it outdoes the nineteenth-century Gothic mansion in several respects. As one of the three character narrators of the novel, the house has a voice; it also has agency, initiating actions that change the course of the characters’ lives. Oyeyemi uses the house’s narration to satirize a maternal ethics of care widely accepted in middle-class families of contemporary Britain and the United States. Gradually, the text reveals how a form of motherly devotion to one’s own children that rests on excluding other people’s children from care nurtures fear and hatred of the outsider; it connects that exclusivist maternal ethic to the violent anti-immigrant hostility and white nationalist politics we observe in the present-day citizens of Dover, where the novel takes place.

Narrative Structure: Beginnings and Endings Oyeyemi’s narrative structure is carefully balanced: two long parts, entitled “Curious” and “Curiouser,” are bookended by a short introductory section and a short concluding section, both untitled. This chiasmus structure, in which the second half of the structural sequence repeats in reverse the first half, imitates as closely as one can, given the linear requirements of the novel, a circular structure. We end the novel where we began, with the novel’s opening question “Where is Miranda?” still dangling in the air, unanswered. The novel begins with Lily Silver’s death when her twin children, Miranda and Eliot, are 16. In Part One, “Curious,” Miranda, unable

256  Jean Wyatt to recover from the death of her mother and suffering from “pica,” a serious eating disorder, spends six months in a psychiatric hospital and then returns to the family home, which her parents have converted into a “guest house,” a bed-and-breakfast inn. Lily inherited the old Victorian mansion from her grandmother, Anna Good, who brought Lily up after the disappearance of Lily’s mother, Jennifer. In “Curious,” we learn about the generations of the Silver family line. Despite its promise of strange and stranger things to come, “And Curiouser” (Part 2) opens onto the ordinary public-world setting of Cambridge University, to which Miranda has been admitted. A fresh narrative voice contributes to the sense that everyday life is resuming: Ore, a young woman of Nigerian origins adopted into a British family, narrates her first term at Cambridge University. Ore and Miranda, both students at Cambridge, become friends and then lovers. When Ore comes to visit Miranda at home over the holidays, the house expresses its hostility toward Ore, a black woman, by playing disorienting spatial tricks on her and finally threatening her life. Unlike the longer named Parts (“Curious” and “And Curiouser”), the opening, untitled section, which for convenience I will call the prelude, is organized by three questions, which serve as subtitles. Likewise, the final section (which I will call the coda) has no title but rather three questions that are subtitles. The first words that a reader encounters upon opening the novel are in the subtitle, “WHERE IS MIRANDA?” The prominence afforded by the capital letters and their placement as the first words of the text, together with the chiasmus structure of the novel, confer on Miranda—and more precisely on questions about Miranda—primary importance in the text to come. As the novel unfolds, the question of Miranda’s whereabouts expands to include more and more primal, fundamental questions: Who is Miranda? What is she becoming? These ontological questions about Miranda open, finally, onto ethical questions. What is good and what is evil, and how can one distinguish between them? Where is the line between the innocent and the monstrous? How can a maternal ethic centered on genuine love and protection of the child produce the child’s destruction? How could a maternal ethic of loving devotion foster a politics of white racism? This untitled prelude is tightly organized to introduce the three character narrators: Ore, Eliot and the house. Each makes a guess in answer to the subtitle’s question, “Where is Miranda?” And each guess expresses in a few words the guiding belief system of the narrator, as that belief system plays out in his or her subsequent narrative. Ore says, “Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house . . . She chose this as the only way to fight the soucouyant” (1). The soucouyant names Ore’s favorite story, drawn from Caribbean folklore, which she recites to Miranda on their first meeting: the soucouyant is an old woman with magic powers who eats children and is

Reinventing the Gothic 257 destroyed by an innocent young girl. Ore clings to the absolute distinction between good and evil in this tale, the more because her worldview has been severely tested by her friend and lover Miranda’s confusing signs of an “unnatural” appetite usually associated with monsters, not virtuous young women. So here, in defense of her guiding principle that good and bad are opposites, Ore insists that her friend Miranda must be on the side of the good, out to battle and destroy the evil soucouyant. Eliot speaks next: “Miranda is gone. Just gone.” He is grief-stricken and bereft of an explanation. He offers none. The third narrator is identified by the speech tag “29 Barton Road.” To the title question, “Where is Miranda?” this narrator answers firmly, “Miranda is at home” (emphasis in original, 3). In the next section, the same narrator answers the new subtitle’s question, “What Happened to Lucy Silver?” with an authoritative answer: Lily, the mother of Miranda and Eliot, was killed while on assignment in Haiti. It is the family house (29 Barton Road) that speaks as narrator here, introducing itself through a binary opposition. On one side, there is the emphatic “Miranda is at home” (3). To the house, this is the only place for Miranda to be—that is, to exist. The other side of the binary is expressed by the house’s judgment on Lily’s wandering: “Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?” (10). The house thinks exactly as a house would think—everyone belongs in one place only, and that place is in the house, and the person’s rightful belonging there is rendered by “home.” People are misguided to wander off to places “that are not for them”: there is no place for Lily to be other than her designated place, as mother of Miranda, in the family home. The house implies that Lily died of her folly. And, indeed, the house carries out the agenda implied by this concrete binary philosophy. She contrives to keep all the members of the Silver family—that is, all the female members, who are the only ones she recognizes and values—within the house, even if that means depriving them of their lives. The house must be quite content, then, to report her answer to the subtitle’s question, “Where is Miranda?” The house replies, “She is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster” (3). The house thinks as a house would think, in concrete terms: belonging, for example, means occupying a physical place in the house—a place meant only for her. This thinking extends to Miranda’s final place, a space so concretely imagined that Miranda is pictured as embedded in the wall, taking in the plaster that will cement her insides, too, into the all-encompassing material house. The novel never provides an answer to the question, “Where is Miranda?” At the end of the novel, she has disappeared, and we have to return to the beginning to ponder the various hypotheses about her absence voiced by the three narrators. At the end of the untitled concluding section (276–83), the sole remaining narrator is Eliot. Eliot’s

258  Jean Wyatt narrational solitude formally reflects his spiritual isolation in the absence of Miranda. Oyeyemi seems in this closing narrative of White Is for Witching to be drawing upon the Yoruba idea that twins share one common soul. “The Yoruba believe that twins share the same combined soul [so that] when a newborn twin dies, the life of the other is imperiled because the balance of his soul has become seriously disturbed” (Leroy et al 134). In Oyeyemi’s adaptation of this belief system, Eliot seems to be pinned to his twin, Miranda, so closely that he is compelled to mirror the totality of her absence through his own internal emptiness. After her disappearance, he is incapable of action, except for obsessive repetitive actions circling around the remnants of Miranda: her music, her bed and her shoes. “I am chained to the shoes,” he says. “There is nothing to be done” (281). This paralysis extends to his voice, “I don’t talk and my silences are not mysterious” (282). The silence expresses Eliot’s utter mental vacuity—as if his soul had been emptied out by the withdrawal of Miranda’s soul from his. Throughout the novel, ideas borrowed from Yoruba belief systems enrich the narrative structure.

Reinventing the Gothic One of Oyeyemi’s techniques for rewriting genre is to adopt tropes from traditional nineteenth-century British Gothic novels but multiply their meanings and reinforce their grotesque aspects. For example, a maternal ambiguity, according to Claire Kahane, often lies in the “dark secret heart” of the labyrinthine Gothic mansion that the Gothic heroine feels compelled to penetrate. This might be a mother figure who is mysteriously dead (but perhaps alive) or a mother figure who mirrors the heroine and tempts her to give up her own separate identity and merge with her (340). In White Is for Witching, Oyeyemi expands the theme of maternal specter, multiplying enigmatic mothers. The Gothic mansion that the family transforms into a bed-and-breakfast inn is itself a maternal entity, I will argue. And it preserves within its hidden and shifting spaces a whole line of dead mothers—Miranda’s great-grandmother Anna, Miranda’s grandmother Jennifer and Miranda’s recently killed mother, Lily. The temptation to give up the distinction between self and other to merge with the mother figure is more completely developed here than in early Gothic novels like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, becoming an increasingly horrific pressure on Miranda to abandon her separate young life and join this dead-alive maternal collective. Allusions to the Gothic novel and its subgenre, the vampire tale, circulate around the figure of Miranda. The Gothic genre is explicitly named when Ore, meeting Miranda for the first time, identifies her as a “Gothic heroine,” “one of those Gothic victims, the child-woman who is too pretty and good for this world” (187). This attribution of the delicate victim-heroine role to Miranda makes sense to a reader of the first

Reinventing the Gothic 259 180 pages of the text. Frail and pale because of her eating disorder (pica), which causes Miranda to refuse nutritional foods and eat non-nurturing substances like chalk and plastic, suffering from melancholia since the death of her mother and manipulated by the spirits of the old Victorian mansion where she lives, Miranda does seem to fit the role of Gothic victim. However, Oyeyemi’s critique of the values embedded in the Gothic genre takes the form of complicating and confusing such traditional roles. Miranda seems at first to be the innocent victim threatened by hungry mother-ghosts, but her changing desires move her gradually toward the position of vampire. Oyeyemi not only takes apart and reassembles standard Gothic roles but also mixes them with figures from the other literary traditions to which she is heir. She combines bits from Yoruba, Caribbean and British oral and written literary traditions with Gothic themes to create a new articulation. For example, Ore and Miranda, both first-year students at Cambridge University, come to know each other through exchanging stories of women who treat children as food. Ore’s story is drawn from Caribbean oral tradition. The soucouyant is an old woman who takes the shape of a flame to fly at night in pursuit of children to eat. She is destroyed by a young girl who rubs salt into the discarded skin, so that when the old woman tries to get back into her skin at daybreak, she feels such pain that she flies into the sun, her flame becoming one with the sun’s fire. In the participatory mode of West African storytelling, Miranda signifies on Ore’s story. When she first tells it, Miranda’s story ends in the happy meeting of an older woman and the child she has chosen to live with her. After hearing Ore’s story of the soucouyant, Miranda retells her story with a different ending: the older woman indeed chooses the little girl but only in order to satisfy her appetite for a dish made out of this particular kind of child. As if in a West African mode of call and response, Miranda revises her story to improvise on the theme of eating children. The shift in the ending of the embedded story subtly foretells the direction that Miranda’s and Ore’s love story will take. As the novel progresses, the young woman Miranda shows more and more signs of wishing to love Ore not only sexually and emotionally but also gustatorily: Last night had been the fifth, perhaps the sixth night that Miranda had lain by Ore, smelling her, running her nose over the other girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred. . . . Ore’s smell was raw and fungal as it tangled in the hair between her legs. It turned into a blandly sweet smell, like milk, at her navel, melted into spice in the creases of her elbows, then cocoa at her neck. . . . Miranda’s head had spun with the desire to taste. (220)

260  Jean Wyatt Miranda, initially cast as the Gothic heroine/victim, seems to be moving to the opposite position of vampire/soucouyant. Ore, increasingly disturbed by hints of Miranda’s new appetites, insists on the absolute difference between good and evil: I told myself that no matter what Miranda said, the soucouyant was the old lady. That was the rule. It was the young girl that defeated the soucouyant. The two did not enter the story in each other’s bodies; the two did not share one body, such a thing was a great violation. Of what? I didn’t know. (252) Confronted with a growing number of hints that Miranda yearns to taste her flesh, Ore clings desperately to the clear distinctions in the traditional Caribbean story. The roles of soucouyant and young girl are fixed, and the distribution of good and evil between those roles is clear and, above all, stable. Unfortunately for Ore, she inhabits a novel by Helen Oyeyemi. And Oyeyemi plays irreverently with the cultural traditions to which she is heir, tossing around their parts and mixing them up. However, Oyeyemi’s playfulness is purposeful, sending an ethical message to readers: don’t trust the comfortable meanings of genre, whether it is the folktale or the Gothic genre. Good and evil do not inhabit opposite poles of a binary but mix and shift in unpredictable ways. Heroines can act like monsters, and victims become victimizers. Ethical behavior toward the other is more complicated and more difficult to negotiate than in the reassuring black-and-white morality of folktale and Gothic novel. If the Gothic genre operates by creating a mood of suspense in the reader, there is suspense here as well. But suspense has moved from the question “Will the vampire seduce and appropriate the will of the young, innocent woman to his will?” to the more disturbing questions, “Who is Miranda?” and “What is she becoming?” The questions are all the more discomfiting because her appetites are troubling to Miranda herself, and if she entertains the desire to taste Ore, it is an ambivalent desire. After the night spent sniffing Ore’s various odors and longing to bite, Miranda struggles against herself, writing in her private journal: “Ore is not food. I think I am a monster” (221). This oscillation between roles is further complicated by Miranda’s self-identification as “the goodlady,” a signifier which seems to refer to the composite figure of all her maternal ancestors. Miranda tells Ore, “We are the goodlady . . . The house and I” (218). Yet this collective identity is not a stable position for Miranda either, for she continues to struggle against the house’s demands that she resign her individuality (233). Oyeyemi’s style of moving constantly among the many cultural traditions she is heir to, and then, within each cultural text she appropriates, shifting the valences of good and bad, young and old, results in her

Reinventing the Gothic 261 character Miranda eluding every unitary identity position that she seems to occupy for a moment: suffering innocent Gothic heroine, Gothic evil vampire, child victim of a wicked mother (or rather mothers) and monstrous Caribbean witch who eats children. The refusal to stabilize her in any of these momentarily occupied subject positions, together with the reader identification produced by a narrative perspective skillfully focalized mainly through her eyes, means that she remains enigmatic as a desiring subject; she is an uncanny indeterminate presence that disturbs and, in disturbing, engages—or even rivets—a reader.2 As the novel unfolds, Oyeyemi widens the scope of inquiry that begins with the question, “Where is Miranda?” and moves on to ontological questions—“Who is Miranda?” “Who is she becoming?”—to include gradually larger and larger ethical questions. The questions that swirl around Miranda eventually lead, through the vehicle of the house’s narrative of its actions, to an indictment of a maternal ethics in which love for one’s children depends on the exclusion from care of other people’s children. That maternal ethic of exclusivity is shown to be continuous with a nationalist politics based on the exclusion of racial others.

The House: Oyeyemi’s Parody and Critique of Middle-Class Motherly Virtues Oyeyemi presents the house as a maternal site: it is both the receptacle for the long line of Miranda’s foremothers and is itself a maternal entity, thinking like a mother. The house enacts a nightmare version of motherly virtues and thereby introduces a powerful satire of the maternal ethics that continue to prevail in British and American cultures. The cornerstone of maternal thinking, as Sara Ruddick has written, is the imperative to protect and preserve the life of one’s child. The house is proud of protecting its “daughters”—for example, Jennifer, Miranda’s grandmother—from the destruction and evils of the world. When Jennifer wanted to leave the house and her young daughter, Lily, to start a new life in Italy with her lover, the house opened up a new room, and Jennifer walked through the door. And there, the house kept her for all the decades of her long life. Of course, imprisonment kept Jennifer from living a life, but the house doesn’t see it that way; she boasts that “Jennifer lived long and relatively well, and she was kept safe from those fears and doubts peculiar to her times. She was safe from the war that sickened what it touched” (99). The repeated emphasis on the word “safe” links the house’s treatment of Jennifer to the maternal ethic of protection, showing how that ethic tips over into possessiveness. The house’s attitude

2 Helen Cousins eloquently describes Miranda’s position as “textually unstable . . . beyond the more typical Gothic dualities” (51).

262  Jean Wyatt parodies a maternal tendency toward overprotection calculated (at least unconsciously) to keep a child within the space of maternal control. The middle-class culture of the Western nuclear family treasures maternal devotion to one’s children. The house exaggerates this devotion to one’s own by excluding even Luc, Miranda’s father, from her concern. Lily married exogamously, so Luc is not part of the Silver bloodline and therefore, in the house’s view, a stranger. When Luc cries in agony over the death of his wife, Lily, the house has no pity “because he is not mine. So I don’t care about him” (15). The house’s single-minded devotion to the female members of the Silver family parodies the maternal devotion that in the Western middle-class nuclear family tends toward exclusivity: I care about my own, to the exclusion of care for everyone else’s children. Oyeyemi adds a political dimension to her critique of the exclusivity of British middle-class motherhood when she dramatizes the house’s hatred and violence toward raced others. As the house relates, during World War I, Anna Good, Miranda’s great-grandmother, used magic to give the house life—“a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive I am” (27). Having received the news that her husband was killed in the war, Anna Good put on a white costume—for “white is for witching,” says the house—and “did some witching” (136). “‘I hate them,’ she said. ‘Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty . . . dirty killers’ ” (137). Anna’s magic animates the house in order to enable it to perform that rage. The house’s task is to persecute, expel or destroy all “others”—foreigners and people of color—who would pollute the domestic space of whiteness. The novel’s title, White Is for Witching, is enunciated here for the only time in the novel. The theme of whiteness connects the sentiment of white supremacy that imbues the domestic space of the house to the xenophobic public space of Dover, which raises its white cliffs to block the entry of immigrants into a U.K. that protects its whiteness from foreigners. Using the spatial terms that come “naturally” to a house, the house insists, “We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else . . . Those others (guesthouse clients) shouldn’t be allowed in” (137). Here is a binary common to both family and nation: “We” on the inside versus “they”—raced others, foreigners, immigrants—who want to come in, but must be shut out. The Other must be drummed out of the spaces that belong to “the same” race, whether those spaces are within the home or within the nation, in order to protect the whiteness and purity of those who have inherited these spaces from their ancestors. The critique of conventional middle-class mothering continues here: the implication is that the focus on protecting and fostering one’s own to the exclusion of others who might bring difference into the family already manifests a xenophobic sensibility and so extends naturally into white nationalist attitudes toward racial difference.

Reinventing the Gothic 263

Sade, Ore and the Maternal Powers of Aje Sade, the Yoruba housekeeper for the family and inn, is a different kind of mother figure. She seems to possess properties of Aje, a Yoruba spiritual force associated with motherhood and thus with special gifts for nurturing and protection (Cousins 47). In Yoruba belief systems, it is the Great Mother who used Aje to create human beings. Aje remains a creative power accessible to some select, usually elderly, women “endowed with wisdom that is tempered by life’s vicissitudes” (Washington 16). Notably, women who wield Aje possess the power of the word: they can speak words that effect change, including powerful prayers, curses and incantations (Fatunmbi 38–9, qtd. Washington 17). Aje provides these women with herbal knowledge and magical skills and thus the power to heal and to punish, as well as the strength and wisdom to lead their communities toward a higher stage of evolution (Washington 14). Sade’s maternal qualities of nurturing, care and protection emerge first in relation to Miranda and second in relation to Ore. Although readers have no access to Sade’s consciousness and therefore lack knowledge of her motivations and feelings, some clues lead to the suspicion that she uses the powers of Aje to counter the influence of the house’s malign magic. Sade supports Miranda both physically and spiritually: she helps Miranda to walk and sit when she becomes debilitated by starvation and provides her with nourishing food. Her spiritual insight is potentially even more helpful. “ ‘They’re calling you, aren’t they? . . . Your old ones.’ ” And she offers maternal empathy: “ ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ ” Sade has the spiritual insight to see to the heart of Miranda’s psychic illness— her bondage to all her dead mothers and the house that shelters them. Sade’s spiritual powers seem to be backed by knowledge of magic. When Miranda asks what Sade is making as she loops black thread into figures that appear to be two hanged men, Sade replies “juju,” in a direct reference to West African magical practices. The dictionary definition of juju is “a fetish or charm believed by West Africans to have magical or supernatural powers” (Your Dictionary: https:www.yourdictonary.com). Could her charm be a talisman meant to work against the malign influence of the house on Miranda? We cannot know, for Sade keeps her own counsel. Miranda interprets it quite differently. “Sade’s talisman was a thing worked against her” (114). Far too enmeshed in her attachment to the house and its malevolent vision of things, Miranda is unable to make use of the maternal comfort, spiritual insight and potential healing that this figure of Aje offers her. Ore, on the contrary, is able to communicate with Sade, to sense the force of her Aje and in the end to avail herself of Sade’s strong magic. When Ore first enters the house on her visit to Miranda, she encounters

264  Jean Wyatt Sade alone in her bedroom. Attracted by the whispering sound of many voices, she opens the door to an attic room to find “a woman dressed entirely in silver and fire-engine red.” She is “kneeling by her bed” with her back to Ore. Before the woman turns around, Ore feels “a strength behind [the woman],” which she likens to the strength of the woman pictured on a Tarot card “subduing a lion at the jaw.” Thus even before Ore comes face to face with Sade, she senses the aura of Aje surrounding her—or, as Ore calls it, “La force” (238). Although Western readers (like myself) might see Sade’s kneeling position as the posture of a suppliant at her prayers, in African traditions of Aje “kneeling is the optimal pose from which to curse or to invoke retributive justice on anyone who disrespects motherhood” (Washington 15). It may be, then, that the voices Ore overhears are not only those of the spectral mothers that occupy the house and persecute Sade but also Sade’s own voice using the power of the word that is hers to counter their influence. For her only address to Ore in this scene is, “ ‘What are you doing here? Go home,’ ” and then again, “ ‘Please go home’ ” (238). Sade’s seemingly hostile commands are in fact protective. Knowing the house as she does, she is urging Ore to get out in order to protect this young black woman from the house’s virulent racism. Perhaps because Ore approaches Sade as a person she respects and trusts, she and Sade can communicate about things that matter to them. Later, in the kitchen, Ore tells Sade the story of the soucouyant, using storytelling again as a means of bonding, as she once did with Miranda. And Sade tells Ore the story of her own scarification (244). It is the house that matters most to both of them—although Ore has yet to learn how crucially the house matters to her. Ore trusts Sade: “If you say yes, I’ll believe you. Just tell me. There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?” “It is a monster,” Sade said simply. (244) Perhaps because Sade sees that Ore, unlike Miranda, has ears to hear and eyes to see the house’s malice, Sade can warn Ore directly about its viciousness. Ore threatens the house on every level. As a black subject, she is the intruder who threatens pollution to the white family—she is the “they” who must be kept “outside” in order to protect “us,” the pure white family on the “inside.” As a person of Nigerian descent, she is the foreigner (despite her British citizenship) who awakens the house’s zeal to persecute and punish “Blackies, Germans, killers” (137). And, as Miranda’s lover, Ore contests the house’s claim to possess Miranda’s body. The house trots out all its magical spells to get rid of Ore. It tempts her to eat a poisoned apple (the house’s specialty, white on one side, red

Reinventing the Gothic 265 on the other). It manipulates its rooms so that when she leaves the bathroom, she finds herself back in the bathroom in a never-ending loop, and when she dries herself off after showering, the towel has traces of black paint to convince her that her skin is coming off on her towel. Picking up the pace of horror, the house subjects her to one phantasmagoria after another of Miranda changing shape into various embodiments of madness and helplessness. In a finale of black magic (or rather, in the symbology of this novel, white magic), the house threatens Ore’s life. The lift takes her to an unknown floor with bare walls and nails sticking out of the floorboards, and she is assailed by the “alabaster white” minions of the house who “stare and [say] nothing” but “crowd [her] closely, murder in their eyes” (264–5). Ore fights back with salt, but then the floor disappears beneath her and she falls into a pit that exudes the smell of “dead marrow rotting” (267)—presumably the stench of human bones decaying. The house’s clearly murderous intentions are interrupted by the entry of “someone red and silver,” who “threw their hands out and white flew from their fingertips” (267). The red and silver regalia identify her as Sade, clad in the ceremonial conjuring costume in which Ore first encountered her. Ore loses sight (and consciousness), only to regain it looking “through white squares. I was in a net. Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me” (267). Throughout the novel, Sade has been diligently knitting a white garment—a shawl? a sweater?—which gradually grows much too long to be either. This expanse of white knitting now envelops Ore. It saves her life. “ ‘Don’t let me die,’ ” she cries to Sade. “With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this” (267). Ore’s cries recognize both the extremity of her situation—the tricks of the house have indeed turned murderous— and Sade’s ability to rescue her from that extremity. The text’s hints of a symbolic rebirth following Ore’s brush with death are not subtle. Ore “sat in a huge white bag, like a stork’s delivery,” and she is “crying like a newborn.” If, in Ore’s extended metaphor, Ore is the newborn baby, Sade is in the position of the mother who has delivered her. In the carapace that Sade has knitted and in Sade’s presence, Ore feels an infant’s sense of protection in the presence of the mother: “I felt so safe in the net” (268). She stays “rocking herself” in the net for some time, as if gaining strength. The birth is not physical, of course, but metaphysical, the result of a struggle between contesting mothers with spiritual powers, between Yoruba magic and the magic of Western maternal and nationalist passion represented by Anna Good and her creature, the animated house. It must immediately be said, however, that this pitting of Sade’s maternal magic against the malignant magic of the house differs from a fairytale struggle of good mother versus bad mother, good witch versus bad witch—as in, for example, Glenda, the good mother/witch of the East

266  Jean Wyatt versus the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Neither narrative discourse nor plot allows a symmetrical balance of power between Sade and the house. Discursively, the house gets more space and narrative power than Sade does. It has a clear narrative voice and a consciousness open to readers, inviting them to speculate on its motives, while Sade occupies less narrative space and has no narrative voice. Since a reader is granted no access to Sade’s consciousness, he or she may be more intrigued than informed about Sade’s feelings, motives and intentions. In terms of plot, there is no final victory of maternal good against maternal evil, for Sade simply leaves the house—at last—after saving one “daughter” of color, while the house gets to keep its daughterly prey, Miranda. The house’s value of loyalty to “the same” and to whiteness reaches its extreme in a scene that follows Ore’s escape from the house, when the house brings Miranda into the circle of living-dead mothers composed of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Difference is elided not just through the expulsion of all that is racially black and foreign (both Ore and Sade have left) but also through the erasure of all individualized traits of the family members that might make each one desire to go her own way. This sameness is literalized by the erasure of each person’s facial features: “They looked the same now, all four of them” (272). In this parody of family solidarity, all are literally white and “pure,” and, in the house’s terms, “safe”—that is, “safe” from adulteration by anything or anyone beyond the Silver female family line. Miranda experiences the extinction of her self and her life in an all-encompassing, dead-alive maternal collective.

Links between Maternal Ethics and Nationalist Politics In various ways, White Is for Witching suggests a historical context for the racism and British nationalism evident in the present-day Dover of the novel’s setting. Miranda’s oscillating tendencies toward vampire appetites recall the late Gothic vampire Dracula. In an interview, Oyeyemi says that it was her reading of Dracula that inspired her to create a contemporary version of Dracula. [While volunteering in South Africa,] I got this flu-like illness and spent a lot of time in bed with Dracula in the dark wing of this big house. . . . I started thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider, because you’ve got this foreign count with the unnatural appetite. . . . I thought, what’s an unnatural appetite? A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else. (Machell) Miranda’s “unnatural” desire to bite into her lover’s flesh slips into the text—a reminder of the archetypal vampire Dracula and therewith a

Reinventing the Gothic 267 reminder of the anxieties attendant on the decline of the empire in the 1890s, when Dracula was written. As Stephen Arata has persuasively argued, the fear expressed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the fear of “reverse colonization” (Arata 263)—a fear that Arata claims was widespread during the last decade of the nineteenth century. In response to the waning of British cultural, social and economic hegemony and the growing doubts about the morality of empire, the Gothic novels of the 1890s, and in particular Dracula, reflected the populace’s fear and guilt about colonization in a “narrative of reverse colonization.” Dracula’s narrative, according to Arata, enacts the fear that the colonized will do to Britain what Britain has done to them. Dracula’s power to colonize the bodies of British citizens so that they reproduce him—the narrator Hacker in Dracula foresees that Dracula will “satiate his lust for blood and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons” (Stoker 67)—gives literary form to the widespread fantasy that the colonized will immigrate to the metropolis, colonize the colonizers, victimize the victimizers and replace the British economic and social order with their own social codes.3 Reminders of Dracula in Oyeyemi’s variations on the vampire theme thus import into White Is for Witching a historical background for the present-day racism and rejection of immigrants in the Dover of the novel’s setting. Dover, and by extension Britain, appears to be permeated with hostility toward immigrants. Four Kosovan refugees fleeing the war in the former Yugoslavia are stabbed in separate incidents, and three die. Even among Ore’s adoptive family in Faversham, there are sympathizers with the far-right white nationalist political party—the British National Party. Ore’s cousin Adam reframes the news story of the murderous violence against Kosovan immigrants to make the Kosovans the immigrant troublemakers who roil the peaceful citizens of Dover: “Bare refugees pissing off the locals” (233). His brother Sean reads an account from a British National Party flyer of the government’s failure to track and monitor immigrants (231–2). Sean reads the passage “six or seven times” to harass his cousin Ore by implying that she, of Nigerian descent, is herself an unwelcome immigrant (despite her British citizenship). Later, the house’s persecution of Ore includes flooding her room with copies of the same anti-immigrant British National Party flyer that Sean read to her. Allusions to Dracula suggest that there is a historical continuity between Britain’s anti-immigrant past, fed by fantasies of the colonized invading England, and the present-day animosity toward immigrants coming into Dover—although now the fear of invasion has an economic

3 Helen Cousins’s perceptive essay on White Is for Witching claims Dracula as ancestor to Oyeyemi’s text and cites Arata’s essay (47–8).

268  Jean Wyatt edge: “ ‘They’ll take all our jobs’ ” (232).4 Within the domestic world of the house, there is likewise a historical precedent for the white nationalist hostility toward immigrants in Dover. Toward the end of World War I, Anna Good donned her white robes to “do some witching”—for “white is for witching,” the house as narrator adds, speaking the novel’s title. Anna Good’s hatred for “Blackies, Germans” and foreigners in general is already an expression of white supremacy, a rage against those who would pollute the whiteness of authentic British citizens. Her spell transforms the house into an instrument for expelling and damaging or destroying racial subjects. At the level of family, the great-grandmother Anna Good passes on to her descendants an unethical maternal ethic that limits maternal care to family members and nurtures a suspicious hostility toward racial difference. Miranda is poisoned not simply by the chalk and plastic she eats but also by a perverse maternal ethic. The initial question of the novel, “Where is Miranda?” gradually opens up ethical questions that exceed the situation of the individual Miranda—questions of ethical behavior toward racial others at both familial and national levels. But there is also a (probable) answer to the question, “Where is Miranda?” A reader who cannot find in the puzzling final narrative of Eliot any answer to the question of Miranda’s whereabouts is thrown back to the speculations of the three character narrators at the novel’s beginning. It is the house’s answer to the question, “Where is Miranda?” that, given Miranda’s progress toward absorption into the spectral company of her mothers, rings true: “She is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster” (3). Miranda is becoming part of the house, a house symbolic of a nation that rejects racial others. The nationalist ethic of white supremacy is tied to an unethical form of mothering, in which love for one’s own children depends on the exclusion of others, and more specifically racial others, from care. The question, “Where is Miranda?” points finally to her and the nation’s envelopment within an unethical white witchery that casts a spell over family and nation that spans the generations.

Psychic Sources of Horror: Some Speculations on Reader Response Traditionally, the Gothic novel aims at evoking responses of horror in the reader. I speculate that in White Is for Witching, horror arises at least in

4 In an interview on White Is for Witching, Oyeyemi refers to current racial tensions in the actual city of Dover: “There’s also the unease of Dover because it’s a port, where so many illegal immigrants come in; there’s a lot of tension there . . . even just reading the local newspapers you can see that one of the things they refer to a lot is the immigrant problem” (Armistead).

Reinventing the Gothic 269 part as an effect of the gradual erosion, over the time of the reading, of a cluster of interconnected tropes: mother, food and house. I want to make the case that, despite the ambivalence that many subjects feel toward their mothers, very early memories of mother, food and house form a signifying chain associated in many readers’ minds with a basic sense of security in the world. In gradually demolishing—indeed reversing— the usual functions of mother, food and house, I think the novel attacks images associated with a reader’s very early experiences of security and safety. Many decades ago (1950), Erik Erikson coined the term “basic trust.” Despite his somewhat uncritical assumptions about mothering practices and their effects, I find Erikson’s conception of basic trust useful for speculating on how readers may respond to the representations of mother, food and house in White Is for Witching. Erikson described the importance of maternal care in fostering a child’s sense of basic trust in the world—trust in the self, trust in the other and trust in the environing world. He sees a turning point in the baby’s development when the baby can allow the mother to go out of its sight without experiencing overwhelming anxiety—because the baby has internalized the image of the mother. In the mother’s absence, that internalized imago can provide “a feeling of inner goodness.” The mother, Erikson says, “has become an inner certainty” (247). The internal good mother, then, becomes an unconscious imago founding a basic sense of security and safety. Since it is often a mother figure who feeds the baby—most obviously in the case of breastfeeding—food likely becomes associated with maternal care. And the family house, if all goes well, provides shelter, support and stability for a growing child, contributing to his or her feelings of safety in the world. The three—mother, food, house—thus constitute a signifying chain associated with nurturing, care and protection. Mother, food and house in White Is for Witching consistently betray these traditional associations with maternal care and protection. The mothers occasionally surge up from the obscure depths of the house to issue maternal admonitions, “Eat, Miranda, you must eat” (148). But they are dead and can offer only spectral food, inedible. The house gives Miranda chalk to eat, feeding her pica disorder and thus contributing to her starvation. And as Miranda grows weaker, the house gloats over her skeletal thinness and near-death, because her moribund state brings her closer to the moment she can be absorbed into the company of dead mothers the house encloses (222). At the circular end of the novel, as at its beginning, Miranda’s body is evidently encased inside the wall of the house, contributing to its material substance. Rather than protecting and sustaining the growth of its child, this house adds the child to its own substance. The house’s consumption of the child is the opposite of maternal nurturance. I hypothesize, then, that the growing horror that a reader feels as

270  Jean Wyatt Miranda weakens from starvation arises in part from the gradual degradation of nurturing images—mother, food, house—that together form a reader’s maternal imaginary and provide the basis for his or her elementary feelings of security and safety in the world.5 White Is for Witching asks a lot of its reader. While the ongoing, continuous perversion of primal images associated with maternal comfort is attacking a reader’s conscious and unconscious associations to mother, house and food, a reader is also challenged to do the cognitive, conscious work of making connections between the house and the British nation. In the generic Gothic novel, the house, with its secret rooms and hidden evils, is meant to play on readers’ anxieties, arousing feelings of suspense and fear. Oyeyemi’s evocation of the house goes further, aiming to touch on dimensions of reader anxiety connected with ethical issues and more specifically with the ethics of race. The house embodies xenophobia. It represents a maternal ethic that focuses exclusively on care for its own family and eliminates, by threatening or violent means, any foreigner or racial other who encroaches on the domestic domain. But it also represents a nationalist ethic hyper-focused on one’s “own” group, on preserving “the same” in the form of a politics based on the equation of Britishness with whiteness and on the principal that all “others”—immigrants and racialized persons—do not belong and should be marginalized or, better, expelled. Oyeyemi’s re-vision of the Gothic evokes anxiety or even terror in a reader not just on behalf of a threatened helpless young heroine but also on behalf of one’s own threatened basic security in an increasingly xenophobic and racist nation and world.

Acknowledgments Marshall Alcorn, Sheldon George and Pelagia Goulimari were generous readers of this chapter. Each made crucial suggestions for structural changes in my argument. And conversations with each of them, over time, expanded the range of my ideas.

Works Cited Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no.4, 1990, pp. 621–45. Armitstead, Claire. “Book of the Week: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi.” www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/18/helen-oyeyemi-white-isfor-witching. 2009. Cooper, Brenda. “Women Dancing on Water: A Diasporic Feminist Fantastic?” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 140–58.

5 I am indebted to Marshall Alcorn for suggesting this line of thought on reader response to the gradual erosion of traditional images of mother, food and house (Private conversations in March 2019).

Reinventing the Gothic 271 Cousins, Helen. “Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba Gothic: White is for Witching.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, 2012, pp. 47–58. Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. W. W. Norton. 1963 [1950]. Fatunmbi, Awo Fa’lokun. Iwa’-pele: Ifa Quest: The Search for the Source of Santeria and Lucumi. Bronx, New York: Original Publications, 1991. Kahane, Claire. “The Gothic Mirror.” The Mother Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether. Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 334–51. Leroy, Fernand, et al. “Yoruba Customs and Beliefs Pertaining to Twins.” Twin Research and Human Genetics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002, pp. 132–6. Machell, Ben. “Helen Oyeyemi: The Times Interview.” http://entertainment.time sonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/artcle6344159.ece. Oyeyemi, Helen. White is for Witching. Random House, 2014 [2009]. Ruddick, Sara. “Maternal Thinking.” Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. Ed. Joyce Trebilcot. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984, pp. 213–30. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Penguin, 1984 [1897]. Washington, Teresa. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature, 2nd ed. New York: Oya’s Tornado, 2015.

Contributors

Herman Beavers is Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches courses in twentieth-century and contemporary African American literature and creative writing. His most recent poems have either appeared or are forthcoming in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine, and the American Arts Quarterly and Supplement. His poems have been anthologized in The 2014 Moonstone Anthology of Featured Poets, Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-First Century and Who Will Speak for America? His chapbook, Obsidian Blues, was published in May 2017 as part of Agape Edition’s Morning House Chapbook Series. His scholarly monograph, Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in early 2018. He serves as an advisory editor for the African American Review, the Black Scholar, the Journal of Black Studies and Modern Fiction Studies. Pamela S. Bromberg is Professor of English at Simmons University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and postcolonial African fiction. Recent publications include essays on Blake’s visual art and on the work of Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Lillian Hellman and Buchi Emecheta. She has also contributed essays on teaching Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park and on teaching Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones to the MLA’s  Approaches to Teaching volumes. She is currently working on a project on the cinematic representations of thought in climactic scenes of anagnorisis in film adaptations of Austen novels. Sheldon George is Professor of English at Simmons University. He teaches courses on literary and cultural theory, American Realism, the Harlem Renaissance, American Modernism and black women writers. Some of his recent publications read Toni Morrison’s narrative structure through a convergence of reader-response and psychoanalytic theory. These include “Approaching the Thing of Slavery: A Lacanian Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” published in African American

Contributors 273 Review, and “The Body that Race Built: Shame, Trauma and Lack in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child,” published in Shame and Modern Writing. His recent editorial projects include special issues of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society on “African Americans and Inequality” at the end of the Obama administration and on social applications of psychoanalytic theory. His book Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity was published in 2016 by Baylor University Press. Pelagia Goulimari is a member of the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, where she teaches women’s writing, feminist theory and literary theory. She is co-director of the interdisciplinary Oxford M.St. in Women’s Studies. Her publications include the single-authored books Toni Morrison (Routledge, 2009) and Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2014) and the edited collections Postmodernism: What Moment? (Manchester UP, 2007) and Women Writing Across Cultures: Present, Past, Future (Routledge, 2017). She is general editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Routledge). She is currently editing the double special issue Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson (Angelaki 25.1 – 2, Jan. 2020) and co-editing the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory (Oxford UP). Sarah Ilott is Lecturer in literature and film at Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K. Her main research and teaching interests are in postcolonial literature and genre fiction. Her publications include New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Palgrave, 2015), Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (edited with Chloe Buckley; Sussex Academic Press, 2017), New Directions in Diaspora Studies (edited with Ana Cristina Mendes and Lucinda Newns, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak (edited with Helen Davies; Palgrave 2018) and multiple journal articles and book chapters. Daphne Lamothe is a literary and cultural studies scholar at Smith College, where she is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a member of American Studies and the Study of Women and Gender. Her research focuses on literary and cultural representations of blackness within the contexts of migration and transnationalism. In her book, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (2008), as well as in her scholarly articles and essays, she explores questions of national and cultural belonging, identity and symbolic geographies within the Black Atlantic imagination. She has published in some of the most respected journals in her field, including Callaloo, African American Review and Meridians. Daphne Lamothe is currently working on a book-length study of representations of blackness

274  Contributors and urbanity that explore selfhood in the absence of ideals of home, origin and belonging. Stephanie Li holds the Susan D. Gubar Chair in Literature at Indiana University, where she is also the associate vice provost of Faculty Development and Diversity. Her teaching interests include racial representation, gender politics and theories of resistance in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century American and African American literature. She is the author of four books, including, most recently, Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects (Oxford UP, 2015). Her next monograph, Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century (Rutgers UP), will be published later this year. Her work has appeared in American Literature, Callaloo, SAQ and various essay collections. She recently guest edited special issues of American Literary History and Black Camera. Naomi Morgenstern is Associate Professor of English and American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She specializes in psychoanalytic and post-structuralist critical theory and gender studies and teaches courses in nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. She is the author of Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) as well as essays on a range of American writers (Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and David Mamet, among others) and on the short stories of Alice Munro. She is currently working on reproductive ethics and maternal sovereignty in contemporary literary and cinematic narratives. Milo Obourn is Associate Professor of English and women and gender studies at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. Their research interests and teaching areas include U.S. literatures, critical race theory, gender and sexuality, disability studies, psychoanalysis and trauma studies. They are the author of Reconstituting Americans: Liberal Multiculturalism and Identity Difference in Post1960s U.S. Literature (2011, Palgrave). Their work has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, Genders and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. Their current project, Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion, is under contract with Temple University Press. Deirdre Osborne is Reader in English literature and drama at Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-convenes the MA Black British Writing and teaches undergraduate modules on Shakespeare, cultural theory, feminism, modernism and postmodernism. Her research interests span late-Victorian literature and maternity to Landmark Poetics, mixedness, adoption aesthetics and Black writing. She edited the first Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)

Contributors 275 (2016) and is an associate editor of the scholarly journal Women’s Writing (Taylor and Francis). Catherine Romagnolo is Associate Professor of English and chair of the English department at Lebanon Valley College. She is the author of Opening Acts: Feminist Beginnings in Twentieth-Century U.S. Women’s Fiction (University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Her articles include “Initiating Dialogue: Narrative Beginnings in Multicultural Narratives” in Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory, edited by Frederick Luis Aladama (University of Texas Press, 2011), and “Narrative Disidentification: Beginnings in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” in Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, edited by James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho and Shaun Morgan (Ohio University Press, 2017). Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is Professor of English and John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric at Wabash College and teaches courses on South African literature, Irish literature, James Joyce, twentieth-century British and Irish literature and postcolonial literature, among others. She has published two books: Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (University Press of Florida, 2010) and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). Her current book project is a comparative study of Irish and South African literatures. Jennifer Terry is Associate Professor of English at Durham University, U.K. Her work is situated at the intersections of such fields as American hemispheric, U.S., and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on black diaspora literature and culture. Terry’s research on the novels of the African American author Toni Morrison appears in various edited collections and journals. Her monograph, “Shuttles in the Rocking Loom”: Mapping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2013. This comparative study examines how, through symbolic journeys, trajectories and geographies, selected African American, Caribbean and Black British novelists speak to ongoing debates about postcolonialism, nationalism, essentialism, hybridity and cross-cultural relations in the diaspora engendered by racial slavery. With Kathryn Nicol, she was co-guest editor of “Toni Morrison: New Directions,” a Special Issue of MELUS (2011). Her current research turns to visions of futurity in contemporary African American fiction and visual art. Dr. Terry has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library, the Durham Institute of Advanced Study, the John F. Kennedy Institute for American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Jean Wyatt is Professor of English at Occidental College and teaches courses on African American women writers, British modernism,

276  Contributors contemporary American and British literature and race and gender theory. She is the author of Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morison’s Later Novels (University of Georgia Press, 2017). She received the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for the Best Single-Authored Book on Toni Morrison at the American Literature Association meeting in May 2018. Previous books include Risking Difference: Identification, Race and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism (SUNY Press, 2004) and Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women’s Reading and Writing (University of North Carolina Press, 1990). She has recently written articles on Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, which have appeared in the journals Angelaki, MELUS, Narrative and Modern Fiction Studies. Her most recent article is “Laplanche, Freud, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma.” American Imago, vol. 76, no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. 183–206.

Index

Abadi-Nagy, Zoltan 86 Abel, Elizabeth 127 ableism 52 – 3, 64 – 6; ableist culture 63; ableist ideology 67; ableist rhetoric 64 abortion 112 – 13, 187 – 91; reproductive rights 112; see also maternal; mothers; pregnancy Absalom, Absalom 129n2; see also Faulkner, William absurd 161 – 2, 174 – 5 accessibility 66, 75 Achebe, Chinua 179 – 83, 187; see also “Empire Fights Back, The”; Home and Exile; “Today, the Balance of Stories” activism 162, 192; activist 21, 147, 206n18; anti-racism activists 22; literary activist 236 Adah 183 – 5, 187, 190 Adebajo, Adekeye 179n2 Adebayo, Mojisola 244n11, 245 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2, 6 – 7, 10, 33, 35 – 8, 42 – 3, 47; see also Americanah adoption 154, 189, 196, 199 – 201, 203 – 4, 206, 210 – 11 Adorno, Theodore 145 aesthetic 2 – 3, 30, 150 – 2, 236; African American novels 5; authenticity 154; black 145, 155; Britain 251; dignity 134; dimension 10; and epistemology 78; effect 122; and ethics 1, 76 – 7, 144, 159, 162, 182; form 19, 122; invention 157; market 230n6; and narrative 77; perception 198n3; post-soul 148n11; realm 145 – 6; representational 250;

sovereignty 151; tennis player 20; transcendence 149 affect 10, 110; affective 115, 149 – 50; affective dimensions 48, 151; affective economies 35 – 6; affective response 39; and ethics 49 – 50 African: diaspora 35n1, 185, 251; literature 35, 50, 180 African American: citizenship 72 – 3; literature 15, 92 – 3; literary articulations 136; literary traditions 208n21 Afro-Asiatic 123, 132 – 3; Coptic 132 – 3; Egyptian 123; genealogy 133 Ahmed, Sara 10, 29, 34 – 40, 42, 44, 46 – 9, 143, 144n4, 146, 198, 244; see also phenomenology, The Phenomenology of Whiteness Aje 255, 263 – 6 Alaimo, Stacy 119 – 21 Albritton, Laura 215 Alcorn, Marshall 270 Aldama, Frederick 15; see also Analyzing World Fiction, A Collection Alice Manfred 70, 72, 76, 84, 131, 133 – 4; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni alienation 47, 123, 126, 132, 191 alignment 33, 37 – 8, 47, 50, 61 allusion, literary 123 – 5, 126, 136, 204, 206, 209, 239, 254 – 5, 258, 267 ambivalence 110, 143 – 6, 152, 158 – 9, 204, 269 A Mercy 5, 107; see also Morrison, Toni Americanah 10, 33 – 50; see also Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

278 Index Analyzing World Fiction, A Collection 15; see also Aldama, Frederick ancestor 92 – 3, 102 – 3, 183, 202, 207 – 9, 239, 262, 267n3; female 126; listening to the 91; maternal 130, 260; see also “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” Anderson, Pamela Sue 202 – 3, 205 Andrews, Kehinde 230n8 Anim-Addo, Joan 236n5 animal 94 – 5, 105, 118 – 19, 222, 224; animality 108, 118 – 19; crossspecies recognition 116, 117; rights 164; slaughter 92, 221; or thing 107 anonymity 250; see also Jazz’s narrator antiquity 133, 234n3, 235 anti-racism 21 – 2, 69, 75, 166, 215, 219 – 20, 225 – 6 apocalypse 111, 118n17, 164, 166; post-apocalyptic 113n14 apotheosis 129 – 30; see also Faulkner, William Arata, Stephen 267 Arendt, Hannah 111 – 12n11 Armitstead, Claire 268n4 Armstrong, Isobel 240 Ashcroft, Bill 187 Ashe, Bertram 148n11 assemblage 201, 204, 208 Astaire, Fred 150 – 2 asymmetry 39, 42, 44, 48 – 9 Atkinson, Meera 246 austerity 9, 163, 172 Autograph Man, The 162 – 3, 166 – 7; see also Smith, Zadie Baartman, Saartjie 29n4, 225 Bakhtin, Mikhail 89, 172 Bal, Mieke 28n10 Baldwin, James 184 Ball, Charing 22 Balthaser, Benjamin 22 Banks, Adam J. 30 Barad, Karen 108, 201 Baraka, Amiri 154n17, 155 – 6; see also Blues People: Negro Music in White America Barchiesi, Alessandro 238 Bareis, J. Alexander 69 – 70 Baudrillard, Jean 74 Beardsley, Monroe, C. 124 Beitler, Lawrence 21 Bell, Alice 27

Beloved 5, 85, 90n1, 101, 112, 113n14, 114, 118, 130, 132, 135, 207, 243n10; see also Morrison, Toni Benjamin, Jessica 108 – 10 Benjamin, Shanna Greene 60 Berlant, Lauren 19 Bernard 215, 226, 228 Bernstein, Charles 236 – 7 Berrian, Brenda 186n8, 189n11 Bettcher, Talia 197, 200, 204 Bhabha, Homi 200, 229 Bhanot, Kavita 169 Biko, Steve 216 – 18 bildungsroman 88, 113, 144, 146, 159, 243 binary 17, 81, 260, 262; false 3; gendered 34; opposition 106, 145, 209n24, 257; symbolic 53 Black: blackface 150 – 1; British, definition of 10; British women writers, settler generation 236; Britons 8, 220; community 53, 56; female subjectivity 144, 146, 147, 187 – 8, 192 – 3; Lives Matter 111, 217, 230; nonbeing 145; post-blackness 148; resistance 21; respectability 57; women’s health 104 – 5 black body 21, 29, 40, 65 – 6, 73, 216, 224; commodification of 226, 245; fetishization of 228, 230; metonymical description of 216; violence enacted on 21; wounding of 70 Blackman, Lisa 246, 249 black music 71, 143 – 59; the blues 129, 155, 156; Gospel music 152; improvisation 4, 123 – 4, 134 – 5, 157, 197, 201, 206 – 9; jazz music 75, 123 – 4, 143 – 5, 154 – 9; musician’s freedom 135 – 7; and sin 133 – 4; Swing music 143 – 59 Blair, Tony 9, 163, 172 Blevins, Steven 250 Blitstein, Ryan 105n3 blog 41, 44 – 5, 48 – 9 Blues People: Negro Music in White America 154n17, 15 – 16; see also Baraka, Amiri Bluest Eye, The 125, 131, 135; see also Morrison, Toni Bois Sauvage 94, 100 – 101, 106, 117 Booker, Malika 244n11

Index  279 Booth, Wayne C. 86 boundary 6, 35, 37, 136; of blackness 148; breakdown of 48; cultural 191; establishing 90; formation 38, 46; historical 24; prescribed 21; and social norms 49; subjective 151; traditional 23 Bouson, J. Brooks 132n7 Braithwaite, E. R. 219 – 20 Brax, Klaus 86 Brewster, Dorothy 127 – 8 Brexit 210, 230 Bride Price, The 181, 184; see also Emecheta, Buchi Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie 230n8 Britannia 172, 233, 236 – 7, 245 British: Black British 10; citizenship 8, 216; Empire 181, 215, 226, 255; Empire Exhibition 221, 226; National Party 267; racism 185, 199, 210, 267 – 8 Brooks, Cleanth 124, 137 Brooks, Peter 163 Brothers Karamazov, The 89; see also Dostoevsky, Fyodor Brouillette, Sarah 170 Brown, Michael 26 Brown, Sterling 155 Brown, Wendy 115 Bryce, Jane 179; see also Wasafiri Buell, Lawrence 35 Burt, Stephen 23 Busby, Margaret 179n2 Butler, Judith 10, 22 – 3, 35 – 9, 44, 47 – 9, 246 call-and-response 196, 202, 204, 209, 259 Cameron, David 163, 166 Cane 33, 136; see also Toomer, Jean Caribbean folktale 6, 254, 256, 259 – 60; see also soucouyant caricature 161, 163, 171, 174 – 5, 225 Cavaliero, Glen 164, 166 Cee Money 76, 81 – 3; see also Home; Morrison, Toni Certeau, Michel de 75 Changing My Mind 152; see also Smith, Zadie Chenery, C. 253 chi 183 – 90, 193; definition of 187; see also ibeji myth; twins Chiasson, Dan 23 Childs, Peter 162

Cholly Breedlove 135; see also Morrison, Toni Christian 113, 132 – 3, 188n9, 189, 247 Citizen 11, 15 – 32; see also Rankine, Claudia City, the 73 – 5, 81 – 2, 84, 128 class 35, 40 – 1, 46, 49 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 7 Coel, Michaela 244n11 cognitive improvement 196 – 8, 201 – 6, 209, 211 Collins, Michael 235, 243 Collins, Patricia Hill 90n3, 201 colonial mimicry 200; see also Bhabha, Homi colonization 6, 8, 234 – 5, 237, 255, 267; reverse colonization, fantasy of 255, 266 – 8 communal 56, 124, 135, 137; expression of hurt 70, 85 community 70 – 1, 85, 128, 154, 187; African-American 201; Black community 53, 56, 217; of Caribbean immigrants 10; diasporic 230n6; and ethics 85; family and 89; friendship and 192; multi-ethnic 178, 190; othermothers 90n3; racial 144, 151; witnessing 110n9 Condé, Mary 231 Conner, Marc 29n11 Conrad, Joseph 216, 222, 224, 245context: African American and Black British 7 – 11; historical and cultural 3; literary 124 – 5 contingency 37, 41; see also Ahmed, Sara Cooper, Brenda 188n10, 190n12, 254 – 5 Coptic 123, 132 – 3; see also AfroAsiatic cosmology 183n6, 187 – 9 Cousins, Helen 254n1, 261n2, 263, 267n3 Craps, Stef 247 Crawford, John 26 Crawford, Margo 148, 148n12 critical race studies 1, 72 cross-species recognition 116 – 17; see also animal Crouch, Stanley 112, 134 Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar 243 – 4 cultural: appropriation 154 – 5; identity 178, 186; ideology 58; imperialism 169; text 16, 151, 260 cut, the 135; see also Snead, James

280 Index Dasenbrock, Reed Way 179 Davis, Anneka 199n4 Davis, Jordan Russell 26 Davis, Todd F. 86 Dawson, Ashley 183 decision 79, 97, 101 – 2, 111, 119, 162, 191, 203; dreadful 112; to drown 127; ethical 101, 162; to leave 185; to narrate 155 defamiliarization 47, 168, 170, 197, 239 DeKoven, Marianne 238 Deleuze, Gilles 201 – 2 Dentith, Simon 89 Derrida, Jacques 22, 118 – 19, 229 Desmond-Harris, Jenée 19n4 DiAngelo, Robin 20, 216 – 17 diaspora: African 35n1; African heritage 251; African woman 185; Caribbean 230; community 178, 183; diasporic feminist fantastic 254; experience 236; identity 186, 193; literary heritage 235; network 6 differentiation 37, 47, 50, 66 Dimock, Wai Chee 106 disability 53, 62 – 6, 148 discursive gaps 215, 217, 229 – 30 disidentification 11; definition of 15 – 17; and intersectionality 17 – 18; and genre 23 – 7; and second person perspective 27 – 30; and visual narrativity 18 – 23 dislocation 144, 146, 154, 158 diversity 8, 44, 85, 146n8, 161 – 5, 168 – 72, 175 Donahue, James 1, 15 – 16; see also Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Donnell, Alison 236n5 Dorcas 70, 81 – 2, 127 – 31, 135, 206 – 8; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni Dostoevsky, Fyodor 89; see also Brothers Karamazov, The; Idiot, The Douglass, Frederick 149 Dracula 6, 254 – 5, 266 – 7; see also Stoker, Bram Drucker, Johanna 250 Dubek, Laura 31 Dubey, Madhu 10, 15 Du Bois, W.E.B. 9 Dyson, Michael Eric 18

eating 93, 259 – 61, 266, 268, 269 – 70; eating disorder 256, 259 Eagleton, Terry 3 Eckardt, Hella 234n2 Eckstein, Lars 206n18 Écrits 54; see also Lacan, Jacques Ejizu, Christopher 187, 189 Eliot, T.S. 2, 124 – 6, 235, 245 Ellis, Cristin 108n7 Ellis, David 225, 229 Ellison, Ralph 84, 129, 137, 147; see also Invisible Man emancipatory poetics 233, 237, 251 Emecheta, Buchi 2 – 3, 178 – 93, 236; see also Bride Price, The; Head Above Water; Joys of Motherhood, The; Kehinde; “Rebel, The”; Second Class Citizen Emenyonu, Ernest N. 179n3 empathy 4, 9, 44, 152, 161, 163, 172 – 4, 263 Emperor’s Babe, The 8, 233 – 7, 243 – 5, 248n14, 250 – 1; see also Evaristo, Bernardine Empire, British 181, 215, 221 – 6, 228 – 9, 246 – 7; and decline 255, 267; flag of 127; sons of 216; Western 149 Empire, Roman 8, 233 – 51; imperial violence, Roman and British 237; Londinium 211 A. D. black Britons in 233, 234 – 5, 237, 250 “Empire Fights Back, The” 180; see also Achebe, Chinua Eng, David L. 200n9 English, Darby 160 Ensslin, Astrid 27 entitlement 33, 42 – 3, 45, 49, 80, 196, 222, 224 epistemology 78, 80, 119, 143n3, 215, 255 Equiano, Olaudah 149 Erevelles, Nirmala 66 Erikson, Erik 269 Essig, Kate 230n7 ethical: answerability 39, 49; effects of form 2, 4 – 5; inquiry 45; orientation 146; relation 36, 41, 46; responsibility 36, 47 – 9, 96, 162; vulnerability 201 – 2, 205 ethics of: maternal 107, 112, 113n14, 115 – 19, 254 – 5, 261 – 2, 263 – 6, 268 – 70; narrative 122 – 4, 127; the

Index  281 oppressed 3, 75 – 7, 84; othering 69, 85; race 2, 270; resistance 76; transgender 196 – 7, 202, 211; unknowing 196, 202, 204, 208, 211; unreliable narration 69 – 70 ethnic minority 171, 230n6 Eugenides, Jeffrey 158n23 Evaristo, Bernardine 2, 8, 233, 235; The Emperor’s Babe 233 – 53; see also Emperor’s Babe, The failure 41 – 5, 81 – 2, 95 – 7, 147, 161; or crisis181; fear of 188; government’s 277; of heroic archetype 149; high cost of 181; of language 134; and learning 49; of the protagonist 151; of representation 35n1; of social protection 114; success or 183n6 Fatunmbi, Awo Fa’lokun 263 Faulkner, William 107, 123, 125 – 6, 129, 135 – 6, 229n5; see also Absalom, Absalom; Light in August; Sound and the Fury, The feminism 36n2, 183 fetishism 171, 224 – 6 Fish, Stanley 125, 170 Flânerie, female 244 – 6 Fleming, Victor 226 Fludernik, Monika 28n10, 29n11 food 259 – 61, 268 – 70; see also eating foreigner 38, 40, 210, 228, 262, 264, 268, 270 Forrest, Martin 239n9 Fortier, Anne-Marie 162 fragmentation 186, 191; and Golden Gray 132; and jazz music 134; and Modernism 123; and Morrison 126, 128; and Thunder, Perfect Mind 132; and WWI 123; see also mind/body split frame narrative 33, 41, 44 – 50 Frank, Arthur W.: wounded storytelling 85 Franklin, Aretha 152 Frank Money 71 – 3, 76, 78 – 84; see also Home; Morrison, Toni Fraser, C. Gerald 180 Freud, Sigmund 55, 108, 110n10; see also “Mourning and Melancholia” Frow, John 236 – 7 Fryer, Peter 204n17

Garner, Eric 26 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2 – 3, 22 gaze 74 – 5, 79, 119, 170, 222 – 3, 227 – 8; white gaze 74 – 5, 222 – 3 gender 33, 40 – 1, 49; and emotion 34; transition 196, 199, 203 – 4, 210 – 11; violence to women 234, 240 – 3, 247 – 8 genre 23, 27 – 9, 234 – 8, 243, 254 – 5, 259 – 60; and disidentification 23 – 7; Gothic 6, 254 – 61, 266 – 8; hybridity 29n11; lyric 17, 23 – 30; novelin-verse 237 – 40; vampire novel 254 – 61, 266 – 7 Geronimus, Arline 105 Gibson, Lindsay Gail 149, 152 – 3, 158n22 Gilbert 215 – 20, 226, 228, 231 Gilman, Sander L. 224 Gilroy, Paul 123, 170, 201 Giroux, Henry 106 Glissant, Édouard 146n8 globe light 126 – 8, 131 Gnosticism 132 – 3 Golden Gray 123, 131 – 4, 137, 209; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni Gone With the Wind 216, 220, 224, 226 – 8; see also Mitchell, Margaret Gothic 6, 254 – 61, 266 – 70; see also genre Goyal, Yogita 35, 45, 47 grammar 2, 73, 75, 78, 84, 238 – 9; and personhood 73 – 5, 84 Greek 115 – 16, 132 – 3 green, debbie tucker 244n11 Green, James 162 Greenidge, Kaitlyn 144, 154, 157 – 8 grief 36, 48 – 9, 96, 206, 257 Grimes, William 179n2 Guattari, Félix 201 – 2 Gunning, Dave 247 – 8 Halberstam, Jack 202n15, 210n26 Hale, Dorothy J. 1, 4, 122 – 3 Hall, Stuart 10, 249 Hallemeier, Katherine 35n1 Hamilton, Edith 107, 112 Haraway, Donna 108n7, 201 Harlem 54, 57, 65, 70, 82, 125, 128, 133 – 6, 206; see also New York City Harris, Cheryl I. 72 – 3 Hawley, John C. 178n1 Hawthorn, Jeremy 80

282 Index Head Above Water 182, 184n7; see also Emecheta, Buchi Heffernan, Thomas J. 247 Hekman, Susan 119 – 21 heterodiegetic 78 – 80 heteroglossia 89 heteronormativity 110, 204 Hite, Molly 16n2 Hobbes, Thomas 113n14, 115 – 16 Holloway, Karla F.C. 72 – 3, 81 “Home” 4; see also Morrison, Toni Home 3, 9, 69 – 73, 75 – 6, 78 – 85; see also Morrison, Toni Home and Exile 179 – 81; see also Achebe, Chinua homodiegetic 78 – 9 Honig, Bonnie 115n15 hooks, bell 19, 202, 205, 225 – 8 Hooper, Karen 234, 237, 243 Hortense 215 – 16, 218 – 20, 224, 226 – 8, 231; see also Levy, Andrea; Small Island Howitt, Dennis 174 humor 9, 64, 98 – 9, 161 – 75; comedy 161 – 6, 171 – 4; jokes 162 – 5, 172 – 4; laughter 161 – 2, 170, 173, 225 Hunter’s Hunter 131 – 2; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni Huntington, Samuel P. 166 Hurricane Katrina 3, 106 – 7 hybridity 24, 27, 123, 132, 148, 154; of genre 29n11; generic 229n5; linguistic 190; of narrative fragments 18; racial 137, 148, 154, 156n19 ibeji myth 186; see also twins identification 36, 73, 112, 182; bodily 248; classical 116; complete 244; of contradiction 157; and counteridentification 17; dichotomy of 29; and disidentification 46 – 8, 50; intimacy and 150; narrator’s 74; with an oppressed group 218; racial 52 – 67; reader 261; selfidentification 197, 204, 260; with suffering 48; identity politics 10, 81, 171 Idiot, The 89; see also Dostoevsky, Fyodor Igbo 3, 46, 48, 178 – 91; immigrants 178; proverbs 179, 187 imaginary: maternal 270; racial 52, 54, 57, 61; see also Lacan, Jacques

immigrants 8 – 9, 38, 165, 172, 196, 199 – 201, 204n17, 206, 210 – 11, 262, 267 – 8; and citizenship 39n4; discourse 229; Immigration Act 216n1; West Indian 220 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 90n1, 149; see also Jacobs, Harriet Inda, Jonathan 24 individualism 150 – 3, 187; individualistic approach 92 inequality 81; global 43; racial 73, 112, 114; structural 154; systematic 163, 165 infanticidal 108 – 12 inferiority 7, 16, 21, 39 “In Memory of Trayvon Martin” 17 Innes, C.L. 236n5 innocence 101, 233, 241; and unreliability 69, 77 – 81 interdependence 36 – 7, 48, 115 internalization 58, 184, 248 – 9 interpellation 162, 168 intersectional 33, 38 – 40, 199; intersectionality and disidentification 17 – 18 intersubjective 35 – 8, 109 investedness 34 – 7, 41, 44, 46, 50 Invisible Man 147; see also Ellison, Ralph irony 98, 171, 179n3, 221; and reader response 124, 137 Iser, Wolfgang 125 iteration 35, 37, 40 iyabeji 189 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman 118 Jacobs, Harriet 90n1, 149; see also Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jakobson, Roman 236, 240 Jakubiak, Katarzyna 161, 168 Jamaica 199, 222; settlers and Windrush 216 – 17 James, Adeola 180 James, Cynthia 229 – 30 James, Jennifer 66n6 Jazz 11, 69 – 87, 122 – 39, 143 – 5, 154 – 9; see also Morrison, Toni; Smith, Zadie Jazz’s narrator 122 – 5; and anonymity 133, 137; and the City 7, 11n5, 73 – 5; and Golden Gray 131 – 2, 134; and pain 129 – 30, 133, 135; and unreliability 2, 69 – 70, 78 – 80,

Index  283 83 – 4, 122; and white gaze 74 – 5; and Wild 136; and Woolf 126, 128 Jellenik, Glenn 106n5, 107n6 Jenkins, Roy 8 Jim Crow 3, 18, 226 Joe Christmas 129 – 31, 135; see also Faulkner, William Joe Trace 70, 80, 125, 129 – 31, 135; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni Johansen, Emily 215 Johnson, Cedric 106n5 Johnson, E. Patrick 143n3 Johnson, George M. 22 Johnston, Jenny 200n7 Jones, LeRoi see Baraka, Amiri Jones-Rogers, Stephanie 232 Joseph, Paterson 252 Joys of Motherhood, The 181, 188; see also Emecheta, Buchi judgement 46, 49, 80, 95 – 6, 151, 154, 172, 193, 257 Jumbo, Cush 244n11 Jussawalla, Feroza 179 – 82 Kahane, Claire 258 Katrina, Hurricane 106 – 8, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118 Kay, Jackie 2, 6, 196 – 200, 206, 210 – 11; see also Trumpet Kearney, Richard 36 Kehinde 178, 182, 185 – 193; see also Emecheta, Buchi Kenya 221; Kenyan nationalism 180 Kim, Sue 15 King, Turi. E. 250n15 Klein-Mekongo, Urielle 244n11 Knadler, Stephen 66, 206n19 Lacan, Jacques 52, 54, 229; imaginary and symbolic 52 – 7, 58 – 62, 270; see also Écrits Lagos 46, 49, 178, 181, 183, 185, 188 – 93 Lammy, David 230n9 Lanser, Susan 16, 28n10, 179, 185; see also “Towards a Feminist Narratology” Larsen, Nella 2, 5, 52 – 5, 58, 65 – 6; see also Passing Leach, S. 250n16 Lecky, Nicôle 224n11 Lee, Spike 112n13 Lennard, John 237 Lentin, Alana 172

Leonard, Mark 165 Leroy, Fernand 258 Levinas, Emmanuel 36 – 7 Levy, Andrea 2 – 3, 215, 217 – 18, 221 – 2, 224, 226 – 31; see also Small Island Lewis, Jane 200 Lewis, Mary 200n7 Lewis, Thomas J. 116n16 Light in August 126, 129 – 31, 135; see also Faulkner, William listening to the ancestor 91 literary canon 11, 123, 131 – 2, 134, 235 literary influence 2, 5 – 7; and Larsen 5; and Morrison 5 – 6, 182; and Ward 5 Litwack, Leon 21 – 2 Lothe, Jacob 80 Lucas, John 21 Lupack, Barbara Tepa 227 lynching photograph 21 – 3 Machado Sáez, Elena 230n6 Machell, Ben 266 Mackey, Nathaniel 85, 156n22 Macpherson, William 204n17 magic 65, 116, 168, 254 – 6, 262 – 5 making kin 201 – 2, 204 – 5 “Making Room” 25 Makoha, Nick 235n4 Malik, Sarita 175 Marchini, Lisa 234n2 Marotte, Mary Ruth 106n5 Marshall, Natasha 244n11 Marson, Una 236, 245 Martin, Nina 104 – 5 Marx, Lesley 232 masculinity 17, 149, 183, 204 Mason-John, Valerie 244n11 maternal: care 114, 268 – 9; collective 258, 266; ethics 107, 112, 113n14, 115 – 19, 254 – 5, 261 – 2, 263 – 6, 268 – 70; figures 90, 110, 254; imaginary 270; instinct 111; sovereignty 107, 112, 113n14, 115 – 19, 116n16; thinking 111, 261; see also abortion; mothers; pregnancy McConnell, Justine 233n1, 234n3 McCoy, Shane A. 35n1, 45 McDonald, Laquan 26 McDowell, Deborah E. 15, 55n1 McLeod, John 161

284 Index Medea 107, 111 – 12, 115 – 18 melancholia 110, 200 – 201, 206, 259; “Mourning and Melancholia” 110n10; see also Freud, Sigmund Mercer, Kobena 236 Mercy, Yolanda 244n11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 198 metafiction 33 – 6, 45, 47 – 50 Methodist Girl’s High School 184 metonymic 187 – 90, 192, 196, 216, 221 – 2 Michael, John 27 microaggression 19, 25, 76, 219, 221 Middlebrook, Diane 210n26 middle-class 156, 170 – 1, 262; black women 54 – 7, 105; caricatures 175; comfort 178; families 255; identity 56; motherly virtues 261; upper- 59, 66; values 169; white women 112 migration 6, 18, 46, 196, 199 – 200, 203 – 7, 210 – 11, 235; migrant orientation 146; see also immigrants mind/body split 133 – 4; see also fragmentation Mirón, Louis 24 miscommunication 161, 163, 165, 171, 219, 230 misogyny 199, 203 Mitchell, David 63n5 Mitchell, Margaret 216, 226; see also Gone With The Wind Modernism 122, 125, 128n1, 134, 245; and nostalgia 128 – 9 Montagne, Renee 104 – 5 Montgomery, Maxine 82 Mooers, Colin 171 moral repair 84 – 5; see also Walker, Margaret Urban Morgan, Shaun 15 Morrison, Toni 89 – 91, 92, 93, 96, 107, 112, 113, 114, 196; A Mercy 5, 107; Beloved 90n1, 101 – 2, 112, 113n14, 114; and fragmentation 126, 128; “Home” 10; Jazz 11, 69 – 87, 122 – 39, 196, 198, 206 – 11; and literary influence 5 – 6, 89 – 91, 92 – 3, 96, 101 – 2, 107, 112, 113n14, 118, 182, 196, 206 – 11; Nobel Lecture 85; “Recitatif” 52, 58 – 65; Tar Baby 77 mothers: in Buchi Emechta 178, 185, 188, 190, 191 – 3; in Jazz 126, 127 – 30, 132, 196, 207 – 8; literary

mother 7; othermothers 90n3; in “Recitatif” 59, 62, 63, 64; in Salvage the Bones 104, 104n1, 107 – 13, 113n14, 115 – 19, 116n16; in Sing, Unburied, Sing 88, 90, 95 – 7, 99 – 100; in Swing Time 147, 147n9, 148, 153, 155, 159; in Trumpet 196 – 204; in White is for Witching 254 – 9, 261 – 70; see also abortion; maternal; pregnancy mourning 83, 110; “Mourning and Melancholia” 110n10; see also Freud, Sigmund Moya, Paula 1 – 4, 7 Mrs. Dalloway 126 – 8, 130 – 1, 135; Clarissa Dalloway 126 – 8, 130 – 1, 135; see also Woolf, Virginia Müldner, Gundula 252 – 3 Mullen, Harryette 236 multiculturalism 8 – 9, 161 – 6, 168 – 72, 175; multicultural ideology 171, 175 Muñoz, José Esteban 11, 16 – 23, 26, 30, 201n10 murder 65, 80, 82, 84, 98, 101, 131, 135, 249, 265 Nag Hammadi Library 132 – 3 Narain, Denise DeCaires 236n5 narrative: coming-of-age narrative 144, 147 – 8; disidentification 16 – 19, 23; and feminism 11, 179; focalization 34, 38 – 40, 43 – 50, 60, 77, 82, 173, 261; form and ethics 4 – 5, 77 – 8; form and race 2 – 3; frame narrative 33 – 6, 44 – 50; polyphonic 89, 95 – 7; structure 11, 16 – 17, 61, 77, 178, 182, 209, 255 – 9; unreliability 69; visual narrativity 18 – 23; see also perspective narrative theory: and critical race narratology 15; and race 1 – 3, 10 – 11, 15 – 17 Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States 1, 15; see also Donahue, James Nasta, Susheila 236n5 nationalism 38, 154; Black 201; British 266; Kenyan 180; racism and 154; white 9, 172, 262, 267 – 8; xenophobia and 172 Nattiel, Adreanna 22 naturalization 34 – 6, 168 Naylor, Gloria 182

Index  285 Nelson, Alondra 32 Nelson, Maggie 121 neutrality 35, 37, 43, 50 New Criticism 2 – 3, 124 – 5 Newton, Adam Zachary 69, 76 – 7, 80 New York City 76, 83, 104; see also Harlem Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 180 Nigeria 3, 6, 38, 42 – 6, 178 – 93, 199, 233, 239, 256, 264, 267; Nigerian literary establishment 179 – 81 Nobel lecture 85; see also Morrison, Toni Nussbaum, Martha 4 NW 9, 162 – 3, 172 – 4; see also Smith, Zadie Obera, Fred 179n2 Okiji, Fumi 145, 157, 159 Okome, Onookome 179n2 Okonkwo 181, 187; see also Achebe, Chinua Olney, James 32 Olsen, Greta 86 Olusoga, David 8 omnipotence 107 – 10; omnipotent mother 108 O’Neill, Karen M. 106n5 Ong, Walter J. 239 oppression 17, 36, 101, 188, 192, 217, 248; and ethics 75 – 6, 84 oral tradition 6, 179, 254, 259; orality of poetry 240, 248; resistant orality 236 Orientalist 170, 216 orientation 10, 29, 46, 143 – 6, 149, 198; disorientation 143 – 6 other: ethics of otherness 85; othering 46 – 50, 69, 85, 156n20, 262; othering encounters 37 – 41 Owusu-Bempah, Kwame 174 Oyeyemi, Helen 2, 6 – 7, 254 – 5, 258 – 62, 266 – 70 Palladino, Mariangela 77 Parchman Prison 88, 93 – 5, 98 – 101 Parkin, Emma. J. 253 parody 167 – 8, 171 – 2, 225, 229, 261, 266 Passing 2, 5, 52 – 62, 65 – 6; see also Larsen, Nella passing 53, 55 – 7, 65, 197, 210 Paul D 130, 207; see also Beloved; Morrison, Toni

Pecola Breedlove 131; see also Bluest Eye, The; Morrison, Toni personhood 66, 72 – 5, 85; and grammar 73 – 5, 84 perspective: first person 23 – 7, 186, 191 – 2; narrative 28n10, 35, 38 – 40, 43 – 7, 261; second person 27 – 30, 186; switching 165, 170, 175; third person 33, 38, 41, 58, 73, 186; see also narrative, focalization Phelan, James 81, 204 phenomenology 143 – 4, 198; of blackness 143; “The Phenomenology of Whiteness” 29; see also Ahmed, Sara Phillips, Siobhan 23 Phillips, Trevor 166 Phiri, Aretha 35n1, 45 pidgin 190 – 1 Plant, Ian. M. 247n13 polygamy 181, 185, 191 – 2 polyphonic novel 89, 95 – 7 post: -blackness 148, 153; -racial 81, 153 postcolonial 8, 149, 162, 166, 170, 178 – 81, 188, 200, 200n6, 240, 245, 251 posthumanism 108, 118 Powell, Enoch 8 precariousness 36 – 7, 44, 48, 240 pregnancy 104, 110, 185, 187, 190, 192; childbirth 104 – 5; see also abortion; maternal; mothers primogenitive 123, 126, 130 – 2, 136 privilege 43 – 8, 153 – 4, 175, 217 – 18, 230; able-bodied 64; complacency and 41; male 186; patriarchal 193; position of 200; price of 55; in relation to whiteness 65; wealth and 224; under white supremacy 56 property 9, 65, 105, 114, 215; whiteness as 72 – 3 psychoanalysis 108 – 11, 163 Punjabi, Rajul 32 Purdie, Susan 168 Queenie 215 – 30; see also Levy, Andrea; Small Island race: and law 7, 72 – 3 racial: economies 53 – 5, 59; hybridity 123, 132 – 3, 137, 148, 154; inequality 73, 112, 114; literacy 7; melancholia 200 – 201, 206;

286 Index subjectivity 11, 55 – 6, 58 – 60, 63 – 5, 123 – 4, 132, 137, 268; symbolic and imaginary 52 – 7, 58 – 62; unknowability 53; uplift politics 53, 66 racialization 36, 39 – 40, 49, 66, 108n7, 118, 123, 146 racialized subjectivity 5, 11, 15, 18, 52 – 68, 123, 131, 134, 143 – 5 Radcliffe, Ann 258 Rainwater, Catherine 77 – 80 Ramchand, Kenneth 240 Ramirez, Manuela Lopez 87 Ramsey-Kurz, Helga 171 Rankine, Claudia 2, 11, 15 – 32; see also Citizen rape 101 – 2, 135, 234, 242, 246 – 7 reader response 4, 52 – 3, 58, 62, 64 – 7, 123 – 5, 137, 261, 268 – 70; and blueprint 124 – 5, 137; and indeterminacy 125, 261; and irony 124, 137 reading: 33 – 5, 38 – 9; and alterity 4 – 5; liberatory reading 123 – 4, 134 – 7; reception by reader 34 – 5, 45, 85 realism 122, 162, 201, 242, 254 “Rebel, The” 193; see also Emecheta, Buchi reception 226, 244, 251; by reader 34 – 5, 45, 85; by viewer 181 “Recitatif” 2, 5, 52 – 3, 58 – 60, 62 – 5; see also Morrison, Toni Reed, Anthony 30 Reichl, Susanne 161 – 2, 170 Reinarz, Jonathan 228 repression 58, 67 rhizome 201, 203, 208, 210 Richards, Denise 216n2 Richardson, Brian 27; see also Unnatural Voices Richardson, Matt 203 Ricks, Shawn 22 Roberts, Dorothy 112 – 14 Roberts, Michael 218, 223 – 7; see also Levy, Andrea; Small Island Roberts, Yvonne 200n7 Robinson, James 133 Rodrigues, Eusebio L. 132n7 Rogers, Ivan 210n27 Roman: black citizens 8, 233, 234 – 5, 237, 250; rule 234 “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” 89, 96 Rosenblatt, Louise M. 125 Rubenstein, Roberta 129n2

Ruddick, Sara 111 – 12, 116, 261 Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. 32 Salvage the Bones 3, 104 – 19; see also Ward, Jesmyn Sandhu, Rajdeep 199n4 satire 49, 163, 261 – 2 Scafe, Suzanne 236n5 Second Class Citizen 182 – 7, 190; see also Emecheta, Buchi Selasie, Taiye 147, 149 September 11th 9, 37 – 8, 42 Settler generation of black women writers 235 – 6 Sexual violence toward women 234, 240 – 3, 247 – 8; commodification of black women’s bodies 234, 245, 246 shame 41 – 5, 48, 55 – 8, 64 – 5, 79, 83, 149, 169, 181, 243 Shariatmadari, David 166 Sharpe, Christina 105 Shaw, Philip 75 Shelby, Tommie 75 – 7, 80 Sheridan, Alan 54 Shipp, Thomas 21 Siddiqa, Ayesha 36n2 sin 77; and black music 133 – 4 Sing, Unburied, Sing 5, 88 – 92, 101 – 2; see also Ward, Jesmyn Slave Girl, The 181; see also Emecheta, Buchi slavery 6 – 7, 130, 188; American 123, 136; in antiquity 234n3; Black women’s bodies 19; dislocation wrought by 144; in the movies 226 – 8; and racism 84, 127; sanitization of 216 Small Island 3, 215 – 17, 226 – 30; see also Levy, Andrea Smith, Abraham 21 Smith, Ali 206n18 Smith, Jamil 22 Smith, Valerie 147 Smith, Zadie 2, 9, 43, 143 – 5, 152 – 8, 161 – 2, 167 – 71, 175; see also Autograph Man, The; Changing My Mind; NW; Swing Time; White Teeth Snead, James 135; see also cut, the Snyder, Sharon 63n5 social: abandonment 107, 111 – 14; formation 49; positioning 3; structure 20, 35, 46, 107, 135 socioeconomic 41, 43, 47, 106, 187

Index  287 sociological 10, 151, 178 – 9, 182 – 4, 190, 193 “Song of the Son” 136; see also Toomer, Jean soucouyant 6, 230n6, 254, 256 – 60, 264; see also Caribbean folktale Sound and the Fury, The 129; see also Faulkner, William sovereignty 73, 107, 112 – 18, 151, 158n22 Soyinka, Wole 232 Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto 60, 63 starvation 102, 222, 263, 269 – 70 state of nature 5, 105 – 7, 113n14, 115 – 16 St. Bonny’s 59 – 62; see also Morrison, Toni Stein, Mark 10, 161 – 2, 170 Stoker, Bram 255, 267; see also Dracula Stokes, Melvyn 226 storytelling 90 – 4, 144, 158n22, 184, 244, 255, 259, 264; canonical 136; collective cultural 90; modernist forms of 85; oral 5; as plot itself 179 – 83; West African participatory 6, 255, 259, 264; wounded 85 subjectivity see intersubjective; racial, subjectivity; racialized subjectivity superiority 39, 46, 163 – 6, 172 – 4, 219 – 20 survival 104 – 5, 109 – 11, 115 – 18, 147n10, 165, 226, 241, 249 Swinfield, Geoffrey 253 swing 10; music 143, 156; Swing Time 10, 143 – 59; see also Smith, Zadie symbolic, racial 52 – 7, 58 – 62 sympoiesis 201 syncretic 132, 179 – 80, 182 – 3, 188 – 90 taboo 188 – 91, 223 – 4, 248 Taiwo 188 – 93 Taylor, Harry 199n4 Teach Yourself to Write 184 Tew, Philip 164, 172 Thandeka 36 Thunder, Perfect Mind 123, 132 – 4 Titley, Gavan 172 “Today, the Balance of Stories” 181; see also Achebe, Chinua Todorov, Tzvetan 89 Toomer, Jean 33, 123, 136; see also Cane; “Song of the Son”

“Towards a Feminist Narratology” 179; see also Lanser, Susan tragedy 166, 172, 181, 243 transgender: continuous transition 201 – 2; ethics 196 – 7, 202, 211; identity 196 – 7, 198, 200 – 201, 204, 210; theory 197; transphobia 197, 199, 203, 204 Trepagnier, Barbara 216, 218 Trumpet 2, 5, 196 – 210; see also Kay, Jackie Tuana, Nancy 106 Tullett, William 228 Tuotola, Amos 180 Turnipseed, Joel 232 twentieth-century 21, 52 – 4, 66, 81, 144 – 8, 188, 216, 236 twins 186 – 9, 255, 258; and sisterhood 191 – 2; see also chi; ibeji myth uncanny 55, 62 – 4, 67, 261; racial uncanny 52, 61 universalism 150 – 1; universality 37, 43 – 4, 137 Unnatural Voices 27; see also Richardson, Brian unreliability 75, 81, 196, 204, 208 – 9; ethics of 69 – 70; and innocence 69, 77 – 8; and Jazz’s narrator 2, 69 – 70, 78 – 80, 83 – 4 vampire 6, 254 – 61, 266 – 7; novel 255 Vandaele, Jeroen 165 – 6, 168, 172 Vernon, Alex 229n5 Veronelli, Gabriela 234 Villarosa, Linda 104n1 Violet Trace 70, 74, 84, 125 – 31, 206 – 10 visual narrativity 18 – 19, 23, 30; see also narrative Wächter, Cornelia 204 Wailoo, Keith 106n5 Waldman, Annie 104n1 Waldrop, Rosemarie 235 Walker, Alice 7, 182 Walker, Margaret Urban 84 – 5; see also moral repair Wall, Cheryl 10 – 11, 15 Walters, Tracey L. 161 Ward, Jesmyn 2, 5, 89 – 90, 95, 100 – 102, 105, 113n14, 118; see also Salvage the Bones; Sing, Unburied, Sing Wasafiri 179; see also Bryce, Jane

288 Index Washington, Teresa 263 – 4 Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ 180 Waugh, Patricia 34, 36, 50 Webb, Clive 200 Weinstein, Philip M. 129n2 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 32 West African 189; beliefs 186n8, 193; culture 178; diasporic woman writer 185, 254 – 5; identity 188; magical practices 263 – 6; origin 250; participatory storytelling 6, 255, 259 Western 208, 216, 265; bourgeois male subject 145n7; civilization 123, 133; colonial institutions 178; culture 133, 135; educated 181; empire 149; ideals 150; identity 132; philosophy 119; readers 187, 190, 264; style nuclear family 191, 262; subjectivity 192; thought 145; worldview 133 white: allyship 215 – 21, 229 – 30; British National Party 267 – 8; fragility 20, 216 – 17; gaze 74 – 5, 222 – 3; nationalism 9, 172, 262; supremacy 52 – 69, 80, 217, 228 – 30, 262, 266 – 8 whiteness: as property 72 – 3; and racialization 53 – 8, 59 – 62, 65 Whitehead, Anne 206n18 Whitehead, Colson 32 White Teeth 9, 161 – 71, 230n6; see also Smith, Zadie Wild 81 – 2, 129 – 31, 135 – 7, 207 – 9; Wild’s cave 136; see also Jazz; Morrison, Toni

Wilde, Oscar 233 Williams, Philip B. 22 Williams, Serena 19 – 20 Wimsatt, W.K. 124 Windrush 200, 229 – 30; and Jamaican settlers 215 – 17 Winnicott, D.W. 109, 115n15 Wizard of Oz, The 59, 266 Wolfe, Cary 108n7 Womack, Kenneth 86 Wondrich, David 157 – 8 Woodcock, Bruce 215 Woolf, Virginia 123, 126 – 8, 131, 136, 167, 243 – 5; see also Mrs. Dalloway World War I 123, 262, 268 World War II 8, 66n6, 200, 215 – 18, 226, 235 Wozniacki, Caroline 19 Wright, Michelle 143 Wuyts, Ann 253 Wyatt, Jean 132n5, 135n6, 208n21, 209n23, 209 Wynter, Sylvia 145n7 xenophobia 9, 163, 172, 199, 211, 262, 270 Yancy, George 29 Yoruba 6, 182, 186 – 9, 233, 254 – 5, 258 – 9, 263 – 5 Zerweck, Bruno 69 Zuleika 8, 233 – 53; see also Emperor’s Babe, The; Evaristo, Bernardine