History and Historicity in African American Women’s Literature
In both my critical and literary readings of Black women writers and literary critics, I see a grappling with historicity and the philosophy of history. Unlike academic historians who rarely cite literary scholars in their analysis of history, Black women scholars of literature cite and directly intervene in conversations with historians as well as on the nature of history itself. This is evident in the work of Cheryl Wall, Deborah McDowell, Frances Smith Foster, Miriam De Costa as well as Saidiya Hartman. Black women’s literary work also addresses issues of history and historicity. The most well known example is probably Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but I also think that the novels Of One Blood, Corregidora, and The Women of Brewster Place all engage in an analysis of history, of possibility, of rupture.
I am informed in my understanding of black women’s literature and history by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, which she defines as
“By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object, if only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity. By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hoped to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. The outcome of this method is a “recombinant narrative,” which “loops the strands” of incommensurate accounts and which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the time of slavery as our present.”
I argue here that other scholars of Black women’s literature-Deborah McDowell, Cheryl Wall, Frances Smith Foster-as well as Black women authors themselves-work to “illuminate the contested character of history” as Hartman does.
Cheryl Wall writes that “on the cusp of a new century, black women’s writing has been preoccupied with the recuperation and representation of the past four hundred years of black peoples lives in the United States and through the African Diaspora.” Wall emphasises the ways in which black women writers like Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor contest, revise and create a history hidden and unwritten. For Wall, “worrying the line” is part of a tradition-of revision, of storytelling. Wall says “Black women writers pay their respect to the line of African American literary tradition while worrying that line in order to recollect stories that were never written but were passed down orally from generation to generation, as well as to imagine stories that were too painful to ever be told.”
Similarly to Wall’s “worrying the line,” Frances Smith Foster writes about black women writer’s “testifying.” She argues that black women writers have been recording and influencing American history since before the founding. She refers to these writers not just as writing themselves into being, but revising the English literary tradition. Smith Foster’s work is focused on the earliest African American women writers, those that were not commonly known even by other black women writers. Smith Foster argues that to find early black women writers, one must “look beyond the archives” and become “literary anthropologists.” Scholars must be prepared to read the fragments. Smith Foster wrote “I suggest that the extant literature from 1746 to 1892, albeit small in quantity proves that African American women, like African American men, deliberately chose to participate in their public discourse despite considerable Anglo-American resistance to their doing so.”16 Foster goes on to say that early black women writers, including Phillis Wheatley, were aware that their testimony was necessary for an “authentic African american literary tradition.” Early Black women writers were aware of both their status, and the power of their intervention in the creation of an American literary tradition.
Use of family photographs as history is also emphasized in Wall’s work, particularly in her reading of Luclle Clifton. Unacknowledged by many academic historians, with the exception of Rosenzweig and Thelen’s study The Presence of the Past, family history is the way most people engage with history. (footnote) Wall quotes morrison on Beloved, where she says “nothing that reminds us of the one who made the journey and of those who did not make it...because such a place does not exist (that I know of), the book had to.” Like the historians and literary scholars who wrote in The Slave’s Narrative, both Morrison and Wall grapple with the history of the enslaved, particularly those who experienced the middle passage. She also discusses Alice Walker’s work on Zora Neale Hurston and the attempts to change (and in some ways create) a history of her work.
In Corregidora, Gayl Jones explores the role of slavery in intergenerational trauma through a narrative that uses fragments and destabilization to emphasize the rupture and history of the Corregidora family. Protagonist Ursa’s Great Gram’s rape by slave owner Corregidora is the origin point of the story: Corregidora also rapes the child he conceived with Ursa’s Great Gram, which produces (WC) Ursa’s mother. Ursa’s family encourages her to continue the family line, as well as the storytelling surrounding rape, slavery and trauma that was central to these women’s experiences. In many ways, this fragmentary narration, this emphasis on storytelling, is what Cheryl Wall refers to as “worrying the line” and Frances Smith Foster calls “testifying.”
Even if the events told in Corregidora did not happen, this does not mean that Jones was not telling history, telling the truth, through her novel. This does not mean we read neo-slave narratives as descriptive histories, but that we can consider the ways in which Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation is also deployed by black women novelists. In The Slave’s Narrative, Henry Louis Gates wrote that “the slave narrative represents the attempts of blacks to write themselves into being.” Similarly, the neo-slave narrative, as well as other forms of Black Women’s literature, is an attempt to write black women not just into being, but into history.
In Playing in the Dark, Morrison writes “my work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African American women writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at: nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.”
In combination, these African American women writers engagement with historicity and with the past do write black women into historical existence. They also dispute arguments, like that of Kenneth Warren in What Was African American Literature?, that African American literature, as both genre and form, only existed as a result of Jim Crow. For Warren’s argument to hold true, it would need to discount hundreds of years of African American women’s writings.
Black Women’s literature, according to Smith Foster, can be traced back to the earliest years of an American literary tradition and in effect created a literary and historical tradition that writes black women into historical existence and challenges not just the boundaries of a 20th century African American literary tradition but the fragments and ruptures that create history itself.
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