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BRIDGING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE:
READING AND [R]EADING DIASPORIC POLITICS IN
ALICE WALKER'S POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY AND
AMA ATA AIDOO'S CHANGES

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BRIDGING THE NIDDLE PASSAGE:
RERDING AND [R]EADING DIASPORIC POLITICS IN

ALICE 'RLHER'S 88 EC AND
RNA ATA RIDOO’S CHANGES

BY

ANGELETTR KIN MARIE GOURDINE

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

1994

ABSTRACT

BRIDGING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE: READING AND [R]EADING
DISAPORIC POLITICS IN ALICE WALKER’S EQ§§E§§IHQ

IEE-fiBQBEI_QEAIQX AND AMA ATA AIDOO’S QBAHQES
by
Angeletta Kim Marie Gourdine

The concept of an African diaspora has motivated
scholars from all disciplines to investigate the cultural
connections amongst the peoples collected under this rubric.
This critical study surveys the development of "blackness”
as a cultural and identity construct, and how the concept of
"blackness” affects African American encounters with African
texts. Analyzing two literary texts, one by an African
American woman and one by an African woman, I discuss how
the discourse of blackness has (1) allowed for a gendered
identity move from black woman to blackwoman, which I
identify as black[ ]woman and (2) licensed the writing of
cultural fictions.

In this work the writers of fiction are the readers of
cultural texts. The major cultural text these writers read
is the African diaspora. Following Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s
distinction between signification and signification, in this
project, I distinguish between Reading and reading. While
reading implies only interpretation, Reading is

interpretation with the addition of a negative underlying or

implicit commentary. Using Alice Walker's £g§§g§§13g_;ng
agg;§;_gfi_lgy, and her reading of ritual female
circumcision, I argue that in an attempt to locate herself
in the diasporic space, she has written an Africa that
accommodates that need; Walker’s reading actually Reads
African women. In response, I examine Ama Ata Aidoo's
Qhanggg. In this novel, Aidoo Reads constructs of African
women like those of Walker and explodes notions of
monolithic African gendered experiences. Though Aidoo
explores the historical relationship between Africans and
African Americans, her discourse only reads that history.
This Africentric project brings these women "face to
face," confronting each other with their own words, uttering
their conditions, and concerns all in search of a
blackwomen's literary tradition. Not only do the fictional
discourses illuminate black[ ]women's oppression and their
struggle to mitigate the pains of that, but the critical
discourses indicate, as well, black[ ]women’s capacity to

oppress each other.

Copyright by
ANGEIETTA KIM MARIE GOURDINE
1994

DBDICATION
In Memory Of

Victoria Graham Priestley M. Gourdine, Sr.
22 Mar 13 - 11 Nov 93 18 Jun 45 - 24 Dec 91

The spiritual beams that have shone this way.

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I thank God for giving me the
wisdom to reason my way, the strength to remain steadfast,
and surrounding me with a large and loving family that
sustained me. To God and to them, I am highly indebted for
the tenacity that got me through this project.

Second, I am grateful to all those who offered me
emotional, intellectual and financial support enabling me to
commence and emerge from this process successful and
somewhat sane. Especially, I am indebted to my siblings
Priestley M., Jr., Altovise LaChelle Denise and Berneta
Jonai for being my inspiration and even for maintaining
those excessive expectations that I dared not fail to meet.
To Gedney H. Howe, III, Attorney at Law, I owe a debt that
my achievements thus far, and to come, hopefully will pay.
Thanks ever so much for believing in me, standing by me and
always wishing me well. You were my first ever
mentor/advisor and are my long lasting forever friend. To
Karla Hallway, thanks for letting me know that no matter
what the distance, your wing span was wide enough that I
would always have its cover. To my dearest friend Catonseia
Jennings, thanks for loaning me your ears when I could not
hear, your voice when I could not speak, your eyes when I

refused to see, and your soul when I had lost my own.

vii

I appreciate the time, energy and patience my committee
members devoted to helping me see my way through this work.
As a collective, Professors Katherine Fishburn, Kenneth
Harrow and Denise Troutman-Robinson offered direction,
support, collegiality and always wisdom. Individually, I
acknowledge their nurturance of my "small idea" into a
larger work that we can all claim and one that I can be
especially proud to call my own. Personally, I would like
to thank Katherine Fishburn for boarding a rocky boat and
not ”jumping ship" when the waters seemed unnavigable, and
most importantly thanks for always believing. As a
linguist, I find this a most confounding moment, for
unfortunately, "Thank You" does not respond to the vast
wealth you have all shared with and imparted to me.

I would like to issue Special Thank You’s to ”Dr. G“
[Professor Smitherman]: I've begun to know what "my own
thang' is, and I owe that, in great part, to you. Dr.
Victor Panaanen, as a committee member and especially as
Chair of the Department of English, thanks for your
listening ear and willingness to help. Rimero Gonzales,
”Whew, I made it;" thanks for listening to me, hearing me
and saving me from myself. Dr. Stephen Rachman, I am
indebted to you for the times you allowed me to flood your
office with my dissertation woes, ceaseless complaining and
hyperdramatic traumas. I thank you for your suggestions,

advice, and your bright sense of humor. Finally, to the

viii
second best support system a graduate student can have:
Friends. To all the people who count themselves among my
friends, especially Tonita Branan, Ronnie Hopkins and
Rashidah Muhammad, I say thanks for indulging my impestuous
moments (I know it was not always easy).

I thank the English department secretaries, Rosemary
Ezzo--for being my friend and for always knowing how to do
what had to be done, Jill Crane--for always being honest and
helping when asked--and Sharon Tyree for always keeping
things on the light and endurable side.

Without people who cared, shared, laughed and cried
with me, this project would not have reached such a speedy

and successful completion.

ix

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: HOW IT FEELS TO READ COLORED ME 1

Newly Creating Africa: African American Cultural
Fiction 6

Asante and He, Or The Africentric Project: The
”Roots” of Race(d) Culture, Culture(d) Race 17

"What is Africa to Me?": Blackness in the
Nineteenth Century and Beyond 25

Cross-Cultural Readings, or Sailing the "Black
Atlantic” 48

CHAPTER TWO: COM YA C'AINT ’NO MORE THAN BEEN YA,
OR KNOWING AFRICAN WOMEN: BEADIH§_ALIQE

HALKEBLS_29EEESSINQ_THE_5E£BET_QI_IQX, 69
On The ugzinign: Walker's Move from Black Women to
Blackwomen 77

The Writer as Quilt Maker: Alice Walker as
Ethnographer 88

The Voice of Tradition; Or, Walker's Literary
Tradition 98

Reading African Women While Writing Herself
Walker’s Web

A BRIDGE: READING (IN) CONTESTED SPACES 128

CHAPTER THREE: ”GOING THROUGH CHANGES" WITH AMA
ATA AIDOO: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND
AFRICA, THE CONVERSATION HISTORY
THWARTED 137

Of Sisterhood and Oppression: Aidoo and the
Critical Tradition of Reading African Women
['s Fiction] 139

Esi Sekyi: I, Too, am African, Or the Complexity
of Gender

Speaking of the Those That Came Before: Aidoo
Literary Heritage, The Issue of Polygamy

Must My Tongue Always Be in My Friend's Mouth?
Or Can Aidoo and Walk Talk it Over Woman to Woman

REFERENCES

155

171

186

197

xi

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Deciding to discuss how African Americans respond to
African literature presented me a major difficulty: How do I
know what the responses will be? After I have decided,
based on my own experiences, what they would be, how could I
”prove" my hypothesis accurate? The text that follows is
the result of my struggle to answer the latter question.
This project analyzes African American readings of Africa as
encoded in literary texts. As a critical analysis of
literary works, this projects borders on ethnographic
methodology: Though I did not desire to interview African
Americans for their opinions on how they read Africa, I do
use their voices as presented in some literatue by African
American. Further, because my arguments challenge certain
linear conceptions of time, they are often circular. I have
constructed this project to both span time and space and
discuss/critique such expanses. Hence, it is as much about
the literature it discusses as it is self reflexive. It

reads literature, Roads literature, and it just Roads.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION :
now 11' nus me new commas xs‘

This project examines how Africa is constructed in the
African American literary imagination, and it interrogates
blackness as a critical theory through which African
Americans read African texts--cultural and literary. As the
title of this chapter indicates, my critical inquiry focuses
on how blackness as a cultural and identity construct
affects African American encounters with African texts.
Furthermore, this study provides an African commentary on
African American readings through blackness. Two literary
texts will be discussed in this project, one by an African
American woman and another by an African woman, but the
”stories" in both these texts are of Africa. In this vein,
I engage in what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. terms criticism of
”comparative black literature” (figures 237).2 Gates's
paradigm indicates a study of cross-cultural reading, but in
the context of African American readers of African texts,
the notion of cross-cultural reading is quite problematic
because of the cultural continuity that affects this reading
situation. In this work, I survey the development of a
discourse of black cultural continuity and examine texts

written within this discourse.

2

Manning Marable presents a position that highlights the
border upon which I locate my discussion. He argues, in
”Race, Identity and Political Culture," that "blackness, or
African American identity is much more than race" (295).
Because race is something that is imposed on a group from
without, blackness has come to be more than just a racial
group identifier: it has become an ethnicity marker.
Blackness is "a cultural umbilical cord connecting [African
American peoples] to Africa" (Marable 295), so to be black,
then, is to be African and American particularly, but also
African and Caribbean, African and Brazilian or African and
English. Thus, blackness has less to do with race, per se,
than with culture: it names a collectivity and defines its
cultural milieu. Therefore, I use ethnicity, instead of
race, to indicate that the collectivity is not being
characterized based on shared biology, but based on common
social history.3 Blackness connotes identity but also
positionality. To be black is not only to claim for
yourself a particular sociocultural history, but it is also
to align yourself with a sociopolitical orientation. The
black people who subscribe to blackness or are inscribed by
it are various. Blackness, as Marable uses it, and
functioning as I describe above, is metonymic. It at once
names a larger population while representing a specific
segment of that population. The objective is to organize a
sociopolitical body around the tenet that first and

3

foremost, blackness signifies "all people of African
descent--the Latin, the Jamaican, the Haitian, the
Brazilian, the Caribbean, and the African American" (Kouyate
B8). D’ Jimo Kouyate further suggests that "although they
were not born in Africa, they are still African people"
(BS). This cultural syncretism has led to_the development
and intellectual and creative exploration of the African
diaspora.

The African diaspora is an ethnic collective defined as
"the population of indigenous Africans [dispersed] through a
planned systematic or curious movement from the African
continent" (Snead 4). Werner Sollors tells us that too
often we take ethnicity to be a "fixed, self-evident
category," when in fact processes like that above constitute
ethnicities as "invented" (xiii). While I too agree that
ethnicity does not always already exist, I am not thusly
minimizing the reality of social and political struggles
waged on the grounds of ethnic differences. The paramount
issue for me, however, is this: if we posit that ethnicity
is an invention, then we are afforded a different lens
through which to examine its functioning. Specifically, I
am interested in how the syncretic process of diasporization
impacts on literary interpretation. One such functioning is
as a ”cultural presence" (Holloway 12).‘ Karla Holloway
reminds us that ethnicity "operates in fictive places in

[black texts]: in the imaginative realms, [ethnicity]

4

becomes the ultimate signifier as it plays within the
imaginative domains of fictional language" (12). It is
precisely how blackness [r]eads in these "fictive places,"
"imaginative realms" and "imaginative domains" that I
explore in the works of Alice Walker and Ama Ata Aidoo.

Take, for example, Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Qur_§i§;er
3111121. The novel is clearly about the conflicts between
African intellectuals, been-tos and others. It is easy to
associate Sissie’s struggle with that of an African American
intellectual. Similar issues exist for both groups (e.g.,
how to reconcile individual achievement with community
responsibility).5 However, 5111191 is teeming with other
African related intellectual issues like the question of the
artists' language: How can the decolonized mind create and
be appropriately represented in the colonizer’s language?‘
While it is not my position that the reading which focuses
on familiarity should be ruled out or eliminated as a
possibility, it is my argument that an explication of
Aidoo's text should not be limited to cultural similarities.
Qur_§is§er_fiilljgy is as much about the African writer’s
linguistic dilemma, as it is about African women’s voices,
or the dilemma of the black [African] intellectual.7 The
text is situated in a culture and the actions that take
place within it should be explicated with attention paid to
that particular culture. While Kouyate's comment submits

that the connections between Africa and African America are

5

a foregone conclusion and should be accepted as point of
fact, the literature itself reflects the ongoing struggle to
negotiate the nature of this relationship. That is, African
American literature has revealed varying attitudes toward
Africa from Phillis Wheatley's poetry to Alex Haley’s Boots
to Alice Walker's recent novel 2g§sgsging_thg_§ggrgt_gfi_lgy.

Furthermore, these varying representations mark a
certain attitude and positionality toward Africa and its
place in African American culture. Countee Cullen offers a
cogent example of how critical an issue "Africa’s" location
in black American culture is. As well, the final line of
Cullen’s well known poem "Heritage" demonstrates some
aspects of the struggle that are highly relevant to my
discussion later on:

Lord forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed.

The poem poses a question that was seminal in Cullen's age
and has reemerged to become a primary question as the
twenty-first century comes upon us.

The question appears in the first line of "Heritage,"
when the poet asks, "What is Africa to Me?" The "me" is of
course the black American, the Negro. This poem epitomizes
the struggle for cultural identity, racial identity. It
demonstrates the foundation of an ethnicity as one black
American attempts to negotiate his identity in relation to

an African past:

6

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his father loved

Spicy grove and banyan tree,

What is Africa to me?
The speaker accepts that there is a connection, but ponders
how that connection should be represented and on what
grounds it should be forged. If we accept that Africa is
bound to black American identity, we can begin to trace the
construction of that identity. Cullen’s final lines suggest
that because of temporal distance, the need to know and
answer that yearning has facilitated the shaping of an
Africa, a mythic grounding place. This shaping did not
begin with Cullen, and it continues beyond him. Through
even the most basic review of how the discourse of African
America came to have such prominence, we can see the effects

of this discourse on literary imagination in the shaping of

cultural fictions.

Newly Creating Africa: African American Cultural Fictions
Cultural fictions are the texts around which I focus
the major portion of this project. I define these fictions
as literary works that explore culture itself--cultural
images and cultural presences. Though it could be argued
that since all literature explores some facet of culture,
literature is cultural fiction, I suggest that cultural
fictions go beyond mere explorations. These texts seek to
first, isolate and identify a particular cultural image,

practice, or dilemma, and then to use that cultural fact for

7
the purposes of representing that culture in a way conducive
to furthering the writer's political aim. Cultural fictions
are fictional works with didacticism at their core. For
centuries, the African American literary imagination has
been actively exploring Africa.~ Not all of these
representations are culturally fictional, however. Here, we
will trace the development of black American cultural
fictions of Africa from early black American writings.

As early as Philliss Wheatley, for example, we get a
conflicted attitude toward the Continent. She at once
remembers it as home but recognizes that because of her
forced removal she had to make a new home. She wrote:

'T was not so long since I left my

native shore,/ The land of errors and

Egyptian gloom:/ Father of mercy! ’t was

thy gracious hand/ Brought me in safety

from those dark abodes. (Redding 6)
Wheatley casts Africa simultaneously as home-~her "native
shore" and as ”dark“. Moreover, she never suggests
returning, as she values the freedom her soul relishes in
the New World. George Moses Horton, on the other hand,
wrote of the slave's "grief and anguish" (Brown 275).
Further, he looked toward heaven ”to soothe [his] pain," so
that he may:

Soar on the pinion of that dove / Which

for long has cooed for thee, / And

breathed her notes from Afric’s grove /

The sound of liberty. (Brown 275).

Wheatley's "land of error," her "dark abode" was Horton’s

edenic ”grove" with "doves" cooing songs of liberty. These

8
two eighteenth century writers set the frame for examining
the literary attitudes that followed.

Nineteenth century literature reflected a similar
disparity of attitudes in the work of Frederick Douglass and
Martin Delaney. Douglass declared that Africa held nothing
for the black American with respect to gaining freedom from
slavery. Contrary to the emigrationist argument that
African offered black American men and women physical and
political refuge from the inhumanity of slavery, Douglass
averred:

Depend upon it savage chiefs of the

western coast of Africa, for ages have

been accustomed to selling their

captives into bondage . . . they will

not more readily accept our moral and

economic ideas than the slave traders of

Maryland and Virginia. Therefore be less

inclined to go to Africa to work against

the slave trade than to stay here to

work against it. (Hill & Kilson 164)
Douglass's anti-African sentiment, and firm conviction that
the home of the African American was America was matched by
Martin Delany's strong emigrationist politics. Delany
clearly saw Africa as a safe haven for black Amerians and
fervently believed that black Americans should relocate to
and begin new colonies in Africa. Unlike Douglass, Delany
considered Africa not only a solace for blacks, but also a
berth from which black Americans could wage the struggle to
reclaim their humanity. Delany argued that:

Our cause is a just one: the greatest at

present that elicits the attention of
the world--Our race is to be redeemed:

. 9

it is a great and glorious work, and we

are the instrumentalities by which it is

to be done. But we must go from among

our oppressors; it never can be done by

staying among them. (183)
The arguments put forth by Douglass and Delany re-present
those presented by Wheatley and Horton, respectively.
However, the nineteenth century ended before the identity
and political issues were resolved. In fact, black American
literature documents the ongoing significance of this issue.
This compulsion to define Africa’s place in the black
American experience saw another rise in the later half of
this century. Examining a few of the later literary
characterizations further illustrates the different
positions.

In the 1965 BIQQK_MADL§_BBIQQD. John Oliver Killens
discusses the "burden" Africa presents for the American
Negro:

Negroes are the only people in this

world who are set apart because they are

who they are, and at the same time told

to forget who they are by the same

people who set them apart in the first

place. (Killens 28)
He explains that the Negro is at once punished because he is
of African descent, and admonished for actively claiming an
African heritage. This controversy has presented such
questions as "Is there a black, African American culture?"°
and ”What is the role of Africa in that culture?" and even

”What’s in a Name?: Black or African American?"9 In fact,

W. E. B. DuBois identified culture--literature and art--as a

10
significant part of the Negro race's message to the world
(see discussion below). Here, in the works of African
American fiction writers, the various answers to these
questions are presented.
In 1966, John O. Killens wrote:

Just as surely as East is East and West

is West there is a ’black’ psyche in

America, and there is a ’white' one, and

the sooner we face up to this

psychological, social and cultural

reality, the sooner the twain shall

meet. . . . Most of us came here in

chains, and many of [them] came here to

escape [their] chains. [Their] freedom

was our slavery. (8: my emphasis)
The present is always linked to the past: Race and Slavery,
America and Africa. For the black American the present
recalls the past in differing ways. Killens, a black
Aesthetician, argues that a cultural matrix for Africans in
the diaspora is necessary for their survival in the New
World. This "cultural reality" involves no renunciation of
heritage, but a synthesis of old and new into a new whole: a
hybrid. What is involved here is a writing of the black
self. Some like Killens acknowledge the African influence
on that self, others like Bruce Wright do not:

Black is where thatched temples burn

Incense to carved ebon-wood:

Where traders shaped my father’ 8 pain,

His person and his place,

Among dead statues in a frieze,

. In the spectrum of his race.
(145)

Wright suggests that "black" lives in the land of thatching,

a reference to a style of building homes in Africa--a

11
reference augmented with the mention of traders and his
ancestral pain, slavery. Wright, unlike Killens, does not
see Africa as vital to his present survival. Africa is
black, and this begs the question of what, then, is the
African in America. As we saw earlier, in answering the
question of his "heritage," "what is Africa to me?" Cullen,
as well, responds with many negative images: "nakedness,"
"wild barbaric birds,” "heathen gods Black men fashion out
of rods" (252-3). In contrast, some fashion another Africa,
an idealized Garden of Eden wherein Africans, blacks, live
free of restraints and in peace. A classic example of this
idyllic, unchanged utopian image of Africa is provided in
Alex Haley's Roots.

In the final chapter of that journal of his ancestry,
Haley describes Juffure, the village of his ancestry thus:
”like most back-country villages, it was still very much as
it was two hundred years ago” (576). Like most idealized
descriptions this one is unreal, but its purpose is to
provide an element of identity, connecting Africa to the
African in the United States. On the other hand, Ralph
Ellison describes Africa in terms of its artifacts, mainly
an ”ugly African god" (148). This god is housed with other
”cracked relics from slavery time" in a University archive
room, and the protagonist avoids the room lest he glance at

these unpleasant images (148).

12

Relative to these representations, Dan Izevbaye
suggests that literature can be used to forge particular
cultural and personal agendas. However, the representations
in literature, he asserts "have no power outside the active
response of its audience" (129). In fact, I believe
writers themselves act as readers/critics when presenting
Africa in their fictional creations. Therefore, these
responses that Izevbaye speaks of are influenced by the
writers' struggle to sort out the African American
connection. It is my position that these writers write for
themselves. I read their texts as manifestation of their
literary imagination functioning as vehicles for situating
the writers in the world, negotiating their identity with
respect to Africa. This is clear in Alex Haley and Countee
Cullen and will be demonstrated with Alice Walker.

Eddy Harris, in his 1992 work Natiye_§tzange;, not only
documents his journey to and from Africa, he also narrates a
connection with his past. He concludes that he is ”a
product of a new culture and defined by it. And [he] sees
the world through American eyes" (29). The routes of
displacement have demanded a replanting of roots, and this
(re)rooting cannot be eschewed. As Harris tells us, the
African American: y

is another race, newborn and distinct,
forged in the blast furnace of slavery,
tempered and tested in the foundry of

survival . . . . Yes, Africa is the
birthplace of mankind. Africa is the

13

land of my ancestor. But, Africa is not
home (28-9: 312).

The title of Eddy Harris’s text provides a way to explain
Haley and Cullen’s new representation of Africa: "Native
[and] Stranger." Their texts are constructed by cultural
critics (fiction writers) who recognize that they are at
once present in the space that they are attempting to
define--Africa--and are simultaneously absent or excluded
from that space. These representations, because they are "a
product of a new culture," will be reviewed in terms of
cross-cultural reading. The cultural links between African
Americans and Africa allow for a certain understanding to be
assumed about African cultural texts. Yet, there is also
enough distance from Africa[n texts] to allow the cultural
critic to make an Africanist criticism of it.10 What
bridges the gulf of being absent and present? Clearly, the
obvious answer lies in demonstrating that the African self
somehow latently resides in the African American self. For
example, Alice Walker believes she can create a Tashi
because she is licensed by her ancestral foremothers, whose
voices are her muses. However, she can criticize the
beliefs of Tashi’s people because she is a Western woman
concerned about the treatment of women and the damage
wreaked upon "the blameless vulva." It is this
inside/outside position that allows writers like Walker to

not only read African cultural texts, but Read them as well.

14

Following Gates’s distinction between signification and
signification, in this project, I distinguish between
Reading and reading. Gates tells us that Signifyin subsumes
several black rhetorical tropes, including, "loud-talking,
testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping,
[and] playing the dozens" (Figures 236).11 Smitherman
further develops Gates's notion of Signifyin. She tells us
that Signifyin is "the verbal art of put down, ritualized
insult: to needle [sic], talk about someone," and most
importantly, Signifyin is "generally non-malicious and
principled criticism" (Blagk_1alk 238). But one of the
forms that Signifyin can take is that of Reading. Reading
is the act of "tell[ing] someone off in no uncertain terms
and in a verbally elaborate manner" (Smitherman 216). In
addition, Reading can often be disguised or indirect. Much
like Gates’s Signifyin, Reading is paradoxically related to
reading: it is at once identical and different. While
reading implies only interpretation, Reading is
interpretation with the addition of an underlying or
implicit commentary. Hence, Reading involves
interpretation, but the interpretation is taken to signify,
or represent, something other than the text. The
interpretation stands for something beyond an uncovered
”meaning." The interpretations rendered when someone [or

something] is Read always reveal more than the obvious. In

15
this sense, Reading involves not only interpretation but
representation and revision.

Texts like Walker's read Africa in a search for
essences. In fact, Walker claims to have found her essence
in her African past. In particular, though, she has
discovered black women's essence, and as a black woman in
America, she finds she is connected to and affected by the
treatment of other black women, wherever they may be.‘2
Correspondingly, her concern for black women and her
grounding in a Western feminist tradition changes her
reading to a Reading. As Foucault tells us, the pursuit of
origins is "an attempt to capture the exact essence of
things, their purest possibilities and their carefully
protected identities" (Counter;uemgzy 142). Furthermore,
this search is "directed to 'that which is already there'

. . . however if [one] listens to history, [one] finds that
there is ’something altogether different' behind things

. . . that there is no essence or that essence is
fabricated” (Countezznemgry 142). What results in Walker's
text, then is an African woman who serves as a pure example
of African women's suffering because of ritual female
circumcision. Yet, what we find beneath that woman is an
"altogether different" woman from what was the intended
object of Walker's search: an African woman who speaks with
an African American voice. This woman Reads [other] African

women 0

16

Related to my argument, Izevbaye argues that the search
for essences can complicate communication across cultures.
Particularly, "specific cultural conditions crucial to an
understanding of the text may not be available to the reader
who proposes to find a more fundamental meaning in it"
(133). Following Izevbaye, then, I would argue that even
though Walker has constructed Tashi, Walker cannot
understand Tashi's experiences as an African cultural text
because the conditions of her understanding are constrained,
limited by her own distance from Africa--a distance Walker
herself fails to acknowledge.

Furthermore, Izevbaye states that "critical methods
reflect the place of audience in lending significance to the
literary text. Meaning matters most at the point of
reception" and the critic’s--i.e., Walker’s as a culture
critic and my own as a critic of her fiction--essential
"task is to clarify the process by means of which meanings
are communicated" (135). Specifically, I want to focus on
how the black collectivity struggled to define its
collectiveness and situate Africa within that definition.
This focus inevitably brings us to discussions of race--
biological, social, and cultural--and how these various
definitions have been used to outline the ethnic entity
known as African_5merigan. For this inquiry, I view
literary works as interpretations of cultural texts, and

their writers as readers. When notions of ethnicity,

17
embodied in Kouyate's claim, assert themselves, the literary
texts that are created reveal much about interconnections
between identity and interpretation. Arthur Schomburg, in
"The Negro Digs up His Past," offers us an entry into
examining these connections. He argues that "[t]he American
Negro must remake his past in order to make his future"
(233). Furthermore, the "closed" Negro past must be
”open[ed] up [through] study of African cultural roots and
origins" (237). One notable example of this widespread
attempt to study and reveal connections between black people

all over the world is Molefi Asante's Africentricity.13

Asante and Me, or the Africentric Project: The "Roots" of
Race(d) Culture, Culture(d) Race

Molefi Kete Asante, chair of the African American
Studies department at Temple University, is the premiere
Africentrist, and his work constitutes the major corpus of
the Africentric movement.“ What is significant about
Asantefs work is that it characterizes the adoration of
Africa that black Americans are experiencing in this, the
latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Asante's
undertaking epitomizes how Africa, for people of African
descent in the New World, has become not only "a mode of
connection" but also "an ethnic and cultural resource"
(Irele 53). Furthermore, an African cultural vision in

African America is "an essential element of [an African

18
American] liberating consciousness" (Irele 64). In an
effort to define African American history, culture, and
social phenomena, Africentricism, Asante suggests, is both
"theory and practice [and] its theoretical aspects consist
of interpretation and analysis from the perspective of
African people as subjects rather than as objects on the
fringes of European experience" ("Africa at Center" 46). As
such, it is historical. There are two interrelated foci in
Asante’s Africentric project.

Primarily, Asante aims to reviSe previous historical
depictions of the Africa’s past. To achieve this, he
struggles to establish Egypt as "a black African
civilization" ("Africa at Center" 46). This attempt at
revisionist history, in Asante's eyes, will allow Africa to
gain its rightful place in the history of Western
civilization, World civilization, and will in effect,
(re)cast with cultural precision the African American
present and future. The popular appeal of Asante’s
Africentric project lies in its emphasis on the centrality
of a black African culture. This centricism gives the
history of Africa a sense of unity.- Just as Europeans have
always had the security of Greece and Rome, Asante places
Egypt similarly for Continental and diasporan Africans. He
tells us:

We know that only one ancient
civilization could be considered

European in origin, Greece. And Greece
itself is a product of its interactions

19

with African civilizations.

(Afmsentrigifx 39)15
Asante argues that Egypt is the mother of all civilization.
Hence, Europeans are descendants of black Africans, and
Egypt the forerunner of Western civilization itself. In
fact, according to Asante, Greece is "a gift of the Nile"
(Afxggentzigity 38). But more significantly, once this
history is established, black people in America and all over
the world will know that theirs is a strong cultural,
intellectual and scientific history, not one of primitivism
and darkness. It is only fair to acknowledge that few
historians would question the validity of Asante's basic
claims that (1) Egypt was an African civilization: and (2)
Grecian science, philosophy and architecture were heavily
influenced by Egypt and the Egyptians. However, what is
problematic about Asante’s work is that too often he depends
on speculation and polemics where well documented research
and scholarship would be more appropriate (e.g. his
arguments about Egypt's role in thedevlopment of
civilization and culture in Africa).

He informs us that "Afrocentricity maintains
intellectual vigilance as the proper posture toward
scholarship which ignores the origins of civilization in the
highlands of East Africa," and that any scholarship which
does not adhere to this intellectual vision [and political

agenda] is suspect (ijggentzigity 39). Hence, he
acknowledges the work of Basil Davidson, Melville Herskovits

20
and Robert Farris Thompson as "pre-Afrocentric" because they
are committed, as he is, to a corrective historical vision,
that is, viewing African and African related issues from an
Africentric perspective. An Africentric scholar, or anyone
conducting research from an Africentric perspective,
recognizes that "to understand the African American
experience" requires availing oneself "of the richly
textured standing place of African Americans" (Cultural Hero
5). More directly, he casts bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., Michele Wallace and Cornel West as "African
Eurocentrists" who "feel inclined to disagree with any idea
that has popular approval among the African American masses"
(Q31;nzal_figrg 4-5). Their inclination is demonstrated by
their critiques of Africentricity as, generally speaking,
"ethnic fundamentalism" (Gates, "Pharaohs" 47).

Despite the contentions between Asante and other black
American scholars about the essentialist strain of his
Africentricism, I am particularly interested in how he casts
Africa and how such casting manifests itself in a particular
attitude toward Africa and Africans. Of specific interest,
Asante connects Egypt to the development of civilization and
culture all over the continent. He tells us:

the foundation of all African
speculation in religion, art, ethics,

moral customs, and aesthetics are [sic]
derived from systems of knowledge found

in ancient Egypt. (Afrgsenrrisifx 38-9)-

21
Asante's attribution of all African and diasporic culture to
one source, Egypt, is unfounded in my view. Furthermore, he
suggests that there exists some cultural center in Africa's
continental history:
"African cultural unity, particularly in

terms of Western Africa, is a factual
reality based upon many categories of

human knowledge". (gnltuzal_flgzg 19-20)
Though, he fails to provide examples of this "factual

reality" or specific instances of its manifestation.
Instead, he argues that "the essential historical qualities
of the African American" include "having roots in the great
mythic, oral and literary works of people of Africa
descent,” and this tradition can be viewed in the "arts
produced by the people of the African world" (ggltgza1_fle;g
18: emphasis added). To this ungrounded speculation, Asante
feels confident in adding that:

all one has to do is to look at the

murals, the engravings, and statuettes

which provide abundant physical evidence

of the antiquity of Egypt's Africanity.

The people of Egypt were no different

than the African people of the United

States, Brazil, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia,

Sudan, or Zimbabwe. (gene; 98)
These claims are indicative of the kinds of overreadings and
overinterpretations that I find problematic. [There are
gross overgeneralizatons here about the development of
culture in Africa. Accordingly, I think Paul Gilroy is
quite accurate in asserting that Asante's theory and

practice would be better labelled "Americocentricity"

22

(Atlantic 191). Specifically, Asante endeavors to use
African cultural holism to establish that an African
derivative or extension culture exists in America. His
argument is not only to postulate that the lineage exists,
but also, and most importantly, to establish the direct
lineage. Unfortunately, his postulation is often
(re)presented as fact without recognition that scholarship
requires critical evaluation, regardless of immediate
intellectual and/or political utility. To paraphrase
Cullen, Asante's need has indeed shaped an African creed.

The overwhelming motivation for Molefi Asante is that
of developing an approach to examining African American

culture which accounts for pre-slavery existence and which

removes the anthropological veil of darkness from the legacy

of Africans prior to the arrival in the New World. Through
grasping this history, Africentricity aims to enact a

pragmatic base from which to reform African American culture

and society. In a critical sense, Asante explores African's

and African Americans' "unutterly painful relation to the

white world" and manifests the result of "the necessity to

remake the world in their own image, to impose this image on

the world, and no longer be controlled by the vision of
themselves held by other people" (Baldwin 35). It is my
sense that Asante's syncretism involves a kind of

(re)invention of Africa. It is not, though, necessary that

such a (re)invention always be a falsehood, or even be

23
characterized as such. What is important is how this
reinvention is represented and what the aims of that
representation are. Crucially, however, while Asante may
add a new dimension to black cultural studies, his arguments
are not novel. Instead, he merely continues a long history
of Western writing and thinking about Africa.

Christopher Miller informs us, in BIAEB.D§IKD§§§. for
example, that Africa as a polity with a collective history
and culture is an invention itself. Africa did not preexist
the word Africa, but the former was constituted by the very
Western utterance of the latter, and Africa was defined in
terms of the West's discontinuity with itself (Miller 61-
62). This place name ("Africa") originally identified a
small area near Carthage, but with the coming of the
European Other, it came to denote the entire continent.
Specifically, Miller points out that Africa as we presently
think of it, historically, is a fiction born out of European
"ideas and concerns" (5). "Africa" is an Africanist
construct, an externally derived idea, that more than
anything represents Europeans' struggle to understand
themselves: hence they created their opposite, as is also
argued by Mudimbe.16 One means by which this invention was
circulated was through the inscription of certain
characteristics--physical and social--upon the place and its

inhabitants.

24

In The_1nyen;ign_gf_5fziga, V. Y. Mudimbe argues that
"identity and alterity are always given to others, assumed
by an I- or a We- subject, and expressed or silenced
according to personal desires" (xi). With respect to the
West's creation of Africa and the inscription of an African
history through these representations, Mudimbe suggests that
”history is a legend, an invention of the present. It is
both memory and a reflection of our present" (194). In
terms of African American representations of Africa in
literature, Mudimbe's notion of a creative history is
explicated best in the unchanged edenic Africa of Alex
Haley. The history constructed of memory is best seen in
Toni Morrison’s figlgyed. fielgyeg is centered around an
incidence during slavery and Beloved negotiates an
historical space in the novel, a space that involves Africa
but does not seek to (re)construct and/or (re)name it. As
Holloway tells us, though "origin and source are thematic
issues in this novel," the presence of the original place,
Africa,is neither idyllic nor negative: it is (re)membered
(182). The foci of this memory are spiritual presents, not
an Africa historical presence: "the future was a matter of
keeping the past at bay" (Morrison 42).

It is my conviction that these varying African American
representations of Africa lie in the essentializing power of
Ngung. In Mnntn, Janheinz Jahn discusses nommo as the

"magic power of the word,“ "a creative act" (121: 133).

25-

Nommo, he tells us, is not only the giving of a name, but
"the designation of the image" (157). Jahn continues that
an object ”is ’complete' only when it is Nommo, a productive
word, effective word or function" (172). The image has no
intrinsic meaning until it is named by its creator. In like
fashion, Africanist discourse serves to designate Africa and
inscribe its completeness.

Miller documents the development of Africanist
discourse and describes it historically: however, Asante's
project illustrates that some African Americans have
developed a discourse that is akin to Miller’s Africanist
discourse. Though the discourse Miller describes and Asante
creates are not literary fictions, they function to name
Africa in a manner similar to, and serve as the foundations
for, the fictional discourse with which I am concerned.

This new--African American Africanist--discourse is best
seen in writers like Haley, to a large degree, and Cullen,
to a lesser degree. African American Africanist discourse
demonstrates an embrace of Africa while writers within it
struggle to name Africa and through this naming name
themselves: their objective: creating a fictional and
cultural space through the magic power of the "written"
word. Asante’s project foregrounds the legacy of African
American Africanist discourse, a positional discourse which

began taking shape in the early nineteenth century.

26

"What is Africa to He?": Blackness in the Nineteenth Century
and Beyond

As early as 1848, attempts were being made to establish
a cooperative black identity. In "An Address to the Colored
People of the United States," Frederick Douglass suggested
that slavery was a problem for all black people, those in
the North as well as the South. He argued that "we are one
people--one general complexion, one in common degradation,
one in popular estimation" (210). For Douglass, it was
necessary to (re)cstablish the common bond amongst all
people of the same color."' The means through which this
sense of cohesion among blacks was achieved in the United
States took many forms ranging from arguments about common
ancestry and shared color to the development of a notion of
an ethnic community. This range is represented, in my
opinion, in the switch from a belief that blackness denotes
only a biological groupto one in which blackness names a
sociopolitical collective (Marable 295-96). In fact, the
sociopolitical view of blackness was reinforced by the fact
that simultaneous to the North's promoting abolition and
embracing industrialization and the South's adopting Jim
Crow laws, European powers were colonizing Africa.1a
During the sociopolitically charged racial times of the late
nineteenth century, one of the premier black racial
theorists and intellectuals emerged in the person of W. E.

s. DuBoisa

27

DuBois argued prophetically that the difficulty of the
twentieth century would be "the problem of the color line"
(5931: 13). For him, color was race, or at least indicative
of it. Color was the visible marker, and the color line was
a racial boundary, the perimeter/parameter of racial
differences. 'Having established the color line, the frame
of racial division, DuBois predicted that racial strife and
struggle would be the crucible of the future. In 1897,
DuBois submitted that ”the history of the world is the
history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations,
but of races" ("Conservation" 21). He further added that
anyone "who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in
human history ignores and overrides the central thought of
all human history” (21). Races afforded DuBois a tangible
way to talk about historical evolution. For DuBois, race
"is a vast family of human beings" defined, in part, by
"purely physical characteristics" ("Conservation” 21: 20).
The constructs of “race" as family, "race” as nation, imply
not only a biological and sociological explanation for
racial divisions, but also a cultural and historical one.
In these ideas surrounding the idea of race as family, we
get the beginning of an ethnicity, blackness as Marable has
defined it above. DuBois argued that each race was
”striving, each in their own way, to develop for
civilization its particular message, its particular ideal"

("Conservation' 24). Inherent in DuBois's notion of a race

28
"message" is the notion of culture and history. This
conclusion revealed DuBois's belief that blacks in the
United States of America were American by citizenship but
were also members of a larger historical group, a race which
was international ("Conservation” 26). Clearly, DuBois was
forging a belief in race as superseding geographical and/or
national boundaries, and suggesting cultural ones, a
racial/cultural family.

Paul Gilroy, in "It's a Family Affair," concedes that
the notion of "’race' as family is everywhere," (305). But
he argues that this paradigm should not be the center of our
discussions of what it means to talk of [b]lack politics,
culture, social reality (305). He suggests that the idea of
the ”race" family conflates the ideas of cultural roots and
routes. The routes of our displacement--from Africa to the
"New World" should not be an excuse for ignoring our roots
in the places where we are at present located: ”Our culture
need not be centered anywhere except where we are when we
launch our inquiries into it" (305). [For DuBois, though,
the routes of cultural and racial displacement are crucial
to understanding the roots of race[d] nations and peoples.
Hence, routes and roots are necessarily and always already
conflated. Most clearly, DuBois articulates this principle
in his definition of the Negro as part of the American

geographical family, but also part of the African race

29

family, the conflation of two seemingly disparate ethnic
entities:

[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son,

born with a veil, and gifted with a

second sight in this American world . .

. . It is a peculiar thing this double

consciousness . . . . One ever feels his

twoness,--an American, a Negro: two

souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

strivings: two warring ideals in one

dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder. (5)
DuBois's description of the Negro as two beings begs the
question of what the two are--American and what else. I
believe that to define this double consciousness as
”American and Negro" is necessarily to implicate Africa,
implicate an Other space, for the roots of the Negro in
America are the consequence of routes out of Africa. It is
this merging of roots and routes that makes an African
American. This identity joins both, and the idea of a
"double consciousness" is accounted for by historical origin
and present day location of black Americans.

Such attempts, as we see in DuBois, to define oneself
across time and space are extremely difficult. In fact,
DuBois highlights this struggle not only in the previously
cited and most recognized passage from his Ih§_fignlg_gfi
filagk_£§13, but in the lines that follow that often quoted
description of the Negro dilemma. The Negro, DuBois adds,

wishes:

to merge his double self into a better
and truer self. In this merging he

30

wishes neither of his older selves to be
lost. (5)

In other words, the Negro should not strive toward Africa
more than toward America. The Negro's space is equally
both. The Negro should strive to be African[and]American, a
recognition of duality and a confirmation of cultural routes
and roots. Such an identity seeks to not only define but
also connect peoples across time and space. This merging of
the cultural past with the geographical, political, cultural
and social present, Africa with America, is difficult
because such connections seek affinities, whereas
dissimilarities, some of which are profound, are ignored and
el ided . ‘9

Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques DuBois's uses of and
developments of the idea of race. He argues that DuBois
reinforces biological notions in the struggle to name
African American identity. However, underlying DuBois's
preoccupations with the concept of race was a strong
suggestion that race is culture, culture is race. The
message each race strives to develop is grounded in its
cultural traditions. In fact, DuBois tells us that the
message is encoded in each race's "literature and art"
('Conservation" 24). Hence with DuBois we.have ethnicity
being made. Appiah ignores these underlying cultural
implications for DuBois's race arguments and suggests that
we abandon race altogether. I concur with Appiah, with

respect to DuBois's arguments which support, or at least

31

depend on the biological notions of race (e.g. "the history
of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of
groups, not of nations, but of races" ["Conservation" 21]).
I disagree with Appiah's argument insofar that it does not
address race defined by culture and reified as ethnicity.
As I have previously stated, often when we speak of "race”
we are actually speaking of ethnigity. Ethnicity refers to
groups of people who may or may not share a geographical
space, but share common ancestry and cultural patterns of
behavior. Appiah suggests that in the West, the United
States in particular, culture became associated with
nationalities--countries of origin--and from nationalities
we are inevitably led back to biological notions of race:
”Nation comes more and more to be identified as a biological
unit, defined by a shared essence that flows from common
descent” (51). Thus, Appiah tells us, "there are no races,"
because there is nothing that can do for us what we ask race
to do for us" (Appiah 45). He seems to suggest that the
move from ”nations” to ”biological unit[s]” is inevitable,
so that if we accept Appiah's position we can never talk
about ethnicity or about the diaspora without assuming and
accepting race biology.

In contrast to Appiah, I believe that because racial
biology is refutable, but that we cannot dismiss ethnicity
as a valid construct, which he does in his rejection of the

focus on common descent. Furthermore, we must honestly

32
discuss ethnicity and its connections to discussions of
race, as well as examine the effects of racialized ideology
on those who are its subjects.) It is my project here to
focus most particularly on how ethnic identity effects these
subjects when they read. Blackness names the synthesis of
two cultural sensibilities, the African and the American.
As Asante's work intimates, the diaspora was formed through
the transference of Africanisms to America. In fact, later
in his life, DuBois himself endeavored to explicate new ways
to envision race as an all inclusive entity more explicitly
akin to Marable's blackness. In 1933, he claimed that "race
is psychology, not biology" (DuBois, 1973 100). DuBois
characterized race as a mental characteristic: race is
thinking, or a mental orientation--race thinking. DuBois’s
assertion that "race is psychology," established that race
could function as a means for people to order_their reality,
as an ideology.

An ideology, Louis Althusser tells us, is defined in
terms of the "lived” relation between individuals and their
world. In EQI_EAIX. Althusser states that the concept of
ideology ”presupposes both a real and an ’imaginary,’
’lived’ relation (between people and their worlds), and is
the expression of the relation between social subjects and
their world," (1969, 233-34). In this vein, Asante's
Africentricity is a project grounded in race ideology.

Consequently, Barbara J. Fields, in "Ideology and Race in

33
American History," uses Althusser’s concept of ideology to
trace the development of race as a tool for group
identification, and "race" as ”an ideological construct and
an historical product" (149: emphasis mine). Moreover, in
”Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of
America," Fields suggests that an ideology consists in "the
descriptive vocabulary of day to day existence, through
which people make sense of the social reality that they live
and create from day to day" (109). Race, then, like any
ideology must be constantly created or verified or it dies.
(112). Race continues to exist, not because we inherited
it, but because we recreate it every day. I would argue
that one way in which we remake it is through discourse.
Hence Africentricity, as an ideologiCal discourse--an
African subject-centered discourse which claims to teach
black people how to define their world from the position of
social agents-~reinforces racial division, the color line
(Althusser 1970, 62).

Correspondingly, in dealing with "race," Fields
continues, we are assigning a significant authority to it
all the while thinking that we are devalorizing it. She
suggests that our belief in its power causes us to need to
refute this power. We at once endorse the thing we aim to
refute. According to Fields, in order to refute racism, we
must depend on race logic. Fields's discussion of "race"

highlights the nature of tropological functioning.20 A

34

trope exists adjacent to literal or conventional language
use. A trope (re)creates meaning and (re)establishes realms
of signification: it is simultaneously a movement {rpm and a
movement tgyatgg. Hayden White suggests that a trope "moves
from one notion of the way things are related to another"
(2). A trope functions to generate alternative
interpretations and to establish a relationship between
these interpretations. Tropes explore the possibilities of
meanings and the ways we can express or indicate them.
Throughout the course of our discussion here, the term
"race“ has been transformed. Race has crossed disciplinary
boundaries from biology to anthropology as culture, and
DuBois moves it on to sociology as an ideology.- In short,
we have shown that the word "race" is a trope. The term
once served to biologically classify people, name their
relationship. Later, "race" functioned to identify the
sociological and cultural connections between people. With
Fields and later DuBois, we get "race" as an ideological
construct. These alternate ways of viewing race generate
varying ways to discuss its function and effects. I believe
that looking at how race functions in interpretation is one
avenue to explore in uncovering the connection between these
varying expressions of "race".

Fields helps us a little, but I am quite troubled by
the fact that she seems to dismiss the possibility that race

has any critical value outside of that which leads to

35
undermining its power. She ignores the fact that moving
from race to "race" has serious implications for a critical
theory. Lucius Outlaw tells us that we should beware of
those who, like Fields and Appiah, "move too fast" and
neglect that "there is still to be explored the 'other side'
of 'race’: namely the lived experiences of those within
racial groups (e.g., blacks)" (77). Outlaw offers us a
point of departure for inquiry into how assumptions about
"race" shape their believers' readings of the world.
Specifically, his ideas help us formulate questions about
how ”race" influences understanding, action and
interpretation, as well as questions about how "race"
functions tropologically in texts created by "those within
racial groups" (77). The caustic exchange between Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., Joyce A. Joyce, and Houston A. Baker, Jr.
from the pages of N§E_L1L§£AIY_H1§£QIY provides an example
of an attempt to isolate, define and critique a race[d]
interpretive community.

In ”The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American
Literary Criticism," Joyce argues that the role of the
"Black American literary critic" is to act as "a point of
consciousness for his or her people" (338). Using Gates’s
argument that texts can be explored by viewing the authors
as writing "at the point of consciousness of [their]
language," Joyce argues that analyses grounded in such

premises eschew the racial grounding of black literature.

36
She suggests that the critic must take his or her "cues from
the literary work itself as well as from the historical
context of which that work is a part" (338). African
American literary critics of black American literature, like
the writers whose work they explicate, must serve "as an
intermediary in explaining the relationship between black
people and the forces that subdue them" (339). It is
Joyce's position that black imaginative prose writers and
black critics share the same community responsibility and
allegiance(s). Just as the writer's text comes from his/her
blackness, according to Joyce, so too should the critic's
criticism/interpretation come from his/her blackness while
explicating the blackness of the writer's fiction. While I
agree with Joyce that critics and authors have
commonalities, I think her comparison of their political or
cultural responsibilities is weakened by the position she
takes.

Joyce is arguing that applying poststructuralist and
other non-indigenous theories to black literature separates
the literature from "the people" for and by whom it was
written. Accordingly, Joyce frames her arguments along
Asante's Africentricity: as a consequence, what is at stake
for her far exceeds the particular question of critical
theory and the applicability of certain theories to certain
texts. In fact, Joyce argues that in applying.

poststructuralist theories to black texts, black critics are

37
accepting not only "the linguistic system [but] an
accompanying world view" (339). Underlying Joyce's anti-
poststructuralist sentiments is the deeper conflict over the
relationship among literature, culture, and the politics of
representation.

Joyce insists that "[i]t is insidious for the Black
literary critic to adopt any kind of strategy that
diminishes or [...] negates his blackness" (341). By this
logic, poststructuralist theories would be appropriate if
they were not grounded in whiteness. Joyce’s argument is
based upon her belief that there is a "direct relationship
between Black lives--Black realities--and Black literature"
(338). It is such a belief that leads her to argue that
opening up these connections, reading them, can best, if not
only, be done through "traditional Black literary criticism"
(339). Central to this argument is the attempt to .
articulate the relationship among identity, culture--as
represented in and by the work of art--and criticism. For
Joyce the work of art is not merely a representation of
blackness, it reinforces constructions of blackness that
already exist "out there." Joyce demonstrates a belief in
the social construction of identity here. But, Roland
Barthes reminds us that "literature is always unrealistic"
and it is the very “unreality” of literature that permits it
to question the world, "though indirectly” ("Authors' 187).

It is because the writer loses all claims to truth and

38
reality that his/her work can stir inquiry into the world
within which it exists--Joyce's "out there". The objections
Joyce registers against the use of poststructuralism to
explicate African American literature signal the need for a
redefinition of the cultural politics of interpretation. A
similar redefinition has already taken place with respect to
feminist reading and this can be helpful to us.

Jonathan Culler discusses what it means to "read as a
woman." In Qn_neggn§tzngtign, Culler suggests that asking
”a woman to read as a woman is in fact a double or divided
request. It appeals to the condition of being a woman as if
it were a given and simultaneously urges that this condition
be created or achieved" (49). Furthermore, the appeal to
experience, Culler tells us, is problematic, because
”'experience’ always has [a] divided and duplicitous
character: it has always already occurred and yet is still
to be produced" (63). To talk about experience is to talk
about things that have happened, but also to participate in
the making of new happenings, other experiences. Experience
is not fixed but always being made.

Joyce encourages Gates and Baker to explicate the black
experience as it is found in literature, but also argues
that their criticism defines that experience. In her
argument against the use of poststructuralist theories by
black literary scholars to explicate black texts, and in her

association of such use with ”selling out" and intellectual

39

or scholarly "passing," Joyce attempts to establish "race"
based critical boundaries--much like the gender based
theories Culler critiques above. I say to Joyce, as Toni
Morrison’s Pilate says to the black nationalistic Guitar:

You think dark is just one color but it

ain’t . . . . There are five or six

kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly.

Some just empty. Some like fingers. And

it don't stay still. It moves and
changes from one kind of black to

another. (Sgng 9f Sglgmon 40-41)

Just as black is not fixed, "just one color," neither is
black experience.

The potential result of Joyce’s prescriptivism is
intellectual nativism and essentialized notions of
blackness. Cornel West maintains that "openness to others
does not [necessarily] entail wholesale cooptation and group
autonomy is not group insularity" (108). However, for Joyce
A. Joyce there can be no openness when the other is one who
has for centuries oppressed you. Akin to Asante arguing
that the "Afrocentric study of a [sic] phenomena asks
questions about location, place, orientation, and
perspective,” Joyce contends that it is imperative that ”the
Black literary critic" acknowledge and recognize that not
only ”what he or she says, but also how they say it will
determine the values to be circulated and preserved over
time" (tnitgtai_fletg 3; "Black Canon" 340). In other words,
it is not only what you represent, but the manner of

representation that is important. Here, Joyce plays the

4O
proverbial race card in an effort to argue for preservation
--within self-contained sociopolitical and cultural
borders--of the sanctity of black literature.

For Joyce, the text is so reflective of reality that to
intimate we suspend the connection, or even to question it,
suggests a denial of the reality. Again, Barthes offers
helpful commentary, in suggesting that writing is
"irreality," and hence cannot describe any authentic
experience. Writing it can only "tell the truth on
language, but not the truth on reality" ("Writers" 391).
But, within Joyce's schema, the literary work of art is not
merely an object of study. It is a cultural artifact, a
symbol through which cultural messages--i.e. DuBois's race
message--are contained, maintained, and promulgated. The
text reveals facets of the black experience and presents
these to the masses. Joyce suggests that we read black
texts through blackness, and that only through blackness can
these revelations be accurately interpreted. At this point,
it is important to unravel certain (mis)conceptions about
the literary text I see underlying Joyce's arguments. The
primary (mis)conception with which I am concerned is that
African American literary texts are the artists' locus for
understanding black experience(s), that the essence of black
American experience(s) is revealed in literary works of

black American writers.

41

I find Jane Tompkins particularly useful as I attempt
to make sense of the varying constructs of the literary
text. She tells us that "when the literary work is
conceived as an object of interpretation, response [to it]
will be understood as a way at arriving at meaning and not
[only] as a form of political or moral behavior" (207). It
is my sense that Gates conceives of texts as objects of
interpretation. 'However, while Joyce wants to limit
interpretation to elucidating sociopolitical aspects of a
text, Gates--and Tompkins as well--suggests that there exist
other aspects that may (or may not) also be present. Hence
it is neither natural nor self evident that black texts and
their critics are always only engaged in some didactic or
revelatory endeavor (related, of course, to explicating some
facet of "the" black experience). Similarly, Iser informs
us that the literary text cannot be "completely deduced from
prevailing concepts of reality" because reality is a given
and fiction a nongiven (180). While the text may "simulate"
a reality, it is never "identical" to the reality it
simulates or, for that matter, identical to the "disposition
of the reader" (180). Moreover, the simulated reality
functions ”not merely to denote the desire to copy a
familiar reality, [but] its function is to enable us to see
that reality with new eyes" (181). Poststructuralism
provides Gates with those new eyes. Though the connection

between text and reality is suspended with Iser, he assures

42
us that it is precisely because the text is not identical to
either the reader or reality that it is able to function as
it is meant to, as communication. Iser defines two ways
that the nonidentity element of the text is manifested.
These are two types of indeterminacies--"blanks” and
”negations"--which regulate the interaction between the text
and the reader.

The text, for Iser, is "a whole system of processes,"
but within this system there is a place for the reader.
Blanks, he says, are just one entryway for the reader into
the text. Blanks are "designated vacancies in the overall
system of the text" (182). In filling these blanks, the
reader interacts with the textual patterns. There are
several means of interaction the reader has at her disposal,
i.e. gender and/or culture. The text for Barthes, however,
”is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological’
meaning (the 'message' of An Author-God) but a
multidimensional space," where multiple writings are merged,
with the reader being the place where the multiplicity is
focused (Image 146). Hence, the critic’s focus on language
is the key to illuminate the various structures within which
a writer encodes literary and social commentary. Therefore,
the reader ceases to function solely as a receptacle, as
Joyce would have it. Instead the reader becomes a
productive agent in text making. For example, the reader

can project her own and/or others' previous readings and/or

43
interpretations and examine the spots where these readings
break down. Here, a variety of readings are meshed in the
process of interpretation which opens new possibilities for
reading and understanding.

Negation deals with what happens in reading when a
previous assumption has been changed, or refuted, and no new
one has emerged in its place. Iser tells us that "negation
situates the reader between 'no longer' and ’not yet'"
(213). Though negation produces blanks in the text as well
as in the reader's position, this is fruitful because new
reader positions are being negotiated and the text is
constantly being opened in a multiplicity of ways.

Following Iser, I find it helpful to think about what is
gained by reading from the very different positions Joyce
and Gates assume. In this vein, I find Norman Holland quite
insightful. In "Unity Identity Text Self," Holland uses the
four conCepts of his title to explore the "openness and
receptivity" of the literary text (119). What I find most
revealing is Holland’s discussion of Identity.
Interpretation, he says, "is a function of identity" (124).
Furthermore, "all of us, as we read, use the literary work
to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves" (124).
Hence, all interpretations hint of how the readers not only
position themselves in relation to the text, but also how
they identify themselves in the world. Holland informs the

Joyce-Gates exchange by suggesting that their respective

44
definitions of themselves as black critics determine how
they read and respond to each other's readings. In her
response to Gates's and Baker's responses, Joyce, in fact,
observes that "the central issue here is identity" ("'Who
the Cap Fit'" 380). She clearly defines her boundaries and
says, quite definitively, ”my views on Black literary
criticism are inextricably bound and unembarrassingly tied
to my identity as a Black person" ("'Who the Cap Fit'" 381).
Joyce demonstrates how her construction of her identity as a
black American affects her interpretation of black American
fictional works.

Furthermore, Joyce confirms the importance of identity
in reading, and Gates and Baker defend the critic's
prerogative to question the text through language. Critical
here is the language of identity and how this language is
negotiated through fictional and critical discourse. Joyce,
Baker and Gates each explore (or their exchange demonstrates
an exploration of) "the impress of black identity upon the
imagination" (Irele 52) and how this impress is represented
and explicated. Just as Barthes suggests that literature is
the "body of the projects and decisions which lead [writers]
to fulfill [themselves] (that is, in a sense to essentialize
[themselves]) in language alone," I intend to examine this
process with respect to African American writers and their

relationship to Africa ("Authors" 189).

45

As we attempt to explore how race functions in the act
of African American interpretation of African texts, Uzo
Esonwanne is quite helpful. In "’Race’ and Hermeneutics,"
Esonwanne argues that in racialized nations, like the United
States, to talk of 'race’ is to speak of "private
investments" as well as "past and ongoing grievances" (565).
The notion of private investments is key to understanding
why it was and is so important, first of all, to
essentialize race--as DuBois did--and then dismiss it as a
valid identity construct--as Appiah and Fields do. Though
Esonwanne does not define "private investments,” I conclude
that he means these are the estimates of what is to be
gained through endorsing a particular definition of "race."
For DuBois, the private investment was reclaiming a group’s
humanity, naming black people in the United States as other
than the despised, degraded Negro. Of particular
significance, Esonwanne suggests that "race" is one of many
”communities of meaning" existing "out there in the world"
and thus it belongs in the "province of hermeneutic .
understanding" (565).21 Esonwanne positions ”race“ within
Heidegger's concept of "the hermeneutic circle".ar The
hermeneutical circle is a reference to the complex process
of understanding itself whereby the parts of anything cannot
be understood without some sense of the whole to which they
belong. Conversely, we cannot comprehend the whole to which

things belong without first grasping the parts that form it.

46

In essence, we are constantly obliged to move back and
forth between the whole and its parts in our attempts to
arrive at an understanding. With respect to "race,” we must
explore what is invested in furthering beliefs concerning
”race" if we are to understand how it relates to
interpretation. The private investments are some of the
parts that constitute "race" as a whole. "Race" functions
to order the reality of those who live within its confines
(e.g., blacks and other consciously aware racial groups),
and as such it affords meaning to certain aspects of their
experience. What Esonwanne is suggesting is that there
exists, or can exist, an interpretive community defined by
and constructed by ”race":3 But he is skeptical of
readings which emerge from such an interpretive community
because of their mythic center: "race". Ironically--
considering the Joyce-Baker-Gates exchange--to argue his
case Esonwanne offers a critique of Henry Louis Gates's The
Weakest;

In arguing that the trip through the Middle Passage did
not erase all traces of Africanisms, Gates compares Yoruba
Esu Elegbara to the African American signifyin(g) monkey.
In this comparison, Esonwanne argues, Gates elides
significant differences between the two figures of his
comparison. Primarily, Gates ascribes blackness to the
Yoruba divinity so as to ”prove" that it is the African

American signifyin(g) monkey's "myth of origin" (577). This

47
inscription, Esonwanne claims, result from Gates
preoccupation with race: "what is at stake is not so much
cultural kinship as it is racial identity" (577). For
Esonwanne, Gates's reading of Esu Elegbara is grounded in
”theology and metaphysics and not history" (Esonwanne 575).
He suggests that because Gates belongs to an African
American interpretive community which reads through cultural
connections, his interpretation is skewed by his conception
of ”race," and blackness in particular. While for Gates,
and [other] African Americans, having a divinity figure who
is black is important, for the Yoruba this is of little
consequence and outside of their theological ontology.
Esonwanne believes that "it is unlikely that fish, as a
divinity straddling the abyss separating humans from deity
is necessarily black" (576). It is clear Gates is abreast
of evidence documenting continuities between "Old World
Africans" and "New World Africans" (Esonwanne 578).
However, it is this knowledge that leads him to elide
Africa’s "multiethnicity" and make unsupported claims about
Esu ElegbarA's racial identity (578).

Gates’s attempt to connect these two figures is only
successful if we overlook the significant functional
differences that Esonwanne points out. Esonwanne suggests
that to privilege Gates's interpretation is to redefine Esu
Elegbara outside of Yoruba culture. The idea of race-based

interpretive communities, then, becomes dysfunctional if

48
their primary aim is demonstrating real connections instead
of struggling for an understanding, a comparative
functioning of the Yoruba Esu Elegbara and the African
American Signifying monkey. Gates, the self named "race
man," undertakes another Africentric project (Clarke and
Tifte 16).

The Africentric scholar is always concerned, Asante
tells us, with "discovering the centered place of the
African" (Quithta1_Hete 2). Molefi Asante, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. and Joyce A. Joyce all attempt Africentric
projects. The difference is that while Asante claims
blackness as a one and only ideology, a religion of sorts,
and Joyce A. Joyce preserves it as the literary theory for
reading black texts, Gates sees blackness as one ideological
lens among many at his disposal. 'Nevertheless, their
results are quite similar. Each in his or her own way
struggled to name a center for African American
culture/literature. Gates and Joyce have managed to write
in this centered place, and in the process they have
illustrated the politics that occasion the writing of
cultural fictions. More directly related to reading African
texts, though, neither Asante nor Gates acknowledges the
power of their Africentric Visioning, and how that vision
"shades" or colors the cross-cultural reading they both

undertake.

49
Cross-Cultural Readings, or Sailing the "Black Atlantic"“

Wilson Harris suggests that cross-cultural reading
inserts a "ceaseless dialogue between hardened conventions
and eclipsed and half eclipsed otherness within an intuitive
self that moves endlessly into flexible patterns, arcs, or
bridges of community" (xviii). Literary texts provide a
forum wherein the African Americans' dialogue between their
"eclipsed and [their] half eclipsed otherness" takes place
(Harris xviii). As we have seen, this dialogue with the
African past has been quite ceaseless, involving the
building a bridge between the past and present. Though the
dialogue has been entered from various vantage points, the
ambition in each case has been to announce that while
African American social systems have responded to the
conditions of life in the United States, many contemporary
forms of African American culture establish, and/or
represent, direct continuities from Africa, the homeland of
black diasporans.

As the discussion of DuBois above has demonstrated, the
group calling itself "African American" represents what
Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to as "tension between strangeness
and familiarity" (295): the modifier "African" symbolizes
the African cultural heritage of the geographical
"Americans.”25 Furthermore, because "cultural identities
. . . . are the names we give to the different ways we are

positioned by, and position ourselves in the narratives of

50
the past,” it could be argued that the African text does not
really afford a cross-cultural reading experience (Hall,
77). In fact, Ron Walters suggests that African Americans
"sought to recreate African culture" in the construction of
their communities (32). The development of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church provides the clearest example of
this "recreation." For an African American reader of an
African text, certain readings afford an African American
the opportunity to (re)represent herself as having a history
and culture beyond that gained in America. Recently, some
scholars have begun to challenge the discourse that proposes
all similarities between African American cultural phenomena
and African cultural phenomena represent continuity.
Specifically, these projects have ushered in an analytical
framework which suggests that African American cultural
manifestations should first be studied within the immediate
context they occur and not as a preserved form from the
past.“’ These new directions do not deny outright the
existence of retentions, survivals, Africanisms. They do
suggest, however, that an analysis of these features that
begins with an investigation of their function and
development on this continent would more adequately
facilitate our understanding of American cultural phenomena,

”’ If we accept this view, as I

African American culture.
do, the reading of Africa[n texts] by an African American

then is a cross-cultural reading event.

51

Along these lines, I rename cross-cultural reading as
reading across sociohistorical horizons, reading across
traditions. Further, it is my position that interpretation,
or cross-cultural understanding, is always a circular
activity, a moving between not only the text and the reader,
but also the situations that have produced them. Or, as
Said says, "the closeness of the world’s body to the text's
body forces readers to take both into consideration" as they
read (39). This epitomizes the functioning of the
hermeneutic circle.

Within the hermeneutic circle, reading texts from
different traditions involves two levels of interaction.
The first level involves a construction of the reader’s
tradition. Tradition, as Gadamer discuses it in Irath_ahg
Metheg, "does not stand over and against us," but is
something in which we stand and through which we exist
(278). Tradition is so transparent a medium that it is
invisible to us, yet it furnishes the stream of conceptions
that constitute our present. This notion of tradition is
akin to Althusser’s conception of ideology. Like
Althusserian ideology, Gadamer's tradition is both "real"
and "imaginary," springing from the relation between people
and their world. In tradition, there is always an element
of history--that stream of past and present to which we
belong and in which we swim toward understanding.

Understanding, then, involves social agents--readers--

52
immersing themselves in an overdetermined field of meaning
where these agents can act and react to in an open-ended
manner.

For African Americans, much of their tradition is
embodied in the legacy of Africentric and "race" thinkers
and "race(d)" critics. What this legacy leaves us, though,
is a narrative of African historicity that begins and ends
with prosperity: an edenic Africa characterized by greatness
and an African America best seen as a descendant of that
tradition rather than as a product of that tradition and the
"aberration” of slavery (Gilroy, 1993 189). What it assumes
is that Africa is a static space upon which black peoples
can inscribe their heritage. It becomes the authentic
homeland to a racial subject who has discovered within
Africa's history her "true self, [and has] pinpoint[ed her]
centre," has discovered the essence of her blackness
(Asante, 1990 15). This essence lies in the African values
”created, recreated and reconstructed and derived" from the
tradition of Africanity within which she exists (Asante,
1990 15). When this authentic racial subject reads, she
carries this essence, or at least the sense of it to the
text. That is the sense that she is an "African in America
[connected to] thousands of years of history and tradition"
(Asante, 1990 15).. Hence, as she engages in the second
interpretive act involved in cross-cultural understanding,

constructing the tradition of the other with help from the

53

text, which "represents" aspects of that tradition, often
there can be an imposition of a "unity that actually
subsists on the suppression" of other versions of African
reality (Harris xviii) .23

As Gadamer argues, the past is not like a pile of facts
which can be made an object of consciousness, but a stream
in which we move and participate, in every act of
understanding (360-62). Attempting to understand a text,
which may invoke our previous constructions of our past
requires that the reader be "sensitive to the text's
alterity," and this sensitivity involves "the foregrounding
and appropriation of one's own fore-meanings and prejudices"
(Iruth_ang_nethed 269). These fore-meanings and prejudices
constitute our historical consciousness--our "historical
reality of being" (Truth 277). Hence, Gadamer does not
suggest that we eliminate--as if we could--these prejudices,
for they make interpretation possible. These
presuppositions come to us from the tradition in which we
stand. However, I read Gadamer's notion of tradition to
suggest that we can know it, that we can consciously know
our own tradition, and know in such a way that when we
encounter the other's tradition we can distinguish the two
and reach the pinnacle of understanding he calls the "fusion
of horizons” (306-07). He tells us that distinguishing the
enabling prejudices from the hindering ones is crucial to

self understanding as well as understanding Others.

54
Furthermore, this act of distinguishing is not separate from
understanding itself (Truth 295-6). In order to
conceptualize how this separation happens, we must
foreground ”temporal distance and its significance for
understanding" (Truth 296).

Though African Americans are not African, Eddy Harris
suggests they are more than ”hybrid." Harris’s quick
dismissal of the idea of the African American as hybrid is
telling. Primarily, I think Harris’s position echoes a
belief that being of "mixed breed" is disturbing because it
implies "not whole." However, from a critical perspective,
I think the notion of the African American as hybrid is a
fruitful way of exploring the problematics of identity and
cross-cultural reading. In terms of positionality, as I
have discussed it thus far, the African American reader of
African texts phrases the identity question not in terms of
"Am I African or American?". Instead, the question is
phrased "How do I show that I am both African and American?"
The African text reflects the African American reader and
thus this reader’s interrogation of it implicates her.
African American literary texts which construct an Africa
operate within what M. M. Bakhtin refers to as hybridization
(359).

Bakhtin tells us there are basically three linguistic
"devices" employed in the novel, one of which is

hybridization.”' He defines hybridization as "the mixture

55
of two social languages within the limits of a single
utterance" (358). With an African American reader/writer
who is engaged in reading (and thus representing) Africa,
this notion of hybridization is quite informative, for the
texts they create are hybrid constructions. There are at
once two social voices, the African American's own authorial
voice and the African voice spoken by the characters, and
the latter voice is always filtered through that of the
author. A hybrid construction, Bakhtin suggests, is an
utterance that on the surface appears to belong "to a single
speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two
utterances, two . . . semantic . . . belief systems" (304).
The term Atriean_5meriean is itself a hybrid construction.
It is meant to indicate a single population, black people in
America. But it also implicates another population,
Africans from the continent. The latter has been subsumed
beneath the former, or the former has been inscribed upon
the latter. Either way, the African American speaks with
two cultural voices, and is named to reflect this “twoness.”
Just as Afiriean_hmeriean is a hybrid construction, so are
the voices in the texts of Africa produced by some African
Americans. It is this hybridization that complicates the
cross-cultural reading endeavor, and allows for not only
misreading, Reading and misrepresentation, but paradoxically

could also permit successful readings.

56

Bakhtin argues that literary texts themselves are
utterances. In Bakhtin's system of "dialogism," literature
is another form of communication, another form of
knowledgefiso Literary texts, like any other kind of
utterance, depend not only on the activity of their
authors”, but the sociohistorical forces in effect when
the text is produced and consumed. Hence, the text can
communicate simultaneously on several levels. The guiding
principle governing meaning in the literary text is
heteroglossia, and "the novel orchestrates all its themes,
the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and
expressed in it by means of [heteroglossia]" (263).
Heteroglossia is characterized by "a multiplicity of social
voices" and Connections between them (263). All of our
utterances are heteroglossic, and in reading cross-
culturally, our own modes of discourse as critics are
sedimented in a cultural matrix from which we can never
extricate ourselves. Furthermore, these discursive modes
are determined by a set of linguistic protocols whose range
and governance far exceed our conscious control. This
revises Gadamer, and nicely so. Nonetheless, Gadamer offers
an ideal, in my view, toward which we should strive. An
utterance, a text, is a border phenomena: it takes place
between speakers--readers and writers--and is embedded in

social factors. It exists on the border of the tradition(s)

that produces it and the larger tradition(s) within which

57

its producer and consumer exist. Hence we must explore not
only the large body of the texts, but the grammars of
discourse that delimit and constitute cultural experience:
the sites of our cultural memory.

Toni Morrison attempts, through her literature, to
connect people of the diaspora to the "motherland," through
remembrance--remembrance, recalling, of things not lost--and

32 In

(re)membrance, constructing, of things never known.
”The Site of Memory," Morrison tells us that "all water has
a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where
it was. Writers are like that, remembering where we were

. . . and forever trying to get back to where it was" (305).
Morrison's memory allows her to create out of the various
cultural texts she has read, a spiritual and mythic fiction
of Africa. This mythic fiction exists in the realm of the
"imaginative and creative" and provides the difference
between Morrison’s representation of Africa in Belated and
Alex Haley’s in Beeta, and more directly Walker’s in
2eeeeeeing_the_§eeret_ef_fley. The middle passage is that
water source within which African Americans are constantly
diving for the sunken treasure of their past: it is the
”hyphen" of their existence. Toni Morrison has tapped a
reservoir of tradition that allows her the freedom to

explore that past but demonstrates her integrity not to

(re)member through essentialism. She has refused to create

eultural fiction.

58

Cultural fictions--fictional texts that read and Read
other cultural texts-~are created because of certain
predispositions toward Africa(n texts) that operate
unchallenged. I do not suggest that it is possible to read
without prejudice. Since we understand always from within
our own horizon, there can be no nonpositional understanding
of anything, because understanding involves lived
experiences. We always understand by reference to our
experience. Overunderstanding begins when readers do not
question when/if their version of cultural reality is being
placed over and above the experience of cultural reality
encountered in the text. In other words, hermeneutical
understanding requires the acknowledgement of the tee
traditions, tee experiences confronting each other in the
interpretive act and requires the African American
separation of roots and routes (see Gilroy 1992).

Maya Angelou provides an example of an African American
reading of Africa that seems to function within the
hermeneutic circle. Ron Walters tell us that many African
Americans embarked on "the return" and searched for "an
authentic expression of their 'African roots'" (103). Maya
Angelou is one of the many authors who did so. However,
unlike that of Alex Haley, her Africa is not Edenic. But,
even so, unlike those in Countee Cullen, there are few

negative images of Africa in her description. In her All
MW. she discusses her trek

p 59

to Ghana in 1962. This novel demonstrates the African
American's familiarity and strangeness in relation to
Africa. Angelou states:

I doubted if I, or any Black from the

diaspora, could return to Africa. We

wore skeletons of old despair like

necklaces, heralding our arrival, and we

were branded with cynicism. (76)
Angelou is ever conscious of the differences between black
Americans and Africans, but she is also conscious of her
historical links to Africa.

For Gadamer, the play between the text's strangeness
and familiarity and the tension between the past and present
that characterizes tradition are central for hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics, he says, is based on "the polarity of
familiarity and sameness" (295). As such, the African
American reading an African text is a perfect "test case"
for hermeneutical inquiry. By analyzing the discourse
produced when an African American reads an African text, the
hermeneutic endeavor, as outlined by Gadamer, will be
challenged as it equally challenges these readings.

In arguing against a method, Gadamer tells us that it
is not the task of hermeneutics "to develop a procedure for
understanding, but to clarify the conditions in which
understanding takes place” (Truth 295). Having a clear
conception of what constitutes a tradition is important if

we are to engage in hermeneutical understanding. I leave

Gadamer wanting more "clarification" of what is a tradition,

60
in practical terms. Because I believe that inherent in the
notion of tradition is the concept of culture, I find
Geertz’s work useful as an attempt to identify kinds of
traditional Otherness which a reader can encounter.

In ”From the Native's Point of View," Geertz argues
that the outsider can never see what the natives see, only
what they see with. In attempting to grasp the customs the
Other uses to see, Geertz says that we must utilize
”experience-near" concepts as well as "experience-distant"
ones. Experience-near concepts, he tells us, are those we
use to define what we see, feel, think and so on--we use
these concepts "effortlessly and naturally" while experience
distant concepts are those that an observer/outsider/critic,
employs to follow the "native’s" philosophical or practical
aims (220). According to Geertz, our aim is to determine
how the natives ”define themselves as persons“ and, if
possible, to ascertain their conceptualization of what it
means to be a self. To do this, we must seek out the
"symbolic forms in terms of which people actually represent
themselves to one another" (228).:B We must attempt not to
enter their horizon--in Gadamer’s sense of the word--but to
grasp how they have constructed it and maintain themselves
within it. In terms of reading cross-culturally, then, the
critic must attempt to ascertain what symbols and discourses
the text uses to construct the tradition within which the
text exists.

61

For example, in reading Buchi Emecheta's The_flriue
Eriee, understanding the concept of marriage is critical to
interpreting the story. "The most important people who
should benefit from [the] marriage were her [Aku-nna’s]
brother and her mother" (149). If the bride price provides
this benefit, then is the custom "selling a bride"? If
marriage is seen as the union of two individuals, then one
could argue that the woman is being sold. If marriage is
seen as the union of families, then the bride price could be
seen as a means of maintaining equity in the relationship
between the two families. The novel provides insight into
how tradition dictates the function of marriage and the
bride price, and though we carry with us our
conceptualizations of what marriage means, in the Western
sense, our criticism of the practice, the paying of a bride
price, should be visibly informed by an understanding its
construction and functioning within its cultural milieu.

Gina Dent asks, and answers, a question that I think is
critical to the issue of cultural identification and cross-
cultural communication with respect to black peoples: ”Do
we, peoples of the African diaspora, any longer have the
right to invent Africa?" (7). She answers that ”we have the
right to attend creatively to any of the domains we find
within our view" (7). She warns that though we should never
“police the-areas over which our gaze may trespass," we must

responsibly "make it clear that what we reveal are the

62
effects of that gaze" (7).“’ It is crucial that we address
this gaze and its literary effects. Dent cogently sets out
the parameters of a discourse that emerges when African
Americans read African cultural texts through their dual
identity.

African Americans obtain a certain power in naming
their cultural selves, and as a consequence, their gaze upon
the Africa of their cultural roots/routes is represented in
ways that reinforce that continuity. Yet, clearly, not all
African Americans who discourse on Africa do so in negative
ways. For example, Gloria Naylor's BQIIEYL§_§§I§ delves
into the lives of women who gather at the magical mystical
tavern. Like Walker’s text, the stories are told by the
characters--one of whom is Miriam, an Ethiopian Jew who has
been infibulated. The circumcision is described
metaphorically as the cutting of a succulent plum: "Eve
plunged the knife quickly into the middle of the split
fruit. With one twist of her wrist, she cut out the large
pit . . . . The plum was cleaned of everything but its
delicate outer skin" (151). Also, thie story is told out of
the ear shot of men: "And there wasn't a man in the place,
not a man to be found. This was women's business" (145).
The chapters that follow present two women who are taking
care of that business from their respective geographical,

cultural, sociopolitical and literary positions.

NOTES

‘ This title is a play on the Zora Neale Hurston essay

"How it feels to be Colored Me,” l_LQxe_nx§elf_flhen_I_am

, Ed. Alice Walker, (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist P,
1979) 152-55.

2 Though Gates seems to include African and African
American texts in his "black literature," I use it without
hesitancy because of the comparative nature of his usage.
This idea of comparative black literature is one that should
be pursued not as a search for similarities but as a means
of defamiliarizing blackness as it is seen in African
America today. It is in the latter sense that I explore the
issues that I confront in this project.

3 For example, one race, Caucasian, may have several
ethnicities represented within its ranks: Italian, French,
or Celtic for example. Similarly, blackness, like other
ethnicities, is an invented or constructed identity. Within
the larger construct of "black," we have several ethnic
affiliations: American, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Caribbean or
Brazilian.

‘ Though this is not explicitly stated or argued in
Meeringe_anu_uetaphere, it is my sense that Holloway uses

race as a means of representing what Marable has identified
as Blackness.

5 See bell hooks and Cornel West’s

Breakins_nread1
Insurgent_Black_1nfellectual_Life (Boston. MA: South End
1992).

‘ See Ngugi's Dec219nising_the_hind1_1he_zslitigs_2f
Language_in_Afrisan_Literature and Achebe’ 8 ideas as well in

Charles Rowell, "An Interview with Chinua Achebe.”

7 In chapter three of this work, I offer another frame
for examining this work, and I explicate particular sections
of it within that paradigm.

5 At this very writing, I am having difficulty with the
language of naming. In using rage and hlaehheee, I seem to
be at once reinforcing ideas that I am challenging and
questioning. I can only confess that I lack the appropriate

63

64

explain my representations of these ideas. I use raee to
identify the word itself. However I will use the unmarked
word race to indicate biological ideas and "race" to suggest
socially constructed notions of identity and tropological
usage.

9 Gates has an article entitled "What's in a Name?” in
his LQ2se_9an2ns1_N2tes.gn_the_£ultural_uar (New York:
Oxford UP, 1993). Also, Smitherman's "’What is Africa to
Me?’: Language, Ideology and Atrieah American“ offers a
detailed historical discussion of the semantics of and
ideological reasoning for the changes in black American
racial naming.

w This is a reference to Christopher Miller's work on
Africanist discourse and my argument that certain texts by
African American writers are similar to those Miller
discusses. I develop this point later in this chapter.

" Gates further develops his theory of signification
as it relates to African American literature in the later
work ' ' ' '
Literary_§ritieiem. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. I have
selected his description from £iguree_in_§laek because of
its brevity. Furthermore, my purpose in recalling Gates's
idea of Signifyin/signifying is mainly to identify the
paradigm within which I am situating my working notions of
Reading/reading.

n In fact, Ama Ata Aidoo as well claims this
”universal" concern for women, but her concern is grounded
in gender and emanates from her concern and struggle for the
rights and safety of African women. She is first and
foremost an African woman and involved in their struggles.

a In his works, Asante terms his inquiry
”Afrocentricity." However I have elected to use Atri; to
provide a more accurate semantic representation of his
arguments and his grounding of them.

“ While no one would argue that this statement is
incorrect, some have suggested that Asante, instead of being
known as the ”Father of the Afrocentric movement,“ should be
known as "co-founder" sharing the honors with Maulana "Ron"
Karenga. In fact, Asante himself credits Karenga. However,
my review of the literature indicates that while Asante’s
aims are indeed akin to Maulana's "cultural nationalism,"
the Africentric polemic as it is recognized, and criticized,
today was indeed spearheaded by Asante and brought to the
forefront in his first work, The_hrreeehtrie_luea. See
Harold Cruse, "Negro Nationalism's New Wave," Qurreht (May
1962) 45-7.

65

“ Asante develops this thesis further in Kemetl
Afrosentricitx_and_xnouledse- See also Martin Bernal's
Blaeh_htheha which is an in-depth study of Egyptology.
Bernal documents very specific lineal connections between
Egypt and Greece. While Asante tends to rely heavily on
speculation and polemics, Bernal’s study offers a detailed
analysis of Egypt's influence on Greece, and indicates some
of the logic behind previous historians' refusal to
acknowledge this connection. Also, Frank N. Snowden, Jr.'s
filaehe_in_hhtiguity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970) is an
earlier study of the Ethiopian and Egyptian influences on
the Greco-Roman tradition(s).

'6 Particularly, Miller traces the development of
Africa from its first being named "Africa" to its
representation in European religious, philosophical and
anthropological writings. It is these very writings that
created not only Africa but Africans. What is significant
about this, though, is that he poses the idea that writing
can create or define reality. A fiction can be called into
reality, thus blurring the line between what is real and
what is fiction. What allows this blurring, and what I
think Miller is hinting at, are representations in
discourse. This will become very important to my discussion
of Alice Walker’s novel, because I maintain that she is
writing within and attempting to reaffirm a kind of
representational discourse. See chapter one of Miller's

Blank_narkness. especially pages 1-29-

‘7 It is important to note that contemporaneous to
Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany was also writing and
speaking on similar issues. However, Delany's objectives
were quite different. Interestingly enough, the differences
between Delany and Douglass resurfaced in the 1960’s in the
split between Martin Luther King, Jr., his Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the more
revolutionary organizations like the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. For

more on Delany, see Victor Ullman’ s HQ££in_BI_D§l§nYI_Th§

neginning§_of_Black_Nationalism (Boston: Beacon. 1971) and
Nell Painter’ s "Martin R. Delany: Elitism and Black

Nationalism." B1ack_Leaders_in_the_Nineteenth_£enturx- Eda-
Leon Litwack and August Meier (Chicago: U Illinois P, 1987)
149-72.

'm In fact, David Walker, in his Appeal, advocated the
notion of the geographically extensive Black family. He
argued that individual Black achievement, happiness, "shall
never be consummated but with the entire emancipation of
your enslaved brethren all over the world" (93). Hence, the
Black American suffering was seen as connected to the
suffering of Africans under the emerging European colonizing

66
ventures. See Daxid_Ea1ker_s_Anaeali_in_Eour_Artislesl

-r* r- . ‘sus ‘ .‘r‘ -
S :-

the_united_States_9f_America (New York: Hill & Wang. 1965)

‘9 I believe that Molefi Asante’s work, as discussed in
this project and as collected in the body of literature he
has produced, confirms my point.

2° The notion of race as a trope is heavily indebted to
Henry Louis Gates’ 8 discussion in "Writing ’Race’ and the
Difference it Makes". Intro. LBaeel__flritihg_ang_nirrerenee.
Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1986) 1-
20.

a What is interesting is that Esonwanne is quoting
Appiah, here. However, when Appiah revised his article,
”The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race,"
to chapter two of his book, he reorganized the information
which changed the meaning entirely.

22 This reference to Dilthey as first defining or
"naming" the hermeneutical circle is taken from my reading

of Gadamer’s Truth_ahg_hetheu, see page 265..-

23 Here, I use interpretive communities in the sense
that Stanley Fish uses the term. See "What Makes an
Interpretation Acceptable-" Ia_There_a_Text_in_this_Qlas§1

‘ .(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1980) 338-355.

“’This is a direct reference to Paul Gilroy’s boolehe

a In his discussion of the "tension between
familiarity and strangeness" Gadamer is referring to the
tension between the present and the past, between "the
historically intended, distanced objectivity of the heritage
and our belongingness to a tradition. In this ’between’ is
the true place of hermeneutics" (295). I appropriate his
ideas here because of the distance between the African past
and American present of African Americans, and I find his
discussion of "temporal distance" informative in that vein.

“’See Joseph Holloway’ s collection Afrieahieme_ih
(Bloomington: U Indiana P, 1990).

Particularly see Holloway’ 8 article "The Origins of African-
American Culture," ix-xxi. Also, as a counterpoint, see
Robert F. Thompson’s "From Africa," Tale_hagaaihe 34(1970)
16-21. Thompson argues, counter to Asante, that though
there are apparent similarities in African and African
American art, some of the characteristics examined are, in

67

fact, recent innovations in West African art (18). Robert
F. Thompson has produced a large body of work exploring and
documenting cultural continuties within the African
diaspora, this particular work, however, warns that not all
similarities can be explained as demonstrating a linear
transference from Africa to the United States.

27'I find this directly related to Paul Gilroy’s
argument that black sociopolitical and cultural inquiry
should be centered in wherever black people are at the time
of inquiry. African American phenomena should be examined
with African America as its center, not Africa as Asante
suggests.

2‘ See also Paul Gilroy’ s "Living Memory and the

Sublime," chapter six of The_filaeh_htlahtie, particularly
pages 191- -196.

29'I recognize that Bakhtin confines his discussion of
the notions of hybridization and hybrid construction to
dialogue in the novel and the creatibn of dialogue.
However, I find these ideas relevant and applicable to my

argument of Atriean_huerieah being an identity construct
that linguistically merges two social worlds.

1” Though Bakhtin himself does not use this term,
Todorov does in describing Bakhtin’s system for analyzing
literature and language connections. See Tzvetan Todorov’s

” For me, at this analytical moment, these authors
are both the readers of the texts and those who pen the
text. It is crucial to the success of my work that I convey
the importance of seeing the writer as a reader--Alice
Walker is a reader of an African text--and the reader as
writer. Scholars and critics represent an Africa in the
texts they produce to explicate literary texts they have
encountered. At times, I realize the reader may find this
flip-flopping of positions unnerving. But I think this
flip-flopping shows the fluidity of the boundaries between
readers/writers and critics/writers.

1” See Karla HollOway’s discussion of (re)membrance in
African and African American women’s writing..Megringe_and

Metaphors. chapter 2-

33 I return to these concepts by Geertz in chapter 2,
and I discuss their use in Walker’ s text to read the
cultural text- of ritual female circumcision.

68

:“ Though it is not stated by Dent, I sense that her
use of the gaze parallels that illustrated in the work of
Michel Foucault, particularly his Dieeiplihe_ahu_£uhieh. As
I examine the functioning of this discourse, I will heavily
rely on Foucault’s explication of discourse as constructed
by the gaze. The gaze, he tells us, is that most coercive
of disciplines: it establishes and maintains power through

observation (Discipline_and_£uni§h 186-89)-

CHAPTER TWO
«can In cvanrr vuo none THAN BEEN am" on
xuoezno arnrcan woman: an ananrsrs or ALICE warxsnvs
s N c 0

W is the greatest
contemporary example of a cultural fiction. Indeed, Walker
finds herself justified in taking the "storyteller’s
prerogative" and creating an Africa (283). However, this
creative representation serves a nonfictional purpose, as it
is fiction only on its most surface level. Beneath the
fiction of Eeeeeeeing is its politics, its cultural
evaluation, if you will. The novel is a journey into the
life and world of Tashi, an Olinkan woman recently come to
the United States. The narrative details the emotional,
psychological, spiritual and sexual trauma she experiences
as a result of complying with traditions that sanction

ritual female circumcision.2

The primary focus of my
analysis will not be on ritual female circumcision, but on
how this ritual becomes a vehicle for the crafting of
Walker’s women characters--Tashi and M’Lissa.

Using Foucault’s assertion that hegiee are susceptible
to power relations, Karla Holloway suggests that in a world
where bodies are identified in terms of ethnicity and
gender, "blackwoman can be conceived of as a category in the

same way that ’black’ and ’woman’ are social categories"

69

7O
(4). I partially center my discussion of Walker’s text
around Holloway’s idea of "blackwoman." The question of
what is "a woman" is a crucial one and has mustered much
debate.3 IHowever, I am focusing on how definitions of
”black" participate in the creation, definition and reading
of Walker’s blackwoman. As Valerie Smith tells us, ”the
meaning of Blackness [in the United States] profoundly
shapes the experience of gender just as the experience of
gender ineluctably affects the experience of race" (47). I
also wish to entertain such questions as Who is this
blackwoman? How do we know her? And, most importantly, How
do we read her? Walker uses her own blackness, and the
connection blackness effects among all people of African
descent, to justify her voicing of Tashi’s story. In
Reeeeeeing we see "blackwoman" functioning (or becoming
encoded) as a means to connect women of African descent.
Because these identity terms, blackness and blackwoman, both
embody culture, a cultural text is the focal point around
which Walker centers her tale.

Unquestionably, if Walker had her way, ritual female
circumcision would be all that I would see as deserving of
critical attention, all that every critic of the text would
see. However, because Walker has exerted so much effort to
direct her readers, I resist her direction. Going against
her direction sends me to the representations of blackwomen

in her narrative and provides a way of discussing the

71
fiction within, and that guides, the fiction that
constitutes W- We
§§§I§I_9£_QQ¥ is about blackwomen and culture. It is about
Alice Walker and her readings of both. Indeed, Eeeeeeeing
is equally Tashi’s, M’Lissa’s, and Alice Walker’s stories.
The novel becomes less the tale of one woman (or two or
three women) than an attempt to decipher and read a cultural
tapestry woven into/upon the black female body. The
narrative becomes equally a R/reading of blackwomen. Just
as the novel details how the woman’s body is not her own,
so, too, is Tashi’s story not her own.

Reading Reeeeeeihg_the_§eeret_er_192 is a dual exercise
in reading culture. First, the creator of the fictional
world within which the novel’s African protagonist lives is
an African American woman. Furthermore, the protagonist is
an African recently emigrated to the United States with her
American husband. The latter offers the ideal African
American, embodying the culture of Africa and inhabiting the
geographical space of the United States. Tashi’s body
serves as the stage upon which the opera of African American
cultural/ethnic identity can be performed. Secondly, the
novel’s actions focus on the cultural rite of female
circumcision. Both African American women’s voices (those
of the author and her heroine) are present in the text and
confront the cultural text of female circumcision from their

various culturally and ethnic embodied spaces. Tashi is an

72
African and an American. She seems fully aware of the
consequences inherent in pledging full allegiance to both,
but is also aware that the two are different--connected but
separate. Her experiences with ritual female circumcision
are examined from both perspectives.

In the novel we get this sense of Tashi’s biculturalism

from the varying references to her as "Tashi, renamed in
America ’Evelyn’, Evelyn Johnson, and Tashi-Evelyn."
Clearly the latter represents the "twoness," the idea of
"two souls, two unreconciled strivings: two warring ideals
in one dark body" (DuBois 1989, 5). Alice Walker examines
the African soul of her protagonist, and ritual female
circumcision is the vehicle for this examination. Walker
views the practice as a means through which African women
are rendered joyless and spiritually dead, and she struggles
to reconcile the two warring cultural consciousnesses.
Clearly, this is a novel by a woman, about women, and which
argues for the rights of women. The particular right that
Walker champions, struggles to protect/defend/encode is that
which insures that African women will continue to "possess
the secret of joy."‘ For Walker, this possession and the
joy are both linked to the "literal destruction of the most
crucial external sign of her womanhood: her vulva itself"
(1993, 21).

RQSE£fi§1n9_§h§_£§QI§E_QfileY is the story of two kinds

of women: those who are forbidden this possession, the right

73
to own their bodies, and those who forbid others this right.
Walker constructs both archetypes: "the mother who betrays"
and ”the daughter so betrayed" (Walker, 1993 21). Through
these constructions, Walker places the "proverbial feminist
personal is political" into direct conflict with "that
notorious black manifesto--we will not have our business put
into the streets" (Dent 3). The conflict is embodied in the
relationship between Tashi and M’Lissa. Particularly, these
two women destroy themselves and each other by their beliefs
in and questionings of ritual female circumcision.
Vicariously, they also destroy Africa. Alice Walker sees
her novel as an attempt to mend the bodies torn asunder aha
to reunite those separated by time and space._

In the collection of essays In_§§§I§h_Q£;QEI_HQ§h§£§L
fiarfiene, Walker casts herself as a healer. Athena Vrettos
tells us that "by reclaiming the history of black women,
those ’creatures so mutilated in body, so dimmed and
confused by pain,’ and redefining their scars as ’the
springs of creativity’" Walker attempts "to forge spiritual
bonds with the past" (455-56). Peeeeeeing is that attempt.
As a cultural fiction, the novel explores how we read
others, understand them, and proceed to tell their stories.
But, it is also about how we--in our understandings of
ourselves--are intertwined with the stories that we tell.
Walker’s text explores ethnicity and what it means to

possess an ethnic identity. Importantly, ethnicity is

74
examined as not wholly inherited: rather, it is exposed as
”something that is reinvented and reinterpreted" by
successive generations (Fischer 195).5 Ethnicity, then,
becomes a fictional space crucial to our understanding of
Beeeeeeihg. Through Tashi, Walker is interpreting her
ethnicity and demonstrating the importance of its
reinvention, redefinition.

As Gina Dent tells us in "Black Pleasure, Black Joy,"
Eeeeeeeihg "forces us to confront hat the history of female
circumcision, but the mythical use of this particularity as
a point of entry into the analysis of our ever elusive
connections to Africa" (3). Walker reads Tashi and M’Lissa
through a lens similar to that which an anthropologist might
read an Other. 2eeeeeeihg_the_§eeret_er_gey offers an
attack upon myths of culture that sanction and sustain
"mutilation" and attempts to recreate for its women subjects
a tradition that is liberating and conducive to building
strong gendered selves. This mission is made obvious in the
text’s final scene. Women gathered to witness Tashi’s
execution have been "warned they must not sing," but these
women allow their bare bottomed female babies to be their
voices. As the little women are lifted onto their mothers’
shoulders, the sounds of the babies’ voices represent the
women’s collective protest against a male authority--
embodied by the armed male guards.7 The presence of these
voiced gendered bodies challenges the authority that would

75
silence them and dictate their behavior. This act is
followed by the revelation, to Tashi as well as to the
reader, that W IS THE SECRET OF JOY!" (281) .

The characters in this novel are Walker’s political
mouthpieces: their voices highlight what she considers to be
violations of "the blameless vulva" (dedication).
Undoubtedly, the novel demythicizes female circumcision as
well as the life of women who undergo it. Tashi is
(re)created, allowed to flourish, if only in her final
minutes. Africa is (re)created as well, but its fate is
less kind. Just as Tashi represents the approximately 80
million women who undergo circumcision each year, the
village of Olinka stands for the continent of Africa.
Eeeeeeeihg constructs an Africa where the woman’s body
serves as the backdrop against which patriarchy is played
out.. It is this essentializing, totalizing representation
that some have found at once objectionable and irresponsible
(Wilentz 1993). '

.Though I respect Alice Walker’s right to cast her
creative eye upon whatever she chooses, her intrusion into
the fictional text of 2eeeeeeihg_the_§eeret_er_19y suggests
that the novel is more than fiction. I contend that this
text exists somewhere on the boundaries of cultural
criticism (a Reading) and fiction (a reading). In glainihg
the_fleritage, Missy Kubitschek provides a discussion

relevant to my reading of Alice Walker and her novel.

76
Kubitschek suggests that the black woman writer explores the
"necessity of knowing and coming to terms with tribal
history to construct tenable black female identities" (7).
Furthermore, she adds, this interest appears in two forms.
"First, the characters’ relationships to the history of
Blacks in the New World" are examined, and then "the
author’s relationships to the literary tradition” (7). The
understanding of "tribal history" is central to the writer,
and to the female character’s becoming and remaining a
functioning black woman presence. Walker excavates Tashi’s
history and in the process discovers her own connection to
Tashi, blackwoman to blackwoman. With respect to literary
tradition[s], Alice Walker is involved in one and tries to
enter another: the African American and the African,
respectively. In her Meerihg_aha_hetaphere, Karla Holloway
discusses the intersection of these two traditions in the
texts of the women writers within each tradition. Of
particular significance here, she argues that blackwomen
writers use myth as a "metaphorical revisioning of
experiential knowledge" (86). These myths are represented
through "patterns of memory and telling" (88). Walker
speaks from within the African American women’s literary
tradition, but she speaks to the tradition of African
women’s writing. Though there are similarities between

these women, and Holloway notes many, Walker elides

77
significant differences and complicates the problematic of

speaking about and for others.6

On the nerigiah: Walker’s Move from Black Women to
Blackwomen

Alice Walker uses the writing of Eeeeeeeing as a means
of anthropologizing her cultural duality. This excavation
of her cultural self is a constant in her fiction: she is
always in search of her political, social, and cultural
gendered self. Using Walker’s first novel with a female
protagonist as a point of departure and comparison, it
becomes easier to see Tashi as existing on a continuum.7
While this positioning does not free Walker from
essentialist criticism, it offers us another way to look at
this writer and her work.8

Barbara Christian aptly points out that Alice Walker’s
fiction is "black women-centered" and as such it focuses on
the pain and struggles of black women (39). With Merigian
this is certainly the case, but what we see in Reeeeeeihg is
a concern for blackwomen.9 ‘Walker’s relationship to Africa
does not begin with Tashi and Reeeeeeihg. In fact, in her
first volume of poetry, ghee, we find "Karamojans," a poem
about an African population "Never civilized" (23). The
poem describes an idyllic Africa represented by "A tall
man/Without clothes/ Beautiful/Like a statue"(20). But

later, this beauty is contradicted once we get "close up"

and see that ”His eyes/Are running/Sores" (21). Walker

78

describes the beautiful man as "The Noble Savage" and
describes the women as their bodies: "Bare breasts loose/In
the Sun/The skin Cracked/The nipples covered/With flies"
(22). Her description here is heavily reminiscent of
Conrad’s "dark woman" roaming freely in "the heart of
darkness." As well, this Natiehal_§eegraphie-like depiction
further demonstrates Walker’s indebtedness to the Western
anthropological tradition.

Alice Walker is no idealist when it comes to Africa.
Her agendais to figure out how she can "take the bitter
with the sweet.” Though Africa can exist as an integral
part of African American awareness of self, Walker reminds
us that Africa is distant, and we must always question how
we identify with things we see and know from a distance.
Walker’s cautioning is best summed up by Robert Stepto’s
assertion that while the identity term "African American"
bestows two equal cultural and geographical spaces for
locating identity, ''it is also a term that cannot help but
painfully remind black people in the New World that while
they can configure ’America’ in increasingly specific,
personal terms," the same cannot be designated for ”Africa"
(xiv). Clearly, the ”African" names a space, but ”it also
teasingly asks us to find it in a haystack as big as a
continent” (xiv). Hence, Walker cannot specify Tashi, for
though Tashi is her link, Walker has no specific place to

which she can attach herself: "I do not know from what part

79
of Africa my African ancestors came, I claim the entire
continent. I suppose that I have created Olinka as my
village and the Olinkans as my ancestral tribal peoples"
(235).

Elsewhere, Walker has spoken to this longing for a
grounding place, a cultural mooring place. Holloway defines
a mooring place as a "deliberately fixed" place whose
"center is where behavior, art, philosophy and language
unite as a cultural expression" (1). A mooring place is
revealed through specified discourse. In "In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens," Walker speaks of her creative genesis,
and states that in attempting to know ourselves through our
history it is important to seek our foremothers and know
their works. She posits that:

[O]ur mothers and grandmothers,

'eureelyee have not perished in the

wilderness. And if we ask ourselves why,

and search for and find the answer, we

will know beyond all efforts to erase

from our minds, just exactly who and of

what, we black American women are. (235)
Walker continues:

Therefore we must fearlessly pull out of

ourselves and look at and identify with

our lives the living creativity some of

our great-grandmothers were not allowed

to know. (237)
It is this searching that we see in Meridian, a black
American woman, and that we see extending to Africa with

Tashi. Also, in both novels we are presented with women--

Meridian and Tashi as well as the women who ”control” their

80
female becoming--who seem unaware of individual gendered
freedom. Walker establishes in this essay the mooring place

w creative

for her search, the gardens of black[ ]women’s
and everyday genius and survival.

In ”Everyday Use," we find the metaphor for Walker’s
identity search--that of quilting.11 .This short story
explores "heritage," and how it is realized by two black
American women, sisters--Dee and Maggie--through their
respective relationships with their mother and grandmother.
Dee has developed a fashionable attraction to her Southern
roots and her African past--she has renamed herself Wangero
Leewanika Kemanjo. When asked by her mother, "What happened
to ’Dee’?" she replies, "She’s dead. I couldn’t bear it any
longer, being named after the people who oppress me" (418).
Ironically, Dee’s attempt at connection entails
disconnection, since she was named after her grandmother.
Dee’s cosmetic ancestral connection--and affected
disconnection--is juxtaposed with Maggie who is quite fond
of her grandmother and close to her. In the discussion
about who should get the quilts, Maggie proclaims: ”She can
have them Mama, I can remember Grandma Dee without the
quilts" (421). Dee’s interest in her past is represented by
her coveting of ancestral artifacts, namely those quilts
made by the woman whose name she bears. Proclaiming her
educated awareness of their cultural, familial and

historical significance:

81

these [quilts] are all pieces of dresses

grandma used to wear. She did all this

stitching by hand (420).
she tells her mother:

Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!

She’d probably be backward enough to put

them to everyday use (421).
Her mother responds: ”She can always make some more. Maggie
knows hey to quilt" (421: emphasis added). The quilts
symbolize heritage--something of the past to be passed on--
but they also symbolize the making of a heritage--the
process of quilting is a process. As Gates would have it,
quilting represents for Walker "a reassembling of the
fragments of [local and] diasporic experience" (1989 xxiv).
Though Dee may be a part of the history, in possession of
its whole, Maggie can continue the traditions embodied in
that whole through repetition--the making of quilts, the
repeating of the historical linking.

Alice Walker as a novelist is quilting--putting

together the bits and pieces of black[ ]women’s lives and
creating a whole which connects them and tells their

stories.12

Though her main emphasis in the essay, "In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens," and this short story is
black women, it was only a matter of time before she
branched out, plowed deeper. As Gates states more clearly,
'[t]o reassemble the fragments of course . . . is to attempt

to weave a fiction of origins" (1989 xxiv). So, Walker

82
weaves. Her fictions are patches in an unfinished quilt:
Tashi and Meridian supply significant and related patches.

Walker tells us that the black woman’s literary
tradition is grounded in the belief that "escape for the
body and freedom for the soul [go] together" (Seareh 5).
Clearly this is as obvious in herigian as in Eeeeeeeing. As
Keith Byerman aptly suggests, herigian is Alice Walker’s
best "effort to incorporate history, folk forms, and the
conditions of women into fiction" (146). Furthermore,
Meridian is the cloth from which Tashi is shaped.

Meridian is a novel about revolution--individual and
collective gendered protest.“ The narrative catalogs the
problematics of being black and particularly of being a
black woman in the United States. We hear of several women
who die and/or suffer from societal restrictions. We hear
of Louvinie, a West African woman who was a slave on Saxon
Plantation. Louvinie’s "tongue was clipped out at the root”
because her stories frightened a white child to death (44).
There is Fast Mary of the Tower who murdered her
illegitimate child, for fear that she would be named by her
society as immoral. Her deed discovered, Mary confined
herself to her room, one with no window, and hanged herself.
Both of these women are silenced and excluded. Like so many
of Walker’s black foremothers these women are also denied
the opportunities to tell their own stories. Also, we meet

Mrs. Hill who suffers under the "double yokes" of Wife and

83

Mother.“ Obviously, these women have not yet learned "the
secret joy".15 The primary focus of the novel, though, is
Meridian’s experiences during the civil rights movement of
the 1960s. Meridian’s story is told from within her mind: a
series of flashbacks inform her present experiences.
Primarily, Meridian is a revolutionary: she confronts and
challenges traditions--gendered and national. This course
of behavior forces her to address the two seminal questions
confronting any revolutionary: (1) Will you die for the
revolution? (2) Will you kill for the revolution? The
revolution is about national change, but brings about a
change in Meridian.

Realizing her death at the novel’s beginning--"I must
look like death eating a seda cracker" (25)--Meridian
decides to live: she reveals this to Truman Held:

[I]f somebody has to go it might as well
be the person who’s ready

And are you ready?

Now? No. What you see before you is a

woman in the process of changing her

mind. (25)
Her (re)birth involves conquering the things that have
affected her death--various traditions. The first
traditions, racial separation and female disembodiment, are
confronted at the circus when Meridian faces the tanks.

In the separate-but-equal South, she has gathered a

group of black children for a trip to the circus: however,

the day of the visit is not one designated for blacks. The

84

trip to the circus centers around viewing "the mummy woman,"
Marilene O’Shay, who is carted around by her husband and
displayed for a fee. The bright banner on the side of the
trailer which entombs Mrs. O’Shay announces "she is one of
12 Human Wonders”: while four stars define her as an
"Obedient Daughter, Devoted Wife, Adoring Mother, Gone
Wrong” (19). The flier promises "The True Story of Marilene
O’Shay" and informs us that she:

had been an ideal woman, a "goddess,"

who had been given everything she

theught she wanted . . . . All she had

to do was lay back and be pleasured.

(20)
For Meridian, this woman represents the shell all women are
forced to live within. Just as the mummy woman is
"[p]reserved in Life-Like Condition," women who fail to
become active in revolution(s), in bringing about change,
exist only in a state that resembles life. The Mummy woman
is a symbol of certain fates experienced by women in
general, and by black women in particular. She becomes an
embodiment of black womanhood. Mrs. O’Shay darkens over the
course of her exhibition, and attempts by her husband to
"paint her original color" fail (20). The Mummy woman
affects and embodies change, ehe changes.

Meridian defines her struggle as residing in her

resistance to social systems and her search for the inner

capacity to change them. This struggle is negotiated though

her relationship with her mother. Mrs. Hill is much like

985

the mummy woman, ”rigid, static and stifled" (McDowell 266)
because she adheres strictly to confining traditions:
religion, marriage and motherhood. Meridian defines her
mother as "not a woman who should have children. She was
capable of thought and growth only if unfettered by the
needs of dependents, or the demands of a husband" (49).
Hence, her asking Meridian, "Have you stolen anything?”
signals her belief that Meridian stole her freedom, her
choices, her spirit, her chances at revolution. The social
definition of motherhood for black women equals sacrifice of
the spirit, and a subsequent squashing of their (female)
children’s spirits as well. Mrs. Hill, after living within
the confines of society’s conscription, laments that "the
mysterious inner life she had imagined gave [married women
and mothers] the secret joy was simply a full knowledge that
they were dead, living just enough for their children“ (51).
For Meridian, it is Christianity and its learned
submissiveness that blinds her mother to choices outside of
wife and mother roles, and forbids her access to the "secret
joy." But Meridian explores her choices and as a result is
alienated, forever, from her mother. Ironically, she does
not fully escape the chains that bind her mother.

Saxon College presents Meridian with a new set of
gendered restrictions. The school song declares, "We are as
chaste and pure as/the driven snow./We watch our manners,

speech/ and dress just so" (93). Meridian breaks these

86
rules and we witness this rebellion in her response to the
body of the "Wile Chile," orphaned, pregnant and unmarried,
whom Meridian rescues and brings to the College. The
tension between tradition and change is deepened when the
Dean runs the child away and causes her to be struck by a
car and killed. The death of the child, and the President’s
refusal to allow Meridian to have her funeral in the
school’s chapel, confirms Meridian’s belief that revolution
is inevitable--and, that only through revolution can she
(re)claim the secret joy lost to her mother forever.

In preparation for her revolutionary role, Meridian
returns to the South. Here she (re)connects with her past
and gains a new sense of herself through the church. This
was not her mother’s church, however, but--metaphorically
speaking--Martin Luther King, Jr’s church, a church where
social and political struggle was linked to the worship of
God. Meridian discovers:

that the respect she owed her life was

to continue, against whatever obstacles,

to live it and not to give up any .

particle of it without a fight to the

death, preferably not her own. And that

this existence extended beyond herself

to those around her because, in fact,

the years in America had created [for

black people] one life (200).
Here Meridian decides that dying for revolution may be
required and it is a sacrifice she would make, though she
would rather not. However, though killing for the

revolution may be equally necessary, she is ambivalent as to

87
whether she herself can kill. Instead, "perhaps it will be
[her] part to walk behind the real revolutionaries-~those
who know they must spill blood" (201).

At the novel’s end, Meridian receives a letter from her
friend Anne-Marion, who writes, "Who would be happier than
you that the Sojourner did not die?" (217). The note
informs Meridian of the tree’s regrowth frOm the stump left
after the original tree was destroyed by rioting students at
Saxon College: "the new past had regrown from the old"
(219). It is no doubt that Sojourner serves two functions.
It represents travel, Meridian’s travel back to the South, a
mooring place of sorts. Also, the tree represents Sojourner
Truth, whose "Ain’t I a Woman" speech has been noted as a
benchmark for black women’s suffrage.

As such, the tree embodies Meridian’s history. It is
all that remains of the plantation that once stood where
Saxon College was built: Louvinie, the silenced West African
woman, planted this tree. The survival of the tree
indicates the sustaining of Meridian’s history, her
heritage. .Meridian is also an extension of that tree
(McDowell 275).16 Equally significant, Meridian realizes
that her history "extends beyond those around her," beyond
the ”one life” of black people [women] in the United States.
Conjured in the image of.the Mummy woman and revolutionized
in the body of Meridian, Tashi is born. As Alice Walker

explores the branches of the tree, the regrown Sojourner,

88
she finds another leaf, wilted and dying. The tree metaphor
carries over into Eeeeeeeing and frames our reading of the
novel, but it also connects Alice Walker’s fictions--

continues her quilting.

The Writer as Quilt Maker: Alice Walker as Ethnographer
2eeeeeeing_the_§eeret_et_lpy revisits a dilemma in
anthropology: separation between ethnography and literature.

The fundamental problem for the ethnographer and/or
anthropologist is hen to describe a culture. This is quite
similar to the literary concern of representation.
Ethnographers help "shape the life history" that they record
(Prell 241). They interpret their data, recordings, and
compile a representation. Though anthropologists have
debated the interpretive strain, the ficitonal quality, as
it were, of their writings, rarely has literature about the
Other been examined in terms of (or based upon a model of)
ethnography."’ From an anthropological point of view, the
dichotomy was once clearly established. Ethnography equals
fact, tells the truth and is science presented by
scientists. On the other hand, literature is fiction,
relays fantasy, and is art written by an artist (Benson
18) .‘3

Beeeeeeing challenges this age old dichotomy for it
takes on an ethnographic style and content. Stephen Tyler

suggests that the "once heralded" scientific nature of

89
ethnography (123) is no longer revered. Furthermore, he
argues that there exists a postmodern ethnography. This
ethnography is a "cooperatively evolved text consisting of
fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of
both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible
world of common-sense reality" (125). Postmodern ethnography
is literary, mythical and creative. Reeeeeeing is partially
a postmodern ethnography, its "break with everyday reality”
is a journey apart into strange lands with occult practices-
-into the heart of darkness--"where fragments of the
fantastic whirl about in the vortex of the quester’s
disoriented consciousness" (Tyler 126). For the quester,
Walker, the fantastic is real, true, and her fiction is
informed by fact. She has journeyed into Africa to
(re)crient her double consciousness.

In her epistle "To the Reader," Walker tells us that
Tashi is flesh, represented by the African woman who plays
her in the film version of The_§eler_£urple. This Tashi
also embodies the "little girls [who] were being forced
under the shards of unwashed glass, tin-can tops, rusty
razors, and dull knives of traditional circumcisors" (284).
This whisper into the readers’ ears suggests Walker’s
postmodern ethnographic tendency. The novel becomes a
dialogue "emphasizing the cooperative and collective nature
of the ethnographic situation” and rejects the "ideology of

observer-observed, [for] there is nothing being observed and

:90

no one who is observing" (Tyler 126). The reader is called
into the text’s story and participates in its telling, for
the "real" story does not end when the cover of the book is
closed--there are the other girls who may still face the
knife. Walker tells us that Tashi, embodied and fleshed,
warrants a "book of her own”. However, I question: Is this
book Tashi’s own?

Eeeeeeeing is an ethnography of blackwomen’s bodies,
grounded in the African American literary tradition and its
discourse about Africa. ‘Ethnography, Clifford tells us, can
be fiction "in the sense of something made up or fashioned"
and existing within the boundaries of "the partiality of
cultural and historical truths" (6). There are at least six
characteristics that constitute ethnographic fiction, and
Alice Walker frames her novel within all of these. These
frame my discussion of Walker. Ethnographic writing,
Clifford says, is determined:

(1)contextually (it draws from and
creates meaningful social milieux):
(2)rhetorically (it uses and is used by
expressive convention): (3)
institutionally (one writes within and
against, specific traditions,
disciplines, audiences): (4)generically
(an ethnography is usually
distinguishable from a novel or travel
account): (5)politically (the authority
to represent cultural realities is
unequally shared and at times
contested): (6)historically (all of the

above conventions and constraints are
changing). (6)

91
These six "govern the inscription of ethnographic fiction,"
and are mainifested in Eeeeeeing.

This inscription upon Eeeeeeaing is demonstrated
firstly by the "bumper sticker" cited in the novel’s opening
epigraph: "When the axe came into the forest, the trees
said the handle is one of us." This bumper sticker casts
the cultural frame, the context, within which Walker
positions her story. The forest, the wilderness, the dark
continent, are at once Africa and blackwomen’s bodies.19
Also, though, this political statement serves as a
rhetorical device, speaking to collectives being torn
asunder from within. The idea is that the easiest way to
deplete the forest is through the manipulation of the trees.
The handle (em)bodies the trees just as it wields the forces
that will disembody them. The blade represents patriarchy,
and though it actually cuts--severs--the trees’ bodies, much
like those blades which remove women’s clitorises, the hands
that hold it, that maintain it, are themselves trees, women.
The novel is about trees and bodies, blades and patriarchy,
women and women, embodiment and dismemberment, a body’s
remembering and [re]membrance.

”[Re]membrance," according to Holloway acknowledges
that "memory is culturally inscribed" within the "genre of
myth" (25). "[Re]membrance" also "emphasizes the body and
the restorative aspect of (re)" (13). Hence, Walker’s

selection of an epigraph foreshadows her grounding of

92

culture in the body--Tashi cannot be remenhered, but Walker
tells us what that body remembers. Walker introduces
herself as part of the narrative, and hence becomes vital to
Tashi’s story as she draws Tashi into her own. Walker’s
fiction, then, is undergirded by a greater fiction: Female
Solidarity, particularly, blackwomen’s suffrage, and Tashi
is Walker’s "universal woman" ("Appeal" Eeeenee JL 92 102).

Walker, through Tashi, speaks for 80 million African
women while also [re]membering her "great-great-great-great-
grandmother who came here with all that pain in her body?
("Appeal" 60). As Gay Wilentz tells us, Walker’s political
approach to Tashi and her story "tends to efface difference
and is problematic for readers acquainted with African
culture and history" (1993, 4). Institutionally, then,
Walker "writes against [this] specific audience" with whom
Wilentz is concerned (see Clifford above). While Wilentz’s
reading is certainly valid with respect to the novel’s
discussion of ritual female circumcision and the
accompanying casting of Africa(ns), I suspect that this
effacement can be mediated, if we consider that the novel is
Alice Walker’s story. She tells it, and she decided where
it begins and ends and what to use to fill its middle.
Alice Walker is the heroine and protagonist of this text.
Reading Eeeeeeeing then becomes a journey into the

political, social and gendered consciousness of Alice

Walker. W is about Alice Walker

93
and her politics more than, or at least equally as much as,
it is about Tashi and her trauma.20

Much like an anthropologist’s transcribed tape-recorded
interviews, Tashi’s (hi)story is detailed in several voices,
and the reminiscences of Tashi, as well as the people who
share and shape her life, take us down the road to Tashi’s
recovery of her soul. Generically, Walker disguises the
fictional, novel, quality of her text.

Significant to my suggestion that Alice Walker acts as
ethnographer, is the narrative presence of Raye. Raye is a
"middle-aged African American woman" psychologist who treats
Tashi after her male psychologist dies (115). In a session
with Raye, Tashi discusses their "leader, like Nelson
Mandela and Jana Kenyatta," who was "Jesus Christ to them"
(115: 117). This Leader instructed the Olinkans that they
”must not neglect [their] ancient customs" (117). One of
these ancient customs is "the female initiation . . . into
womanhood . . . Circumcision" (119). Raye takes the
opportunity to ask questions that would elicit what Geertz
calls experience-near concepts. These concepts are those
which subjects "might naturally and effortlessly use" to
name their reality ("Native’s Point” 227). Tashi names her
reality by using the words initiatien and eireuneieien, and
in response Raye requests specifics: "What exactly is this
procedure? I am ignorant about this practice, though, and

would like to learn about it from you. Is the same thing

94
done to every woman. Or is there a variation?" (119-120).
Tashi responds by informing the therapist of the "three
forms of circumcision“ (120). Tashi explains only two of
them as she tells Raye that while "[s]ome cultures demanded
excision of only the clitoris, others insisted on a thorough
scraping away of the entire genital area" (120).

At this point the anthropological taint of Walker’s
text is uncovered as an experience-distant concept that is
presented as experience-near. Tashi’s description begins
quite "effortlessly"--as "initiation"--and progresses to the
medicatechnical-- as "circumcision". This progression is
from that which is local to that which is distant.
Experience-distant concepts are those "which various
specialists employ to forward their scientific,
philosophical or practical aims" (Geertz, "Native’s Point"
227). In this instance, Walker has Tashi describe her
thoughts about her'body, thus revealing Walker’s
role/presence in the text:

It was only after I came to America, I
said, that I ever knew what was supposed
to be down there.

Down there?

Yes. My own body was a mystery to me, as
.was the female body, beyond the function
of the breasts, to almost everyone I
knew. From prison Our Leader said we
.must keep ourselves clean and pure as we
had been since time immemorial:--by
cutting out unclean parts of our bodies.
Everyone knew that if a woman was not

circumcised her unclean parts would grow
so long they’d touch her thighs: she’d

95

become masculine and arouse herself. No

man could enter her because her own

erection would be in his way. (121)

You believed this? 7

Everyone believed it, even though no one

had ever seen it. No one living in our

village anyway. And yet the elders,

particularly, acted as if everyone had

witnessed this evil, and not nearly a

long enough time ago. (121)
Here we see Walker’s attempt to reveal, explore and erase a
myth of repression. Raye questions Tashi’s belief in this
myth though she, Tashi, had not witnessed its
manifestations, to which Tashi responds that her parts may
have grown as the myth suggests because her friends "jeered
at [her] for having a tail. I think that meant my labia
majora" (121). This reveals not only the power of myth, but
an individual’s potential to rewrite the myths that control
and define a culture. Though African women have described
other versions of this myth,21 I define Tashi’s description
as an "experience-distant" one because it embodies the
”Hottentot" stereotype of the late nineteenth-century.

Later in the novel, this stereotype is reinforced by

Pierre, the child of Tashi’s husband and his French lover.
Tashi lauds Pierre as the one who "continues to untangle the
threads of mystery that kept [her] enmeshed" (277). One
such untangling comes when Pierre tells her that in a book
”by a European anthropologist," he sees pictures of "early

uncircumcised women" and that these "bushwomen, small,

gentle, completely at one with their environment, liked

96
elongated genitals" (277). Furthermore, "by the time they
reached puberty, well, they had acquired what was to become
known . . . as ’the Hottentot apron’" (278). Clearly, this
is the way Tashi should have remained, at one with her
environment, the environment that is her sexuality. This
very characteristic that Alice Walker cites and reinforces
was once used by anthropologists as evidence serving to
"distinguish these parts [the female genitals] at once from
those of any of the ordinary vanities of the human species”
(Gilman 235: emphasis mine).”t Wilentz suggests that
Walker’s use of this stereotype to promote a "positive
aspect of female sexuality" (1993: 5) may be more harmful
than helpful. That this description comes from Tashi during
a session with her psychoanalyst strengthens Sander
Gilman’s claim that "the line from the secrets possessed by
the ’Hottentot Venus’ to twentieth-century psychoanalysis
runs reasonably straight" (257).

Walker’s manipulation of the Western anthropological
tradition is highly relevant in light of a recent segment on
ABC’s newsmagazine Day One entitled "Scarred for Life.” In
this discussion, Forrest sawyer and Sheila MacVicar
attempted to shed some light on female circumcision. Sawyer
describes circumcision as "a brutal ritual so tied to
culture and tradition that for thousands of years women have
been powerless to stop it" (Transcript #129, 1). In fact,

Sawyer continues, "taboos are so strong that women subjected

97
to it will rarely talk about it at all. But now a handful
of them are breaking the silence." The language used by
Sawyer is highly significant as we read Walker’s text.
Walker’s American citizenship provides her the distance to
use such language, but her assumption of an African culture
problematizes the validity of such terms.

Phrases like "brutal ritual," "culture and tradition"
and verbs like "subjected" introduce us to the conception
Westerners have with respect to female circumcision, a
conception of ritual female circumcision that documents the
female body politic. The practice is not conceived as one
that a woman would defend or participate in willingly.
Though such inquiries pretend to be interested in
"uncovering" how these traditions function in societies that
have such practices, the language of their reports suggests
otherwise. In terms of tradition, and the political
characteristic of ethnographic fiction, female circumcision
not only provides women with a protected status, but is
itself protected.

As El Dareer tells us, ”tradition [is] the primary
reason for retention of the circumcision of women," and ”it
does not occur to anyone to question [traditions because
they] are firmly woven into the social fabric" (67-8). It
is Adam, Tashi’s American husband, who addresses this
question for Walker: ”When they say the word ’taboo’. . .

[a]re they saying something is ’sacred’ and therefore not to

98

be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery: or
are they saying that it is so profane it must not be
exposed, for fear of corrupting the young?" (165). Indeed
this is Alice Walker’s dilemma. Why is it that all African
women--African women writers in particular--are not speaking
out against a tradition that so maims them and their
sisters? In addressing this question, Walker contests
African women’s authority to represent their own cultural
realities (Clifford 6).

Linda Alcoff tells us what is said changes depending on
who is speaking and to whom the story is being told (12).
Importantly, she tells us that the "work of privileged
authors who speak on the behalf of less privileged persons
has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing and
reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for" (7).
Alice Walker presumes to have her Tashi speak for the
silenced African women who undergo circumcision each year.
But, just as Alcoff tells us that when we speak for
ourselves, we construct possible selves, "ways to be in
[our] world,” I suggest that Alice Walker’s Tashi speaks for
Walker herself, her African American self (21). Tashi is
embedded in the traditions that constitute her maker and
hence cannot be taken, as Walker designed her, as "a

universal generalization" (Alcoff, 1991 21).

99'
The Voice of Tradition: 0r, Walker's Literary Heritage
Tashi and M’Lissa are characters clearly cast in the

African American literary tradition. As Hazel Carby tells
us, African American women writers:

foreground [themselves within] their

active tales as historical agents as

opposed to passive subjects, acting upon

their own visions they make decisions

over their own lives. They do also

document their sufferings and brutal
treatment but in a context that is also

§h§_§§QIY_QI_I§§i§§§nge (22: emphasis

mine).
Eeeeeeeing is a story of resistance, Alice Walker’s
resistance to silence and Tashi’s resistance to tradition.
Furthermore, M’Lissa’s indictment epitomizes these
resistances. Laurent Jenny tells us that "we can grasp the
meaning and structure of a literary work only through its
relation to archetypes which are themselves abstracted from
a long series of texts" (34). Alice Walker’s text is
embedded within such a long series, and in order to address
this intertextuality, it is necessary that we, as is said in
the African American oral tradition, "go to the source."

With Reeeeeeing Walker engages several literary

traditions. A significant source for reading Walker is Zora
Neale Hurston whose Their_Eyee_flere_flatehing_§ed is the ur-
text of contemporary black American women’s writing, and for
Alice Walker’s in particular. While searching for her

mothers’ gardens, Walker made a trek through the "Garden of

the Heavenly Rest" ("Looking for Zora" 304). Among the

100

weeds, Walker discovers what she believes to be Hurston’s
unmarked grave. She describes this discovery, and forecasts
her literary frame:

There are times--and finding Zora

Hurston’s grave was one of them--when

normal responses of grief, horror, and

so on, do not make sense because they

bear no real relation to the depth of

the emotion one feels. . . . It is only

later, when the pain is not so direct a

threat to one’s own existence that what

was learned in that moment is

understood. Such moments rob us of both

youth and vanity. But perhaps they are

also the times when greater disciples

are born. ("Looking" 313: emphasis mine)
Walker fashions herself as one such disciple. An
anthropologist by training, Hurston serves as a model for
Walker, and one of Hurston’s least critically attended works
serves as a model for Possessing. that is Mules_and_uen-

Mulee is an artfully constructed collection of fictive

folktales. The ”collection,” like Eeeeeeeing, is complete
with explanatory notes and appendicesd23 Folklore frames
hulee, and folklore is important to how Tashi’s tale is
told. A centralizing folk parable for Walker’s text is the
brief conversation in the wilderness she identifies as a
"bumper sticker.“ Just as Hurston’s Mulee opens with a tale
which frames the story that follows, so, too, does
Eeeeeeeing. When we are introduced to Tashi for the first
time, she tells us that she is dead, and this realization
"reminds [her] of a story" (3). The story is about "a

panther who had a co-wife and a husband" (3). As Howard

101
Faulkner tells us, such frames "purport to assure the
[reader] that the fiction is not fictive, not ’parasitic,’
but true, or at least based on truth" (333). We are told
that "Tashi expressed herself" through stories (6). Like
hulee, Reeeeeeing is a collection of "tales,” stories about
Tashi and from Tashi herself. The story of Tashi’s life is
surrounded and grounded in folklore and myth. In fact,
Tashi herself becomes an embodiment of folklore. While
visiting M’Lissa, Tashi learns "that it [is] only the murder
of the tsunga, the circumciser, by one of those whom she has
circumcised that proves her (the circumciser’s) value to the
tribe. Her own death, [M’Lissa] declared, had been
ordained" (208). When Tashi kills M’Lissa, she reinforces
the power she intended to silence and to exterminate.
Folklore also structures Eeeeeeeing for it is folklore that
sustains women’s acquiescence to traditions that, in
Walker’s view, oppress and repress them.

In terms of the African literary traditiOn, Walker
engages Flora Nwapa’s mild portrayal of circumcision in
Eruru. Nwapa refers to the operation as a "bath" and for
Efuru, this bathing occurs after she is married. Buchi
Emecheta, considered by many to be the most Western of
African women writers, allows circumcision only one line in
her Deuhle_Xle. For Walker, these mild addresses are
inconsequential at best. However, this is also where Alice

Walker enters an African literary tradition, to use

102
Kubitschek. Though the women, in their fiction, have been
virtually silent on this subject, their silence speaks
loudly to the cultural and gendered sense of delicacy
attached to this subject. However, Walker does engage the
male tradition, as it were, of representing ritual female
circumcision. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o discusses circumcision in
his novel Ihg_Biy§r_figtyggn as does Ahmadou Kouromma in his
W. '

In the former novel, the rite is discussed within the
context of the Christian missionaries’ arrival and their
desire to ban the practice; hence, the community is divided
over the continuation of this I'sin." In the cultures and
societies that practice female circumcision, the practice
functions akin to Jewish circumcision which served, once, to
separate Jews from nonJews. For the cultures that support,
sustain and practice ritual female circumcision, the
practice is quasireligious.“’ Jomo Kenyatta, first post-
colonial president of Kenya and leader of the Gikuyu, tells
us that "irua"—-female circumcision-~is a "tribal symbol
that identifies age-groups” and allows the Gikuyu to
maintain and "perpetuat[e] that spirit of collectivism and
national solidarity" (134).

Consequently, Muthoni, Ngugi’s female protagonist in
1h§_31ygx_flg;wggn, feels ethnically obligated to undergo the
rite. Though Muthoni does not physically survive it, she

does live long enough to aver that she is a "true" Gikuyu

103
"woman.” Walker’s Dura—-Tashi’s sister who bleeds to death
after her operation-~is Muthoni. Kenyatta, as well as
Ngugi, can be read as questioning the Western idea that
maleness equals culture while femaleness equals body. The
female body is linked by these two African, Gikuyu, men
directly to culture and its maintenance;25 Both see ritual
female circumcision as a tradition whose eradication has the
potential to destroy the beauty of Gikuyu tradition and
life. Gayle Rubin suggests that "we never encounter the
body unmediated by the meanings that cultures give to it"
(277). Tashi’s presence in America causes Tashi to
recognize a new body construction wherein her pleasure and
joy have been annihilated. Secondly, Tashi’s confusion
introduces us--Western women and black women alike--to the
idea that forms of sexuality, as they are defined and
experienced, are cultural, that is, constituted by the
cultural spaces we inhabit. Hence, a change of cultural
space affects a (re)construction of sexuality.'

Egggggging negotiates African and American visions of
sexuality. Female sexuality for Olinkans is, in part,
marked by excision of the clitoris. The women being
initiated into that particular cultural nexus are also
informed of the sexual boundaries, those involving pleasure
and danger: the pleasures of belonging and being defined as
Olinkan, the dangers of sociocultural ostracism and physical

death (represented in the text by Dura). Circumcision,

104
then, entails socializing into culture and into sexuality.
Walker is trapped in this seemingly immediable space: Can
Tashi survive as an alien as Salimata does, between two
worlds? Walker’s clear response is "no." This is evidenced
by Tashi’s death. Tashi must die after murdering H’lissa
for her cultural consciousness cannot be split, or at least
Walker cannot reconcile them. As Griffin tells us, the
attempt to separate "self from self is quite simply to
choose death" (231). Walker positions Tashi in a struggle
to make sense of the physical and cultural gap between
African women and black women in America, and Tashi’s
attempts to reconcile her split identity--Tashi-Eve1yn--
results in her death. The murder of M’Lissa signals her
choosing of one of her selves over the other.

Female circumcision for Kenyatta, Ngugi Tashi and
Walker then, is about women, but for the former two, it is
primarily about the larger issues of national, ethnic,
cultural distinction. Tashi/Evelyn reinforces this view.
She responds to questions about her reasons for wanting to
be circumcised by averring that it entails "accept[ance] as
a real woman by the Olinka people," for "we must keep all of
our old ways and no Olinka man--in this [Our leader] echoed
the great liberator Kenyatta--would even think of marrying a
woman who was not circumcised" (122). As the voice from

the gallery tells us, women-~circumcisors and circumcised--

105
hold the primary responsibility for maintaining and
perpetuating cultural traditions and mores.

In Kourouma’s Ih§_§gn§_g§_13g§pgng§ngg, we encounter a
representation different from Ngugi’s, but reminiscent of
Walker’s. The principal female protagonist in this novel is
Salimata, and she has been prepared for initiation by her
mother, who tells her that "initiation is the turning point,
a break with the years of equivocal impure girlhood" (21).
Salimata, however, does not complete initiation, she faints.
Hence, she is caught at a confluence of development, not
quite woman but no longer child. Though Ngugi demonstrates
an affection for the practice as culturally significant,
Kourouma seems to indict its status as ritual. Kourouma
likens the ritual to the activities of colonialism that
destroyed Africa. Kourouma uses Salimata and her body to
allegorize post-Independence Africa, for just as Salimata is
stuck between two worlds, Africa is "between two seasons"
(5:38). Walker "borrows" this allegorical approach and uses
Tashi--and her body-~to represent the inscription of pain on
women of the world and the pain such inscription imposes on
women, Africa and the world.

Walker attempts, nevertheless, to fill the female
voiced voids, and revise the male portrayal of circumcision
as culturally bound. Instead, she suggests that the ritual
is an excision of feminine spirituality. 'To demonstrate

”the sexual blinding" enacted by ritual female circumcision,

106

Walker compares it to her own "visual mutilation." As a
child, Walker was shot in the eye by one of her brothers
with a pellet gun he had received for Christmas. Walker
surmises that it was her brother’s dislike for her female
presence that precipitated this attack. Likewise, or so she
argues, it is African men’s dislike of African women’s
female sexual power that precipitated the ritualization of
female circumcision ("Warrior Marks"). Accordingly, Walker
demonstrates an inability to penetrate the cultural system
which supports circumcision and thus render its premises
illogical to functioning members within it. Therefore,
Walker’s Tashi views herself as dead or sexually wounded
because of her circumcision.

subsequent to writing and publishing Egggggsing, Walker
endeavored to make a documentary film about female
circumcision. As a companion to the film, Walker published

a book cataloging her journey into Africa to make her

documentary. In the book. W
W. Walker tells us

that because In: wrote Egsgggging "there is at least one
girl born on the planet today who will not know the pain of

genital mutilation," because "the pen will prove mightier

than the circumcisor’s knife” (25: both emphases are mine).

She functions as the Western eye that sees and corrects.
Just as Walker has declared that she has found her

"mother’s garden"--the continent of Africa-~she has

107

undertaken to sow the seeds therein. Walker tells us in her
collection 1n_sgargh_gf_gg:_flg§ng:§;_§g:ggn§ that she is a
"womanist” and as such is "committed to [the] survival and
wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a
separatist, except periodically, for health" (xi). Is
Egggggging an instance of that "periodi[city]"? Chikweyne
Okonjo Ogunyemi offers us an important reading of Walker’s
womanism. ‘She tells us that "Black womanism celebrates
black roots, the ideals of black life while giving a
balanced presentation of black womandom" (240). She further
suggests that the "ideal" for womanism is "black unity" and
that "its aim is the dynamism of the wholeness and self-
healing" (240). Walker "certainly recognize[s] Tashi as
[her] sister" (285), but ironically Walker loses this focus.

Though aware of the cultural premises that sustain
female circumcision, Walker counters that there is no
cultural argument strong enough to justify the "hazardous
effects of genital mutilation, not only on health and
happiness of individuals, but on the whole society in which
it is practiced, and the world."“’ This position
acknowledges the dilemma between her womanist consciousness
and its concern for community and her feminist
consciousness. Without a doubt, African women have written
and spoken out against female circumcision--Walker presents
several of them in flgrzig;_uark§--but Walker’s condemnation

hinges on cultural imperialism, not female solidarity.

108
Pratibha Parmar, Walker’s co-producer and co-author for the
film and book, addresses cultural imperialism. She suggests
that while the ritual "involves questions of cultural and
national identities, the fear of being labeled cultural
imperialists . . . is not an excuse to sit by and do
nothing" (94-5).

However, is the Walker who authored Egggggging and who
speaks out for the individual collective woman, the same
womanist Walker of fictions past? For me, there is a
difference between "doing something" and being a cultural
imperialist. I support the position advocated by Efua
Dorkenoo:

ED: Women [who support circumcision]
must feel that we [those who oppose it]
are working for them and with them, as
opposed to against.

AW: 0r condescendingly telling them how
they should do it [define themselves as

women]

ED: That’s it, that’s it. (flgzzigz
Marks 254)

She and Pramar cannot find this medial space-~between
working with the women and working against circumcision--
because they are too heavily indebted to imperialistic
tradition. In fact, Walker’s own imperialism is
unexpectedly questioned by/in the narrative itself.

Tashi is, like Alice Walker, an African American woman.
Yet, Tashi’s voice clearly speaks contemptuously of ideas

that describe her as a blackwoman, like other black women:

109
"I felt negated by the realization that even my psychiatrist
could not see I was African. That to him all black people
were Negroes” (18). Furthermore, hearing of her decision
to return to Africa to undergo the rite of female
circumcision, Tashi’s describes Olivia’s response in a way
that makes Walker’s awareness of her own culturally
imperialist tendencies clear. Tashi says, "Olivia begged me
not to go. But she did not understand. . . . The foreigners
were so much more dramatic than Africans dared to be. It
made one feel contempt for them" (21). Evelyn, however, is
asked about her sense of African self-righteousness and her
attitude that conveys the idea that she is "the only African
woman to come to America.“ Evelyn responds to this charge
admitting, "I did think this. Black American women seemed so
different to me from Olinkan women, I rarely thought of
their African great-great-grandmothers" (188). That the
African American voice speaks these words is significant in
light of Bakhtin’s ideas about double voicedness in the
novel.

Like the words chosen by the journalists for Day One,
the language Alice Walker gives her characters reveals her
positionality. Bakhtin tells us that "any concrete
discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it is
directed already . . . overlain with qualifications, open to
dispute, charged with value . . .entangled, shot through

with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments"

110
(276). Through Evelyn, Walker attempts to affect a nonalien
positionality for herself, to connect her voice with those
of the African women’s collective for whom she speaks
through her novel. Tashi, on the other hand, speaks "the
word [broken] through to its own meaning and its own
expression across an environment full of alien words and
various evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the
elements . . . [while] striking dissonance with others"
(Bakhtin 277). Walker speaks through Evelyn and confronts
her connection to Africa as engendered by Tashi’s resistance
to American influence. Evelyn tells us that African women
resent black women because of their brutal honesty: "I was
reminded of the quality in African-Americans that I did not
like at all. A bluntness. A going to the heart of the matter
even if it gave everyone a heart attack" (119). It is this
"going to the heart of the matter" that Alice Walker affects
with her exploration of ritual female circumcision, and the
"heart attack" is embodied in some Africans’ responses to
her depiction.

In ”The Cutting Edge," Eichman recalls two African
panelists’ responses to Walker’s text. The panelists
reminded Eichman, and Walker, that "where the practice is
routine it is often desired . . . [T]o go uncircumcised in
some African cultures is to forego an essential rite of
passage” (49). Furthermore, they charged the West--Alice

Walker--with "insensitivity and arrogance," and of affecting

111
a "Desert Storm approach" to practices indigenous to Africa
(49). That Walker allows Pierre to uncover Tashi’s secret,
and allows Evelyn to utter these questionings speaks to her
Western position.

In a chapter headed "Evelyn" we find the woman on trial
for the murder of her circumcisor. A voice from the court
gallery shouts to Adam, who is in the witness box discussing
the ritual, ”[t]his is our business you would put into the
streets! We cannot publicly discuss this taboo . . . . Your
wife has murdered a monument. The Grandmother of the race!"
(163). Here intrudes Walker’s awareness of the secrecy
surrounding the ritual and the political duality involved in
discussions of it. Sassia Singateh, a Gambian woman who
spoke with Day One correspondent Sheila MacVicar, reinforces
the social significance attached to female circumcision.
Singateh tells us that girls are "given the impression that
[they’re] going into some glorious experience, relating to
womanhood . . . and [they] look forward to that glory”
(Transcript #129). .The practice is shrouded in secrecy,
silence and tradition. "It’s a secret society. Everything
is meant to be done in secrecy and it’s hidden behind
traditions" (Singateh, Transcript #129).

Indeed Lightfoot-Klein tells us that ”Pharaonic
circumcision in the Nile Valley is as old as recorded
history” and it serves to "distinguish ’decent’ and

respectable women" and affords women a "protected status"

112
(375). Moreover, circumcision functions in some communities
to "confer full social acceptability and integration," and
the uncircumcised are "estranged from their own kith and
kin" and may lose their rights as citizens to participate in
the politics, social and otherwise, of their communities
(Koso-Thomas 8). With the publication of Eggsgsging in
1992, female circumcision became a topic of ethical, medical
and political significance in the United States as well as
in other Western countries. The pressing questions for most
United Staters are: Why is female circumcision ritually
practiced? Why do women participate in a ritual that
mutilates them? Is the voice from the gallery
representative of those women, those who will not put their
business in the streets? The dilemma is further presented
when H’Lissa tells us that she does what she does "[iJn
service to tradition, to what makes [Olinkans a] people. In
service to the country and what makes [Olinkans] who [they]
are" (226).

The ritual separates ethnic groups and divides women
into those who are and are not marriageable. As Muriel
Dimen suggests, sexual experience "entails lots of
self/other boundaries, the endless opening of doors to more
unknown inner spaces, confusions about . . . where one
person begins and another ends" (140). Walker, however,
suggests that ritual female circumcision functions not to

create boundaries within which women can exist and

113
function, but to create bound invisible women--disembodied
flesh without subjectivity, autonomy, or the ability to
perceive themselves as selves. This is revealed by
separating Tashi from her knowledge of herself as a body.
Tashi is made invisible by her compliance with traditions
that are supposed to inscribe her, and H’Lissa affects this
erasure by performing the operation. Like Kenyatta, H’Lissa
sees the ritual as linked to Olinkan identity. Walker
herself provides us evidence that a circumcisor would not
utter the words "who are we, but the torturers of children”
(187). In flarr19r_flarka Walker presents several interviews
she conducted with circumcisers in which these women
rejected Walker’s notions of circumcision as torture and as
a tradition that should be destroyed:

Q [by Walker]: Do you think it is a good
tradition, and why?

A [Circumciser 1]: She says they’re
doing it because it is tradition. She
says normally during the healing period,
and during the coming-out ceremony
there’s a lot of food, and lot of
festivity and they like it. (fiarrigr

Marks 304)
Similarly, another circumciser, after attending a workshop
conducted by women campaigning against circumcision,
provided this information:

Q [by Pratibha Parmar]: Following the

discussions during'the meeting today, do

you have new ideas and would you abandon

this practice?

A [by Circumciser 2]: No. I have only
one idea. I want to carry on practicing

114
circumcision . . . [it] is considered

amongst the public as something
beneficial to our society.

(Earrigr Marks 314)

Hence, Walker’s voice is clear in the final words spoken by
M’Lissa: "But who are we but torturers of children?” (226)
Alice Walker’s tongue is definitely in H’Lissa’s mouth.

In the West, male circumcision is recognized and common
not only among the Jewish, for whom it is matter of
religion, but the nonJewish as well. However, female
circumcision is neither recognized or practiced--that is,
legitimated. It is not my contention that it should be,
however, some suggest that there is a legitimacy for it, a
nonWestern legitimacy but a legitimacy just the same. There
are at least four types of female circumcision: Pharonic or
Infibulation, Intermediate, Excision or Clitoridectomy and
Sunna (El Dareer 1: Walker, 1993 367). Pharaonic
circumcision, considered the most extensive, involves the
"removal of the clitoris, the labia minora, and much of the
labia majora:" the remaining sides of the vulva are sutured
leaving only a small opening for menstrual fluid and urine
to pass (Walker, 1993 367). Also, this is the one least
often performed (Wilentz, 1992 4). Nonetheless Walker
chooses this extreme form to "represent" her case.

The extreme form of circumcision has attracted
considerable critical attention with respect to the
cultural, historical, traditional, medical, gender and

ethical issues. Some have attacked female circumcision as

115
an instance of patriarchal control over female sexuality and
freedom. Elizabeth Williams-Moan suggests that female
circumcision is grounded in "sexual politics" (11). Awa
Thiam tells us "every woman is, or ought to be, concerned
about sexual mutilation practiced on the body of another,
whoever she may be" (85). Here is Alice Walker’s
invitation. Her Evelyn tells us that Africa, the Africa of
the novel, is full of stories about women’s sexuality that
license female circumcision. One such myth I have cited
above. Walker suggests that the men sanction circumcision
for their own sexual benefit: however, the Day One segment
reveals that "women carry on the tradition, but it is to
make the daughter acceptable to men. The men say it is
women’s business" (Transcript #129 2). Who holds the power
to stop this practice? It is Alice Walker’s clear position
that women, all women, must shoulder this responsibility.
The most compelling parts of the novel are the sections
where Tashi and H’Lissa talk before Tashi kills her. Here,
is revealed the ones whom Walker blames for female genital
mutilation--Women.

In H§£I12I_H§IK§. Walker tells us, "I am a great
believer in solidarity," and I am certain it was this belief
that precipitated the journey that began with her writing
2gaaaaaing_§ha_§agrar_gralay. Tashi’s story begins much
like Heridian’s. Tashi tells us, "I did not realize for a

long time that I was dead" (1). We go with Tashi on the

116
quest that gives her life--even in her actual death. We
discover that tradition--embodied by women and disembodying
women--has affected Tashi’s death. This tradition is
represented by H’Lissa, a mother of Tashi’s people. But
there are other traditions affecting Tashi as well. One is
Christianity, against which she--like Meridian--rebels.
When Tashi informs Olivia, her black American sister-in-law,
that she intends to be circumcised, Olivia begs her, "[t]ell
me to do anything, and I will do it . . . Only, don’t do
this to yourself, plaaaa, Tashi" (21). Tashi responds that
her major concern is for the revolution "the struggle for
[her] people” (21). She added, “[y]ou [Olivia] are a
foreigner" (22). Olivia invokes the name of Jesus, to which
Tashi responds smugly, "Also a foreigner" (22). She chides
Olivia and her charges bring into the fore Walker’s mission
in this, defining blackwomen’s struggle.

. Like Meridian, Tashi is a revolutionary. She rejects
the rigid God of the Judeo-Christian tradition and embraces
a new God, the Olinka leader who is called Jesus Christ.

But with this embrace she is engaged in another revolution,
against another tradition. In order to fulfill her
revolutionary mission, Tashi must return to Olinka land, to
Africa, just as Meridian returns to the South to find
herself, to emerge anew. Tashi must discover the tree from
which she branches out. Tashi, "the grownup daughter,”

returns to receive "the only remaining stamp of Olinka

117

tradition" (64). "The operation [she wanted to have done to
her] joined her, she felt, to [Olinkan] women, whom she
envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman.
Completely African. Completely Olinka" (64). The operation,
the sewing of the quilt, inscribed Tashi into the history of
her people. But it is this inscription that confines and
restricts her life. Like the mummy woman, she is expected
"to lay back and ha pleasured" (119.119.1111 20) .27

The relationship between Tashi and M’Lissa is that of
mother and daughter. What informs Walker’s manipulation of
this relationship, as well as that between Meridian and Mrs.
Hill, is the function of women, mothers, in cultural
transmission and maintenance. Wilentz tells us that the
process of transmitting cultural values and customs falls
within the women’s domain (xix). It is from the women that
the girls learn how to identify themselves as women.
Meridian rejects her model. Tashi fights to embrace hers,
but later acquiesces to a new one. Tashi invokes a new
female tradition. Nonetheless, M’Lissa, as "custodian of
tradition,” is key to understanding Tashi’s struggle. In
order for Alice Walker to complete her quilting of the life
and struggles of black[ ]women, the bond between these two
women must be explored and eventually destroyed. As
Filomena Steady argues, women "represent the ultimate value"

for African lives, "the continuation of the group" (32).

118
Hence it is necessary that modelling behaviors strive toward
holistic sustenance.

In "Our Own Freedom," Buchi Emecheta declares that
"mothers [hand] down the future to their daughters (47).
Alice Walker questions the tradition that Emecheta’s mothers
pass on, and posits the daughter’s right to refuse those
traditions that physically and spiritually scar her. We
have seen with Meridian that black women’s daughters can
choose and these choices come at a high cost, their own
alienation. But do blackwomen have choices? Alice Walker
wants us to believe that they do, that everywoman has
choices. The Mothers of black[ ]women have the freedom to
choose the traditions to which they will adhere and
ultimately transmit to their daughters. Because the
establishment of this freedom is central to Walker’s
mission, she has created an alternate tradition for her

"black sisters."

Beading African Women While Writing Herself: Walker's Web
At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that
Egaaaaaing was not raally about ritual female circumcision.

Consequently, I have spent very little space discussing
Walker’s presentation of it. Instead, I have labored to
show that Raggaaaing is Walker’s story. As a cultural
fiction, Egaaaaaing engages the cultural reality wherein the

”’black’ psyche in America" (Killens 28) meets the African

119
psyche and endeavors to join them, to unite their struggles
toward freedom. Walker engages the gendered psyche of an
African woman, and attempts to (re)write a tradition. There
are strong prejudices in Walker’s reading of Africa and the
particulars of ritual female circumcision. Walker clearly
recognizes those that are enabling, but she fails to engage
those that hinder. For this, she will undoubtedly always be
criticized. Remarkably, though, Walker has managed, in
spite of herself, to write a journey novel--a journey into
the black gendered self. In endeavoring to give voice to
Tashi, she has "uncovered" a significant point of contention
in black American identity politics. Walker masks her
personal struggle in the garb of an African woman’s fight
for sexual and spiritual freedom. I have firm objections to
Walker’s position. However, I recognize that as an author,
she can function as a vehicle for Fcharacteriz[ing] the
existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses
in society" (Foucault, 1977 124). The discourse she has
informed and in many ways perpetuated and questioned is that
of African American ethnicity.

Rachel DuPlessis tells us that "one of the great
moments of ideological negotiation in any work occurs in the
choice of resolution" (3). The spiritual bond that Walker
has forged with Tashi ends when Tashi dies. This is indeed
a most problematic portion of the text. Why does Tashi have

to physically die, just when she is spiritually reborn? In

120
telling the "untold tale" of an African woman’s trauma,
Walker designs a story that cannot help but outrage the most
cursory reader. Yet, Walker has woven a web of conflict.
She is at once speaking as a person of African descent while
maintaining a Western imperialist position, which requires
that the Other change. 2aaaasaing_rha_fiagrar_gf_lgy is
political: Tashi is not woman but symbol, a symbol of the
old, acquiescent victim of patriarchy. However, she is both
victim and victimizer. Her decision to comply with
traditions that debase women renders her guilty, an
accomplice who must suffer for not knowing, on her own, that
ritual female circumcision La mutilation. But, I wonder if
is there can be no "safe haven" for women who suffer as
Walker’s Tashi has? I suspect that there is, but the
culture of Alice Walker cannot access the discourse that
licenses such ”safe havens," and for Walker such a life,
post circumcision, is a death. Walker can only write her
self, and writes Tashi as that self. If Tashi were to
survive, then she would transmit another tradition of
resistance/resilience: ritual female circumcision does not
scar the human will to survive. This is not Walker’s
message: this is not the ideological choice Walker has made.
Walker replaces the Olinka myths and archetypes with a new
prototype: the bare bottomed screaming [girl] babies. These
new voices cry for their physical, spiritual and sexual

freedoms. Unlike Tashi, their cause will be their own

121
survival. These bodies are conceived of as Western,
”bounded unique more or less integrated" individuals (Geertz
229). Tashi becomes the sacrificial lamb, as it were,
because her death is necessary. She must die so that Walker
can kill a tradition, a tradition Tashi embodies.

The voice that Walker assumes in this novel affects a
cultural passing: Walker is passing as an African woman. If
this passing were for purely fictional purposes, the mask of
an author, I do not contest. However, Walker’s fictional
mask is adorned with a non-fictional, political purpose.
Tashi and M’Lissa both, before their deaths, decry a
tradition to which they had previously steadfastly held. We
owe their awareness to Westernization acquired through the
relationships Tashi has with Pierre and Lisette. Tashi’s
realtionship with these characters inluences hers with
M’Lissa. These two manipulated and pitiful women deserve no
fate smaller than death. The illusion that Walker creates,
though, is that we ahgald care for them, that her concern is
for Tashi. My objection to Walker’s posturing is that in
the novel Tashi is cast as second to Walker’s political
agenda, and the message that is sent about African women is
inconsequential. Walker realizes that Tashi, and M’Lissa to
a lesser degree, have their own voices, but she silences
them and pontificates in that absence. Her conversation is

with herself.

122

As Trinh T. Minh-ha avers when an "us" "them"
conversation takes place, "us" being the West, the
conversation becomes "rather intimate: a chatty talk, which,
under cover of cross cultural communication, simply
superposes one system of signs over another" (68). The
raising of the crying babies clearly replaces the silent
pangs and nightmares of Tashi. Tashi could not speak her
pain: she dreamed her suffering and endured in silence. She
tried and tried to speak her pain, but Walker filled in the
blanks on Tashi’s behalf and Tashi was said (Minh-ha 80).
Walker created a fiction grounded in discourses of cultural
and gendered connectedness. She writes herself an African
woman, a sista, who can speak her thoughts, legitimize her
politics and ingratiate herself with those to whom she is
historically connected. The interesting thing, though, is
that in her attempt to speak for female solidarity and to
raise world consciousness about crimes against women, Walker
forgets to listen to those Other voices and hear their
direction. She remains firmly on the Western side of the

bridge.

NOTES

‘ The title of this chapter is taken from a Gullah
proverb my Great-grandmother often used to calm the many
womanish moments of my life, the times when I thought I knew
rha answer. Put as simply as possible, the proverb advises:
A new arrival, in a specific place or in the world, cannot
know more about that place or that world than one who has
been there for quite some time. This is my charge of Alice
Walker.

2 As I have said earlier in this text, I struggle with
the language of naming and the representations given in the
names we choose. I am fully aware that for many ritual
female circumcision may appear euphemistic, however, I have
elected to use it in my discussions of the practice.
Though, Walker and many Western (and nonWestern) critics of
the practice uSe the more graphic phrase female genital
mutilation, it is not my position to argue whether the
operation is or is not "mutilation.” My phrase of choice
represents an acknowledgement of its "validity" for those
who adhere to, and struggle to defend and maintain, the
practice.

3 The discussion of what constitutes "woman” or the
gendered subject has been waging in feminist criticism for
some time. For specific discussions of this issue, I

suggest Judith Butler' s W
W and Diana FUSS' s
. For discussions

on the implications of monolithic constructs of "woman" as
it relates to Black women, see bell hooks AingrrLJLJBmumu_
Blask_flgmen_and_£eminism: Deborah McDowell’s "New Directions
in Black Feminist Criticism," Iha_Nag_£gmini§r_§r1r1giana
WW. Ed. Elaine
Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985) 186-99. While these
are only a few of the texts that discuss and explicate these
issues, I believe these set out the parameters of the
discussion most cogently. See also Hazel Carby’s

WW. chapter 1 .

‘ The title of Walker’s novel is taken from Afriga
Saga, the memoir of an Italian woman raised in Kenya: "I
had always got on well with the Africans and enjoyed their
company, but commanding the people on the farm, many of whom
had watched [me] grow up. With the added experience of my

123

124

people are natural, they possess the secret of joy, which is
why they can survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted
upon them. They are alive physically and emotionally, which
makes them easy to live with. What I had not yet learned to
deal with was their cunning and their natural instinct for
self-preservation." Interestingly, Walker paraphrases this
excerpt for the paperback edition of £Q§§a§_ing. That
excerpt reads "There are those who believe Black people
possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will
sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical
devastation". The incredulity inherent in Ricciardi’s novel
is shared by Walker and guides her construction of Tashi,
who emerges at the novel’s end spiritually intact despite
the "physical devastation" of her circumcision. Further, it
is her "cunning" that permits her to return to Olinka and
without suspicion gain access to and kill M’Lissa.

5 Fischer does not suppose that ethnicity is created by
individuals: instead he suggests that individuals have the
power to influence, and alter, collective understandings of
what it means to have an ethnicity. Hence, ethnicity can
undergo successive redefinitions. The call for a switch
from "Black" to "African American" represents such an
altering call. Dr. Ramona Edelin, later echoed by Reverend
Jesse Jackson, called for an identity name which recognizes
the cultural, and geographical, origin of the peoples once
called Black. Correspondingly, African American became the
name of choice for many in the population. See Smitherman’s
"’What is Africa to Me?’: Language, Ideology and ’African
American’” for a historical overview of ethnic identity
naming and the ideological consequences.

6 As a point of fact, Holloway’s book develops a
continuous tradition in blackwomen’s literature. Her work
analyzes the gendered and cultural linguistic community
established in the women’s literatures of black America,
Africa and the Caribbean. However, she notes
discontinuities as well. I respect the level of cultural
and critical integrity observed in her study and have in
many ways tried to model that here. That is, African and
black American women’s texts can be discussed under the
rubric of blackwomen’s literature without conflating their
experiences and voices into diasporic experiences and
vo ces.

7 I have selected Marifiian because, though Ina_2h1r§
Wand is equally about women as it is

about Grange, the woman are discussed in relation to him.
Also, I recognize that Walker’s other works equally fit into
my paradigm and I will discuss them as required. But it is
beyond the scope of this project to discuss all of Walker’s
relevant fiction in detail. Hence, I limit my discussion by

125

tracing a line from Walker’s first novel named for a woman
and focusing on her growth in relation to men and community,
to her latest novel which does the same but from an expanded
cultural vantage point.

3 Particularly, I am referring to Gay Wilentz’s
criticism that Walker universalizes Africa and essentializes
African womanhood by refusing to ground Tashi in‘a specific
geographical and/or ethnic space. See her "Mutilations of
the Self.” See also "Alice Walker’s Appeal.”

9 The distinction that I am making between the
references "black women" and "blackwomen" is one of
representation. Black women refers to women of African
descent in the United States, while blackwomen refers to
women of African descent throughout the world, including but
not limited to, the United States. Barbara Christian
discusses the development of Alice Walker’ s writing from Ina
Wtowinw

‘ 1 ' ~0u 1t 0' 1 f '01 2 °,- 9 ., This
discussion focuses on Grange’ s concentration on his lives
and Ruth’s in contrast to Meridian’ s focus on self
discovery. Christian suggests that these novels show
Walker’s change in focus from private experiences to
community and community maintenance. It is this focus in
Mariaian that guided my choice to compare it with "Tashi’s
story" in Egaaaaaing. See my discussion below.

m I am here bracketing a "space," the gulf that
represents Stepto’s needle in a continental haystack and
Alice Walker’s link and separation from her gendered
history. This configuration signifies Walker’s attempt to
move from the one position--black woman (two words)--to an
Other--blackwoman--one word. The span across these spaces,
however, remains. Hence her bridge is vacuous and wide like
"the Middle Passage:" it is always already absent and
present.

" For an extended example of quilting as a metaphor
for fiction, see Whitney Otto’s flgg_rg_Maka_an_Amgrigan
Qail;a_fi_flgya1. Also, see Houston A. Baker and Charlotte
Pierce Baker’s "Patches: Quilts & Community in Alice
Walker’s ’Everyday Use’," Sgarharn_3ayiau 21 (1985): 706-
20. Baker and Baker discuss the quilt maker as a woman
nOvelist who uses bits and pieces from her life on the
margins as material for her art. Also, they discuss the
quilt as loss and potential, an emblem of difference, a
crafting of identity which joins people into one group while
separating them from other groups, collectives, of people.

126

n For detail discussion of Walker’s envisioning of her
relationship to this foremother of Black American women’s
literature see her "Looking for Zora." See also Marjorie
Pryse’s "Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the Ancient
Power of Black Women" in Pryse and Spillers’s ganjnringr

e
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) 1-24.

m For a detailed discussion of Marigian within the
context of revolution, see Karen Stein’s "Marigian: Alice
Walker’s Critique of Revolution.” This text primarily
focuses on the Civil Right’s Movement and discusses the
novel within the context of Walker’s essay, "The Civil
Right’s Movement: What Good Was It," found in Walker, fiaargh
119-29.

“ This is an obvious play on the title of Buchi
Emecheta’s novel pgapla_xaka.

“ This is both a play on the novel Egaaaaaing and a
reference to the passage in Marigian. That this concept of
”secret joy" is first presented in the latter novel,
reinforces my argument that Meridian is a precursor to
Tashi, for it is her mother who speaks (see below).
Furthermore, this illustrates that contrary to Ricciardi’s
ideas, ngr_a11 black people can withstand "devastation."

m It is significant to note that Walker’s foremother,
Hurston, opens her story of Janie Starks with a tree
metaphor: "Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with
the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone"
(20). See "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text” in
Gates, fiignifiying_flgnkay 170-217. The usage of this
metaphor by Walker in grounding her first female protagonist
is symbolic of Walker’s recognition of her indebtedness to
roots in Southern [slave history and] culture as well as to
Zora Neale Hurston’ s literary precedence. Again, see
”Looking for Zora."

‘7 It is worth noting that African literature has for
some time been read through anthropology. Most recently,
Christopher Miller has tried to revive this approach to

reading African texts. See his Inagriaa_af_arrigana.

‘m For a more elaborated discussion of ethnography and
writing, the relationship between authors and ethnographer
and the problematics therein, see Clifford Geertz’ s Hark:

(Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1988) 1-25, 129-52.

127

w Marianna Torgovnick suggests that tropes for
primitives and primitivism become tropes for women in
literature about and centered around Africa (17).
Particularly, she addresses how African women’s bodies are
cast in images of exotic and primal being with respect to

their sexuality- See W
W 3-42 141-158.

2° In fact, Kenneth Wylie and Dennis Hickey give a
reading of Egaaaaaing wherein they suggest that Walker’s
Africa is "the heart of the narrative" and is not
"consciously based on the historical" regarding her
connections to Africans. Further, they seem impressed by
Walker’s gendered universalist approach to Reading Tashi:
"Walker’s thematic focus in [the novel] is sharp and
unyielding . . Whatever one may think of the novel as
literature or social commentary, it stands out [as one]
which took considerable moral courage to write." See An

1 1-1 1° '- .1 ‘T' 1: Lu‘ ; 01 0 a 1 1:
(East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP,
1994) 207-210.

a Ama Ata Aidoo, for example, in "Ghana: To be a
Woman,” informs us that she was made aware of the dirtiness
associated with women’s genitalia and to have an intact
clitoris indicated a woman’s uncleanliness. Similarly,
Elizabeth Williams-Moen in "Genital Mutilation: Everywoman’s
Problem,” discusses the use of circumcision as a means to
establish sexuality and that an intact clitoris represents
”maleness” in the female (5). Awa Thiam concurs, and Sue
Armstrong provides us with a discussion of the strongest
form of this myth: "Unless [female genitalia are] cut, the
clitoris and the labia will grow until they hang down
between a woman’s knees" (44). Interestingly, the removal
of the genitals symbolizes a disconnection of the woman’s
appendage. .

:n For a more detailed discussion of the "icon of the
Hottentot” as related to Black female sexuality, see Sander
Gilman’s "Black Bodies, White Bodies."

2" For a discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s use of
folklore in her fiction, see Howard J Faulkner, "unlaa_an§
nan: Fiction as Folklore," QLA_Jgarna1 23 (1991): 331—39.

2“I say "quasireligious," because though it is taught
that circumcision is ordered by Islam, and one form of
ritual female circumcisiOn is called aanna which means--
sanctioned by the prophet--there are no references to it in
the figly_Qar;an as a requirement for women (Williams-Moan
5). Circumcision as an Islamic requirement is enforced
through the use of a myth which purports that "a mother,"

128

envious of the male rite of passage, witnessed a male
circumcision--"removal of the foreskin of the penis"--and
“went home and did something similar to her daughters"
(£131g_uaaning§ 11). Such fold belief is not supported by a
search of scripture. I have confirmed that the figly_gar_an
does not sanction circumcision through personal
communication with Elam Muhammad, Imam at Masjid Wali
Mahmoud in Lansing, Michigan. Imam Muhammad informs me that
the QaLran does not sanction circumcision and hence "to
refer to it as [any form of] fianna is misleading."

25’For.a more detailed discussion of women as
maintainers and transmitters of cultural knowledge and
practices see the "Introduction" to Gay Wilentz’s flinging
galraraa. Later, I will discuss this cultural functioning
of women as it is embodied by Mother(s) in two of Walker’s

novels Marigian and Egssessing.

“’Though the cultural "justifications" are presented
in the novel through various character voices, Walker uses
Bakhtinian hybrid constructions to undermine these
representations. I discuss some of these instances more
directly below.

2’1 make this comparison based on arguments that women
who have been circumcised do not experience pleasure from
sex, in contrast to the men who prefer the smaller openings.
See for example, Olayinka Koso-Thomas’ Ina_§irgamgiaign_gr
WM. AlsO. Walker makes this
point in the novel: Tashi tell us that sex, after her
circumcision, "was very hard" because she had been sewn so
tight, and M’Lissa retorts "the men like it tight“ (245).
Tashi then confesses that she has never received pleasure
from sex (246).

Also, the image of the mummy woman in Maridian is
brought about by one of the parables which informs Tashi’s
understanding of her "Life Like Condition". ‘Pierre relays
the story of Torabe and his promiscuous wife, whose body was
"dragged from the river and left to rot, her body food for
vultures and rodents" (139). Marilene O’Shay was thrown
into the Great Salt Lake by her husband because "she was so
generous with sharing herself," and she resurfaces at the
circus preyed upon by vulturous spectators (9).

A BRIDGE:

Reading (in) Contested Spaces1

brigga 1 a: structure carrying a
pathway or roadway over a
depression or obstacle
b: a time, place or means of
connection or transition:

3 a: a musical passage
linking two sections of a

5039 E§E§§§2L§_Hin&h_flfifl
W
This project reads/Reads discourses of African American

identity and is thus itself such a discourse. Hence, I have
attempted to define my discourse as one attentive to the
boundaries between African and black America. I have used
the concept "black America," in fact, to denote the
separation that I attend to and that others have tried to
elide. I have designated this section "a Bridge," because
it functions in all the ways identified above. The term
brigga is a chronotope. That is, brigga is temporal and
spatial and provides "an optic for reading [Alice Walker’s
and Ana Ata Aidoo’s] texts as x-rays of the forces at work
in the cultural system from which they spring" (Bakhtin
425).2 One such force is the discourse of blackness
discussed in chapter one. The reading I have given of Alice
Walker demonstrates her inheritance of that vision. Ama Ata

Aidoo, as we will see in the following chapter, questions

129

130
constructs such as those crystallized in Asante’s
Africentric project.

My project is an/other Africentric project, struggling
for a minimal level of diaspora literacy.3 Diaspora
literacy "defines the reader’s ability to comprehend the
literatures of Africa, Afro-America, and the Caribbean from
an informed, indigenous perspective” (Clark 42). Akin to
seeing "from the native’s point of view," diaspora literacy
requires a grasping of the other’s terms of definition,
modes of meaning making: and it also requires that the act
of reading an/other acknowledge these operating systems
(Geertz, 1999). The quest for diaspora literacy, with
respect to literature, was initiated by the incursion of
black literary movements into the academy, and the
discourses these movements engendered. Negritude in Africa
and the Caribbean, New Negro Renaissance in the United
States and Indigenist in the Caribbean gave voice to those
who were once only spoken about. The writings produced
during these periods gave form and body to the, until then,
invisible--or at best unseen. Each of these literary
movements produced a new discourse of identity and self
definition, as diasporan peoples sought through the arts to
redefine themselves and create their own images. Each of
these movements sought to write agency and subjectivity upon

the slate of passive objectivity upon which Black people

131

were inscribed. Maryse Conde explains that sense of absent
or invisible agency:

It was not so much the conversation that

amazed and revolted me as their way of

going about it. You would think that I

wasn’t standing at the threshold of the

room. They were talking about me yet

ignoring me . . . . I was a nonbeing.

Invisible. (24).

As black people stare across the gulf of time and
space, their vision appears blurred. Memories fade, and
vestiges of past selves dissolve. Yet, the notion of the
diaspora reminds them that they must know each other,
remember the past and retain traces of it. Hence it becomes
necessary to erect structures which make the possibility of
cultural traverse conceivable. An even better option would
be constructions that make the gulf appear less wide.

Alice Walker and Ama Ata Aidoo are staring across the
watery space and their erected structures offer quite
different visions of the diaspora. Walker’s Egaaaaaing
offers a virtually absent African woman center/subject.
Tashi is written but does not really speak even when she
does. In her work, Aidoo implicitly questions Tashi’s
imposed silence and disassembles Walker’s universal
construct of African women. Entering an ongoing literary
conversation, Walker and Aidoo show us how populations from
both sides of the abyss must have their say, be seen.

Africans and African Americans each have their

discourses of identity and truth, their regimes of truth,

132

the normative territory they alone own. These "sacred
discourses" construct ”boundar[ies] to be maintained [rather
than] a nexus of relations and transactions actively
engaging a subject" (Clifford, 1988 3). This project aims
to demonstrate that, contrary to the politics of writing
cultural identities, such delineations are not "fully fixed,
complete and unnegotiable" (Olaniyan 536). Furthermore, to
end the "identity crisis" that African Americans find
themselves in does not require essentialist discourse.
Culture is a "complicated politic" articulating "mutually
contradictory and often antagonistic elements" (Olaniyan
536). There does not have to be some holistic entity,
giaapgra, to which Africans and African Americans must
belong before they can communicate with each other, share
things and be kin. There are other ways to span this
distance without collapsing it, disavowing its existence.
Moreover, African Americans must be careful that they do
not, in their attempts at diasporization, inadvertently
revise the "pet Negro system":

And every [African American] shall be

allowed to pet himself a[n African].

Yea, he shall take a[n African] unto

himself to pet and to cherish, and this

same [African] shall be perfect in his

sight. . . . usually in the capacity of

"representing the [African]”. . . . The

appointer has his reasons personal or

political. (Hurston 156, 160, 161).

Zora Neale Hurston in describing this "pet" Negro system

conveys a most powerful message.‘ There is no authentic,

133
pure insider that speaks to outsider [in]authenticity.
There is no essential Insider or essential Outsider. For if
there were, what would the African American be? To the
contrary, Zora Neale Hurston situates the identity
negotiation in the nondirectional passageway between both of
these positions. There is more going on here than self-
reflection, self-criticism, a questioning of pet-owning and
pet-being. The quest for authenticity, or authentic
representation, must cease to be a predominant inquiry. As
such, African American subjects must be seen as neither
belonging fully to nor completely rejecting either place or
time (Africa or America: past or present). Bridges must be
built, but they must be recognized as spanning two times and
places.

Texts function like bridges. By texts I am not
referring only to the bound pages housed in libraries. We
are texts. We read like pages bound, but in the words of En
Vogue, "[b]efore you can read me, you got to learn how to
see me" ("Free Your Mind"). My text is a medley of at
least two other social texts--ethnicity and gender. I am
black and woman. But, as bell hooks tells us, things are
not simply so. She argues that blackness is seen as male
and woman(ness) refers almost exclusively to white women.

So where are those who are black and woman, somehow white
and some how male.5 The black woman identity question is

yet to be asked, yet to be fully addressed. Are we

134
"race(d)” first and then gender(ed)? Or, are we gender(ed)
and then "race(d)"? Abena Busia tells us that
[blackwomen’s] reality is that we are ’neither white nor
male,’ [but] both black and female" (1). We are always
already and equally both, doubled and then some. That is,
DuBois’s double consciousness is intensified for black
women.

The Negro American split does not account for, or
address the black woman’s hybrid being. The texts of
ethnicity and gender collide in me, forming the text of my
self. Holloway suggests that naming my self blackwoman
responds to the pertinence of gender and ethnicity in my
identity. Or, is it better rapraagnrag_a§ black[ ]woman?
This [question] is our business and Walker and Aidoo attend
to it, arguing quite decisively for the acknowledgement of
black[ ]women’s voices. If identity defines "who we are as
individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside,”
then identity crises denote transitions, a moving toward
that place where differences come face to face with each
other, struggle, negotiate, struggle yet some more and rest
only to struggle again (Anzaldua 2).6 Identity, then, is
not an ending: it is a point of departure.

Textual bridges link the voices and bodies of the
[African] written and the [African American] writers. Ihifi
middle passage separates African American and African

readings of African gendered identity, but also connects

135
them. These two writers’ voices are not always found in the
words on the pages. Accordingly, if we read texts as
telling themselves and as well as Reading us, then we may
encounter these subverted voices, those which speak what
cannot be said. Finding, reading and being read by these
unspoken voices can prove to be powerful reading moments.
The silences always speak to us, but whether or not we
choose to (1) hear them and (2) acknowledge them are
different questions and perhaps equally important ones.

I focus critical attentions on the relationships
between representors, represented and uses of
representations. We should give equal attention to how
interpretation is representation. We cannot escape that we
know our Self, by naming another thing that is not us, an
Other, and one such way we name these Others is through
reading and interpretation. Once we have determined the
representational leanings of our interpretations and
readings, and how these readings are sometimes influenced by
forces outside of our control (e.g. institutional racism
and/or sexism), we might begin to develop other interpretive
strategies and forge new hybrid grounds from which to read.
No doubt, these new strategies will also be influenced by
and coinciding with those of [O]ther interpretive
communities, and we always bring their readings into our

own, sometimes without our awareness.

136

This passage, my bridge, r/Reads, [uanrites some of
the written and allows the written to write. However, our
writings of ourselves are not the focus of inquiry any more
than someone else’s writing of us. It is not a matter of
which picture is closer to the "truth," or even who can tell
my story, your story or someone else’s story but a
questioning all the stories that are told for us, told about
and that implicate us. The question should not be "how it
feels to read colored me/you", (or even "how it feels to
write nonoolored you/me"), but "how do I/you Read when I/you
read and/or write a self". After all, reading and writing

selves--somebody else’s or our own--are what we are about.

NOTES

‘ The notion of reading in and talking about contested
space(s) truly summarizes what this work is about. However,
framing that discussion in those exact terms is Professor
Stephen Rachman’s contribution to my work. Nonetheless, the
development of this bridge under that rubric is entirely my
own doing, as well as the shortcomings thereof.

2 Using "a bridge" to frame and comment upon this
project is much like Paul Gilroy’s use of "ships" in his
work Iha_fi1a§k_ar1anrig. Though I had this idea prior to
reading Gilroy’s work, I credit his project for drawing to
scale the condensed model I had in my mind.

3 My project, because it questions the narrowing
cultural space between Africa and black America, by design
focuses on only two of these cultural lands.

‘ Though Hurston’s discussion was of the black-white
relationship, I contend that often the oppressed become
oppressor in some of the same ways that they themselves
are/were oppressed. Especially, considering that black
Americans have participated in and been, in many respects,
integrated in Americanism, her idea becomes applicable to my
analysis as well. In the case of Alice Walker, her feminism
allows her to R/r African women as she does and feel quite
righteous in doing so, and this R/r represses African
women’s agency. Walker has indeed found an African to pet,
the image of the resistant African woman Tashi has not been
allowed to become.

5 Specifically, hooks notes the "bind" in which black[
]women find themselves with respect to feminism--defined by
the poet Haki Madhubuti as political "infighting" between
white men and women--and racism--defined with emphasis on

black male struggles and needs. See the first chapter of
. ' I e ; a 1 . . - -

 
  

 
   
 
 

    

 

4 E! Q ‘!Fe
6 The identity crises to which I am referring is

exemplified by the regular shifts in identity labels for
black people in the United States. The name has changed
from Afirigan in the seventeenth century to Emancipation:
Qalarag in the nineteenth century: Nagrg at the turn of the
twentieth century: Bligh in the mid sixties to late
seventies: Afirg;5marigan and Blagk coexisted until the call

137

138

for arrigan_5marigan in the late eighties. For a detailed
discussion of this process see Smitherman’s "’What is

African to me?’: Language, Ideology and arrigan_Amarigan”.

CHAPTER THREE:
"GOING THROUGH gnarggau WITH AHA ATA AIDOO:
AERICAN AMERICANS AND AFRICA, THE CONVERSATION HISTOR!
THWARTED‘

As I have demonstrated in chapter one, the relationship
between Africans and African Americans has been a theme in
African American literature for centuries. This connection
to the past has been a recurrent theme for both black
American male and female writers. In the main, however,
African writers have not shown much interest in exploring
this historical connection.2 One notable exception to
this pattern of indifference, though, is Ama Ata Aidoo. In
her crafting of African women and in discussion of their
status in Africa, she has found it useful to investigate how
African Americans fit into an analysis of the African
woman’s condition.

Aidoo defines her literary commitment as an extension
of her social vision. This vision includes black people all
over the world, and her concern for women is equally global.
Aidoo tells us she is certain that the socioeconomic,
political and cultural survival and development of Africa
”[hinge] on the woman question. It might be the catalyst for
development" (James 26). Furthermore, she holds that the
silence of history regarding why and how Africans came to be

displaced and dispersed across the globe must also be

139

140

overcome if Africa is to come to terms with its past and
move toward the future. Aidoo recalls that "go[ing] to
places where there are concentrations of other black
peoples" aided her resolution to "face the question," in her
literature and by other means available to her, to explain
just why "so many [African peoples] are in Harlem and so
many in the West Indies" (Vincent 35). Aidoo chose to
explore this avoided issue, the hidden history of African
dispersal, in her first play Qilamma_afi_a_§ngar.
Furthermore, in all of her longer works, there is an
allusion to the diasporic relationship, particularly as it
relates to Africans and African Americans. Read alongside
Alice Walker’s construction of an African woman, Aidoo’s
gendered identity narrative, gnangaa, signals a distant
closeness between these two women, one that can neither be
taken for granted nor overlooked.3

Most of Aidoo’s work can be characterized as resembling
dilemma tales. Roger Abrahams identifies the dilemma tale
as a tale which "throw[s] the floor open to debate,
demonstrating yet again that in the African context the
function of storytelling is to initiate" (16-17). ghangaa
[re]initiates issues raised in Aidoo’s previous work.‘
Particularly, I propose that Aidoo Reads Western readers
with respect to their [re]creations of African women. The
specific creative readers of interest for my analysis are

African Americans--particularly, Alice Walker. Aidoo’s

141
Angga and Dilamma_gr_a_§ng§r help us begin to examine this
relationship. Though they are not explored in depth in
Qhangag, the issues highlighted by Eulalie’s presence in
Africa strongly relate to Alice Walker’s reading of African
women and her participation in the proliferation of some of

the stereotypes and misconceptions about these women.

Of Sisterhood and Oppression: Aidoo and the Critical
Tradition of Reading African Women['s Fiction]

In Angga, Aidoo briefly tells the tale of the slave
trade and the dissemination of Africans across the globe. In
fact, Aidoo’s dramatization offers insight into why other
writers may have elected to avoid this subject. Angga is
set in the late nineteenth century, approximately 1870, and
focuses on Anowa, a beautiful woman who rejects societal
authority and expectation in order to marry a man she has
chosen, Kofi Afo. They gain wealth in trading, but soon
Kofi expands their trading to include human cargo: ”[Kofi]
is buying men and women as though they were only worth each
a handful of sands on the shore" (39). Anowa refuses any of
the benefits from her husband’s business in stocking and
selling slaves, for she finds it an immoral as well as
inhumane enterprise. For Anowa, there was "something
unwholesome about making slaves of men" (39). Importantly,
though, Anowa recounts to the reader a story told to her by
her grandmother, Nana, wherein the "truth” is revealed as to

how "the pale men" came to own Africans.

142

Nana tells of her travels to lands far and away from
Africa, a land across a "sea that is bigger than any river
and boils without being hot" (44). In these new lands she
sees "houses whose foundations are wider than the biggest
roads" in Africa (44). These house were built large, she
tells Anowa, to house the slaves--"[those] who are bought
[and sold" (45). Anowa questions Nana:

Did the men of the land sell other men
of the land, and women and children to
pale men from beyond the horizon who
looked like you or me peeled, like
lobsters boiled or roasted?

Nana: I don’t know, child. . . . I was
not there! . . . No one talks of these
things anymore. . . . They have
forgotten! (46)

When Anowa goes to sleep that night she dreams that she like
Africa gave birth to the men and women who were captured
into slavery:

I dreamt that I was a big, big woman.
And from my insides were huge holes out
of which poured men, women and children.
And the sea was boiling hot and
-steaming. And as it boiled, it threw
many, many giant lobsters, boiled
lobsters, each of whom as it fell turned
into a man or woman, but keeping its
lobster head and claws. And they rushed
to where I sat and seized the men and
women as they poured out of me, and they
tore them apart, and dashed them to the
ground and stamped upon them. (46)

In Dilanma_9r_a_§ngar, one of the children returns.
Dilamma_gr_a_§hgar deals with the problematic marriage

between a Ghanaian man, Ato Yawson who is a been-to, and

Eulalie Rush, an African American woman. Ato is a Ghanaian

143
student studying in the United States: he meets and falls in
love with Eulalie, a black American student. They marry and
return to his village. The obvious dilemma to which the
play’s title refers is Ato’s inability to reconcile his
American education and its ideas and values with the values
and expectations of his family (Berrian 156). However, on
another level the dilemma of the play can be defined as the
reconciling of historical dissonance. The ghost of the
title is an explicit reference to a children’s folk song
about a ghost lingering at the crossroads between Cape Coast
and Elmina, pondering to which city it should travel.
Unable to decide, it simply repeats, ”I don’t know, I can’t
tell" (23). This ghost returns to Ato in a dream, from
which he awakens exclaiming "Damn this ghost at the junction
. . . I used to wonder what the ghost was doing there. . . .
But why should I dream about all these things now?" (24)
The ghost has been read as reminiscent of Ato’s own dilemma,
balancing his Western acquired ideas with the traditional
expectations he meets when he returns to Ghana. In other
words, it is the dilemma of the been-to (Wilentz, 1992 45).
The ghost clearly revisits Ato because he has invoked the
ghost of hidden history, personified in the person of
Eulalie, an African American woman. In fact, Cape Coast and
Elmina were very active ports during the slave trade (Busia
35). In this respect, the ghost in the play’s title refers

to the haunting and silent history of African involvement in

144
the slave trade. The ghost read this way initiates a
conversation which hopefully can expose the lack of
information and understanding that Africans and African
Americans have of each other. Ato can serve as a potential
bridge spanning the Middle Passage, for he is the only
character who has made a life on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, Ato fails in this respect, because even
though Eulalie "returns" to Africa, she has yet to establish
her life there, a life amongst Ato and his people. As a
result, the necessary dialogue across the silence and the
distance is deferred.

When Ato informs his family that he will marry an
American, they fear that she is white. Upon hearing that
Eulalie is black, but belongs to no tribe, Nana, Ato’s
grandmother responds, "[sJince I was born, I have not heard
of a human being born out of the womb of a woman who has no
tribe. Are there trees which never have any roots?" (11).
Ato explains that Eulalie’s family was amongst the Africans
taken to America as slaves. Hence, Ato awakens the African
dilemma of how to deal with their past:

Nana: My spirit Mother ought to have
come for me earlier. Now what shall I
tell them who are gone? The daughter of
slaves who came from the white man’s
land. Someone should advise me on how
to tell my story. (14)
Because Nana serves as the link between her living relatives

and their ancestors who have passed on, it is her

responsibility to narrate.her family’s history to account

145
for their actions. Eulalie’s presence complicates her
narration because to include Eulalie in the story she must
speak, or write, what has yet to be acknowledged. Like
Beloved’s story, this was not one to be passed on (Morrison
193). However, Ato has forced Africa to confront this past,
or at least include it in the telling of its present.

While Ato’s family initially rejects Eulalie, Aidoo
does not cast Eulalie as totally responsible for the bad
communications and poor relations she has with her in-laws.
Ato as well must bear that responsibility for not having
"dealt well with" his family and his wife. Ato had not
clearly explained to Eulalie what would be expected of her
in Ghana as his wife and a member of his tribe. In part,
Ato’s silence is due to Africans’ failure to acknowledge
their historical implication in the slave trade, which bore
upon Eulalie’s predicament. Secondly, Eulalie’s conflicting
emotions toward Africa represent the African American and of
the dilemma. Her expectations are akin to those described
by Alex Haley in Ragga. She tells Ato that she will relax
among the "palm trees, the azure sea, the sun and golden
beaches” (36). She describes Africa in terms of story-book
myths, and, as Ato tells her, "a tourist brochure" (36).
More directly, she speaks to her dead mother’s spirit and
tells her, "I’ve come to the very source. I’ve come to
Africa and I hope that where’er you are, you sort of know

and approve" (19). Eulalie has married Ato with as much

146
information about Africa as Ato has of African Americans.
Importantly, Eulalie attempts not only to address her double
consciousness but to reconcile the two parts of herself.
Instead of existing as a "native stranger" in Ato’s land,
Eulalie yearned to be simply native, to annihilate her
strangeness: for once she was going to be at home.

Though Eulalie’s desire had been to find peace and
harmony in her new marriage, in her new home with her new
family, their ignorance of each other brings only chaos.
However, having brought Eulalie to Africa, Ato perpetuates
her ignorance by not providing her with adequate
information: he has not taken the time to educate his new
wife to his family’s ways. For instance Eulalie agrees with
Ato’s proposition that they should not have children. Ato
tells her that he would be jealous of the children taking up
so much time, and furthermore, that they "shall be free to
love each other. . . . and that is all [Eulalie] should
understand about Africa" (37). However, the tradition
amongst Ato’s people is clearly that marriage is not a two
person affair, but involves families. Hence, Nana confronts
Ato with his and Eulalie’s secrecy surrounding the issue of
having children, over her desire to become a great-
grandmother. Ato refuses to admit that they are using birth
control, but instead, leaves Eulalie to explain and bear the
responsibility as well as the scorn. Eulalie’s reaction is

to pose the question, "Ato, who married me, you or your

147
goddamn people?" (87) The climax of the play comes when
Eulalie and Ato battle over their crumbling marriage and his
failure to communicate to her what his people expected of
her as a wife. Eulalie accuses Ato’s people of only
understanding ”their own savage customs and standards," to
which Ato responds, ”Shut up! How much does the American
Negro know?" (87) Eulalie storms out, and Ato goes to his
mother to complain about Eulalie’s insult:

Ato: She said that my people have no
understanding, that they are uncivilized

Esi: Is that It? My child, and why
should your wife say this about us?

Ato: I don’t know. (90)
Esi scolds Ato for he "never seems to know anything" in
spite of all that they have sacrificed for his schooling.
Ato attempts to explain, retorting “in these days of
civilization,“ but Esi Kom interrupts him and admonishes
him:

Esi: In these days of civilization,

what? Now I know that you have been

teaching your wife to insult us. No

stranger ever breaks the law . . . my

son. You have not dealt well with your

wife in this. (90-91)
At this point, Eulalie enters, stumbling, and Esi Kom
embraces her reminding Ato that "[her] mother is dead [and]
if she had any tenderness, [h]er ghost must be keeping watch
over [a]ll that happens to her" (92). Because Eulalie has

married a family instead of an individual she is saved.

However, dilemma tales very seldom end with an instructional

148
moral and when they do the moral is often so "divisive and
open-ended" further discussion is always necessary (Abrahams
17). This tale ends with Ato alone and the ghost repeating,
"I don’t know. I can’t tell". Though Esi Kom embraces
Eulalie and says "come my child," it is not clear that her
embrace is one of acceptance as some critics have claimed
(Berrian 158: Wilentz, 1992 56). I believe the embrace
signifies an embrace of the responsibility to tackle the
issue, to discuss the silent history.
Aidoo investigates the lack of knowledge in her later
work as well. Here, the inquiry is launched from an
exchange between an African American student who questions a
visiting African Professor about African history. At the
end of Qnr_§iarar_xilljgy, just before Sissie’s long letter
addressing the behavior of her fellow Africans abroad, the
exchange occurs:
Sir, please tell me: is Egypt in Africa?
. . . . I mean Sir, I don’t mean to
harass you or anything, pressed the
student, but did the_Egyptians who built
the pyramids, you know, the Pharaohs and
all, were they African? (111)

The Professor responds quite exasperatedly:
My dear young man . . . to give you the
decent answer that your anxiety demands,
I would have to tell you a detailed
history of the African continent. And to
do that, I shall have to speak every
day, twenty-four hours a day, for at
least three thousand years. and I don’t

mean to be rude to you or anything, but
who has that kind of time? (111)

149

Though this only occupies about thirteen lines of the text,
it serves to introduce Sissie’s letter which voices her
concerns over violation against Africa by nonAfricans and
Africans alike. Particularly pertinent to my discussion
here, Sissie questions "[her] Precious Something," about why
they "were never able to discuss some of [the] matters
relating to their group survival" (114). Among these is the
"old story" and a "painful one" about how Africans were made
slaves and exploited as free labor. This violence was
committed, Sissie discloses:

with the help of the gun and some of our

own relatives . . . . [and] we were made

slaves because we are stronger, and can

work longer hours in the sun and other

such nonsenses . . . (114)
Without a doubt this passage speaks to the forced labor of
Africans during the colonial period, but the literature of
Africa also informs us that though this violence is a
painful story, it has not been one untold.s However, as
evidenced by Anowa and her "dream," the role of Africans in
the slave trade is an old, painful and untold story. The
”love letter" demonstrates that Aidoo’s gaze is definitely
inward.

Moreover, Qhangaa offers us an interesting opportunity
to examine that inward gaze and how it is somewhat directed
from without. It is a gaze directed in part by assumptions
like those of African Americans like Eulalie and the unnamed

student. To clarify, gnangaa is a novel about African

150
women, but its representations of these women result from
the narrative willingness to engage the Other’s gaze and to
turn what the Other sees on its head. Like Egaaaaaing_rna
fiagrar_gr41gy, Changaa is a cultural fiction. It is a novel
about gendered culture in Africa, and how it has been
inscribed, described and transcribed from the outside.

In this novel, Ama Ata Aidoo tackles the challenge
issued by Paul Rabinow in "Representations are Social
Facts.” Though Rabinow directs this challenges to
Westerners, Aidoo’s fiction allows us an opportunity to see
the West anthropologized from the outside, the way it has
anthropologized Others. In that essay, Rabinow argues that
cross-cultural conversations are "only possible within
contexts shaped and constrained by historical, cultural and
political relations" and the "social practices that
constitute them” (239). Furthermore, he suggests that in
cross-cultural encounters we should be "attentive to our
[own] historical practices of projecting our cultural
practices onto the other" (240). The result of all this,
then, would be that we would "anthropologize the West" and
examine its perceived universals for their "historical
peculiarities" (241).. On a corresponding note, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis tells us that narratives "produce representations
by which we imagine the world as it is" (3). For Alice
Walker, the world of African women is one organized around

the bodily sexual politics of patriarchy: however, for Ama

151
Ata Aidoo, such categorizing is not always appropriate.
Just as Walker crafts Tashi and M’Lissa within her literary
and cultural tradition, so, too, does Ama Ata Aidoo cast the
female characters in gnangaa within her particular
traditions.

Changaa is the story of Esi Sekyi, among others. On
the surface, the novel is about love and Esi’s experiences
in search of love on acceptable terms. However, it is also
a novel about traditions. Hortense Spillers tells us that
”traditions are not born. They are made . . . they survive
as created social events" (Spillers 153).“ In the story of
Esi we find several traditions intersecting, being made and
remade. First, Aidoo engages the representations of African
women already out there and the Western peculiarities
projected onto them. In addition, she manipulates these
characterizations as she questions the stories that have
been, can be, should be and/or/but may never be told. As
well, the novel is a text of representational struggle and
revision. Revision, Holloway tells us, is a restructuring
of traditional modes of organization yielding not only a
”(re)new(ed) structure, but a new lens through which to view
the preexisting one(s)" (13). In this text Aidoo revises
two modes of organizing African women’s experience.

Until about ten years ago, African male writers were
responsible for the depiction and representation of African

women as they were generally disseminated worldwide. Within

152
male-authored texts, African women are often presented
within what Roseanne P. Bell identifies as seven primary
stereotypes of African women: "[tJhe Earthmother, concubine,
doormat of a wife, the sacrificial lamb, the high life
floozy, the ’been-to’, and the willing mechanism in a
polygamous drama" (491). In the traditional African texts--
male-authored--the use of these archetypes allowed for
monolithic characterizations of African women’s experiences.
Furthermore, these characterizations allowed Western, mostly
white middle-class, feminists to theorize and discourse on
African women through sexual liberationist politics.7 In
fact, Aidoo tells us that some of these feminists have gone
so far as to declare that women like her are "bourgeois
African women [who] are in no position to speak for ordinary
African women in the village" ("Capacious“ 153).

Despite the obvious differences between the women who
developed and for whom these politics were developed, and
the women for whom they desire to speak, this gender
universalism ignored colonial influences. As Aidoo tells
us, "many African women are convinced that much of the
oppression of women that modern African men indulge in and
claim as ’genuine’ African culture is, in fact, a legacy of
the European colonizers” ("Capacious" 153). Hence, reading
Ama Ata Aidoo’s women-centered stories, and those of other
women writers as well, becomes problematic when taken

alongside Western and African male "narratives of gender"

153
(de Lauretis 25). Chinua Achebe says that such
representations have functioned to create, and reinforce
"all kinds of myths that support the suppression of the
[African] woman" (4). He further states that the time has
come for this to change and that ”the woman herself will be
in the forefront in designing what her new role is going to
be” (4). It is my belief that Aidoo, even prior to Achebe’s
declaration, was doing just this kind of designing.

The critical colloquies like that of Achebe and the
feminists provoked an interest in African women’s fiction
that was marked by the 1981 publication of Lloyd Brown’s
Waman_flrirara_in_filagk_arriga, the 1985 Black Women Writers
and the Diaspora Conference, followed by the 1986
publication of Ngemhika1_Stueiee_ef_flemen_in_Afrieen

Literature and the 1987 Special issue of Africen_Litereture
Iggay dedicated to discussions of women’s texts.8 These

three critical events evidenced the dearth of attention
previously paid to female novelists, and each of these works
endeavored to analyze what African women had to say about
(1) Africa: (2) women’s experiences in Africa: (3) the place
of women in Africa and (4) men’s representation of women in
their writing. Nonetheless the majority of the critical
readings in these texts are Western feminist, against male
readings, or both. In the latter two texts, for example,

the pervasive concern was how feminist African women writers

are. In the Special issue Eemen_in_Afriean_Literature

154

ngay, critic Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie lamented that "many
African female writers like to declare that they.are not
feminists, as if it were a crime to be a feminist" (11). It
is my sense that the politics of feminism are not
objectionable to these writers, but the discourse engendered
by use(s) of that particular term is what they find
unacceptable. Ama Ata Aidoo stated that she would not
"protest" if critics and readers of her work choose to call
her "feminist," but she intimates that she is not a feminist
solely hagaaaa she writes about women ("Unwelcome Pals" 40:
emphasis mine). For Aidoo, being a feminist is more than
demonstrating a sincere regard for women and writing about
women’s experiences. Actually, the central characters in
her novels are women, she says, "because [she] is a woman
[...] and that is natural" (James 14). More caustically,
Buchi Emecheta rejected the politico-cultural location of
feminist discourse and the term "feminism" itself:

I will not be called a feminist hara

because it is European. It is as simple

as that. I just resent that. Otherwise,

‘if you look at everything I do, it’s

what feminists do too: but it is just

that [the term] comes from Europe, or

European women, and I don’t like being

defined by them. (Grandquist and

Stotesbury 19).
Clearly, these two writers would argue that not every woman
who makes a political statement assessing and/or critiquing

the social position of women is a feminist. For some

African women writers, "feminist" may suggest "a profoundly

155
individualistic philosophy: [which] values the personal
growth and individual fulfillment over any large communal
needs or good" (Frank 45). Additionally, Aidoo and Emecheta
link gender and location: they see the discourse of feminism
as located outside of where they and their subjects
experience gender. However, I would argue that Aidoo
engages that same feminist discourse in fulfillment of her
commitment "as a writer, as a woman, and as a third world
[African] person" (Ogundipe-Leslie 11).

Changaa illustrates how Aidoo works within and against
discourses of Western feminist and male construCted, and
some African women’s, monoliths of African women’s
experiences. Aidoo’s particular aim is to force us to
question past representations of African women, to challenge
our presumptions and assumptions about the African woman’s
condition, and in so doing to [rerrite a discourse of
feminism that treats the African woman on her own grounds.
In particular, Aidoo’s Esi is a woman struggling to adhere
to Emecheta’s pronouncement that: i

[The African woman] must clarify her
notions of home and family, of freedom
and identity. She must finally, choose
her own life, or at least her own master
(Emecheta, 1975 179).
These lines from Ina_filaya_§1r1 aptly characterize the axis
upon which Ama Ata Aidoo’s ghangaa turns. Aidoo’s text

revolves around a concern with identity making and who the

maker will and should be. Aidoo tells us that when gender

156

politics are discussed in "the African context, we quickly
find that we must lay the blame for [the African woman’s]
present predicament squarely on the doorsteps of African
men" ("Capacious" 153). However, it is not because these
men are patriarchal by nature--this is implied in their
references to "traditional African societies"--but that the
colonial process has afforded them a convenient opportunity
to forget the significance of women to Africa’s
sociopolitical struggles and its overall survival (Aidoo in
James 24-25: Emecheta in James 38-39).9

Changaa is a novel about personal and political shifts
and struggles: the changes that colonialism promised, the
changes women go through as they enter what was once man’s
domain--the work place--as well as the changes a society
must go through in order to allow women financial and
personal freedoms. Aidoo identifies two factions that
clamor for authority in determining what the African woman
needs for her liberation: Western white feminists and
African men educated in the West and living outside of
Africa ("Capacious" 153). Aidoo further charges that the
former impose their brand of feminism while the latter aver
that feminism of any kind is not what the African woman
needs. Never once, she reminds us, did either of these
groups recognize that African women can and do speak for
themselves. Esi Sekyi, however, does indeed speak for

herself.

157

gnangaa provides us with two strong female characters.
Through these women, Aidoo evidences that "to be constituted
by a discourse" is not necessarily "to be determined by
discourse where determination forecloses the possibility of
agency" (Butler, 1990 143). Aidoo as a writing subject,
consciously writing through her multiplicity and against
foreign and domestic essentialist transcriptions of her
identity, constructs subjects [her characters] who serve to
subvert, diffuse, and/or dislocate dominant forms of social
discourse (Butler, 1990 141-3). Specifically, Aidoo writes
as a womanist, and as such she creates women who confront
their realities laboring not only to survive as individual
gendered subjects, but also as contributing members of a
society struggling to revolutionize itself. This dual task
is not a ping for them, nor are the often conflicting
requirements of these existences a gilgmma they must

w Instead, it is their social consciousness,

resolve.
their lives, that is the goal toward which, in frustration

sometimes and even in anguish, they steadily labor.

Esi Sekyi: I, Too am Africa[n], or The Complexity of Gender

When the novel opens, we are introduced to Esi first as
a professional woman--"from the Department of Urban
Statistics"--then as a wife and mother (4). Immediately,
the novel forces us to confront a problematic feminist

representation of women in Africa. In "Women Without Men:

158

The Feminist Novel in Africa,“ Katherine Frank asserts that
the ”paramount question that nearly all [African novels by
women] ask is how can the contemporary African woman
negotiate her way between the claims of tradition and
modernization, how can she be rendered whole again?” (18)
This commanding issue has been termed by Frank and others as
”the African woman’s bind," "the African woman’s dilemma,”
and even borrowing from Buchi Emecheta’s novel, "the double
yoke" (Ngambika 178). Marie Umeh further suggests that this
dilemma is created by the "inherent sexism of many
traditional African societies" (175). Particularly, the
bind is connected to the social institutions--i.e. family,
community, economy--with which women choose to associate.
Aidoo directly engages this presumption of an intrinaig
choice African women must make between social and financial
independence on the one hand and Africanness on the other.

Secondly, Aidoo addresses how female sexual presence is
an important reality for the women in male-authored African
fiction. For the most part, male writers see the women they
create as appendages or tools in the hands of their central
figure, often someone male (ugampika v: Frank 16).
Katherine Frank attempts to define "the feminist novel in
Africa" and one criterion for this novel is the
interrogation of "traditional" African sexual politics.
Analogously, Ann Ferguson sketches two of the primary

positions under debate in feminist sexual politics, and her

159

discussion clarifies the grounding of Frank’s ideas about
"the feminist novel in Africa." In "Sex Wars: The Debate
between Radical and Libertarian Feminists," Ferguson
suggests that while radical feminists argue that "sexual
freedom requires sexual equality of partners and their equal
respect for one another as both subjects and body,"
libertarian feminists suggest "sexual freedom requires
oppositional practices, that is, transgressing socially
respectable categories of sexuality and refusing to draw the
line on what counts as politically correct sexuality" (108-
9). The African woman’s bind, then, is reflective of
repressive social categories of sexuality which preclude
"equal respect" for women as subjects and bodies. In fact,
Frank tells us that the African woman writer is involved in
a "repudiation of prevailing patriarchal roles and norms" in
order to ”delineate fully the new life of the African New
Woman" (32). A primary "patriarchal role and norm" against
which Frank sees African women writers struggling is to be
found in the practices of polygamy--one of the most
"glaringly sexist feature[s] of traditional African society"
(Frank 18). Particularly, Frank is concerned with how this
institution defines and conscripts female sexuality (18).
Aidoo addresses this construction of polygamy in the
narration of Qhangaa, and Reads criticisms like Frank’s.

Upon meeting Esi’s husband, Oko, we discover that he is

displeased that his wife "definitely puts her career well

160

above any duties she has as a wife" (8). Esi "was on those
dreadful birth control things: pills, loops, or whatever,”
and she ”complained endlessly anytime she had to enter the
kitchen" (8). Though they have one child, Oko laments that
his wife seems not to want more children: "he wanted other
children, at least one more . . . a boy if possible. But
another girl would have been welcome“ (8). Upon reflection,
Oko is quite confounded by these feelings and silently
argues with the "loud male voice[,] . . . whose voice was
that? His father’s?" that tells him that Esi does not fit
the mold. Hence, he questions, "is Esi [...] an African
woman? She not only is, but there are plenty of them around
these days. . . these days. . . these days" (8). This
question reflects concerns much larger that those implied by
the immediate context of its utterance, and to highlight it
as such, Aidoo situates the "voice" and Oko’s question
within the narration and not in Oko’s mouth as dialogue.
The immediate question is "What is an African woman?"
Throughout the novel, Esi endeavors to answer Oko’s unspoken
question by engaging several discourses that have attempted
to define African women, namely Western feminist readers of
African literature and male African writers. In fact,
answering Oko’s question provides the foundation for the
second text of this novel.

The voices in gnangaa tell us a lot about how to read

the characters. Particularly, the nonprosaic portions of

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this novel represent a commenting, Reading, other voice.
Aidoo uses this voice, the Reading voice, to signify
directly on the reader who reads African women’s fiction
from perspectives like that of Frank and Umeh. Furthermore,
this commentary signifies upon Alice Walker’s crafting of
Tashi and M’Lissa as helpless victims of patriarchy awaiting
their Western saviours--feminist or otherwise.

Early in the novel, Esi is trying to come to terms with
her feelings about what she describes as a "marital rape"
and trying to decide her course of action. Esi imagines
herself presenting a paper entitled “The Prevalence of
Marital Rape in the Urban African Environment" (10). Her
presentation, she imagines, receives "boos from the men, and
uncomfortable titters from the women" (11). The question
answer period consists of only one, quite elaborate
question:

Yes, we told you, didn’t we? What is

burying us now are all these imported

feminist ideas . . . And dear lady

colleague, how would you describe

"marital rape" in Akan?

Igbo? . . . Yoruba

Wolof? . . . or Temne? (11)
The speaker contends, as most Western feminists also imply,
that there is no feminism in Africa that was not brought to

it from the outside.11 Hence, the speaker charges that

such imported ideas are of no consequence in explaining

162
behaviors in Africa. 'Significantly, Aidoo recasts this
objection and presents it through the Reading voice:

She was caught in her own trap. Hadn’t
she some time ago said in an argument
that

you cannot go around claiming an
idea or an item was imported into a
given society unless you could also
conclude that to the best of your
knowledge, there is not, and never
was any word or phrase in that
society’s indigenous language which
describes that idea or item?

By which and other proof, the claim that

"plantain" "cassava" and other African

staples came from Asia or the Americas

could only be sustained by racist

historians and lazy African academics?

. . . African staples coming from

America? Ha, ha, ha! . . . And

incidentally, what did the slaves take

there with them in the way of something

to grow and eat? . . . . What a

magnificent way to turn history on its

head! (12)
The question that this excerpt raises is not only that of
imported ideologies, but also the ideological assumption
inherent in claiming that an idea is (or is not) imported.‘
Particularly, when is it appropriate to assume that an idea
is imported? And what does that assumption do to the
validity of the idea itself? Though the narrator later
asserts that ”the society could not possible [sic] have an
indigenous word for [marital rape]" because "sex is
something a man claims from his wife as his right," (12-13)
we are still left to ponder the "significance" of the

previous discussion.

163
Bakhtin offers us a lens through which to view the

Reading voice. In "Discourse in the Novel," he argues:

[the] novel can be described as a

diversity of speech types (sometimes

even a diversity of language) and a

diversity of individual voices,

artistically organized. . . (262).
These "diverse speech types" contribute to the novel’s
"heteroglossia" (Bakhtin 262: 332). The Reading voice
functions in Changaa as an instance of the polyphony of
social and discursive forces. It allows us to hear what the
characters are thinking, but also offers us a perspective
different from what the characters have established, and
even what we have come to expect from them. Directly
related to Esi’s contemplation, in fact, the Reading voice
suggests that we cannot, nor can Esi for that matter,
demonstrate that "never" in her language did such a concept
exist. Though Aidoo is specific to the items of food, her
comment that claims about Africa’s historical significance
can only be supported by "racist historians and lazy African
academics" signals to me that she takes issue with more than
food staples but a history that has been turned on its head
and I suggest that aims to turn it over again. Just as
African food items were once said to have come from
elsewhere, it is possible that the pre-colonial existence of
ideas like marital rape was equally ignored.

Esi’s characterization of that sex act with her husband

as "marital rape" in fact does conjure up debates about

164

gender politics, but Aidoo reminds us, ever so cautiously,
that to critique Oko’s behavior, we must understand how
gender politics are negotiated in Africa. The commentary
constructs a self-representation of the colonial body, an
expression of its scars from history. Africa and Africans
are not allowed to claim anything as their own, or as a
contribution to the development of civilization: all that is
African or in Africa comes from somewhere else. Aidoo turns
that silent African history on its head, or at least she
encourages us to examine assumptions that support thinking
that all that is within Africa came from without.12

After the incident of marital rape, Esi leaves Oko and
begins a relationship with Ali Kondey. Ali is the "managing
director of Linga Hide Aways, the travel and tourist agency
he established" (22). The narrator describes him as an
extremely attractive man who was "able to pay for luxury"
(23). Like his father--Musa Musa, a master trader along
Africa’s west coast--Ali is wealthy and quite a lady’s man.
The narrator makes it quite clear that All revered and
admired his father, and he consequently tried hard to
emulate him, professionally and personally: Ali "was very
proud of the part of himself which resembled his father.
Above all, he was aware that establishing Linga was just
continuing the family trade" (24). Significantly, though,
the arena of sexual politics was "the only way in which Ali

was not like his father" (24). Whereas "Ali’s father

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preferred his women young and tender [who] had to be virgins
of course" (23), "Ali liked his women mature, and he had no
special use for virginity" (24). It is highly meaningful
that Ali rejects the idea forged by Alice Walker that
African men desire virgins, women whose sexuality has been
regulated for the increased sexual pleasure of men.13
Indeed, Ali’s attitude toward women convinces Esi that
he would respect her in ways Oko did not and could not.
Subsequently, we learn that Ali acquired both a Bachelor’s
and Master’s degree in Sociology and Economics from a
university in England. Appropriately, through his thoughts
we are allowed to confront the social forces of tradition
that confound African women. His comments, however, also
relate to Western feminists’ discourse on the body,
sexuality, and the connection between sexuality and
identity. After recognizing, and admiring, the ease with
which Esi shares her nakedness with him, Ali reflects upon
the fact that:
. . . he knew very few women from his
part of the world who even tried to be
at ease with their own bodies. The
combination of forces against them had
been too overwhelming -
traditional shyness and contempt
for the biology of women:
Islamic suppressive ideas about
women:
English Victorian prudery and
French hypocrisy imported by the
colonisers . . .
All these had variously and together
wreaked havoc on the mind of the modern

African woman: especially about herself.
(75)

166
These problematic characterizations, like Oko’s earlier
question, are presented in the narrative voice, not the
character’s voice. Ali’s thoughts as expressed above are
another example of double voicedness in this text. These
descriptions overemphasize the legacy of victimization
foisted upon the "modern African woman" and allow her only
the role of a passive object in a male sexual discourse,
following typical patterns of patriarchy. Moreover, they do
not assign adequate analysis to the degree to which
sexuality and understandings of sexuality can be
simultaneously oppressive and liberatory-~an arena for a
liberatory political struggle. Furthermore, if we are to
accept Ali’s premise that these foreign and domestic factors
have scripted African women’s negative impulses toward their
bodies, we must also accept, as Karen Rian argues, that "our
sexuality has been constructed for the most part through
social structures over which [women] have no control" (45:
49). In this view, male power, patriarchy, is totalistic.
Rian’s definition of a liberated sexual self requires that
women totally control the social structures that shape their
lives (38). This is the position Ali implies as he ”thinks”
these thoughts. He represents for us a social
constructionist view of sexual identity formation. But
Esi’s ease with her body suggests that the relationship
between the individual and society, or the social forces Ali

describes, is probably not one of total social determination

167
nor socialization. To the contrary, Esi demonstrates that
socialization is an ongoing theoretical endeavor never fully
realized in practice. One is never fully socialized, but
always in the process of socialization.

Foucault is quite accurate in proposing that "the real
strength of [a liberatory] woman’s movement is not that of
having laid claim to the specificity of the sexuality . . .
but that they have actually departed from the discourse
conducted within the apparatuses of sexuality"
(Bayarlfingwlaaga 219-20). Following Foucault, we can see
that Esi does not concede that she should be ashamed of her
body. Her resistance results not from her ignorance of the
patriarchal operating forces, but instead, from her refusal
to situate herself within the apparatuses they construct.“
With her body, Esi tells a new story, one breaking through
to its "own meaning and its own expression across an
environment full of alien words" and alien constructs
(Bakhtin 277). Ali’s comments deny Esi, and African women
generally, this power and this agency. Esi’s behavior--”not
shy about showing her body to the men she slept with" (75)--
is demonstrative of her liberatory stance toward sexual
identity in her society.1s However, unlike Rian, Esi does
not see her liberation as attached to dismantling social
structures. Instead she revises the structures whenever and

wherever she can, and for her, this is liberating.

168

Additionally, Esi’s attitude indicates that while
hegemonic forces are indeed powerful, they are not all
encompassing.“ Hence, negotiating her sexual identity
involves mediating the conflicting and contradictory
discourses, and the repressive, oppressive social forces.‘7
Thus the "bind" Frank and others have described becomes
merely the means by which an individual, undergoing these
struggles, emerges with a fragmented and dynamic self, the
selves we all are, whether we acknowledge them or not.
Hence, women in Africa emerge not always as victims of
colonialism and/or patriarchy, but instead as members of a
dynamic population. A significant dynamic in these women’s
lives is the practice of polygamy.

At the same moment that Esi has freed herself from her
strangulating marriage--"if I had wanted someone’s grown up
son, I would’ve stayed with Oko" (88)--she contemplates a
polygamous marriage. Because her "society does not permit
single women to exist" since their "single state was an
insult to the glorious manhood of [their] men" (47, 48), Esi
decides that she will remarry and become Ali Kondey’s second
wife. This polygamous relationship provides a vital
commentary on the issue of changes as well as epitomizing
Aidoo’s critiques of Western feminist and African male
representations of African women. After agreeing that they

would marry and that Esi would become Ali’s second wife, Ali

and Esi try to decide on a wedding date and on the day Ali

169
would travel to meet with her fathers. Eagerly, Ali decides
that he should go the next day, Saturday. At this point,
Esi introduces traditions among her people governing
marriage. She explains to Ali that "her people didn’t
consider Saturdays as good days for betrothal and such"
because it is a masculine day. "You see . . . days of the
week are divided into those that are feminine and the rest
which are masculine" (89). Aidoo defines Esi as a woman
determined to abide by the traditions, but Ali is unaware of
them, or at least uninterested in maintaining them. In
fact, he is characterized as one "who frequently bruised
tradition" (128).

Subsequently, Ali presents Esi with a ring and asks her
to wear it, to which Esi asks, why? At this point, Esi
questions Ali about the implications of the ring, inciting a
discussion of the differences between polygamy and bigamy.
Because Esi’s skepticism confounds him, Ali questions her:

What do you mean, "but why?" I thought
you had agreed to be my wife.

Are you saying that this is some kind of
engagement ring?

Definitely.

But, Ali . . . I thought I was going to
be your second wife.

So what difference should it make?

Ali, I mean Fusena already wears your
ring. (89-90)

170

Esi bluntly asks Ali if what they are doing, what he is
doing by having two women wear his rings, is not bigamy, to
which Ali angrily responds:

When put like that, yes, we are

committing a crime. Polygamy, bigamy.

To the people who created the concepts,

these are all crimes. Like homicide,

rape and arson. Why have we got so used

to describing our cultural dynamics with

the condemnatory tone of our masters’

voices? We have got marriage in Africa,

Esi. In Muslim Africa. In non-Muslim

Africa. And in our marriages a man has a

choice--to have one or more wives . . .

as long as he can look after them

properly. (90)
Esi wrestles with the Western definition of bigamy versus
what Islam understands as polygamy. The implications,
though, are not that having two wives is bigamy, or that
polygamy is unlawful, equal to bigamy. More significantly,
Esi is concerned that the process by which they are entering
into their marriage is contrary to the rules for
establishing polygamous relationships. Though Ali’s
objections represent his rejection of Western critiques,
Esi’s objections come from an analysis of their situation
within their own cultural tenets. Though she is not a
Muslim, she recognizes that there are customs, Islamic and
nonIslamic alike, that must be-followed if their marriage is
to be legitimate and honest. Clearly, she tells Ali, the
idea of two women wearing one man’s rings is a departure

from the traditional "way of doing the two or more wives

business" (90). Esi recognizes that in the polygamous

171
marriage the second wife is never to undermine the power and
status of the first wife, and she recognizes that wearing
Ali’s ring would do just that to Fusena’s station as "Mrs.
Ali Kondey" (90).

Ina_gar;an, in fact, instructs the man considering
taking another wife that "[i]f [you] cannot do justice,
[then] marry only one or that which your right hand
possesses . . . . if [he] cannot treat them with perfect
equality in material things as in love and affection, then
marry only one" (Ina_gar;an, 34:127). Ali obviously sees
Esi’s wearing his ring as "equality in material things,"
while Esi sees this as an injustice to Fusena. The decisive
issue here is that women and men, collectively, have to
negotiate how the polygamic enterprise is to be organized:
the ambiguity of the terms as set out by the religious text
must be reconciled with the social terms their societies
require. Furthermore, the reconciliation must be directly
addressed, and if possible resolved, with both men’s and
women’s interests considered.

Ali knows that Fusena is due a certain level of
respect, and he is conscious of the ambiguity in the holy
text. Therefore he justifies his behavior with a tradition
even older than Islam. He tells Esi that though his
suggestion goes against "recent traditions," a betrothed,
"first or fourth," has worn a ring since the time of

"[their] Ancient Egyptian ancestors" (90-91). Esi

172
reluctantly agrees to wear Ali’s ring, but not without first
averring that Ali’s behavior was that of a "severe lunatic
and so ’contemporary Africa’ that she would save her sanity
by not trying to understand it" (91).

The debate over the rings takes us back to Spillers and
Gadamer. While Gadamer suggests that we belong to a
tradition before it belongs to us (282), Spillers reminds us
that when we become a part of a tradition we participate in
its remaking, reconstituting.18 Indeed, Ali’s and Esi’s
conflicting approaches to the tradition of polygamy
demonstrate that traditions are not necessarily fixed, but
are "socially created" and recreated (Spillers 153)."

Aidoo allows her protagonist to enter into this
institution fully recognizing and confronting the potential
difficulties the reader will confront. Characters within
the text are shocked that Esi and Ali would reinscribe old
traditions. These characters, older villagers, Read Esi and
Ali’s behavior. For example, Ali’s elders are equally
surprised that "a modern young man would want to have a
second wife,” for "they thought that such desires only lived
in the breasts of people like them: old and with only a few
years of Koranic education" (105). Furthermore, elder women
lament "obviously how little had changed for their
daughters-~school and all!" (107). Aidoo prevents her
readers from labelling, without question, Esi Sekyi and/or

Fusena Kondey as feminist, modern, traditional or otherwise

173

since such terms eschew crucial factors relative to ”the
state of women and the nature of their expression in Africa
today" (Oyekunle qtd. in Okonkwo 38).

ghangaa presents Esi’s different voices and the
different voices that she confronts. These confronted
voices represent the different possibilities for African
women. Esi is presented as a woman not willing to just sit
and wait for things to happen. She makes things happen.
Esi changes, goes through changes, is put through changes
and changes things.“' The other two major female
characters in the novel--Fusena Kondey and Opokuya Dakwa--
are affected by changes. Accordingly, this novel presents a
variety of ways gender can be experienced in Africa. The
voice of tradition that speaks to Ama Ata Aidoo, and through
Esi, is not just one of gender politics, though it is
influenced very heavily by it. Just as Alice Walker called
upon_Zora Neale Hurston and the literary heritage of African
American women, so too does Ama Ata Aidoo’s QDQDQEE revisit

and revise readings of Mariama Ba’s representation of

polygamy in W.

Speaking of Those That Came Before: Aidoo's Literary
Heritage, the Issue of Polygamy

In §g_Lgng_a_Letrar, Mariana 88 offers two characters,
Aissatou and Ramatoulaye, who embody direction directions
followed by women. The novel is an epistle from Ramatoulaye

to her oldest and dearest friend. The letter serves as an

174

occasion for Ramatoulaye to reflect upon her life, her
development into a woman: it also offers the reader an
opportunity to "hear" an African woman tell her story, the
way most personal stories are told, into the ear of a
friend. Though the narrator asks her friend pardon for
"perhaps boring [her] by relating what [Aissatou] already
know[s]" (9), I imagine that it is for the benefit of the
other implied readers--those to whom the letter is not
addressed--that so much time is taken with specifics. The
epistolary style allows the reader to eavesdrop on the
narrator’s account of her life. We hear the intimate
details of Ramatoulaye’s life as revealed through her
thought, feelings and desires, all of which are shared with
a friend. Similarly, as I have shown above, Aidoo uses the
Reading voice in Changaa-to reveal the unspoken thoughts of
the characters. According to bell hooks’s discussion in
Ia1king_Baek14Ihinking_Feminieti_1hinking_nleek. both of
these women are ”talking back" through their characters (5).

[B]ell hooks tells us that "within feminist circles,
silence is often seen as the sexist ’right speech of
womanhood’--the sign of woman’s repression," but non-WASP
women,.hooks suggests, have never been thar silent (6).
Though the latter group of women’s voices may have been
ignored, they spoke and often disguised their speech so that

the tendency to "tune it out" would be lessened.21 It is

my position that Qheneee talk backs to §e_Leng_a_Letter.

175

just as both women writers talk back to their society.
Under the guise of revelatory private thoughts and personal
correspondence, these authors have constructed women "with
sharp tongues" who would not deny themselves the "right to
voice, to authorship" (hooks 6). Significantly though,
while Ba’s protagonist views herself as a victim and moves
from silence to speech, Esi is always an agent, speaking
herself and seeking to further exercise her agency. In
ghangaa, Ba’s colonized body-~African [and] woman-~speaks,
utters its injury and_negates its assigned muted condition.

Mbye Cham offers an interesting reading of 83’s
construction of Ramatoulaye. Cham argues that what I refer
to as Ramatoulaye’s move from silence to speech is actually
an instance of her subverting tradition, in effect "talking
back" without seeming to talk at all. Cham suggests that Ed
uses the Islamic concept of mirasse as an opportunity for a
woman to speak the truth about her polygamous situation. He
tells us that mirasse is "a juridical principle that defines
and stipulates in precise mathematical terms the nature of
inheritance in the Islamic family" (91). Furthermore, it
also requires that secret possessions of the deceased be
disclosed so that these possessions may be equally
distributed between his/her heirs. However, Ramatoulaye
uses this holy requirement to expose not only Moudou’s
finances, but his personal secrets as well. She tells us

that:

176

the mirasse commanded by the Koran

requires that a dead person be stripped

of his most intimate secrets: thus is

exposed to others what has been

carefully hidden. These exposures

crudely explain a man’s life. With

consternation, I measure the extent of

Moudou’s betrayal. (9)
After this explanation, Ramatoulaye begins her "stripping".

As Cham states, "mirasse, therefore, becomes the
principle that legitamises and regulates Rama’s act of
systematic personal revelation” (92). Cham would argue that
in this sense Ramatoulaye was never silent in the way I have
characterized her here. Instead, he would suggest that
Ramatoulaye "invoke[s] canons of indigenous tradition" to
justify her actions, her silence and seeming lack of agency.
Ramatoulaye’s voice is to be found in the words of the
letter to her friend. As bell hooks says, "writing [is] a
way to capture speech," and it allows the silenced to
"express the intensity of [their] sorrow, the anguish of
speech" (6-7). As such, Ramatoulaye writes what she could
not speak.- It is on this point that I see Esi as a revision
of Ramatoulaye. Esi indeed invokes traditions indigenous to
her people, but her acts of subversion and challenge are
loudly spoken. Each character in the novel witnesses and
comments upon her clear and constant voice. Esi has ”made
speech [her] birthright" (hooks 6).
Furthermore, Aidoo not only revisits 85 but she also

signifies upon §Q_Lgng_A_Larrar. 86 has created a
"speakerly text," one "which produces the illagign of oral

177

narration" (Gates, 1988 181: my emphasis), which is
revisited and revised by Aidoo. As Gates tells us,
[r]evision is an important rhetorical strategy and
"[eriters signify upon each other’s texts by rewriting the
received textual traditions" (124).:22 B3 offers us
Aissatou and Ramatoulaye and their different responses to
polygamy. Aidoo revises Ramatoulaye offering us Fusena
Kondey and Esi Sekyi. These two women assume postures
represented by the divided consciousness Ramatoulaye
presents in her letter. Aidoo splits Ramatoulaye and
develops two different women from 85’s shell of a woman. At
the novel’s end, Ramatoulaye tells Aissatou:

I warn you already, I have not given up

wanting to refashion my life. Despite

everything--disappointments and

humiliation--hope still lives within me.

It is from the dirty and nauseating

humus that the green plant sprouts into

life, and I can feel new buds springing

up in me. (89)
We never know what becomes of Ramatoulaye in her struggle to
"refashion" herself. However, Aidoo offers us a look not
only into the choices available to women like these two, but
she also allows us to witness the consequences of the
choices they make.

fia_Lgng_a_Latrar is a chronology of Ramatoulaye’s life,

a letter occasioned by the death of her husband, Moudou
Fall. The passing of her husband places her in a

contemplative mood which arouses in her remembrances of her

past life and the circumstances through which she has

178
persevered. Most significantly, she recalls the polygamous
relationship into which she was forced to enter. Both of.
the women in 83’s novel are confronted with the news that
their husbands have taken second wives without first
consulting them. Aissatou is made livid when she hears the
news that her Mawdo 85 had married again, and she writes him
a scathing letter before leaving him. She makes a new life
for herself as an interpreter in New York, declaring to her
husband, her friend and her society that "[erinces master
their feelings to fulfil their duties. ’Others’ bend their
hands, and, in silence, accept a destiny that oppresses
them. That, briefly put, is the internal ordering of our
society, with its absurd divisions. I will not yield to it"
(31). In similar fashion, while Esi suggests that marital
rape may not have existed prior to her experience, she
manages to find a course of action that not only serves her
best interests, but also puts Oko, and vicariously other
men, on notice that such deeds by husbands toward their
wives are neither acceptable or tolerable. Marital rape,
now, definitely exists.

Unlike Esi, Aissatou rejects her society’s values when
she decides that her society’s support of Mawdo’s behavior
is unacceptable and pursues her determined course of action:
she decides to abandon him and that society. In contrast,
Esi does not ever consider leaving her world: she is

determined to live within her society while negotiating a

179
space there for people like her, women like her. Aissatou
has no such conviction. Clearly, for Ba, just as Western
women may have the legal right and social "freedom" to
reject polygamous behavior from their husbands, African
women also have that option. However, for those who choose
to function and exist within a society that sanctions and
recognizes polygamy, there are other choices available to
them. Aidoo demonstrates some of these choices and the
consequences of them. Silence is one such choice, the one
Ramatoulaye and Fusena elect, though even in their silences
they give voice to very different possibilities.

Ramatoulaye stays with her husband Moudou all the while
hoping that he will follow traditional Islam regarding
polygamic relationships. Like Ali, Moudou ignores
traditional practices in favor of satisfying his own
desires. Ramatoulaye is informed by her brother-in-law,
Aissatou’s husband, and the local Imam that she has a co-
wife. As she sees the men approaching she fears that harm
has come to her husband, and she questions them about his
condition. The Imam responds that Moudou is alive and well,
and that "[a]ll he has done is to marry a second wife today
[and] . . . he praises you for the quarter of a century of
marriage in which you gave him all the happiness a wife owes
her husband" (37). While Ramatoulaye finds it objectionable
that her husband has taken a new wife, one who is their own

daughter’s age, she is most disturbed by "[his] abandonment

180

of his first family . . . . [h]e rejected us. He mapped out
his future without taking our existence into account" (9).
Ramatoulaye is referring here to her husband’s extensive
financial arrangements with his new family-in-law, and to
his physical removal of himself from the family. He agrees
to pay his new wife’s tuition, provide her an allowance and
present her family with expensive gifts, one of which is to
supply her parents with the titles Alnaja and Alnaji;a
All of this is done at the expense of Ramtoulaye and her
children: Moudou mortgages their home without informing
her.“

Fusena Kondey is cast in the likeness of Ramatoulaye.
Fusena, we are told, was a good friend to Ali before they
were married. In fact, Fusena was quite resistant to the
idea of marriage. She was once pursued by an alnaji who
courted her family with expensive gifts and chased her male
friends away. Unaffected, Fusena pursued her education and
began a career as a school teacher. All the while, Ali--her
best friend--was by her side pursuing his degree as well.
Ali had never openly expressed any interest in Fusena beyond
friendship, any more than she did in him, but when it became
apparent that they would be separated for a long while,
their feelings emerged. Ali was awarded a scholarship that
required he go to England so he asks Fusena to marry him:
she accepts. Their decision was made in haste and

complicates the traditional negotiation between families.

181
However the families manage to negotiate and the union is
blessed by both sides. For three years, Ali lives without
Fusena in England and this troubles her family with whom she
and their oldest son are living. Finally, Ali sends for her
and she joins him in London.

Fusena’s life in London was one for which she was not
quite prepared. Though she had given up her formal studies
and resigned her post as a teacher, she still required
something to occupy her time, and her new life of "being
pregnant, nursing the new baby, looking after Adam and Ali,
and staring at London’s bleak wet views" was not satisfying.
She raised this with Ali after deciding that "life should
offer more than marriage [and that] the life she was leading
was in fact marriage" (66). This is where Aidoo begins her
revision of Ramatoulaye. Both women are teachers who give
up their careers to be wives, but while Fusena recognizes
that being a wife is not much of a life, Ramtoulaye does
not. Instead Ramatoulaye is convinced that she is "one of
those who can realize themselves fully and bloom only when
they form part of a couple. . . . even though I respect the
choice of libararag_ngman, I have never conceived of
happiness outside of marriage" (56: emphasis added).

Ramatoulaye stresses, however, that "marriage is an act
of faith, of love, and of total surrender to the person one
has chosen and who has chosen you (I emphasize the word

’chosen’)" (56).25 Fusena reconciles herself to a similar

182

position. Though Ramatoulaye recognizes that the secret and
second marriage changes her relationship with Moudou, she
seems to accept him that he was "a good father and a good
husband, a husband [who had] become a friend" (38). This
acceptance was an option refused by Fusena: she dismissed
long before Ali’s second marriage the possibility that her
one-time friend, now husband, could ever again be her
friend. Fusena realizes that Ali is no longer a friend, but
a husband. As Ali’s wife:

there was nothing she could do about her

situation. Leaving Ali was not only

impossible but would also not be an

answer to anything. . . .there would be

no chance of getting her friend back if

she left or divorced Ali the husband . .

. . she kept telling herself that given

the position of women in her society,

she would rather be married than not,

and rather to Ali than anyone else. (67)
The signifyin[g] on 85’s text is most clear when we look at
Ramatoulaye and Fusena’s responses to marriage and their
roles as wife. Marriage for both of these women offers them
a comfort that they value more than "independence," and each
of them recognizes the trade-offs that they have made. But
only Fusena analyzes the consequences of this trade-off:
that of being only a wife. Ramatoulaye accepts her station
as a wife and concentrates on developing that aspect of her
life. She maintains a home and works outside, but her
largest commitment is to her home and her husband. Though

Ramtoulaye talks about the difficulty of working in and out

of the home, her strongest dedication is to her role as wife

183
and mother. Fusena on the other hand chooses balance,
dividing herself equally and faithfully to both of her two
jobs: "When she was in the kiosk, she was there. And of
course when she was at home, she was home" (99).

Fusena has fashioned a life for herself that is equal
to her life as wife, and for that Ali respects her. Hence,
when she discovers that her husband plans to take a second
wife, she is angry not about the traditions he ignores, but
that her co-wife "has a university degree" (99). Fusena is
reminded of the time Ali persuaded her not to continue her
education, tried to convince her that idleness was a wife’s
privilege. Luckily, she had reasoned that Ali’s "wealth or
ability to support her was a matter only of mild
importance--just something that would make [her] life
easier," and pursued selling in the marketplace (67).
Interestingly, Ramatoulaye, like Esi, has a university
degree. She was "among the first pioneers of the promotion
of African women" (14). If it could be argued that she
rejects polygamy because Western education has lifted her
"out of the bog of traditional superstition and custom" (Ba
15), then it could also be convincingly argued that this
education equally had no effect on Esi’s decision to
willingly enter such a marriage. Furthermore, the influence
and power of Western education is predicated upon how the
subject locates herself in her society and positions herself

vis a vis its operating discourses.

184

The notable divergence between Ramtoulaye’s position
and Fusena’s has to do with how each of them defines herself
and their choices. The former chooses to stay with her
husband as a wife and maintain her home, while the latter
pursues interests outside of her marriage. However, the key
is that they both have choices, and Aidoo’s revision of Ba
illuminates how a woman fashions herself when her dependence
on her husband renders her unstable. Ramatoulaye and Fusena
both choose the instability of dependence because their
other choice, "liberation," as Ramatoulaye calls it, is too
difficult. Ramatoulaye is dedicated to her society’s
notions of the sanctity of the family. She is "persuaded"
of the necessary "complementarity of man and woman" (88).
Further, she sees the "success of a nation" (93) as
dependent on the success of the couple and the family they
develop. However, Ramatoulaye’s faith in the couple does
not eradicate the legitimacy of polygamy. If tradition had
been followed, her marriage would have survived.
Traditionally, the decision to expand the family through a
second or third marriage involved the couple. Ideally, both
parties, man and wbman, must agree that the second marriage
will not disrupt the home they are in the process of
forming. But, in both cases, Ali’s and Moudou’s, the first
wife was not involved in either the decision to take a co-

wife or the selection of the appropriate woman.

185

Aidoo challenges the silencing of woman’s power in this
domain. Ramtoulaye is silent when she is informed of her
husband’s new marriage: her feelings are neither solicited
nor volunteered. In fact, her pain, obvious to Moudou, is
tuned out. Likewise, Fusena is silent when the women in her
village try to convince her that Ali’s taking another wife
was not the worst thing for their marriage. She reasons
that "[i]t was a man’s world [and] you only survived if you
knew how to live in it as a woman" (107). For Fusena,
living as a woman meant being a wife and a mother, being
silent about your pain. But, it also meant having something
else, like her kiosk. For Esi, living as a woman was having
what you wanted, including someone who respected you for
wanting. By offering the contrasting models that Esi and
Fusena are, Aidoo contests Walker’s implication that Tashi’s
choices are either to live always under the repression of
patriarchy or renounce her affiliation with the Olinkans.
Walker, like libertarian feminists, sees the only freedom as
that which comes from totally destroying the social systems
that repress. Aidoo confesses that some women are confined
to certain realities, there are some colonial bodies whose
stories will never be rewritten: however, there are others
who write. While M’Lissa and Tashi have no choices, Esi and
Fusena do, and they live the consequences of those choices.
Walker is right to suggest that "resistance is the secret of

joy," (281) but there are various resistances: the gag she

186
valorizes and the aghara she ignores. It is through not
resisting limits that Ramatoulaye and Fusena allow for
instable dependence.

That Ramatoulaye and Fusena become instable within the
security of the family is chiefly the result of the modern
African man’s bind. Fusena has a home with Ali but
recognizes that a woman with more education may take that
away. Hence her security is not protected, for she does not
accept that as a wife she

must understand, once and for all, and

must forgive: [they] must not worry

[themselves] about "betrayals of the

flesh." The important thing is what

there is in the heart: that what unites

two beings inside. (Ba 34)
She can lose her sanity as well as her cherished marriage.
Fusena, like Ramatoulaye, reasons that her happiness is
within the social norms of the family. She wants to be more
than a wife, but without the concerns of Esi and Aissatou.
There is a certain security that Fusena finds in marriage,
but that security is contingent on Ali behaving in
appropriate ways and her accepting when he does not. As Esi
tells us, there is much "insolence [in the person of] the
modern African man" (91).

The pivotal issue is not so much insolence, but
confusion about how he is to manage this whole affair with
Esi, and with polygamous relationships in general. Aidoo
demonstrates through Ali’s thoughts that it is not just an

African woman’s bind to balance the "modern" and the

187

"traditional," but a conflict that arises for Africans
regardless of gender.. As Ali contemplates with whom he will
spend New Year’s Eve, he thinks:

How did our fathers manage? He wondered

to himself. He knew the answer. They,

our fathers, lived in a world which was

ordered to make such arrangements work.

For instance, no man in the old days

would be caught in his present

predicament . . . . (119-20)
Ali takes a wife, but he does not treat her as a wife, for
his heart is with Fusena. He felt a deep sense of guilt
whenever he spent time with Esi, though "by all the precepts
of his upbringing Esi was indeed his wife," but when he went
”home, he [went] only one place, which was where Fusena and
his children were" (119).

Hence, Ali and Esi were not in a polygamous marriage,
for there was not "equality in material things as in love
and affection" (Ali 173). Moreover, Fusena is not a ”a
loyal doormat of a wife," for she makes Ali fully aware that
she is not a co-wife, but a woman who has children, a home
to maintain, and a business to run (Bell 173). Though she
could not prevent Ali from marrying Esi, she managed to
preclude his reducing her to a convenience, a bodily object
of his affection, which is what Bell’s phrase--"loyal
doormat of a wife"--implies and what Esi becomes to him.“’

There is no exact ending to gnangag for there is no

simple and/or uncomplicated answer to the question it

attempts to answer. I believe that Aidoo’s point is just

188
that. The status of African women is an issue that is yet
to be resolved, as is the status of all women regardless of
origin. Esi’s story is not finished, for the silences of
history have not yet been voiced for some colonial bodies.
African women, all women, are some of those bodies. Aidoo
offers a reading of African women which confirms Diana
Fuss’s assertion that identity is "historically contingent
and constantly subject to change and redefinition" (20).
Identity is a story, told, retold, revised and unwritten.
In the telling of this story that constitutes Aidoo’s work,
African American women have not been absolved of their
participation in constituting discourse antithetical to the
revolutionizing of Africa. Though Western readings of
African women are challenged in Qaanges, as is the influence
of the West on the ideas of African men, this "West” is not
limited to white middle class feminists, but includes

African Americans.

Must My Tongue Always be in My Friend's Mouth? Or Can Aidoo
and Walker Talk it Over Woman to Woman

Paul Gilroy tells us that the "telling and retelling”
of the ”narratives of loss, exile, journeying" serve to
direct the attention of black peoples to some original
"nodal point," a mythic place in their social history (1993,
198). These narratives have served to participate in the
making of what Gilroy calls the black Atlantic, otherwise

termed the diaspora. While we have accepted the diaspora as

189
a concept, there is still ambiguity about how to represent
the relationship the concept represents. More important to
this project, there is disagreement over what privileges
membership in the diaspora grants us when it comes to
creating new narratives, telling new tales. Ama Ata Aidoo
has constructed one narrative strain, that of inquiry.
Alice Walker has constructed a narrative wherein members of
the diaspora, united in their struggle against oppression,
speak with and for each other. It is Aidoo’s position that
there can be no "real" conversation amongst diaspora peoples
until the hidden history of that relationship is explored in
their respective and present geographical location.

When Tashi journeys back to Olinka, M’Lissa inquires as
to what an American looks like. In response, Tashi tells
her "an American looks like me" (Passassiag 210). Eulalie
too is an American, and she tells Ato, when he challenges
her over the language she uses to refer to his family, “I
speak the way I was born to speak, like an American"
(pilamma 87). Both of these women acknowledge that the
African who comes to America, resides in United States of
America--either in 1819, 1965 or 1993, either through
slavery or immigration-- eventually becomes American.

Though these bodies carry traces of Africa, inscriptions of
Africa, they are American bodies. This is the reality that
people of the black Atlantic must face. In pursuit of her

political agenda, though, Alice Walker manipulates this

190
reality and in the process projects an image of Africa
supporting its past reputation as the land of barbarity and
bloody rituals. In fact, she proves how American the
African in America has become. Her political imperialism is
disguised as moral outrage and gendered camaraderie.
Clearly, the reality of the Americanization process, this
making of the doubled consciousness, the hybrid identity is
more important for Walker than the image of Africa she has
made.

On the other hand, Aidoo finds that the image of Africa
is equal to the fictional reality she makes, especially the
reality of our connection. Aidoo tells us she "write[s]
about things that people will feel uncomfortable about":
things she hopes people will squint at (James 15);”' As I
read her Esi and her other women, I do indeed squint. My
squint is affected by several things. First, as I read her
works, I am quite frankly sure that I am being
simultaneously Read by them. As a woman, I am drawn to her
female subjects and as a black woman, I feel the pull to
identify with their pains and pleasures. After going
through the various perspectives offered me by the texts, I
am left with my experiences as a black woman through which
to interpret. This is a difficult and a problematic reader
position for me. Hence, I squint.

Through my squint, I begin to see the limits of those

experiences. I share a color (I presume) and a sex with

191
these subjects, but here is where the connections between us
stop. Indeed the construction of reality in Aidoo’s fiction
challenges black[ ]woman-centered readings of texts, while
at once speaking £2 that understanding. Because Aidoo
explores issues of gender, a sociocultural and political
construct, the squint is an adequate description of the
approximate shared vision between Aidoo, Walker and myself.
It is certain that Aidoo is concerned about African women,
black[ ]women, all women, however, she is especially
concerned about how the first of these is represented by
others. Because of the varying ways womenness is
constructed and experienced within different social systems,
reading gendered behaviors across cultures can be a tricky
business. gnaagaa is a novel that questions the facility
with which readings like those in ggssassigg are
constructed.

Significantly, though, Aidoo’s texts cause me to squint
at Walker’s Tashi. Sissie tells her "precious something"
that whenever she encounters Western women "hotly debating
the virtues of the African female," she thinks about her
mother (5111191 117). Her mother, she tells us, was a
villager with no schooling: furthermore, she, like Sissie’s
father, "had never lived anywhere near a modern town," and
had never been to the West (117). Hence, she ponders, "if
they did not know how I should have been brought up as an

African woman, then who does?" (117). In Tashi’s case,

192

Alice Walker thinks she does. But, as Qaangaa shows us,
there are many African women and Alice Walker’s universal
model does not begin to represent the majority of them.
This section poses the question, of whether Walker and Aidoo
can talk. I contend that they can and do, but across each
other. Aidoo proposes a conversation, but before Walker can
engage it she must acknowledge that her political agenda
cannot supplant the power of those for whom she fights}!8
I have endeavored to construct a conversation between these
women, the one who talks and the one who talks back,
respectively. The womanist platform, a concern for
communities, provided Walker with the stage upon which the
drama within and of black[ ]women’s discourse and
connections should be acted out. Walker struggles to
maintain a belief in that agenda: Aidoo struggles to
perpetuate the aims of womanism. Abena Busia makes the
valuable point, stressed throughout this work as well, that
diasporization is a delicate process. In syncretic efforts,
we must be careful not to design the melting pot, black
style. She tells us, in discussing blackwomen’s literary
tradition, we need:

to hear words whispered over the void,

to learn what we must tell each other,

despite the vagaries of our respective

conditions, across the generations of

time and space. (2)

This Africentric project brings these women "face to face,"

confronting each other with their own words, uttering their

193

conditions and concern all in search of a blackwomen’s
literary tradition. Readers have read, have been Read by,
and hopefully will read against these discourses--Aidoo’s,
Walker’s, and mine. Not only do the fictional discourses
illuminate black[ ]women’s oppression and their struggle to
mitigate the pains of that, but the critical discourses
indicate, as well, black[ ]women’s capacity to oppress each
other.

There is always a danger in any kind of

"diaspora" studies: The willingness to

embrace a commonality might blind us to

the uniqueness which distinguishes the

separate peoples of the desired whole.

(Busia 2)
Just as Esi Kom embraces Eulalie at the end nilamma_gr_a
Qhaar, bridging the cultural distance between them by
agreeing to listen and speak r9 each other, critics of

black[ ]women’s literature must listen to the voices of the

literature, read and be Read by them.

NOTES

1 This is a play on Aidoo’s title as well as the
expressions, "going through changes,” and "put through
changes," from the African American linguistic community.
Clarence Major, in his historical dictionary Qapa_rg_liya
(New York: Penguin, 1994), defines the first phrase as
"experiencing emotional or psychological problems," and the
latter as "to make a person uncomfortable by doing or saying
something that contradicts with their version of
reality”(86). Likewise, Smitherman defines the first phrase
as having "problems in one’s personal life: unanticipated
emotional experiences" (76-7). Aptly, we witness Aidoo’s
Esi going through and being put through "changes."

2 Though some male writers have addressed the dispersal
of Africans during the slave trade, their response has not
as focal as Aidoo’s. Wole Soyinka, for example, has an
African American school artist, Joe Golder, in his
Inrarprarara, and mentions Africans selling Africans during
the slave trade in A_pange_gf_the_£gre§_§. There is a
mention of black Americans in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Dgyil_gn
tna_grg§§, and Ayi Kwei Armah explores the experiences of
black Americans travelling to Africa in his Fragmenrg and

Igg_1nga§aag_§aaagn_. And recently, Syl Cheney Coker’s Ina
Laet_Harmetten_ef_Alueine_Dunbar centers around African
Americans who have emigrated to Liberia. In film, Sembene
Ousmane’s Qaggg (1976) discusses the slave trade and his
gamp_ga_1aiargya (1987) brings an African and an African

American face to face. Nonetheless, compared to African
American writings on the historical connections between
these two peoples, African discussion has been limited. See
Berth Lindfors "The Image of the Afro-American in African
Literature" and Jacob Drachler’s edited collection filagk

Henslenei_filaek_niaepere for further details-

3 With respect to African American women writers’

constructs of African women, see also Maya Angelou’s All

’s eed 1 cc . It is not my position
to argue that Walker is the only African American woman to
"write" an African, so Angelou offers another such writing.
However, I have selected to focus Walker specifically
because of the didactic and polemical nature of her
construction and the representational problematics her/story
engenders.

194

195

6 It is only fair to acknowledge that in an author’s
note to Changaa, Aidoo writes: "[t]o the reader, a
confession and to the critic, an apology . . . [Changes] is
not meant to contribute to any debate however current."
Like Alice Walker’s readers’ directive, though I take note
of this disclaimer, I find it too restrictive.

5 See the Introduction to Ken Harrow’s, InIe§h91Q§_Qfi
Qhanga (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994).

6 See also Susan Andrade’s "Rewriting History,
Motherhood, and Rebellion".

7 Katherine Fishburn’s ms
provides an extensive discussion of Western feminist
politics as it relates to the reading of and critical
response to African women’s literature. Though Fishburn’s
discussion is specific to Emecheta’s novel, her critiques of
certain Western feminist readings of gender politics offer a
larger scope and inform quite appropriately the issues I
raise here.

6 These works are by no means the first critical
responses to African women’s literature. However, they mark
a significant increase in attention to this literature and a
certain mainstreaming of the discussion that I think is
telling in critical ways to my discussion here.

9 It could very convincingly be argued that Aidoo and
Emecheta’s argument that African societies were not
patriarchal is indicative of their own ideological
approaches to reading gender in Africa. That is to say, I
am in no way suggesting that their positions are reflective
of all African women writers. Mariama Ba and Ellen Kuzwayo
create literature that reflects an alternate analysis of
gender and colonialism, for example.

w The underscored terms are references to ideas
discussed by feminist critics Katherine Frank and Marie Umeh
and to Aidoo’s play Dilemma_9f_a_§n9§t, respectively. I

discuss these in more detail below.

" See Adelai Murdoch’s discussion of precolonial
African "feminism" in "Severing the [MJother Connections,"

u Though much of this colonialist "history" has been
addressed by historians and others and, where there is
evidence, corrected, Aidoo still finds it necessary to add
this to her narrative. I believe that this addition
demonstrates her preoccupation with outside influences, and
her repeating of this past "history" is her attempt to

196

establish a continuum of such Western claims evidenced by
naming African women.

a See also Carol Boyce Davies’ "Maidens, Mistresses
and Matrons: Feminine Images in Selected Soyinka Works,”
, pp. 75-88. Davies offers a discussion of this
characterization of women in men’s fiction, and particularly
in Wole Soyinka’s dramas.

“ Note, I am in no way proposing that Esi’s actions
negate the presence of patriarchal forces in her society, or
that Aidoo would support such a denial. However, I do
maintain that Esi actively engages her experiences and
consciously chooses her responses to them.

” For a detailed discussion of the "positional
definition" of subjectivity, see Linda Alcoff’s "Cultural
Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory."

“ See also, Raymond Williams’s "Hegemony."

‘" Importantly, Linda Alcoff has expressed an objection
to uses of Foucault such as I employ here. In the article
noted above, "Cultural feminism versus Post-Structuralism,”
Alcoff argues that Foucault, in fact, offers no theory of
resistance or any means for distinguishing the experiences
of the truly subjugated from the experiences and behaviors
of those actually resisting hegemony. I reject this
argument, but not without acknowledging that such an
ambiguity does exist in Foucault. Moreover, my argument
hinges on that undefined theory whose absence Alcoff finds
problematic. Aidoo’s use of the Reading voice signifies
that the traditional view of power, operating from the top
down, can be turned on its head, and that the manifestations
of such subversive acts are often subtle. For a related
discussion of Foucault’s usefulness to feminist inquiry see
Judith Butler’s "Variations on Sex and Gender."

‘m I am referring to my discussion of Gadamer in
chapter one of this work.

'" Particularly, Ali and Esi come from different
regions, and each bring their different conceptions of
relationships, and particularly, male-female relationships
to bear on their relationship together. Hence, their
constructions of relationships is also a tradition they
remake and reshape as they negotiate their partnership.

1m See endnote one, this chapter, for an explanation of
these expressions and the distinctions between them.

197

a In her work, hooks actually specifies the "feminist
circle" as "WASP backgrounds in the United States,” and
where I have indicated in this text "nonWASP," she
identifies ”black communities (and diverse ethnic
communities)" (6).

22 Also, see Karla Holloway’s s
for another useful discussion of revision in African and
African American women’s literary traditions.

23 These are titles indicating that one has made

pilgrimage to the holy City of Mecca. The pilgrimage, or

' is one of the five pillars of Islam and as such it is
required that Muslims hajj at least once in their lifetime--
if it is economically feasible. Once the hajj is completed
the title is added to the person’s name. (For example,
Malcolm x became El hajj Malik Shabazz after his pilgrimage
to Mecca.) While the title has primarily religious
significance, it also indicates a high level of economic
security. Often when a man wishes to demonstrate to his
betrothed’s family that he can provide for her and them as
well, he contracts to provide them the money for hajj.

2"Similarly, when Esi confesses to Opokuya that she
has never met Fusena, Opokuya explains, "You see, first rule
already broken . . .in the traditional setting it was not
possible for a man to consider taking a second wife without
the first wife’s consent" (97). Furthermore, in Efuru the
title character actively searches for her husband’s second
wife. Guided by the commonplace saying among her people
that "it is only a bad woman who wants her husband all to
herself" (53), Efuru decides that she must be an agent in
forming her own destiny. If her husband, or his mother,
should choose her co-wife, Efuru is sure to lose her power
within the family.

5 In fact, Ramtoulaye tells this to Aissatou’s husband
Mawdo who comes and asks for her hand after Moudou has died.
She explains to him that she is not "an object to be passed
from hand to hand," but a person with a heart and a mind.
She, of course, rejects his proposal. These remarks allow
us to see into the character’s consciousness as she attempts
to rationalize her reasons for staying with her husband
after he treated her so disrespectfully. Additionally, her
comments suggest that like Fusena, she loved her husband and
that love binds her in the instability of dependence. See
my discussion below.

26’I wish to note, however, that for Esi, Ali is the
same. It would be a great matter of inconvenience for her
to divorce yet another husband, so she maintains her
marriage with him. Yet, she is aware that he is having

198

affairs and rrggblea not to question him, for though she
knew "he loved her in his own fashion," she was quite
resolved that "his fashion of loving [was] quite inadequate

for her" (165).

27'In an interview Adeola James asks Aidoo what was the

significance of the subtitle for her first novel, Qgr_§1arar
- S , to which

Aidoo gave the response I quoted, adding that Sissie looks
at life through a squint and forces the people she confronts
to do the same.

26 See film "Warrior Marks," and the published account
of her journey to African and the making of the film,
Warrigr_uark§. In these two media, Walker makes it quite
clear that she see herself as an advocate, a voice for these
women.

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