Intersection of Cultures: Edwidge Dandicat

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969, writer Edwidge Dandicat moved to the United States to join her parents who had emigrated to the U.S. when she was young. The early separation from her parents would have a lasting effect on young Dandicat as would her arrival in the U.S. in 1981. Finding it difficult to adjust to American dress and manners, the newly arrived girl found solace in books. The separation she felt would become a theme in her later works. The 1994 novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory was developed from her Master's thesis at Brown University and is excerpted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

As pointed out by Gates and his fellow scholars, Dandicat's novel reflects the discomfiture at living between cultures, of feeling separation from one's homeland and the reticence at accepting the new and strange environment. He writes, "Written in imagistic and lyrical prose, Breath, Eyes, Memory follows its protagonist as she moves between her Haitian homeland, where she is steeped in the storytelling of her maternal kin, and her new home in Brooklyn, from which she looks back at the culture she has left with a loving but critical eye." Her protagonist, much like the novelist herself, experiences a new kind of 'double consciousness': that of living across cultures--and across the languages that became so intrinsic to her identity. Gates quotes the writer's reflection on her dilemma, as she notes that "[her] writing in English was as much an act of personal translation as it was an act of creative collaboration with the new place [she] was in" (1475-6). The reader observes the ways in which the writer interpolates Haitian Creole into the dialogue of her characters--as well as introducing elements of Haitian Vodun religious culture. When Sophi must return to Haiti to prepare her mother for burial, she dresses her mother in the fiery red symbolic of the goddess Erzulie Frieda both as an act of reverence and of rebellion.



Dandicat's predilection for intertwining dual cultural elements appears to be common among many Africana women. According to Gates, "This fusion of celebration and critique is familiar in writing by African American women, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker" (1476). One is compelled to add the authors Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and Nalo Hopkinson to the cadre of women writers of color who, rather than being trapped in the stasis of double consciousness, locate their characters at the intersection of cultural identity--a cultural identity that critiques and reveres the past toward discovering vitality and wholeness in the present. 

photo of Edwidge Dandicat: madamenoire.com
image of Erzulie Frieda: jazintellect.wordpress.com


In the video below, a young Haitian woman discusses her linguistic background speaking both English and Haitian Kreyol:

Malcolm X

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, known to most as Malcolm X, was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was an outspoken Garveyite, who supported Marcus Garvey's views on separatism and racial politics. When his father was murdered by members of the KKK in Omaha, his mother was left to raise multiple children on her own--a task that led to her nervous breakdown and hospitalization. In his formative years, young Malcolm spent time in foster homes, moving from one family to another, before becoming involved in criminal activity. As your text reports, he was arrested and incarcerated for burglary in Massachusetts and it was there, in the Charlestown State Penitentiary, where Malcolm Little underwent a transformation. Embracing the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Little began writing to the leader of the Nation of Islam from his prison cell. He would embark on his own, self-styled education, which enlightened him to the fact that the black man had largely been written out of the history taught to him as a child.

"It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence." (Malcolm X)

By the 1960s, Malcolm had made a trek to Mecca, where he discovered Muslims of all ethnic and racial backgrounds congregating under a single faith. His trip to Mecca did, in some regard, soften his attitudes toward separatism in the U.S., and his attitude toward the Nation of Islam began to cool. In Spike Lee's adaptation of X's life, the film suggests that Malcolm X had become disenchanted with Elijah Muhammad as a leader when he found out that the holy man had several dalliances with his secretaries. It is suggested that Malcolm X's knowledge of, and threat to expose this knowledge is what led to his murder in 1965.

Malcolm X is important for so many reasons: he enlightened his listeners with the ways African Americans had been cheated out of their own history; he called upon them to recognize their own worth, and to reevaluate the way the black woman had been regarded throughout history. In the clip below, Malcolm X makes it plain what a Muslim will do if his woman is threatened.

Looking back on history, it is perhaps natural to align Malcolm X with Martin Luther King, Jr. The two leaders have been understood as rivals, sharing a fairly tense relationship over racial politics. While King was accommodationist in his approach (a strategy Malcolm X decried), X was, for most of his speaking career, a separatist. However, Dr. Gates points out that at some point they were actually not as adversarial as previously thought (566).

The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the creative arm of the Black Power Movement. The term "Black Power" originated in part from a Richard Wright work by the same name, and was further coined by Stokely Carmichael, co-founder of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or "SNCC"). A philosophical movement that urged the need for African American autonomy through political and economic independence, the Black Power Movement gave rise to organizations such as the Black Panther Party.

Huey P. Newton

Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton
Largely inspired by the writings of Malcolm X and Mao Tse-tung, the Black Panther Party advocated, in accordance with the philosophies of its co-founder Huey P. Newton, a policy of armed aggression against an oppressive, and corrupt white governmental infrastructure in the U.S.
*From Huey P. Newton Website

Photo taken by student, Christina Hill, March 2019

El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, or Malcolm X, whose ideology and affiliations with Black Nationalism inspired and galvanized the Black Power Movement.

The Black Arts Movement, produced such figures as Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka (or, LeRoi Jones) who advocated the poetic form--particularly spoken word poetry--for its immediacy and thrift to articulate the anger, frustration, hostility, and desires of the artist for a new era in race relations. These poets advocated solidarity among members of the African American diaspora, and the need to assert their rights by force if necessary. Kaluma ya Salaam observes that "[b]oth inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. As previously mentioned, the use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness" (Kaluma ya Salaam 1)

The following video features Amiri Baraka calling for "poetry that kills."

"From a historical perspective, it is clear that the Black Arts Era is, in many ways an echo of both Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. Once again, African Americans questioned the terms of their identity, history, and future prospects as citizens of the United States. They were concerned with the meaning and purpose of art both as a factor in social change and as an economic enterprise. Relevant questions about stylistics, form and discourse/language as well as intended audience and purpose were again debated. Yet the terms and circumstances of these questions and concerns were distinctly different, if for no other reason than writers of the Black Arts era were aware that their literary predecessors had raised similar issues during Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. From that legacy dating back to one hundred years before, they determined that artists needed to exert more control over the production and marketing of their works. Moreso than Reconstruction and Harlem Renaissance authors, Black Arts era writers questioned both the personal and the communal significance of literary production and distribution. Many chose to be published by small (and often transitory) presses that allowed them greater freedom of expression, that targeted a particular readership, or that simply promised greater financial profit...
     "Whereas Langston Hughes had said in the 1920s that writers were going to create whether people liked or understood them or not, the proponents of the Black Arts era contended that their work be understood by African Americans, that it must be both political and aesthetic, and to be successful, it must move their audiences to action" (Moody 343-4).

     Maya Angelou

  Nikki Giovanni

Rita Dove

Lucille Clifton

Questions for Discussion: In what ways has the Black Power Movement shaped and influenced contemporary African American popular culture?

What other movements, literary or cultural, sprang from the Black Power Movement?

Alice Walker's 1970 (re)discovery of Zora Neale Hurston's fiction catalyzed a literary movement among African American female writers. How might Walker's discovery of a lineage of literary 'foremothers' coincide with the aims of the Black Power Movement?

Kaluma ya Salaam lists several of the generative collections of Black Arts poetry and other writings in:

Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology.

For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration.

The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.

The Harlem Renaissance: Some Major Figures

Alain Locke

The first African American Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Harvard University, and one of the major anthologists of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke edited and published The New Negro in 1925. This anthology, which reflects the social and political contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, also distills the spirit and varied talents of Harlem Renaissance poets, dramatists, essayists, and short story writers. Considered one of the preeminent texts of its time, The New Negro conceived of black America as linked not only to other African-based cultural movements around the world but also to other movements, such as the Irish or Czech, that fused ethnic pride or nationalism with a desire for a fresh achievement and independence in art, culture, and politics" (Gates 957).

Charlotte Osgood Mason

Charlotte Osgood Mason was one of many white patrons who subsidized the careers of such artists as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke. Considered a "woman of volatile temperament and sometimes arresting ideas," Mason frequently insisted that her beneficiaries addressed her as "Godmother."

Carl Van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten was another principle--and highly visible--patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Initially a music critic and essayist, Van Vechten became closely associated with many of the African American writers who emerged from the Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and later, Richard Wright. During and well after the Harlem Renaissance reached its peak, Van Vechten took up photography of many of the most notable figures of that time and later. His personal papers are held at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where a collection of over 1800 Kodachrome slides of his photographs is held and featured at this, Library of Congress site.

Jessie Fauset

Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell University, Jessie Fauset published four novels--including her most acclaimed, There is Confusion before becoming the literary editor of the NAACP's The Crisis magazine from 1919-1926.

Arthur Schomburg

Of Puerto Rican and German descent, Arthur Schomberg was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1874. While in primary school, a teacher claimed that African Americans had 'no history.' Schomburg set out to prove her wrong. He devoted most of his adult life to archiving, recording black history that included slave narratives, literature and art, that now comprises the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (1).

W.E.B. Dubois

photo from this site.

Considered the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance," William Burqhardt Dubois was a scholar, philosopher, journalist, and educator whose groundbreaking publication, The Souls of Black Folk offered an unprecedented look at the particularized struggles of African Americans in the 20th century. Co-founder of the NAACP and editor of its literary arm, The Crisis, Dubois helped to spearhead the careers of such writers and poets as Countee Cullen and Sterling A. Brown, while he examined the nature of "Double Consciousness," "The Veil," and encouraged African Americans to think of themselves as belonging to a global community. 

The Harlem Renaissance: Written and Performing Arts

The Harlem Renaissance (known then as the "New Negro Renaissance" refers to the period of artistic boon that occurred in Harlem, New York from 1919 till 1929. A number of events can be said to have led to the birth of the Renaissance: initially, the mass movement of southern blacks from the Jim Crow South to the North--or Great Migration--contributed to a population swell and competition for jobs in cities like Harlem, Boston, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Marcus Garvey is credited with having been a major influence on the Renaissance, as he rallied African Americans around a political campaign none had ever seen the likes of before. A newly discovered sense of unity began to form, followed by an emphasis on black nationalism in politics, a demand for deeper intellectual insight into the problems of African Americans, and a growing economy that arose from black entrepreneurship. All of these developments contributed in their own ways to the emergence of the Renaissance.

Of course the politics and philosophies of the Renaissance gave rise to the "race men" of the time. The term, coined by W.E.B. Dubois articulated the need of the artist to represent the experience of blacks in the United States and urged them to politicize their roles and their writing. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, and poets Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay enjoyed great literary success during the decade of the Renaissance. 

                            Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston pose at Tuskegee Institute (1). 

While literary scholars naturally like to point to the proliferation of literature that arose in Harlem, there were other areas of artistic expression that thrived during the Renaissance. Jazz clubs--like the Cotton Club--hosted numerous famous names like Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, as well as the arrival of the Apollo Theater--a theater designed exclusively by and for African American audiences and performances. 

www.pinterest.com

Below Billie Holiday performs "Summertime":

In addition to the word, both written and sung, an upsurge of visual arts, featuring artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley reflected life in the hustle and bustle of Harlem: nightlife, characters, and colors were all represented. 

Archibald Motley "Black Belt"

Palmer Hayden, "Baltimore"

German-born painter, Winold Reiss, fell in love with the energy and culture of Harlem, and his paintings pay homage to the faces he observed--both recognizable and not so recognizable. His "Brown Madonna" is below.

Zora Neale Hurston by Winold Reiss:

Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss:

Finally, as Harlem was, during the Renaissance, the go-to scene for music, arts and letters, and entertainment, as well as a thriving economy, blacks enjoyed a rare and unique independence and relative freedom. Harlem author and physician Rudolph Fisher writes in "Home to Harlem" that "In Harlem, black was white" (my emphasis). Along with that freedom and self-governance came self-styling, fashion trends, and entrepreneurship.

Madame C.J. Walker became the first African American female millionaire, after having marketed her hair straightening pomade:

Image and bio of Madame Walker found at this site

And fashion was the name of the game. Below a Harlem youngster escorts his two lady friends home.

Photo shared from this site.

*Winold Reiss images, unless otherwise credited are located at www.pinterest.com

Harlem Banner at www.history.org

Civil Rights Icon: Ida Wells-Barnett, 1862-1931

*photograph sourced from this site

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi "just six months before Emancipation," Ida B. Wells would become one of the earliest and most outspoken advocates of human rights (Gates, et al.). Her father was politically-minded and considered himself a 'race man'; her mother, Elizabeth, who worked as a cook, strongly encouraged her children's educations. Ida would attend one of the Freedman Schools in Holly Springs until she was sixteen. After losing her parents to the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 1870s, young Ida was determined to keep what remained of her family together and supported her siblings on her meager teacher's salary. Her interest in racial politics in the South began with her outrage at the disparity between the salaries earned by white teachers (eighty dollars a month) compared to those of African American teachers (about thirty dollars a month). This concern, together with a determination to improve the educational opportunities for African Americans, galvanized her early activism. Wells moved to Memphis, where she found better pay in the Shelby County School System. During the summer sessions, she would attend Fisk University (an HBC in Nashville) and LeMoyne Institute (1). 

Wells' journalism career began shortly after an incident occurred in which Wells refused to surrender her seat on a Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train. After two lawsuits to sue the railroad (neither of which was successful), she began to write about her experiences in the newspapers, The Evening Star and The Living Way--a weekly Baptist newspaper located at the Beale Street Baptist Church. Wells wrote these columns under the pen name "Iola": a stylistic (and logistic) choice that inspired the fictitious character Iola Leroy, created by fellow activist Frances E.W. Harper in the novel by the same name. Her focus soon shifted to the subject of lynchings when in 1892 "three black businessmen opened a grocery store that competed with a white merchant. They were lynched" (Gates 676). 

The young journalist railed against the incident, exposing the "Old Threadbare Lie": the presumption among white supremacists that black males were inherently drawn to, and determine to violate, white women. "Nobody in this section believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women. If southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women" (Gates 676). Her words sparked a firestorm, and the office of her newspaper, Free Speech, was destroyed by angered whites. Fortunately, Wells was out of town at the time. 

During her time away from the South, Wells developed her career as writer and editor, and assumed partial ownership of the New York Age. Her Red Record exposed the atrocities of lynchings in the South for a national audience, and advocated "positive action" from its readers. Wells went on to become an important figure in the club women movement--African American women who organized for social change--and was among the founding constituency for the NAACP.

Video on Wells-Barnett by Katherine Bankole-Medina

Plantation Culture of the "Old South"

Abbeville Institute

A slave cabin in Barbour County, Alabama (researchgate.net)

In the slave-holding states of North and South Carolina and Virginia, there was a distinct hierarchy in place that was constructed along the lines of property ownership--either that of slaves or of real property. In the South Carolina low country before the Civil War, it was not uncommon for planters to own hundreds of slaves. The more property a planter controlled--real or human--the higher he ranked in society. This social tier controlled much of the economy and politics of the Old South, as most politicians were, in fact, slave owners. The Old South became known as a 'slavocracy,' a system controlled and structured around the exploitation of slave labor. Defendants of the slavocracy in Congress often referred to the economic system of the Old South as 'the peculiar institution,' referring to its uniqueness to the South, and to the South's reliance on slave labor. In fact, the utterance of the term "slavery" for a time was forbidden in public--and political--circles.

A planter class/aristocracy ensured the perpetuation of slavery and in many cases, an individual planter's reach extended into the highest levels of government. Further to validate this system of chattel slavery, the planter argued that Scripture justified the practice of slavery. One source observes that "white southerners proclaimed slavery as a 'positive good' and not a 'necessary evil,' and that it was the natural status of blacks. Second, some stated that slaves were necessary to the economy and were symbols as the quest for prosperity. Third, others believed in a hierarchical view that God had set in stone" (1). 

                                

Not all planters were wealthy, and not all of them were cruel: there were those who believed it their Christian duty to provide slaves with sufficient clothes, nourishment, lodgings, and to keep families and marriages intact where possible. Nevertheless, this "paternal" approach to human trafficking was merely a less severe form of an existing evil. By the mid-1800s, progressive reform movements were afoot to market Abolition as the true Christian cause. Religious groups such as the Quakers sought to end slavery: Isaac and Amy Post were well-known advocates of the abolition of slavery, even having housed Harriet Jacobs for a time in their home, and encouraging the former bondswoman to pen her narrative. Other religious groups such as the Methodists--and Spiritualists--who appeared by 1843, sought the end of the unjust institution. 

The slave narrative initiated as memoir, but soon evolved into political tract. Authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Solomon Northup published their biographies that were later distributed as propaganda for the Abolitionist cause. Publications like The Liberator, edited by famous abolitionist Henry Lloyd Garrison advocated the end of slavery as well, and re-printed excerpts from narratives that showed the particularly loathsome acts many slaveholders performed. From these texts, 19th century reading audiences learned that some masters administered whippings themselves; some delegated the distasteful task to an overseer--who may have been black or white. From narratives like Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, readers learned of the particular atrocities foisted on women and their bodies. 

Perhaps the most outstanding irony of the social structure of the Old South was that while the Planter Class projected an image of civility and superiority, it supported and perpetuated a system of overt--and subtle--cruelties that undergirded its status as a superior class. 

In the traditional plantation structure, slaves were divided into two separate tiers: the house servants, usually of fairer complexion, tended the master's children. These slaves served as seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, silver- and blacksmiths, stable grooms, and so on, while other, darker and less cultivated slaves worked the fields. The latter were considered of a lower social importance. This segregation of the slave population was one way in which the planter power structure reinforced a social hierarchy that was inculcated into the minds of its victims. The effect of these divisions was that slaves adopted their own prejudices against one another on the plantation: lighter complexions were valued above darker complexions.  

In addition to the divisions along the color line, the slave population was demoralized on the basis of gender-specific cruelties. On the meanest plantations, women were used as breeders to ensure the continuation of a slave population and to increase the master's wealth. Males were treated as 'bucks' or 'brutes,' and purchasers chose these males for their superior strength and virility. Resistant slaves were beaten into submission by overseers called "slave-breakers": Frederick Douglass reports on his experience with a particularly notorious slave-breaker, Edward Covey, in his narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom. For women, there were other, particularized brutalities. As Harriet Jacobs exposes in her memoirs, slave women--especially mulattoes--were prized for their beauty and often taken as concubines: unwilling partners in sexual affairs with their masters. A galling double-standard emerged in the 19th century that would drive a lasting wedge of distrust among women in slave-holding households. 

Much is now known about life as it was for slaves on a plantation thanks to the Narratives published by Jacobs, Douglass, and others. As we will examine, the slave narrative has evolved to serve purposes such as historical document, memoir, biography--and the dawning of an African American literary tradition. Additionally, the slave narrative draws from the Vernacular Tradition for its inspiration and illustration. The "Sorrow Songs" that Douglass, and later, Dubois will attest, were the means of expressing themselves in subversive, yet effective ways. Also, as we have examined, the early vernacular forms of oral storytelling first served to express the heart of the slave. The film "Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives" shows the trajectory from oral to written story, and then a return to oral narrative in dynamic and interesting ways. These voices were those who did not attain the literacy to write their narratives, but their voices resonate with pain, pathos, and history. Here, the talents of Roscoe Lee Brown, Robert Guillaume, Jasmine Guy, Samuel L. Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and Angela Bassett (among others) reanimate the voices and the stories of those who lived--and survived--the horrors of slavery.

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