Black Letters Unfettered
p. 9-25
Texte intégral
I looked forward to a time at which it would be safe to escape. I was too young to think of doing so immediately ; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative, 57.
. . . Ah ast, “where is me? Ah don’t see me.” “Everybody laughed, even Mr Washburn, Miss Nellie, de Mama of the chillun who come back home after her husband dead, she pointed to the dark one and said dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself? ”
Dey used to call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen i twas mah dress and mah hair so Ah said
“An, aw ! Ah’m colored!”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God,
181–182.
The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. The receipt of my “X” meant that forever after in the Nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X
Malcolm X, The Autobiography, 199.
1 Writing (voice?) and black différance
1The 2006 congress of the French American Studies Association in Le Mans took as its theme “American Letters” to honor the work of the late Claude Richard who was my professor at the University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier and had sent me to teach at the University of Michigan in 1980. Claude Richard’s work on Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Pynchon, American Letters (1998), came out of the Derridian times when French literary criticism bore the imprint of the debate between Lacan and Derrida on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (Lacan, 1966, 11–67; Derrida, 1987, 411–496). Having specialized in African American literature for now more than twenty years, partly as a result of my studies in Ann Arbor under the joint guidance of Lemuel Johnson and Martha Vicinus, I thought that to focus on African American “letters” would be an opportunity to assess, if only briefly, the incidence of the letter in African American culture. Echoes of Lacan’s work led to formulating the subtitle of this collection as the “insistence” of the letter or, as another translation has it, the “agency” of the letter. It is the contention of this collection of essays that the letter insists, that the letter acts in African American culture.
2Among analyses squarely grounded in that field presented at the AFEA, I have also included an article on the correspondence of the famous white abolitionists known as the Grimké sisters, for their letters chronicle the fight to end slavery and testify to the impact of the letter (as epistle) in progressive struggles. Their correspondence was instrumental in a political fight where white and black, feminists and abolitionists joined forces.1 Moreover, their name was handed down to two black women writers: Charlotte Forten Grimké, teacher and abolitionist who married their nephew, and Angelina Weld Grimké, their grand-niece and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
3While Lacan theorized the insistence of the letter on the Unconscious as a dominance of the signifier on the signified and gave a new formulation for the subject, the compulsion to repetition (Wiederholungzwang) in African American culture takes the shape of a struggle to free oneself from the master’s letters/fetters as the slave mimics his writing, “masters” it and gives it back to him as a mirror of writing’s own limits. “How could the spirit live without the letter,” Lacan ponders (1966, 509, translation mine).2 This signifying on the master’s (hand) writing goes together with a foregrounding of “voice,” as if it was necessary to found a counter-model, as if the “speakerly” had to be heralded as the sole solution (Gates, 1982), the hallmark of the black text in opposition to the “writerly” and the “readerly” (Barthes, 1970). A folktale entitled “How to Write a Letter.” included in Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), illustrates in a dialogue between an illiterate black man and his educated daughter how oral material cannot be “written.” The exasperated father finally exclaims:
You mean to tell me you been off to school seben years and can’t spell (clucking sound). Why Ah could spell dat myself and Ah ain’t been to school a day in mah life. Well jes’ say (clucking sound) he’ll know what yo’ mean and go on wid de letter. (Gates, 1997, 107)
4In many ways, black literature performs a return to the voice before the text. To write as if one spoke, to reproduce on the page the intonations, the grain of the voice, to “presentify” the black speaking subject in order to fight against the deadening effect of the master’s letter and thus go back to, or at least maintain, the initial trope of the “Talking Book” (Gates, 1982): such seems to have been the project and the circular nostalgia of black literature in its complex dialogue with dialect literature and black vernacular (Matvejevic).3 It is its predicament. It performs a return (to the origin of a lost language), it doubles up on itself: it writes b (l) ack. It re-members the telling of stories as much as their content, the accents of the storefront “lies” that Hurston recorded, the “lying sessions” which made up the stuff of her novels. The oral character, the voice-effect, has been maintained with an urgency that makes writing all the more menacing and alluring. This division or oscillation perpetuates the bifurcation between the folk and the scholars, the illiterate masses and the educated elite. Typical of this insistence on orality and anonymity, Morrison’s Jazz (1992) has as its main protagonist a nameless “character,” the “Voice.” She explains:
The thing is, I could not think of the voice of a person. . . . The voice is the voice of a talking book. So when the voice says, “I know what it’s like to be left standing when someone promises,” it talks to the reader. It sounds like a very erotic, sensual love song of a person who loves you. This is a love song of a book talking to the reader. . . . It was interesting to me how the whole act of reading, holding, surrendering to the book, is part of that beautiful intimacy of reading. When it’s tactile, your emotions are deeply involved. . . . I deliberately restricted myself using an “I” that was only connected to the artifact of the book as an active participant in the invention of the story of the book, as though [. . .] the book were talking, writing itself, in a sense.
(Carabi, 1995, 43, italics mine)
5In his early works Derrida deconstructed the opposition and hierarchical relation between speech and writing (Derrida, 1967a, 1967b, 1972). His attack on “phonologocentrism” challenged the emphasis on orality that runs through Western philosophy at the expense of writing. Writing is always already included in speech and language is first and foremost, in a meaning that will be progressively disclosed, writing. Writing, reformulated as “arch-writing” or “différance,” is a force of dislocation of phonocentrism and logocentrism; it is pure difference (Derrida, 1972). African American literature endlessly replays this concurrent movement of speech and writing when marking its own difference since the “traces” of the slave’s historical conditions and his troubled access to the letter (the transgression of what has been forbidden at the cost of one’s life) have always haunted the texts s/he wrote. The “spectral” quality of the voice takes up in the context of black letters an interesting turn. In the slave narratives, the “identity” of the author enclosed in the inscription “written by himself/herself” is at the same time denied, or at least challenged, by the authenticating letters of white protectors that frame the text.4
2 Letters and/in African American History
6The aim of the Le Mans workshop was to think about the letter, the alphabet and the epistle, both in literature (Les Belles Lettres), but also in the culture at large. The letter, purloined by the slave from the master, is a means of communication that African American culture cherishes in the form of the “open” letter of protest, as if preserving the direct link between sender and addressee was crucial in its directness, in the knowledge that letters always reach their destination, albeit through circuitous paths. This open letter is modeled after the Pauline epistle for the Bible teaches that the Word can be delivered in epistolary form. From his Birmingham jail in 1963, Martin Luther King wrote “so long a letter,” a gesture in keeping with the intrinsic link that access to literacy and letter-writing bears to freedom and to the Biblical text (Gates, 1997, 1854–1866). King’s intervention, firmly placed under the apostle’s patronage since St Paul had also been imprisoned, echoes Douglass’s open letter to his master Thomas Auld published in The Liberator on September 22nd, 1848.5 Widely circulated, it was instrumental in attracting the attention of public opinion to black civic rights. Written on scraps of paper provided to King by the jail’s black trustees—the letter as Raymond Saunders’s paintings make plain is first and foremost a material object (Sanconie)—, it helped him plan the 1963 March on Washington.
7While open letters appear as so many step-stones in the History of the African Americans, private letters constitute a source of information that needs to be tapped by historians. Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History founded in 1915 established an archive of letters.6 Yet, by the 70s, John Blassingame bemoaned that few historians had made use of this resource to offer a revision of African American History from the point of view of the slaves and the black freemen.7 The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis 1800-1860 (1926) stands alone of its kind as a record of black life. Fortunately, Dorothy Sterling’s two collections: The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (1976) gathering letters from the Reconstruction and We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the 19th Century (1984), a compilation of letters by African American women and a corrective to a male-centered version of black History followed in Woodson’s steps. Letters from black soldiers, such as Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.’s volume “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902 (1971), Philip McGuire’s Taps form a Jim Crow Army: letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (1981), or Virginia Matzke Adams’s On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, James Henry Gooding (1991) have also been collected and published. They form an ensemble of invaluable documents, to which have recently been added letters from the Gulf War edited by Juanita Chenault Carman: 86 Letters to the Persian Gulf War (12 Letters Received and 5 letters “Returned to Sender”) (1991).
8While African American historiography must unearth the correspondence between slaves and their families, rely on exchanges between relatives, and more generally reconstruct the History of the African Americans from these testimonies, in the publishing world, the correspondence between black writers and their white editors reveals the persistence of racial prejudice. The intermediary role played by the amanuensis in the slave narratives—“as-told-to” narratives—finds an avatar in the present-day editor who normally acts as facilitator for the black letters. As the final three articles in this volume make obvious, the black writer remains embroiled in racial dynamics that may lead to his death as a writer (Cottenet on Chesnutt), to bowdlerizing his texts by white censors (Cossu-Beaumont on Wright) or to a silencing of his sexuality by a well-wishing yet ultimately treacherous friend who publishes their correspondence (Rocchi on Stein and Baldwin). The history of these relations between writers and editors needs to be written.8 It is the task the history of publishing has set out to do. Combined with the interest in the genesis of the work and the emphasis on writing as process, this endeavor promises to contextualize the power relationships at work and to uncover the impact of race, class and gender in the genesis and the publication of specific texts. In April 1950, Hurston herself wrote in the Negro Digest a piece bluntly entitled “What White Publishers won’t Print” denouncing the lack of books written about the interior lives of the upper-class “Negroes” (Hurston, 1999, 695–712). The foundation of black presses at the time of the Black Arts Movement is proof, if need be, that the publishing world, a reflection of racial tensions in America, has never been color-blind.9
3 The Theft of the Letter
9The slave narratives document the struggle that learning how to write was for the slave who had to steal the letter from the master. This takes the form of Douglass literally “purloining” the letter. When working in a shipyard, he writes down the letters he sees on the boards to identify the different parts of the ship:
[. . .] The ship carpenters, after hewing, and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that part of the ship for which it was intended. When a piece of timber was intended for the larboard side, it would be marked thus—“L.” [. . .] I soon learned the name of the letters [. . .]. I immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able to make the four letters named.
(Douglass, 1968, 57)
10Once isolated, the “pure signifier” (Lacan) can be put to different uses, not the least of which consists in imitating official documents. Stolen, the letter is also forged. It passes for the master’s hand in a game of substitution that echoes the workings of the signifying chain where meaning is produced through difference.
11For African Americans, the letter as litera stands in a peculiar relation to the “proper” name, which, as Levinas, Derrida, and Lacan have each in their own work explored, occupies a singular position in the signifying chain. The name of the slave that should mark the uniqueness of the subject is itself historically the place of an erasure, a theft: the slave, the African American has no name. His proper name stigmatizes his status as property of an other, as exchangeable “good.”10 Hurston’s Janie in Their Eyes were Watching God is called “Alphabet” (see epigraph above) and Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm “X” when he joins the Nation of Islam (Benston, 1985). Yet the name is not “under erasure” since its crossing out is not superimposed on a previous and still visible name. The name of the slave master disappears altogether, replaced by the mark of erasure, a crossing out that interpellates that other who had performed a similar gesture, when naming the slave. As Malcolm X points out, to the Muslims, the X marks the space of the African name that they have lost under slavery. The “X” thus eradicates a lineage of bondage to replace it with a new bond: the family of his brothers and sisters of the Nation of Islam. Thousands of Muslims chose to add an X to their first name. The March 17, 1963 Chicago television interview, “City Desk,” shows Malcolm refusing to utter his father’s name since he insists that he does not know it. The proper name is lacking.
12The loss of the name, together with the assignment to “animality,” explains how the proof of the slave’s humanity lay in his ability to “write his own self’ in an entrapping imitation of the master’s accomplishment (Gates, 1982). Frederick Douglass owns: “I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book” (Douglass, 1968, 58). At the end of his narrative, having become “his own master”, he signs or in his words “subscribes himself” to the struggle for freedom, the “sacred cause” on April 28, 1845 (Douglass, 1968, 126). The tension of a transgressive access to literacy that, by necessity, transforms itself into a political gesture performed in writing, through writing, is the hallmark of the slave narrative as a genre.
13A direct illustration of the slave’s ability to read and write, fragments of letters are included in the slave narratives. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents documents the original moment of the weaving of letters into the narration, a pre-figuration of the black epistolary novel and its postmodern variations. Dr. Flint writes Linda (Jacobs’ pseudonym) letters that she refuses to read, pretending that she cannot read: “Before long, notes were often slipped into my hand. I would return them, saying, ‘I can’t read them, sir.’ ‘Can’t you?’ he replied; ‘then I must read them to you.’” (I, 30).11 When it becomes obvious that she can read and write, Dr. Flint fears that she may use her skills to write to another man (I, 40). Eventually, Linda writes two letters that she has somebody else post from New York to lure her master into believing that she has fled, while she is literally under his nose, hidden in the garret of the shed of her grandmother’s house. He himself retaliates by a false letter to her grandmother, telling her that she repents and wants to come back: “He broke the seal, and I heard him read it. The old villain! He had suppressed the letter I wrote to my grandmother, and prepared a substitute of his own.” (I, 132). Flint’s letter is included in the text.
14Following the logic of Poe’s purloined letter, Linda herself stands in the “place” of the Minister’s letter: out of reach precisely because she is so close, elsewhere when she is close-by, hidden yet in full view, disclosed in her narrative yet untouched and untouchable by Dr. Flint.12 The letters duplicate the deceptive nature of her physical concealment, allow displacement while she lives in a crippling place. They reach the master from a usurped yet real destination. They deconstruct the logic of the flight North, precisely because they sustain it. Linda is careful about dating her letter from Boston, and not New York: “That was before Massachusetts had consented to become a ‘nigger hunter’ for the south” (I, 134). She is confident: “The letters will do good in the end. I shall get out of this dark hole one day or another” (I, 134). Incidents is replete with quotations from letters copied from the original and references to correspondences between Linda, her friends and family members, between Dr. Flint and his entourage: another forged letter by Dr. Flint who pretends that it is written by Emily Flint’s younger brother (I, 176–177), Mr. Thorne’s letter to Dr. Flint torn to pieces and then re-assembled (I, 183), one of her grandmother’s last letters to her (I, 200). A trace of the vogue for the epistolary novel of the 18th century, these letters constitute what a colored citizen of Boston who knew Harriet Jacobs and guarantees the veracity of what she relates calls an “interesting narrative” full of “living truths” (I, 210): they thicken the plot and testify to the authenticity of Linda’s story.
4 The Flight (of the Letters)
15One letter figures prominently in the black literary canon, representing a continuation of the strategy of disguise and concealment evidenced by its occurrences in the slave narrative: Bigger Thomas’s ransom note to the Daltons.
He should disguise his handwriting. He changed the pencil from his right to his left hand. He would not write it; he would print it [. . .] He thought I want you to put ten thousand. . . . Naw; that would not do. Not “I.” It would be be better to say “we.” We got your daughter, he printed slowly in big round letters. That was better. He ought to say something to let Mr. Dalton think that Mary was still alive. He wrote: She is safe. (Wright, 1991, 609)
16As Barbara Johnson explains, Bigger’s crucial revision—he ultimately crosses out “safe” to write “alive”—makes plain “his belief in the white man’s inability to think his daughter safe that has led to her not being alive in the first place” (Johnson, 1998, 65). Bigger’s erasure of “safety” to replace it with an assertion that the text’s diegesis denies—Mary is dead—relocates the ransom letter in relation to life and death. The letter defers death, maintains the illusion of life. The usurpation of the signature—Bigger signs “Red” since he wants the Daltons to believe that the Communists have kidnapped their daughter—is a duplication of the racist “assignment” that assumes a young black man must be a rapist. Bigger writes a pre-ordained narrative, duplicating his own “trapping” in the accidental murder of Mary. His injunction to the Daltons, “Do what this letter say” (1991, 609), is a literalization of racism’s overdetermined script; it also spells out what is hidden behind the signature (Red): its black authorship.13
17If Bigger’s ransom letter can be read as a metonym for black writing, one resounding occurrence of the letter in the canon of black literature is the letters of recommendation that the hero of Ellison’s Invisible Man carries with him, only to find out that they contain exactly the opposite of what he thought. A satire of Booker T. Washington’s educational project, the incident exposes the trick played on its bearer by the powerful, the treachery of a variety of racial and class-based discourses (racial uplift, Communism, etc.). A dream in which the protagonist’s grandfather appeared had foreshadowed his misadventure, as if to prove ironically that knowledge is to be found in the Unconscious rather than in experience:
That night I dreamed that I was at the circus with [my grandfather] and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open the brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope, I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. “Them’s years,” he said. “Now open that one.” And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. “Read it,” my grandfather said. “Out loud!”
“To Whom It may Concern,” I intoned. “Keep this Nigger-Boy Running.”
(Andrews, 1997, 1535)
18The letters condemn the naïve black protagonist to endless wandering, to being eternally on the move, to an “essence” defined by motion, uncannily similar to the flight of the signifier along the signifying chain. The irony consists in the fact that his gullibility makes him the messenger of his own fate, the blind engine of his own demise. The runaway slave kept running by the bloodhounds here turns into the figure of the dupe, the simpleton tricked by his own “race” (by racial discourse). The image of the series of envelopes that at first only contain other envelopes, and hence no message, is a metonym for the condition of the black man as bearer of passes written by others, the butt of white men’s jokes, the target of black men’s scorn. The ironic openness of the address, “To Whom it may Concern”—the message first and foremost concerns him—shows how “invisible man” must shrug off language (and here writing), must reflect on knowledge, power and discourse before emerging from his hole.
19Both the primacy of voice and the quotation of the letter in the slave narrative recur in the use of correspondence in contemporary African American novels. The Ur-text of that tradition is undoubtedly Alice Walker’s bestseller The Color Purple (1982), although one can also mention Ellis Trey’s Platitudes (1988).14 Celie’s letters to God, a rewriting of spiritual narratives, such as Rebecca Cox Jackson’s, and Nettie’s letters to her sister sent from Africa illustrate the post-modernist turn as pastiche of Richardson’s Pamela that John Edgar Wideman picks up in The Cattle Killing (1996) and Percival Everett pursues in A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Storm Thurmond (2004), co-authored with James Kincaid.
20While deferral and différance are central to the strategy of Walker’s text (Van Peteghem), Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (Feith) is a meditation on the weight of the letter in African American History as well as a reflection on the black literary text as interface between voice and letter, letter and being, lettre et l’être to take up Derrida’s pun. Wideman’s hybrid text (letters, diary, witnesses’ accounts), a mixture of oral and written communication, deploys a spectrum of diverse kinds of letters, from the public to the private. It is also a pastiche of pastiches: Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, the tradition of 18th century epistolary fiction and the novel of consciousness, as well as Walker’s The Color Purple are some of the hypotexts of The Cattle Killing. A poetics of the gap emerges from time-lags while Wideman can be said to reflect on his own writing practice, at the same time postmodern and African American. The novel ultimately amounts to an archeology of America, probing for the origins of racial tensions. It unsettles official “truths” and questions the genre of the novel itself. “Stories are letters,” Wideman wrote in the dedication to Damballah (1988, 5). For its part, Everett’s AHistory of the African American People (Birat) uses autofiction to question polyphony in historical discourse precisely in its use of private archives: “correspondences”. It explodes the seriousness of ideological positions through parody and satire in the tradition of the black trickster. It is also a reflection on conventions and rules that govern language and by extension, social relations. As both novels demonstrate, the epistolary form lends itself more readily than others to the deconstructive impulses of postmodernist fiction.
21At the core of The Color Purple is the time lapse between writing and reading caused by Pa’s stealing and hiding Nettie’s letters, a fairly common narrative trick that elevates différance to the central principle of the novel. Letters are hoarded rather than destroyed: their receipt is delayed; they have been “en souffrance” as the French put it (over-due as in an out-standing bill), undelivered, in a cache. The readers of the novel find in Celie as reader of her sister’s letters a double: reading the letter is subject to circumstance. It is contingent, fragile, precarious. Yet it eventually happens. The cache reveals its wealth, an incident that repeats on the level of the plot Jacobs’ own prolonged stay in the loophole of retreat. It is as if the time lapse allowed the letter to deliver a blunter “truth”. Like the dream deferred that Hughes compares to a raisin in the sun, the letter may suffer holding back only at great cost: a return of the suppressed.
5 The Letter as Political Weapon
22Long is the tradition of letters from prison, as is that of prison as the privileged “scene of instruction” for black Americans. Malcolm X’s confession about his self-education in the Norfolk Prison Colony is an uncanny “repetition” of Douglass’s apprenticeship:
I spend two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I had never realized so many words existed! I did not know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.
In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting. (Haley, 1973, 172)
23Malcolm X copies the dictionary from A to Z: “Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.” (Haley, 1973, 172). Malcolm X’s powerful voice and oratorical skill that explode in speeches such as “The Ballot or the Bullet” (Gates, 1997, 90–101) owe their strength of persuasion to these humble beginnings.15
24Black “letters” as epistles function in a way similar to the sermons, the oratory art of the black Church preachers. They are interventions in the public domain to make things change; they enact transformation. The letters written by the white abolitionists known as the “Grimké sisters” (Collomb-Boureau) make clear that the double address: to a particular addressee, in this case William Lloyd Garrison, and to the public at large, when the letter becomes an open letter, capitalizes on this double charge (the private made public) to strike a bigger blow. That the specifically gender-marked issue of propriety—of women’s access to the lectern—should be vested in the destiny of these women’s letters illustrates the troubled relation of the feminine to politics. The sentimental appeal reinforced the political urgency. Conversely, Georges Jackson’s prison letters gathered in Soledad Brother (Clary) reveal the feelings he had for Angela Davis and contribute to contextualizing the violence of the times, to emphasizing the humanity of the black revolutionary, to disclosing private emotions amidst the doxa of revolutionary rhetoric. The letters are love poems. Yet these missives are also letters from the front of the black nationalist struggle of the 60s. They bear witness to black militancy, to the formation of a black revolutionary mind: they are historical primary documents on organizations such as RAM and on the FBI’s war against the Black Panther Party. They echo and prolong the slave’s often-uttered desire to die free rather than live as a slave. They repeat Claude McKay’s 1919 plea: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs /Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot [. . .] Dying, but fighting back” (Gates, 1997, 984).
25Mumia Abu-Jamal (Christol) sends his own prison letters from death row, strangely not to claim his innocence, but to condemn the American prison system, to bear witness, to testify. His letters follow the sequence of the epistolary canon: the narratio and the petitio. The prisoner’s plight parallels the slave’s condition: freedom is the gauge of the human condition. The call is for a change that would transform society as much outside as inside. As John Edgar Wideman puts it in the introduction to Live from Death Row: “Mumia Abu-Jamal’s voice can help us tear down walls—prison walls, the walls we hide behind to deny and refuse the burden of our history” (Abu-Jamal, 1995, xxxiv).
26In the wake of Martin Luther King’s historical intervention, James Baldwin’s use of the open letter of protest evidences an unmatched mastery of the genre. The collection The Fire Next Time (1963) contains two texts that explicitly take the shape of open letters: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross,” subtitled “Letter from a Region in my Mind.” The first letter starts with the salutation: “Dear James,” an expression taken up later as “My dear namesake”. Baldwin insists: “I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not really know that you exist.” (1964, 15). Through the play on pronouns, the reader becomes Baldwin’s nephew. He/she cannot not be involved: h/she is enclosed within the family circle. The personal and the political, the intimate and the collective, the “I” and the “we”: the epistolary form links them both firmly and calls for action now. Otherwise, the prophecy of violence and chaos carried by the letter will be fulfilled.
6 Conclusion
27This brief sketch illustrates how the “letter” as signifier (Lacan), actual missive with its link to a referent (e.g. the correspondences of slaves, the letters of African American writers) and its explicitly political counterpart (the prison letter, the open letter of protest) suggest directions for research beyond the reflection initiated by the theoretical turn of the 90s. The move away from the published text to its actual genesis, its publishing history, by using the correspondence of writers and creative artists, the incidence of post-modernism on African American literature which has led to unsettling the notion of “race” in the wake of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, signal new directions. In the realm of literature, for instance, Everett’s Erasure (2001) mocks ghetto literature and revisits the debates about the role of the black artist that once opposed Wright and Hurston, or the same Wright and Baldwin. In the visual arts, Raymond Saunders’s use of actual envelopes in his paintings demonstrates how the artist’s craft by diverting material from everyday life signifies on communication and the destiny of meaning. Recycled, the black letter as material object becomes work of art, the site of an aesthetic experience, while insisting on its singular trajectory in relation to African American History.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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7 Works Cited
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Live from Death Row. New York: Avon Books, 1995.
Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Baldwin, James. [1963] The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin Bks, 1964.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970.
Benston, Kimberly. “‘I yam what I am’: Naming and Unnaming in Afro-American Literature” BALF 16/1: 3–11. Expanded version rpt. in Black Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1985, 121–47.
Brent, Linda. [1865] Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Carabi, Angels. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Belles Lettres 10.2 (1995): 40–43.
Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967a.
Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967b.
Derrida, Jacques. “La différance” in Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972, 3–29.
Derrida, Jacques. “Le facteur de la vérité” in The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and beyond. Alan Bass Trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, 411–496.
10.4159/9780674053755 :Douglass, Frederick. [1845] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Written by Himself. New York: New American Library, Signet Book, 1968.
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Everett, Percival. Erasure. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.
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Notes de bas de page
1 This inclusion is not intended to obscure the later divisions and dissentions between white feminists and abolitionists on the issue of black suffrage.
2 Here is a definition of the letter according to Lacan: “Un élément essentiel dans la parole elle-même était prédestinée à se couler dans les caractères mobiles, qui, Didots ou Garamonds se pressant dans les bas-de-casse, présentifient valablement ce que nous appelons la lettre, à savoir la structure essentiellement localisée du significant” (Lacan, 1966, 501, italics mine).
3 On dialect poetry, see Gates, 1987, 167–195.
4 The letter written by African American poet Phillis Wheatley’s master John Wheatley to prove that she was actually the author of the poems she had written was reprinted in the introduction to the English edition of her work (September 1773) (Gates, 1997, 167–168). The poet’s own letters were published as a volume subtitled “The Negro Slave Poet of Boston” in 1864. Her letter to Samson Occom (February 11, 1774) containing her indictment of slavery was often reprinted. In 1978, Robert Hayden wrote a poem in the form of a letter sent from London by Phillis Wheatley to another black woman, Obour Tanner (Gates, 1997, 1514–1515).
5 www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1121.htm accessed 24 August 2010.
6 This paragraph is based on Cheryl Lester’s entry “letters” of The Oxford Companion to African American literature (Andrews, 1997, 436–437).
7 Robert Starobin, Randall Miller and Bell Wiley subsequently published letters by slaves and former slaves.
8 As I write this introduction, Cécile Cottenet is planning a conference on race and editing at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 2012.
9 The Third World Press in Chicago (1967-), the Broadside Press (1965-) and the Lotus Press (1972-) in Detroit. They are still active today.
10 In Morrrison’s Beloved, Sethe exchanges sexual intercourse with the stonecutter for the letters of her daughter’s name on the pink headstone.
11 The quotations are from Linda Brent, [1865] Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, hereafter cited as I followed by the page number. Jean Fagan Yellin has established Harriet Jacobs’ authorship thanks to letters Jacobs exchanged with Amy Post.
12 For a reflection on John Edgar Wideman’s short story “Surfiction” in relation to Poe’s “Purloined Letter, “see Raynaud, 1999.
13 Johnson remarks that Bigger is present when Mary’s father receives the letter in a duplication of the scenario of Poe’s purloined letter. The evident is invisible. Her analysis of the black woman as reader of the black man’s writing is another crucial development of her essay.
14 Keith E. Byerman’s entry on the “epistolary novel” in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature also cites Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson’s The Confessions of a Lazy Woman (1988) and Shirley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) that both rely on an imitation of the diary.
15 This speech is included in the CD that accompanies the Norton anthology.
Auteur
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Claudine Raynaud
Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III
Claudine Raynaud est professeur de littérature anglaise et d’études américaines à l’université Paul-Valéry — Montpellier III. Elle a enseigné en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (Michigan, Northwestern et Oberlin). Chercheur au Du Bois Institute (Harvard, automne 2005), elle a dirigé la Jeune équipe « Études afro-américaines » créée en 2004 et travaille au C.N.R.S. Elle est l’auteur de Toni Morrison : L’Esthétique de la survie (1995) ainsi que de nombreux articles sur l’autobiographie noire. Ses publications les plus récentes sont : « Coming of Age in the African American Novel », The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), un recueil d’articles sur The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman de Gaines (CRAFT, 2005) et « Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory », The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (2007).
Claudine Raynaud is Professor of English and American Studies at the Université Paul-Valéry — Montpellier III. She has taught in England and the United States (Michigan, Northwestern and Oberlin). A Fellow at the Du Bois Institute (Harvard, Fall 2005), she headed the nationwide African American Studies Research Group created in 2004 and works at the CNRS. She is the author of Toni Morrison : L’Esthétique de la survie (1995) and numerous articles on black autobiography. Her most current publications are « Coming of Age in the African American Novel », The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), an anthology of articles on Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (CRAFT, 2005) and « Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory », The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (2007).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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