In trying to un…

Aside

In trying to understand “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I tried to answer this question. They cannot.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak talks about the way western cultures looks at other cultures in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. From the beginning of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak says that western thinking is produced in order to support the west. Spivak says that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. This is true of any history book, the good guy depends of what culture is presenting the text. Knowledge is exported from the west to the third world for financial and other types of gain to Spivak. This idea can be read in the quote: “The subaltern is thrown out of joint when his cultural macrology is operated, however remotely, by the epistemic interference with legal and disciplinary definitions accompanying the imperialistic [Western] project.”

The fact that the west is gathering information on the cultures in the third world country and taking that information back to the west, to be sold for the benefit of the western readers, and financial gain of the western writer is noted by Spivak. Spivak wonders if it can be possible for the west to speak about the “the other” without colonial the filter.

Through use of the Sati the subaltern is not able to speak: through “patriarchy and imperialism [Western ideology]…the figure of the woman [Subaltern] disappears…”

Donzell Evans

For the Colored Girl: Self-discovery and Wholeness

For the Colored Girl: Self-Discovery and Wholeness

By Tiffany McFadden

My response to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is more emotional than analytical. In all my academic years, I have never read an essay where I felt that the author was speaking directly to me. It is an essay made to encourage the colored girl to search for her creative abilities by exploring her own heritage and culture. In order to activate that spirituality that lives within her she must search her own mother’s creative–abilities or explore the creative works of Black American female artists.

Alice Walker, as the speaker, narrates with a very motherly and nurturing tone that seems to soothe and guide the reader through a story about self-discovery. Walker makes the case to the reader that the Black woman’s creativity was snatched and taken from her. Yet, by taking away her rights to learn or not giving her “the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action” did not damper her spirituality. Through the years, the creativity of the Black woman would reveal itself in different forms: song, quilt making, and gardening.

I can relate to Walker’s idea of exploring her mother’s creative abilities in order to find her own creativity. The feeling of being abandoned by my mother has always left me with a feeling of emptiness and void. I have always felt that by learning more about my mother I would then discover more about myself. The reading seemed to evoke these feelings that I have internalized about my mother, and my desire to know her on a deeper level. Even though the reading plucked at my sentiments, Walker’s words filled the empty space in me with encouragement.  Now, I know that my desire to know my mother is a longing to have a better understanding of myself. And to have a better understanding of myself will help me to comprehend the passion I have for writing creatively.

Walker asked th…

Aside

Walker asked the question what did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time.”  These women labored long, hard hours from sunup to sundown picking cotton in the fields. The luckier ones(often times the fairer-skinned ones) labored in the house tending to the master and mistress. These women bore many children, some of whom were auctioned off to the highest bidder. Too, they faced and succumbed to the sexual advances of their masters.  

Imagine for a moment our female children and grandchildren. How would they describe our lives? To begin, they would acknowledge our accomplishments and the countless trials we overcame in areas of education, entertainment, and our personal endeavors. They would say “Our mothers and grandmothers went to the best schools, became lawyers, doctors, and scientists. They were famous, had countless hit songs; won coveted awards. They won Olympics medals, made groundbreaking scientific discoveries.

Take for example Oprah’s accomplishments as a Black television hostess,  billionaire, and philanthropist. Or Condoleezza Rice, the first female African-American Secretary of State. Or even  Halle Berry, the first Black woman to win an Oscar.

On the other hand though, our children and grandchildren might say that we’ve shame the image of the Black woman, that we’ve taken creativity to an entirely different dimension. Take a look at the rap videos, where women dance and gyrate half-naked.  Even R&B singers have ‘sexified’ their image, wearing more scandalous outfits. Yes, they are gifted and create beautiful music., but where’s the creativity?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

I wonder what our grand children and great-grand children might say about their mothers and grandmothers. I also wonder how, as black woman, their lives will be.        

J.GILBERT

 

Keeping a Voice Alive

by Amber Laraque

Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” discusses what the life of an artistic Black woman in the 18^th century must have been like. She puts into perspective how difficult it was for a woman to be creative in the time, and reminds readers that it was nearly impossible for an enslaved Black woman.

Walker says, “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write?”

This question posed by Walkermade me think a lot. How did black women find it in themselves to share and keep their voice alive, after it had been suppressed for so long?

Furthermore,Walker asks the question, “What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great-grandmothers’ day?” Then goes on to say, “It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.”

Walker refers to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and reminds readers that Woolf writes that a woman needs her own room and money to support herself in order to write fiction. Of course, at the time, Woolf was speaking of white women. With that said, how could a black woman think of writing fiction when she not only had no room of her own, but had no freedom?  

The reminders of the place of black women in this country’s history are eye opening. These are not new facts, or discoveries, but opened my mind into really understanding the strength and the power of the voice of black women—a voice that had been hushed for so long.

Walker & Rampersad: The African-American Writer Missrepresented

By Frank Miller

Over the weekend I read Arnold Rampersad’s “Biography and African-American Culture.” The article discusses how a biographer’s use of psychoanalysis allows him/her to successfully produce a biography; however Rampersad argues that a psychoanalytic approach not only misrepresents, but definitively hinders the most triumphant African-American figures of American culture. Though the article mentions the biographies of Frederick Douglass, MLK, Jr., and Richard Wright; it is Rampersad’s example of a W.E.B. DuBois passage in DuBois’ autobiography, Dusk if Dawn (1940) which is truly representative of the conflict African-Americans face. He writes:

It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively….One talks on evenly and logically in this way, but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear, that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world [my italics]  (198).

Rampersad explains that because of the thick sheet of invisible plate glass, some become “hysterical” and “scream and hurl themselves against the barriers” (198). He states that some may even “break through in blood and disfigurement [my italics] and find themselves faced by a horrified, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their very own existence” (198). Rampersad appears to be saying that African-Americans who perceive this “plate glass” to inhibit them, and act upon such inhibition by “breaking through,” ultimately become “disfigured.” In the passion of their frustration, they provide the world (who receives their agressive act unkindly) with a “distorted” view of who they truly are.

In Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the author seemingly speaks with similar frustration as she writes, “Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, ‘the mule of the world,” (237) for the fact that they carry the burdens that all others have rejected. She mentions black women being labeled as “Matriarchs, Superwomen, Mean and Evil Bitches, Castraters” and “Sapphire’s Mama.” However, emphasizes that “[they] have pleaded for understanding, [their] character has been distorted” (237) in a manner paralleling those who “break through in blood and disfigurement.” In manner to similar to Anzaldúa in “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers,” Walker seems to have actually broken or completely disregarded what makes some “hysterical.” She writes, “to be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it: and yet, artists we will be” (237).  To counter the thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass that drowns voices, Walker reminds her audience of the strength of the African-American women before her, “it is well known that the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without ‘knowing’ it, reality of their spirituality, even if they didn’t recognize it beyond what happened in the singing of church – and they never had any intention of giving it up” (237-238). While contemplating the origins of the black woman’s creativity, Walker suggests that “often the truest answer to a question that really matters can be found very close” (238). She informs her audience that it is her mother’s passion, determination, and will to care for her children that exists as true creativity, and in a manner to similar to the quilt hanging in the Smithsonian Institution made by the “‘anonymous’ black woman from Alabama,” these women “left [their] mark in only materials [they] could afford…in the only medium [their] society allowed [them] to use” (239).

In today’s society in which many feel the answers to their questions lie hidden deep within some complex and nearly unattainable thought, Walker keeps us humble, reminding us to search in “our mothers’ gardens;” in essence, to venture for creativity in places both “high – and low” (239).

The Black Woman Artist: Silent and Invisible

“For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was the release.”

                                                                                                            -Alice Walker

                                                                                                In Search of Our Mother’s Garden

            Invisibility and silence of the black woman artist are themes that are portrayed in Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden”. The invisibility goes further than the experiences that either black men or white women tell about in their writing. It is most difficult for a black woman writer because the oppression directed towards them is far more invisibly embedded than the oppression directed towards black males and white women. What I am trying to articulate is that the invisibility and silence is not only a product of racism but one of gender roles.

            White women; although of the same gender as a black woman lack the knowledge and experience of the political oppression directed toward the black woman. A black man is a man therefore there are less oppressing factors despite being of the black race. “Black women are called in the folklore that so aptly identifies one’s status in society, “the mule of the world”, because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else refused to carry.” (Walker, 237) In her essay, Alice Walker divulges how the economic, political, and social restraints of slavery and racism have affected the creative lives of Black women.

            The theme of dualism is represented in the discussion of Virginia Woolf’s and Phillis Wheathley’s literary works. These descriptions depict two great writers of different races facing different types of oppression. The white woman writer may have been criticized because of her themes of: sex, love, race, etc. while the black woman writer would’ve faced oppression for all that and for having “contrary instincts”. A black woman writer having “contrary instincts” can be explained by taking a look at what W.E.B. Du Bois coined as “double consciousness”; meaning that the person of the black race had two souls divided one being black and the other the American. Invisibility and silence of the black woman artist is a product of cultural imperialism where race is a higher oppressing factor than gender.

“Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Jackie Torres

          Gayatri Spivak the writer of “Can the Subaltern Speak”? is a feminist who is questioning the acts of the western culture.  Subaltern is a term used to describe the Marxist theorist. The Marxist theorist delineates the act of someone who is not allowed for social reasons to express themselves or write about their own cultural experiences and politics. When reading Spivak’s essay it was a bit difficult to understand her stance. Towards the middle of her essay I realized what her discussion was about. Spivak says, “The first part of my proposition-that the phased development of the subaltern is complicated by the imperialist project-is confronted by a collective of intellectuals who may be called “Subaltern Study Group”.

 In this passage I was able to understand that Spivak wonders why  Western culture or civilization want to write about or describe practices of her own culture. She uses the example of hegemony, she says, ” he is concerned with the intellectual’s role in the subaltern’s cultural and political movement into the hegemony”. Here Spivak explains how the role’s are being given out depending on your societal and economical role. As she goees on explaining in detail her point of view she crtitizes some of the works of some theorist. However, her ending view and conclusion does not seem to be cohesive with her essay and in some ways seem to be contradicting to many other previous points made.

The Tools of the Black Woman Artist

In Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South,”the poet discusses the perception of black women in America from early slavery to her own childhood. I found that both Walker and I see the merit of examining perception versus reality because the reality of black women artists of the past 300 years was certainly shaped by both. The poet Jean Toomer looked upon the black women of the Post-Reconstruction South and saw “Saints” who “lay vacant and fallow as autumn fields with harvest time never in sight.”(233) If his account of these women was true, how then do you explain Alice Walker herself? Did her creativity inexplicably spontaneously generate on the bodies of her dead “vacant” ancestors or, to play on the title, sprout out of a garden instead of her mother’s womb and experiences? Contemporary black women artists, as Walker saw them, are products of artists just like themselves who created art with whatever tools were at their disposal.

Walker gives us an excellent archetype of the black woman, who kept the creativity alive through the stifling years of slavery, oppression and sainthood, in her own mother. Toomer saw a black woman and saw a creature who “waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known, but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead.”(233) But Walker looked at her mother and saw a tireless provider of eight children. She recalls that her mother never once had a moment to herself to reflect or examine herself.(238) Therefore, Minnie Lou Walker was not sitting around waiting for anything to be revealed to her in the darkness. Their was no “unknown thing” that she lacked. Her artistry was herself and her art hung not on the walls of a museum, but in the clothes on her children’s back and in the roots of the garden that she planted.

To further examine the tools of the black woman artist, it is again necessary to look at perception versus reality. Walker makes note several times of the violence inflicted on black women and how their bodies were virtually and literally taken from them. “When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labors of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.”(237) Child bearing became not only a product of this violence, but also a consolation prize for their sacrifices. Instead of being given a paintbrush or a pen, black women were “gifted” children to raise and the role of the matriarch to assume. Yet, as Walker reflects at the end of the article, it is perhaps in their own children that black women produce their greatest piece of art. Although children were given to black women as tools of their own oppression, black women artists claimed their offspring or themselves. As her mother and grandmother did before her, Walker will keep the creativity of the black woman alive and truly become their “signatures.” (243)

-Kaitlyn D’Agostino

Deconstructing Post-Structuralism: Spivak’s Theory of Un-Theory. L.R. Corcoran.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” begins to pick up when she proposes the intriguing demarcation between “represent” as in what a political body such as a congress does, and “re-present” as in the mode of representation that is employed in language and by extension in philosophy. This separation comes for Spivak’s problemization of Gilles Deleuze’s desire to compound theory into action, or better phrased, to remove the binary between the two. In her words: “Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’ and ‘re-presenation as in art and philosophy.’ ”

My immediate sense of this, and an unclear one at that, is Spivak is suggesting that the kind of theorizing which deconstructs systems of powers, somehow implicitly maintains its systems of hierarchy in its formulations. This is manifested mostly in the intellectual’s position within the discourse of power that he or she is attempting to deconstruct, and this position vis-à-vis Delueze’s desire to make theory into action and thus remove the signifier, i.e. the represented, (as he puts it, “There is no more representation; there’s nothing but action.”) is to conflate the two different meanings of “represent” and “re-present,” thereby wholly removing the voice of the Other.

Although I readily admit to my near complete obfuscation of this text, I will try to piece together an ad-hoc synthesis of Spivaks’s argument. She ends her discussion of the various means of this double entendre of “representation” with “My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire.” This line of attack is similar to the manner in which she described the goal of post-structuralism in the beginning of her essay. Post-structuralism must resist the urge to narratize history and human relations because the relations between power, desire and interest are so complex that any reduction provides no real use. Yet, it must be acknowledged, the human mind is so prone to narrative creation that a constant criticism against this instinct must be waged.

It seems here that Spivak is suggesting that even post-structuralism has not been able to resist sufficiently the urge towards narrative, a narrative that also obliterates the Other. Even though post-structuralism was able to do away with the “too neat” binaries of structuralism, by introducing power and desire into the argumentation, it has still allowed for an abstraction that in some ways denies the total spectrum of actuality. Now, if I am reading Spivak’s critique correctly, I must assent to her argument, but I must also add that the problem to which she is pointing is systemic of not just post-structuralism but of all theories. It seems that Spivak is taking a hard Humeian line against generalization, but if this be the case, she leaves no room to theorize herself: all that is possible with Hume’s formulation is a taxonomy of the known or a priori reasoning of mathematics.

Perhaps then this all comes back to language. An utterance about something is invariably not an utterance about something else, and, to continue in this reasoning, any discourse, unless it be the dictionary itself, is going to have not accounted for something. In the sciences, this is serviceable: botany can be unconcerned with astronomy without anyone being disenfranchised. The problems arise in the realm of social discourse. The question becomes: how does a society create social procedures that are viable, and formed by the necessary procedure of abstraction, without effacing any persons in this process of representation/re-presentation?

The “Contrary Instincts” of Woolf & Walker.

Two weeks ago, I analyzed the back end of Virginia Woolf’s opus, A Room of One’s Own, only for her thesis to appear in Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden.” Indeed, one of the few criticisms one can lob Woolf’s way is that her thesis may bear a certain racial bias, an accusation that at first appears more substantial when Walker presents Phillis Wheatley, a much-needed counter argument. But as so often the case when analyzing feminist works, one finds little to be solely black or white.

Walker frames her essay by lamenting the lost generations of black women’s “strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talented,” under which they were “[driven]…insane.” (233) From there, one may draw a connection to Toni Morrison’s Sula, a novel which chronicled one such frustrated “artist” and left an ominous message: “Any artist without an art form…[becomes] dangerous” (Sula, 121) Instead of fearing them, Walker would prefer we mourn “the agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists and Short-Story Writers…who died with their real gifts stifled within them.” (234)

Before Walker, as Woolf sometimes did, falls into the trap of writing as if this was the fate of all potentially creative women, she reminds us: “for all the young women…have not perished in the wilderness.” (235) If women need to own a room and money, what does Woolf make, Walker asks, of “Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” (235) Wheatley was fortunate for a black woman of her time to be sold to a comparatively progressive Boston family, who taught her to read and write and allowed her to live as a West African Mozart and cultivate her immense literary talent. “Had she been white,” Walker believes, “[she] would have been easily considered the intellectual superior of all the women and most of the men in society of her day.” (235)

When Woolf writes of woman’s hindrance “by contrary instincts,” Walker immediately draws a connection to Wheatley, whose “loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her mind.” (235-236) Walker questions the assumed honorable intentions of the “wealthy doting whites who instilled in her the ‘savagery’ of the Africa they ‘rescued’ her from.” Wheatley may have blossomed under captivity, but Walker reminds the reader that, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, a caged bird may sing, but that does not make her any less trapped.

Walker views this singing as her undoing; she sees a woman “burdened not only with the need to express her gift but also with a penniless, friendless ‘freedom’ and several small children for whom she was forced to do strenuous work to feed, she lost her health, certainly.” (236) Her fate parallels the choice, according to Woolf, all women must make: “If Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been–that was the snag in the argument–no Mary.” (A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 1) The white Mrs. Seton lived a long, if creatively unfulfilled life in a manner not to dissimilar to Walker’s image of the black woman who also had “her body broken and forced to bear children…eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children…” (233)

Was, then, Phillis Wheatley’s creativity ultimately stifled as a result of being a black woman or simply being a woman?