Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
even laws. He summarizes: “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”[7] Like Baldwin, Fanon forecasts that the always-already, limiting identities prepared for Black men may be the destruction of the respective societies where they lived. He predicts, “It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history.”[8] While Baldwin forewarns with a biblical reference to the Noah’s Ark story, Fanon reminds the reader that historically, oppressed people have violently rebelled against domination when civil solutions seemed dubious. After all, in the Gramscian sense, hegemony may be normative, but it is not totalizing: there is always some voice of dissent that irrupts to disrupt the status quo—sometimes violently. Historically, people rebel against a dominant, seemingly normal, narrative that misdefines, silences, and caricatures them. Men of African descent are no exception in that regard.
Ontologically speaking, within some Enlightenment/scientific racism writings, one form of existence became supreme, articulating an uneven binary that continues to shape and define gender relations in Western society. European standards of masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, became “the dominant fiction,” as Kaja Silverman argues.[9] Through colonialization and then enslavement, Europeans imposed their standards of masculinity as heteronormative and anxiously viewed all other masculinities as somehow deviant and in need of correction. It is this gendered view of race that justified slavery. It is the “authoritative” rhetoric of the writings of scientific racism that gave the fiction verity. It is this dominant fiction of European, heteronormative masculinity that allowed the same Enlightenment philosophers who wrote of freedom and individual liberty to hold stock in slave trading companies. As modes of production andtechnology changed, as power dynamics shifted, maintaining hegemonic masculinity, particularly since it was never concretely defined in the first place, produced near tangible anxiety in Euro-American males.
Once slavery ended, the United States experienced a rash of extralegal lynchings of Black men—sometimes accompanied by castrations—while crowds of white spectators watched approvingly. The lynchings, as proven by journalist and activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett in her landmark text, A Red Record (1895) simply could not be explained away by the fabrication of the Black male rapist beast that populated white American popular literature and later, film. As Wells-Barnett contends in her writing, slavery and the Civil War presented myriad opportunities for Black males to rape white women, yet there was not a rape epidemic in the South. There was something more sinister that served as an explanation for the racially motivated, extremely gender-specific violence (this is not to say that Black women were not lynched. They were. The overwhelming majority of victims, however, were male). Euro-American men once had a whole body of Other (ed) male bodies by which to negatively define themselves against, but with the dismantling of slavery and later, colonialism, that order of things, that negative identity was threatened with erasure.
The notion of a heteronormative masculinity that is negatively defined, one based upon what it is not rather than explicitly stating what it is or could be, has always been incongruent with reality. Real conditions produced and continue to produce a multiplicity of masculine identities. This explains why masculinity scholar Raewyn Connell uses the plural term, “masculinities,” in the landmark 1995 text, Masculinities. While some critics have lambasted Connell’s 1995 original articulation of multiple masculinities, it is still a very relevant theoretical paradigm in that it allows for an accounting of the subtle nuances of masculinity. Because of the multiple definitions created in oppressive conditions, there is never one totalizing definition of masculinity even among subordinate men. Like hegemonic masculinity, Black masculinity varies based upon geographical location, culture, and history; this is why I explore Black masculinity in a comparative framework here.
Like any study done in a comparative framework, a study of Black masculinity should not mean “monolithic” masculinity. Being a Black man in Nigeria or Senegal is inherently different from being a Black man in the Caribbean or the United States. The conditions against which each population of men asserted their “manhood” also varies from region to region. Black men in Africa experienced oppression in one way while Black men in the New World experienced it in others. Carol Boyce Davies writes, “[i]n Africa, colonialism, with its emphasis on assimilation and expropriation, asserted Euro-American culture to the African peoples it sought to conquer.”[10] Leaders in Europe viewed Africa as a vast reserve of raw material for trade. During the Cold War, both the United States and the former Soviet Union engaged in a competition for arms and markets and targeted Africa for its seemingly limitless market potential. The United States interfered in the politics of various African nations in much the same way as it did in the Caribbean and Latin America. Again, the wishes of the people in those African nations were paternalistically disregarded by Western powers. It is against this backdrop of paternalism and colonialism, steeped in the “racisme” which Baldwin frequently references in his writings, that African men asserted their own masculine identities.
Chinua Achebe explains African writers’ occasion for speaking in his critical essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Achebe insists that Conrad portrays Africa as a land of silence and frenzy. In doing so, the text “projects the image of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.”[11] Alongside European ideals about what constitutes masculinity and ultimately, civility, African men are portrayed as utterly depraved, bestial, sexually licentious, and unable to defend themselves against outside forces; therefore, in spite of their fabled sexual potency, African men are portrayed in colonial, pro-slavery, and Enlightenment writings as effeminate and weak, deserving of colonization and European masculinizing/civilizing influence.
Nonetheless, African men retained their own ideas about masculinity through their own cultures. As stated by Johnetta Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall in Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (2003), gender relations in West Africa were more complicated than what Europeans initially reported, and debates still rage about the extent of patriarchal dominance in those societies. Constructions of masculinity often survived more fully in literature, both oral and written, rather than reports from European travelers and anthropologists. In Africa, the oral epic significantly informs the construction of masculinity in society. The oral epics most certainly inform the literature. Some earlier texts, such as Forest of Thousand Daemons (1938) by D. O. Fagunwa and The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) (included in this text) by Amos Tutuola, mirror the oral epics that inform them. For the African texts included in this book, I use West African constructions of masculinity as informed by the orality of those cultures, since many slaves in the New World originated from the coast of West Africa. Many historians and literary critics believe that these traits did survive the Middle Passage and can be easily accessed in a text like the slave narrative of Venture Smith, an American slave who wrote his story via amanuensis during the late 1700s.
Historians and critics of the oral epics such as Thomas Hale acknowledge that “African oral epics appear as ‘masculine’ texts not only because their heroes are men, but also because these narratives have been told almost exclusively by men known regionally as griots.”[12] From the Epic of Sundiata to the Epic of Askia Mohammed, griots weave stories of heroic deeds performed by men through acts of bravery during battle or other feats of superhuman strength. Other characteristics include an impeccable sense of justice, honor, and honesty, and the ability to rule over others benevolently without tyrannical impulses. A proper African hero, according to the griots, is implacable in demeanor, but not cruel to those he may rule. Poet and critic Tanure Ojaide defines this oral construction of masculinity as “a conglomerate of virtues and characteristics built around the traditional expectations of being a man and the glorification of virile values.”[13] Like the oral texts, masculinity is an integral part of written texts produced by African authors. Literary critic Simon Gikandi writes that masculinity “lies at the center of the key texts of African literature, defining the natures of cultures, traditions, and experiences and signaling the complexity of contexts and texts.”[14]