Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
a complex system of reciprocity between male and female in the works of many African writers; it is not the sole normalizing force.
This tendency toward questioning accepted standards of masculinity engaged Black male writers long before the twentieth century. In the New World, men of African descent experienced attempted cultural annihilation through enslavement. Yet, many African traits survived the Middle Passage and manifested themselves in the cultures of New World Africans. For example, the African root is prevalent in Caribbean nation language, African American cuisine, and the syncopated drum rhythms found throughout the Black Atlantic. Many slaves originate from warrior cultures, such as the Asante nation, and arrived with those ideals of gender roles and division of labor. Some of the very first slave narratives, like that of Venture Smith, portray a nuanced type of masculinity that is remarkably similar to those found in the West African oral epics. Oloudah Equiano, who experienced the Middle Passage, subsequent enslavement in the United States, extensive travel in the Caribbean, and a form of indentured servitude in Britain, crafted a masculine identity similar to Smith’s. Both Smith and Equiano shared the same masculine traits as their oral African predecessors: bravery in the face of adversity, fearlessness during battle, and honesty and frankness in business transactions. Smith and Equiano even implied that their African masculine identities were superior to that of their European counterparts. As aspiring entrepreneurs, they incorporated several instances in which Euro-American men were dishonest in business, and implied that dishonesty was a moral and masculine failure.
Historians agree that building a system of global-style capitalism by conquering and subduing foreign lands and peoples, and ultimately designing an international system of slavery using a brand of brutality the likes of which the world had never known prior, was largely a European, male undertaking. Regardless of the privilege and status African males may have enjoyed in their home lands, once captured and sold into slavery, their identities as masculine beings became subordinate to the Euro-American sense of masculinity. Sociologist Aldon Morris writes that “an important goal of slavery was to prevent the emergence of a sense of Black manhood. The slaveholders realized that the solidification of a robust Black masculinity could prove detrimental to the institution of slavery.”[15] In order to prevent this, many slaveholding societies passed laws that severely restricted the rights and physical movement of Black men. For instance, some states within the United States forbade Black men from owning guns or hunting or fishing to supplement their families’ diets with wild game.
The Caribbean saw the worst of the global plantation system and colonialism with the almost total annihilation of the Arawak and Carib people, obliteration of an entire linguistic system, and the introduction of forced slave labor that supported a global mercantile capitalist system based upon the production of sugar and other raw goods such as leather that enriched landowners who may or may not have lived in the islands. For example, writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father became exceedingly wealthy from slave labor in Jamaica, but remained in England. One of the family’s fears was that they may be forced to the island during an economic downturn. Against the mostly Black male bodies in the Caribbean, European men developed a very complex system of patriarchy, and “this European male domination of the social relations within Caribbean society laid the foundation for the institutionalization of gender inequality in the region.”[16] In addition to gender inequality, the slave labor system set up racial disparities, with Black bodies doing the manual labor of sowing seeds of global capitalism and European men reaping the benefits. This system of domination neither began nor ended with Anglophone plantation system. It was also characteristic of French, Spanish, and Dutch islands. Therefore, any study of Caribbean culture, regardless of the colonizing metropole, should begin with the plantation, according to Benitez-Rojo. I agree with Benitez-Rojo when he writes, “This is so because the Caribbean, in substantial measure, was shaped by Europe for the plantation, and the generalized historical convergences shown by the different territories in the region are always related to that purpose.”[17]
Continued discrimination after slavery prompted in Black Caribbean men an “occasion for speaking,” according to Caribbean theorist and writer George Lamming. Throughout the Caribbean, Black men began to adopt and appropriate Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Black Caribbean male writers identify closely with Caliban, the slave in the play who performs most of the manual labor but who is objectified by Prospero, the invading European who takes the land and enslaves Caliban. In Telling Our Stories, literary critic Adetayo Alabi declares, “those most violently objectified by slavery insist, like Caliban, on their rightful status as speaking subjects.”[18] As Alabi points out, in Caribbean appropriations of Caliban, his voice is not construed to support Prospero’s notion of imperialism. The figure of Caliban, since he represents those who are enslaved, also transcends island differences. After all, Black people, regardless of linguistic and cultural differences from island to island, are present in the region solely due to enslavement. Therefore, as Lamming and Alabi theorize, this makes Caliban suitable to speak for all subordinate Black men.
Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the early cleft of white American men from Europe allowed Euro-American males to define themselves independently of European ideals of masculinity. Instead, white masculinity was based upon success in the capitalist system rather than genealogy and feudalism. In fact, one key tenet of North American masculinity is feigned independence. These factors combined to form the “Self-Made Man” or the “Masculine Achiever” model. Though America has always been a multicultural country of immigrants, the Self-Made Man or Masculine Achiever Model is one built upon the exclusion of other non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant masculinities, and “in this way, white men sought to limit the extent to which they were forced to deal with competition from the diverse masculinities that were actually the norm in America.”[19] From its formative stages, white American masculinity was plagued with the insecurities produced by the unstable nature of nascent capitalism, but an entire body of people was available to white men of the United States with which to contrast and allay their economic insecurities. Slave men, not women, were the antithesis to white masculinity. Black slave men were seen as a form of severely subjugated masculinity: weak and effeminate, trapped in a perpetual state of childishness and adolescence, and not intellectually equipped to be a masculine achiever in a free, democratic, capitalist society. Craig Wilkins, in the essay “Brothers/Others Gonna Paint the White House Black,” lists how white American males elevated their own image by crafting unflattering ones of Black males. Wilkins claims that white American males contrasted their own images with “the naturalized image of the brutal, base, highly sexualized, aggressive, animalistic, angry male is constantly broadcast through airwaves . . . to an all-too-receptive public.”[20] Such stereotypical images created the object while they named it. Black men became rapist beasts in need of civilizing and/or violent eradication.
One of the most ontologically violent (and in the case of African American men, one of the most illegal) acts against the attempted normalization of oppression was the simple act of writing by a slave, then attaching the subtitle: “Written by him/herself.” Phyllis Wheatly, the mother of the Black belletristic tradition in the United States, performed an act of discursive violence by writing verse that showed astute awareness of herself as an enslaved African and in-depth political acumen in the United States and Great Britain. This writing of the slave, and subsequently, the colonized, took place all over the African Diaspora with a veritable explosion of creative production in the middle of the twentieth century as African countries and Caribbean island nations agitated and fought for their independence, and African Americans were embroiled in an international Civil Rights Movement. It is during this time period, which began slowly on the eve of World War II, that I begin this study.[21]
On the surface, it seems the fact of blackness may be the only commonality of these disparaging cultures. These Black male writers traverse geographies, languages, and religions in order to create a dialectic concerning masculine identity. With their fiction, drama, and poetry they create and recreate identities for themselves. This project follows fiction and drama and the identities Black men create within those frameworks. They write then rewrite masculine identities through signification and critique. They warn of stereotypical, reactionary images in the literature, and some even create alternative visions of masculinity. Further, this book devotes a chapter to fiction and drama by Black women writers