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RACISM AND OPPRESSEION IN RICHARD WRIGHT NATIVE SON AND ALICE WALKER THE COLOUR PURPLE
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
This thesis attempts to find out the trial of the black women in search of self and identity, racism, gender in the Color Purple and other two novels by Alice Walker who introduced her own theory called “womanism.” Walker tries to indicate that Black women should enjoy the benefits, the rights that all of the white women and men have. She believes that Afro-American women should not be considered as slaves anymore. She reflects her concern in her works with racial, sexual, and political issues, particularly with the black woman’s struggle for spiritual and political survival. Black women in America live a discriminated life and their humanity and black female self are denied not only by white men but also by their own people, particularly by black men. Alice Walker in her works highlights the problems of black women in their day to day life and leads them to self discovery, overcome their disillusionment and recognize their own worth. Walker felt committed to the fact that she had to create awareness among the media and higher authorities to seek some relief for her people’s problems. Her novels deal with the human experience in general specially the human experience from the perspective of the suffering and the downtrodden, the oppressed. Mary Helen Washington in “An Essay on Alice Walker, “In Sturdy Black Bridge: Vision of Black Women in Literature writes that, ‘from whatever vantage point one investigates the work of Alice Walker – poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, essayist, and apologist for black women – it is clear that the special identifying mark of her writing is her concern for the lives of black women’ (Washington 133).
African-American literature is produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of late 18th-century writers such as Philip Wheatley Olaudah Equiano. Pillis Wheatly was a new poet of England who contributed the literary
practices to the people. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. African-American literature reached early high points with slave narratives of the nineteenth century and Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of flowering of literature and the arts in 1920s. African-American literature writers have got the recognition and received some of the prestigious awards, including the Nobel prize to Toni Morrison. The role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality are some of the themes and issues dealt in the African American literature. Apart from the other themes African American writing dealt with the themes of spirituality, liberation, and gospel: ‘African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap’ (Ward 146). The place of African Americans in American society has changed over the centuries, so has the focus of African-American literature. Before the American Civil War, the literature primarily consisted of memories of people who have escaped from slavery. A slave narrative is the genre that includes accounts of life under slavery and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. The early distinction existed between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks who had been born in the North of America. Free blacks wanted to express their feelings in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often spoke out against slavery and racial injustices using the spiritual narratives: ‘The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation’ (Peterson 4).
1.2 Statement of the problem
At the turn of the 20th century, authors of non-fiction works such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, some of the authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendoly Brooks wrote about the issues of racial
discrimination and Black Nationalism. Today, African-American literature has become accepted as a whole part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; and Beloved by Toni Morrison attaining both best-selling and award-winning status.
In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent who live in the United States. It is highly varied and replicates the voices of the people who have mostly faced racial discrimination. The general focus of African-American literature is with the role of African Americans within the larger American society, and what it means to be an American. As Princeton University Professor Albert J. Raboteaue has said, all African-American study ‘speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation’s claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all’ (Coon 32). The issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the United States are explored in the African-American literature, along with further themes such as culture, religion, racism, slavery, segregation, migration, feminism, a sense of home. African-American literature presents the African-American experience from the view of African-American. In the early Republic, African-American literature represented a way for the negotiation of free blacks and about their new identity in an individualized republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy as a defense mechanism against white public. An early theme of African-American literature was to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary America, like other American writings.
Today African American Literature occupies a significant place in United States with eminent writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Walter Mosley. The genre of African American is accepted as an integral part of American
literature. African American literature has generally focused on themes of particular interest to Black people in the United States of America. The issues of freedom and equality which are denied to Black people are reflected in the writings. African- American women’ lives have been critically affected by racism, sexism and classism, which are system of societal and psychological restriction. The American society compartmentalize its various ethnic groups by the racist, sexist and classist structure, and defame the colored as inferior and characterizes males as center and females as margin respectively. The groups of blacks are relegated to an underclass by virtue of their race and similarly black women are relegated to a separate caste by virtue of their sex. The greatest source of oppression of blacks in America is not only the racist and sexist assumption but also the class exploitations which form the basis for victimization of black women. Sexism paralyzed the minds of African-American women and even worse defiled their sexual being and scarred them psychologically. Thus, the Black and especially the Black female suffer from the twin evils of racial discrimination and gender bias. Black women suffer not only because they are Black and female but also because they are economically poor. In American society, the ideal concept of woman is not just racist and sexist but essentially classiest. The black poor women who could hardly approximate the norm are discriminated and dehumanized which eventually make them lose their self-esteem and develop self-hatred. They struggle on their own but it becomes a part of the black struggle. Brenda Elchelberger writes:
By and large, black women will define their struggle as part of black struggle and not as part of women’s struggle because they know that if sex barriers were removed there would still be race barriers…Black women can visualize superficial sex barriers on the larger society going away before race barriers. When we are viewed by the larger culture, we
are not looked on in terms of our class sex first, but in terms of our black skin. (Elchelberger 16-28)
Another characteristic of African American literature is having strong tradition of incorporating oral poetry into itself. In oral poetry, African American culture has many examples which are included in spirituals, African American gospel music, Blues and Rap. This oral poetry also shows up in the African American tradition of Christian sermons. These examples of oral poetry have made their way into African-American literature. However, while these characteristics exist on many levels of African American literature, they do not give the exclusive definition of the genre. As with any type of literature, there are disagreements as to the genre’s definitions and inclusion of authors and their works. For example, some people include in African American literature writings which lack African American characters and situations and are not particularly targeted at Black audiences. An example could be Samuel R. Delany’s outspokenly gay science fiction, whose writings are not about African American issues, but who is considered as a leading voice in African American literature. Some of the criticism of African American literature over the years has come, surprisingly enough from within the African American community. The major drawback is that the Black people are not portrayed or rather projected in a positive light.
African American writing has deep roots in historical circumstances of slavery. In fact, whether one is born in slavery or not, most major writers of African American Literature before World War I started their literary works via some form of the slave narrative. African American Literature can be described as a multi-faced nature of oppression, protest against the sub-human condition of black people and the idea of the Old Negro as servile docile. Much of literature of the period of enslavement was an emphasis of the humanity of the blacks. In contrast to the cruelty and ignorance of pre-
Civil War South, these narratives attempted at restoring the individual dignity of the blacks. Only African descent experienced slavery over a long period of time. Even if slavery degraded the enslaver, as Thomas Jefferson and Fanny Kemble persisted, only the slave knew the depths of that degradation. Thus, only they could sing what DuBois has called ‘The Sorrow Songs’. It was due to the special and bitter experience which was later known as sorrow songs – ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Steal Away to Jesus’. Only the slaves knew and felt the double meanings of these songs. Slaves and ante- bellum free Negroes were in the vanguard in attacking institutions and practices which enslaved and degraded them. Slavery is indicated as the subgenre of slave narrative. Slave narrative is a genre of African-American literature that developed in the middle of the 19th century by the fugitive slaves about their lives in the South which were often written after escaping to freedom. They deal with the cruelties of life under slavery, as well as the persistent inhumanity towards the slaves. It was useful to the uncertain Black people to define their identities based on the life stories of former slaves. The slave
narrative of 20th century helps the Black Americans deal with their lives with the words
of their ancestors. Most Black people during slave-era couldn’t read or write and they didn’t had the freedom to think. The descriptions of the Black women were negative in the early literature: ‘Black people often presented them as fat and doting mammies or as seductive temptresses and jezebels, seducing and conquering with sex.’ (Smith 55)
During this period, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue, with novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery. Southern white writers produced the “Anti-Tom” novels in response, purporting to describe the life under slavery, as well as the severe cruelties suffered by free labor in the North. The slave narratives were integral to African-American literature with the writings of more than
6,000 former slaves from North America and the Caribbeans who wrote their lives and eventually 150 of these got published in separate books or pamphlets. Slave narratives can be broadly categorized into three distinguished forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The most popular forms are the tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif. Many of them are recognized as worth 19th-century writings by African Americans now, with two of the best-known writings Frederick Gouglass’s Autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861).
1.3 The condition of African American people
After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African- American authors wrote nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans people and their lives in the United States. Among the most prominent writers was W. E.
B. Du Bois (1868–1963), who had a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, and was one of the original founders of the NAACP in 1910. At the turn of the century, Du Bois who has published a highly influential collection of essays entitled The Souls of Black Folk (1903) coined the term “double consciousness” to explain what it is to be an African on American soil. This feeling of being different with “double-consciousness” was evident in the lives of the black people, and also in black art and black aesthetics. Commenting on American Black history Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk says:
The history of the American Black is the history of this strife-this longing to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost…He would not bleach his black soul in a flood of White Americanism, for he knows that Black blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Black and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois 16- 17)
The essays on race were groundbreaking and drew from Du Bois’s personal experiences for describing the life of African Americans in rural Georgia and in the larger American society. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois writes: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line’ (Du Bois 10). Du Bois believed that African Americans should work together to fight against prejudice and inequity. He was a professor at Atlanta University and later worked at Howard University
Another prominent author of this period is Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) who in many ways represented opposite views of Du Bois. He was an educator and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Alabama. Among his published works are Up From Slavery (1901), The Future of the American Negro (1899), Tuskegee and Its People (1905), and My Larger Education (1911). In contrast to Du Bois, who adopted a more confrontational attitude toward ending racial strife in America, Washington believed that Blacks should lift themselves up and prove themselves as equals with whites before asking for an end to racism. While this viewpoint was popular among some Blacks (and many whites) at the time, the political views of Washington later fell out of fashion.
Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was a former slave who managed to establish a successful career as a dressmaker and catered to the Washington political elite after obtaining her freedom. However, soon after publishing Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years as a Slave and Four Years in the White House, she lost her job. Although she acknowledged the cruelties of her enslavement and her resentment towards it, Keckley chose to focus her narrative on the incidents that have moulded her character. Behind the Scenes details Keckley’s life in slavery, her work for Mary Todd Lincoln and her efforts
for liberation. Keckley was also deeply committed to programs of racial improvement and protection and helped in finding the Home for Destitute Women and Children in Washington, D.C. In addition to this, Keckley taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
Josephine Brown is the youngest child of abolitionist and author William Wells Brown, who wrote a biography of her father, Biography of an American Bondman, By His Daughter. Brown wrote the first ten chapters of the narrative while she was studying in France, as a means of satisfying her classmate’s curiosity about her father. After returning to America, she discovered that the narrative of her father’s life, written by her, and published a few years before, was out of print. She produced the rest of the chapters that constitute Biography of an American Bondman. Brown was a qualified teacher and she was also extremely active as an advocate against slavery. Although not a US citizen, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), was a newspaper publisher, journalist, and activist for Pan Africanism who became famous in the United States. He founded the Universal Negro Association and African Communities League (UNIA). He encouraged Black Nationalism and helped the African community to look positively upon their ancestral homeland. He wrote a number of essays published as editorials in the UNIA house organ, the Negro World newspaper. Some of his lecture materials and other writings were compiled and published as nonfiction books by his second wife Amy Jacques Garvey. The writings were Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Africa for the Africans (1924) and More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1977).
1.4 History of prominence of African poets
Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was the first African-American poet to gain national prominence often wrote in the rural, black dialect of the day. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. Much of Dunbar’s works such as When Malindy Sings (1906) includes photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Joggin’ Erlong (1906) presents revealing glimpses about the lives of rural African
Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, and a short story writer, essayist, novelist. Some of the other popular writings were The Uncalled (1898) and The Fanatics (1901).
Other African-American writers also rose to prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among these writers is Charles W. Chesnutt who is a well-known short story writer and essayist. Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) wrote four novels, several volumes of poetry, and numerous stories, poems, essays and letters. In 1853, the publication of Harper’s Eliza Harris which was one of many responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought her national attention. Harper was hired by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and in the first six weeks she managed to travel to twenty cities, giving at least thirty-one lectures. Her book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, a collection of poems and essays published in 1854 were sold in big numbers within three years. Harper was often characterized as “a noble Christian woman” and “one of the most scholarly and well-read women of her day”, but she was a strong advocate of anti- slavery.
The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American literature and art from 1920 to 1940. It was part of a larger flowering of social thought and culture based in the African-American community of Harlem in New York City. Harlem Renaissance in 1920s was a period of creativity among Black artists, writers, musicians, and entertainers and it was a movement toward recreating a unique African American identity. It was a time when Harlem in New York City became the capital of Black America. But as the Great Depression of the late 1920s deepened and extended into the next decade, the Harlem Renaissance became slow because of the little financial support to the artists.
Numerous Black artists and musicians produced classic works in various fields from Jazz to theatre; perhaps the best known for the literature that came out of it, is the
renaissance. The poet Langston Hughes is among the most renowned writers of the renaissance. Hughes first received attention in the 1922 publication The Book of American Negro Poetry. Edited by James Weldon Johnson, this anthology featured the work of the period’s most talented poets including Claude McKay who published three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom and a collection of short stories). In 1926, Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930 a novel, Not Without Laughter. Perhaps his most famous poem which he wrote as a young teen is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. His single character is Jesse B. Simple, a plainspoken, pragmatic Harlemite whose comedic observations appeared in Hughes’s columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Perhaps the best-known collection of Simple stories is Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) which published in book form. Until his death in 1967, Hughes published nine volumes of poetry, eight books of short stories, two novels and a number of plays, children books, and translations. Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful women in the world, has played a significant role in presenting the African American Literature to a vast audience through her Book Club which includes the authors such as Edwidge Danicat, Alan Paton, and Lalita Tademy. Alexis De Veaux says:
I see a greater and greater commitment among black women writers to understand self, multiplied in terms of the community, the community multiplied in terms of the world. You have to understand what your place as an individual is and the place of the person who is close to you. You have to understand the space between you before you can understand more complex or larger groups. (Veaux 76)
The development of African American fiction is mirror of the relationship between sexism and racism in America. The struggle in the tradition of these writers from the
nineteenth century to the present depends on their attempts to use the range of one’s voice and to express the totality of the self.
The novelist Zora Neale Hurston is another notable writer of the renaissance. He is the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Dianne Sadoff views Their Eyes Were Watching God as a heterosexual love that is undercut by Hurston’s own ambivalence over the compatibility of marriage and the creative “voice” that produces fiction. Sadoff makes the case most sympathetically, in as much as she discerns ‘marks, fissures, and traces of inferiorization’ (Sadoff 4), that amount to ‘scars of disguise or concealment because [Hurston] is black and female-doubly alienated from a white and patriarchal mainstream literature’ (18). Although Hurston wrote 14 books that ranged from anthropology to short stories to novel-length fiction, her writing is about the obscurity for decades. Her work was rediscovered in the 1970s through a 1975 article by Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (1975) which has been reprinted several times, and which has also appeared in the book In Search of Our Mother’s Garden (1983), a volume of Womanist prose which defines the Womanist as, ‘Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender’ (1972). Zora Neale Hurston in How It Feels to Be Colored Me says: ‘I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all…I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife’ (Hurston 23).
While Hurston and Hughes are the two most influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance, a number of other writers also became well known during this period. Some of the writers who made an impact were Jean Toomer, author of Cane, a famous collection of stories, poems, and sketches about rural and urban Black life, and Dorothy West, whose novel The Living is Easy examined the life of an upper-class Black family. Countee Cullen was another popular renaissance writer whose poems described everyday
black life (such as a trip he made to Baltimore that was ruined by a racial insult). Frank Marshall Davis’s poetry collections Black Man’s Verse (1935) and I am the American Negro (1937), published by Black Cat Press had a critical acclaim. Author Wallace Thurman made an impact with his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), in which he focused on interracial prejudice between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance marked a turning point for African-American literature. Prior to this period, books by African Americans were primarily read by other Black people. With the renaissance, African-American literature as well as black fine art and performance art started to be absorbed into mainstream American culture.
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