Over the last few days the subject of personal "history" came up in a few of my conversations.
In this post I'll share with you the conversations I had, and maybe you can help me to answer these questions. I have some immediate responses, but I understand well that I have certain biases and am looking forward to your take on all this.
In the trailer below for the documentary Meeting David Wilson, David seeks to find the answer to the question, "what is wrong with Black people?"
Now as I watched this video a number of thoughts came to mind. To what extent should we feel responsible for the actions of our forefathers? How is it fair to expect that this White man should feel some immense guilt for slavery, beyond what we all feel, because his parents were fortunate enough hundreds of years ago to be a part of an unjust but acceptable system of exploitation? Reparations? For what? For the struggle of your fore-parents, of for your struggles, which are a legacy of the oppression that began centuries earlier? And who should pay? Surely not the descendant who has nothing to do with what we now consider the immoral actions of his ancestors.
To the extent that I don't see why this man should be responsible for the lives of his fore-parents, I'm having a hard time understanding this connection David Wilson feels with his ancestors who were slaves. I am the direct descendants from slaves, and indentured Indian workers, but I have always tried to understand Jamaican historical events within their context. It doesn't seem fair for me to despise coloured Jamaicans who may be direct descendants from the plantocracy, even though I can see very clearly how Jamaica's legacy of slavery has shaped the island in a myriad of ways. Then there is the going back to Africa bit. Huh? I would go out on a limb and say that David Wilson has more in common with a Caucasian American than he does with someone from the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, or wherever he went to reconnect with his "roots". We've convinced ourselves that our identities are wound up in our given race/ethnicity, ignoring the powerful influence that our cultures and societies have on our identities.
China Towns are not accurate representations of China. They are the imagined Chinas of immigrants and their descendants. Sure, Chinese people preserve many of their cultural practices in these communities, but their perspectives are coloured by their experiences as immigrants in a way that detaches them from life in their home countries. I am no longer just Jamaican, whatever that means, because my individual has been shaped extensively by cultures elsewhere. Do I start a search now for my "authentic" Jamaican identity? I guess I could, but what would it look like? Further, when there comes a time when I have lived outside of Jamaica longer than I have lived on the island, what claim do I have to a purely Jamaican identity?
In one of my classes we are reading Beloved, by Toni Morrison. It occurred to me then that because Toni Morrison is a Black woman her narrative about slavery society would be perceived as more authentic than anything a White American could write, but why? Besides the written accounts by people who lived in that time, which everyone has access to, why is Morrison's imagined portrayal of plantation life considered personal and authentic? And if a White person had written Beloved (Is that even possible, you question) how differently would we read the story?
In this post I'll share with you the conversations I had, and maybe you can help me to answer these questions. I have some immediate responses, but I understand well that I have certain biases and am looking forward to your take on all this.
In the trailer below for the documentary Meeting David Wilson, David seeks to find the answer to the question, "what is wrong with Black people?"
Now as I watched this video a number of thoughts came to mind. To what extent should we feel responsible for the actions of our forefathers? How is it fair to expect that this White man should feel some immense guilt for slavery, beyond what we all feel, because his parents were fortunate enough hundreds of years ago to be a part of an unjust but acceptable system of exploitation? Reparations? For what? For the struggle of your fore-parents, of for your struggles, which are a legacy of the oppression that began centuries earlier? And who should pay? Surely not the descendant who has nothing to do with what we now consider the immoral actions of his ancestors.
To the extent that I don't see why this man should be responsible for the lives of his fore-parents, I'm having a hard time understanding this connection David Wilson feels with his ancestors who were slaves. I am the direct descendants from slaves, and indentured Indian workers, but I have always tried to understand Jamaican historical events within their context. It doesn't seem fair for me to despise coloured Jamaicans who may be direct descendants from the plantocracy, even though I can see very clearly how Jamaica's legacy of slavery has shaped the island in a myriad of ways. Then there is the going back to Africa bit. Huh? I would go out on a limb and say that David Wilson has more in common with a Caucasian American than he does with someone from the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, or wherever he went to reconnect with his "roots". We've convinced ourselves that our identities are wound up in our given race/ethnicity, ignoring the powerful influence that our cultures and societies have on our identities.
China Towns are not accurate representations of China. They are the imagined Chinas of immigrants and their descendants. Sure, Chinese people preserve many of their cultural practices in these communities, but their perspectives are coloured by their experiences as immigrants in a way that detaches them from life in their home countries. I am no longer just Jamaican, whatever that means, because my individual has been shaped extensively by cultures elsewhere. Do I start a search now for my "authentic" Jamaican identity? I guess I could, but what would it look like? Further, when there comes a time when I have lived outside of Jamaica longer than I have lived on the island, what claim do I have to a purely Jamaican identity?
In one of my classes we are reading Beloved, by Toni Morrison. It occurred to me then that because Toni Morrison is a Black woman her narrative about slavery society would be perceived as more authentic than anything a White American could write, but why? Besides the written accounts by people who lived in that time, which everyone has access to, why is Morrison's imagined portrayal of plantation life considered personal and authentic? And if a White person had written Beloved (Is that even possible, you question) how differently would we read the story?
At lunch last week my friends and I were discussing the excesses of Mugabe's family. Bona Mugabe, the president's daughter, studies in Honk Kong and students in Zimbabwe once protested this, saying that she should be made to study in Zimbabwe, and be forced to contend with poor infrastructure, and life in general. I wondered then, how she must feel, knowing that she has the opportunity to study abroad and live well while the majority of her nation suffers, because of poor policy decisions pursued by her father. One of my lunch dates spoke up, saying that it would be unfair to expect this girl to bear the burden of all the ills committed by her father.
She was born into a life she did not choose, and surely it is not easy for Bona to reject her parents, and deny them the opportunity to give her the good life they can afford to give. The criticism then got a little more personal as my friend said that if her parents were not elites in the West African country they fled, they could have died. Must she feel guilty that her family had the option to run away when things turned ugly though most of the people in her country couldn't?
We all lead lives bound up in history. How loosely can we define our personal histories? Can we claim the history of our parents as our own? Can our histories be in the past? To what extent are we responsible for the actions of those we have directly descended from? For how many generations? If Bona shouldn't be held responsible for Mugabe's dictatorship (maybe you disagree), why should the White descendant of slave owners be expected to feel shame and guilt, and even pay reparations to the descendants of slaves? Why should African-American history be more personal to Toni Morrison whose ancestors have a very subjective perspective of slavery? Is the White man's perspective not valid, or should it not be because we now judge it to be immoral? Why do first generation immigrants insist on their children learning the parent's native tongue in a foreign country? We wouldn't want the children to "lose" their culture, but don't they gain culture by virtue of being in a new country with new practices?
She was born into a life she did not choose, and surely it is not easy for Bona to reject her parents, and deny them the opportunity to give her the good life they can afford to give. The criticism then got a little more personal as my friend said that if her parents were not elites in the West African country they fled, they could have died. Must she feel guilty that her family had the option to run away when things turned ugly though most of the people in her country couldn't?
We all lead lives bound up in history. How loosely can we define our personal histories? Can we claim the history of our parents as our own? Can our histories be in the past? To what extent are we responsible for the actions of those we have directly descended from? For how many generations? If Bona shouldn't be held responsible for Mugabe's dictatorship (maybe you disagree), why should the White descendant of slave owners be expected to feel shame and guilt, and even pay reparations to the descendants of slaves? Why should African-American history be more personal to Toni Morrison whose ancestors have a very subjective perspective of slavery? Is the White man's perspective not valid, or should it not be because we now judge it to be immoral? Why do first generation immigrants insist on their children learning the parent's native tongue in a foreign country? We wouldn't want the children to "lose" their culture, but don't they gain culture by virtue of being in a new country with new practices?
You know how I know that this post is excellent? Because as I respond, I'm not sure where to begin. I feel compelled to tell my own story of returning to Greece, to my grandfather's village, and how moving it was to stand in his boyhood home and look at his view of the sea, and wonder if that view was what lured first his father and then him away, to America. I don't think that my journey to Greece changed how I understood myself. But certainly it helped me to understand my grandfather. I arrived in the town on a moped in the middle of the day with a card in my hand that said, in Greek, who my grandfather was. The first person I handed it to could not read. The second person was the only woman in the square -- and she was waiting on the men having coffee at the tavern. Both of these details stunned me. Alienated me. But when everyone found out who I was, the entire town formed a crowd around me, and chattered at me, and then paraded me to my grandfather's home -- which stood unoccupied, even though he'd left almost sixty years before. They handed me things to take with me -- a couple of hand-blown goblets; the wedding picture of him and my grandmother that he'd sent back so that everyone could see how prosperous he was: a brand new wedding suit; a pretty Greek wife. I felt what it must have meant to him, this place that he left and then went back to, in the Balkan Wars, to defend. And I also came to understand the way in which Greek and America came together to forge something new in him. And that I was the inheritor of all of that, and more.
ReplyDeleteWhat "all that" is, I'm not sure I can say. Maybe it's the novelist in me that thinks this experience is important -- maybe I've imagined or constructed, like my own private Chinatown, an inheritance of place and culture that has very little to do with the place that it came from. Or maybe there is something, really, of value there. Something that I need to understand, and wrestle with, so that I can be, fully, me. I think it's an open question.
You ask if Toni Morrison has more right than others to tell the tale of Beloved. The story of slavery isn't one-sided, and I begin to wonder why the descendants of those who have owned the slaves have not written their own Beloved, have not vanquished their own ghosts. But looking at the problem another way, I'm not sure Beloved is about slavery, but about the haunting of slavery, which Morrison asks the black community to chant back into the ground. In that sense, this is her story to tell, and it's a present-day story. The past is not easily rid of.
Still: I'm thinking hard about your argument, and I think it has merit. We may be making a myth of our pasts and giving them more power and credit than they deserve. Maybe we should pay more attention to who we are now, and who we are going to be. Although even these are identities are likely constructed, imagined.
Thanks for a great post. I'll be thinking about this for awhile.
I agree with Karen; this is a great post, and has no shortage of intriguing entry-points. I'll start with Wilson's movie--and I think it's problematic right off the bat to start with the premise that there is something "wrong" with black people. While there are indeed myriad issues within a number of African American communities, such a blanket statement of "wrongness" almost requires some sort of equally strong statement of blame. In this context, the idea of reparations makes sense--but at the same time, it denies the complexities of what actually might be "wrong" with particular African American communities at the microscopic level.
ReplyDeleteThe more interesting part of the trailer to me is the personal aspect--I'd be interested to see the extent to which Wilson actually does connect with his "roots" across the Atlantic, if at all. However, I hesitate to criticize the endeavor, as you seem to. True, he may not really be able to identify with the Ibo culture, but maybe that's the point. It seems to me that there is such a strong disorientation inherent in the transatlantic nature of African diaspora. Maybe by experiencing a culture far different than his own, he is experiencing this disorientation firsthand--which perhaps gives more insight into his identity than the Ibo traditions themselves.
I think the question of manufactured identities is really interesting. I wrote my culminating experience paper for my history major on Americo-Liberian settler discourse. Americo-Liberians were the freed slaves sent back to Africa by white slave owners in the early 19th century by the American Colonization Society. You can spend a lot of time combing through the muddled ideologies that spawned the effort in the first place, but I was far more interested in the results. Instead of identifying with the indigenous populations, as white americans expected, the Americo-Liberians constructed their own identity, adopting the same discursive norms of superiority used by the white purveyors of the colonization effort. Furthermore, they erected a set of institutions to protect this identity--the result was an ossified ruling class that subjugated a vast population of indigenous Africans, and yet skin color had little to do with it. This episode is a testament to the real consequences of an imagined identity--and inherent in constructed identities are larger issues of language and power that provide a great conceptual framework for rereading your post.