Author Archives: Aleksandra Kus

Black and Silver: Pauline’s Self-Imposed and Cultural Trauma

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   The disruptions and shortcomings in Pauline’s upbringing, and indeed her whole life, reverberate outward through her coping mechanisms and the consequences they bring. Pauline herself considers “a rusty nail [that] punched clear through her foot during her second year of life” as the inciting incident to all of her miseries; the neglect that she endured as a result surely led to a repetition of the pleasure-denying pattern of her life (Morrison 110). The isolation she suffered throughout her childhood engendered an essential longing in her for human contact, which is most evident when she takes Ivy’s religious song for something much more secular. The conflation of a mysterious man, representing all of humanity, with the obvious analogue of Jesus partially explains her nearly immediate total love for Cholly, a savior in two senses; it is that sudden identification of him as not being that ideal “precious Lord” that worsens the effect when their relationship starts to sour (118).
   The souring of Pauline and Cholly’s relationship is what really establishes the pattern of heartbreak in Pauline’s life, as it also again comes as a result of outer societal pressures bearing down on her. Although she “merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way,” rather than the trappings of luxury themselves, this desire edges out her desire to sustain her and Cholly’s relationship (118). This tension is somewhat eased, however, when Pauline chooses to stay with Cholly when her white employer conditions her job on leaving him. The white woman acts as a symbol of denial, with her claim that Pauline “owed her for uniforms” invoking both the forbidding world of fashion, and its related costs, as well as the omnipresent racism that comes through on a fiscal and social level (120). However, the resurgence of compromised happiness is around the corner again, as the nostalgic green memories of june bugs are confronted by “the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs” (121-122).
   Morrison characterizes “physical beauty” as “[p]robably [one of] the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought,” which tracks from how it initiates the most pronounced repetition of the joy-loss cycle of Pauline’s life (122). Her idea of beauty being “one she absorbed in full from the silver screen” of course meant a Eurocentric ideal of beauty, fully unchallenged by any alternate stream of culture (122). Her view of the day on which she lost her tooth as something she “don’t believe [she] ever did get over” is later sealed into place by the doctor’s statement to his peers that Black women giving birth feel “no pain… like horses” (123, 125). In her attempt to create a new life, for her an attempt to create beauty from a body where she sees none, she is reminded of the inherent cultural bias that puts a low ceiling on how beautiful she can be seen. The joy that her children could bring is curtailed by their blackness, so much so that the first impression we hear from her about Pecola is that she resembles “a black ball of hair” (124). Pauline’s existing dissatisfaction with her life is consistently magnified by learning about new expectations she did not know she was failing to meet, dooming the next generation raised by her to feel the ramifications of her emotional trauma.

Hurston and Engineering the Invisibility of Race

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In Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston explores the ironic distance created between herself and the world by racism. Her claim that “the game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting” summarizes one of her main points, that there is an inherent tragedy in operating from a point of racial superiority (Hurston). Her anecdote about her white friend’s inability to understand jazz in the same way as her ends with her claim that “the great blogs of purple and red emotion have not touched him,” alluding to an emotional colorlessness attached to his whiteness (Hurston). His displacement within the black jazz club is not just unfelt because of his race, but because of an inbred blindness that has never been challenged in him. He is not refusing the music or it’s meaning; he can only hear “good music” because he has been trained to hear it as that and that alone (Hurston). Hurston sees this as almost tragic, the inability to access a layer of emotion that she clearly appreciates a great deal.

The absence of race, or a simulation of such a thing, also factors into Hurston’s view of the inescapable reality of race. Her statement that in certain moments “I have no race, I am me” calls back to her childhood realization of her own race, the moment she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl” (Hurston). The presence of race as a complication is a given, but she is able to displace its effects from her mind because of her perspective. She remembers what it is like to be in a non-racialized mindset, or at least one not racialized by her herself. This allows her to break apart her status as a Black woman in society, pulling out the positives while mitigating the negatives as much as possible. Her analysis gives her the tools to fight back on some level against the conditions in which she must live.

Where The Sidewalk Ends (and the Riot Starts)

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The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is, among his many trials, blocked on the sidewalk by a collection of items belonging to an elderly couple being evicted. His interpretation of the various items begins as “a lot of junk waiting to be hauled away” (Ellison 206). Though he learns that the items have significance to their owners, his read on the situation continues to involve the low quality of their belongings. The early description of the “old woman… wearing a man’s shows and a man’s heavy blue sweater” establishes a theme of this section’s narration, the narrator’s disdain for the items despite his wish that the elderly Provos be allowed to keep them (206). This is the central conflict in the narrator’s position, best evidenced by statements he makes that emphasize the shabby qualities of the Provos’ belongings while upholding their right to keep them. IM notes “a fragile paper, coming apart with age,” which turn out to be Brother Provo’s freedom papers (210). These are the final straw of indignation; when he realizes that the very symbol of an elderly man in his community’s freedom is being left on the ground like trash, he is disgusted but not yet stirred to speak. However, only when other men in the crowd begin to menace the marshal conducting the eviction does the narrator step in to try and control things with his rhetoric. His outrage is “only a bitter spurt of gall” until what he sees as the reputation of the Black community is challenged, at which point he takes on the role of mediator (211). In his own mind, the inspiration of seeing the Provos’ things strewn across the sidewalk allows him to step in and offer unseen perspective to those who may benefit from it.

However, the IM’s intentions may belie the truth of how he feels about himself and his ideology, as well as the ruling ideology. Even his mental categorization of the items that the Provos are having taken away is internally racialized; he separates items such as “‘knocking bones’” and “a small Ethiopian flag” from another group with such things as a child’s greeting card and newspaper clippings (209-210). There is a shame in the narrator’s recognition of these items, just as earlier in the chapter he had to slowly overcome his shame to enjoy the street vendor’s yams. When the narrator rhetorically asks the crowd “who’s being dispossessed?” he is trying to channel this assigned shame into anger, one on behalf of his community (216). His internalized anger at not being fully in touch with his community marries with the anger at his community that he has learned from his necessary dealings with a racist world. The significance of the freedom papers now becomes clear: they stand as a symbol of the lack of progression of the Black community as a whole, something which only the narrator is able to “pick up” on. His appeal to the crowd ends in violence against his best efforts not because he is a poor speaker, but because he has externalized an unknown inner rage where he thought there was only indignation.

The Mystery of the Invisible Whiteness

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      I found that the most interesting part of Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s essay “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” is the idea that “to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race… acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made ‘me.’” Similarly, it is very easy to imagine that the current moment in history is disconnected from the moments of the past, but we must ask ourselves if that’s a perspective that comes out of the myopic view that whiteness creates. These limits on creativity, be they literal creativity or the mental kind that allows one to better conceptualize the world around them, are intrinsically tied to race in the American consciousness.
      The work of Hurston itself is a great example of how race in writing is treated by white society. In describing her experiences growing up in the South, Hurston is far beyond making explicit the divide and differences between racial groups. Her very existence is split; for her Black neighbors her dancing is something to leave unacknowledged, while the White visitors to the town treat her as an amusement. In a way, this is a clear parallel to the way in which the reader with unexamined views on race may read Hurston. Rankine mentions that “writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn’t and shouldn’t enter” and this is something that writers even project onto each other. For Hurston to write about her youth, an inherently Black experience, would not raise any eyebrows among the (white) literary elite because it is assumed that a Black author would write on Black topics; the dialect that she uses phonetically in her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was only really objected by Black writers. White writers, by contrast, assume that a Black author is not only qualified to write about Black topics, but indeed almost required to do so. Although the tide of history has reversed these opinions somewhat, Hurston’s work is still representative of the unconsciousness with which whiteness accepts the limitations that it itself places on blackness.