Locating
a Text: Implications of Afrocentric Theory
By Molefi Kete Asante
We have finally arrived at a
cultural junction where several critical avenues present themselves
to the serious textual reader. Any fair estimate of the road that
got us to this point must conclude that it has been a difficult
one, filled with intellectual potholes and myopic cultural roadblocks,
but at last there is an Afrocentric viewpoint on texts. This view
has been developed on the basis of works by scholars such as Houston
Baker, Abu Abarry, Carol Aisha Blackshire, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., and Trudier Harris in recent years. There seems to be a growing
number of writers who have abandoned or are attempting to abandon
the staid domains of an encapsulated theory.
Afrocentric theory as advanced
in numerous works, including my own, establishes two fundamental
realities in situating a text: location and dislocation.
The serious textual reader is able to locate a text by certain
symbolic boundaries and iconic signposts offered from within the
text itself. However, much like any traveler the reader's location
is also important in order to determine the exact location of
the text.
An inordinate number of African
American scholars have become lost souls trying to negotiate the
Eurocentric pathways of mono-culturalism and mono-historicalism.
An equal number of non-African scholars have floated around ethereally
when it came to locating an African American text. Both sets of
readers have been victims of a breach in good highway manners.
They have ignored all of the signs signifying Afrocentric literacy
in favor of blind alleys based in a mono-cultural reality. What
I hope to demonstrate is that multicultural literacy can lead
to a critical transformation in the way we approach any discourse.
However, multicultural literacy
does not exist apart from the substantive knowledge of specific
cultural communities. There is no multicultural literacy apart
from cultural bases. It is the ability to use and integrate these
cultural bases that allows us to speak of multicultural literacy.
An examination of an African American writer such as Henry Dumas
provides an example of the range and vision of Afrocentric theory.
I shall discuss theoretical issues and then move into an examination
of Henry Dumas' location.
An Orientation to Motif
Charles Fuller, a colleague in
my department who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in l982 for
his work "A Soldier's Play", claims that many of the dramatic
characters for his plays come from people he knew on Broad Street
in North Philadelphia. Not knowing what Fuller knows and not seeing
what he sees in the faces of people on Broad Street might create
difficulty in understanding the nuances of his drama. While there
are certain readily understandable guideposts in good literature,
accessible, that is, to the least literate of us, to truly capture
the setting of Charles Fuller's drama one must have more than
a passing appreciation of African American culture. Indeed the
good critic and serious reader of African American literature
should have been exposed to a variety of cultural information,
e.g., the Dozens, folk tales, Ebonics, barber shops or beauty
parlors, Baptist churches, Hoodoo and Root rituals, Ebony
Magazine, Jet, and numerous authors and musicians. All
of this information may not be useful on every trip through the
literary territory in the African American world but it is surely
advantageous on most occasions for the critic and reader. This
means that critics must take courses in African American culture
and history as they take courses in Euro-American history and
culture. In fact, they must search the ancient foundations of
the African's cultural response to reality and environment much
as one looks to Greece or Rome for analogues in the Euro-American
writers and authors. The only reason, it seems to me, that this
is not done in the first place is the abiding bias against African
culture that continues to disorient most critics.1
An explosion of interest in multicultural
issues, diversity in the classroom, and centered visions in curricula
has contributed to a critical transformation in literature. Like
Tuthmosis IV, who in the third year of his reign, asked his scribes
to take a retrospective of all that had gone before, we must take
a critical look at what has happen in the last few years in multicultural
literacy. The king's intentions were to re-establish the foundations
of the kingdom, to examine the preparations for the future, and
to re-assert the unity of the Two Lands. Our aim in a retrospective
is simply to be able to navigate the cultural highways of a multicultural
society.
A New Historiography
as the Basis of Location
The critical spirit that has
served to temper the received position on certain texts is the
result of a multi-cultural consciousness brought about by a new
historiography. Based on the idea that ancient Kemet and Nubia
are to the rest of Africa as Greece and Rome are to the rest of
Europe, this new historiography has insinuated itself into contemporary
thinking in education, anthropology, sociology, history, and literature.
2 Pioneered by African and African American scholars
such as George James, Chancellor Williams, Leo Hansberry, Cheikh
AntaDiop, and Theophile Obenga, this critical historiography influences
the most elementary discussions of text by bringing the gift of
new information. Unfortunately ,as Martin Bernal has said in his
monumental re-assessment of the European classical tradition,
Black Athena , most white scholars have ignored the writings
of these scholars.3 Bernal believes that in the last
five centuries racism has been the source of the mono-ethnic and
mono-cultural portrayal ofthe production and acquisition of knowledge.
In his book The African Origin
of Civilization: Myth or Reality? , Cheikh Anta Diop laid
a revolutionary foundation for the new pathways of critical knowledge
in the field of human creativity. He argued a position that was
radical only because for five hundred years the Western world
had denied Africa's role in human history. Diop contended that
Western scholars had tried to take ancient Egypt out of Africa
and Africans out of Egypt. 4 The context for this attack
on Africa was the rise and promotion of the European Slave Trade.
So massive was this vulgar trade in human beings that it colored
every relationship in the European and African worlds. Nothing
was untouched by the anti-African attitudes developed in the fifteenth
century. Art, literature, dance, music, theology, and philosophy
were adjusted to deal with the Great Enslavement and domination
of Africans. Defamation of Africans and African intellectual gifts
was sanctioned at the highest levels of Western literature and
goverment; subjugation of Africa was confirmed ultimately in the
way writers wrote about the encounter between the two peoples.
In the Mismeasure of Man,
Stephen Jay Gould reports that some of the key leaders of the
West recorded their anti-African attitudes in clear and straightforward
terms. 5 For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I advance
it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally
a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are
inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind".6
Indeed Gould demonstrates that the British philosopher David Hume
held negative attitudes about the contributions of Africans to
human society.
David Hume asserted "I am apt
to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of
men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a
civilized nation of any other complexion than white, or even any
individual eminent either in action or speculation, no ingenious
manufacturers among them, no art, no sciences". 7 Indeed
Louis Agassiz wrote of Africa, "...there has never been a regulated
society of black men developed on the continent..." .8 Arnold
Toynbee, one of the Western world's leading historians said "When
we classify mankind by color, the only one of the primary races,
given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution
to nay of our twenty-one civilization is the black race".9
The famous German philosopher F. Hegel wrote of Africa, "This
is the land where men are children, a land lying beyond the daylight
of self conscious history, and enveloped in the black color of
night. At this point, let us forget Africa not to mention it again.
Africa is no historical part of the world...10 These
attitudes often find a place in the most contemporary thinking
of Western thinkers.
The publication of the Great
Books of the Western World in l990 under the editorship of
Mortimer J. Adler continues the Eurocentric idea that Africans
have made no contribution to the West. 11 A typical
collection of white male writers (there are only 4 white women
writers out of the total of 130 writers) the Great Books of
the Western World serves as an instrument to block the
road to multi-culturalism. With no African Americans and only
four women included in the list of writers, the collection is
certain to be without much enduring credibility. Any group of
"Great Books" that does not include writings from either Frederick
Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Edward Blyden, Richard Wright, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin,
Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison is surely a pretense
to inclusiveness.
Locating a Text
There are several elements which
help to locate an African American text or any text: language,
attitude, and direction. These elements might be used alone
or in combination. I shall examine each of these elements as they
relate to African American writers and critics. However, a word
should be written about the nature of the creative production
derived from authors engaged in the communicative process with
readers. Writers are fundamentally committed to the principle
of expression; one cannot express one's self without leaving some
insignia. From the writer's own textual expression the Afrocentric
critic is able to ascertain the cultural and intellectual address
of the author.
The Place
Among the complications in the
location process for critics of African American texts is the
devastating extent to which African American authors have been
removed from general cultural terms. There are two types of texts
produced by individuals who have been removed or have removed
themselves from terms of blackness: the decapitated text and
the lynched text. A text which is decapitated exists without
cultural presence in the historical experiences of the creator;
a lynched text is one that has been strung up with the tropes
and figures of the dominating culture. African American authors
who have tried to "shed their race" have been known to produce
both types of texts.
The decapitated text is
the contribution of the author who writes with no discernible
African cultural element; the aim appears to be to distance herself
or himself from the African cultural self. Among the best practitioners
of this genre of writing is the author Frank Yerby. His contributions
to literature have been made as a part of the European and white
experience in the West. Although he responded to criticism long
enough to write the Dahomeans , he remained fundamentally
committed to a style of writing which placed him outside of his
own historical experiences. Thus, his African voice remains essentially
silent. Yerby is the kind of author one reads and says, if you
do not know, that this must be a white writer. Even my white students
are surprised to discover that the author of some of the finest
Southern plantation novels is an African American. While he became
relatively successful in a commercial sense in this vein of writing,
Frank Yerby has no clear literary tradition and adds to no new
school of aesthetics. He produces decapitated texts with no guiding
heads and no sense of soul.
The lynched text is more
easily produced by African American authors who have literary
skills but little cultural or historical knowledge. Images tend
to be thoroughly Eurocentric, producing lines such as "the war-like
natives" in a historical novel or "the Valhallian quest of the
black hero" in poetry. An African writer who uses such language
may be rewarded by the Eurocentric establishment for demonstrating
a mastery over or expertise in handling European themes but it
does not mean that the writer is placed in her own center. Since
the literary establishment often reinforces Africans the more
removed we are from our cultural terms, there is social pressure
on the writer to "write what whites writes." One can perhaps see
why James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, John A. Killens,
and John Edgar Wideman are not given greater prominence in the
literary curricula of this nation. Neither attempted to shed blackness;
in fact, some tried to re-accumulate what they had lost through
education.
Elements of Location
Language. Normally we
say that language is a regularized code that has been agreed upon
by a community of users. There is nothing particularly wrong with
this general definition of language. However, language can be
said to involve grammatical rules, nuances, words, and deep systems.
In that case if we concentrate on one aspect of language, words,
for instance, we can obtain a fairly good assessment of where
a writer is located.
Words have function, meaning,
and etymology; my concern in this discussion is primarily with
meaning. An African American author or any author, for that matter,
who writes of "Hottentots," "Bushman," and "Pygmies" has already
told the Afrocentric critic something about where she or he is
located. Of course, the same observation can be made by any critic
of any author. Location is determined by the signposts. In any
situation where the author is trapped in the language of a racist
society that provides pejorative terms, the critic is seeking
to see how the particular writer handles the situation. What turn
on phrases, what lacunae and nuance, what unique rendering make
this particular writer succeed. Language is the most important
element because it is the most easily manifest in the text. One
sees words on paper. If one sees a reference to Africans as primitives
or to Native Americans as "a bunch of wild Indians" or Latinos
as "greasy" , then one knows the cultural address of the author.
While it is true that authors might use irony, sarcasm, and other
techniques of language to deliver a certain point or perspective,
the Afrocentric critic is sensitive to the persistent and uniform
use of pejoratives as demonstrating the author's location. When
an author use pejoratives unknowingly to refer to Africans, the
critic often is being confronted with an unconscious writer, one
who is oblivious to the social and cultural milieu.
Attitude. Attitude refers
to a predisposition to respond in a characteristic manner to some
situation, value, idea, object, person, or group of persons. The
writer signals his or her location by attitude toward certain
ideas, persons, or objects. Thus, the critic in pursuit of the
precise location of the author can determine from the writer's
characteristic or persistent response to certain things where
the writer is located. The attitude is not the motive; attitudes
are more numerous and varied than motives. Consequently, the attempt
to locate a writer by referring to "motivating attitudes" may
be useful in some situations. The common adage, "I cannot hear
what you say because what you are shouts so loudly in my ear"
is a remarkable example of how our attitudes influence our appraisal
of those around us. This is the same for writers. Once a critic
has read certain portions of a text to "get the drift" of what
it is the writer is getting at, he or she can usually locate the
author.
Direction. The line along
which the author's sentiments, themes, and interests lie with
reference to the point at which they are aimed I am referring
to as direction. It is the tendency or inclination present
in the literary work with regard to the author's objective. One
is able to identify this tendency by the symbols which occur in
the text. For example, a writer who uses Ebonics, African American
language, in his or her works demonstrates a tendency along the
lines of Afrocentric space. The reader is capable of digesting
some of the arguments, the poetic allusions, and situations because
of the tendency identified in the writing.
Therefore, a text must be seen
in the light of language, attitude, and direction when the serious
reader wants to locate it. Each text carries its own signature,
a stamp, if you will, of the place to which it belong or to where
it is going. In any case, the reader will be able to adequately
locate the text in order to make judgments about the author's
creative abilities as well as the author's philosophical underpinning.
Ultimately, as we shall see, a text must fit within a multiplicity
of places, each one defined by the dynamic interplay of culture
and purpose.
An Example From History
One of the greatest (in my judgment)
African American writers was born on July 29, l934, and killed
in New York on May 23, l968. His name was Henry Dumas and his
death at the age of thirty four cut short a brilliant career of
a poet and short story writer who gave meaning to the Afrocentric
term, located.
Henry Dumas' work, Ark of
Bones and Other Stories and Poetry for My People ,
was published posthumously.12 However, he had been
engaged in teaching at the Experiment in Higher Education at Southern
Illinois University and served as a member of the editorial staff
of the Hiram Poetry Review and through these activities
had made many friends and acquaintances who knew his creative
power. Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond ably brought Henry Dumas
to life again in the editing of his works. Few African American
writers have been so successful as Henry Dumas in demonstrating
the opposite perspective of the race shedders. Dumas, as we shall
see, was pre-eminently an Afrocentric writer in every aspect of
the term.
For the reader seeking to possess
the literacy necessary to understand the stories or the poetry
of Dumas, it suffices to say that one must pay attention to every
nuance of the African American culture. That is to say one must
understand the "bop" and the "do". Furthermore, the reader must
be able to see how nicknames locate a person in the text as well
as the author's ability to write culturally, that is, out of the
culture. For example, Henry Dumas gives his characters names like
Blue, Fish, Tate, and Grease. These are important names in the
context of Dumas' stories. Actually, each of the names carries
definite meanings. Blue, for example, relates to a person being
so black he looks blue. Fish is the nickname for a a person who
swims very well. Tate is the nickname for a person whose head
is shaped like a potato. Grease is the name of a smooth talking
individual. There are several reasons why these names are significant
in Dumas' cultural understanding and our appreciation of his art.
In the first place, nicknames are means for placement, location,
identity. They are often more descriptive and defining than the
European names given to African American children. Since many
people did not have access to African names, the practice of nicknaming
became a major avenue for the maintenance of African culture and
expression. Names could still mean something much like names had
meant among the Yoruba, Ibo, Fanti, Asante, and Congo. Dumas understands
the relevance of the nickname and appropriates its use to the
functions of his art. Another reason Dumas' use of these names
is important comes from the creation of atmosphere in his works.
He seeks always to expand the boundaries, to move against the
tide, and to raise the difficult questions. There is no better
way to create atmosphere than to allow the traditions to blossom,
particularly in reference to what people call things, that is,
the words given to identify persons and objects.
The richness of Dumas' language,
the clarity of his symbolic attitude, and the rhythm of his trajectory,
cannot be overestimated. He impressed himself as well as others
with the tremendously accurate portrayal of the African American
language. Indeed, Eugene Redmond wrote "Dumas-a brilliant, creative
linguist-contracts and expands English, Black Language and various
African tribal (sic) sounds to come up with what is perhaps a
"found" utterance...." 13 Redmond's introduction to
the stories of Henry Dumas is a penetrating look at the style
of the artist. What Redmond observes in the language of Dumas
is what places him squarely within an Afrocentric location. When
Redmond says "Dumas is also the first among young black writers
to re-acculturate" he is speaking to Dumas' love of his language.14
There is no caricature of the African in his use of African language;
no self conscious concentration on loss exists in the mind of
Henry Dumas. He finds the African American language richly endowed,
as he found the people.
In the powerful story, "Ark of
Bones", Dumas brings together all of the experiences of his young
life to produce a text richly contoured with cultural artifacts
of language. Headeye, one of the characters, had a mojo bone
in his hand. But we learn that "Headeye, he ain't got no devil
in him." His only problem was that he had "this notion
in his head about me hoggin the luck." Dumas knows the
close community language as well as the religious allusions, but
his knowledge of this language is a gift of his sensitivity to
the voices he has heard. The reader knows precisely where Dumas
is at all times, even though as you read him you know that he
is aware of every thing he is doing in the text. There is no stream
of words here floating endlessly on with no point; this is a master
writer whose point is made in every sentence. "Headeye acted like
he was iggin me" is about as precise as you can get with
language. To understand iggin is to be right in the center
of the culture; however, it is an understanding that comes from
experience or from study. One of the most insidious forms of critical
hierarchy is the criticism of Afrocentric writers by those who
have neither studied nor lived the culture. The assumption that
one can simply make critical judgment and commentary about the
text, perhaps locate the writer, without serious study
of the culture is an arrogant and false assumption. As one who
does not know white American culture can truly understand it without
some background, neither can Afrocentric writers be understood
without some background. Normally, the student of American literature
gains the knowledge of the nuances of white American literature
and can adequately place the writers. But Afrocentric literature
is much like Old English literature in the sense that it must
be seriously studied or else the reader will usually miss the
point. I am not just speaking about knowing the meaning of words
or understanding the structure of Ebonics, that is a starting
point. More fundamentally, the reader must know from what center
of experience the writer writes. An African American person writing
from a Eurocentric basis will produce text that may have some
references to the cultural materials of the African American people
but will remain essentially a white writer with a black skin.
Such a writer is not much different from a white writer who writes
knowledgeably about certain cultural icons of the African American
community. But to really come from an African-centered perspective
in literature, the writer must immerse herself or himself in the
culture of the people. The value of this immersion is that one
becomes more authenthically a voice of the culture, speaking much
like Henry Dumas the language of the African American heritage
with all of its universal implications in similar experiences
of other people. To deny Afrocentric writers this possibility,
either through criticism or creation, is to assume that the special
language of the African American is somehow different from other
languages, i.e., Spanish, Yoruba, Gikuyu, Polish, and so forth.
Dumas understood the nobility
of the culture from which he had come and so when he wrote that
Headeye's daddy "hauled off and smacked him side the head" he
recognized that the perfection of action could only be told with
two verbs. Rather than say, as might be said in English, that
his daddy "smacked him side the head", Dumas goes into the culture
and brings to bear the full meaning of this action. To truly complete
the act the daddy had to have "hauled off and smacked him." This
construction is like the one I often heard in Georgia as a child
when someone had become a member of the local church. People would
say, "Child, she got converted and joined the church." Another
such construction of language is the command "Turn loose and jump
down from there" to a child who is climbing a tree.15
In his stories as in his poetry
Dumas gives his readers all of the signposts of his location.
He is not a writer without a place in his own culture;he is
firmly planted in the midst of ancestors, ghosts, haints, and
spirits of the past as well as the generative power of the present
condition of African Americans. Among the expressions and terms
which he employs are: Glory Boat, afro-horn, Aba, Heyboy, Sippi,
catcher-clouds, and Saa saa aba saa saa. While his corpus is limited
because of his early death, he remains one of the most centered
of African American authors. Language, attitude, and direction
are clearly demarcated in his works. When we read Dumas we are
reading a profoundly honest writer who tells his and his people's
special truth to the world. Contained in the language, the attitude,
and the direction of his work is the symbolism of strength, mystery,
energy, dynamism, intelligence, wisdom, and trust. A compact exists
between Dumas and the characters of his stories which allows him
to use their language to tell the truth. He "ain't give on to
what he know" but the reader knows that Dumas found the center
of his cultural being intact and never left it. Why should he
have left? What other writers would be required to leave? How
silly of a writer to think that he or she must leave the source
of power in order to be universal; true universalism in literature
adheres in the ability of a writer to capture the special story
or stories of his or her own culture in ways that those stories
make impact on others, regardless of the first language. In the
end, the serious reader of writers must work to re-affirm the
centrality of cultural experience as the place to begin to create
a dynamic multicultural literacy because without rootedness in
our own cultural territory, we have no authentic story to tell.
Notes
1The controversy over
the "Great Books" which ensued in l990 is a case in point. The
fact that Mortimer Adler and others who organized and published
the works considered "great" did not include one book by a writer
of African descent demonstrates the point made by numerous authors
that mono-culturalism remains the dominant ideology of the literary
establishment in the West.
2Among the works in
this vein are Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, l987); Molefi Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity,
and Knowledge, (Trenton: Africa World Press, l990); Cheikh
Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization. (New York:
Lawrence Hill, l974); Martin Bernal, Black Athena. (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, l987).
3Martin Bernal, Black
Athena, pp. 434-437.
4Cheikh Anta Diop,
The African Origin of Civilization. (New York: Lawrence
Hill, l974).
5Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man . (New York: Norton, l981).
6Gould, l981, p. 32
7Gould, p. 41
8Gould, p. 47
9Gould, p. 41
10Basil Davidson,
The Lost Cities of Africa. (New York: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1984).
11New York
Times, October 25, l990
12Henry Dumas, Ark
of Bones and Other Stories. Edited by Hale Chatfield and Eugene
Redmond. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press,
l970.
13Eugene Redmond,
"Introduction," in Henry Dumas, Ark of Bones and Other Stories.
Edited by Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond. Carbondale, Illinois:
Southern Illinois University Press, l970, p.xiv.
14Redmond, ibid.,
p.xv.
15Molefi Kete Asante,
"The African Essence in African American Language," in M.K. Asante
and K.W. Asante, African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Trenton:
Africa World Press, l990.
