JOSÉ ENDOENÇA MARTINS
Abstract
The study explains the process of self-reflexiveness in African American literature. It discusses this black literary phenomenon from two major aspects: theme and genre. Regarding theme, emphasis is placed on the idea that self-reflexiveness interconnects black women’s spiritual and political conversion. As for genre, the text highlights conversation going on between autobiography (spiritual and slave narrative) and novel. The content of self-reflexiveness in black women’s texts under discussion is a politics of conversion, in its two-folding element of nihilism and love ethics.
Keywords: self-reflexiveness, autobiography, conversion.
Resumo
O estudo discute o explica o processo de auto-reflexividade na literatura Afro-Americana. Explica este fenômeno literário a partir de dois aspectos: theme e gênero. Em relação ao tema, coloca ênfase na idéia de que a auto-reflexividade aproxima conversão espiritual e política da mulher negra. Quanto ao gênero, o texto discorre sobre a forma como esta conversa textual avança da autobiografia (espiritual e narrativa de escravo) e o romance. O conteúdo da auto-reflexividade em discussão nos textos de mulheres negras é uma política da conversão no seu duplo elemento de niilismo e ética do amor.
Palavras chave: auto-reflexividade, autobiografia, conversão.
What is at once characteristic and suggestive about black women’s writing is its interlocutory, or dialogic, character, reflecting not only a relationship with the “other(s),” but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female subjectivity.
Mae G. HENDERSON (2000, 349)
Self-Reflexiveness
Mae G. HENDERSON’s (2000, p. 349) words identify, in the writing of black women, a wish to reject self-isolation by relating itself with something else, thus dialoguing externally and internally. By pointing out the “interlocutory, or dialogic, character” of black women’s writing, Henderson alludes, on the one hand, to its “relationship with the ‘other(s)’”, represented by both the white and black male tradition. On the other hand, Henderson calls attention to an interior dialogue, suggesting that, internally, black women’s writing is attuned to their common experiences, which speak of “the plural aspects of self that constitute the nature of black female subjectivity”. Marked by a dialogic hybridity, black women’s writing characterizes itself as a self-reflexive mode of writing.
Actually, self-reflexiveness goes beyond the realm of black women’s writing to become a major aspect in African-American literature as a whole. Self-reflexiveness suggests mutual links among black texts. This article deals with the idea of a certain movement from the literary to the spiritual to the political. The literary indicates a textual progression from autobiography to novel. The spiritual and the political are content-based aspects, implying a movement from spirituality to politics. The spiritual deals with an individual’s move from selfhood to community because of a conversion. The political manifests itself in the individual and group progression from nihilism to love. Though the central idea here is the progression involving the literary, the spiritual and the political, when it comes to the political, the shift from nihilism to love does not always occur. In some cases, there exists a hybridization of nihilism and love because the first intermingles with the second. In short, self-reflexiveness is understood as the interdependence that accounts for the process through which the autobiography reappears in the novel, in the same way the spiritual conversion is present in political conversion and as nihilism is also visible in love.
Autobiography
Self-reflexiveness fuels African-American literature through the presence of autobiography. According to William L. ANDREWS (1993, p.01), “autobiography holds a position of priority” over other forms of black narratives. Autobiography starts African-American literary tradition and equips it with a process of self-reflexiveness. In African American literary expression, autobiographical self-reflexiveness influences form and content both externally and internally. External self-reflexiveness concerns the interdependent relationships between African-American and European-American autobiography. Internal self-reflexiveness suggests that similar interdependence occur within the African-American literary tradition, between spiritual and slave autobiography and the novel. African Americanists and literary historians acknowledge external and internal self-reflexiveness and critically analyze the intertextual ties interweaving black and white American autobiography. Henry Louis GATES (1993, p.12) recognizes the mutually influencial aspects of these two traditions, remarking that the black autobiographer makes “the [white] written text ‘speak’ with a [black] voice”. The act of merging a black voice – an experience in slavery – inside a white form – written autobiography – is in itself a revolutionary literary attitude. Black autobiography, thus, revolutionizes white autobiography through the way it imitates and revises the previous text.
Black American autobiography, then, enables literary whiteness and blackness to co-exist and integrate and harmonize differences. In its hybridity, black autobiography has become a major form of black American literary expression since the second half of the eighteenth century and, as such, has attracted the attention of slaves and former slaves who wish to express selfhood by writing about their personal experiences. Constructing black selfhood is intrinsically tied to the earliest African-American narrator’s search for knowledge (literacy) and freedom. Henry Louis GATES (1993, p.09) notes that the slaves’ search for freedom and literacy “became the trope that revises that of the text that speaks in the literature of the slave”. William.L. ANDREWS (1993, p.01) sees in the black narrator’s struggle to possess literacy and freedom the authentication of selfhood. For him, in working as the authentication of black selfhood, autobiography testifies “to the ceaseless commitment of people of color to realize the promise of their American birthright and to articulate their achievements as individuals and persons of African descent”. These achievements – conquest of literacy and freedom – present a dual aspect, one spiritual, another secular. The spiritual achievement is what William L. ANDREWS (1986, p.01) calls the freedom from “the slavery of sin”. The secular conquest is what he calls the freedom from “the sin of slavery”. Both freedom from sin and freedom from slavery not only highlight the complexities of the black autobiographer’s selfhood but also indicate the subtleties of autobiography in its earliest forms of spiritual and slave narratives.
Spiritual Narrative
The spiritual narrative portrays the spiritual achievements of the African-American autobiographer who believes that her or his freedom from “the slavery of sin” is an experience worth telling. It also presents the construction of black selfhood as empowered by the spiritual narrator’s acquisition of knowledge and conquest of freedom. The knowledge is a divine gift predicated on God’s calling, which requires the narrator’s response, that is, the narrator’s public preaching. Freedom is her or his liberation from sin, resulting from a personal quest and God’s blessing. Both knowledge and freedom authorize the spiritual autobiographer’s selfhood by means of the word in its written form, that is, the autobiographical texts. This saving knowledge is essentially spiritual and, deriving directly from God, sponsors the spiritual narrator’s freedom from “the slavery of sin”. As for Andrews, the direct ties of the spiritual narrator with God provide “the necessary intellectual groundwork by proving that black people were as much chosen for eternal salvation as whites”. In other words, the ability to write – that is, the possession of Logos - authenticates the long denied soul and humanity of the narrator, as Jarena LEE’s (1849, p.02) Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel may suggest. The writing of Lee’s spiritual narrative, Andrews adds, displays “an argument for women’s spiritual authority that plainly challenged traditional female roles (…) committed herself to her ministry and wrote of it as a supremely fulfilling experience”. Fortunately, Lee is not alone in these black American women’s spiritual enterprises. Though she epitomizes the high quality reached in black female spiritual narrative, there are other spiritual narrators, such as Zilpha Elaw, Julia A. Foote, and others.
Slave Narrative
As the second form of African-American autobiography, the slavery narrative depicts primarily the secular achievements of the slave narrators. For Henry Louis GATES (1987, p. ix) these achievements reflect the slaves’ overcoming of “the severe conditions of their bondage”. Interconnections between spiritual and slave narratives suggest that the overcoming of “bondage” results in the slave’s possession of civil rights, as much as the overcoming of sin guarantees possession of soul and humanity. As spiritual and political empowerment occur simultaneously, the spiritual narrator is able to celebrate soul and freedom from sin in spiritual narratives, as much as the slave narrator is now able to praise freedom from slavery. The narrator not only deserves soul, humanity and freedom but also struggles for them. Thus, as William L. ANDREWS (1986, P.1-2) accentuates, empowered by the soul restored in the spiritual writing of preceding brothers and sisters, the black narrator can “hope for success in restoring political and economic freedom to American blacks”. In establishing “the priority of the spiritual autobiography to the slave narrative,” and their mutual interdependence, Andrews reinforces the idea of internal self-reflexiveness that is an essentially black literary feature. He thus antecipates Henry Louis GATES’s (1987, p.x) ) idea that “these narratives came to resemble each other, both in their content and formal shape”. For him, resemblance in content and form between spiritual and slave narrative derives from his view that “when the ex-slave author decided to write his or her story, he or she did so only after reading, and rereading, the telling stories of other slave authors who preceded them”. In concrete terms internal self-reflexiveness as it is highlighted by Andrews and Gates links Harriet JACOBS (1861) to Jarena Lee, although we do not know whether Jacobs read Religious Experiences before writing her Incidents. This conscious or unconscious reading may explain the way these two black narrators challenge the roles imposed upon black women. Like Lee who, during her autonomous public preaching does not surrender to traditional social roles prescribed for women, Jacobs, through her character Linda Brent, also challenges the values of traditional womanhood to guarantee escape from her slaveholder’s sexual abuse, and concentrates on her quest for freedom from slavery.
Black Novel
Being the privileged mark of African-American spiritual and slave narratives, internal self-reflexiveness also interconnects black American autobiography to the novel. Internal self-reflexiveness makes spiritual and slave narratives construct a mutual conversation, while allowing a similar conversation to exist between these types of narratives and the black novel. Many Afro-Americanists have acknowledged that, in its spiritual or secular version, autobiography has influenced the novel. Among them, for instance, Arna BONTEMPS (1966, Apud GATES 1987, p.x) recognizes the literary ties connecting black narrative autobiography and black novel writing: “from the narrative came the spirit and vitality and the angle of vision responsible for the most effective prose writing by black American writers from William Wells Brown to Charles W. Chesnutt, from W.E.B. Dubois to Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin”. In contemporary black American literature, along with Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, other novelists can be included in Bontemps’s list of those who solidify “the spirit and vitality and the angle of vision responsible for the most effective writing by black American writers”. Certainly among them is Morrison who continues “this process of imitation and repetition,” to use Gates’s phrase, that makes African-American literary tradition so genuine. Like Bontemps and Gates, Smith (1987, p.2) not only acknowledges but also articulates “the influence of the slave narratives on later black writing”. She addresses her explanation of the phenomenon of self-reflexiveness to black literacy and notes that the acquisition of reading and writing is crucial for the African-American narrators’ affirmation of autonomy and selfhood. She calls attention to “the variety or ways in which the idea of literacy is used within the tradition of African American letters”. She also observes “slave narrators and protagonist-narrators of certain twentieth-century novels by African American writers affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their own lives”.
William L. ANDREWS (1992, p.85) similarly contributes to the understanding of the process of repetition and revision that ties earlier and recent black American narrative. His discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of “novelization,” though brief, is useful here. Using “novelization,” Andrews argues that “all narrative forms since the rise of the novel have been undergoing repeated revolutions, or ‘novelization’”. It is this capacity to “novelize,” Andrews observes, that allows the novel to revolutionize “the form and content of other narrative types […] closely allied to it”. He observes that “under the influence of ‘novelization’, traditions and generic standards of narrative form undergo constant revision”. William L. ANDREWS (1993, p.01) later expands his acknowledgement of Gates’s notion of signifying – literary repetition and revision among African American texts - in practical rather than theoretical terms. He establishes the connections between black autobiography and novel and notes that the first African-American novel – Brown’s (1853) Clotel: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States – pays tribute to autobiography in its title, specifically to one of its subgenres, the slave narrative. He remarks that autobiography, or the slaves’ “first-person accounts of their lives,” antedates and influences Brown’s novel, as the author himself was “a fugitive slave autobiographer” before becoming a novelist. “Ever since”, Andrews writes, “the history of African-American narrative has been informed by a call-and-response relationship between autobiography and its successor, the novel”.
Conversion
The first achievement of African-American literature resides in the writer’s inclination to favor an internal vitality, fusing the elements of prior texts into new texts. In its formal and thematic features, internal self-reflexiveness, understood as a process of intertextual relationships and novelization, interweaves spiritual and slave autobiography with the novel and becomes a major characteristic of African-American narrative. As self-reflexive genres, spiritual and slave narrative and novel converse and interweave shared black experiences. The second achievement is an essentially content-centered perspective dealing with conversion. As a theme, black woman’s conversion also mirrors an instance of the novelization – imitation and revision – that is present in black American literary tradition, from the eighteenth-century autobiography to the twentieth-century novel. Being the theme of novelization – or self-reflexiveness – conversion seems to cover a long period in black American narrative. One concrete instance is visualized in the way conversion, on the one hand, unites different black women writers like Lee, Jacobs, and Morrison and, on the other, relates spiritual and slave narratives to novels. In other words, starting from Jarena LEE’s (1849) Religious Experiences it reaches Jacobs’s (1861) Incidents, advancing to Toni MORRISON’S novels Beloved (1987), Sula (1973), and The Bluest Eye (1970). In its movement from one narrator to another, or from one genre to another, conversion moves from a religious to a secular arena, or from spirituality to politics, without losing its prior focus. In other words, though Lee’s struggle against sin deals explicitly with her spiritual conversion, the reader may also uncover implicit political aspects of conversion that she decides not to emphasize. Similarly, in its political commitment to freedom from slavery Jacobs’s slave narrative keeps its spiritual aspects implicit so that the political implications are made overt. Finally, in the novels, even the implicit spiritual aspects of conversion that Jacobs’s Linda Brent accepts are mixed and become less visible in the political experiences of Morrison’s female characters. In sum, from Lee to Jacobs to Morrison the progress from spirituality to politics corresponds to an ongoing substitution of a religious for a secular morality. Broadly speaking, Lee’s spiritual religiosity is replaced by a more political activism in Baby Suggs, Nel Wright, and Peccola Breedlove for many reasons, some of the authors’ choosing.
Spiritual Conversion
Black woman’s spiritual conversion is a major issue in black woman’s spiritual narrative. For its literary achievements Jarena LEE’s (1849) autobiography Religious Experiences is judged to portray a highly qualified depiction of black woman’s spiritual narration and, as such, epitomizes a nineteenth-century black woman’s spiritual conversion. Like Lee, the black female narrator, as a rule, divides the telling of her conversion and spiritual journey out of “the slavery of sin” into two specific narrative moments: conversion and preaching. Conversion is the moment in which the spiritual teller describes how she is saved; preaching is the moment in which she exposes how God saves sinners through her public ministry. In its dual aspect of conversion and preaching, the black woman’s spiritual journey partakes of the Christian tradition of conversion which, in both white European and American spiritual autobiography, William L. ANDREWS (1986, p.10-11) suggests, “addresses the central question of the fate of the individual soul”. In conversing with the white experience of conversion, the black spiritual narrator chronicles her move from “damnation to salvation,” together with the construction of her “true place and destiny in the divine scheme of things”. These two levels are inseparable, the first demanding the second. In other words, after salvation is assured, the converted black woman struggles to guarantee a “true place and destiny” for herself in the community, often through public ministry.
Black woman’s conversion, or salvation, is a dramatic experience, informed by her personal trials, weaknesses, and doubts. It reflects the black woman’s struggle against sin and consequent quest for sanctification. Black woman’s spiritual narratives of conversion follow Wesleyan Methodism, which includes three levels: repentance, justification, and sanctification. William L. ANDREWS (1986, p.15) details them: “first, repentance as result of the conviction of one’s sinfulness; second, justification from the guilt of sin by Christ’s atonement and forgiveness; and third, sanctification, or a ‘new birth’ free from the power of sin by virtue of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit”. Together these three levels of spiritual achievement represent a movement toward a perfect Christian life that, Andrews adds, is compatible with the convert’s seeking “greater growth in grace and in the knowledge and love of God”. The convert’s acceptance of and response to divine grace, knowledge, and love at the same time evince her “total harmony with the will of God” and reflect her “being perfectly pure in intention and action”. Andrews observes that, as a result of conversion, “the sanctified Christian enjoys the inner peace that comes of being convinced that, having been liberated from sin, one is now completely identified with God in thought, word, and deed”. However, nothing is free from problems or mistakes in the experience of conversion. More often than not, despite her spiritual connection with God, the black female convert’s journey from sin to sanctification is challenged by trials, temptation, weakness, ignorance, doubts, and attempt to commit suicide. Satan’s trials, the convert’s weakness, and her ignorance of God’s word trouble her mind and expose her doubts about whether she is saved or not, or whether she deserves salvation or not. The insecurity ends when the black spiritual narrator assures herself that she has been favored with Christian salvation, which only happens when she explicitly requests, as Jarena LEE (1849, p.10-12) does: “Lord, sanctify my soul for Christ’s sake”. From this moment on, she feels saved, but still incomplete. That is, though spiritually empowered, and sanctified, the black female narrator’s salvation and call do not seem to be enough, as Lee discovers. Andrews notes, “conversion alone would not magically solve the problems inherent in [her life]”. Because conversion is a dynamic process, personal and public at the same time, Andrews argues, the black female convert has “to come to terms with the world outside and the self within”. As result, her search for “the world outside” is the response for the call to which her self decides to attend and subscribe.
Having won “The self within”, the black narrator can address “the world outside”. In other words, with conversion assured public preaching is the next step required. Thus, preaching becomes the response to her call. The integration of conversion and preaching is necessary because, as William L. ANDREWS (1986, p.13-14) suggests, “Christian tradition granted women spiritual gifts such as the power of prophecy and charismatic preaching”. Preaching becomes inevitably both a requirement and a guarantee generated by the level of sanctification. If conversion is the first blessing, public preaching is taken as the second blessing. The public ministry presents two levels: exhorting and preaching. As an exhorter the black female convert is allowed to conduct religious classes and prayers or to speak in church when invited by the minister presiding over the service. Exercised under strict control, exhorting is a lower level of public ministry and, as such, is commonly allowed for the sanctified narrator to assume. Exhorting offers the converted black woman a sense of evangelical achievement, which is restrictive in many aspects because it maintains, William L. ANDREWS notes, the black female exhorter “dependent on the male leadership of the Church for access to the ears of a congregation and to the Bible itself”. Commonly she resists to be frozen at this level and struggles for the higher level of preaching, a wish frequently denied her. However, when it occurs, the achievement of preaching results from a radical attitude on the part of the spiritual narrator. In so radically acting, Andrews argues, the convert replaces “the pastoral authority of many male ministers in favor of the primacy of [her] individual perceptions of God’s will”.
Public preaching is frequently a conquest, not a reward, resulting from struggle for it. As such, it grants the black female convert to progress from selfhood to community as she moves from “the self within” to “the world outside” and, likewise, mirrors her capacity to spread God’s word while saving those who need salvation. As black woman’s preaching turns into a spiritual experience, informed by a radical individualism that challenges religious institutionalized laws and male authorities, her success is intrinsically connected with her ability to construct a community of converted women and spiritual sisters. This spiritual community of women in a sense compensates for the other family that she leaves behind in the name of her “individual sense of mission” and “religious activism”. Thus, in partaking of partnership and mutual empowerment with other black women, her itinerant preaching and public spiritual work take “precedence over” familial demands. For William L. ANDREWS (1986, p. 20-21), the community of women that she builds inspires the preacher “with a sense of [her] potential and worth” and, additionally, sustains her “in tribulations brought on usually by condescending or overbearing men”. Informed by “spontaneous, egalitarian community of the Spirit,” this collectivity of women challenges “everything in the church that tended to order and regulate people,” while favoring “genuine spiritual inspiration,” and “unselfconscious genuineness of response to the Spirit,” of women, especially, black sisters.
In the female communion of the Spirit, the itinerant preacher not only delivers Christian salvation through the gospel, but also she has to resist sexist persecution, especially from male religious authorities, to empower other black people, while enduring stress, sickness, family separation, and inclement weather. As William L. ANDREWS (1986, p.16) points out, her freedom from institutional constraints is not complete until she feels “obliged to cite from the Bible some precedent or verse that would authorize [her] convention-shattering views of behavior.”
Political Conversion
The black spiritual narrator’s merging of “the self-within” and “the world-outside” reappears in the black woman’s political conversion. That is, the fusion of the individual and the group is, at the same time, a spiritual and a political experience among black women. Thus, the political becomes an expansion of the spiritual. As an expansion of black woman’s spiritual achievement, the third move informs the political outcome resulting from her experience of nihilism and love. Here again black American literary self-reflexiveness plays a relevant role as it informs the intertextual conversation of both spiritual and political conversion, and this indicates that a woman’s spiritual achievement is prior to her political gain. Having been denied a soul, the converted black woman is led to recover it and to restore her human condition. The possession of a soul and humanity fortifies and validates her public reclamation of political identity and selfhood. Aware of the interdependence between a black woman's reclamation of a soul and the female slave narrator’s demand for freedom, William L. ANDREWS (1987, p.1-2) states:
Before the fugitive slave narrator could hope for success in restoring political and economic freedom to American blacks, the black spiritual autobiographer had to lay the necessary intellectual groundwork by proving that black people were as much chosen by God for eternal salvation as whites. Without the black spiritual autobiography’s reclamation of the Afro-American’s spiritual birthright, the fugitive slave narrative could not have made such a cogent case for black civil rights in the crisis years between 1830 and 1865.
In giving the spiritual narrator a soul, spiritual conversion gives the black woman a selfhood whose communion with God dares to request political emancipation by means of the political conversion that takes place in the slave narrative. In her pursuit of spiritual salvation, the spiritual convert encompasses a double commitment. Through conversion she elaborates a profound commitment to herself, and during her public preaching, she develops an expanding commitment to other black folks, most of them women slaves.
In her reclamation of political freedom and civil rights for her now-restored soul and humanity, the female slave narrator develops a double commitment, to herself and other slaves. Linda Brent, in Harriet JACOBS’s (1861) Incidents, epitomizes the ideal achievements of all female slave narrators’ political conversion. But she is not the only black woman to pursue political emancipation for her and other slaves. As full citizenship is not automatically granted – but results from permanent struggle against social constraints and limitations – many African-American women, though mirroring their slave foremothers’ pursuit of social emancipation, are even today invited to come to terms with some degree of political conversion. Incontestable instances of black women’s struggle for complete citizenship are Toni MORRISON’s Sethe Suggs, Sula Peace and Pecola Breedlove. Her black woman, like Linda Brent and unlike Jarena Lee whose quest is spiritual, activates a double search – for herself and for others – which reveals a secular conversion profoundly political, as it continues expanding the desire to possess full citizenship. In her struggle, she does not seem to be dismissing spirituality but subordinating it to politics.
Aware of political conversion as empowerment in action in black America, Cornel WEST (1994, p.23-30) refers to the phenomenon as a politics of conversion. In Race Matters, he highlights the vitality and usefulness that black political conversion has to reverse the psychological damage that is still devastating today’s black Americans. He believes that “the politics of conversion openly confronts the self-destructive and inhumane actions of black people”, suggesting that in the confrontation, the politics of conversion activates self-love through which black people reverse or destroy the nihilistic, “destructive and inhumane actions” they eventually perpetrate against themselves. For him, black American’s self-destruction – physical or psychological – derives from a feeling of worthlessness that inundates black life. Being “a disease of the soul,” worthlessness sickens the black soul. As a disease of the black soul, “Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness”. Political conversion is, thus, a black struggle for the kind of racial empowerment that is strong enough to defeat meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness of black soul. Because of the magnitude of the disease, the task of curing and healing the black soul cannot be a solitary enterprise but demands the participation of the community. Success depends on the conjunction between the individual’s self-love and the love of others.
Cornel WEST (1994, p.23) traces his discussion of black American’s politics of conversion back to slavery as he judges slavery the initial social setting for the confrontation of black nihilism and love. In being responsible for the psychological, social, political and economic context of black American’s nihilism, slavery also provides her or him the counter-practice of love and self-love. He explains:
Nihilism is not new in black America. The first African encounter with the New World was an encounter with a distinctive form of the Absurd. The initial black struggle against degradation and devaluation in the enslaved circumstances of the New World was, in part, a struggle against nihilism. In fact, the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat – that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning.
Denouncing slavery in America as the nihilistic setting that positions itself against their humanity and integrity, enslaved black Americans counter-attack their “loss of hope and absence of meaning” with the strength of the black soul, which finds support in mutual and reciprocal love, and self-love.
Cornel WEST’s (1994) hybridization of the black American’s initial experiences of nihilism and love and their contextualization in slavery fit William L. ANDREWS’s (1997, p.667) dichotomy of slaveholder’s inhumanity and the slave’s humanity. In opposing white inhumanity to black humanity, Andrews argues that in slavery the two are incompatible because slavery opposes “the inhumanity of the slave system” to “the incontestable evidence of the humanity of the African-American”. As a result, “the inhumanity of the slave system” confers on the slave an animal status and works as the generator of black American’s nihilistic experiences. The slave counteracts by appealing to mutual black love, together with the reclamation and affirmation of her or his humanity and soul, as the spiritual female narrator does in her spiritual text. Both Andrews and West seem to address similar concerns. In slavery, William L. ANDREWS notes, white inhumanity and black humanity are incompatible. So are nihilism and love, Cornel WEST argues.
As William L. ANDREWS (1997) points out that the slave’s humanity struggles to defeat slavery’s inhumanity, Cornel WEST (1994, p.93) argues that black love and self-love fight to beat black nihilistic experiences, both in slavery and contemporary black America. In today’s America, a politics of conversion is vital so that the black soul can confront two nihilistic and damaging forces that have adversely affected their life: “too much poverty and too little self-love”. Cornel WEST (1994, p.30) believes that black existence is disenfranchised, in countless situations, by “the self-destructive and inhumane actions of black people” attacking their own physical and emotional integrity. Though he argues that the presence of poverty and the absence of self-love are responsible for the conditions in black communities, he does not believe that the politics of conversion can be used to beat poverty. He admits that the politics of conversion is rather addressed to attack the lack of self-love or nihilism. The presence of a strong nihilistic feeling inundating black America, the nihilism whose source lies in a number of negative feelings and terrifying experiences has been threatening black people for years with despair, fear, meaninglessness, and personal devaluation. West sees hope for despair, arguing that nihilism can be defeated by personal and collective love and self-love, the major ingredients of a politics of conversion.
Cornel WEST´s (1994) analysis of black nihilism not only deals with contemporary issues concerning black America but also calls for solutions. He observes that the debate of African-American problems has been conducted for years from two major perspectives: the structural and the behavioral. Structuralists and behaviorists identify different causes and solutions for black American’s nihilistic experiences. For instance, structuralists position the historical and sociological source of black people´s problems in their long and devastating exposure to slavery, segregation, job and housing discrimination, unfair unemployment rates, inadequate medical coverage, and poor education. Behaviorists emphasize that the obstacles which tend to prevent black people from ascending mobility are due especially to the weakening of the Protestant work ethic, work, delayed rewards, frugality, and personal responsibility. Considering both the structural and behavioral views, the author also discusses the structuralist and behaviorist tools for the eradication of black nihilism. Initially, he mentions that structuralists agree that the extirpation of nihilism will depend on a number of measures, such as programs for full employment, medical insurance, child education and assistance, and an end to job and housing discrimination. He, then, emphasizes that behaviorists believe that the problem will disappear if they promote programs encouraging personal initiatives, the expansion of black enterprises, affirmative action, and free market strategies. In short, the behaviorists defend strengthening the Protestant ethic in black America.
Although Cornel WEST (1994, p.18-19) recognizes the relevance of both proposals, he does not seem totally satisfied with either structuralist or behaviorist solutions because, for him, “structures and behaviours are inseparable and institutions and values go hand in hand”. He states that “how people act and live are shaped – though in no way dictated or determined – by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves. These circumstances can be changed, their limits attenuated, by positive actions to elevate living conditions”. As a matter of fact, West believes that the analysis of black nihilism cannot be reduced to, but rather goes beyond, the economic and political structural or cultural behaviors encountered in black America. For him, black nihilism lies in something subtler and deeper than what structuralists and behaviorists are willing to confront to. This has to do with the Negro’s loss of hope, with the fear of street violence, the collapse of meaningful lives, and the tremendous carelessness toward black people, and their property. Nihilism is not recent, and the fight against it has started with a struggle against the degradation and devaluation of the slave’s life. However important, money, jobs, health care and decent housing cannot by themselves defeat nihilism. Its defeat requires something spiritual. Black literature exemplifies this struggle. For instance, the spiritual narrator Lee finds it in the spiritual strength or grace of conversion that prepares her or him for public service. Linda Brent recovers from despair with her quest for virtue just as Sethe Suggs keeps nihilism at bay by fighting for her children´s safety. Sula Peace defeats nihilism with an uncontested affirmation of individuality, and Pecola Breedlove´s demand of love results in an evidence of communal sanity. All these women fight with black cultural values rather than with structuralistic and behavioristic social programs. The fuel for such a fight, Cornel West (1994, p.24) notes, has always come from black culture, which has developed over centuries “ways of life and struggle that embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence”. However necessary, these black cultural forces have not been enough to maintain people´s fighting spirit against their social and personal degradation. Today, market forces and consumerism have made black nihilism worse. For West, the expansion and intensification of pleasure caused by the market of comfort, commodification of sexism, femininity, violence, and sexuality have seduced black America and, thus, have eliminated traditional black values.
Despite the immense difficulties of black experiences in America, Cornel WEST (1994, p.27-29) does not lose hope. On the contrary, he believes that nihilism can be defeated by a new and more energetic form of empowerment through a politics of conversion. He argues that black people´s politics of conversion seems to be “the strategy for holding the nihilistic threat at bay” as it “is a direct attack in the sense of worthlessness and self-loathing”. He also argues that a politics of conversion requires love and care because nihilism is a “disease of the soul,” it cannot be destroyed by arguments or analyses. “Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one´s soul. This turning is done through one´s own affirmation of one´s worth – an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion,” he says. And he suggests that a love ethic “is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among downtrodden people”. Like the spirituality of conversion, the politics of conversion demands the merging of “the self-within” with “the world-outside”, that is, the individual and the group.
Finally, Cornel WEST (1994, p.30-31) does not entirely dissociate his politics of conversion from both liberal structuralistic and conservative behavioristic agendas. On the contrary, he admits that structuralists, behaviorists, and defenders of a politics of conversion share common ground, though a limited one. He explains:
Like liberal structuralists, the advocates of a politics of conversion never lose sight of the structural conditions that shape the sufferings and lives of people. Yet, unlike liberal structuralism, the politics of conversion meets the nihilistic threat head-on. Like conservative behaviorism, the politics of conversion openly confronts the self-destructive and inhumane actions of black people. Unlike conservative behaviorism, the politics of conversion situates these actions within inhumane circumstances (but does not thereby exonerate them).
In fact, one point becomes clear: according to him the turning of one's soul or the defeat of nihilism cannot be an individual’s isolated experience, but requires both individual and collective action. In uniting the individual black convert and the converted black community, West’s political conversion converges and converses with spiritual conversion, as the spiritual level of conversion likewise establishes a spiritual communion between the sanctified preacher and the sanctified group of black women who support a ministry of love.
As the text intended to demonstrate, literary self-reflexiveness positioned the African American literary tradition in its historical perspective by privileging the “call-and-response relationship” that made the autobiography and the novel two interdependent genres. The autobiography, the novel, and the mutual interconnections between them were the concern of African-Americanists. Since Brown’s Clotel: A Narrative of a Slave Life in the United States, the first black novel, published in 1856 “the history of African American narrative has been marked by a call-and-response relationship between autobiography and its successor, the novel”. The same “call-and-response relationship” occurred inside the black autobiography, as well, suggesting the interdependence between the spiritual and slave narratives. Additionally, the “call-and-response relationship” was present in the self-reflexiveness that interwove the spiritual and political conversion. The spiritual conversion favoring the black women’s Christianity restored their souls, and the political guaranteed their possession of civil rights. The restoration of the black spiritual status antedated and urged the black possession of political status.
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