Coloring the Self: Race and the Formation of Identity in Ethnic American Literature
Brendan McAuley
Race is perhaps humankind's saddest construction. Our strange fear of that which appears to be different has been the source of some of the most terrible, shameful things ever carried out by the hands of man. Our belief that there exists among us some real, intrinsic and classifiable difference has clouded the minds of not only those in the position of self imposed superiority and dominance that create and stratify these racial categories, but also and especially those in the position of culturally imposed powerlessness and inferiority arbitrarily based on the color of their skin. The way a person is viewed and thus categorized by his or her culture affects the way that person views and thinks about his or her self, and in effect works to create and skew that person's identity. Ethnic writers in America, where we all are supposedly created and living equal, are transcribing the problematic struggle of ethnic Americans to seek out a unique, individualized identity in a racially stratified society. However, as asserted in African-American, Native-American, Chicano/a, and Asian-American literature, an identity free of distorted racial judgment and fragmentation is unattainable in such an inherently prejudiced place.
In her novel, Jazz, Toni Morrison addresses the issue of identity as it is affected by the social construction of race. Morrison styles and structures the novel so that the reader can never fully get its feet planted firmly the text. The narrative voice is often ambiguous and purposefully difficult to discern, and it creates for the reader a fragmented, disjointed and blurry awareness of the characters it creates. This fragmented, disjointed and blurry awareness mirrors the condition of many of the character's identities. Joe Trace changed eight times in his life, each time triggered by some violent form of racial injustice. Different forms of Violet appear throughout the novel that even Violet herself can't explain, recognize or understand. Furthermore, because of the ambiguous nature of the novel's narrative voice, (or rather voices) there are times when the reader is unable to determine the age, sex and race of the certain characters. Morrison's denial of the reader of the ability to easily racially identify her characters accomplishes two important things: it makes the reader aware of how he or she uses race to define, categorize and identify, and at the same time shows the instability of definitions, categorizations and identifications based on race. This makes the reader become like another character in the book, another one of the people whose almost subconsciously embedded racial prejudices—the runoff of the cultural psyche that once allowed, depended upon and justified slavery—create within Joe and Violet, and Dorcas, and every other African-American in the story a skewed, sadly degraded and fragmented sense of self.
Racial identity is a thread that runs through most of Morrison's work. In “Recitatif” she explores it again, and employs a narrative technique similar to the one in Jazz. The narrator changes, as in Jazz, and the reader is forced to search the text for clues as to who is speaking, who is telling this story. The different people telling the story, Roberta and Twyla, have different memories regarding the same incident that occurred to them both while they were in an orphanage as children. This ambiguity of the narrative voice again makes it hard for the reader to discern who is speaking, and impossible to decide, without imparting (and thus coming face to face with) his or her own racial assumptions upon the text, the race of the characters involved. Roberta's and Twyla's fragmented and faded memories, and the processes that went into creating these memories mirror both girls' sense of self, and the processes that went into creating their fragmented and faded identities. Morrison creates for us a skeleton made up of the brittle bones of memory and identity, and wraps it in the colored skin of race, showing that how a person thinks about his or her past, and thus creates his or her present self, is colored and altered by racial experience.
Moving away from Morrison, but remaining in the realm of African-American literature, we encounter other writers who have explored the issue of racially affected identity. One such writer, Richard Wright, struggles with the dominance of whites over blacks and how this controls African-American identity formation in his 1945 autobiographical novel Black Boy, and particularly in the excerpt from that novel entitled, “A Five Dollar Fight.” When speaking to a white man, the main character and narrator, Richard falls quickly into “that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the-presence-of-a-white-man pattern” (Wright). This is a part of his identity, it is how he sees himself and therefore how he feels about himself; and it is entirely controlled and forced upon him by the culturally determined dominant whites around him. In the story, Richard is viewed as a sub-species, as less than human and is made to fight another African-American boy for five dollars and the enjoyment of the whites. He is psychologically tormented by the whites into acting as, into becoming as the whites view him. The socioeconomic conditions, also created by the whites, nudge Richard and the other boy into fighting (and thus fitting into the white's idea of black) because it offers them a way to make a few extra, hard-to-come-by-for-a-black-boy dollars. Again, as in both Morrison pieces, the influence of the dominant group is seen in the painful (and all three stories orbit around a central, painful and violent formative incident) formation of identity.
Chicano/a literature began as “a literature of resistance to Anglo-cultural imperialism.” Though psychologically and emotionally rooted in the same struggle to discover the pieces and piece together their shattered identities, Chicano/a historical roots differ from those of the African-American, and this creates a difference in the way identity is formed. Whereas the African-American struggle can be traced historically back to slavery and being brought into America forcefully and against their will across the Middle Passage, the Chicano/a historical legacy dates back to a choice: when the United States won the Mexican-American War and signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, over one million square miles of territory changed hands overnight. An estimation of 80,000 Mexican citizens were caught up in the land that switched from Mexican soil to American soil with the border shift. These people were given a choice (though a forced choice with only two possibilities) by the United States government: stay or leave. A majority chose to stay, and become an American. Few realized how difficult that would prove to be.
As a result of this choice, the original Mexican-Americans and their descendants would be fated to have to make that same choice over and over again, everyday in America, a place described by Chicano theorist Bruce Novoa as “the other's space.” Mexican or American or both or neither. This choice is a problematic one, as seen in Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. He struggles with the idea of assimilation and the effects it has on an individual's identity by exploring his education and a proposed method of educating ethnic minorities called bilingual education. The proponents of bilingual education “say that children lose a degree of ‘individuality' by becoming assimilated” (Rodriguez 26). Indeed in becoming educated, Rodriguez was forced to make the choice of his ancestors, and he recognizes the split in his identity as it was created by his education. He writes of the pain that comes with losing the intimate connection of his childhood (based on and rooted in linguistic ties) with his family, something very important to the Chicano/a tradition, but at the same time relishes in the notion that it is possible to create for oneself an individualistic public persona, as well as a individualistic private persona.
Whereas Rodriguez seems to celebrate this split between Mexican and American in his identity, other writers are not as welcoming to the dichotomy. And perhaps dichotomy is a poor choice of words in that it simplifies the issue too much; the split is never simply in half, rather an individual is forced to search in all different directions to try and salvage fragmented remnants of what he or she once believed to be his or her identity. Sandra Cisneros portrays this identity split as problematic in her short story “Mericans.” The narrator calls her grandmother, the embodiment of her Mexican heritage, the symbol of the Mexican part of her identity, “the awful grandmother” and all she can hear from her grandmother is “mumbling, mumbling, mumbling”(Cisneros). The narrator, who is a young girl can not understand or believe in the Mexican part of her heritage and identity. Instead she, as a majority of her ancestors did in 1848, chooses to identify with the American influences upon her life; only the problem is, she can not fully understand them either. She says to the strange white woman, “We're Mericans,” (Cisneros) a telling linguistic error: she mispronounces “American” while at the same time intermixing the two main parts of her identity—Mexican and American—signifying her inability to really understand either part of herself.
Cisneros also addresses this split in identity among young Chicanas in The House on Mango Street. In the vignette entitled “My Name” Esperanza the narrator tells us, “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (10). Here she addresses a few of the many influences upon her identity as a young Chicana in America. She is aware that her name, her symbolic representation of her identity, does not just have one meaning, but has many disjointed meanings. The segments of her identity that she discusses here are but a few of the separate and different pieces of herself that she is forced to come to terms with as a Chicana living in “the other's space.”
Like Chicano/a literature, Native American literature is very much a “literature of resistance.” Today, the American Government continues to encroach upon and destroy sacred Native American land. In our destruction of their land and the obliteration of their culture, “Americans” are, in the eyes of many Native Americans, akin to a terrorist organization (Dann). American terrorism has also extended its sweaty little white, blue and especially red stained hands into the collective and individual identities of Native Americans, as expounded in their literature.
In “Blue Winds Dancing” Thomas S. Whitecloud discusses the plight of a Chippewa trying to identify and survive in white American culture. He describes the differences between his home and the strange place that is white America, as well as the different parts of himself that are torn in the direction of both:
That land which is my home! Beautiful, calm—where there is no hurry to get anywhere, no driving to keep up in a race that knows no ending and no goal. . .no hysterical preparing for life until that life is half over; no anxiety about one's place in the thing they call society. (Whitecloud)
After being exposed to white American culture, the narrator is able to see its effects on his soul, his identity. He is drawn to the American culture, he sees education as a way of creating for himself an identity, rather than having an identity imposed upon him. However, the intrusive and strange nature of the American educational system and culture are too much for him to handle; he can not keep up “this bluff of being civilized” (Whitecloud).
“Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Ever Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock” by Sherman Alexie discusses the distortion of Native American culture and identity by white America. In the story, the narrator's father says “After all the shit I'd been through I figured Jimi must have known I was there in the crowd to play something like that. It was exactly how I felt” (Alexie). The narrator's father is able to connect with and understand Henrix's version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Hendrix played the song in protest against the American Government and used heavy, angry distortion while performing and bent notes so far and for so long that his guitar sounded like it was crying. The Native American can sympathize with this, because they too know what it is like to be oppressed and distorted by the American Government. We can see the results of this in the battered, split and mangled identity of the father in this story. His wife says of him, “Your father was always half crazy. And the other half was on medication” (Alexie).
This distortion and projection of European prejudice onto the Native American race has been occurring ever since we first set foot on North American soil. White America has invented the Native American race as an inferior, uncivilized savage so that it can easily obtain dominance over them economically, socially and politically. Despite mythical talk of progress, this attitude remains today. When Lyman and his brother are dancing around and yelling “Crazy Indians!” in Louise Erdrich's “The Red Convertible” what we see are two utterly and hopelessly lost human beings, lost in the tangled web of distorted identity, intricately woven by that greedy little beady-eyed American spider.
The plight of the Asian American is somewhat different from that of the African American and the Native American in that “America” was not forced upon the Asians. Asian immigration was of their own accord, and this factors into how their very different racial attributes have affected their formation of identity in America. As seen in “Half and Half” from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Asian American identity is, as suggested by the title, split between Asian-ness (which they know and are used to) and American-ness. This American-ness does not come easy. The narrator, while discussing a family trip to the beach says, “We were all blind with the newness of this experience: a Chinese family trying to act like a typical American family at the beach” (Tan). Asian writers seem to be profoundly conscious of the fake aspects of American culture: of how we are all, especially ethnic Americans (who are more aware of it), pretending to be American by trying to live up to the many mythical and unreachable American ideals. In this way, Asian American identity is affected by their race: in order to assimilate and have a shot at success in America, they must, in a sense pretend to be something they are not.
Another Chinese writer, Maxine Hong Kingston, similarly explores the place of the first generation Chinese woman in America in her story “No Name Woman.” Like Tan, she recognizes the “invisible” things to which Americans try to live up to, the unattainable goals toward which we strive, and looks at the effects this condition has on the identity of Chinese in America:
Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert the brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America. (Kingston)
This touches not only on how one builds up an identity based upon the place he or she wishes to—or perhaps more precisely for ethnic Americans, forced to—inhabit in his or her culture, but also the split in their identity as created by being raised by an entirely different generation: their parent's were molded and hardened by an entirely different world, and an entirely different set of experiences. Second and third generation Chinese, like so many other second and third generation ethnic groups living in America, are forced to recognize the split in themselves between old world and new world, and often are forced to choose which one best suits them. However, it is the psychological and emotional problems that arise from this very split that often, as expressed in ethnic American literature, makes the choice so hard to make.
The exploration by ethnic American writers of identity is vital to the growth and survival of these groups in this country. The very act of writing gives them the opportunity to create for themselves some sense of identity rather than having their identity created for them by dominant cultural forces. By telling stories about their struggles, especially the struggle of overcoming racial prejudices, ethnic American writers are enabling themselves find a place in American culture and by having these stories read and recognized, they are chipping away at the cement foundation of the construction of racism in America and attempting to alleviate the pain and struggle caused by it—the same pain and struggle from which their stories have sprung.
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