FROM THE LEGENDARY “NO” OF ROSA PARKS TO BARACK OBAMA’S VICTORIOUS “YES WE CAN”: THE IMPORTANCE OF ABSENCES AND “NO”S IN THE BLACK AMERICAN SENSIBILITIES

What is freedom but an absence of bondage? Freedom is the ability to have a voice. Freedom is to say ‘No’ to segregation, to oppression, to abnegation. Most of all, freedom is to be visible. Freedom is to exist. From Rosa Park’s legendary ‘No’ to Barack Obama’s victorious ‘Yes We Can’: Black America has traveled from the ghettos of oblivion to the centre stage and the rightful place of equality. But this visible presence is the answer to the ages of absence and invisibility. Black is not the absence of white, Black is indeed beautiful. This colour blindness is the result of the innumerable years of non-existence.

Surrounded by a crowd of people, the Blacks were sold as slaves at the auction blocks. From the podium surrounded by a multitude of people, Martin Luther King Jr. people proclaimed: ‘I have a dream’. On 20^th January, 2009 Barack Obama proved ‘Yes We Can’ from this very symbolic position of the podium surrounded by the world.

But the visible site of power is not what defines the ‘soul’ of Black America, rather the absent voices do. It is the gaps in the history that heralded this change. It is the ‘No’s of the past that made this possible. The visibility might fade but the invisibility never does.

This paper intends to portray the importance of absence and ‘No’ in the Black American sensibility. For ages, Blacks were not seen as rightful citizens but rather as “trespassers of humanity”, as Toni Morrison notes in her novel “Beloved”. They were absent. They were invisible. Their language was seen as inferior. And their culture as no culture at all. ‘That invisibility to which I refer’, explains the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, ‘occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I came in contact.’ Invisibility is the absence of a social identity whereby the Black is not ‘seen’ by others (even by those of his own race) because of the colour of the skin. So ‘black’ becomes a commodity to be bartered, traded and sold. Not only as physical objects but also as a symbol. Black exists as a symbol but still remains invisible as a being. The Black in Invisible Man thus becomes a Black American Everyman. This paper would try to point out the different zones of invisibility and absences and the importance of them in the Black American sensibility.

Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and thereby declaring freedom for four million black slaves. On July 2, 1964 the Comprehensive Civil Rights Act was passed. During this 101 years one event altered American perception forever. This was the simple utterance of a “No” by Rosa Parks. She refused to follow the discriminatory practice of segregation on public transport. This simple act fueled the resistance movement further. The local chapter of the National association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a boycott of the city buses that lasted for more than a year. It ended with United States Supreme Court order that the segregation on the buses was unconstitutional.

Blacks were made aware of a white ‘civilization’ that was in stark difference with their own. The domination and subjugation was on both body and mind. The Black suffered jailing and also socio-economic imprisonment of life in ghettos. Black was portrayed as an absence of white. The absence of purity and goodness was equated with Black. Thus, the very skin colour became synonymous with evil. The colour in itself began to be portrayed as the absence of values and principles that the white held pious and moral. Stephen E. Henderson in his essay, “Survival Motion: A Study of the Black Writer and the Black revolution in America” argues that “Western religion, western iconography, western symbolism, all conspire to create black self-hatred, black self-denial, black slavery.” This systematic subjugation of the Black culture and abnegation of a Black history was countered not only with an attack at the concept of the superior white ‘civilization’ but more importantly by the search for a black identity. “Absence”, which was the very tool of subjugation was itself taken up to fight it. The idea was not to deny these absences but rather to overwhelmingly indulge in these. The values and principles which were seen as an antithesis of the white civilization and hence absent, were themselves used to portray a pan Black American identity.

Mercer Cook in the essay “African Voices of Protest” describes the impact of this search on the Black writer: “Taking the white man’s language, dislocating his syntax, recharging his words with new strength and sometimes with new meaning before hurling them back in his teeth, while upsetting his self-righteous complacency and clichés, our poets rehabilitate such terms as Africa and blackness, beauty and peace.” This was an affirmation of the negation. In Invisible Man, the ‘nameless’ hero confronts and accepts his blackness by eating a baked yam openly on the street. The hero exuberantly says: “I yam what I am”.

The Black rejected the White values, the rationalistic response to life. Feelings as the absence of rationalist thinking were held in high respect. The body became the unimportant aspect of the Black imagination. “Soul” was the “Black man’s thing”, as Henderson notes. Soul was the absence of any bondage. It was beyond the body and beyond the physical colour of the skin. Soul was truly the absence of any race. Soul was colour blind. Lerone Bennett describes the term as: “Soul is a metaphorical evocation… It is the feeling with which an artist invests his creation, the style with which a man lives his life. It is, above all, the spirit rather than the letter: a certain way of feeling, a certain way of expressing one-self, a certain way of being.”

Blacks had to prove that they existed and not only to the Whites but to themselves too. The slave narratives tried to write themselves into existence. They merged oral histories with emotive languages and situations to assert the equality and ‘differentness’ of Blacks and Black American way of doing and perceiving things.

During the Civil Right Movement, it became more important than ever to speak up and come out of the invisibility. The literature of this era was the written experiences of a cross-section of people who had their own special places and relationships within the movement. Stories of personal courage and heroism and personal memoirs were able to transform the microcosmic experiences to larger personification of whole classes and races. The struggle for civil rights was both an outward and inward directed movement. It was against the most recognized symbols of racism and it sought to convince the Black Americans of the righteousness of their cause. Antony Lewis wrote, “The real significance of the protest movement was psychological”. Writers created documents of the lived history.

The process of naming became the important way to fill the void of identity. Ambivalence towards names and naming become a touchstone in Ellison’s novel. In Ellison’s view “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are.” Invisible Man is “a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality.”

The story of Ellison’s protagonist is a search for an identity. The invisible man is driven by his quest to exist, to be visible. Throughout his life, he encounters figures of authority who impose fake names or unsuitable identities upon him. He realizes that to have a name meant to be present. The act of naming is linked inextricably to issues of power and control. The very act of telling this story is an attempt by the narrator to name himself. By narrating the story, the invisible man tries to be visible, to exist. He does not want to be absent any more. By linking the act of narration to the achievement of identity, Ellison places the protagonist in a tradition of Black American letters that originated with the slave narratives.

The protagonist’s sense of an identity is deeply connected with the approval of the White. To him, the opportunity to speak before “a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens” is “a triumph for community”. Seeing the mockery at the Battle Royal, he is repelled. But repelled not of the degrading match but because he resents to be associated with other black boys. The psychological subjugation makes him search for identity in the eyes of the Whites. He wants to fill his void. He learns that if he does what the world demands of him then he would get respect and acceptance. The narrator is in a constant search of a “usable past”. The novel attempts to construct its own universe.

The negative concord in the Black vernacular also shows the importance of negative in the speech of the Black Americans. The reason for this non-standard English was often portrayed by the Whites as an effect of cultural deprivation. The naïve view is that the nonstandard dialect simply have too many negatives. Historically-minded linguists and dialectologists point out that multiple negation is the traditional pattern and that the standard form is a rule imposed on English by grammarians in the 18^th century. The attack against cultural deprivation in the ghettos is overtly directed at family structures typical of lower-class families. The family structures of many black American households are female headed. The absent father figure is an unfortunate reality. Before emancipation the slaves were not even allowed to marry. But they were allowed to reproduce so that cheap labour was available for Whites. Thus the idea of a integrated family structure never was imbibed in the Black sensibility. The absent father figure remained an illusive influence on the Black American Children.

In the field of visual arts, the Black artists sought to create a balance between realism and abstraction. During the Word War II years the shift was from dominant Black figure portrayal to abstraction. The abstract and expressionist art at times had references to Africa, Black America and to the Civil Rights Movement. But basically the art was predominantly non-figurative and abstract.

Aaron Douglas’ paintings has strong presence of African motifs. The figures in the paintings would tend to break free. He was a Harlem painter and Harlem had a strong influence in his works. He uses images of Black myth and tradition. Sargent Claude Johnson’s sculptures like “Forever Free” is heavily influenced by Africa. He not only uses Egyptian motifs but also Egyptian method of preserving wood. Similarly Paul Hayden uses African motifs like masks but also juxtapose them with western symbols like cigarettes and chains. But other artists show a deliberate shift from the figures to the complete absence of them. Charles White shifted from figures to African signs and symbols. Artists started converting everyday incidents into abstractions. Mary Edmonia Lewis’ figures bears no resemblance of belonging to any particular race. Thus rather than the presence of the figure, the absence was portrayed on the canvas. They indulged in the absence and celebrated the absence. They removed themselves from the landscape. But abstraction made people uncomfortable and not just the Whites. The Blacks would search for Black American motifs in the paintings and the sculptures but would not be able to locate themselves in them. These artists celebrated a presence that need not be a physical one but beyond it. Many Harlem artists chose to speak through their works.

Harlem failed to bring the revolution it was credited with because it became too real and too present in the Black consciousness. Harlem became a physical reality. It became a symbol that was exploited by both the Whites and the Blacks. Blacks invested too much expectations out of Harlem. Harlem became over populated. Property rates reached sky high. The crime rate increased. Authors and thinkers became disenchanted with Harlem. The Whites found Harlem to be a convenient absence. The whole of Harlem became a ghetto that could be a mass segregation of the Blacks. It became a symbol that could be attacked and thus Harlem failed to realize the equality for all.

A recent controversy regarding an American newspaper cartoon raised the issue of racism. Barack Obama as the president of United States of America has become a symbol of power of Black America. He has become a convenient symbol of racial harmony. But by becoming a symbol of a community within the nation, it became a symbol that could be attacked. He has become a visible presence of a symbolic important stage in America. His presence will be exploited by both the Whites and the blacks.

I would conclude with the first paragraph of the prologue of Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.

[this paper was presented at the American Center, New Delhi during the celebration week marking the visit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to India]