minority literatures[1]
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Mohammed Jhilila
Prof. Haddadi
Minority literature
03 April 2008
One of the immanent failings to understand what minority stands for, besides
misunderstanding it in juxtaposition with majority, is taking it as synonymous to ethnicity.
The two concepts do overlap at many instances but they are not equivalent; that is to say,
while ethnicity might include many minorities that are excluded from a given society, which
makes it inclusive to minority, minority can not always include all ethnicities. However, both
are considered as victims and of the contemporaneous millennium.
Poetry and all texts emerging from minorities are considered arts of the victims. Poetry
is, as William Wordsworth has defined, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and
for Thomas Hardy, anything different from words knitting. The poetic texts am going to deal
with is taken from the second perspective. Poetic texts have always been considered as
pleasurable genre, while, like any other texts, they are a reflection of the social, political and
the economic contexts the poet and the poems stem from. The African American literary texts
in this respect do not make any exception. The sociality, the politicity and the ecomonicity of
the texts understudy are, I deem, the best linchpin lenses through which we can read them.
Being a minority text entails a social fragmentation and may be even social exclusion.
Accordingly, careful reading is necessitated. Poetry is an allegorical and symbolic
(re)presentation of the whole tapestry it emerges from. Before taking the reading any further, I
need to make the distinction between both ethnicity and minority, if any, and how the two are
reproduced within the artefacts. The historical epoch in which the poets lived and produced
their texts is significant. The slogan of the coming paper will be always historicise as well as
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always politicise. Henceforth, the texts are dealt with as historical records and social mirror of
the general situation of the African American minority.
A minority is any group that lives in the margin of a given society. Because of its
particularities, it is not easily assimilated within the general social economic and political
environment. An ethnic is marked by its linguistic, cultural and even racial simulacra. Both
labels are featured by solidarity among their members. Yet, they are dichotomous because an
ethnic group can not always be marginalized as is the case of the minorities. The question of
identity is usually raised while studying or probing both categorizations. For Felix Geyer, a
minority is a normal consequence of the process of social change. Though this latter does not
link the term to migration, he stresses that alienation is the minorities pressing umbrella.
Melvin Seeman, totally opposing Geyer, structures five types and dimensions of alienation
that are the following: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social alienation, and
self-estrangement. Both minorities and ethnicities suffer some common features of alienation
that are powerlessness and social alienation if not also self-estrangement. In reading the
coming poems, my focus will be on the social alienation as well as powerlessness and how
they are reflected by the Harlem Poets. Seeman has later on added another feature of
alienation that is the cultural one. I will open a vantage, whenever necessary, to refer to the
cultural dimension of alienation. As it is mentioned in The Political Unconscious and
Alienation, Ethnicity and Postmodernism, one is not always conscious about his alienation; he
might be alienated but because of a false consciousness, would not experience it and would be
happy with his present situation.
Having settled the ground for the paper, I would like to investigate the experience of the
African American minority. Before Martin Luther Kings Negro American human rights
movement during the 1960s, the African originated Americans were socially and politically
negated accesses to many facilities and responsibilities that the rest were allowed in. long
before the Harlem movement, the Harlem renaissance took place. Yet alienation protracted.
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The African American alienation was a process and strategy rather than a microcosm of the
normal societal development. This can be read from Geyer who says: Alienation is a process,
although marked by a degree of stagnation of fixation, rather than a state1
In the collection of poems issued by the African American poets is mirrored, adamantly
and with little dexterity, the general experience suffered by the generation of the 1940s. In the
Babilon Revisited, Amiri Baraka tackles one of the most critical issues raised by researchers
concerned with minorities in multicultural studies. Migration and the African Negro Diaspora
in Europe and America are reflected through the first verses. For the poet, the discourse of
the savage other is the legend that these countries made use of to alienate him. The African is
depicted as a vampire who sucks the life of some unknown Niger. For Baraka, the African
mans name will be known but his substance will never. This leads me to Frantz Fanons
Black Skin, White Masks where the black is estranged psychologically by the white ideal
when he becomes not known even to him/herself. For Fanon, the black was taught to seek the
whiteness he will never achieve and to hate blackness which he can nere recuperate.
Alienation, in this respect, is not always strictly social it is also psychological. The African is
psychologically reduced to a mere phallus that seeks recognition that he finds in his sexual
intercourse with white women as it is expressed by Amiri when he says: to concern the white
stomach of maidens. The anima of the black man is a white girl as it is expressed by Frantz
Fanon when he says:
Who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves
that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like white man. I am a
white man2.
I was made a white man by lighter, white man talk says Amiri. This latter is a little bit
ambivalent in (UN) identifying himself with the African origins; in K ba, he says: we are
beautiful people with African imaginations and proudly refers to Africa yet he says later on
that Africa is a foreign place. For him, addressing his so called people as he use it.1 Felix Geyer, ed. Alienation, Ethnicity, and Postmodernism ( London : Greenwood Press, 1995) X.2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans, Charles.L. Markmann (New York : Grove Press, Inc, 1967) 63.
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Blacks are as any sad man here American. Here may be he is referring to the other
minorities like the Hispanic and the Irish.
Social alienation and powerlessness, in the case of the African American minority, is a
racially fuelled segregation. It is because of the accidental qualities that blacks were and are
his alienation. This identification for Hegel is an inward and outward accord that gives
ones people its identity: its language, rules, customs, practices and institutions. For Amiri
Baraka, the African American was dissocialized and disassociated from his African
environment and deprived of his language. In Monday in B-flat, the poet feels displaced
and experiences enmity by those who wont let you speak in your own language who
destroy your statues. Language is an important key-concept in the study of identity. The
transformation of which is led by the transformation of the vehicle through which all
societies transmit their cultural attributes and by the means of which they are affiliated into
their community. For Baraka, the host language ban [ned] the black from his omm bomm ba
boom. Paul Valery says that language is the god gone astray in flesh. For this latter,
language is the medium through which the world is expressed and possessed. This leads me
to the third space or "cultures-in-between" preached by Homi K. Bhabha. The African
American can be considered as a mimic man market by his movement to and fro, against and
pro, and not totally not partially African nor American. His status is not totally assimilated
within the American society nor totally dissimilated from his African origins. In this status as
Bhabha says: the observer becomes the observed and the partial representation rearticulates
the whole notion of identity and alienates it3.
The impasse of language use is critical; the Afro-American man can not speak his indigenous
vernacular and can not feel his identity in the learned English, he can not express himself
through another medium either. It is as Kafka puts it:
3 Robert Young, White Mythologies Writing History and the West(London & New York: Routledge, 1989) 147.
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Limpossibilit de ne pas crire, limpossibilit dcrire en
allemand, limpossibilit dcrire autrement4
The issue of language and identity is also surveyed by Joy Harjo but with much idiosyncrasy.
Being a women text takes the line of thoughts somewhere else. The poet raises the similarity
between the Indian and the black minority. The stereotypic image held about the Indian,
vociferously co-existing with animalistic features, is unveiled when the poet says: no one
knew her, the stranger whose tribe we recognized, her family related to deer the Indian and
the Black American suffer alienation through the stereotypic clishs through which they are
infiltrated in the western mind. They are also regarded as unchangeable entities that are
organised in fractions like tribes and sub-tribes. The African nigro is depicted the same way
being a buffalo-like. It is through these images that the two minorities are excluded by the
white ruling power causing a social illness that is prostitution. Both the Indian and the
African American resort to prostitute their bodies by as she says: dance(ing) naked in the
bar of misfits. Prostitution is a fruit of poverty and economic depression.
Broadly speaking, minorities and minor literature are considered as minor because of
the idea of the lack of agency and the absence of subjectivity, because of the use of the
language of the metropolis, deterritorialization, because their literature is considered as
essentially political and because a minor literary figure speaks to all intents and purposes on
behalf of his community. Because of these criteria a minority is always distinguished. It
remains necessary to mention that the question of representation remains questionable in all
cases and that minorities have always existed, but because of the fear of their extinction
under the power and the hegemony of the center, debates and symposiums are held for the
sake of achieving Ecology of cultures and languages.
4 Kafka, Pour Une Literature Mineure, ed, L. Touaf & S. Boutkhil ( Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Pres, 2006)
29.
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