We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
Ben Okri, The Famished Road
It is very recently that we have been blessed with notion of gender performativity (Citation required). Judith Butler has assigned a kind of fluidity to the nature of gender which is innately grown out of social norms and mores.
It is our shared observation that we develop our identity within a social system. It has numerous influences upon an individual or group of individuals shaping up an identity around a person. The debate of nature and nurture shall never cease as a primeval point of contestation. Whatever, which is being brought into the theoretical underpinnings is either a feel around deep-rooted malaise or grounded tales of sufferings and exploitation the hands of societal institutions.
The pro-profiteering elements of the society openly applying glass-ceiling tactics. The main reason behind such a discriminating tendency is mere a dismal belief that woman and the coloured are less productive and unskilled components of the workforce. A simple look at the composition of workforce would unravel the attitudinal unrest within subalterns whose disquiet has no voice among those who have control over society.
The glass-ceiling has a kind of invisibility, but it has become a besetting sin committed upon marginalized sections of the society.
In recent past, I have come across an article on LinkedIn, wherein the phenomenon of calling out truthful people as ‘difficult’ was debated in detail. The author who was also doctoral researcher contended that being black is a ‘tiring reality’.
The writer states an incident that her being a doctoral candidate was discredited with agonizing words, ‘“You don’t look like someone who would be educated”. It was utterly a shocking revelation for a scholar that she is coloured, so she is unlikely to be an educated woman.
When she inquired, ‘what educated people are supposed to look like?’
Upon this, he laughed awkwardly and in an apologetic manner he continued to express his open disbelief whether a black woman can be an educated person.
One wonders what other way he would have her to look like an educated person?
Being from marginalized section, any irritated and offended person can pose a question or disagree assuming nature of apathy. In every way, people assign us to otherness, when our smile, gesture and response has an opposition. Like black doctoral scholar, we even lose to put boundaries on our repeated disrespect.
It is absolutely unnecessary that one should linearly affirm what other people do think? Do act? And do speak? People are different. They have different perspectives to look into the things. They have different understanding of the situation they found themselves in? They have different opinion about things which prick them?
Identity of Goerge Floyd or Martin Luther King Jr. have distinctive nature because they have been under tremendous pressure and unbearable traumatization of centuries from enslavement to racial discrimination. The struggle of getting out of obscurity spanning across centuries is excruciatingly painful. Even people like Wole Soyinka observed that he needed to win a Nobel prize to come out of ‘anonymity’. He also lamented this fact that the accolade also forced demands and expectations upon him to attest the things which were more agreeable in nature to whole a lot of literati. He found himself in a hell-like situation. The differentiation was a unique aspect which was rewarded in order to ascertain new found world of ‘appropriateness’.
A universal identity of the black is recipe entailing the agonizing social pressures, roasting traumas and a fiery identity arising out of a brutal subjugation within manufactured social contexts. The march for a black woman towards transcendence from immanence was even more tiring reality. She could only dream about such a healthy prospect.
Coming back to theorization of Butler (1990, 1993), who sees performativity as identity, we may assign the practices centered around black bodies as their notional identity. However, there has been a debate around the notion of performativity of the black bodies.
Usually, we consider race as physical characteristics and temperaments that are hereditarily passed on from one generation to the next (Song, 2017). Apparently, it dismisses the ensuing contestation of performativity as identity. In reality, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks () offers epidermal schema attesting the epidermalization of inferiority. The blackness as a gestural, social and cultural phenomenon shall continue to gather the faults identified skin colour.
The prominent black activist and intellectual Cornel West perceives that the deep-seated feel of being worthless degenerates’ black’s search of an identity. Cornel West disapproves liberal defense of a society which has set the discrimination as a thing which requires to be taken for granted.
Our attitudes about others are stereo-typical. We dismiss others qualification, wisdom and experiences with unmatchable regret. This is sheer nonsensical behaviour of a society, which Cornel West has labelled as “color-blind” society. He wonders how people can confront an impasse in a society which has downgraded the Blacks (especially the black women) as a second-class citizen.
This nihilism is not a distinct identity of blacks. The oppressive trends, humiliation and disregard trickles down to marginalized people. The tiring struggle breaks the back bone of a subaltern. One just resigns one’s self to an ill fate.
Cornel West is not alone to highlight this depressing nihilism, the idea of never been in a state of uprising. Despite writing a magnum opus poem, ‘still, I rise, woman activist and poet like Maya Angelou herald an outcry in ‘All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes’.
I wonder whether the docility is an attribute. I wonder whether scriptures have been able to set a right path for human regard. From flesh trade to slavery, the weak, coloured people have become accustomed to all kinds of insults.
Maya Angelou laments,
Over the white seas
rime white and cold
brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus
bled her with guns.
That’s the region of suffering. Pain gets cultivated. And, we are taught to be patient, whereas, the guns keep on bringing the young’s down. The schooling, which has come from church teaching tolerance, is abominable. People were oriented with the utter helplessness.
From Martin Luther King Jr. to Tupac Shakur to Goerge Floyd, black lives constantly search for the solace. This search has pain and anguish as major ingredients.
Like Martin Luther King Jr., people like Tupac Shakur were discharged with the label of gangster. However, it never stopped them from ‘abjuration of American dream’.
He cracked,
“Because lady liberty is a hypocrite, she lied to me. Promised me freedom, education and equality.”
The struggle of black identity has facets. It has intellectual splendour in the shape of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West. It has an outcry in the shape of Maya Angelou who sings the songs of liberty and freedom while still being in a cage. It has youth fervor and renegade for so-called American dream in the shape of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dog. People who love to replenish the garbage, do criticize the black anger. They equate it with the hatred. However, it is an anger which has taken a shape of scholasticism, artistic veneer and sense of disgust for deprivation translated into rape songs.
Ben Okri is another writer who has preached the return to ancestors. Despite being an allegorical work, The Famished Road’ sees a hope in distress. The strange persuasion of return to roots apparently looks like a hallucinatory triviality.
Whatever, the black people are still marching for an invincible freedom, the one that which can not be taken away from them. They are fighting for a legitimate human grace. They are not a nihilistic race. They foster a abhorrence for the idea of enslavement which has kept them aloof, estranged and alienated from the pleasures of human existence. They are adamant to bring racism down to a deserved end.
