Fashioning Black Cultural Identities to Resist Western Precepts: A Comparative Study of Aimee Cesaire’s a Tempest, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain

Abstract

No doubt, the theme of colonialism and slavery permeate many of the works of black playwrights of African Diaspora. In various ways, these playwrights preoccupy themselves with subverting the effects of colonialism and the slave trade. In this study, I investigate the strategies these playwrights deploy in forging a distinct black cultural identity to counter western precepts imposed through colonialism and slave trade. How have these playwrights, in the words of Olaniyan (1995), tackled ‘Euro-American cultural hegemony on black cultural identity in particular’ (6). By examining plays from three different countries of African diaspora, this study investigates the forms of Euro-American cultural hegemony that exists in these countries and the forms of resistance these playwrights mount against the imposed western cultural identity. Also, implicitly implied in this study, is the exploration of the simultaneous affirmation of the sameness and difference of black culture because as Olaniyan reminds us, these cultures are ‘diverse but not completely alien to one another’ (6). In that regard, how does these plays mediate the diversity but not outright difference of black cultures.

Olaniyan (1995) situates the emergence of black dramatic culture in the Caribbean and the United States in what he calls the ‘representation of representation’ (16). The former in the Trinidadian carnival (camboulay) and the latter in black face minstrelsy. Both dramatic forms involve the whites “performing” as blacks. Olaniyan notes that black face minstrelsy flourished between the early 19^th century and the 1920’s and it involves white entertainers blackening up their faces with exaggerated makeup and outlandish costumes ‘to represent what they consider black “peculiarities,” to the hilarity and delight of their equally white audience’ (13).  In the same vein, camboulay, – the Trinidadian Carnival – also features the ‘pillars of the society’ that is, the ‘white planter aristocrats and overseers’ doing a parodic appropriation of the culture of their slaves. This includes as Olaniyan reveals ‘caricaturing the slaves themselves and performing slave dances and songs, to the rhythm of “African drums”’ (15). Apparently, slavery is the facilitating context of both camboulay and the black face minstrelsy. The origins of these shows can also be traced to the white man having fun at the expense of the degradation the black body and its culture. Despite these overlapping similarities, some differences are noticeable. As Olaniyan reminds us, unlike black face minstrelsy that later became commercialized, the Trinidadian Carnival never did. Also, social revolution sweeping across the Americas by mid-19^th century ‘democratized’ these shows. Blacks and former slaves were able to participate in camboulay and black face minstrelsy in the Caribbean and, United States respectively. According to Olaniyan, ‘Unlike minstrelsy, however, what was caricatured in camboulay was not the slaves’ so-called peculiarities but their response to a particularly agonizing moment of labor’ (16). It is worth noting that the peculiarities that the whites perform in black face minstrelsy are gross oversimplification and essentialization of black humanity deduced from the unequal contact between black and white people within the context of slavery. What, within the context of Middle-East, Edward Said calls Orientalism.  This act of black continuing to perform what has been performed about them is what Olaniyan refers to as ‘representation of representation.’ Clearly, in the United States and the Caribbean, blacks did not have active agency in the formation of their own cultural identity or the way they were represented – blacks were spoken for and about.

The late African-American historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, W.E.B DuBois’s famous phrase “About us, By us, For us, and Near us” stands out among various voices that fashions out rubrics that should guide theatrical representation of blacks in the United States. Likewise, the Caribbean postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon (1961), discusses how a black national culture is important in reversing the dehumanizing colonial representation of black people. ‘A national culture,’ Fanon argues is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence’ (210). Fanon recognizes the similarities that exist between black people but for national culture to be effective in its combative intent, specificity to individual nations is crucial. An example he gives to substantiate this is the difference in the dynamics of challenges confronting the blacks in the United States and those in Africa during the 60’s when he was writing. For Fanon, national culture must counter the white man’s pre-colonial barbaric black history and must rescue this history from distortion, disfiguration and destruction. It must also be able to incite action. He writes: ‘The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (210).  Otherwise, in Fanon’s estimation, not following up the words with the action merely amounts to making ‘comparisons between coins and sarcophagi’ (211). He conceives culture and its representation not as a codified entity, but what needs constant revision, and update, while staying true to the mission of reviving devalued pre-colonial history of the black race engendered by colonial activities. Hence, in Fanon’s words, ‘the intellectual often runs the risk of being out of date’ because, ‘in an underdeveloped country, during the period of struggle, traditions are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies’ (209). This constant revision that Fanon espouses strike resemblance with W.E.B Dubois calls “double-consciousness.” That is, the identity of an African-American is an amalgamation of both his African and American roots.

This logic of constant revision lies at the core of conceptual paradigms of cultural identity and difference Olaniyan (1995) proposes. For him, cultural identity in African, African-American, and Caribbean drama is either ‘expressive’ or ‘performative.’ For expressive identity, ‘society itself is taken as given, preconstituted’ while in performative identity, society as a ‘unitary entity is discarded for mutually impinging social networks of differing scales relating to different types of power – political, military, ideological, or economic’ (31).  According to him, the claims of expressive identity are rigid and ‘oftentimes unexamined ethnocentric biases’ while that of performative identity ‘is a self-critical model that conceives identity as open, interculturally negotiable, and always in the making – a process’ (4). He makes a distinction on how both cultural identities conceive society. He goes on to explain how some gaps in the assumption of the performative necessitates his proposal of ‘an enabling performative as ‘articulation.’” ‘This articulation,’ he says, is ‘not only nonessentialist in its insistence on an abrasion of histories but also emphasizing, as an articulated structure, interactional levels of subordination and the existence of power within, between, and among cultures and cultural forms, structured as they are, in dominance’ (5). He goes on to apply these conceptual paradigms to understand the invention of cultural identities in his site of analysis: the drama of the African, African-American, and the Caribbean people. His analysis shows how the dramatic imagination of the playwrights he investigates vacillate between the performative and expressive identity although, one form is more dominant. It should be noted that implied implicitly in these conceptual paradigms is the subversion of West’s cultural hegemony over black people even though as Olaniyan points out that ‘performative identity is not inherently and automatically insurgent or anti-imperialist’ but ‘effective forms of these struggles are hardly conceivable without it’ (36). This is because in conceptualizing society and culture where ‘more productively resistant, insurgent identities could be thought and fashioned,’ performative identity is useful in ‘subverting expressivity in its different forms: either as singular rationality proposed by the Eurocentric discourse or as unnegotiable autonomy put forward by the extreme relativism of Afrocentric cultural nationalism’ (37). While the objective of both the expressive and performative  remains to counter the subhuman identity that the West foisted on the black people through slavery and colonialism, a major difference between both models is that while performative identity acknowledges the contact between the histories of the colonialized and the colonial powers, expressive identity stays rigid in its historical claims to the point of romanticizing it.  I shall apply these two conceptual paradigms to analyze Aimee Cesaire’s A Tempest, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain. Determining the cultural identity fashioned in these works will illuminate our understanding on how these playwrights were able to mount resistance against western precepts that stifles the flourishing of their humanity. Just like Olaniyan points out in his analysis, the playwrights examined in this study also vacillates between the expressive and performative identity although one form of cultural identity is more dominant. I argue that dominantly Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain articulates performative identity while Aimee Cesaire’s A Tempest occupies a more ambiguous position. He vacillates between both forms of identities and I argue that his work is hard to be subsumed neatly under a specific paradigm although, he projects most of the qualities of the performative.