In Search of Africa

Manthia Diawara

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780674004085, 9780674446113
• eBook ISBN: 9780674262980
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

"There I was, standing alone, unable to cry as I said goodbye to Sidimé Laye, my best friend, and to the revolution that had opened the door of modernity for me--the revolution that had invented me." This book gives us the story of a quest for a childhood friend, for the past and present, and above all for an Africa that is struggling to find its future.

In 1996 Manthia Diawara, a distinguished professor of film and literature in New York City, returns to Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country. He is beginning work on a documentary about Sékou Touré, the dictator who was Guinea's first post-independence leader. Despite the years that have gone by, Diawara expects to be welcomed as an insider, and is shocked to discover that he is not.

The Africa that Diawara finds is not the one on the verge of barbarism, as described in the Western press. Yet neither is it the Africa of his childhood, when the excitement of independence made everything seem possible for young Africans. His search for Sidimé Laye leads Diawara to profound meditations on Africa's culture. He suggests solutions that might overcome the stultifying legacy of colonialism and age-old social practices, yet that will mobilize indigenous strengths and energies.

In the face of Africa's dilemmas, Diawara accords an important role to the culture of the diaspora as well as to traditional music and literature--to James Brown, Miles Davis, and Salif Kéita, to Richard Wright, Spike Lee, and the ancient epics of the griots. And Diawara's journey enlightens us in the most disarming way with humor, conversations, and well-told tales.

SITUATION III

MALCOLM X: CONVERSIONISTS VERSUS CULTURALISTS

Culture, defined as a whole way of life, is that which the traveler both brings to a destination and carries back home, in altered form, from the place visited. In other words, cultures and their attendant modes of dress, names, customs, and ideologies are always influenced by commercial, religious, and political relations between inside and outside. This broader definition of culture, which animates the best works in contemporary cultural studies, is eclipsed in black studies by a narrower, purist definition which sees culture as a people’s nostalgic relation to images of themselves, or as the best achievements and thoughts of a people. Furthermore, black intellectuals, be they apostles of Afrocentricity, black conservatism, Islam, or liberation theology, tend to discredit and categorize as pathological certain cultural practices that challenge their ideal of blackness. I shall provisionally call “culturalists” those practitioners who work with the broader definition of culture, and “conversionists” those who regard culture as an elitist and exclusionary domain.

Here we will look at black conversionist and culturalist discourses, and their relation to life issues, politics, and economics as depicted in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. Conversionists and culturalists have long been fighting a custody battle over the first part of the book, which includes such pivotal chapters as “Homeboy,” “Harlemite,” “Detroit Red,” and “Hustler.” Despite the conversionist discourse in the second half of the book, which warns the reader against embracing the early chapters, these constitute the appeal of the book today, giving significance to inner-city youths’ identification with Malcolm X as a “homeboy,” and making “Detroit Red” the archetype of rap songs and black male films of the 1980s and 1990s. A culturalist reading, which resists the second half’s definition of the first part of the book as black pathology, is better able to account for the popularity of Malcolm X among today’s youth, who see their own lives mirrored in the experience of Detroit Red, Malcolm X’s young self.

What fascinates readers in the Autobiography is its detailed description of black life in Harlem, particularly the nightlife. Malcolm X presents Harlem in the 1940s in a cultural, political, and economic setting. Harlem’s nightlife attracts not only blacks but also World War II soldiers, whites from midtown, and tourists. The fact that audiences form around the black good-life institutions (clubs, bars, theaters, dance halls) and entertainers in Harlem evokes concern for the stability of traditional black-white relations during a climate of war. In the text, Harlem’s culture defies the ban on interracial relations and subverts the code of morality imposed on black and white soldiers during World War II.

Crucially, Detroit Red’s relation to and fascination with this black culture of Harlem, the way in which he views and takes pleasure in its institutions and entertainers, enable the reader to identify with him and the text in ways that are not convincingly deconstructed in the latter part of the Autobiography.

The Conversionists

How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there simply lost in admiration of my hair now looking “white,” reflected in the mirror in Shorty’s room.

—The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Conversionist discourses deploy narratives about the worst sinners to justify the need for transformation. At the end of the chapter entitled “Caught,” Malcolm X confesses: “I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven’t done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was” (Malcolm X and Haley, 1992: 150). Malcolm X tells the story of his depravities, which lead to his discovery of Allah and the religion of Islam. He presents the narrative as proof that he has been there, so to speak, down with the rest of the people, and that they, too, can join him on the other side. He states that, once motivated, “no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that” (261). The difficulty of conversion is not emphasized here; Malcolm X stresses only the superiority of his new world over the old one. Conversionist discourses, whether motivated by religion, science, or politics, always underestimate culture or liken it to pathology. Conversionists, whether politicians or religious leaders, build their audiences by blaming the culture of the people they are trying to convert. They always expect people to achieve a revolutionary consciousness or a spiritual awakening and walk out of their culture, shedding it like a shell or a cracked skin, in order to change the world.

The rhetoric of the second half of the Autobiography seems to move too rapidly to its conclusion, condemning black culture with the demise of Detroit Red. Malcolm X uses alienation as an analytic tool for disparaging the Harlem culture which he describes so well in the first part of the book. He shows Detroit Red’s transformation from observer of culture to participant, presenting black people’s consumerism and their relation to style as major manifestations of estrangement. Malcolm X’s charge that “conked” (straightened) hair is an expression of black people’s unnatural desire to look “white” (54) is consistent with other conversionists’ views on the subject, and it informs the decision by many black youths to abandon conked hair for “natural” styles such as the Afro.

Malcolm X also detects symptoms of alienation in the way in which black people buy products: “I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was ‘sharp.’ My knob-toed, orange-colored ‘kick-up’ shoes were nothing but Florsheims, the ghetto’s Cadillac of shoes in those days. (Some shoe companies made these ridiculous styles for sale only in the black ghettoes, where ignorant Negroes like me would pay the big-name price for something that we associated with being rich.)” (78).

The metamorphosis from Detroit Red to Malcolm X requires the protagonist of the Autobiography to deny a part of himself for every piece of knowledge he gains from the Nation of Islam: “‘You don’t even know who you are,’ Reginald said. ‘You don’t even know, the white devil has hidden it from you, that you are of a race of people of ancient civilizations, and riches in gold, and kings. You don’t even know your true family name, you wouldn’t recognize your true language if you heard it” (160). Conversionists of the religious or political kind are particularly prone to self-denial. At one point, in Ghana, at a party given in his honor, Malcolm X says to his hosts: “You wonder why I don’t dance? Because I want you to remember twenty-two million Afro-Americans in the U.S.!” At the same time, he tells the reader: “But I sure felt like dancing! The Ghanaians performed the high-life as if possessed. One pretty African girl sang ‘Blue Moon’ like Sarah Vaughan. Sometimes the band sounded like Milt Jackson, sometimes like Charlie Parker” (358).

Through conversion, Malcolm X not only attempts to abandon expressive styles in language, dress, and hair associated with black ghetto life; he also speaks of Detroit Red as if he were a different person: “I still marvel at how swiftly my previous life’s thinking pattern slid away from me, like snow off a roof. It is as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime. I would be startled to catch myself thinking in a remote way of my earlier self as another person” (170). Malcolm X associates Detroit Red with death and now thinks of him as a menace to society: “Awareness came surging up in me—how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, a flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum” (287).

The first part of the Autobiography is carefully crafted to lead up to Detroit Red’s transition from unemployed hick to hustler to hardened criminal and drug addict. Even the sequence of chapter titles—“Detroit Red,” “Hustler,” “Trapped,” “Caught”—presupposes an inevitable descent that, for Malcolm X, can be reversed only through conversion: “Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society when—soon now, in prison—I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life” (150). Malcolm X attempts to account for the rough edges in the text, such as the places where the reader identifies with Detroit Red’s love for black culture, by assimilating them to a state of alienation. Against Detroit Red, he asserts that “what makes the ghetto hustler yet more dangerous is his ‘glamour’ image to the school-dropout youth in the ghetto” (311).

Toward the end of the first part of the Autobiography, Detroit Red sinks to the bottom, and the narrator with him, as if black culture has died with them. The black cultural figure most vividly present in the chapter entitled “Trapped” is Billie Holiday, whose end as a drug addict bears a strong resemblance to Detroit Red’s last days in Harlem. It is interesting from a stylistic standpoint that Malcolm X and Alex Haley put Billie Holiday and other tragic figures at the end of the first part of the book. Presenting culture as a dead end helps the conversionists’ case. Malcolm X traps Detroit Red in a hole and leaves him no choice but to convert, inducing the reader as well to identify with the sermon of change. Crucially, when Detroit Red returns to Harlem as Malcolm X, he wants to change it completely. This occurs at the time the jazz clubs are moving from Harlem to 52nd Street, leaving hustlers and prostitutes without jobs.

Malcolm X makes an important contribution to the art of autobiography by exploring the alienation which enables him to distance himself from Detroit Red. Malcolm X often refers to Detroit Red as another person—a stylistic device that generates an autobiographical text in the form of a sermon. Malcolm X and Alex Haley have shaped the Autobiography as a preacher would a sermon. They do not intend the reader to be entertained by Detroit Red’s story; they want the reader to understand the symbolism behind it and take it as a lesson. With Malcolm X and Alex Haley, autobiography ceases to be an intimate and personal story, and becomes a public and conversionist essay.

The frequent reference to change in conversionist discourse echoes the modernist impulse toward constant renewal. Every conversionist discourse addresses an epistemological crisis which requires the author’s contemplation for a solution. Malcolm X’s autobiography includes moving scenes in which he ponders situations of crisis and imagines ways of getting out of them. Such reflections always mark him as an outsider to culture, a philosopher burdened with the desire to change things, a utopian reconstructionist.

The most widely quoted lines from the Autobiography dealing with an epistemological crisis come at the point where Malcolm’s English teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, tells him: “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” (36). In this passage, the young Malcolm is asked to accept a stereotype of himself and his people as a reality. Malcolm’s reaction to it sums up why young blacks call into question the fairness of the system and identify with a lawbreaker ideology, through which they feel that they can overcome the obstacles placed in front of them by the likes of Mr. Ostrowski.

But for me, Malcolm X describes his distress at epistemological crises more effectively when he delineates them as a coming-to-consciousness from a state of innocence, a process by which new knowledge displaces business as usual and enables forward movement. These are the moments of discovery in the Autobiography, moments when Malcolm X is with a group but feels lonely, lost in contemplation of a better future for black people. For instance, there is a lovely passage in the opening chapter of the book where Malcolm X reflects about the satisfaction he derives from working in the family garden: “I loved especially to grow peas. I was proud when we had them on our table. I would pull out the grass in my garden by hand when the first little blades came up. I would patrol the rows on my hands and knees for any worms and bugs and I would kill and bury them. And sometimes when I had everything straight and clean for my things to grow, I would lie down on my back between two rows, and I would gaze up in the blue sky at the clouds moving and think all kinds of things” (8).

The clouds moving on the horizon are leitmotifs for change in the Autobiography. For instance, years later, during his trip to Mecca, Malcolm X thinks of his break with Elijah Muhammad and pictures his new predicament using the sky as a setting: “I remember one night at Muzadalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land—every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike—all snored in the same language” (344). The leitmotif occurs for the third time when Malcolm X returns to the States: “I remember there in the holy world how I used to lie on the top of Hector’s Hill, and look up at the sky, at the clouds moving over me, and daydream, all kinds of things. And then, in a funny contrast of recollection, I remember how years later, when I was in prison, I used to lie on my cell bunk—this would be especially when I was in solitary: what we convicts called ‘The Hole’—and I would picture myself talking to large crowds” (365).

Malcolm X makes this last allusion to the sky and clouds in 1965. The epistemological crisis in question concerns how to build a black nationalist organization that would welcome Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists. As Malcolm X puts it at the time: “I have friends who are called capitalists, Socialists, and Communists! Some of my friends are moderates, conservatives, extremists—some are even Uncle Toms! My friends today are black, brown, red, yellow, and white!” (375).

Malcolm X was a complex man who constantly revised his thinking. As the recurrence of cloud and sky imagery shows, he was very American in his dreams: he was impatient with the obstacles placed in front of black people. Like the Founding Fathers, he was prepared to remove these obstacles by any means necessary in order to move ahead, toward better and better societies. Malcolm X was also a modernist, as revealed in the way he used cloud imagery to reflect his concerns, and in the way he kept revising his style in order to build larger audiences for his ideas.

Other conversionists since Malcolm X have resorted to Marxism, Afrocentrism, liberation theology, and black nationalism as frameworks for the construction of a public sphere among black people. In fact, Malcolm X’s Autobiography stands out as an inspiration for these conversionist schools, with its detailed discussions of identity politics, class struggle, black self-determination, and religion. Conversionists continue to ring the wake-up bell for black people, and—much in the manner of Malcolm X (312–314)—to treat black culture as pathology.

Yet there is a good deal of evidence that Malcolm X the modernist feels ambivalent about his thoroughgoing embrace of a conversionist stance. He emphasizes in the Autobiography that his success as a public speaker depends on the fact that he is a “homeboy” who “never left the ghetto in spirit, . . . [who] could speak and understand the ghetto’s language” (310), and who has been schooled as a hustler like most ghetto kids (296). But one could argue that Malcolm X’s purist philosophy is too demanding, in the sense that it incorporates only black people who have left their culture behind. Malcolm X’s philosophy in the second part of the Autobiography does not, to borrow an expression from a critic of the Black Arts movement, “address itself to the mythology and life style of black people” (Harper, 1996: 46). Malcolm X himself repeatedly ponders the shortcomings of his purist philosophy: “my old so-called ‘Black Muslim’ image kept blocking me” (375); “Numerous people said that the Nation of Islam’s stringent moral restrictions had repelled them—and they wanted to join me” (316). Still, Malcolm X remains a conversionist who believes that “it was a big order—the organization I was creating in my mind, one which would help to challenge the American black man to gain his human rights, and to cure his mental, spiritual, economic, and political sicknesses” (315). But the conversionists of today are the culturalists of tomorrow.

Culturalists

Then, suddenly, we were in the Roseland’s jostling lobby. And I was getting waves and smiles and greetings. They shouted, “My man!” and “Hey, Red!” and I answered, “Daddy-o.”

—The Autobiography of Malcolm X

There is another way to look at the epistemological crisis Malcolm X shared with other black people, without reverting to a view of black culture as pathology. This demands a partisan identification with culture, a belief that culture knows and that it can be channeled to create and capitalize on epistemological breaks. My culturalist approach stipulates that—contrary to the conversionists’ view of “authentic black culture” as an emanation of the church, or of a true revolutionary consciousness, or of a separatist gesture toward Africa—black religion, revolutionary theories, and political economy are all specific expressions of black culture.

The view that conversionist discourses are but enunciations of particular aspects of black culture enables us, first of all, to distinguish culture from its particular manifestations in the church, the arts, and politics. I shall define “culture” here as a way of life aimed at producing the black good life. A major part of black culture in America is created through attempts to liberate everyday life from colonizing systems. Blacks often derive the good life by systematically reversing the signification of the institutions built against them. They test the limits of modern institutions for inclusion and emancipation of multicultural ways of life. Hence, black culture is the last frontier of American modernism.

Second, a view of culture as that which encompasses the church, the black nationalist tradition, and other ideological movements not only liberates us from the monopoly that these institutions place on black culture, but also legitimizes other elements of culture such as economic narratives, art in the context of international politics, and other cultural forms engendered through black people’s relation to more and more com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Situation I. Sartre and African Modernism
• Situation II. Richard Wright and Modern Africa
• Situation III. Malcolm X: Conversionists versus Culturalists
• Situation IV. Homeboy Cosmopolitan
• References
• Index