Brown One Mother, Two Daughters the Afro-American and the Afro-caribbean Female Bildungsroman

One Mother, Two Daughters: THE AFRO-AMERICAN AND THE AFRO-CARIBBEAN FEMALE"BILDUNGSROMAN"Author(s): Geta LeSeurSource: The Black Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 2, THE BLACK WOMAN WRITER AND THE DIASPORA(March/April 1986), pp. 26-33Published by: Paradigm PublishersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067257 .

Accessed: 08/01/2015 15:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Paradigm Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Black Scholar.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 190.80.99.253 on Thu, 8 Jan 2015 15:54:24 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=paradigm

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067257?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


One Mother, Two Daughters:

THE AFRO-AMERICAN AND THE AFRO-CARIBBEAN

FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN byGetaLeSeur

of childhood are not new to any particular culture, nationality or ethnic

group. Despite the national origin of childhood experiences, each child's experience is unique because of several factors within that culture. Do an Afro-American child and a West Indian child share a similar history? Or is theirs simply a transplanted experience? To date, no one has pooled stories about growing up black in these two areas and dealt with them comparatively.

The slaves who were taken to the West Indies and the southern United States came mostly entirely from West Africa, so that James Baldwin, a Harlem black, and George Lamming, a racially mixed West Indian from Barbados, share a dim ancestry to Camará Laye from West Africa. If Poco- moania, Voodoo and Afro-Caribbean music have their sources in West Africa, why shouldn't literary sources be as clear? Both Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Lamming are writers in the European tradition, and the specific tradition of their first novels of childhood is the Bildungsroman.

Female writers Toni Morrison, Paule Mar- shall and Merle Hodge made major con- tributions to the genre because of their modes of telling stories of growing up female and black. By comparing and con- trasting the stories about boys growing up, with those about girls growing up both in the West Indies and the United States, some

GETA LESEUR holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University and is currently doing post-doctoral research on the Afro-Caribbean Bildungsroman at UC Berkeley.

interesting conclusions can be drawn. In all of these novels, race, color and class have an impact on the child's consciousness.

The West Indian novelist writes a Bil- dungsroman to recall childhood roots and to discover the truth about himself and his home, while the Afro-American novelist tends to use his experience in order to make a viable protest which is almost always about race, slave history and the white establish- ment as a whole. The West Indian writer's concern is for the child born into an isolated community and who grows up in a world influenced by European administrators. What happens to these children is the very subtle protest they project in their novels.

If one thinks of the autobiographical nature of the works of Maya Angelou, Louise Meriwether, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison, it can be seen that the female Bildungsroman has been launched. The traditional Bildungsroman prior to the 1960s was black on white, and dealt primarily with boys. With more novels being written about girls by women, it is now possible to raise some important questions.

Most West Indian writers do their writing and publishing from abroad because of the lack of sensitivity of their art at home. Living abroad but quarrying a West Indian sensibility and experience for the subject matter of her art, the "exiled" writer almost inevitably returns to a childhood scenario in her first few novels in order to discover a "lost domain," for the world of childhood retains the freshest images and the most deeply imprinted experiences of a native, landscape and sensibility. The need to look back, to

PAGE 26 THE BLACK SCHOLAR M ARCH/ APRIL 1 986



reassess one's childhood from the vantage point of maturity, is related to the writer's wish to establish an authentic basis of experience: to repossess or reinterpret a past that seems broken and fragmentary to the adult.

Afro- American writer experiences a different kind of exile. She is an exile

in her "own" country, and her motive for writing a Bildungsroman is not to rediscover a "lost domain" or recapture an "experience," but to expose those conditions which robbed her of a memorable and happy childhood. But while the black American writer's Bildungsroman becomes a platform for protest, the West Indian's operates out of the child's consciousness, thus she is primarily apolitical.

Black women writers in the United States and the Caribbean are beginning to utilize the Bildungsroman to tell their stories and their sister's stories. While there seem to be more female writers in America using the form, only Hodge, Edgell and Kincaid so far have written novels of girlhood in the West Indies. Jean Rhys who is a Creole does not use the form. It follows that there is a dearth of literature which deals with young girls growing up in the West Indies.

Mary Oliver (1949) by Mary Sinclair is a female European Bildungsroman but its plot has some interesting parallels with Toni Morrison's novels. The conjecture is that black women writers are conscious of the European tradition also. By age four Mary distrusts her mother, fears her father, loves and envies her brother. A psychology of association and memory of the brother's excessive regard for his mother is observed by Mary. This is also reminiscent of the reverse relationship between Selina Boyce and her father Deighton in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). The story traces the development of a sensitive intellec- tual family in a provincial town. The protagonist, Mary, wins psychological deliver- ance by the discovery and affirmation of herself by sorting out her memories through the novelistic form.

This sorting out is almost impossible for the black girl in the United States. What does

it mean to be a poor black girl in the United States? Popular studies have consistently maintained that the formation of the self in the black child presents a major problem because of the great influence of oppression. The "black" self hatred or negative self- image thesis has become so popular that novelists like Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks have written about it well. Morrison's Pecola, who embraces white role models, experiences a total rejection of self. It is inescapable for blacks who are born into a society that makes such a strong distinction between white and black (and even light and dark skin shades within the race) to grow up without, at some point, entertaining feelings of inferiority because they are not members of the majority, the privileged group, which has attached a high premium to white skin. Morrison, in The Bluest Eye has as her main theme the idea of color and race as a detriment to acceptance in the American society. Even in Sula which is a more complex work, Sula could be forgiven all the wrong and cruel things she had committed, but her worst sin of all was sleeping with a white man.

LITERARY BRIDGE

Novelist Paule Marshall, whose parents

are Barbadian immigrants, is the bridge between the Afro- American and the Afro-Caribbean literary tradition. Her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones is a Bildungsroman which addresses the problem of dual cultures, American and West Indian. Her protagonist, Selina, is concerned with finding her indigenous origins. Selina has similar concern for roots, regardless of the fact that she lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has never been to the islands. Brown Girl, Brownstones is semi-autobiographical, and it is a unique contribution to the Bildungsroman because of its subject, which is what happens to transplanted emigrants and their off- spring, and how a poor, ethnic, emigrant child copes in the city. Marshall, like Morri- son, has used the form to tell the story of Selina Boyce, but unlike Morrison, her theme is not racial protest but survival via ethnic or cultural identity.

THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986 PAGE 27



Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones is different in several ways from most West Indian novels. First of all it is the story of West Indians struggling against the odds, not in the United Kingdom, but in the United States. Second, its author is a woman - a first-generation American born in Brooklyn of Barbadian parents. Third, its central character is a young girl, Selina, growing up in a Barbadian family. With the exception of Geoffrey Drayton in Christopher (1959) and to a lesser degree, George Lam- ming in In the Castle of My Skin, West Indian writers have not shown any willingness to develop the theme of childhood or adoles- cence for its own sake.

In the United States new West Indian immigrants encountered racism in various forms, including ostracism by American blacks . . . "Monkeychaser" was and still is a derogatory term used by American blacks for Afro-West Indians. These emigrants clung to each other, not unlike other emigrants from other countries. Stories from "back home" were told over and over again by the women who were mostly mothers and domestics. It was these stories with their solidly black base which laid the foundation for the sense of celebration evident in Marshall's stories. Recall, and the role of their past in the colorful oral language of these West Indian women, is what Selina, the main character, also heard as she grew up in Brooklyn or as her West Indian mother and friends called the United States, "this man country." Marshall says:

... I do not know that their need to establish a sense of themselves each afternoon by recalling their past life nurtured in me a desire to understand that combined heritage which was at once Afro- American, Afro-Caribbean and to a lesser degree American, that was mine . . . There was always the desire ... to bring together all the various strands (the word is synthesis) and thus make of that diverse héritage a whole . . . The personal quest became translated . . . into a belief that for black people to define themselves on our own terms we must consciously engage our past. . . .

is inevitable but unfortunate that the voice of the economically deprived and

socially depressed woman is little heard except through the mouthpiece of her liter-

ary sisters. This fault is not necessarily a function of the poorer woman's lack of education, for she is often as articulate and more literate than men in her class, but to hear her we have to draw out some of the main themes from the existing voices. Mor- rison has given many themes to attach to Pauline Breedlove in The Bluest Eye.

The situation of the black American woman has particular complexity because in most cases she lives in a society in which sexual and emotional relationships are intri- cately affected by the diversity and fragmen- tation of cultural patterns, by strong di- vergence between male and female motiva- tions and, most importantly, by economic needs and economic manipulations.

With the publication of The Bluest Eye and Sula, Toni Morrison had laid claim to a modern portrayal of a sensitive but rudely thwarted black girl in today's society. Maud Martha (1953) by Gwendolyn Brooks is semi- autobiographical and, though different from Morrison's The Bluest Eye, looks briefly at growing up black and female in America. Through her false belief that she has, in- deed, acquired blue eyes, beauty, Pecola escapes to the deepest isolation of all.

The damage was done total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. (p. 162)

For the community, Pecola's madness, coupled with her family history, excites scorn rather than sympathy. She becomes the scapegoat not merely for frustrated children, but for all of society. She assumes:

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us who knew her - felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplic- ity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health . . . Even her waking dreams we used to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength, (pp. 162-163)

The novel is effective because of the importance of its theme and the skill with which the inevitability of the failed initiation

PAGE 28 THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986



is developed through the compelling fore- shadowing encounters. This device keeps the story convincing even while distancing Pecola from the reader, perhaps the final dramatization of her hopelessness and her eventual ostracism from a society which would rather destroy than accept her.

Though the initiations of Sulk Peace and Nel Wright also fail, Sula differs from The Bluest Eye in both complexity and the assign- ment of responsibility. Here, while it is still made clear that Sula and Nel are under- valued and that their families contribute to the initiation failure, both girls made specific decisions and choices which also contribute. Pecola struggles with the fate assigned to her; Sula and Nel help to choose their fates.

BEAUTY AND LOVE THEMES

Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha is by no

means as rich, complex or as well developed as any of Toni Morrison's works. However, it deals with the similar themes of beauty, love, and what it means to be accepted fully or initiated properly into society as a whole. Brooks' work has no real plot, but is a sequence of vignettes which suggest a chronological progression from childhood to adulthood, from childhood to courtship to marriage, and from marriage to motherhood. The novel is a thinly dis- guised autobiographical account that depicts a young black woman in a ghetto, similar to the one in which Ms. Brooks grew up.

Maud is very aware of everything around her. She has an acute sense of male-female relationships and character and she feels inadequate because of her early insecurities at home. But she refuses to compromise in adjusting herself to certain jobs, ideas and functions. When she does have a sexual encounter, the boy is from a different background.

Maud's favorite flower is the dandelion because of its "everydayness" and "She saw that what was common could also be a flower." (p. 171) She sees herself as being nothing special, unpretentious and simple. Beauty for her is "only in the eye of the beholder." Thus she tries to cultivate those

THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986

traits which are more fundamental to one's basic relationship with others.

In Maud Martha, the female protagonist feels that the main reason for her deprived circumstances is her appearance. Her initiation is one of despair because she will never attain those things of value passed on to her through black culture, white society and her family. Brooks depicts a sensitive woman's grappling with the difficult problem of reconciling her human needs to be cherished, with society's preferences and insensitivity, which exclude her from its ranks.

Gwendolyn Brooks' novel is a novel of education with the larger elements of the autobiographical novel. Its true meaning for this context is the recognition of race, color, and sex as barriers to completeness in American society. It is a lesson which Maud Martha learns early.

The novels by Toni Morrison, Paule Mar- shall and Gwendolyn Brooks show that the passage into womanhood is marred by an overemphasis on sex, race, love and the importance of beauty. These things seem to be by-products of the American scene and its emphasis on physical characteristics as passports to some semblance of acceptance into the larger society. The Bluest Eye is effective because of the skill with which the inevitability of the failed initiation is developed. In Brown Girl, Brownstones, the immigrant experience was central to the initiation process. Two cultural traditions are at war in Selina and Silla Boyce.

Some problems facing Afro-American

and Afro-Caribbean women are not uni- versal but deal with the tragic consequences of prejudice, discrimination and the un- fulfillment of the "American Dream." Dis- crimination, stereotyping and poverty are part of the experiences of Pecola, Maud Martha and Selina Boycei The sense of "two-ness," of belonging to a minority group, and being female (or foreign as in Brown Girl, Brownstones) is shared by Afro- Ameri- can and Afro-Caribbean women. All of the young protagonists experience pain and only one (Selina) shows hope. All reveal

PAGE 29



anger, bitterness and frustration toward society even at a young age.

In recent years there has been an in- creased interest in the political and cultural life of the West Indies. By the same token, there has been a growing interest in the literature coming out of the area, as evidenced by the growing inclusion of Carib- bean literature in black studies courses. Although most West Indian writers are men, there are a few noteworthy West Indian women writers. Among them is Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), who was born on the island of Dominica and spent her youth there. Another is Sylvia Wynter, whose first novel is The Hilh of Hebron ( 1 962) .

WEST INDIAN WOMAN

A study of West Indian culture and litera- jTVture will reveal that women play a dominant role in that society. West Indian literature abounds with unforgettable female characters, but very few of the novels are about young girls or about girls growing up. However, the woman in the literature of the West Indies is multifaceted. Often she is portrayed as strong, indomitable, very ver- bose and fiercely loyal to her children and her man.

She is sometimes the butt of sexual ribald- ry, as evidenced in the oral literature of the calypso. Hence it is mainly through the eyes of the male creative artist that the West Indian woman has been portrayed. Some of these creations are stereotypes; some few are romantic versions, but many are bona fide, recognizable West Indian women. Two West Indian young women will be touched on: one, created by a woman writer, the other by a man.

Crick Crack Monkey (1970) was the only novel by an Afro-Caribbean, female writer in the Bildungsroman genre until the recent publication of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1983). Through the consciousness of Tee, a young girl who spends her first eleven years in a rural West Indian village. Al- though Claude McKay's Banana Bottom was published in 1933, it bears some looking at again because of McKay's interest in explor-

ing one's roots to declare identity, and the effect of the colonial culture on one's growth. When looked at against Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey, it becomes richer and more substan- tive because of the many issues McKay raises.

Bita Plant in Claude McKay's Banana Bottom and Tee in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey are from two different West Indian environments. Born in culturally and mater- ially impoverished worlds, they are either given the opportunity to leave the stultifying confines of their society, or seek a means of escape.

Although Bita Plant is older than the other protagonists in this paper (except for Sula), her initiation is important within the framework of her total development. Her initiation can be seen in three phases. Her first one in the West Indies was a negative and painful sexual encounter with a village eccentric. The rape certainly had to have been imprinted on her mind for a long time.

The second was the initiation into a new and foreign culture in England, which is synonymous with exile or isolation. The third is her return and integration back into her indigenous culture. Most blacks, like Bita, are forced to function and form images of themselves under the influence of a white society. Consequently, they must incorporate what is of value to them in the "White Western" culture into their black consciousness. For Bita, it is a question of integrating her black pride with her white education.

The tension created by the conflict be- #tween the Afro- West Indian's personal needs and the values of the adopted metropolitan culture forms the subject of Merle Hodge's novel, Crick Crack Monkey. The theme is not new; but, unlike the majority of other novels which direct the reader's attention to the cultural dilemma of the Afro- West Indian man, Crick Crack Monkey is one of a very small group which seeks to examine the reactions of the Afro- West Indian woman to the problem of cultural identification.

narrator of Crick Crack Monkey is a black West Indian girl, Tee. The narra-

tive covers the years of Tee's childhood. The nature of Tee's experiences suggests that, at




one level, Hodge intends her young narrator to function as representative of the West Indian people, few of whom are indigenous to the region. The novel opens with the death of Tee's mother, an incident which is immediately followed by her father's emigra- tion. These two events deprive Tee of her natural home and make her a type of castaway. The frequency with which the figure of the castaway occurs in West Indian literature is evidence enough of the general nature of the experience.

Tee moves in two worlds - the world of Tantie and the world of Aunt Beatrice - and these two worlds are bound together in a coherent and unified way by the response of the central character to the experience of both worlds. She (Tee) moves in a context in which there is strong opposition between certain social and cultural values, and as narrator, she recounts the intensely personal dilemmas of her life in that context.

This she does with a remarkable depth of insight and with a vivid evocation of childhood memories. The reader is made to share in the diversity and richness of Tee's experiences without being able to discern at times where the child's voice with a child's percep- tion of things slides into the adult voices and vision of the omniscient author. Child vision and adult vision are made to coalesce at several points in the novel.

The two worlds of childhood which Tee inhabits result from the nature of her domes- tic circumstances. Her father, who has emi- grated to England, is the brother of her Aunt Tantie, and her deceased mother is sister to Aunt Beatrice. Tee oscillates between these two spheres of existence and emerges as a deeply disturbed being; her plight derives from the essential conflict of life-styles between the Creole middle-class and Tantie's world. The conflict externalized in these two classes of society generates acute feelings of ambivalence within Tee.

Both in form and content the novel is a response to the inner pressures of a pro- foundly felt and complex experience. The vivid exploration of the child's feelings, thoughts and actions, as she responds to the social and cultural environment in which the novel is set, reflects the authenticity of

remembered experience. Tee's early years are passed amid scenes

of hilarity, warmttf, and childish rapture. The period of growing up in Tantie's world is presented with freshness, vivacity and charm.

Tantie's company was loud and hilarious and the intermittent squawk and flurry of mirth made me think of the fowl-run when something fell into the midst of the fat hens. ··

METROPOLITAN CULTURE

Claude McKay's Banana Bottom and Merle

Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey show what happens to a young girl when the natural initiation process is complicated by an im- ported metropolitan culture. Both protagonists handle the "foreign" intrusion dif- ferently; one ends happily (Bita's) and the other unhappily (Tee's) because success or happiness depends on the emotional in- volvement of the individual.

Most blacks like Bita Plant are forced to function within and to form images of themselves under the influences of a white society; consequently, they must incorporate what is of value to them in the white Western culture into their black consciousness. This is true whether an Afro-American or an Afro-Caribbean, but for West Indian women the problem is compounded primarily because of sex and; class.

Bita and Tee are given an opportunity to escape their environments. But even before Tee's physical departure from the island, we. have witnessed her emotional and cultural alienation from her roots. Unlike Pecola, who must fend for herself in a hostile world, both Tee and Bita experience the basic richness and security of rural West Indian culture, and later both are given an opportunity to take part in a more sophisticated culture. However, while Bita is able to absorb from this new experience, much of what she considered positive values must be discarded, but for Tee there is no middle ground. Tee, once having caught a glimpse of how the other half lives, totally discards the values of her former life, and becomes obsessed with being accepted into her new

THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH/APRIL 1986 PAGE 31



environment. As much as one is tempted to applaud

McKay for his treatment of his heroine and indict Hodge for hers, anyone who knows anything about West Indians would agree that McKay's Bita is a romanticized version of West Indian womanhood. In the West Indies, there are many Tee's but few Bitas.

An inevitable part of growing up in America for both male and female is coming to terms with racial conflicts, and closely connected with the race issue is the question of identity. In Brown Girl, Brownstones, for example, the racist attitude of white America looms largely in the background. Selina's cry of anguish voices the feelings of all peoples of the minorities. Her desire for violence, "to grab the cane and rush into some store on Fulton Street and avenge that wrong by bringing it smashing across the white face behind the counter" is not uncommon either. Selina comes closest to the Afro- American girl child's concern for daily racial reminders which confront her from a white racist society. Very early the black girl child finds out that to be black and female is a "double whammy."

portrayal of the American protagonists by Morrison, Brooks and Mar-

shall are very real, believable, and unroman- tic. They feel self-hatred because they are individuals who lack the power to shape their lives; whereas, the West Indian female protagonists take positive action to change their lives. Their self-concept is based on beauty alone, and it becomes a crippling factor in their lives.

Pecola and Maud Martha hate themselves because they're "ugly," and dwell on it to the point of self-destruction, but Tee, though inwardly torn and her dilemma unresolved, opts for the chance to "move up." Their environment, unlike the Afro- American's, is not so overwhelming that they relinquish all control over it. It seems therefore, that in growing up female into normal adulthood, the Afro-American and West Indian differ in that the West Indian, because of a less charged racial context, has the edge, at least as presented in these novels.

How are the novels about boys growing

up and those about girls growing up different?. Since all of the Afro-American novels about girls were written by women, the immediate assumption is that they are biased to the authors' point of view. Perhaps so because, as Paule Marshall has cited, women need to catch up anyway. She also adds that girls seem to have a "fear of growing up, and of other people, and of life, and ulti- mately retreat into their own worlds."

Pecola retreats into a world of madness, Sula into her silence and secrecy, and Maud Martha into her books. They predicate their success as women on looks and beauty. They are alienated from their mothers and the society and their initiations are painful or thwarted. Selina Boy ce, whose roots include two cultures, seems Jo have the most hope, but she has to return to her parents' home- land of Barbados to experience rebirth.

TWIN CULTURES

girl in the West Indian novels, and there are only a few, are not preoccupied

with looks but with coalescing the twin cultures in which they find themselves. They seem more ambitious, aggressive and pas- sionate than their Afro- American sisters but like them, they learn early about sex, men and motherhood. They also share equal education advantages with men if they show intellect or are favored by a patron. The blending of maleness and femaleness begins early, even in play, where girls and boys participate in the same games such as mar- bles or cricket. Despite this equality there is a code of conduct prescribed for a girl by the family and the village, and she must at all times remain "feminine."

Because of the customary "wandering" nature of the men and boys, girls still have a special place in the heart of their mothers. Interestingly none of the female protagonists in the novels discussed "had" mothers, but the mother/daughter bonding remained. Bita and Tee are orphans but both become educated and are given class mobility. One often wonders how these children survive




the growth process because of the aloneness of their family circumstances.

The relationship with a family member, especially in the case of the female characters, is another similarity in the novels. The girls seem to be closer to their fathers and alienated from their mothers. The declara- tion of paternity in the Afro- American novel is peripherally important but in the West Indies it is not a major issue because it is accepted as a common occurrence. The fact that there is a lack of strong female characters who conform to the specific Bildungsro- man model in West Indian literature may be justified by some readers and writers because boys take on "femaleness." Some male protagonists in novels written by men show this duality.

In emergent literatures of the world, in places like Africa, New Zealand and Oceania, where children of color are born and grow up, it is possible to use the Bildungsroman form to see how those cultures and lifestyles act upon the developing mind of a child. How does growing up in Black Africa differ from growing up an aborigine in Australia or Maori in New Zealand? What is the effect of living in two worlds on the development of second generation children of West In- dians in Britain or Canada? Or on Chicanos in the American Southwest? Or on Puerto Ricans in New York City? Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones gives us one aspect of that experience; Toni Morrison and Merle Hodge another.

paper demonstrates the many pos- sibilities for comparative and cross cul-

tural studies of the Bildungsroman. I have suggested that by inventing or re-creating situations, the novelist can reveal in a person what in life may be hidden and only latent. The inventions of the Bildungsroman indi- cate, in fact, a general principle of the novel. All are based on experiences of life, and many on particular and identifiable originals of character and incident.

How does belonging to an ethnic group influence one's life? What does it all mean? To many, these questions may have a ring

of seriousness, of commitment, of ties to a certain cultural heritage which certainly makes them "different" and sets them aside from others. Young black females, if given the chance and a sympathetic audience, have good insights into their conditions and can separate the illusions from the realities of their home and environment.

These children, who have unhappy or happy memories associated with their cultural lifestyles, should be given the opportunity to express them freely through the voices of their authors. One hopes that boys as well as girls will be able to tell their painful or joyful experiences as they search for their unique identity as they explore the world beyond their communities. Black children should never feel that their cultural past is imprisoned in Anglo history or that their only future is as invisible swimmers in the European mainstream. D

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. New York: Harper, 1953.

Clarke, Austin. Amongst Thistles and Thorns. London: Heinemann, 1965.

Drayton, Geoffrey. Christopher. London: Collins, 1959. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Wilhem Meister. Trans,

from German by Thomas Carlyle. London: Chap- man and Hall, 1874.

Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack Monkey. London: Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., 1970.

Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. New York: Garland, 1938.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1983.

Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph, 1953.

McKay, Claude. Banana Bottom. New Jersey: The Chatham Bookseller, 1933.

Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New Jersey: The Chatham Bookseller, 1959.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1970.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Andre Deutsch, 1966.

Sinclair, May. Mary Oliver. London: Cassell & Com- pany, 1919.

Wells, H.G. Tono-Bungay. London: Macmillan, 1909. Wynter, Sylvia. The Hills of Hebron. London: Johnathan

Cape, 1962.

THE BLACK SCHOLAR MARCH /APRIL 1986 PAGE 33



Brown One Mother, Two Daughters the Afro-American and the Afro-caribbean Female Bildungsroman

Documents

Transcript of Brown One Mother, Two Daughters the Afro-American and the Afro-caribbean Female Bildungsroman