Escaping the ghetto of your skin
Was it bad
conscience about her colour, or a desire to assert pride in her race
and face, that led the Queen of Sheba to declare, “Nigra sum sed
formosa”? The line is telling- “I am black, but comely”- and lends
itself to both these interpretations; as if royalty and wealth were not
enough to ensure her esteem; as if she needed the refuge of her beauty
to escape the ghetto of her skin. None of this, of course, could have
mattered to Solomon, fair-minded sage and seducer, committed as he was
to building a large and racially diverse harem and lineage.
In our time colour
has mattered, nowhere more so than in America, where the theatre of
race has repeated itself for four centuries as suffering and tragedy.
Long before Michael Jackson morphed into a white man, and Barack Obama
entered the White House, there was another charismatic and talented
figure who sought to transcend race. Anatole Broyard is less well-known
today than the singer or the President, but at one time, at least in
America, his name too was “musical in the mouth of fame”.
He has been the
actual subject of an essay by Henry Louis Gates, and a memoir by his
daughter, Bliss Broyard, as well as the presumed model for Coleman Silk
in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. Gates’ profile, the first to
appear, conveyed in its tenor the suggestion that Broyard had sloughed
off familial roots that were entirely black. Things were far more
complicated than that, and during his lifetime Broyard managed, to an
extent, to shield the details of his heritage with a natural bodyguard
of Caucasian- looking hair, skin, and eyes. The Broyards were descended
from a French soldier who came to America in the eighteenth century.
Intermarriage with mixed race women had produced a line of Broyards who
could pass for white, as Anatole’s parents, and eventually himself,
chose to.
One of the more
startling revelations in the biographical accounts concerns the fact
that Anatole Broyard’s two children had grown up unaware of their
father’s racial dissembling. His wife was Norwegian, and knew of his
family history; it was she who pressed him, to little effect, to
disabuse the children of their perceptions. He found any number of
reasons to put off disclosure. As he lay dying in 1990, Anatole Broyard
called his children to his hospital bed and hinted at a certain matter
he wanted to reveal. Even then he could not bring himself to speak, and
it was ultimately his wife who broke the news to their children.
This sheer
incapacity, or unwillingness, to tear off an elaborate veil of identity
prompts Gates, in his essay about Broyard, to call him “the
Scheherazade of racial imposture”.
The Broyard case
reveals just how fraught and futile can be the effort to untangle the
single, shining thread of individual identity from the knot of race,
genes, gender, cultural heritage, and vocation.
Anatole Broyard was
born into a society in which, like many others, the colour of one’s
skin improbably assumes a moral quality; it could be the virtue that
recommended one for social privilege, or it could be the vice that
damned one from birth. Broyard’s parents chose to pass for white when
they arrived New York from New Orleans because it was the only way they
could secure proper employment.
What Gates saw as
Broyard’s “racial imposture” could not have been gratuitous. Nor was it
without its cost. Anatole Broyard might have been, as T.E. Lawrence
said of himself, “a standing civil war”; and the victims of that
lifelong inner unrest were not only the darker-skinned siblings and
relatives whom he chillingly broke off contact with [and who appeared,
to much perplexity, at his funeral] or the blacks about whom he could
be bizarrely scathing, but ultimately the man himself. His writing
hand, exercised no doubt by the work he did for the New York Times,
seems to have been mysteriously inhibited, foreclosing on the full
fruition of a literary talent whose early offerings had bred
expectation in admirers.
Yet for all his
unwillingness to salvage any relics from a rejected heritage, from the
ghetto of his past, there were those who saw in his gait and physical
tics a distinct African – American air. The body may only go along so
far with its own evasions.
The ironies and
nuances which surround colour in our world were visible in the sequence
of events that brought Barack Obama to the American presidency. His
entire campaign persona was calibrated to give the impression of an
eloquent and outraged citizen, not, mind you, an eloquent and outraged
black citizen. But the mere sight of this biracial candidate was enough
to evoke the grim history of white injustice and black rage, with all
its implications. His demeanour may have been reassuring to many white
Americans, but there were some in the black community who felt that
Obama’s psychic share in their tortured patrimony was minimal at best,
and that his physical share, owing to a Kenyan father and a white
mother, was nil.
George Berkeley
wrote that “to be is to be perceived”. The strange workings of being
and perception were brought home to me in a peculiar manner. A few
years ago I encountered, by chance, a man with whom I had been at
university. We were participants at a two-week event, and over that
time renewed our acquaintance amid much bonhomie and reminiscence. One
day, quite casually, he revealed that when we were at university he had
disliked me fiercely because he thought I looked Igbo.
For some reason he
did not explain, the Igbos had incurred his enmity, and I, with my
Igbo- looking skin [if such a thing exists] and my Igbo circle of
friends, was guilty by resemblance, if not in fact.
To hate, after all,
is human, but I found his past, secret animus somewhat ridiculous
because of its tenuous connection with anything that I had actually
done, any act that had struck and inflamed the flint of his tribal
grudge. On my own part I thought it would be logical for me to dislike
him not for being from his tribe, or for being squat, bald and
potbellied but for being talkative and crude.
The human eye
trained in recognizing difference is nothing if not the window of
discontent, of dissatisfaction with another, or oneself. This is a
world not only of mirrors but also of other people’s eyes. Among black
people, among Nigerians, the tendency has been to adapt to the judgment
of other people’s eyes, to derive our sense of being not from anything
inherent and authentic, but from what the overt and insidious catechism
of the white West. How else to explain the legion of black men and
women with bleached skin, with blonde wigs and blue contact lens if not
as individuals seeking to escape the perceived ghetto of their skin by
being aesthetically beholden to the ideal beholder?
Going beyond
sartorial imitation, beyond acquiring a foreign language- none of which
I carp against- to actually attempt to usurp the legacy of white genes
defies comprehension. Self contempt has many guises.
All of the foregoing invariably serves to illustrate a sense that by
creating societies where colour is a crucial emblem of difference and
individual worth, by persisting in judging a mind by its cover, we are
condemned to making, and acquiescing to, wholly untenable distinctions
between amateur and professional human beings.
