novel fragment: thoughts on identity formation

I looked again at what I had written. I was unsatisfied. I felt as if I hadn’t clearly delineated for myself the line between blending and adapting and being appropriated. How firm do the boundaries have to be? I wasn’t sure. I felt as if the answers to that question were crucial to my own personal development. There was something, I thought, to the idea of mixing on an abstract level—culturally—while still simplifying and protecting one’s literal space. It was important, I reasoned, not merely from an ecological but from a spiritual and ethical perspective, to live in relationship to one’s surroundings, to inhabit a specific location. That literal groundedness had to be preserved not only because it would necessitate an ecologically responsible lifestyle—a way of life that makes evident and obligatory the reason for nurturing and maintaining what nurtures and maintains you—but also because it would keep a person humble, aware, as I had written, that humans exist only as a part of creation and not merely as its creators and stewards—that life is interdependent—separated still, but interdependent. And once that sense of symbiosis is lost—once the partner in the relationship is viewed merely as resource, as convenience, and not as something whose well-being is part of your own and vice versa, once a relationship to one part of one’s surroundings is lost or abstracted, then all other relationships are affected—the way becomes hidden and buried. The relationship one has to space and time affects how one relates to other humans. And it affects self-growth and development, the ability to be a complete and heroic person. If we as modern human beings have become machines, it is because machines have mediated and even severed our relationship to the land, to the soil and blood that created us. If we see the land we live on as a resource to fulfill human needs, we are likely to see other human beings the same way—as resources. If the land is not granted autonomy, neither can human beings. And if we interact with the land we live on only as dirt to be tread and scenery to be viewed or fruit to be plucked—if its presence as our creator is not constant—we will interact with other human beings in the same careless manner. And we will suffer.

So the trends towards isolation, ideas and tools and laws that promote surpassing and not understanding human limits, must be withstood, but history has likewise shown that any effort to completely repel such forces will end in failure—will vitiate and destroy the resistance. Some degree of integration—of knowledge and contact with the enemy soul—is crucial for any resistance movement.

I thought about my personal situation—how I had moved to a somewhat isolated commune in Wyoming but still spent time in New York City. I didn’t need to keep my teaching job in New York; I wanted to. Truth is, I enjoy my job. I enjoy the teaching, the academic culture, and I also enjoy New York City. At the same time, I have come to see both cultures, academic and urban, as inherently noxious. In other words, I haven’t maintained contact with the darkness so as to better recognize and resist it; I’ve maintained contact because I enjoy doing so—because those cultures are a part of me; they bring me pleasure, and, without them, I would feel lost and rejected. How then, I have to wonder, can I achieve liberation?

My conflation with the forces that I theoretically object to explains perhaps why so many revolutionary efforts, both public and private, have failed entirely or mirrored the culture they wish to overthrow. In trying to achieve liberation, I was being forced to cast myself away. I was revolting against myself. It’s one thing to avoid appropriation but quite another to create selfhood once the appropriation of the self has already occurred. I had become one kind of outcast and was attempting to become another so that I might find a place in the world—so I might end my exile, my outcast existence. And the darkness I fought against was a part of me.

I’m thinking about race in America. Growing up in small town Idaho, I did not personally know any black people. During my Junior year in High School, I remember that a newly adopted boy transferred in from Botswana Africa, but he was two grades below me and I don’t recall ever talking to him. For the most part, my acquaintance with black people came through popular media, so most of the black people I knew were of two types: athletes and comedians (or sometimes, as with Muhammad Ali, they were both). I knew of Dr. J and OJ Simpson. I knew of Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. I knew of movie stereotypes such as Sambo (there was a local restaurant named Sambos, featuring a logo of a black man with a bone through his hair and a large ring through his nose) and Buckwheat and Uncle Remus. I knew of Samford and the Jeffersons and of musical entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Stevie Wonder. Black people, in other words, were familiar to me only as TV images. It was a time in America in which images of African Americans were changing, a time in which the traditional clown images that served obviously to comfort white audiences into believing that black identity could be regulated were still intact but now served not to suggest that black people were better off being cared for by racially superior whites but to convince a recently desegregated nation that black people weren’t really that scary—that they could be as civilized and as tame and as harmless as white people.

At the same time, as if to counter such a blatant appropriation of blackness, these comforting media clown images were supplanted with less comforting images, by films, for example, in which blacks portrayed themselves as the embodiment of everything that whites most feared—violence, sexual potency, unruliness…. The blaxploitation films, however, didn’t really make it to rural Idaho. So for me, black people were typified more by the Louis Armstrongs and Joe Louises and Jesse Owenses and Hattie McDaniels than by the Charlie Parkers and Malcolm Xes and Tommie Smiths and Foxy Browns and Cleopatra Joneses. The latter were there, but they lurked behind the other images, as darkened subtext. As a result, it didn’t strike me as unusual for one of my friends to comment that she loved black people, as if black people were a homogenous group whose every member fit a clear and distinct definition. Fact is, I loved them too. Black people, as I knew them, kept the darkness, kept black people, out of sight.

Undoubtedly, both the blackface minstrel show and the 70s blaxploitation films served a similar purpose; they both portrayed blackness from the perspective of white people. You could say, as many popular culture critics have, that both forms of entertainment perpetuated slavery, allowing white people to own black identity without literally purchasing the black body. And that may be true up to a point, but they also offered to blacks an avenue to power, narrow as it was. When blacks donned the blackface themselves, buffooning both their race as well as the masks that portrayed it, and when black writers and producers deliberately objectified themselves in 70s action films, they were claiming, in a way, the only power offered them. They were walking through the one open door whereby they could access and participate in the world (and, if their buffoonery were extreme enough, they could even call into question the world and the boundaries that white livelihoods depended on). That door may have looked at first like an escape—and it opened up no doubt to a refreshing change of scenery—but it turned out to be a well marked path surrounded by bars—an opening from one cage into another. Still, it marked one’s entry, at some level at least and only within very confined circumstances, into the culture of power.

A case can be made that such a deal with the devil might be a necessity—that one must do what it takes to gain entry, and that, once inside, once granted membership in humanity, one can participate in shaping and maybe reforming the universal human face. But identity it seems is defined as much or moreso by what it isn’t as by what is. Culture can be shaped from outside. And when America tells itself that its face isn’t black, isn’t Mexican, isn’t Indian, isn’t Soviet—when it sets up markers for definition, it makes itself dependent on those markers, and, like figure with ground, it shares its destiny. Consequently, both the marker and the marked have an interest, a necessity even, in preserving the boundary that separates them. For both sides it represents a form of power, though for the demeaned element that power comes at extreme cost—the cost of perpetuating an image of themselves as inferior. By accepting, for example, the power offered to black males in the bedroom and the gymnasium, one simultaneously perpetuates a racist image of the black man as less evolved, less mental than physical, closer to the other animals than to humans in his development. But it does give him at least a voice, a voice he might use to counter the racist mythology.

In a modern world delineated not by physical boundaries, by blood ties or territory, but by abstractions—God, the nation state, professional status—identity formation becomes an exceptionally precarious and unnerving process. That insecurity about who we are can lead to such a desperate willingness to clarify and strengthen the boundaries that distinguish and define us that even minorities whose societal images are negative might wish to preserve their inferior status, especially if their inferior status is superior to other groups—they might wish to preserve the stereotypes as markers with which they can shield themselves from evil—as a means of preserving at least some social role or to keep what little identity they have from becoming extinct. Even a false or imposed identity is something, a defense against the void and the dominant culture. So the black man imitates the stereotypical thug, becomes Shaft; or the female wields sex as a weapon, becomes the Black Widow, both embodying the fears that keep themselves and their oppressors in existence—and oppression merely changes form but remains steady and ubiquitous.

Over time, the machine will find a way to incorporate its negation. Then other villains will be created and the process will begin anew. But at some point—it seems obvious—we have to step out of that cycle. And I think it’s possible to do so, not likely perhaps, but possible. I'm not convinced that we're doomed. I’m not suggesting we can or should do away completely with stereotypes. To do so would only increase our anxiety and subsequently our oppression of one another. And generalizations are useful. An effective jazz improv solo can’t exist without a song standard to initiate and frame it, and neither can a genuine individuality emerge without a template to react against and drive it onward. It should be understood, however, that the personality is no different than a jazz solo—it’s a creation, a mix of time, place, and circumstance through which something previously unseen is seen, is lit up. The fictional character created by the playwright and actor’s collaboration is no different than the character created by daily life, which isn’t to say, as some strains of Buddhist philosophy tells us, that our selves are unreal. The characters we make of ourselves, the magician’s tricks, might be temporary and they might be mere symbols, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. In fact, they might be the only part of us that is real—a reality whose nascent form emerges from and depends upon the artificial. Put another way, the real can’t exist without the unreal and vice versa. Figure needs ground.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in American history, the idea of freedom was appropriated. The meaning today is the exact opposite of what it was likely meant to signify (or perhaps the concept was created only to mask any real potential for liberty). Today it connotes an escape from foundation, from ground—a flight away from everything that is deemed unstable and uncertain. Freedom today connotes a completely alien and impossible notion of individuality and disconnect, and, in the name of freedom, understood as a paradoxical flight from engagement, from the very things that create us, we are systematically destroying ourselves. In trying to tame the darkness, to take refuge in the light, in figure, we have raped ourselves several times over. We have driven ourselves insane.

That isn’t inflammatory rhetoric, either. We have become like an eagle trying to be free of its wings. We have waged war against our bodies, the food that nourishes those bodies, our expressive potential, our symbols of all kinds, our passions—everything that makes us human. Freedom has become escape and escape has become a need to transcend life itself. We have become a culture in love with death, with a more sinister kind of death than is possible, with a death that represents no kind of regeneration—an utter silencing.

The concept of freedom hasn’t yet been completely co-opted. We still hold on to counter notions rooted in ideals of democracy—in real democracy, I mean, wherein each person participates directly in his/her fate as well as the fate of the community, wherein each person creates an individuality that embraces and integrates darkness and uncertainty rather than expels them, wherein identity may doubt itself without feeling humiliated. Those ideals have not died all together. They live on in Jazz solos, in various novels and poems, in wilderness areas, in contemplation, in tragedy, in dreams and nightmares—in all types of fictional truth. But the space allowed those ideals grows increasingly narrow.