The
first thing you probably notice when you open up my page is the background
picture -- Kanye West, acclaimed songwriter and husband of Kim Kardashian, etc.
To me, Kanye is one of the biggest symbols of black art, performance, and life
in the world right now. He symbolizes some of what black culture is, what black
culture is going to become, and how it has formed over time. I don’t
particularly like using the words “black culture” because I feel like they
generalize and put people in boxes, but I don’t know of another way to quickly
describe the history, present, and future of a whole race (whoa). In many ways,
Kanye is an envoy for black culture, and even though he is not “black culture” himself,
I think of him as a pretty good representation. What we are mostly covering in
this class is black history through literature, but I think it’s really
important to realize that there is a ton of relevance today, and hence his
image on my blog.
You
will have noticed, however, that none of what I have mentioned so far actually
talks about the first book we read for this class: Native Son by Richard
Wright. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first picked up this book, but I
read Section 1 in one reading and found myself with many emotions and
questions. Why is murder suddenly involved? How did Bigger get in this
predicament? Is this a typical historical “black” novel? I finished the book
and began to contemplate a number of the questions that were posed in class. In
Book 1, how does Wright depict/draw Bigger? What is the larger context of this
story? We talked about fear and Bigger’s emotions a great deal, which
was confusing because he is a fictional character controlled by an author. One
question that I began to ask myself was “Where does Bigger fit in his
environment?”
Throughout
the book, Bigger struggles to find the community he belongs in, and questions
whether he should even belong in one. He constantly embraces and rejects the
people and environment around him, and it’s never really clear to me what he
wants. At the start of the book, we are confronted with some of Bigger’s
behavior problems:the way he dangles a dead rat over his sister; the way he
acts out the father/abuser figure in his family because he’s the only one with
power; and the way that he wants to jeopardize his safety in one robbery of
Blum’s shop. It’s overwhelming to read about all the roles he plays in the
first twenty pages of the Native Son. So, initially, we think he rejects
his mother, Vera, and Buddy, and only wants to indulge in his own passions and
pleasures.
Quickly,
though, things change as he willingly takes the job at the Dalton’s. This
reminds me of the phrase “with power comes responsibility,” and finally it
seems that Bigger is willing to take positive responsibility over his family
and embrace his community. Thinking about his mother, I was happy that he was
willing to do this. I felt sympathetic for her and her lifestyle, but didn’t
realize that the job Bigger was sliding into would be just as hard for the
reader to hear about as his previous hobbies such as robbing banks and chain
smoking. So, is that the reality? Are we to think that whether it’s a white
world or black world or an in between world that it’s uncomfortable for the
reader to read? I think Wright plays a lot with his reader; he makes us feel
weird and uneasy about where the book is heading.
But
now, we are confronted with a new phase in which the white world everything at
the Dalton’s. Bigger is forced to forget about where he comes from, even though
he might not fully realize it. Part of that is because he is faced with an
unfamiliar environment, and has to respond to the Daltons in a way that he
isn’t used to, but also because the Daltons are willing to provide for him more
than his mother ever has, and that catches him way off guard. It’s a job, yes,
but I think in Bigger’s mind, the white culture he has begun to work in serves
as more of a lifestyle. Ms. Dalton asks him about education and if he would be
interested in continuing with his studies; Jan and Mary force him to choose
between them and his own girlfriend at Ernie’s Kitchen Shack; Peggy prepares
him a meal he would never be used to eating, and so on. And this pattern
continues -- where whether he likes it or not, he has to choose between one
community or another (or none). When he is running away from everyone, he
decides to act single-mindedly (part of the reason he kills Bessie). But when I
think about what would have actually been best for Bigger, I think that acting on
his own and letting his own head seep through the walls of his body would be
beat rather than letting other figures control him like they have been his
whole life? In what way does his violence and destruction come from this
control others have had over him? That’s where his so called “freedom” comes in;
in the final analysis what I most want to make sense of is if the way he gets
to finally take control of his communities and to be where he wants to be whenever
he wants is a good thing.
My
final question -- one that might not be so important but that is connected to
Bigger's communities -- is “Does Bigger die alone?”
