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Characteristics of African American Literature
How do we know African American literature? What do we see in a literary piece that tells us it is African American?
The key things to consider in locating the features/characteristics of African American literature include: authorship, experiences covered or subject matter addressed by a text, setting, style and techniques.
Authorship
African American literature is usually written by African Americans, and occasionally by non-African Americans, on/about African American experiences.
Experiences/Subject Matter
African American literature dwells on African American heritage, the lives of African Americans, the events of history that have shaped their lives, how these events have been accepted/rejected or interpreted by both the African American and non-African American, and how African Americans live and relate with non-African Americans and vice-versa.
Setting
African American literature is usually set in America, and when it is not, it explores the lives of African Americans in other places.
Style and Technique
Because African American literature grew out of the oral tradition of storytelling, work songs of slaves on plantations and spirituals, these verbal modes still have a great deal of traceable impact in the literature. In other words, African American literature leans a lot on verbal modes or oral traditions.
G. Smitherman
G. Smitherman (1994:80- 101) has the following as the formal characteristics of African American literature:
1. Rhythmic, dramatic, evocative language. Example: ―Darkness is like a cage in black around me, shutting me off from the rest of the world.
2. Reference to color-race-ethnicity (that is, when topic does not call for it). Example: ―I don‘t get in trouble at school or have any problems with people picking on me. I am nice to everyone no matter what color or sex.
3. Use of proverbs, aphorisms, Biblical verses. Example: ―People might have shut me off from the world ‗cause of a mistake, crime, or a sin.... Judge not others, for you to will have your day to be judge.
4. Sermonic tone reminiscent of traditional Black Church rhetoric, especially in vocabulary, images, metaphor. Example: ―I feel like I‘m suffering from being with world. There no lights, food, water, bed and clothes for me to put on. Im fighten, scared of what might happened if no one finds me. But I pray and pray until they do find me.
5. Direct address-conversational tone. Example: ―I think you should use the money for the railroad track.... it could fall off the tracks and kill someone on the train. And that is very dangerius. Don‘t you think so. Please change your mind and pick the railroad tracks. For the People safelty O.K. [From letter writing persuasive task.]
6. Cultural references. Example: ―How about slipping me some chitterlings in tonite.
7. Ethnolinguistic idioms. Example: ― ...a fight has broke loose; ―It would run me crazy....
8. Verbal inventiveness, unique nomenclature. Example: ―[The settlers] were pioneerific; ―[The box] has an eye look-out.
9. Cultural values-community consciousness. Expressions of concern for development of African Americans, concern for welfare of entire community, not just individuals, as for example several essays in which students expressed the view that recreational facilities would have to be for everybody, ―young and old, and the homeless among Blacks.
10. Field dependence. Involvement with and immersion in events and situations; personalizing phenomena; lack of distance from topics and subjects.
Themes in African American Literature
Since writers do not write in a vacuum but harvest materials for their works from their environment and experiences, the kinds of theme one finds in African American literature are not surprising, taking a look at the history of the Black in America.
Dasylva and Jegede (2005) summarise the themes in African American literature as ―a passionate concern for race and identity, nationhood and dignity, self-integration and self- assertion and a general quest for roots and freedom stemming from the physical and psychological dislocation which slavery had caused (191). In these themes are seen writers efforts to preserve, explain and make sense of history. Tsaaior (1998) expands these themes further: ―race differentia and tension, political domination and marginalisation, economic exploitation and alienation, oppression and cultural deracination and the quest for roots which results, inevitably, in an epiphanic homecoming (1). The idea of African American writers‘ inability to escape from their past or present is also embedded in this submission.
From the above, key themes arise which we will, one by one, look closely at: slavery, racial discrimination, alienation, quest for roots, African American culture, black nationalism,
Slavery
A great part of the dignity we enjoy as humans comes from our freedom. The moment we become objectified, our sense of worth is hampered. The instance blacks were sold into slavery, their worth and value in the eyes of investors in slave trade became those of goods/property to be sold, bought, owned and treated as the owner deemed fit. This being the case, slaves were subjected to inhuman treatments. Slavery in American history is documented by many websites, in many books on blacks in America. ―Slavery in America records:
Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, to aid in the production of such lucrative crops as tobacco. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the central importance of slavery to the South‘s economy. By the mid- 19th century, America‘s westward expansion, along with a growing abolition movement in the North, would provoke a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody American Civil War (1861-65). Though the Union victory freed the nation‘s 4 million slaves, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the tumultuous years of Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s, a century after emancipation. (―Slavery in America, n.p)
When facts are dropped like this, one may not see the experiences accompanying them. The slaves suffered in every area of their lives, having to master the art of having two faces – the one that remains silent and unconcerned in the presence of the slaver, and the other face that embodies all the sufferings of the black: the disintegration of families (being constantly resold by their owners), sexual abuse of the female slaves by their owners (many times with the knowledge of their black helpless husbands who would lose their lives if they intervened), reckless killing by their masters or other whites for minor offences or just for sport and the show of total control over the life of a black, and mistrust engendered by the stratification among them occasioned by the different duties they performed on the farms and plantations – the house servants were considered of a higher quality than the skilled artisans and lastly, the farmhands. The list of evils can go on. The period of slavery was indeed a horrible time for the African American and their literature has, in many ways, captured this through biographies, autobiographies and fictional works. Frederick Douglass‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is a
good example.
Racial Discrimination
While it might be argued that it is a human tendency for people to seek alignment with their kind, it has to be established that this alignment must not translate into hatred or dislike for people outside one‘s kind or group. When this exclusion is accompanied by unpleasant emotions, there is a problem. Also, when the exclusion is based on the colour of the skin, we are dealing with racial discrimination. African Americans faced a lot of marginalisation and ill-treatment as a result of their difference in colour. The cases of the hatred of the whites for blacks demonstrated by the actions of slave owners on their black slaves, the denial of human and civil rights to the African American, the segregation polices that fuelled the rights movements, and the Ku Klux Klan‘s actions are few examples. Racial discrimination forms a key concern in African American writings as Martin Luther King (Jr.)‘s ―I Have a Dream and Richard Wright‘s Black Boy show.
Alienation
This refers to the separation, disconnection or estrangement resulting from hostility which the blacks experienced and, to some degree, are still experiencing. We are all familiar with the human need to be a part of something, to want to be wanted. When we do not have it, the tendency is for us to drawback into ourselves, having at the back of our minds that it is safer and better to be on our own than to meddle where we are not wanted. A classic example is Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man.
Quest for Roots
This comes as a result of disconnection. Having been made to feel unwanted and knowing their history of slavery, it is only natural for African Americans to want to find out and know where they came from. Although this may not be possible for them to do (going by the fact that slave traders and owners changed the names of their slaves to ensure the slaves‘ anonymity and make it impossible for them to establish a connection with their home countries), African American literature is replete with the longings and search for a place to call home. This place in some of the works may not necessarily be the home (African) country. But, there is a reaching out to Africa couched in the writers‘ desire to have a contact with the continent generally as their home. Alex Haley‘s Roots: The Saga of an American Family exemplifies the quest for roots as a theme in African American literature.
African American Culture
The way of life of the African American is represented in his literature in a way that calls attention to it as a key focus. In a way, one can say that one of the aims of the writers is to define the African American and present him to the world as he sees himself and not as the world would like to define him. To achieve this, African American writers give elaborate details on their culture and lifestyle.
Black Nationalism
The promotion of the black spirit, culture and belongingness and patriotism to the black community (nation), as well as aspirations for freedom of the black race and expression of the dignity of the black person are at the base of Black Nationalism in America. This is the spirit behind the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, Black Art or Black
Power.
CONCLUSION
Going by its themes, African American literature is closely tied to the African American history. It becomes easy to say that one only needs to know a people‘s history to arrive at the themes of
their literature.
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