July 2022
Sarita Nyasha Cannon teaches courses on 20th-Century American Literatures in the English Department at San Francisco State University. She has presented her scholarship at conferences around the world and is the author of Black-Native Autobiographical Acts: Navigating the Minefields of Authenticity (2021).
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It’s been said that the past is never past. How do these narratives of Black resistance spanning nearly two centuries help us understand the present?
Music has always been an important form of expression and resistance in Black communities, especially in the United States. The sorrow songs (often known as spirituals) created by enslaved people that offered solace in desperate times and sometimes contained coded messages of insurrection are foundational to African-American literature, art, and politics. These spirituals laid the foundation for the blues tradition of the 1920s, the protest songs of the 1960s, and the socially conscious hip-hop of today.
These narratives also remind us that the challenges faced by Black people in 2022, such as lack of access to quality housing, education, and healthcare, are rooted in centuries of oppression. A text like Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl highlights both the horrors experienced by enslaved girls and women and the ways in which women like Jacobs fought back against exploitation, abuse, and rape. The stereotype of Black women as lascivious “jezebels” who seduced white men made it difficult for Jacobs to write openly about the abuse she experienced in slavery. While the #MeToo movement has nurtured a space for women of all backgrounds to share their stories of sexual abuse, Black women today may still not feel comfortable speaking up because this stereotype about Black women still permeates our culture, even though it might manifest differently than it did in the 19th century.
Resistance and resilience can take many forms. Has the depiction of them evolved over time, and, if so, how? Are the differences also gendered to some degree, too?
In all of these narratives, we see Black people using language in subversive ways. For example, enslaved people used metaphors in sorrow songs to communicate plans for escape. Harriet Jacobs uses the tropes of the sentimental novel in her slave narrative to appeal to white women readers. Toni Morrison draws upon the myth of Odysseus in her depiction of a Black soldier’s homecoming in her 2012 novel Home. Blending both European-American rhetorical traditions and Black forms of expression is, in fact, a mode of resistance that Black artists and writers continue to play with in creative ways.
And yes, resistance is absolutely gendered. A comparison between two of the most famous 19th-century slave narratives brings this into focus. In his 1845 narrative, Frederick Douglass asserts his manhood and vows to escape enslavement after beating a “slave breaker” named Covey. This fight provides the foundation for his physical and emotional liberation. But Harriet Jacobs’s resistance looks very different. Instead of physically fighting back against her abusive owner, she begins a relationship with a white man in the community whom she hopes will free her and any children that come from the union. After working unsuccessfully to secure the freedom of the two children she gives birth to, Jacobs runs away: not to New York, as her enslaver believes, but just blocks away to her grandmother’s attic, a 9 by 7 by 3 foot space where she hides for seven years. Both a prison (the effects of which leave her permanently physically disabled) and a protective den (she has a tiny peephole through which she can watch her enslaver as well as her children, thus becoming an empowered gazer rather than one who is gazed upon), this garret represents Jacobs’s resistance and resilience in the face of trauma.
Who is one writer you find yourself turning to again and again, and why?
I first read Audre Lorde in graduate school, and her work continues to be vital to me over two decades later. As a Black, lesbian, disabled, working-class daughter of immigrants, she wrote and lived at the intersection of multiple communities, encouraging us to acknowledge our differences as well as find solidarity across them. Her 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, is a book that is deeply important to me, and I look forward to teaching it in this class. Lorde writes about growing up in a West Indian family in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s and coming out as a lesbian in the 1950s in a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Stonewall, pre-Roe v. Wade world. Lorde’s ability to invite readers into intimate and vulnerable moments in her life moves me again and again, no matter how many times I teach this book. And she does so by challenging traditional generic boundaries, blending poetry and prose, fiction and memoir, myth and history. In this piece and in her other works, Lorde rejects the either/or thinking that shapes European-American patriarchal systems, instead encouraging us to embrace the generative possibilities of multiplicity, contradiction, and ambiguity.
What do you think will be the most surprising part of this course for OLLI members? Or, put another way, what do you hope they take away from this course?
I hope that students will recognize that while there are often common themes in African-American literature, there is no single text or author that can represent “the Black experience,” because there is no monolithic Black experience. The range of characters within the Younger family, the fictional Black family living on Chicago’s South Side after WW2 that is the focus of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, illustrates this point well. She juxtaposes the perspective of Lena Younger, the devoutly Christian widowed matriarch of the family who grew up in a time when Black people were lynched regularly and came to Chicago in search of a better life for herself and her family, with that of Beneatha Younger, her ambitious, atheist, feminist daughter who wears an Afro, wants to be a physician, and has a Nigerian suitor. The differences within Black communities that Hansberry brings to life in her play reflect the gender, sexual, socioceonomic, religious, and generational diversity of Black life.
I also hope that students will think about Black literature and art not solely as a response to the oppression that African Americans have experienced. Nurturing expressions of Black joy is important to me, just as it is to the writers that we will study in this course. In a world where people of African descent are still dehumanized in ways large and small, Black joy can be a healing balm.