In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Tradition, Toni Morrison recontextualizes the American literary tradition by addressing the “Africanist” presence inherent in all American writing. That is to say: it is impossible for an American author or an American story to embody the idea or sense of American-ism without gesturing or referring directly to the influence of Black communities, their people, and their experiences.
Over the course of this class, that perspective has been applied to various works under the umbrella of the noir genre. As early as The Maltese Falcon, one may point to the novel’s treatment of the “other” or the “foreigner” as parallel to and undeniably influenced by the treatment of white Americans towards Black Americans. Even characters identified as white or as coming from a specific place of origin would still exist within the realm of the other, a realm understood only through the paradigm of the novel’s white author. In a sense, every character but the noir anti-hero is Black, in the sense that they are othered and treated as less human than the protagonist himself.
However, Morrison’s reappraisal of the American literary tradition goes deeper, as her aim is not to merely generalize as non-white, non-male characters as equal. Her analysis is specific to the “Africanist,” Black presence. As our course has progressed, we’ve witnessed the progression of that presence: from Black secondary characters written by white authors, to Black protagonists written by white authors, to Black protagonists written by Black authors, and so on. Rather than hinting or unintentionally engaging with the presence of Blackness in their subject matter, we’ve moved towards literature that directly confronts, embraces, and bares for all the world to see the highs, the lows, the complexities, and the simple realities of the Black, American experience.
Given our class discussion identifying a perceived difficulty or a lack of engagement with our recent books, I’ve tried to understand our collective response to Never Die Alone using Morrison’s thinking as a magnifying lens. She says in her first part of the collection:
My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming (4).
I interpret this in several ways, some of which may be taking liberties. However, when applied to Never Die Alone, I can’t help but wonder at Donald Goines’s personal experience writing the text and the ways in which he as the writer needed to become his novel; or rather, the novel became him. Like Iceberg Slim and Trick Baby, Donald Goines’s Never Die Alone draws heavily from his own personal history. What distinguishes Goines’s work from Slim’s is the extent to which each author’s novel becomes representative of the author. Slim writes a character supposedly based directly on himself. Goines, however, writes several characters who aren’t explicitly stated to be the author, yet connect to his highs, lows, complexities, and hard experiences in a way that’s multifaceted and impossible to avoid/ignore as a reader.
I’d say that, beyond our individual issues with ideology or morality in the recent texts we’ve read, our class’s difficulty in reading these texts may be due to a level of discomfort inherent in the aspect of becoming. Having been raised in a society where Blackness is both blatantly and unconsciously pushed to the margins, reading these texts may be the first time that many of us have been tasked with intimately reading a text so tied to the author’s experience as Black in America.
Again, there are several ways to apply Morrison’s thinking to our class and Never Die Alone in particular. However, I think reevaluating whether or not our earlier discussions were truly more fruitful is worth some attention. Did we truly unpack and engage with the inexplicit presence of Blackness in otherwise “white” texts? Or did we discuss only what was comfortable until confronted with texts like Trick Baby and Never Die Alone?