Charting the Atlantic: The White Gaze and "Joy Parts"

Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (2008), writes, “the white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me” (95). It is a racialized gaze that is fixed on Black life. It ‘dissects’—polices, weaponizes, brutalizes, fears—the Black body and the Black mind.

Embodying Fanon’s words are two distinct memoirs that significantly record the Black condition within White supremacist geographies: Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), and Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959). In Black Boy, Wright writes about his Black identity growing up in, and navigating, a Jim Crow America. In Down Second Avenue, Mphahlele documents his lived experience as a Black boy, adolescent and man, in South Africa during apartheid.

It is not merely the physical geographies of these memoirs I am concerned with, however. I am also interested in mapping the personal geographies of Wright’s and Mphahlele’s lives, of how the White supremacist gaze infiltrates the internal; the personal and private. Through a comparative reading and analysis of the selected memoirs I thus seek to dissect the White gaze itself and ultimately demonstrate how the Black body and mind subvert such a gaze.

Locating the discussion

I find it necessary to, firstly, discuss the transnational relationship exemplified by the parallels between the two memoirs. I borrow Stéphane Robolin’s definition of transnationalism as the “engagements, transactions, exchanges, circulations, migrations, and practices that exceed the boundaries of nation-states” (5). In Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing (2015), Robolin spotlights and untangles the literary relationship shared between African Americans and Black South Africans, from 1948 to 1994. It is a period, Robolin explains, “of heightened racial struggle and transnational solidarity” (5), and it is a relationship based on patterns of “race-based oppression” and histories of “entrenched, violently maintained racial segregation” (5). My comparative reading is thus located within Black Atlantic Studies.

Such a statement in itself, however, reveals two significant modes of thought—that of Blackness and of locality. Firstly, in Black Transnationalism: 20th Century South African and African American Literatures (2012), Robolin importantly points out that any comparative analysis of Black South African and African American contexts and lived experiences, must acknowledge differences and contrasts, too. These are deviations that Robolin argues “speak to the independent histories and social forces of each country”, such as “varying racial hierarchical systems and lexicons” (82).

As a result, the question What is ‘Blackness’? necessarily arises. For the purposes of this discussion, I understand Blackness—and Whiteness as its counterpart—according to Robolin’s definition, as a "constructed, politically inflected category—an umbrella term subject to regular reshaping and redefinition to suit the needs of those who claimed this designation or found it imposed on them—a designation that admits its substantial intra- and transnational differences." (19)

Secondly, in terms of locality, I purpose to expand on the argument made for spatiality in tracing and traversing the literary transnational relationship between Black South Africans and African Americans. Central to my discussion then is the claim that the engagements of Black cross-cultural relation were “fundamentally bound by racialized land, social space, spatial arrangement, and physical geography” (6). In both White supremacist social and physical geographies read in Black Boy and Down Second Avenue, the “entanglement of race and space” is “elemental” and “pervasive” (6), in turn foregrounding how “space continues to be a key modality through which race is experienced, defined, produced, and reproduced” (6).  Considering this, I seek to highlight the similarities between the racial landscapes read in Black Boy and Down Second Avenue; how young Richard’s and Es’kia’s physical and personal geographies, as respectively expressed through movement and thoughts, are policed by the White gaze, ultimately contorting the Black condition.

"But move anyhow"

The first point of departure for this discussion flows from Mphahlele’s poetic description of the Black embodied experience of living under the White gaze:

"And the Black man keeps moving on, as he has always done the last three centuries, moving with baggage and all, forever trampling with bent backs to give way for the one who says he is stronger. The Black dances and sings less and less, turning his back on the past and facing the misty horizons, moving in a stream that is damned in shifting catchments. They yell into his ears all the time: move n*gger or be fenced but move anyhow." (Mphahlele 147)

When Mphahlele writes about the Black man moving as he “has always done the last three centuries” (my emphasis), the history of White supremacy comes to light. Both apartheid and Jim Crow laws are consequences of a long tradition of White supremacy: a centuries-old system. Mphahlele’s words, therefore, paint a harrowing picture of Black life on the move, in a constant state of emergence and emergency.

For example, in Black Boy Wright chronicles his young life, moving from Mississippi to Jackson, then Arkansas to Memphis. His schooling and sense of home are interrupted, and his life is marked by physical dislocation. In the opening chapter, Wright describes a moment when he was just four years old and set his family’s house on fire. His grandmother is gravely ill, and Richard’s mother commands both him and his brother to keep quiet. Bored and restless—“angry, fretful, and impatient” (Wright 1)—Richard tears out “a batch of straws” and tosses them into the fire (2). There is a tangible sense of enclosure that young Richard experiences here. He crosses “restlessly to the window” to push back the curtains that he is “forbidden to touch” (1). Home is like a microcosm of the plantation, and Richard dreams of escape. He looks “yearningly out into the empty street”, and “dream[s] of running and playing and shouting” (1). What happens in the private sphere, therefore, is tied to the politics of the nation; the logic of the plantation locates itself in the private.

The plantation-to-prison pipeline is also described later in the memoir. When Richard plays outdoors, he sees a chain gang for the first time and describes them as “a herd of elephants” (55), as “strange creatures” that moved “slowly, silently, with no suggestion of threat” (55). The legs of “the black animals”, Richard observes, are “held together by irons” and their arms are “linked with heavy chains” (55). This “baffling spectacle” (56) speaks to the master-slave dialectic and the precarity of Black life in the wake of colonial modernity. After all, modernity—so-called ‘progress’, ‘triumphs’ of the modern age—is borne from plantation cultures, genocide and Black labour. Despite the abolishment of slavery, the Black body comes into modernity incarcerated.

Similarly, Mphahlele describes the Black condition as perpetual refugeeism in Down Second Avenue: “The Black people conditioned themselves by the day, so as to survive…Perpetual refugees seeking life and safety in Jim Crow town” (Mphahlele 95). Beginning in Maupaneng, Pietersburg, when he was just five years old, to ending with a ticket to Nigeria at thirty-seven years of age, Mphahlele’s memoir canvasses the atrocious and harsh conditions characterizing the Black condition throughout his life. It is a memoir of movement, and as we, readers, move with Mphahlele across time and space, we read his existence as a Black person as one of poverty and policing.

Mphahlele relays the Black lived experience within physical geographies: “You are on white man’s land; you must do his washing; you must buy his bread with his money; you must live in houses built by him; he must police your area…” (31). Mphahlele speaks of spatial segregation – of dislocation and land dispossession. Moreover, he explains that when he was merely twelve years old, he became aware of the politics of land and locality when “young able-bodied men” left rural villages for the city: “The land was not giving out much. The Black man could work only the strip given him by the chief. The chief had no more to give out. The old men at the fireplace endlessly that most of their lands had been taken away by the white man” (13). This speaks to the Black condition of dislocation as established by the Natives Land Act of 1913 that was a systemic bottlenecking and dispossessing of Black people into the wage-labour, granting majority of land to White people. This dispossessing of Black people led to dislocation and alienation, and thus to a constant state of movement and dispossession. As a result, “the Black man keeps moving” (147).

"The invisible whites"

Wright’s explanation of grappling with his growing emotional responses to racism serves as the discussion’s second point of departure:

"A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination…I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumour regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites…I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will." (Wright 71)

This evidently speaks to the internalizing of the White gaze, glaring and guarding over the respective geographies of a racist America and South Africa.

When Richard, as well as his mother and brother, move in with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Hoskins in Elaine, readers come to learn that any semblance of a normal life is so violently undone by White terror. Hoskins, the owner of a booming saloon, is a threat to the White Southern society. As a result, Wright reveals how Hoskins would sleep with “the big shining revolver […] near his head, within quick reach of his hand” (51). The success of a Black man is feared by White people. Aunt Maggie even explains to young Richard that “men had threatened to kill him, white men” (51). Even though these White men are never seen—remaining nameless, faceless, and “invisible”—the fear that Wright’s words capture is tangible. This is most pronounced when one night Hoskins never returns from the bar. When it is ultimately revealed that Hoskins was shot and killed by White men, Wright evocatively writes that “[f]ear drowned out grief”, that “[b]efore dawn [they] were rolling away, fleeing for [their] lives” and “kept huddled in the house all day and night, afraid to be seen on the streets” (52). The White gaze infiltrates the private landscape of young Richard’s mind as he admits that “[t]his was as close as white terror had ever come to [him] and [his] mind reeled” (53).

In Down Second Avenue, the fearful ‘presence’ of “invisible whites” is also revealed, when Mphahlele describes a typical Saturday night in Marabastad:

"Saturday night and it’s ten to ten, I can hear the big curfew bell at the police station peal ‘ten to ten, ten to ten, ten to ten’ for the Black man to be out of the streets to be at home to be out of the policeman’s reach. […] The whistle is every near now and the hunted man must be in Second Avenue but the bell goes on pealing lustily and so Black man you must run wherever you are, run." (34-35)

In this excerpt the curfew—as heard by the clock, bell and whistle—is the White gaze policing Black existence. Even though the young Es’kia cannot physically see the White policeman, the sound of the police whistle, barking dogs, pealing clock and floating bell instil a sense that he is being monitored and regulated.

Es’kia’s encounter with the English language is also symbolic of the White gaze imposing itself on the inner mapping of a young mind. He explains that, despite being “pretty poor in English, which was the medium of instruction” (40), he felt “really big and important and useful because [he] could read fast” (40), unlike the other boys he would watch movies with. As a result, Es’kia “read, and read, till it hurt” because he felt he was “overcoming [his] backwardness” (40). What this reveals is a mindset that associates the mastery of the English language with progress and power. He is, however, exiled from his mother tongue. Mphahlele recounts a significant moment when he attended the Methodist school and had to prepare two poems for oral examinations: Tennyson’s Half a league, half a league and Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib’s Host (77). Both poets are White men, and Es’kia’s examination was judged by “European inspectors” (77). Es’kia’s schooling experience was dominated by the White gaze. Writing in hindsight, Mphahlele admits that “[they] understood little of what [they] were reciting” (77). When the students ask the teacher what the lines mean, his reply is simply: “It’s poetry, boys and girls, it’s poetry, can’t you see it?” (77).

In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1981), Ngugi wa Thiong’o analyses the politics of language, arguing that,

"African children who encountered literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history. Their entire way of looking at the world, even the world of the immediate environment, was Eurocentric. Europe was the center of the universe. The earth moved around the European intellectual scholarly axis." (93)

In Thiong’o’s view, colonialism’s “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world” (16). Es’kia, a colonial child according to Thiong’o’s arguments, “was made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and defined by or reflected in the culture of the language of imposition” (17). What these examples thus reveal is the idea of insidious violence—a violence that bears no physical scars, but operates in sophisticated, invisible yet internalized ways.

The "joy-parts"

In centralizing the Black experience as shaped by the White gaze, this discussion errs on overlooking the agency, creativity, beauty and joy experienced and expressed by the Black body and mind. What comes to mind is Koleka Putuma’s poem Black Joy (2015). “Isn’t it funny?” she writes, “that when they ask about black childhood / all they are interested in is our pain / as if the joy-parts were accidental”. In recounting sweet and innocent memories of her childhood, Putuma challenges the narrative of Black childhood as marked only by hardship. Joy is erased. I wish to extend Putuma’s thoughts beyond the boundaries of merely childhood, to explore the defiant “joy-parts” of Wright’s and Mphahlele’s existence.

In the final chapter of Black Boy, Wright reflects on how his reading freed him. “It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism”, he writes, “that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities” (Wright 260). He astutely observes how, despite traversing the White supremacist geographies that “had failed to support or nourish [him]”, he “clutched at books” (260). It is in literature, in that private space, that he is inspired to head North, and defy the White Southern gaze—a gaze that he clarifies neither knew him nor afforded him “the chance to learn who [he] was” (261). He writes:

"[…] it was out of these novels and stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative construction of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light; and in my leaving I was groping toward that invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my justification for action." (261)

Richard’s reading and his love for literature could not be dominated, controlled or even taken away by White supremacy, for this is where his hope was borne.

In “Homeplace (a site of resistance)” (1990), bell hooks speaks about the significance of “homeplace in the midst of oppression and domination, of homeplace as a site of resistance and liberation struggle” (hooks 385). In other words, it is in the Black home—a domestic space created specifically by Black women—that the White gaze is subverted, Blackness is affirmed, and resistance is borne.

For example, the homeplace for Mphahlele was the site in which his resistance to White oppression was nurtured. This is accredited to his bearing witness to “the womenfolk’s resistance” and aligning with “their defiance”, as Uhuru Portia Phalafala notes (732) in “The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism” (2020). One particular incident between Aunt Dora and Abdool, an Indian shopkeeper, exemplifies this. When Abdool refuses to stamp Es’kia’s book to its full value, Aunt Dora demands he stamps the book. When he refuses again, she heaves herself over the counter, propels Abdool out of the store onto the veranda, and bangs her head against his face, drawing blood from his mouth (Mphahlele 99-100). The book was ultimately stamped, and Es’kia describes feeling “a sense of heroism on the side of Aunt Dora” (99). Mphahlele indeed portrays these women present in his young life, particularly his mother, grandmother and Aunt Dora, as “strikingly resilient” (739), to use Phalafala’s apt description.

Hidden, embedded, within these sites—these geographies—of regulation, restraint and racism, are evidently also sites of resistance.

Conclusion

Indeed, the White gaze ‘dissects’ the Black life. This was unveiled through a comparative reading of the condition of the Black body and mind situated within White supremacist geographies in Black Boy and Down Second Avenue. Movement and dislocation mark both young Richard’s and Es’kia’s lives in a Jim Crow American and apartheid South Africa, respectively. Through the White terror experienced by Richard at twelve-years-old, and the politics of language encountered by Es’kia at school, it was also revealed how the mapping of their personal lives and minds were policed. In the homeplace and books alike, however, the White gaze is subverted and “joy parts” are rediscovered. The hope that literature sparked in Richard, and defiance that Es’kia learnt from the women in his life, transcend the racist geographies and elude the dissecting, discriminatory White gaze.

Fanon, F., 2008. Black skin, white masks. Rev. ed. Trans. R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

hooks, bell. “Homeplace (a Site of Resistance).” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End P, 1990.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.

Phalafala, Uhuru Portia. “The matriarchive as life knowledge in Es’Kia Mphahlele’s African humanism.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2020, pp. 729–747, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1762999.

Putuma, Koleka. “Black Joy.” 2017. African Poems Archive, https://africanpoemarchives.blogspot.com/2022/09/black-joy-by-koleka-putuma.html.

Raymond, Robolin Stéphane Pierre. Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African-American and South African Writing. University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Robolin, Stéphane. “Black Transnationalism: 20th-century South African and African American literatures.” Literature Compass, vol. 9, no. 1, 2012, pp. 80–94, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00859.x.

Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Boydell & Brewer, 1986.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. London: Penguin Random House UK, 1945.