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Prachi Wahi

Professor Subarno Chattarji

M. A. English (Fourth Semester)

28 March 2013

Racial Memory and the Invisibility of the Self

The experience of racial discrimination at the social and political level has

been often described by many writers in the most realistic terms. However, it is

the sight of the deep-rooted emotional and psychological predicament of an

African-American’s memory of the racial past that unnerves the heart and opens

up a more significant aspect i.e. of ambiguity regarding one’s own self. James

Baldwin unfurls the same dilemma of the self and tries to seek a way out as well.

Baldwin reminds his nephew of the prehistory of oppression, who

represents the progeny of a slave, and is born free, the young hope of a better

future that is still a mystery even after a hundred years of the Emancipation. The

recollection of their past is the most crucial step in the formation of their future.

The reason is that the African-Americans have been codified and stereotyped by

rigid narrative translation and white mediation. Consequently, they have moved
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from being treated and labeled as the black, the other, to the invisible. This can

be understood in conjunction with Hannah Arendt’s view that “the omnipotence

of an individual man would make men superfluous” (Kohler 166). The white

“totalitarian” attitude renders the black man “superfluous”. Baldwin says, “most

of them do not yet really know that you exist.” Thus, one can find a clear

projection of Black existentialism and the need for self-discovery by struggling

with the duality of being “black” and “American”.

Here, it would be interesting to discuss about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,

a work dealing with the same crisis of identity and the retirement unto invisibility

or “hibernation” (Ellison 5) from where the narrator recalls his past events that

led him into that hole where he stays alienated from the world of racial injustice.

Just like Baldwin wishes his nephew to remember the hard time of his parents,

the narrator too, in Ellison’s novel, is haunted by the dying words of his

grandfather at the crucial junctures of his life, which intensifies the splitting of the

self between a life of an assumed happy existence among the White Americans

and that of resistance to such a “superfluity” (as Arendt would call it). The words

of his grandfather are noteworthy: “I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in

the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction”

(Ellison 13). And this is what Baldwin too reminds his nephew of: “You were not
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expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with

mediocrity.” The grandfather reveals that one has to doubt the White man’s

generosity, as that of Mr. Norton’s in the novel, which is nothing but a fake

philanthropy. The novel is filled with various sections suggesting metaphorically

the “blindfolded” existence of not just the Black, but the White Americans too.

Where the Whites are blind to see the visibility of the Blacks, the Blacks are

willingly blind in order to gain favor and support from the White Americans. The

situation that Jim Trueblood confronts is a perfect example of this, and even the

narrator himself has been chastised for revealing the dark side of the black

community to Mr. Norton. Here, one can locate Fanon’s notion of the “inferiority

complex” (Fanon 9), as a possible outcome of forgetting one’s roots, one’s racial

past. This kind of feeling leads to the invisibility of one’s self and its ultimate

splitting. The narrator’s relation with “the Brotherhood” too turns out to be the

final blow to realize his being an “invisible man,” as the “great white father”

(Ellison 365), Brother Jack ushers the narrator to speak what is scientifically

scripted for his public speech, and later berates him for attending Tod Clifton’s

funeral. Clifton’s death is not regarded as an exercise of racial violence, since he

violates the codes of the White “dictators” by making the dancing Sambo dolls.

Such an attitude is a clear display of reinstating racial discrimination instead of

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preventing it by being the so-called White Liberals. Thus, towards the end, the

narrator discovers: “I’m invisible, not blind” (Ellison 447), which is the beginning

and also the end of the book, is also the beginning of self-recognition, as he

decides now to come out of his “hibernation”: “after years of trying to adopt the

opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. . . . But my world has

become one of infinite possibilities” (Ellison 444-446), as Baldwin also states: “If

you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”

Thus, where Ellison’s narrator is yet to choose his path towards self-

fashioning, Baldwin advises his nephew that instead of urging to become one with

the White Americans by donning “white masks” (Fanon), “[y]ou must accept them

and accept them with love. . ., [as] these men are your brothers . . . We cannot be

free until they are free.”

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Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One

Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." Baldwin, James. The Fire Next
Time. 1963. 11-18.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1952.
<http://www.kwasu.info/ENGLISH/ralphellison.pdf>.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks (1952). Trans. Charles Lam Markmann.
Pluto Press, 2008.

Kohler, L. and Saner, H. Hannah Arendt - Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969.

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.