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"I Yam what I Am": Naming and Unnaming in Afro-American Literature

1982; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2904266

2326-1536

Kimberly W. Benston,

Race, History, and American Society

Several years ago-so the story goes-Malcolm X was engaged in a heated debate with a prominent black academic. Sensing that they had reached a moment of absolute impasse, Malcolm paused briefly, then queried his antagonist: Brother Professor, do you know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? No. What? came the reply, to which Malcolm answered simply: Nigger. The story, whatever it might suggest about the often internecine dynamics of contemporary culture, subtly proposes a basic interpretation of history and identity. Malcolm swiftly levels distinctions of class, training, and pretension by reminding the professor of a shared origin, returning him to the debasing ground of Middle Passage and slavery. Indeed, Malcolm calls his rival brother only by dispossessing him of his acquired title (professor) and reductively christening him with the cursed yet bonding epithet of a nation dispossessed (nigger). It is an act of radical unnaming that sees all labels formulated by the master society (they) as enslaving fictions, and implies further that no true black nation, no truly named black self, emerged from reconstructed post-bellum America. Malcolm's deconstructed vision of history is, of course, neither peculiarly his nor definitive among black artists, intellectuals, and citizens. Yet, as the semantic lineage stretching from nigger to colored to Negro to black/ Afro-American certifies, his cynicism takes account of a central crux of all black self-definitions: How envision and name a people whose very existence was predicated upon expropriation of land, culture, and the binding imperatives and designations of what Ellison terms the familial past? Those who lost their fathers, mothers, priests, and gods over the ocean have acquired a painful linguistic marginality. As Malcolm understood, former slaves are not easily turned into self-fashioning revolutionaries, for in what language (Malcolm's primary trope of power) except the master's would that demiurgic act shape them? Language-that fundamental act of organizing