Free English Literature Dissertations - The Assumptions That Griffin Makes Are Based On Real Experience.
The assumptions that Griffin makes are based on real experience. Structurally, the way in which Griffin writes tends to undermine the traditional assumptions that one associates with whiteness and blackness. He does this not by questioning the politics and the identity of blackness and whiteness singularly, but by looking at it through the paradigm of the actual people that he meets. On both sides of the racial divide, he meets people that he is overwhelmed by; for instance, the construction worker, whom he remarks: [a]s we drove, the tensions drained from me. He was boisterous, loud and guileless. I could only conclude that he was color blind, since he appeared totally unaware that I was a Negro., and also people that he is disgusted by; [m]y revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. Similarly, he criticises black people too for sabotaging themselves. He says that if whites looked at blacks with distrust, it was nothing compared to the cast distrust with which blacks regarded whites. He meets people who are well-meaning, but essentially flawed; [h]is questions had the spurious elevation of a scholar seeking information, but the information he sought was entirely sexual, and presupposed that in the ghetto the Negro’s life is one of marathon sex. The impression he gets is that Griffin challenges and abhors the man’s ignorance but is ultimately compassionate with the man’s enquiries. What is important about this is that, because of the characters that he meets, further enlivened by the choice of using the journal format to express it, Griffin bypasses assumptions about race, about what needs to be done, Griffin offers a complex and layered psychological map concerned with the identity of both blackness and whiteness. In focussing more upon the individual, rather than the collective experience, Griffin eschews the dogma that usually dominates such attempts at racial profiling and works towards a solution; the notion of hybridity.
It was the same nightmare. I had been having it recently. White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me.
Griffin’s experience as a black man is marred constantly by the presence of racism and of the belittlement of his assumed nationality that occurs on a regular basis. W. E. B. Dubois states that [t]he double-aimed struggle of the black artisan on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of word and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. This confusion; this duality is capitalised upon by the economic and situational void that Griffin finds himself immersed in as he begins to assume the characteristics of an oppressed race.
Dissertations - Free English Literature Dissertations
