Fleeing the Excremental Stain Through Acquisition: Getting to the Bottom of Black Suburban Splendor in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills

Abstract

Like Ishmael Reed’s novel, Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, a modern-day revision of Dante’s Inferno, uses scatological satire to address the construction of race within the nation. Still, the text is less interested in showing the impact of sanitary and social engineering on black subjects than it is in presenting the ways in which black characters seek to move past excremental association through financial gain and acquisition of property, to achieve, in other words, the American dream of wealth and property ownership. Because African Americans in the novel are demarcated as excessive national bodies—the two main characters are named “White” and “Shit, for example—they experience a double alienation from the body; they must overcome not only the individual body’s movement toward excreta, but also national discourses that drench and inject black bodies with innate racial difference. To transcend constructions of blackness rooted in national fantasies of bodily differentiation, the novel shows how black suburban characters deny multiple bodily excesses in order to gain entrance into capitalist understanding and recognition of value or worth. In other words, characters cleanse themselves of excremental blackness, of white shit, by replacing bodily life with inanimate objects in the belief that the acquisition of property will erase or cover racial difference. In presentation of suburban subjects fleeing the excremental stain, the text refuses to celebrate monetary success epitomized by the collection of objects or homes in the African American suburb, but instead calls for the negation of such subjectivity dedicated to possession, which in the context of the novel is the replacement of full bodily life and human connectivity with inanimate objects. In the two main characters’ sojourn through the black suburb, White and Shit bemoan the sacrifice of bodily life and human intimacy as characters attempt to escape abject blackness through acquisition. Combining Brown’s and Freud’s insights into “filthy lucre” with Fanon’s work in Black Skin, White Masks, the chapter explores the ways in which Linden Hills presents the double alienation of the black subject from bodily life. Further, analysis of the novel shows how Naylor presents an alternative way of responding to racial demarcation as excess by reveling in what is believed to be useless by white, capitalist society: organic excess and worthless bodily pleasure.