"Obsidian Mine": The Psychic Aftermath of Slavery

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Oh, yes, I had my bad dreams. I had my good ones, too. Both required critique. He [the analysand] must find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness. His illness itself must … become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. In the foundational article “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race” (1996), Hortense Spillers argues “that the psychoanalytic object, subject, subjectivity now constitute the missing layer of hermeneutic/interpretive projects of an entire generation of black intellectuals now at work” (377). A mere handful of African-American writers serve as the exceptions that prove this rule, and the experimental science fiction and fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany is foremost among them. As both literary practitioner and critic, Delany has deeply considered the possibilities and the limitations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual framework and as a means of psychic repair for black and/or queer subjects in the late-twentieth century. However, because Delany's oeuvre has often been analyzed outside the context of African-American literary and cultural studies, the implications of his engagement with and critique of psychoanalytic theory for black cultural discourse have not heretofore been explored. Representing psyches and, more specifically, sexualities damaged through racialized and gendered forms of oppression has been one of the most significant projects of twentieth-century African-American literature, at least since W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The internal operation of psychic recovery—the means by which psychological repair might be accomplished—takes up much less space within black American literature, and when the process of recovery has been represented, spiritual and cultural communion are, more often than not, the paths to psychic health.1 Thus, Delany's deployment of psychoanalytic practices of narrative healing, coupled with his critique of the homophobic orientation of much psychoanalytic theory, render his Return to Nevèrÿon series the most thorough engagement with psychoanalysis within African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952).2