One Must Say Yes: Poetic Acts of Affirmation in Works by Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison

Abstract

One Must Say Yes: Poetic Acts of Affirmation in Works by Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison Jacob Pagano (bio) [O]ne must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found…. —James Baldwin In the above quotation from James Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s photo-essay portfolio, Nothing Personal (first published in 1964), Baldwin, writing during a consequential moment in the fight for civil rights, offers a resounding imperative to his reader to say “yes” and embrace life. The basis Baldwin offers for why one must say “yes” is rooted in both memory and a kind of existentialism. Baldwin recalls a formative childhood experience in which his parents, amidst the terrors of racism, did not just bear life but affirmed it (60). Because he witnessed this affirmation, Baldwin maintains that he can affirm life too, and hence, the next generation, by witnessing him, can do the same. The “yes” in this passage is thus a speech act par excellence: It performs in its annunciation an act of affirmation, thereby making possible the survival of oneself and one’s progeny.1 It also calls to mind other resonant “yes” statements in works that similarly address the concern of how to live in and resist racist worlds: “Man is a yes that vibrates”, Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks (2), while Ralph Ellison’s protagonist, the invisible man unseen by anti-Black society, vows to “affirm, say yes” as a guiding principle (579). These “yes” statements, all offered by authors committed to the liberation of the Black experience, suggest that asserting “yes” constitutes an anti-racist strategy. But while these “yeses” clearly convey more than quotidian affirmation (e.g. “Yes, I hear you”), it is not clear what role they play within their authors’ anti-racist projects. A question arises: What purpose do these “yeses” serve for three authors who, though writing distinct projects, are all committed to creating what Aaron Ngozi Oforlea calls a “space where they are free to define themselves or articulate their subjectivity in any way they choose” (2)? Studies of Black subjectivity in Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison respectively often focus on how Black speakers recover agency in opposition to anti-Black oppression and subjugation. Joseph F. Trimmer and Per Winther, writing in the CLA Journal, have both looked at this in Invisible Man; Oforlea has recently considered [End Page 246] empowered Black subjectivities in Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s fictional work. An area that has received far less attention, however, is the relationship between affirmative speech—literal “yes” utterances—and subjective empowerment, which Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison all draw forth.2 I argue that, for them, the articulation of “yes” in meaningful ways—whether as a way to self-affirm for a fictional character (Ellison), as a psychological commitment (Fanon), or to passionately commit to one’s humanity and ancestry (Baldwin)—itself constitutes an anti-racist practice or strategy. The most obvious reason is that when Black speakers affirm themselves in their own complexity, they are resisting discourses that negate or restrictively define Black subjective existence, whether in hate speech, cultural racism, or structural discrimination. I argue more specifically that these authors’ interest in “yes” marks a strategy to militate against anti-Black racist discourse’s distortion of the “yes” utterance. Langston Hughes sums up the historical legacy of “yes” as used in racist discourse when he writes of how a Black porter must “Say / Yes, sir! / To you all the time . . . All my Days / Climbing up a great big mountain / Of Yes, sirs!” (161). Hughes’ verse perfectly distills a historical reality: the trope of Black speakers who must say “Yes, sir!” not from their own volition, but because of the racist social code. Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison, as I show below, not only document this history but respond to it by emphatically affirming themselves and others through “yes” imperatives outside the framework of race, thus undermining it. All three authors frame affirmation as a generative practice for empowering Black subjectivity, and, in doing so, stand in conversation with movements such as Black Lives Matter today, which is fighting every minute for a world where “Black life is not systematically targeted for...