"Oral Tutelage" and the Figure of Literacy: Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

An important theme in African American literature is relationship between writer or artist and community in general. This is true in black women's fiction and is often embedded in relationship between mother and daughter. mother-figure in black women's fiction ironically embodies a faith in education while she herself participates in a largely culture. She may, strictly speaking, be literate, yet to say that her literacy bears a heavy residue seems inadequate. Rather, her powerful primary orality may be said to betray a sedimentation of literacy. daughter, often protagonist in black women's fiction, may or may be formally educated, but she stands, broadly speaking, as figure of literacy, and as such, subsumes, within figuration, function of writer or artist. At one level at least, literacy is disjunctive in a physiological sense, level at which configuration of senses is rearranged, play of eye and ear, for example. In a much quoted essay, Characteristics of Negro Expression, Zora Neale Hurston observes that, among other qualities, action and picture prevail in black speech. speaker add action to it [language] to make it do, and referring to terms like `chop-ax,' `sitting-chair,' and `cook-pot,' she observes that the speaker has in mind picture of object in use (39). She concludes, So we can say white man thinks in written language and Negro thinks in hieroglyphics (39). Hurston suggests that The stark trimmed phrases of Occident seem too bare for voluptuous child of sun (40). What speaker resists is precisely removal of agency and visualization which, according to Eric Havelock, occurs with acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Havelock calls our attention repeatedly to fact that what occurred with invention of Greek alphabet is essentially a syntactical disruption: The mind must be taught to enter a new syntactical condition, that of mathematical equation, in preference to syntax of story (230). new syntax requires one to identify `subject' in relation to that `object' which `subject' knows (201). This disjunction between subject and object, if it is initiated with literacy,(1) is exacerbated in project of rationality and Enlightenment philosophy and continues to be a central concern of Western philosophy. With what Michel Foucault describes as an epistemic shift occurring at end of eighteenth century, the continuous relation which had placed man with other beings of world was broken. Man, who was once himself a being among others, now is subject among objects. As a result of this break, Man, as an invention of modernity, realizes that he is seeking to understand, only other but himself. Thus he is not only a subject among objects, but becomes subject and object of his own understanding (Dreyfus and Rabinow 28). In Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, generational conflict between mother and daughter, between Silla and Selina, may be understood in terms of this disjunction. Mother and daughter are represented by a thematics of interiority and exteriority, and such a thematics defines a different syntax for each, different syntactical possibilities between subject and object. powerful primary orality of mother figure is represented in what we may call scenes of oral tutelage, scenes where inside and outside are defined on a continuum, where subject and object define a continuity. daughter, in contrast, is caught in a restless movement, vacillating between subject-object positions. syntax here disrupts continuity between subject and object, commensurability between interior and exterior. Before undertaking a closer analysis of Brown Girl, Brownstones, we might note that thematics of inside and outside is emblematic of a tension between self and other, between community and individual, between belonging and exile, membership and exclusion. …