Writing with Purpose: Invention, Rage, and Freedom

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth defines the work that I do as a rhetorician. I remember sitting in my college dorm room, vibrating as I read it for the first time. Are you allowed to write like this? I’d never encountered writing quite like it: poetic, urgent, direct. By then, I’d absorbed the idea that sophisticated writing—writing that tries to convey this thing that’s always called nuance—doesn’t name or assail power directly but talks around it. In contrast, the first few pages of this book announce that this writer intends for his work to do something in the world: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder” (1). My continued engagement with this and with other work by Fanon (most especially Black Skin, White Masks) has impressed upon me how much his writing is concerned with the problem of invention. How do we make new selves in the wake of the injury that is colonialism? I labor over this question as I write about how in the early years of independence in Zimbabwe, state actors and citizens alike struggled to remake not only notions of the racialized and gendered self, but ways of moving and being in public spaces.Jane Caputi’s The Age of Sex Crime, another book I first read as an undergraduate student, was one of the first texts to model for me what cultural critics do—how they read across genres and media, taking interest in things like cultural ephemera—to tell a compelling story about how power operates. It argues that the serial murders of women animate Western culture, functioning as a “mythic/ritualistic act in contemporary patriarchy” (3). Caputi’s text is equal parts feminist polemic and academic study, written with a gripping anger and clarity. This text taught me that as feminist critics, we can make our object anything we encounter that provokes us, pushes back against us, and makes us see clearly the waters in which we are immersed.I feel like I become a different person after I read a Toni Morrison novel. I first read Morrison’s Paradise just before I began fieldwork for my dissertation, feeling a little depleted and anxious. I was emboldened and transformed by this book. Paradise is a novel about an Oklahoma town named Ruby, a Black utopia whose racial, gender, and moral boundaries are policed by a group of patriarchs. The women who have been cast out of this utopia find refuge in a place on the edge of town called the Convent. The Convent is a site of nurturing, healing, and magic, as the women mobilize the material and metaphysical to protect each other. It doesn’t give the ending away to tell you that these powerful and therefore terrifying women are disciplined in a spectacularly violent fashion—the book begins and ends with the witch hunt meant to silence them once and for all. Morrison chafed at the suggestion that she had written a feminist book, countering that she wasn’t in the business of writing what she derisively called “‘ist’ novels.” It’s the writer’s prerogative to insist that art ought not be subsumed by ideology, but with all respect to Morrison, this is an unmistakably feminist novel. It attends to the power—and danger—of women’s spaces and intimacies. In my own work, I return to the tantalizing promise of Black women’s congregation, to the possibilities held in Black women’s collective attempts at escape and freedom.