CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
African-American literature is dominated by the attempt of writers of African
descent to represent in narratives, the historical experiences of African-Americans in a
color-coded American culture. It represents experiences spanning the period of traumatic
slavery, through the harsh Jim Crow racial segregation law, to the black exodus to Africa
initiated by Marcus Garvey and some other black activists. African-American literature,
therefore, depicts the interaction between black and white Americans and the
connectedness of black Americans to their root. It explores themes that are influenced by
the milieu that gave rise to it. Such themes include the place of the African-Americans
within the larger American society, racism, segregation, culture, migration and social
equality. Also, within the African-American discourse, the issue of identity has become a
recurring problem for individual American, African-American and the American nation at
large. Thus, DeSaulnier et al assert that:
the American national identity is constructed by race and the American
experience is shaped by the boundaries set, and reset, by Americans since
the very first colonists arrived. Historically, for African-Americans, the
color‐line was drawn legally, socially, and culturally, so that they would be
excluded from the American experience that many others would enjoy. (2)
Hence, different periods in the history of American society has experienced numerous
crises as a result of the prejudice of a color-coded world, segregating between the blacks
and the whites in America. Africans in America became victims of double displacement,
being neither Africans nor Americans.
As an aspect of African Diaspora Studies, African-American literature explores
greatly the issue of identity. This was as a result of the Civil Rights Movement era of
1940s, ’50s and ’60s which motivated black writers to address the issue of denial of
identities prevalent in America. Many African-American writers of the time like James
Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison wrote
stories and essays examining what it was like to be of any of the identities not accepted
by the American culture of her time, such as black, homosexual, female. And since the
early 19th century, according to DeSaulnier et al, African Americans have been forced to
reconnect with their ancestral homeland, both figuratively and literally in response to the
prejudice of a color-coded culture. However, most of the analyses of the theme of identity
in African-American Studies have examined identity either in relation to racism, as a
struggle for a voice and as transcending individualism and maintaining the collective
mind of the Negro, or as a reconnection to the root.
This study analyzes identity from another dimension. It explores identity within
the texts under study as supernaturally and naturally imposed, an obligation made on the
characters by forces beyond them, from which they have no power of escape, thus,
making the individual a pharmakos of a destined self. In analyzing Isidore Okpewho’s
Call Me By My Rightful Name and Richard Wright’s Native Son that are heavily loaded
with intrinsic poetic features that mark them out as classic literary texts, the study carries
out an analysis of the diction and structure of these texts in other to establish how
language and imagery have been used to represent the protagonists – Otis Hampton and
Bigger Thomas – as inevitably taking another self under pressure. The research studies the
internal consistency of the representations in the two texts, whereby the linguistic and
structural movement of the texts develop on their own momentum, to reflect a force
which compels the main characters to respond and accept their individual identities – Otis
as a black African identity and Bigger as a labeled and stereotyped black nigger. Otis
cooperates with the force he cannot fight to define himself and claim his identity while
Bigger though resisting but inevitably responds and takes the identity given him.
Bigger, therefore, can be said to fit perfectly into W. E. B. Du Bois’ history of a
human heart in his tale of a black boy who is presented as struggling with life that he
might know the world and know himself, who met three temptations of Hate for the
culture which imprisons him from realizing his dream; of Despair that he is losing grip of
identity actualization, becoming what he truly desire to be; and of Doubt perplexed at
who he finally turns out to be at the end. And one who crosses the Valley of Humiliation
and the Valley of the Shadows of Death (Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folk 133). For Otis
Hampton, even though he passes through the same crucible, does not finally cross the
Valley of the Shadows of Death because he cooperates with the supernatural force that
led him to the discovery of a self he is at home with.
This study, therefore, sets out to analyze the texts – Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me By
My Rightful Name and Richard Wright’s Native Son – based on the two directions in
which Identity Theory has evolved over time, namely how social structures impact on the
structures of self, and the internal dynamics of self-processes as these impact social
behavior in the micro and macro units of action within the texts.