Black Existentialism - Black Existential Literature

Black Existential Literature

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the archetype of black existentialist literature, is one of the most revered and reviewed novels written by an African-American writer. It presents examples of absurdism, anxiety and alienation in relation to the experience of the black male in mid-1900s America. The namelessness of the main character of the novel, a figure based on Ellison's own life, points to the trauma of black people receiving names that were forced on them from the violence of slavery. That renaming was meant to inaugurate a loss of memory, and that process of dismemberment is explored in the novel as the protagonist moves from one abusive father figure to another—white and black—to a culminating reflection on living as an invisible leech off of the system that produces light. In Ellison's novel, the only black characters who seemed somewhat free were those designated insane, as in the famous scene at the Golden Day bar where a group from an insane asylum became the critical voice early in the novel.

The African-American writer who was the closest to the Sartrean existentialist movement was Richard Wright, although Wright saw himself as working through the thought of Søren Kierkegaard with a focus on themes of dread and despair, especially in his novel The Outsider. Dismayed with his experience of American racism in the south, Wright sought refuge in a Parisian life. In France, he was heavily influenced by Les Temps modernes members Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty. The existential novels that he wrote after leaving the United States, such as The Outsider, never received the high critical acclaim of Native Son. In his famous introduction to Native Son, Wright made concrete some of the themes raised by Du Bois. He pointed to the injustice of a system in which police officers randomly arrested young black men for crimes they did not commit and prosecutors who were able to secure convictions in such cases. He also argued that Bigger Thomas, the anti-hero of the novel, was produced by such a system and is often envied by many as a form of resistance to it. Wright's insight portended the emergence, for example, of the contemporary black "gangsta," as portrayed in gangsta rap.

In retrospect, James Baldwin has been considered by others as a Black existentialist writer; however he was quite critical of Richard Wright and suspicious of his relationship with French intellectuals.

Baldwin also brought questions of interracial and bisexual relationships into consideration and looked at the question of suffering as a struggle to defend the possibility of genuine human relationships in his novel Another Country.

The writings of Toni Morrison are also contributions to black existentialism. Her novel The Bluest Eye examines how "ugliness" and "beauty" dominate black women's lives as imitations of white women as the standard of beauty. Her famous novel Beloved raises the question of the trauma that haunts black existence from slavery. (See, for example, the discussion of that novel in Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim Nor Survivor, chapter 8.)