Navel-Erasing

Abstract

As the above quotes demonstrate, Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid highlight the ways in which black women, specifically throughout their history in the West, have been engaged in transgressing boundaries of gender and challenging traditional gender roles. These sensibilities are translated into their fictive works where repre-sentations of gender and the black female body are fluid, ambiguous, and unstable. Kincaid theorizes about negotiating the fluidity of her postcolonial identity in a 1991 interview with Kay Bonetti. She says, “All of this [reading of British literature] has left me very uncomfortable with ambiguity. Within the life of an English person there was always clarity, and within an English culture there was always clarity, but within my life and culture was ambiguity … I was taught to think of ambiguity as magic, a shadiness and an illegitimacy, not the real thing of Western civilization” (128–29). She goes on to say, “I am illegitimate. I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity and the right to clarity” (129). Kincaid finds power in claiming illegitimacy and ambiguity; her movement between ambiguity and clarity is also illustrative of her navigation between various states of being.

I have never met a man more impressive than my mother.

—Jamaica Kincaid, from “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid” by Kay Bonetti

Black women slaves in this country were not, by and large, domestics in the house, with the headrag … There was no question of ‘You can’t haul this sack, you can’t cut down this tree, you can’t ride this mule,’ because women were laborers first and their labor is what was important … A woman had a role as important as the man’s, and not in any way subservient to his, and he didn’t feel threatened by it, he needed her.

—Toni Morrison, from “Toni Morrison” by Charles Ruas