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Books by
Eldridge Cleaver
Soul on Ice /
Post-Prison Writings and
Speeches / Target
Zero; A Life in Writing /
Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver
Being Black /
Education and Revolution /
Eldridge Cleaver /
Eldridge Cleaver Is Free
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Tearing
the Goat's Flesh
By
Robert F. Reid-Pharr
On Cleaver's
Soul on Ice
Cleaver
documents what has become one of the most recognizable, one might even say
trite, markers of Black masculinity, incarceration.
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Cleaver's
misogyny and homophobia have been chalked up to his male privilege and
antiquated notions of what constitutes properly Black gender and sexual
relations.
To date no one has examined seriously Cleaver's
tragicomic struggle to construct a Black heterosexuality, to finally rid the
Black consciousness of the dual specters of effeminacy and interracial
homoeroticism. One might argue, in fact, that Cleaver's
woman hating and fag bashing were, for all his bravado, failed attempts to
assert himself and the Black community as "straight."
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[In
Soul on Ice] Cleaver
confesses to having been a racially motivated rapist, perfecting his craft on
the bodies of Black women before he "crossed the tracks" to seek out
his "white prey."
Clearly the abuse of the Black female body acts
as a means to an end, a type of cultural production in which Cleaver's
manhood, his sense of self-worth, is established and articulated. I would be
wrong, however, to suggest that Cleaver's
ultimate goal is to possess and abuse white female bodies.
Again women act only
as conduits by which social relations, relations that take place exclusively
between men, are represented. Cleaver
may indeed be raping Black and white women, but it is white men whom he intends
to hurt.
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The
peculiarity of Cleaver's
twisted logic rests not so much in the fact that he saw sexual violence as an
insurrectionary tool. On the contrary, the rape of women, is used regularly to
terrorize and subdue one's "enemies." The difficulty in Cleaver's
logic rests in the fact that he raped both white and Black women. Was he, I must
wonder, seeking revenge on the white man when he violated poor, Black female
residents of his quintessentially Black ghettos?
This
question is not simply rhetorical. Cleaver
himself argues that there is a tendency within some segments of the Black
community to understand the Black woman as having collaborated, particularly
through the vehicle of sex, with the white master.
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* * *
Indeed Angela Davis attempts
to contextualize this sentiment in her seminal essay, "Reflections on The
Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," Raping the Black woman
could be interpreted, then, as an attack on the white man's stooge. The Black
woman becomes the means of telegraphing a message of rage and resistance to the
white male oppressor, a figure Cleaver
recodifies as the Omnipotent Administrator.
It
becomes clear that the ultimate target of Cleaver's
sexual attacks is always the white man. Both white and Black women act as pawns
in an erotic conversation between Cleaver
and his white male counterparts.
This fact is emblematically represented in an
exchange between Cleaver
and a white prison guard who enters Cleaver's
cell, rips a picture of a voluptuous white woman from the wall, tears it to
bits, and then leaves the pieces floating in the toilet for Cleaver
to find upon his return. The guard later tells Cleaver
that he will allow him to keep pictures of Black women, but not whites.
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Cleaver's
pin-up girl acts as not only a sign of interracial desire, but also a marker of
his heterosexuality. This fact, which seems easy enough to understand, actually
represents a deep contradiction within Cleaver's
demonstration of the Black male heterosexual self. It points directly to the
disjunction between the reality of the interracial homoerotic, homosexual
environment, the prison, in which Cleaver
actually lived and wrote and the fantasy of Black heterosexuality that he
constructs in his narrative.
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* * *
He
[Cleaver] spends some time in Soul
on Ice
describing the exchange of "love" letters between his lawyer, Beverly
Axelrod, and himself. Strangely enough, there is little of Cleaver,
the rapist, in these works. His love seemingly transcends the corporeal. By
turns he describes Axelrod as a rebel and a revolutionary, a person of great
intelligence, compassion, and humanity, a valiant defender of "civil rights
demonstrators, sitiners, and the Free Speech students." And just at the
moment when he has produced her as bodiless, transcendent saint he interjects,
I
suppose that I should be honest, and before going any further, admit that my
lawyer is a woman . . . a very excellent, unusual, and beautiful woman. I know
that she believes that I do not really love her and that I am confusing a
combination of lust and gratitude for love. Lust and gratitude I feel
abundantly, but I also love this woman.[12]
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Yet
Cleaver's
description of his non-corporeal, non-funky love for Beverly Axelrod can only
redouble upon itself. It directly challenges the claim that Cleaver's
work is a product of the stark reality he has experienced. Cleaver
has, much like the white man, the Omnipotent Administrator he so despises,
excised his own penis, his lust, his physical self from the conversation.
The
Omnipotent Administrator, having repudiated and abdicated his body, his
masculine component which he has projected onto the men beneath him, cannot
present his woman, the Ultrafeminine, with an image of masculinity capable of
penetrating into the psychic depths where the treasure of her orgasm is buried.
Still
even as Cleaver
decries the bodilessness of the Omnipotent Administrator his love for Beverly
Axelrod is no more physical than is the white man's for the ultrafeminine.
Beverly Axelrod is unlike the victims of Cleaver's
rapes in that she is all intellect and no body. The "sexual" passion
between the two is even more rarefied than that of the Omnipotent Administrator
and the Ultrafeminine because there is never even the promise of physical
contact, raw sex, but only endless literary representations of their desire.
Beverly Axelrod should be understood, then, as a fiction, or rather as the site
of yet another fictional exchange. In this manner the idea of heterosexual
normality becomes a sort of caricature of itself. The body gives way to the
intellect, lust to love.
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* * *
Perhaps the most telling
moment . . . is Cleaver's
confrontation with his white intellectual mentor, Chris Lovdjieff, a prison
teacher and a man whom Cleaver
describes as "The Christ." Lovdjieff introduces Cleaver
to what the great novelists and playwrights had said of love. He reads poetry on
the subject and plays his students tapes of Ashley Montagu then instructs them
to write responsive essays. Cleaver
writes that he cannot love whites, quoting Malcolm X as evidence:
How
can I love the man who raped my mother, killed my father, enslaved my ancestors,
dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killed off the Indians and keeps me cooped up in
the slums? I'd rather be tied up in a sack and tossed into the Harlem River
first.[14]
Lovdjieff
responds in a fit of tears to what he takes to be a personal attack. Cleaver
remarks, "Jesus wept" then leaves. Soon thereafter the San Quentin
officials begin to curtail Lovdjieff's access to the prisoners, finally barring
him from entry altogether.
The
ideological work that the reenactment of this oedipal ritual accomplishes is
both to detach Cleaver
and his narrative from the deeply homoerotic relationship he maintains with
Lovdjieff and to clear the way for a purely Black masculinity. It is important
to remember here that the country was in the midst of rather striking changes in
the manner in which the official "reality" of both race and sexuality
were articulated.
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I
would suggest again that when Cleaver
severs his ties with Lovdjieff he is helping to reestablish an ontological
economy that would take racial difference as primary. The resolution of the
crisis represented by their relationship leads to the renormalization of
received racial thinking.
At
the same time it is important to point out that the post-World War II period
witnessed an incredible bifurcation in the means by which sexual desire was
articulated and actualized. . . . the most prominent
chroniclers of the Black urban male experience, including not only Cleaver,
Baldwin and Thomas, but Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka all reference
the increased visibility of the urban homosexual.
What
I
would argue, then, is that the homosexual, and in particular the racially marked
homosexual, the Black homosexual, represented . . . . [a] deep crisis, a crisis of identity and community that threw into
confusion, if only temporarily, the boundaries of (Black) normality.
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On Baldwin's Another
Country & Cleaver
The progress of Baldwin's
early career might be narrated, in fact, as a series of successively more
explicit and stark representations of the Black Abject, or as I will demonstrate
below, the ghost of the homosexual.
The whisper of adolescent longing for
distant fathers and virile young men in Go Tell It on the Mountain gives way in
Another Country to the tragically inverted "straight" man, Rufus, who,
on the one hand, has passionate sex with his white girlfriend, a woman Cleaver
refers to as a southern Jezebel, and, on the other, takes a white male southern
lover, or again to quote Cleaver,
"lets a white bisexual homosexual fuck him in the ass."
To
be "fucked" by the white man is not simply to be overcome by white
culture, white intellect, white notions of superiority. Nor can it be understood
solely as the undeniable evidence of the desire to be white. Instead Cleaver's
fear is that Baldwin opens up space for the reconstruction of the Black
imaginary, such that the most sacrosanct of Black "truths" might be
transgressed.
The image of the white (male) southerner raping the (unwilling)
Black woman resonates with a long history of African-American literature and
lore in which the licentious white man acts as the absolute spoiler of Black
desire. The image of the white (Southerner) "making love to" the Black
man, however, throws all this into confusion.
On
the one hand, we see a rescripting of Frederick Douglass's famous account of the
whipping of his aunt Hester. The Black male subject is no longer able to remain,
in the closet, as it were; instead he takes the woman's place on the joist,
becoming himself the victim of the white man's scourge. On the other, it seems
that the white man needs not force his "victim" at all. The reader
cannot find comfort in the idea that the image of the white male
"abuse" of the Black male body is but a deeper revelation of white
barbarism. The Black subject willingly gives himself, becoming in the process
the mirror image of the culpable female slave whom Angela Davis has described so
ably. One might argue, in fact, that the spectacle of interracial homosexual
desire puts such pressure on the ideological structures of the Black national
literary tradition that it renders the continuation of the inside/out binarism
nearly impossible.
Source: "Tearing
the Goats Flesh: Homosexuality,
Abjection and the Production of a Late Twentieth-Century Black
Masculinity."
Studies
in the Novel, Fall 96, Vol. 28 Issue 3, p372, 23p
Also in
Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997)
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great
Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a
sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi
for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin
was falsely accused of stealing a white
man's turkeys and was almost beaten to
death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling,
a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem
after learning of the grove owners'
plans to give him a "necktie party" (a
lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for
the United States Army and couldn't
operate in his own home town." Anchored
to these three stories is Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's
magnificent, extensively researched
study of the "great migration," the
exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into
the novelistic narratives of Gladney,
Starling, and Pershing settling in new
lands, building anew, and often finding
that they have not left racism behind.
The drama, poignancy, and romance of a
classic immigrant saga pervade this
book, hold the reader in its grasp, and
resonate long after the reading is done.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 29 April 2010
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