Black Like Us

A few years after the 1970 Black Panthers trial in New Haven, Conn., Cleanth Brooks stood at the well of a packed lecture theater. It was April, and Brooks was the dean of Faulknerians, a courtly, white-haired gent of medium height, and the subject of that afternoon was William Faulkner’s short story, “That Evening Sun.” I don’t know whether it was the odor of magnolia that wafted into the hall or just some pedagogical whim, but in the manner, one could only guess, of an old-time patrician white Southern gentleman entertaining his male guests after dinner, Brooks looked up from his notes and began to sing.

“I hates to see dat evenin’ sun go down,” he shuffled behind the podium to the chorus of “St. Louis Woman.” “I hates to see dat’ evenin’ sun go down.” Shuffle, shuffle. One hundred jaws in a variety of colors, went slack. Even in those Edenic days before political correctness (and even before Slim Pickens taught Cleavon Little how to sing in “Blazing Saddles”), Brooks’ manner of dramatic presentation of Faulkner made more than a few people nervous.

So it is hardly surprising that, 15 years later, when Edouard Glissant stood before an audience of African American students and professors at Southern University in Baton Rouge and argued that it was time for a reconsideration of William Faulkner, for a fresh, black reading of his works, that a similar dropping of jaws occurred.

Faulkner was a man whose views on race were only slightly less complex than his prose. He made many enemies among his white neighbors with his emphatic and vocal opposition to enforced segregation of schools and universities. But he was also a man who was reported as saying, “But if it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians [meaning whites].” Although Faulkner’s superb biographer Frederick Karl makes a strong defense--attributing this latter statement to depression, drink and a dunning by the British journalist Russell Howe--none of Faulkner’s millions of words can be easily dismissed.

Yet Glissant, in his book-length essay, “Faulkner, Mississippi,” makes a strong case for a reassessment of the author of not only the great middle tragedies “The Sound and the Fury,” “Absalom, Absalom” and “Light in August” but also of the poet of the white trash Snopeses of “The Hamlet” and the underappreciated “Intruder in the Dust.” His case is nothing less than that, no matter how Faulkner’s personal Furies twisted his public speech, Faulkner was a great, world-beating multiculturalist.

Of course, Glissant is not talking about the wishy-washy multiculturalism that passes for an elementary school curriculum these days. An eminent writer from Martinique, Glissant has been preaching for some years--in his poetry, his novels and particularly in his essays--a sermon titled “The Poetics of Relation.” For Glissant, authors who demonstrate the power of the “Poetics of Relation” have a complex understanding of the world that comes from thinking of identity as something that is grown, not in isolation but in relation to other peoples and other cultures. Faulkner ties perfectly into a sermon. Half a millennium of trading in human languages and souls has thrown together whites and blacks, blood and speech, into a genealogical and linguistic mixture that is inseparable in Faulkner.

Faulkner’s ambivalent public stances on race relations, in fact, connect him more closely with the literature of the Caribbean than with the writing of his North American neighbors. Homogeneous epic institutions, Glissant argues, like the America of white Europeans or the tribe of the Jews, stake their claims on a clear line of descent back to a firm, unquestionable Genesis. Not so the communities of the Amerindians or the Caribbean, where origins are so clouded that each fractional mixture of Carib, European and African blood has spawned its own marvelous Creole word to describe it. “The word of the Story,” Glissant says, “is not dictated by a God, or derived from a Law. It is the composite word, which contests, even if not openly, any idea of Genesis, a creation of the world, a legitimate genealogy guaranteed and passed down through bloodlines. I am speaking of the Creole tales of the Americas.”

It’s a fascinating way to read Faulkner--and Glissant provides many specific references that will send even the most memorious Faulknerites back to their bookshelves. Creole readings are inevitably spicier than the plain biblical fare. And even though Faulkner was God the Creator of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, “when Faulkner was writing,” Glissant says, “what he put at risk was the supreme institution of this Southern community. He questioned its very legitimacy, its original establishment, its Genesis, its irrefutable source.”

Glissant finds the Caribbean everywhere in Faulkner, not only in the shades of black and white ancestry but in the very way the stoic housekeeper Dilsey in “The Sound and the Fury” and the other black denizens of Yoknapatawpha County “endured.” “For those of us who are Caribbean,” Glissant writes, “our prophetic vision of the past makes us hear--the cry Black slave women would shout to each other: ‘Manje te pa fe yich pou lesclavaf’ (Eating the Earth saves a child from slavery), which refers to the belief that eating dirt could make women abort when they had been raped by their masters or those sent to do their breeding for them. What suffering there is in this one cry! A suffering as stubborn as Dilsey’s.”

Far from joining the students of Southern University in their dismissal, Glissant adds a Creole crown to Faulkner’s laurels, bringing Parnassus down to street level. “Can literature make one forget grief and injustice?” he asks. “Or, rather, is literature, and particularly the work of Faulkner, inextricably tied to grief and injustice so as to be able to point them out or fight against them? . . . Literature matters more than making testimonies or taking sides, not because it exceeds all possible appreciation of the real, but because it is a more profound approach and, ultimately, the only one that matters.”

These may seem extravagant claims for Faulkner. Yet consider the writers who claim descent from Faulkner--Flannery O’Connor and William Styron, of course, but also Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.

But the best proponents of the “Poetics of Relation” may be Glissant’s nearest neighbors--most immediately Glissant’s Martinican brother Patrick Chamoiseau, whose magnificent novel “Texaco” is as perfect an act of Creolization as “The Sound and the Fury,” and the St. Lucian Derek Walcott, who drinks and breathes the stuff. There are days, in fact, when it seems that the plate tectonics of culture have shifted the omphalos, the bellybutton of literature, westward past the Pillars of Hercules to the Isles of the Caribs.

At times, there’s a utopian innocence to Glissant’s optimism. When Glissant quotes the liner notes from a Native American ballet performance in New York to illustrate how the “Poetics of Relation” translate into even the Sioux, for instance, one can’t help but hear the flaky tune of “It’s A Small World After All.”

But ultimately, a realistic Glissant recognizes the limits of Faulkner’s power and the power of literature. “What would it mean,” he asks, “for Faulkner to do the impossible in literature?--to speak the impossible of the South without having to say it, to create a literature that patiently confronts everything inexpressible in this impossible, and perhaps to effect change through the sheer force of this literature. That, in my opinion, is what he achieved--except on the last point, for if he undoubtedly brought about change, it was far away from his country.”

Still, any school or university could do far worse than to rename its multicultural studies program, “The Department of Creole Affairs” and make Faulkner (and Glissant) required reading.