Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Lettres noires

L’insistance de la lettre dans la culture afro-américaine

Claudine Raynaud (dir.)

DOI : 10.4000/books.pulm.15410

Éditeur : Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Lieu d’édition : Montpellier

Année d’édition : 2012

Date de mise en ligne : 25 mars 2022

Collection : Horizons anglophones

EAN électronique : 9782367814148

https://books.openedition.org

Édition imprimée

EAN (Édition imprimée) : 9782842699529

Nombre de pages : 230

Référence électronique

RAYNAUD, Claudine (dir.). Lettres noires : L’insistance de la lettre dans la culture afro-américaine. Nouvelle édition [en ligne]. Montpellier : Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2012 (généré le 28 mars 2022). Disponible sur Internet : <http://books.openedition.org/pulm/15410>. ISBN : 9782367814148. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.15410.

Légende de couverture

Illustration de couverture : Raymond Saunders, Sending a Letter (aquarelle, 100 cm x 65 cm), n° 8 de la série Marie, age 5 ?, of Paris gave me 10 drawings – A Paris Marie, 5 ans ?, m’a donné 10 dessins , Raymond Saunders, catalogue d’exposition, Galerie Resche, 1990. Libre de droits

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 mars 2022.

© Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2012

Conditions d’utilisation :
http://www.openedition.org/6540

Résumés

Depuis le vol de la lettre par l’esclave qui accédait à l’écriture au péril de sa vie, le parcours de la lettre noire se fait en référence à la liberté et à l’illettrisme. Écrire est une conquête, un signe d’humanité, un miroir tendu au maître. L’oralité originaire du parler noir et le topos du « livre qui parle » hantent l’écriture de romans complexes qui mettent en abyme les aléas des correspondances. L’épître est aussi, à l’instar des lettres des sœurs Grimké, cette lettre « ouverte », héritière du sermon, qui s’inscrit dans une démarche politique. Lettre de protestation, lettre intime qui se fait publique, elle participe alors aux luttes qui jalonnent l’histoire noire. Retour aux sources, elle est le matériau brut de l’artiste Raymond Saunders. Elle intervient. Elle insiste.

Retracer la trajectoire de la lettre dans la culture afro-américaine, tel est le but de ces essais qui portent sur les lettres de prison (George Jackson et Mumia Abu-Jamal), le roman épistolaire (Alice Walker) et ses avatars dans le roman postmoderne contemporain (John Edgar Wideman, Percival Everett), et les correspondances d’écrivains avec leurs éditeurs (James Baldwin, Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright).

Claudine Raynaud (dir.)

Claudine Raynaud est professeur d’études américaines à l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3. Chercheur au Du Bois Institute (Harvard, 2005) et à l’ITEM/C.N.R.S., elle a dirigé l’équipe de recherche « Études afro-américaines ». Sa recherche porte sur l’autobiographie noire, Toni Morrison et Zora Neale Hurston.

Sommaire

Black Letters Unfettered

Claudine Raynaud

1 Writing (voice?) and black différance

2 Letters and/in African American History

3 The Theft of the Letter

4 The Flight (of the Letters)

5 The Letter as Political Weapon

6 Conclusion

La lettre et la lutte

De la lettre comme forme de lutte : les « Grimké Sisters »

Colette Collomb-Boureau

1 Un « coming out » réussi

2 La lettre au service d’une cause

3 « A war of words » ou la guerre incivile

Un Noir à l’ombre : Live from Death Row et la lettre de prison

Hélène Christol

Les lettres de prison de George Jackson : poèmes de combat et d’amour

Françoise Clary

1 Le regard « ethnographique » : la perspective de l’historien

2 Le jeu textuel : les variations d’une écriture d’émotion

3 Pensée et culture noires : les lignes de force

4 Conclusion

De la voix au vol de la lettre

« The Talking Book » : de l’illéttrisme au postmodernisme afro-américain

Suzanna Matvejevic

The Color Purple : de la lettre volée à l’envol du sujet

Isabelle Van Peteghem

1 La différance

2 L’épistolaire revu par Alice Walker

3 Le texte-textile ou la lettre trame

A Chain of Letters: Correspondences with the Epistolary Novel in John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing

Michel Feith

1 A High Breed Mix

2 “ Lettres et le temps ” or Writing and Time

3 An Archeology of Writing

Percival Everett and the Epistolary Novel

Kathie Birat

La lettre en partage : entre éditeur et écrivain

« Native Sons, Creative Friends, and Lovers » : le James Baldwin de Sol Stein ou les « dé-liaisons » dangereuses

Jean-Paul Rocchi

1 Baldwin à la lettre — volée

2 « Je signe le texte d’un autre » : la lettre anonymante

Auteur cherche éditeur : échec d’une correspondance, Jean Toomer, 1924-1947

Cécile Cottenet

1 La publication de Cane et la disparition de Toomer

2 Refaire surface

3 La figure de l’auteur

4 Une certaine conception de l’éditeur

5 Les intermédiaires et les réseaux

Les lettres de Richard Wright : de l’éditeur au censeur, de la correspondance à l’œuvre

Laurence Cossu-Beaumont

1 Dorothy Canfield Fischer ou l’œuvre amendée

2 Edward Aswell ou l’œuvre dirigée

La lettre-objet d’art

Raymond Saunders : la lettre comme matériau artistique

Maïca Sanconie

1 Correspondances et collages

2 Œuvres et iconographie postale

Black Letters Unfettered

Claudine Raynaud

I looked forward to a time at which it would be safe to escape. I was too young to think of doing so immediately ; besides, I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass.
Frederick D ouglass , Narrative , 57.

. . . Ah ast, “where is me? Ah don’t see me.” “Everybody laughed, even Mr Washburn, Miss Nellie, de Mama of the chillun who come back home after her husband dead, she pointed to the dark one and said dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself? ”
Dey used to call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen i twas mah dress and mah hair so Ah said
“An, aw ! Ah’m colored!”
Zora Neale H urston , Their Eyes were Watching God ,
181–182.

The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my “X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. The receipt of my “X” meant that forever after in the Nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X
M alcolm X, The Autobiography , 199.

1 Writing (voice?) and black différance

The 2006 congress of the French American Studies Association in Le Mans took as its theme “American Letters” to honor the work of the late Claude Richard who was my professor at the University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier and had sent me to teach at the University of Michigan in 1980. Claude Richard’s work on Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Pynchon, American Letters (1998), came out of the Derridian times when French literary criticism bore the imprint of the debate between Lacan and Derrida on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (Lacan, 1966, 11–67; Derrida, 1987, 411–496). Having specialized in African American literature for now more than twenty years, partly as a result of my studies in Ann Arbor under the joint guidance of Lemuel Johnson and Martha Vicinus, I thought that to focus on African American “letters” would be an opportunity to assess, if only briefly, the incidence of the letter in African American culture. Echoes of Lacan’s work led to formulating the subtitle of this collection as the “insistence” of the letter or, as another translation has it, the “agency” of the letter. It is the contention of this collection of essays that the letter insists, that the letter acts in African American culture.

Among analyses squarely grounded in that field presented at the AFEA, I have also included an article on the correspondence of the famous white abolitionists known as the Grimké sisters, for their letters chronicle the fight to end slavery and testify to the impact of the letter (as epistle) in progressive struggles. Their correspondence was instrumental in a political fight where white and black, feminists and abolitionists joined forces. 1 Moreover, their name was handed down to two black women writers: Charlotte Forten Grimké, teacher and abolitionist who married their nephew, and Angelina Weld Grimké, their grand-niece and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

While Lacan theorized the insistence of the letter on the Unconscious as a dominance of the signifier on the signified and gave a new formulation for the subject, the compulsion to repetition ( Wiederholungzwang ) in African American culture takes the shape of a struggle to free oneself from the master’s letters/fetters as the slave mimics his writing, “masters” it and gives it back to him as a mirror of writing’s own limits. “How could the spirit live without the letter,” Lacan ponders (1966, 509, translation mine). 2 This signifying on the master’s (hand) writing goes together with a foregrounding of “voice,” as if it was necessary to found a counter-model, as if the “speakerly” had to be heralded as the sole solution (Gates, 1982), the hallmark of the black text in opposition to the “writerly” and the “readerly” (Barthes, 1970). A folktale entitled “How to Write a Letter.” included in Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), illustrates in a dialogue between an illiterate black man and his educated daughter how oral material cannot be “written.” The exasperated father finally exclaims:

You mean to tell me you been off to school seben years and can’t spell (clucking sound). Why Ah could spell dat myself and Ah ain’t been to school a day in mah life. Well jes’ say (clucking sound) he’ll know what yo’ mean and go on wid de letter. (Gates, 1997, 107)

In many ways, black literature performs a return to the voice before the text. To write as if one spoke, to reproduce on the page the intonations, the grain of the voice, to “presentify” the black speaking subject in order to fight against the deadening effect of the master’s letter and thus go back to, or at least maintain, the initial trope of the “Talking Book” (Gates, 1982): such seems to have been the project and the circular nostalgia of black literature in its complex dialogue with dialect literature and black vernacular (Matvejevic). 3 It is its predicament. It performs a return (to the origin of a lost language), it doubles up on itself: it writes b (l) ack. It re-members the telling of stories as much as their content, the accents of the storefront “lies” that Hurston recorded, the “lying sessions” which made up the stuff of her novels. The oral character, the voice-effect, has been maintained with an urgency that makes writing all the more menacing and alluring. This division or oscillation perpetuates the bifurcation between the folk and the scholars, the illiterate masses and the educated elite. Typical of this insistence on orality and anonymity, Morrison’s Jazz (1992) has as its main protagonist a nameless “character,” the “Voice.” She explains:

The thing is, I could not think of the voice of a person. . . . The voice is the voice of a talking book. So when the voice says, “I know what it’s like to be left standing when someone promises,” it talks to the reader. It sounds like a very erotic, sensual love song of a person who loves you. This is a love song of a book talking to the reader. . . . It was interesting to me how the whole act of reading, holding, surrendering to the book, is part of that beautiful intimacy of reading. When it’s tactile, your emotions are deeply involved. . . . I deliberately restricted myself using an “I” that was only connected to the artifact of the book as an active participant in the invention of the story of the book, as though [. . .] the book were talking, writing itself, in a sense .
(Carabi, 1995, 43, italics mine)

In his early works Derrida deconstructed the opposition and hierarchical relation between speech and writing (Derrida, 1967a, 1967b, 1972). His attack on “phonologocentrism” challenged the emphasis on orality that runs through Western philosophy at the expense of writing. Writing is always already included in speech and language is first and foremost, in a meaning that will be progressively disclosed, writing. Writing, reformulated as “arch-writing” or “ différance ,” is a force of dislocation of phonocentrism and logocentrism; it is pure difference (Derrida, 1972). African American literature endlessly replays this concurrent movement of speech and writing when marking its own difference since the “traces” of the slave’s historical conditions and his troubled access to the letter (the transgression of what has been forbidden at the cost of one’s life) have always haunted the texts s/he wrote. The “spectral” quality of the voice takes up in the context of black letters an interesting turn. In the slave narratives, the “identity” of the author enclosed in the inscription “written by himself/herself” is at the same time denied, or at least challenged, by the authenticating letters of white protectors that frame the text. 4

2 Letters and/in African American History

The aim of the Le Mans workshop was to think about the letter, the alphabet and the epistle, both in literature ( Les Belles Lettres ), but also in the culture at large. The letter, purloined by the slave from the master, is a means of communication that African American culture cherishes in the form of the “open” letter of protest, as if preserving the direct link between sender and addressee was crucial in its directness, in the knowledge that letters always reach their destination, albeit through circuitous paths. This open letter is modeled after the Pauline epistle for the Bible teaches that the Word can be delivered in epistolary form. From his Birmingham jail in 1963, Martin Luther King wrote “so long a letter,” a gesture in keeping with the intrinsic link that access to literacy and letter-writing bears to freedom and to the Biblical text (Gates, 1997, 1854–1866). King’s intervention, firmly placed under the apostle’s patronage since St Paul had also been imprisoned, echoes Douglass’s open letter to his master Thomas Auld published in The Liberator on September 22 nd , 1848. 5 Widely circulated, it was instrumental in attracting the attention of public opinion to black civic rights. Written on scraps of paper provided to King by the jail’s black trustees—the letter as Raymond Saunders’s paintings make plain is first and foremost a material object (Sanconie)—, it helped him plan the 1963 March on Washington.

While open letters appear as so many step-stones in the History of the African Americans, private letters constitute a source of information that needs to be tapped by historians. Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History founded in 1915 established an archive of letters. 6 Yet, by the 70s, John Blassingame bemoaned that few historians had made use of this resource to offer a revision of African American History from the point of view of the slaves and the black freemen. 7 The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis 1800-1860  (1926) stands alone of its kind as a record of black life. Fortunately, Dorothy Sterling’s two collections: The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story of Reconstruction (1976) gathering letters from the Reconstruction and We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the 19th Century...