The Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002

1. Conversion and the Intractable Saul: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

ConverSion and The inTraCTable Saul The Autobiography of Malcolm X [Those] historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. Sigmund freud, “The Future of an Illusion” ■ In his epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley gives us an endearing, bittersweet glimpse into the lindy-hopping Malcolm X of preconversion days, allowing the reader a glimpse of what might be called the intractable Saul: One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, “re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—” and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly grumpy. (391) I call this scene “bittersweet” because it conveys that at some level, Malcolm X is aware of the gap between what he once experienced as the pleasure of dancing and his current identity as the sober, disciplined-body leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI).The gap between pleasure in the past and present protocol makes him “grumpy,” as tension between desire and duty often does. This tension appears in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was narrated to editor and writer Alex Haley and published posthumously in 1965, as old bodily pleasures (sensuality and dancing) are repressed 1 2 3 4 28 ConverSion and The inTraCTable Saul by NOI strictures yet pop up as textual pleasures in Malcolm’s retelling of his Saul days. Although the converted, Pauline Malcolm understands sexual license and dancing as forms of enslavement to white ways, those moments of sex and dancing convey the most intense, unfettered pleasure in the book. I conceptualize this textual “Sauling around”—or moments that illuminate the intractable Saul—in terms of a loosely defined hydraulic Freudian theory: whatever excessive repression subjugates emerges later in some form as the return of the repressed. Hydraulic theory, a common way of understanding Freud, “depicts the mind as operating like a fluid in a closed system” and is best illustrated by Freud’s idea that “if a symptom is alleviated without curing the underlying causes, the pressures will surface in a new system” (Corsini 456). I extend this idea to suggest that Malcolm’s adult, conscious repression of desire in accordance with NOI doctrine results in the return of the repressed in the form of textual inconsistencies, such as Malcolm’s mixing of proscription and pleasure. Thus, repression here means to consciously hold back or control one’s impulses (a secondary meaning listed in dictionaries), rather than exclusion from the conscious mind, as Freud means it. This kind of repression too can have its hydraulic output. In other words, emotions and impulses checked and curbed will out in some way or another, in this case, evidenced by textual traces of the intractable Saul. Furthermore, I make the related but discrete argument that preceding this repression of desire, Malcolm X had to suppress his critical judgment in order to swallow the NOI’s fantastical religious doctrine in the first place. Framing both of these arguments is the understanding that the NOI was and is a powerful social and political machine, as well as a religion. Although Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation had a spiritual aspect, it was the product of a strong social desire—to be part of a new black “nation.” The Nation of Islam, started by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 and taken over by Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975) in 1934, was a uniquely black American religion that borrowed from Sunni Islam but also differed sharply from it in philosophy and mythology. Sunni, according to Karen Armstrong, is “the term used to describe the Muslim majority, who revere the four rashidun [Prophet Muhammad’s four immediate successors] and validate the existing political Islamic order” (174). The beliefs of Sunni Muslims contrast with those of NOI followers, but also with those of minority Shii Muslims, who hold malColm x 29 that Ali...