Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning

In a 1924 review essay titled "The Younger Literary Movement," W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke praise Jean Toomer for his daring portrayal of black sexuality in Cane. They proclaim him the first black writer to challenge the conventions of black genteel literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its endorsement of Victorian notions of purity, chastity, and domesticity.¹ While these writers of genteel literature sought to restore dignity to black bodies discursively assaulted in mainstream news and literary organs, the ideology of respectability upheld by these texts, as well as the surveillance and policing that reinforced this ideology socially, imposed new forms of sexual repression.² By deviating from these conventions, Toomer's work, according to the review, advances a necessary shift in black arts and letters.

That Toomer's depiction of sexually transgressive women marks a literary achievement is certain. However, Du Bois and Locke's serial gloss of these women resembles a seraglio:

Here is Karintha, an innocent prostitute; Becky, a fallen white woman; Carma, a tender Amazon of unbridled desire; Fern, an unconscious wanton; Esther, a woman who looks age and bastardy in the face and flees in despair; Louise with a white and black lover; Avey, unfeeling and immoral; and Doris, the cheap chorus girl. These are [Toomer's] women, painted with a frankness that is going to make his black readers shrink and criticize; and yet they are done with a certain splendid careless truth.

(289)

Locke and Du Bois imply that liberating "the colored world" from repressed sexual mores can be achieved through liberating black women's bodies. By ascribing an element of realism and "truth" to Toomer's depictions, these authors bestow a certain degree of authenticity to an unbridled black female sexuality.³ Moreover, the review fails to account for the overlap of desire and loss that occurs on the bodies of black women in Cane.⁴ Toomer's representations of black women's sexuality neither replicate the exotic primitivism of the Jazz Age nor the nostalgic return of the romantic imagination. Rather, acts of sexual union and conception in Cane are marked again and again by traumatic history.

I want to intervene at that critical crossroads in Cane, where sexuality and loss intersect at the black female body. I call this coupling of desire and loss an "erotics of mourning" and regard Cane as an embodied narrative of a passing era associated with the trauma of slavery. Materializing this passing era in song and/as female embodiment, Cane accentuates the role of black female sexuality in modern constructions of blackness. Moreover, Toomer connects anxieties around racial and cultural continuity generated by modernity to the regulation of black female desire.

In "Love and Loss: An Elegy," George E. Haggerty attributes an erotics of mourning to the pastoral elegy, and specifically to the male homo-eroticism that is common to the elegy form. I also find the elegiac connotation of the erotics of mourning suggestive for considering Toomer's use of the landscape of black female sexuality to uncover a history of racial trauma. Yet, Toomer reworks the elegy —as well as its thematic preoccupations with sex and death —and makes it relevant to an African American historical context of slavery, lynching, and migration. In the tradition of the pastoral elegy, Toomer laments modernity's corruption of nature and of folk aesthetics. At the same time, his critique of modernity retains critical ambivalence. He mourns a vanishing "folk spirit" without romanticizing it and attends to the potentially destructive elements of modernity without insisting upon a return to a simpler past.

Since the South for African Americans functions as a site of trauma as well as a symbolic homeland, black pastoralists tend to be less nostalgic than their Anglo American counterparts.⁵ Evoking Billie Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit," for instance, Farah Jasmine Griffin recounts, "[Holiday's] portrayal of the naturally beautiful 'pastoral South,' marred by the realities of burning black bodies, gives meaning and emotion to the descriptions written by [black] novelists" (15). Like Holiday, Toomer...