Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (38)

In Du Bois' view, Emancipation brought to the American Negro a "dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect" (41). But with the birth of self-consciousness, the former slave sees his own soul "darkly as through a veil," with only "some faint revelation of his power, his mission" (41).

Du Bois' "double consciousness" inevitably brings to mind Lacan's "mirror stage" of consciousness. Seeing itself in the social mirror of white America, the ex-slave enters a complex dialectic of identification, creating an imago of self that is partly a construction of the non-black other. Lacan writes:

Indeed, for the imagos--whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacity--the mirror-stage would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its infirmities, or its object-projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested. (3)

Consciousness is double--and to a degree "veiled"--for all people in the Lacanian scheme. For the socially marginalized, it is dizzyingly multiple. Frantz Fanon writes, "Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty" (110-11). A black person is "dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes," and thereby "fixed" (116).

Doubleness is a feature even of the format of The Souls of Black Folk. Each chapter begins with a passage of European or American poetry and notated black music. In the first chapter these consist of "The Crying of Waters" by British poet Arthur Symons and the Negro spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Moreover, Du Bois' use of "second sight" and "veil" relates to African-American folklore. In the words of editors Bight and Gooding-Williams, "a child born with a caul, a veil-like membrane that sometimes covers the head at birth, is said to be lucky, to be able to tell fortunes, and to be a 'double-sighted' seer of ghosts. In some West African folk traditions, a child born with a caul is thought to possess a special personality endowed with spiritual potency" (Du Bois 197).

In Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Werner Sollors discusses the double-consciousness of the American ethnic writer, who must negotiate with what James Weldon Johnson called the problem of the "double audience." Characteristics of authorial double consciousness lie in (1) "a superior narrator explaining to a reader, whose values he presumably shares, some inside information" ¹ ; (2) the use of dialect as a formal strategy to accommodate double audiences--for example, Langston Hughes's Semple stories or Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley Says; (3) the comic and ironic use of the unreliable narrator, a technique that conflates modernist and ethnic self-consciousness...