Outward Evil Inward Battle: Human Memory in Literature

Chapter 10. “Go Back and Get It:” Spirit Possession as Rite of Passage and a Medium of Self-reinvention in Contemporary African Diasporic Literature

186 Chapter 10 “Go Back and Get It:” Spirit Possession as Rite of Passage and a Medium of Self-reinvention in Contemporary African Diasporic Literature Festus Fru Ndeh One ever feels his 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…. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Dubois 3) Through the invocation of “two-ness,” Dubois launches the dialectic of double consciousness which to him delineates the African diasporic people’s constant struggle to reconcile an African heritage with a European upbringing and education. This ambivalence, or ethnic dualism, occasions the need for African diasporic people to define themselves not only by the identity of the land in which they are born, but also by their Africanness. To elucidate this, Rampersad argues while commenting on Dubois, that African Americans are “American by citizenship - political ideals, language, and religion – 187 and African as a member of a ‘vast historic race’ of separate origin from the rest of America” (61). Dubois, therefore, reminds society that the “soul” of black folks is not a coherently unified one, but rather “two souls” - American and African. This is not only true of African Americans, but of all African diasporic people. Informed by this perspective, it could be said with certainty that any understanding of the black diasporic self must be framed by the subtext of this dualism, for, as Ron Eyerman contends, contemporary African diasporic people will need a certain transitioning cushioned on “being modern, forgetting slavery and the past, looking to and even returning to Africa … these would characterize this generation’s search for identity and reworking of collective memory” (88). In this vein, the life of one great, but often ignored African American scholar’s struggle through memory to understand himself and to construct his own identity forms the center of this chapter. Hoyt W. Fuller was born on September 10, 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia, and later became an editor, educator, critic, and author during the Black Arts Movement. Fuller attended Wayne State University and graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in literature and journalism. During his time in Michigan, he met Fred Williams, an amateur historian of Detroit’s black community, who became his mentor. Williams introduced Fuller to a myriad of readings about Africa and African Americans, and also took him along as he went about interviewing older members of Detroit’s black community. Upon graduation, Fuller pursued a career in journalism between 1949 and 1957 with the Detroit Tribune, the Michigan Chronicle and Ebony Magazine. In his autobiographical work Journey to Africa, Fuller recounts that he became dissatisfied with the gap between Ebony’s content and the fight for black freedom, so he left his editorial position in 1957. After quitting Ebony, he became very distraught at the racially overbearing culture of America; consequently, he, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Europe where he lived in France and Spain between 1957 and 1960. While living in Spain, Fuller traveled to Africa where he spent three months in Algeria and Guinea, and 188 contributed articles about West Africa for the Amsterdam Hasage Post. These visits were transformational experiences and became his motivation for writing Journey to Africa. As Fuller explains in the work, his experiences in Africa led him to return to the United States in 1960 with a fuller understanding of his raison d’être. He resolved to stop concerning himself with trying to alter white American racial tenets, instead focusing his attention on black America with the aim of fostering the understanding of the black self as the key to the formulation of individual as well...