Slipperiness of Identity

A little over a year after the election of Barack Obama, one of my students updated her Facebook status, writing, "Stop saying 'Post-racial,' or I will punch you in the jaw." I wondered who sparked her outrage: A naïve liberal? A cynical racist? Or a lazy reporter, dutifully marking the passage of time with yet another year-in-review story? Her outrage, I'm sorry to say, amused me in a decidedly patronizing way; "There, there," I thought, "good for you for being mad at anyone who thought Obama's election marked the end of racism in America."

I began reading Eula Biss's brave collection of essays on race in the US, Notes from No Man's Land, with the same kind of patronizing approval that I had for my student. While I was prepared to agree with Biss's arguments, I reserved judgment on whether she had anything new to offer to the conversation. I weighed the novelty of her perspective as a white, privileged woman whose mother had embraced West African religion against her Iowa Writer's Workshop pedigree, and, for a time, I merely admired her skillful and beautiful writing as I traveled over uncomfortably familiar ground. I read protectively, sparing Biss as long as I could from some sort of final dismissal as too earnest, too sorry, too white to matter.

But I was wrong—because I'd mistaken her for myself, reading out of a sense of weary and cowardly liberalism, looking over my shoulder to see if anyone noticed who was really being too earnest, too sorry, and too white. Biss is up to something else, something wonderfully mature, intelligent, and new. In these essays, Biss reexamines not only her own history but that of her country, revealing in both delicate, poetic prose and blunt, necessarily emotionless journalism the truths, both painful and triumphant, of the American experiment. As she self-corrects her earlier reading of a children's classic, she offers us a way to read her own story, writing,

When I return to Little House on the Prairie now, as an adult, I find that it is not the book I thought it was. It is not the gauzy frontier fantasy I made of it as a child. It is not a naive celebration of the American pioneer. It is the document of a woman interrogating her legacy.

Notes from No Man's Land is Biss's interrogation of her own legacy, one that is at once both distinct within the American experience and distinctly American.

Biss positions herself as a member of a self-described "mixed" family, explaining how, through marriage and adoption, she has biracial, black, and Cherokee cousins, and black and Chinese half siblings. She lived for a year in Brooklyn with her biracial first cousin; she taught creative writing in inner city schools in New York; she wrote for an African American newspaper in San Diego; she traveled to Mexico; and she studied in Iowa City, where she considered the difference between media coverage of post-storm looting by local university students and by Katrina survivors. But her most enduring connection to non-white culture was nourished by her mother, who left her husband and adopted a West African religion, the Yoruba tradition, and introduced Biss and her siblings to its art and ritual. Biss recalls, "There were weekends when I stood next to my dancing mother in a small, sweaty room that smelled of coconut oil and pulsed with the batá drums of Yoruba ritual." Biss's memories include "salty beans and rice" and singing "in a language we did not understand." Even so, the experience remains embedded in Biss's consciousness and identity.

Except, that is, when authenticity threatens to drift away; Biss hints at the slipperiness of identity as she finds herself missing pieces of her own past. She writes, "In college, I remember, the African-dance class humiliated me. Beginning dance students could perform the ritual dances of my childhood better than I could...