my ankles are cold

Self-immersion

Griffin points to self-help discourse, critical cultural theory from bell hooks and Cornel West, and medical text such as Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well Being, to contextualize her study of the role of fictive portrayals of black women’s embodiment. Echoing the theme of community-building, Griffin argues that Angela Davis and June Jordan’s introduction “assert[s] that attention to individual healing lays a foundation for entering a community of resistance” (524). Griffin’s work illustrates a central effect or trend of this scholarship: it works cumulatively, rather than defensively, building a discourse community in which discussions of health and well-being and emotionality are paired with critical engagement. This is a hallmark of black women’s thought traditions.


Griffin also clarifies that this claiming project does not require returning to a “truer self”, but instead is a “claming [of] the body, scars and all—in a narrative of love and care… healing does not deny the construction of bodies, but instead suggests that they can be constructed differently, for different ends” (524). Griffin argues against the implied subjectivity debates that a return to emotionality and the body is somehow an essentializing of blackness and femininity or a demand that one deny or repress the constructedness of identity. Instead, as she points out, the return to the body is a creative project that empowers the embodied subject to “construct” the body in a different way, to begin to use her own body for ends that she designates as important. This is a crucial intervention into the feminist misunderstanding of black women’s literature: the body is not essentialized, it is transformed from its muteness or one-dimensionality. This process of embodiment, requiring “constant attention and effort,” is a lifelong responsibility that empowers the subject to operate with pragmatic control in a field not of her own making: “necessary acts for those of us who are constantly bombarded with very strong fictions” (525). Griffin’s work illustrates the intersection of pragmatism and subjectivity.

Similarly, Elizabeth Alexander argues that the unconscious, private, sacred space of African American identity is “the black interior”. Alexander’s phrase invokes both the fetishized “colonial fantasy”—the “heart” of African “darkness”—and the interiority of a black subject as a safe and sacred space of privacy and self-renewal. Alexander argues that “’the black interior’ is not an inscrutable zone … [r]ather, I see it as inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t, or should be” (5). The political transcendence Alexander invokes is mirrored, to some extent, in Walker’s spiritual transcendence: like spiritual practitioners, Gwendolyn Brooks and the other artists of the black interior practice daily, specific imaginings that illustrate the human dimensions of African American creativity. Alexander’s reading of the black interior, a material (geographical) and metaphoric space, illustrates a similar process as Griffin’s conceptualization of embodiment: each is a cumulative product of a creative responsibility, renewed through daily attentions.

This is the process that Walker illustrates in The Color Purple. And then we return to the problem of just what the hell she’s doing in the other book. Dammit.