What literature is within us?

I recently read the essay "No Name Woman" by the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. It was not a traditional essay by any means, and I found it a little difficult to follow, but there was one section in it that addressed some issues I've wondered about quite a bit recently, having read several different kinds of criticism that all seem to focus on rooting texts in writers' identities. As Kingston tells stories of her childhood experiences, she questions, "Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" In our class, we've moved from Marxist to Feminist to Ethnic criticism, and it seems like all of them are so similar in some ways although they deal with different qualities that define groups of people.

In Langston Hughes' essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he talks of the way that an African American's poetry must be rooted in their African American identity. When Hughes encounters a young poet who wants "to be a poet--not a Negro poet" (1313), Hughes takes this to mean that the poet is trying to put aside his own identity so that he can better assimilate into the white culture. Hughes despises this attitude, responding, "But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why thould I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!" (1316). This is such a different idea than what we read earlier from Emerson about the way that a poet should transcend him/herself in some way in order to tap into a truth that applies to all people. Instead, Hughes seems to think that a removal of the racial identity from African American poetry is a removal of truth from the poetry. According to him, African Americans "have an honest American Negro literature already within us," and it is their duty to expose that literature that exists within (1316). This works well for the type of poetry that Hughes wants to right. In poems such as "I, Too," he embodies his racial identity with lines like "I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother." But it seems almost like a restriction in some ways on the African American writer to say that they must write in a way that is perceived as embodying their own seperate culture from the white culture.

Helene Cixous, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," seems to share some of Hughes' ideas about writing according to one's identity, but her focus centers on gender rather than race. She writes, “I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man” (2041). Reading Cixous' ideas gives me a different perspective than I can have with Hughes because--while I've never experienced the life of an African American--I am a woman. However, it wasn't until I came to college and began reading feminist writers that I even thought about gender differences in writing. I had to be educated as to what these feminist writers mean by instructing all women to “write woman." Cixous even has a difficult time articulating what feminine writing is in any concrete manner even though all of her ideas revolve around it. In the same essay where she prescribes that women should “write woman,” she claims, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2043). So basically, she's saying that something about women's writing makes it the same in some way even though it doesn't seem apparent that it all shares some womanly writer quality. Although I feel that it's not necessarily right or helpful to determine a type of feminine writing that is completely separate from that of males, perhaps in saying this, I'm over-generalizing to ignore a difference that is there.

I tend to wonder if classifying literature into groups like "African American literature" or "women's literature" tends to lead to the creation of more stereotypes. When Langston Hughes was writing, he was addressing a particular problem in society: the African American writer didn't seem to have a voice apart from the adopted style of white American culture. And a woman writer such as Virginia Woolf also addressed the societal issues that affected her during her life as a woman writer; women were literally not allowed to be writers. But is it still worth discussing literature within these labels today as society becomes more diverse and moves toward greater equality? While these ideas about race and literature do make points about the way things have been--and the way that some things stilll are--focusing on these issues almost perpetuates them in some way because it forces people to view literature in categories based on the author's identity.