210
Any daily paper will show the varieties of fennent of the
Negro peoples, and we can see its articulate consciousness
in
fiction as
In the Castle of My Skin
by George Lamming of the
bados, or
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
and
My Life in the Bush
Ghosts
by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola.
"The artist must lose such lesser identities [as Negro]
in
great well of life," Waldo Frank says in
his
foreword to
Cane.
has not been the view of many Negro artists of our time. In
Baldwin reports, the American Negro "finds himself involved,
another language, in the same old battle: the battle for his
identity," and this turns out to be part of a largeI1 American
"The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the
tion of his identity." There is a Negro character in Claude
Home to Harlem
for whom identity is largely a matter of
"He would not eat watennelon, because white people called it
niggers' ice-cream.' Pork chops he fancied not. Nor corn pone.
the idea of eating chicken gave him a spasm." Ellison has
exhaustively on the identity problem in "Richard Wright's
and elsewhere, but his most graphic account of it is a
culinary identification in
Invisible Man.
The narrator had
scorned Negro food, along with other backward "darky',
in his effort to rise in the white world, until a moment in the
of the book when on impulse he buys a yam from a peddler
eats it on the street. At that moment, in the magical equation
"yam" with "I am," he comes to tenns with his Negro identity
folk tradition, while maintaining his quest for a fully developed
man consciousness. In other words, he wants yams, but he wants
be a twentieth-century Western man eating them. It is in just
fashion that the blues, say, develop in significance; starting with
specific lament for lost love, calamity, or hard times, and
with these events metaphoric for the most universal human
'-U1JLUlUUlI
The folk tradition, for the Negro writer, is like Ellison's
not the regression or reversion it appears to be, but another path
the most ironic and sophisticated consciousness. Tate's preface
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
finds that full utilization of
resources of modern poetry and language has made Tolson "not
but more intensely
Negro."
There is an almost unavoidable
scious pun in dealing with Negro culture. A silly white NetrroDllll
