Trayectorias afrodescendientes. Una reflexión metodológica
| Autor | Manuel Matos Díaz |
| Páginas | 229-257 |
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Your silence will not protect you. (Lorde, 1984:41)
Theirs [Black Women Writers] was the project I wanted to be part of. And they gave me the map that I, a poor Dominican immigrant boy of African descent from New Jersey, could follow. (Díaz, 2012)
The self-identiied “warrior poet” Audre Lorde is one of the pillars of black feminist thought. Going far beyond Fanon’s “Oh my body, make me always a man who questions”, Black Feminist Thought (BFT) relies on a methodology constructed by the insights gleaned from engaging that which we keep silent about our social realities. The irst of the two quotes presented above: “Your silence will not protect you” (Lorde, 1984:40) is one of the key aspects for relecting on a methodology of Afro-descendant scholarship.
The silence that Lorde —and BFT in general— refers to stems from the patriarchy that shapes modern society. It is the product of the violence through which racial, sexual, and gender ideologies and practices are enforced. This silence keeps the subject from participating in transformative social-political action through a fear of the internal and external repercussions of challenging patriarchy. In this way, patriarchy is internalized and becomes an almost unquestionable norm. Taking into account the multiple positions of any social group or individual (racialized, sexualized, genderized), BFT elaborates a methodology of social analysis premised on the practice of “learning to put the fear in perspective” (Lorde, 1984:41). Because both the fear and the silence it engenders have their origin in patriarchal oppres-sion, BFT is explicit in confronting the patriarchy that gives modern societies their form. The aforementioned act of putting “the fear in perspective” means that the scholar must engage with how patriarchy manifests within his/her own being. Herein lies one of the biggest challenges to advancing Afro-descendant scholarship. The scholar must engage with ways that patri-
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archy has, and which continue to shape, the production and interpretation of the historical and socio-political sources she works with and produces. BFT offers a clear response to this challenge: scholars must look both within and without, and have the courage to elaborate, practice, and defend methodologies that necessarily challenge the very foundations of western knowledge production and the institutional structures and actors that reproduce them.
My positionality as a heterosexual black man implies that the paradigms through which I read, interpret, process data, and express my understanding is conditioned by the privileges and oppressions –and their corresponding silences – of the patriarchal systems that I intend to resist. My observations about gendered constructs in the section titled “Maroon Communities and State Violence” offer but a preamble to the possibilities for gender analysis brought forth by ancestral consciousness. Traditional readings of Domini-can history would rarely give notice to these concerns. Rather, they cement gender constructs, which reinforce the white-male-supremacist hegemony of colonial and national identity. Moreover, I recognize that my positionality implies another point supremely pertinent for this article. In an academic en-vironment, the knowledge historical subjects that reinforce male supremacy produce are inluenced by gendered interpretations and constructions. Within said environment, it would be admissible for me simply to engage with the questions I raise about Dominican historiography without publicly recognising the intellectual sources that led me to raise them in the irst place. It is, precisely, the personal act of recognizing that such an act would constitute gendered violence against black women scholars, and upon myself, which exempliies yet another way that I interpret Lorde’s call. To silence the foun-dational role of BFT in my ongoing liberatory struggle is not to engage in my own liberation at all. BFT is much more than theory applied to academic subjects, its main arena, is the self. It is, therefore, imperative that black male scholars be more than proactive in “recognizing” the immense contributions black women scholars continue to make to the social sciences and the humanities. We must be explicit in breaking the silence that denies the leadership of black women, and incorporate the methodologies of BFT and practice into our academic and non-academic endeavors. As I attempt to elaborate a meth-
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odological relection of Afro-descendant scholarship, I reference the second quote by writer Junot Díaz: “Theirs [Black Women Writers] was the project I wanted to be part of. And they gave me the map that I, a poor Dominican immigrant boy of African descent from New Jersey, could follow” (Díaz, 2012).
Junot Díaz’s novels and short stories are often derided for their integration of Spanglish (the mix of English and Spanish language), liberal use of swears, and graphic portrayal of sexualized, gendered, and racialized violence. Those who focus on this aspect of his literature miss the intellectual depth behind his literary style. Far from a marketing gimmick, Díaz’s writing style is a deliberate exercise of BFT. Rather than silence the mix of Spanish and English language characteristic of diasporic communities in the United States, or the vulgarity and violence of patriarchal oppression, Díaz brings these characteristics to the forefront. In so doing, he offers his audience what he terms a “mirror” through which they can relect on the ways the colonial legacy of racial and sexual violence manifest themselves in their own lives. The way he writes, and the content of his writing has earned him great recognition within the Dominican and broader Latino community in the United States, especially among those of us who are irst generation or second generation immigrants. His writing speaks to the unspeakable: nationalism and Dominican blackness, sexual violence to both girls and boys, and the ways patriarchal violence affect men and women, all stemming from his own personal experiences. However, not only does he craft his literary representation by engaging with his own personal experience, he also engages with the so-called scholarly production of knowledge. Díaz declares that the methodologies that have garnered him so much popular success, as well as a Pulitzer prize and the McArthur Foundation’s Genius Award, are the result of his engagement with BFT:
To me (and many other young artists and readers) the iction of these foundational sisters represented a quantum leap in what is called the post-colonial-slash-subaltern-slash-neocolonial; their work completed, extended, complicated the work of the earlier generation (Fanon) in profound ways and also created for this young writer a set of strategies and warrior-grammars that would become the basis of my art. That these women are being forgotten, and their historical importance elided, says a lot about
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our particular moment and how real a threat these foundational sisters posed to the order of things (Díaz, 2012).
I have seen my own gendered-racial dynamics relected in my writing for over 15 years. Thus, I ind Díaz’s work to be of particular relevance to the present task for at least three reasons. 1) Along with other sources of popular culture –i.e. rap, and hip-hop music- his work was one of the few venues through which I could engage explicitly with questions of the racial dynamics of my own family. 2) Recent interviews and lectures have made me relect more explicitly on sexual and gender oppression within my own family and history. 3) His open acknowledgement of the foundational importance of BFT, which converges with the urge to engage with questions of my family’s legacy of racial, gendered, and sexual violence. This paves the way for me to express my own positionality regarding the socio-political dimensions of patriarchal oppression in the context of afro-diasporic scholarship.
Díaz’s writings and relections make plain the necessity to exalt the legacy of internal and external struggle that black women continue to face both within and outside of the academy. His writing, made possible by black women writers, is living evidence that the exaltation of black women intellectuals can and must go beyond mere linguistic recognition. Such exaltation must consist of putting black feminist theory into action. The present article attempts to do just that by “breaking the silence” implicit in my own afro-diasporic experiences. Thereby, it uses the accumulated voices of BFT to speak of a past that is also constantly present. It is by no means exhaustive, and it does not break all of my own silences. As Lorde reminds us, “there are so many silences to break” (Lorde, 1984:44).
In this way, the central thesis of this paper goes beyond simply stat-ing that the lessons of BFT must be put into action. Rather, it manifests how these lessons spur an attempt to present the ways in which I came to recognize the liberatory character of BFT. It prompts research questions and ways of interpreting sources of analysis that expose and confront patriarchal knowledge production, within the author and from the sources. Thus, each example I present, has been reached by employing the black feminist practice of breaking the deepest silences of patriarchal oppression. As I mention
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