Also, matters of race and matters of home are priorities in my work and both have in one way or another initiated my search for that elusive sovereignty as well as my abandonment of the search once I recognized its disguise.Īs an already-and always-raced writer, I knew from the very beginning that I could not, would not, reproduce the master's voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father. I can't wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work. Third, because eliminating the potency of racist constructs in language is the work I can do. Second, the term domesticates the racial project, moves the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yeaming and futile desire away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity. "Home" seems a suitable term because, first, it lets me make a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home and helps me clarify my thoughts on racial construction. From Martin Luther King's hopeful language, to Doris Lessing's four-gated city, to Jean Toomer's "American," the race-free world has been posited as ideal, millennial, a condition possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or situated in a protected preserve-a wilderness park.īut, for the purposes of this talk and because of certain projects I am engaged in, I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream, or as the father's house of many rooms.
#THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS PDF CONVERTER FREE#
Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape-Edenesque, utopian, so remote are the possibilities of its achievement.
I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always within earshot, was race. It became increasingly clear how language both liberated and imprisoned me.
But I have known for a good portion of the past twenty-nine years that those delights, those seductions, are deliberate inventions necessary to both do the work and legislate its mystery. There alone the delight of redemption, the seduction of origination. There, in the process of writing, was the willed illusion, the control, the pleasure of nestling up ever closer to meaning. In that activity alone did I feel coherent, unfettered. 1997.įROM THE BEGINNING I was looking for a sovereignty-an authority-that I believed was available to me only in fiction writing.
0 kommentar(er)
