African American women and feminism: Alice Walker's womanism ...

African American women and feminism: Alice Walker’s womanism as a proposition of a dialogic encounter 17
As Related by Himself in 1774. Gates starts his analysis of the trope by quoting the
famous passage of Gronniosaw’s narrative, in which the narrator describes how
he unsuccessfully tried to hear the master’s book talk to him by literally putting
his ear close to it, which brought Gronniosaw to the (only logical for him) conclusion
that everybody and everything despised him for his blackness. Gates sees the
book’s refusal to speak to the Black man as the renaming of “the received tradition
in European letters that the mask of blackness worn by Gronniosaw and his
countrymen was a trope of absence” 33 . The fact that Gronniosaw could not hear
the book indicates that this “canonical text of Western letters – either the Bible
or the prayer book” – could not see him or hear him, as “texts can only address
that which they can see”, concludes Gates 34 . On the one hand, Gronniosaw’s
conflation of vision and voice, that is the visual and the oral, is paradoxical; on
the other hand, it becomes logical in Gronniosaw’s narrative, in which the text’s
voice “presupposed a face; and a black face, in turn, presupposed the text’s silence
since blackness was a sign of silence, the remarkably ultimate absence of face and
voice” 35 . Many years later, Gronniosaw managed to undo the relationship between
silence and blackness by writing his autobiography, “a text that speaks his face
into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition”, thanks to
the fact that he “was fully able to structure the events of his life into a pattern
that speaks quite eloquently, if ironically, to readers today” 36 .
The trope of the Talking Book, as analyzed by Gates, is illustrative of the
tension “between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the
spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary
discourse”, which has been addressed by Black writers since the eighteenth
century, when slaves attempted to prove their humanity “by literally writing
themselves into being” 37 . Hence, Gates connects the paradoxical trope of “the
oral within the written” as notions of voice/presence and silence/absence with
African American literary tradition 38 . The recourse to the Talking Book trope
demonstrates that Walker, by literally finding “a room of her own” in Woolf ’s
essay, makes this text speak with a Black voice.
Walker is of the opinion that an African American woman artist has to align
herself with “the living creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not al-
33
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 137.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 138, 142.
37
H. L. Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, op.cit.,
p. 131.
38
Ibid.