I D É E S   F O R T E S    Issue 2.10 - October 1996

Life Behind the Screen

By Kali Tal



After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled arrivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

I have long suspected that the vaunted "freedom" to shed the markers of race and gender on the Internet is illusory, and that it masks a more disturbing phenomenon - the whitenising of cyberspace. Ironically, African-American critical theory provides very sophisticated tools for the analysis of cyberculture, since African-American critics have been discussing the problem of multiple identities, fragmented personae and liminality for more than 100 years.

Take Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen, which is interesting as far as it goes but limited in scope. If Turkle had looked to W. E. B. DuBois, she might not have had to wait "more than 20 years after meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari" to find an environment in which these "Gallic abstractions" were "more concrete". Turkle is talking about the white self, and a limited set of the white self: middle- to upper-class, educated, usually male - the "we", unfortunately, of most of the Internet.

But the struggle of African Americans is precisely the struggle to integrate identity and multiplicity, a perfect model of the "postmodern" condition - except that it predates postmodernism by hundreds of years. Cyberpunk writers have felt this resonance, which is why William Gibson's Net is populated by loas, deities from the Voudou religion of the Caribbean, and why Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net features Rasta-based characters. What Turkle calls the "culture of simulation" in this country is no different from "the culture" for people of colour, who have been "inventing themselves, their multiple selves" as they go along.

At a science-fiction workshop in 1976, the teacher assigned us to write a story that answered the question, "Why don't black people write science fiction?" White publishers, the white science-fiction establishment and white critics simply couldn't see African-American science fiction, just like the white guy who bumps into Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man can't see him, even as the Invisible Man beats the crap out of him. George Schuyler wrote science fiction back in the 1930s. Ellison wrote it in the 1950s. Sam Greenlee wrote it in the 1960s. Octavia Butler, Sam Delany, Toni Bambara, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed have been writing it for the last couple of decades.

Just like no one talking about hypertext pays attention to Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose description in The Signifying Monkey of the Ifa (Yoruba sacred texts) could be a model for the form:

Its system of interpretation turns upon a marvellous combination of geomancy and textual exegesis, in which 16 palm nuts are "dialled" 16 times, and their configurations or signs then read and translated into the appropriate, fixed literary verse that the numerical signs signify.... These verse texts, whose meanings are lushly metaphorical, ambiguous and enigmatic, function as riddles, which the propitiate must decipher and apply as is appropriate to his or her own quandary.

The texts are interpreted by the translator-god Esu, who has metamorphosed into the Trickster of contemporary African-American culture. This Trickster/Signifying Monkey - "marking, loud-talking, testifying," and so on - is surely the Father of Flames. He is, in fact, the essence of the Net.

Yes, the Internet gives us more people writing, but at the moment it's more of the same people writing. We don't need "a whole new set of metaphors for thinking about the unconscious". We need to see some real difference.

Kali Tal is the author of Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma and an upcoming book, No Body Here: Race and Gender Identity on the Internet.