Chandana Chetia

Assistant Professor of English, Digboi College, Assam, India

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Abstract:

In his seminal essay “The Politics of Recognition” Charles Taylor says that one’s sense of his or her self is lost if it is formed monologically. He therefore lays emphasis on the dialogical character and on the broader cultural practices and symbolic acts including ‘the languages’ of art, of gesture, of love and the like. Similarly, the individual freedom: contributes to his or her identity formation. It is this modern freedom which leads to the redefining and re-negotiating of social and political relationship. But sometimes the community has little regard for him and his freedom and mobility. It is then he is left in a position of vacillation. It is a pressure which seems to tear him apart and leads to the loss of his or her identity. In his novel A Long Day in November Gaines has got hold of a theme as big as America itself — ‘identity’. This notion of identity has been recognized here through the protagonist Eddie, his search for self, love, freedom and society. But since the protagonist seeks these goals within the framework of society, compromises and adjustments are inevitable. The paper is an attempt to show the relation between identity and affiliation in Ernest Gaines A Long Day In November. Eddie’s quest for a new identity by way of adopting new ways of living—the car which acts as an agent to define his new identity- takes him away from his family. But by burning his car he renews his affiliation with his family and reclaims his identity through simultaneous acts of affiliation and dispossession, the car being a symbolic outsider in his family.

Keywords: Affiliation, Identity, Community, Loss, Reclaim

Objectives:

• To identify and analyse problem, patterns into the loss, reaffiliation, relocation, and reclaimation of identity in Gaines’ novel A Long Day in November.
• To show how the quest associated with diverse characters get unified as all set out on an odyssey that promise to transform their own self-conceptions and join to produce an extended communitarian identity.

Methodology:

• The study is broadly socio-cultural though there are invariable engagements with postcolonial strategies.
• Secondary sources such as books and journals are studied thoroughly to find out the real matter.

Discussion:

A Long Day in November (1958/68) is a novel that addresses issues relating to the search for autonomy on the part of Eddie, an African American plantation worker. This novel examines how modernity and tradition have been treated as exclusive domains by the African American community. Gaines here looks for what could be termed as intermediate path. In his novel as elsewhere we find that definitions of both tradition and modernity has been stretched in order that either one or both help the African American to reclaim an identity that is either lost or has been fractured.

The novel is primarily meant to address the larger question of reclaiming identity in the novels of Ernest Gaines and to find out how Gaines has addressed the question of identity, loss of identity and reclaiming identity in the multicultural American society.

By reclaiming identity, we have sought to refer to the process or processes through which the self-negotiate with challenges to or loss of its perceived notions of identity or identities. We have sought to differentiate between self and identity in terms of epistemological and behavioural distinctions. Self-understood this way refers more to essence and epistemology. This self may or may not have any governing identifiable socio-political attributes. In other words, the self is almost always under erasure almost always unavailable. This is not to say that the self does not does not exist but that it cannot be approximated once and for all. Identity on the other hand is understood in terms of a person’s social and cultural moorings. There is no doubt that identity is dynamic and flexible, the flexibility arises in out of the self-clashing with multifarious factors and vectors of change. We can for instance refer to and partially respond to what is called ‘Indian identity’ but pressed beyond a particular point would offer attributes, and oppose to the essence, of this sense of identity.

It is possible to say however that there are certain beliefs and habits which appear rooted in Indian culture, folding one’s hands to greet another person and at the same time saying Good morning or Good evening both changes/challenges and confirms a certain degree of Indianness which cannot be mistaken for anything else. A person doing such a thing cannot be mistaken for a Mexican for example.

The process itself involves the dynamics of identity, allowing for stability and change at the same time. As suggested earlier identity is challenged by vectors of change. One such vector, in multicultural societies is interactive understanding of progress and development. For instance, the African American are continually exposed to symbols, forces, icons and agents of modernity is either compelled by circumstances to adopt these or to see them in opposition to his own traditional self or identity. Theorists of modernization have referred to this process as a kind of cultural lag. The black man compares himself and facilities available to him with those white peer or his former master. This negotiation with his master’s modernity, makes him uncertain of the forces of his own tradition.

We know that the black Americans has not had the opportunity to draw directly from his African tradition or roots in view of the intervening period of slavery. We also know that the period of slavery has been often treated as a gap, as a repository of historical amnesia. The African American has lost what is his identity, perse.

African American literature has often referred to this loss of identity by making use of figures of invisibility or of speechlessness. In Ernest Gaines black people are constantly uprooted, are constantly compelled to leave home or what they supposed to be home. This forced mobility is both a fact and a figure in all Gaines’s works. We have tried to prove that physical mobility of a person, the loss of names, homes, children, husbands, wives, possessions, family secrets is indicative of the dynamics of identity. Having said that this mobility also helps the African American to acquire and understand, possess new names, accept or adopt children not his own. In other words, expand. This process of expansion is one way of negotiating with challenges to one’s identity. A writer like Gaines is equally interested in dealing with a man’s tradition as a source of strength as well as of weakness

In A Long Day in November Eddie engages with attributes of tradition and modernity even as he seeks to form a notion of himself. In this fast moving novel Eddie runs into trouble with his wife because of his second hand car. This car, as it turns out gives him more trouble than service and guarantees slowness rather than speed because it stops more frequently than it moves. “Honey, the car broke down,”…..” What I suppose to do, it broke down on me. I just couldn’t walk away and not try to fix it” (LDN 11). Eddie however doggedly holds on to the car and blows a consudual portion of his salary on keeping the car alive. His wife considers the car a rival of sorts and persuades him to sell it off. In any case as Eddie does not earn enough with which to support his car and his family he has a choice to make. Even as he wants to remain loyal to his wife and child, he cannot get rid of his car. His wife leaves him and for all practical purposes his relationship with his wife is over as long as he has the car.

He proudly holds on to his belief that the car has been unnecessarily targeted by his wife either out of spite or because of her female inadequacies. He spends more money on his car which has this miraculous power to swallow dollars on petrol and on repairs. He knows that the car is dead and for all practical purposes useless. But then he loves it and would like to keep it because the car makes him stand out from the rest of the crowd.

The story takes quick unexpected turns as he gets desperate to get back the love and comfort of the family, which includes among other things a decent meal after work and a clean bed for the night. Eddie is desperate to save himself from further distraction and destruction. He goes to a hoodoo woman Madam Toussaint. She promises to help him only if he pays the required fees. Subsequently she manages to take away Eddie’s last three dollars and with that the last semblance of pride. Instead of the miraculous herb or lotion that such hoodoo woman offer, Madam Toussaint asks Eddie to ‘sacrifice’ his car. Eddie burns his car, deciding to forgo his contact with modernity and mobility and is reunited with his wife and child.

The story takes several formulaic oppositions between tradition and modernity. Both in normal circumstances challenges the individual identity. Elsewhere in Gaines we see tradition curbing an individual’s natural instincts and forcing him to errors that he would normally avoid. Similarly tradition helps rescue individuals from the brink of disaster and spiritual degeneration. In this novel tradition appears to be restrictive and hostile to individual freedom. Eddie considers his wife and child as forces that hold him back. Amy says, “Mama, I’m just tired of Eddie running up and down the road in that car” (LDN  17). She further says, “Burn it,” “You know what burn?” (LDN 66).

That the self is motivationally social is also acknowledged by Michael Sandel (1982), who claims that the autonomous self is bound to community. Sandel comments:

To say that the members of a society are bound by a sense of community is not simply to say that a great many of these profess communitarian sentiments and pursue communitarian aims, but rather that they conceive their identity – the subject and not just the object of their feelings and aspirations—as defined to some extent by the community of which they are a part. For them community describes not just what they have as fellow citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose… but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity (Identity and the Social Self 75-76).

Eddie also entertains the belief that the car will make him an unrival trader among the plantation workers. This is ironical to say the least because it is a used car. Gaines alerts the reader to this “used upness of the car” which possibly refers to the shallow and unusable ideas that the black man is likely to borrow or buy from his white master. This happens even though the black man is no longer a slave and the white man is no longer his master. The car therefore apes modernity, not only as a form of slavery. Modern equipment would guarantee a certain change in the life of people but cannot improve general level of life and awakening in a given community.

Eddie buys the car not because it is useful but because it is fashionable to do so. This superficial assessment of tools of modernity is more likely to rob a person of his traditional moorings than other more physical factors. The car an agent of modernity must be disowned. For all practical purposes Eddie can neither use nor afford a car. Gaines often highlights such simplistic fascination of the African American with cultural symbols of the masters. These cultural symbols have to be first recognized and then dismantled. In this sense there is a continual development of oppositional centers in Gaines’s work that cancel out and at the same time strengthen each other’s tradition in this sense needs modernity in order to be first challenged and then compelled to find out means of survival through vis-a- vis modernity.

At this point we can perhaps return to the projection of tradition in the novel. Deeply rooted in African religious traditions, hoodoo and practitioners have been connective link between the black new world and the old. Eddie believing in traditional Christian doctrine initially is inclined to turn to the preacher of the quarters for aid. But the preacher proffers complacency rather than counsel. However, he insists that Eddie leave his wife in God’s hands.

But the hands in which Eddie’s fate is actually left are the hands of the hoodoo women, Madame Toussaint. Madam Toussaint with her old house that is likely to fall down any minute, symbolizes tradition. She is the symbolic reservoir of folk culture and the organic community of the African American. For a fee of three dollars, she gives Eddie a piece of advice. “Go set fire to your car” (LDN 59). Eddie’s visit to Madam Toussaint becomes an odyssey having which he learns the cunning necessary to eke out the fruits of the modern society. Eddie’s ardent attempt to gain access to the fruits of this modern society has resulted in self-identification, a diminished self though it is.

Birds are symbols of freedom, of liberation and a widening consciousness. Eddie is in search of that freedom. But Amy is that strong wind who comes as a barrier to his progress, to his freedom. Gradually because of this their relationship turns cold. In a very significant passage the narrator seems to indirectly give an inkling of the gradually dying relationship between Eddie and Amy:

The grass is dry like hay. There ain’t no leaves on the trees. I see some birds in the tree. The wind’s moving the birds’ feathers. I bet you them little bird’s some cold (LDN 38).

Eddie’s actions isolate him from his own family and also from the community. His desperate attempts to make contact with Amy put one in mind of the sound of one hand clapping. He pleads Amy to return back to him. But Amy rejects to do so. Amy says, “If you burn it up”, … “If you burn it up, yes. I’ll come back” (LDN 65). As the story develops Eddie realizes that he needs a secure relationship with his son and wife to develop a healthy manhood.

Characters are tried by force within themselves and the forces of society. In this novel the force is the force of tradition holding back Eddie to acquire that modern identity for himself which he yearns for. Eddie’s life is of a fleeting nature particularly since he decides to live it as a black man who wants to stand alone in the crowd of other black man by owing the very “white man’s toy”, which is both a symbol of his quality or status and a necessary means of transportation. This automobile which Eddie prizes isolates him more and more from his wife and his child.

Madame Toussaint who symbolizes tradition make Eddie reevaluate his assessment of his world. She makes him realize that an automobile doesn’t make a man but maintaining familial stability does. Being a father and a good husband is an integral part of being a man. But at the beginning of the novel Eddie does not have a clear conception of his role neither as a father nor as a husband. ,…. He changed after he got that car, Mama says, He changed overnight” (LDN 20). Eddie neglects his wife perhaps because he feels that life’s meaning and his own manhood are to be found outside of and independent of the home. Certainly, Eddie has sought his manhood through his car and not within the familial context. Eddie has desperately tried to be a member of something but unfortunately he chooses the wrong thing (the car).

Through her direct action Amy is able to affect her family’s situation. She in fact forces Eddie to choose between his car and her, “You love your car. Go let it love you back” (LDN 13). At this crucial moment he realizes that his freedom is tied up not with the car but with the question of maintaining familial stability (Eddie who till now think that he has found his true image in life by owing a car and thereby achieved his identity is mistaken). His education begins when Amy leaves him.

Eddie’s accepting himself as a part of his affiliated identity is identical to those of initiation rites and ritualized suffering, isolation from community and family, acceptance of personal responsibility, recognition of a new social status, and a new understanding of self and nature.

Although Eddie wins back his family but each step in his accomplishment points out the dominance of women over men in this black society. His first trail to regain his family by going directly to his mother-in-law’s house ends in failure. For this old-war-house drives him away in tears by firing a shot gun over his retreating force. Next he goes to a black male preacher and asks him to intervene but he too is turned away by “Granmon”. It is then finally when he consults a woman, Madame Toussaint, a black magic fortune teller he is able to attain the formula for the return of his family. The advice she gives to set fire to the car and Eddie finally setting his car afire confirm his importance. A poor cane-cutter who in spite of his poverty manages to keep an automobile as a symbol or token of independence had to ultimately burn it.

Thus Eddie embodies that irresponsible member of a minority group who in spite of his poverty manages to keep the white man’s toy simply to enforce his white master’s or man’s sense of superiority. However Eddie is more understandable for he deliberately destroys his one material possession and after this act of final absurdity he is able to reintegrate his fractured self or what we can say achieve true masculinity in order to re-acheive the happiness and an awareness of the foundation of the black family.

Sonny who has been a careful observer of this little drama, no doubt learns a significant lesson from the responses of his father. He is after all the ‘tyro’ and through the ‘tutor’ (his father Eddie), he learns how to act with grace under such circumstances, in the face of the interests of the larger community practices and tradition and in the fragmentation of the loved ones.

Eddie’s reuniting with his family in spite of each one’s apparent hostility invariably leads to a loss of the new society’s materialism and technology (i.e. loss of modernity) and thereby reclaiming and reaffirming his identity given by the larger community (tradition).

The identity of an individual is related to community tradition. An individual cannot produce his existence by himself. He is not defined by his creative ability or his capacity to make choices that he might construct his own life. The individual draws strength from its vital tradition. Eddie’s confusion and conflict within the community arises as he is in search for a fully realized self and place within the community. It is a search for ‘the dream’ (to achieve a modern identity) and that is the truth for him. Eddie’s extreme fondness for the white man’s toy demonstrates that the force of alien cultural images would give him his identity.

Eddie feels that he is a victim of traditional society which has forced him to live an unnatural life devoid of all the fruits of modern society. Eddie initially tries to mimic the white social codes with the hope of moving socially and economically in the black society. But the double jeopardy of being both black and poor excludes Eddie, or any equally ‘poor’ and ‘black’ ‘male’ or ‘female’ from gaining and sharing the identity that may be offered.

Eddie begins to feel the pressure of tradition; it is a pressure which only serves to tear him apart as he is unable to conform or measure up to neither the community nor to his own expectations. For Eddie who sought for a single private self finally to get back the love of the family and caring has to sacrifice the agent of modernity. Eddie disowns his car. The car no doubt in some way gives him freedom for it is his untenable desire to conform to white middle class social and economic values and to internalize it what it means to be modernity.  But in decepting these false values of modernity he is trapped between modernity and tradition. For in seeking the unattainable – to be white he is alienated from his tradition, from his community and more important he is alienated from himself--- “who he really is?”. Eventually the absence of his families love and the absence of communal coherence and kinship ties gives him enough reason to understand that now he has little impetus to survive and grow without his tradition. His strength and growth now lies in adhering to his family and community which connects him to his cultural tradition.

Madame Toussaint who personifies history as represented through her bearing the name of the black freedom fighter Toussaint Louverture also helps Eddie to achieve his cultural identity deeply rooted in his tradition. But the nature of community is such that one is prevented from knowing who he is. Gaines presents the same point in a much more effective manner when he suggests in the novel, incidents that diminish Eddie’s self image, interfere with his creating an identity and thereby succumb to his community’s identity because ones identity and reality are both confirmed and threatened by “the look of the other”. The other in this instance constitutes Madame Toussaint. Eddie’s going to Madame Toussaint for advice seems to be very irrational move. But it is clearly an act which Eddie takes after he discovers and seeks his ‘real place’, a place that might be called a community.

The desire for separateness (i.e. modern identity) leaves Eddie and he begins to understand that identity can only be found in the future in his linear vision to ‘own things’, ‘own people’, and ‘own yourself’. In the beginning of the novel Eddie wishes to escape from his past tradition because it has for him, no materially functional purpose. But the novel closes with the mournful, belated recognition and acceptance of cultural tradition, that Eddie has achieved his sense of me-ness.

With tradition Eddie has attempted to discover himself through experience and thus, for a time, transforms his life, for he has tried to understand his community’s call and his positive response to this call shows that Eddie identifies his connection with the community. Till now Eddie has measured modernity in keeping a car, and other sorts of material comforts, of the white society that is associated with success.

But his search for identity is complete when he enters into a primeval world, a world that is fast disappearing against the onslaught of a new world- a world where ‘one’s money’, ‘one’s car’, or ‘father’s reputation’, will help him. Eddie realizes that he has permitted the American dream myth to devalue his senses and block out his natural ability to be a loving, empathetic human being. The black man’s central tradition symbolizing Madame Toussaint for belonging and brotherhood frame’s Eddie’s sudden awakening to his essential connection, to other people of his community and thereby to his own self.

Conclusion:

Eddie’s initiation and transformation coupled with his fearless appraisal to accept his cultural tradition implies that Eddie is now able to mediate between both modernity and tradition. As his transformation signifies, that it is progress from his superficial sense of modernity to a  more firm set of values of brotherhood and belonging which ultimately springs from and illuminated reality. Thus, it is evident in Eddie’s case that no matter how hard the black man tries to merge himself into American society he or she look or is bound to look at himself from an individualistic perspective. This on the other hand enables him to accept or reject elitist American values and thus widen the chasm between his/ her world view and those of the Blacks.

In the novel we see that initially Eddie consider affiliation to be a source of burden. But finally he realizes that affiliation is a source of strength. In the case of Eddie as his wife Amy and son Sonny leave him, he attempts to reconstruct a new identity through an awareness of self, family, and the true meaning of being a man. Eddie’s setting fire to his car is a step he takes to maintain his identity as a father and as a man. Eddie accepts his community affiliations and rise above the limited identity especially with the help of the newly found ‘old’ affiliation.

References:

Babb, Melissa Valerie.Ernest Gaines.Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Gaines, Ernest J. “A Long Day in November” Bloodline. Dial P, 1968.

Gaudet, Marcia and Wooton Carl. Porch Talks with Ernest Gaines. Louisiana State UP,1990.

Lowe, John, ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. UP of Mississipi, 1995.

Moya, Paula, and Michael R. Hames – Garcia. ed. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Orient Longman,2001.

Shelton , Frank W. “ Ambiguous Manhood in Ernest J. Gaines’ Bloodline”, CLA 19, 1975-76,pp.200-209.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge UP, 1989.