Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Daryl Cumber Dance

Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves:

Caribbean American Narratives and the

Second Generation. New York: New York UP,

2005. 327 pp. $50.00.

Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Piri Thomas, and the meringue hip hop group Proyecto Uno, Lisa D. McGill considers in Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation the issues of identity formation of those whose heritage ultimately includes Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, most often New York City. Though her subjects come from different national, racial, and language backgrounds; though they have made their names in different media; and though they have different views of race, identity, and culture, she convincingly makes the argument that "African America becomes a powerful site of assimilation for Caribbean second generationers and that the racialization of Caribbean immigrants in the United States plays a dominant role in the acculturation process" (240).

Her first subject is the popular entertainer Harry Belafonte (born in New York to Jamaican and Martiniquan parents), who became the first of these immigrants to achieve success as a US pop icon. Exploring Belafonte's 1956 album, Harry Belafonte--Calypso, and the film Island in the Sun in the context of historical images of Black males in the media, McGill argues that he represents the first marketing of Black male sexuality in America. She contends that his "black Caribbean body afforded a sexual freedom not made available to his black American one" (33). Theoretically and historically her argument is well made. The only problem is that she repeats "black male body" ad nauseam throughout the discussion, with that phrase or some variation of same appearing 20 times on pages 68-69 alone. Though she makes some interesting observations about the texts of Belafonte's songs, one might argue in retrospect that her focus on the Black male body here results in less textual analysis of his art than is the case with her other subjects. One might also object that Belafonte receives a less-balanced consideration of his activism than does her next subject, the acclaimed novelist Paule Marshall.

McGill begins her discourse on Marshall, the child of Barbadian immigrants living in Brooklyn, New York, with a discussion of her participation in "artistic-political realms" (76), such as the Harlem Writers Guild, the Association of Artists for Freedom, journals such as Freedomways, and other organizations, symposia, and conferences associated with the US left community. Indeed, this first part of the Marshall chapter, titled "All o' We Is One," represents McGill's most important contribution to Marshall scholarship. While McGill acknowledges the significance of several other Marshall works to her theme in this study, she chooses in the second part of this chapter to focus on her 1983 novel, Praisesong for the Widow. Here she notes Marshall's insistence on the relationship of the African American, Caribbean, and African communities and her goal in the novel to lead Blacks to appreciate the need to find a more truthful sense of their identities through the psychological and spiritual return to Africa. This section, though well done, adds little to prior scholarship treating this important aspect of Marshall criticism. Further, given McGill's thesis, one would argue that there should be some mention of Daughters, The Fisher King, and "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam." Finally, McGill misleads in her passing reference to the "black subjects" of Soul Clap Hands and Sing (83), given that Max Berman of "Brooklyn" is White. While one acknowledges the importance of the Black women in these novellas, there is no question that Marshall forces the reader to focus on the males as subjects through her quoting of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" in her forward and in her title ("An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing").

McGill's third subject is noted poet and essayist Audre Lorde, born to Barbadian and Grenadian parents in New York. This chapter focuses on African god(dess) figures in The Black Unicorn, Lorde's seventh and most complex book of poetry, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, her fictionalized autobiography or "biomythography." While Lorde, like Marshall, views Africa as the source of racial identity and awareness, Lorde, McGill argues, "enacts Africa as the site that validates her ties to multiple racial, cultural, and sexual communities" (117), thus making it possible for Lorde to reconcile all of those parts of herself that she frequently was asked to justify: a woman, a feminist, a lesbian, a Caribbean, an African American, a poet.

McGill moves to the African Hispanic community with her fourth subject, Piri Thomas, a Black Puerto Rican, whose autobiography, Down These Main Streets, reveals the dilemma, not only of a Black male in a dominant White society, but also a Black male in a family where everyone else was lighter-skinned and in an African American community where he sometimes felt alienated. McGill argues that this work is quite different from the African American Bildungsromans with which it is usually compared, such as Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice: "Piri is not liberated by his black consciousness, as are Malcolm X, Brown, Cleaver; thus, that consciousness of a black self undergirds a suspended tension in the autobiography, a tension that is never quite resolved" (167). Thomas's work, McGill informs, "was one of the first to launch the Nuyorican literary movement" (165).