What Is African American Literature? by Crawford Margo N.;

Author:Crawford, Margo N.; [Crawford, Margo N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2020-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

Just as Toomer was frustrated with the intentional posing of dancers who cancelled out the “real sensing of the body,” he was frustrated with being made a part of a structure of African American literature that converted the vibratory dance of his book into the arrested development of the still pose. Through the lens of the post‐Cane poem “The Lost Dancer,” the vibratory power of Cane is its refusal to bind sand on the feet. Toomer uses this image, in “The Lost Dancer,” of moving sand that does not stick to the moving feet when he writes, “He can find no source/ Of magic adequate to bind/ The sand upon his feet” (39). When we heed Alice Walker’s advice to keep Cane but let Toomer go, we are not keeping the sand; we are keeping the vibrations of his dance.

Toomer’s vibrations of dance (in Cane) feel like the mystery of the lyrical struggling to not be swallowed by the narrative impulse to represent blackness in a clear and definitive manner. The attention to dance in the vignette “Theater” is one of the key moments when Toomer provides a meta‐narrative that teaches us how to allow Cane to remain a part of a vibratory dance that we can call African American literature (and not a part of a structure that we need to call African American literature). In “Theater,” Toomer foregrounds his frustration with the posing that makes some dance seem like “tricks” as opposed to the power of vibrations. Toomer writes, “Dorris dances. She forgets her tricks. […] The walls press in, singing. Flesh of a throbbing body, they press close to John and Dorris. They close them in. John’s heart beats tensely against her dancing body” (52‐53). The vibratory power of the dance makes the walls almost implode as the intensity of the shared atmosphere loosens the solidity of the walls. The thoughts of John shift into a dreamscape as he watches Dorris dance. His experience of her dance breaks out of spectatorship and becomes the feeling of a shared atmosphere of vibrations. When Dorris’ dance stops and John is no longer within the shared atmosphere of vibrations, Dorris “seeks for her dance” in John’s face but “finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream” (53). The deadness is the structure that crushes vibrations. Like Rhobert’s helmet, the “dead thing” is what cancels out the “stuffing that is alive” (40).

The is‐ness of African American literature is what Toomer found, as he wrote Cane, when he, like John in “Theater,” felt pulled into a shared atmosphere of vibrations. The deadness of the category of African American literature was what Toomer detested when, after the publication of Cane and its steady framing as a “Negro” book, he felt his “whirls” (like Dorris’ “whirls”) being frozen and forced into a category that, for Toomer, created the falseness of dance that is more about posing than real movement (“a false thing, a phony something which makes for posing and attitudinizing”).

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