THE DISCOURSE OF THE BLACK COUNTERCULTURE:
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER'S SOUL ON ICE
(1968) Soul on Ice, by former black prisoner Eldridge Cleaver, has been traditionally seen as an attempt to stir the blacks into revolution. America's divided image of a white affluent society and the black underclass, America's commitment to imperialism, America's assertion of power by mere physical strength ("the blood of the beast", Cleaver calls it) and America's deep fear of miscegenation are all sharply analysed in Soul on Ice by the Afro American spokesman for the Black Panthers. In his book, Cleaver voiced the frustration and dissatisfaction of a group of blacks who considered Martin Luther King's programme of passive resistance ineffectual. This was the same militant line to which Malcolm X adhered but later on left aside. Soul on Ice, then, represented the rallying cry of the black counterculture which wanted to express their disaffection to the values of white America.
In this paper I take up some of the themes stated above but from a discursive perspective. I analyse the strategies of black subalternization the author detects in the white culture in relation to its social practices and discourse strategies. For this analysis I concentrate on the attacks he makes against the establishment's hegemonic discourse.
In Soul on Ice Cleaver rejects the discourse of conventional white America, which has silenced the black community and has imposed its univocal interpretation of reality, and he celebrates any moves against its acquiescence. As Maxwell Geismar states it in the preface to Soul on Ice, Cleaver "stirs up the national psyche that had been unnaturally comatose, slothful, and evasive since the McCarthyite trauma". These are refernces to the cultural atmosphere of the fifties. The hegemonic discourse at the time was particularly monologic; that is it did not leave room for alternatives and, at the same time, consolidated and reproduced, at the domestic level, the preservation of capitalism and consumerism and the values of the white middle-class family; at the international level, it advocated a bigoted fear of communism and the consolidation of America as a world power and the champion of the Free World. The widespread adherence in society to the hegemonic discourse is what allows for the characterization of this decade as the "age of conformity" or the time when society seems to be paralysed in some kind of mental coma, as Geismar defines it.
At the end of the fifties, the only scant voices of dissent which are heard come from the "beats", who try to challenge the acceptance of this ideology of the establishment. The protest of this small group becomes wider in the sixties when most youngsters become dissafected to the conventional American way of life. Cleaver, who opposes the ideology behind the discourse of the power structure, since it alienates the blacks, rejoices in the white youngsters' rejection of the values of the establishment in the sixties. During this decade, the Afro-American author observes, the white youngsters become disillusioned with the myths on which the white civilization is based and they start to question the heroes the white race has usually praised: "They recoil in shame from the spectacle of cowboys and pioneers- their heroic forefathers whose exploits filled earlier generations with pride- galloping across a movie screen shooting down indians like Coke bottles" (72). Cleaver here depicts the white youngsters' dissatisfaction but, at the same time, takes aim at the mythical characters of the American past: the pioneers and the cowboys. By mocking the "exploits" of the American traditional heroes, Cleaver shows how "heroism" and courage in the official language can be labelled as villainy and power abuse in the perspective of the "other".
Apart from unmasking the questionable basis of American civilization, Cleaver's main concern in this text is to expose the ways in which white America has managed to keep blacks first completely alienated from the project of emancipation, and later on, subdued. Soul on Ice, exhibits how the white power structure has resorted to discursive strategies of subalternity to support discriminatory practices, and to sustain a regime of inequality within what should be the realm of democracy.
America's internal fissure and discriminatory practices and the mechanism of discursive subalternization are exemplified in what Cleaver defines as the "America's schizophrenic image of itself". America sees itself as the land of equality and of the inalienable rights of the individual; but these tenets only hold for white America. Black America has always had a different status. Needless to say, the existence of slavery, since the mid sixteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, constitutes the most profound contradiction to the hegemonic liberal and humanistic discourse and the mechanism that facilitated the perpetuation of that inhuman institution was, precisely, as Cleaver well notices, the hegemonic discourse that viewed blacks as a subspecies. In other words, the representation of the Afro-Americans as the subaltern, the "not registered or registrable as a historical subject capable of hegemonic action" (Mignolo: 25) legitimized the "peculiar institution" andallowed for the existence of a divided America. Probably the most severe confrontation between the two images of America occured during the Civil War. Since then, there has been no end to the different attempts to try to keep the blacks subdued and out of the mainstream, that is, to continue the two sided America. One of the last attempts, Cleaver points out from his perspective in the sixties, is the discourse of the "separate but equal" doctrine in the fifties. "Separate-but-equal marked the last stage of the white man's flight into cultural neurosis, and the beginning of the black man's frantic striving to assert his humanity and equalize his position with the white" (81).
The Afro-American struggle for a new subject position in the social discourse starts in the fifties and is intensified in the sixties. Nevertheless, simultaneously, white america still holds the control of social discourse and devises new ways and more subtle ways of "overdetermination" of the "other". One example of these mechanisms of subalternization of the Afro-American group can be traced in the government's attempts to "cool out" the blacks' claims, that is to divert the blacks' petitions for equality by taking them away from the political arena or by reformulating them in terms of a discourse that loses its illocutionary force of an urgent and peremptory request. Cleaver explains that "by crushing black leaders, while inflating the images of Uncle Toms and celebrities from the apolitical world of sport and play, the mass media were able to channel and control the aspirations and goals of the black masses. The effect was to take the "problem" out of the political and economic and philosophical context and place it on the misty level of "goodwill", "charitable and harmoniuos race relations", and "good sportsmanlike conduct". This technique of "Negro control" has been so effective that the best known Negroes in America have always been- and still are- the entertainers and athletes..."(89). In other words, white America avoids an open confrontation by resorting to misnomers and "hedges" in its discourse, as we see in the expressions between inverted commas. These strategies have as a purpose to mask the conflictive nature of interracial relations, to distract society from its serious problems and to mitigate the depth and urgency of the conflict.
As suggested in Cleaver's passage above, even black voices can be used to reproduce the hegemonic discourse. Indeed, there are some black leaders or public personalities who are more easily accepted by the whites since they do not antagonize or make claims for the "other" America the society tries to hide. In those cases the whites in a condescending attitude take in the Afro-American subjetc in their discourse and the "Uncle Tom" type himself replicates the hegemonic discourse. To illustrate this, I will refer to the essay "Lazarus Come Forth". There, Cleaver comments on the different expectations, along racial lines, on the Muhamed Ali's and Floyd Patterson's fight and how the latter, by the time of the boxing confrontation, had become the whites' favourite due to his more complacent attitude towards them. Muhamed Ali, on the other hand, was distateful for the whites because he had refused, up to a certain extent, to become a tool for the white power structure. "The white hope for a Patterson victory was, in essence, a counterrevolutionary desire to force the Negro, now in rebellion and personified in the boxing world by Ali, back into his "place". The black hope, on the contrary, was to see Lazarus crushed, to see Uncle Tom defeated, to be given symbolic proof of the victory of the autonomous Negro over the subordinate Negro" (91). The white power structure's discourse is voiced through Patterson who announced before the fight that he would restore the crown back to America. His discourse filters the white man's view of considering Ali, the rebel, a usurper, a dark alien force. To this, Ali replied vigourously "What does he mean? I'm an American too!" (92). His complaints went unheard. He had been undoubtedly cast out of America in its mainstream discourse and, though he was a successful sportsman, he was alienated for not responding to the mould of one "the faithful darkies of the mythical legions that inhabit the white imagination..."(92).
Another strategy of subalternity and of discursively creating an "outgroup" to perpetuate the ideology of the white man's superiority is that of inserting the epithet negro to every kind of activity developed by Afro-Americans. The marked terms "Negro" literature, "Negro " athletes, "Negro" doctors denote a difference in quality with the universal white literature, athletes, doctors etc. The norm seems to be given by those white standards that is why there is no "white" specification behind the activities performed by the whites. The marked terms suggest there is a deviation and imply that the quality of those activities or occupations is not the same. They are just variations of the "authentic" white experience. Cleaver also complains about this phenomenon, though not in these terms, by saying: "The malignant ingeniousness of this device is that although it accurately describes an objective biological fact- or, at least, a sociological fact in America- it concealed the paramount psychological fact: that to the white mind, prefixing anything with "Negro" automatically consigned it to an inferior category" (81).
Of all the strategies of subalternization probably that of the indoctrination of the white man's standards of beauty is one of the most harmful ones. It is highly destructive because it fosters a deep feeling of racial self hate. Though Cleaver is not specific about the type of discourse that encourages the devaluation of black aesthetics, it is easy to imagine that the main cause lies in the association of everything that is beautiful and noble with the white race mainly in the discourse of the media and the movies. As a consequence of the circulation of this discourse, blacks try to pass off as whites and they straighten their hair, bleach their skin or thin their lips.
A more terrible consequence of the reproduction of this discourse lies in the fact that back in the sixties most black men seem to prefer white women. In this case, Cleaver believes that this is not a natural and free choice among the blacks but it has been motivated by another myth created by the hegemonic discourse. In fact, he sees it related to labour division, social roles and the caste system along racial lines existing in America. His thesis is that as the whites, from the very beginning, were assigned the superior roles in society, those that corresponded to the mental functions, they were then seen as the "Omnipotent Administrators", in the case of man, and the "Ultrafeminine", in the case of woman. Whereas the blacks, who were in charge of the lower functions of society, were cast as the "Supermenial Workers" (men) and the "Amazon" (women), and they developed mainly the bodily functions.
Cleaver sees the natural attraction between the black man and the white woman and white man and black woman, as an attempt to find the other half and make up for those functions which have been neglected according to their roles and "caste" in society. The hegemonic discourse, seeking to avoid interracial relations, has sanctioned the white males' attempts to have sex with black women as "a form of degeneracy and treason to caste" and the black males' approaches to white women as "a malignant desire to transcend the laws of nature by mixing" (174).
In any case, Cleaver assigns a "revolutionary" motive to black men lusting for white women. He himself acknowledges having raped white women as a way of revenging himself upon the white oppressor[1]. After listening to some of his prison mates revelations, he comes to the conclusion that this is a common motive among the blacks for committing such crime.
Despite Cleaver's self definition "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation", which exposes a lot of his limitations, in his Soul on Ice he reveals himself as an acute cultural critic. In fact, he seems to be a very modern one because of his keen perceptions on social reality and of his understanding on how discourse is handled by the dominant group to present their views as uncontested truths and undisputable facts of the natural order of life.
His sharp insights and criticism as revealed in this text, "quickly translated by all bourgeois European publishers as if it were the true voice of the groaning masses" (Lasky: 9), allowed for the empowerment of the black counterculture. By debunking myths which appeared to be universal and eternal truths in American society, by noticing the way reality and social or individual mental representations can be constructed through discourse, (though he did not put it in these terms) and by being alert to spot fallacies and manipulation in the hegemonic discourse, he not only changed the blacks' standing in society but also provided tools for further sociological and cultural analysis.
Yet, it must be noticed that despite his acute observations on the way the white hegemonic groups handled discourse to perpetuate power and hidden inequality, he also let himself be manipulated by another hegemonic grand narrative: marxism. Indeed, the discourse of Soul on Ice is very often tinted by marxist rhetoric and cannot escape the 1960's typical marxist ideological clichès. It is worth mentioning here that following the publication of his book, as a consequence of the charges made against Cleaver for advocating rape, murder and arson as proper means of social protest, he had to become an exile. He moved to Cuba and North Africa where he tried to organize protest groups, but he became disappointed with the leftist regimes in those countries that did not meet his expectations as regards justice and equality.
One by one, his illusions collapsed. In Castro's Cuba, he found a racism as bad as that he had complained about in the United States; even worse, since back home he at least had the freedom to complain. He began to feel that perhaps bourgeois liberties were not a farce, but the very real basis for extending democratic rights. The "Left-Fascist" dictatorships of North Africa disillusioned him completely. These narrow illiberal, corrupt, fanatical, hopeless societies were not the world for which he had called his people to struggle and make sacrifices. He appealed to Washington to let him return; he was willing to stand trial for whatever charges were still on the books (Lasky: 9).
Finally, leaving aside Cleaver's life and going back to the text, we can probably say that the greatest contribution the militant writer made and the greatest paradox he pointed out was America's self conception as the land of democracy and equal opportunities and its contradictory stance as regards the oppression of the black population at home and the support to colonial or dictatorial regimes abroad. That is why Cleaver's final exhortation was addressed at trying to work together for the liberation of the "Negro" at home and the support to all international movements of liberation as a way of exposing the hypocritical and fake attitudes of the Free World champion.
CLEAVER, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1968.
LASKY, Melvin J. The Ideas of '68. In: Encounter, USA, November 1988.
MIGNOLO, Walter. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princenton University Press, 2000.
BHABHA, Homi K. The Location of Culture.London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
FAIRCLOUGH, N. Language and Power. ondon: Longman, 1989.
_____. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
SAID, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
VAN DIJK, T.A. Estructuras y Funciones del Discurso. México: Siglo XXI, 1986.
_____. (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage, 1997.
[1] Lasky explains Cleaver's rapist conduct in this way: "His explanation (Cleaver's) was that, in the dialectics of revolutionary racial ethics, raping white women represented a moral compensation for past oppression" ("The Ideas of '68": 9) (Brackets mine).