Tara T. Green - A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men

I'll never forget the day that my father drove off. I knew I was on my own. I don't want my son to ever have that experience. A black manan abandoned son and loving fathershares this emotional memory with me twenty-five years after his relationship with his father disintegrated. His eyes reveal a lesson that may be reflected in the autobiographies of black men who have had similar experiences with their fathers: Memories of loss are rarely forgotten. Black men's autobiographies reflect the significance of loss, especially when that loss is the first and most important male role modelthe father.

The stories of black men, whether they are relayed in oral or written form, are the inspiration for this work. In particular, my interest is in examining an important issue within black communities that I might have overlooked, had it not been for the voice of one of my former students. While teaching an introduction to African American literature course at Southern University, a historically black university in Louisiana, I was in the process of reviewing background on James Baldwin when a young man asked a question that would haunt me for several years: Why were so many of these black male writers abandoned by their fathers? It was a pattern I had not noticed, although I had completed a dissertation on Richard Wright no more than two years before. When I asked him what he thought, he simply shrugged his shoulders and told me it was best for a father to stay in place, even if he didn't want to. This young black man had jolted me out of my oblivion and shown me, in the process, that the question was not merely a literary one, but a social issue that black writers themselves had been trying to answer for decades. My interest inblack people, in general, and in black men as my fathers, uncles, cousins, friends, and brothers, in particular, has compelled me to give a voice to what has been a too-often-overlooked subject in literary studiesthe impact of absent fathers on their sons. My goal here, then, is to offer an analysis of several autobiographies written and published during the twentieth century and ranging from the era of World War II to after the Civil Rights movement (19401995). The objective of A Fatherless Child: Autobiographical Perspectives of African American Men is to examine the impact of fatherlessness on racial and gender identity formation by looking at black men's autobiographies and other constructions of black fatherhood in fiction by black men. I intend to probe the sons' understanding of their fathers' struggles to define themselves, and, the role of community in forming the sons' quest for self-definition in their fathers' absence. My analysis of the autobiographical works of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama intersects autobiography studies and black masculinity studies, and when appropriate I use cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

Autobiographies often illustrate a subject's quest for identity. A book in the genre focuses on a subject that tells about his/her personal experiences expressed though a version of a self. James Olney argues that an autobiographer, as do people in general, has many selves: If all selves are unique and, in their uniqueness, only subjectively experienced (i.e. we may experience other selves, but then only as objects, not as proper selves), and [] all selves are constantly evolving, transforming, and becoming different from themselves. Autobiography, then, tracks the transformation of a self as that self constructs a truth that the self in relation to the writer desires to reveal to the public.

Of course, truth is a subjective term, which I define as an autobiographer's interpretation of a series of events that is more of a perspective that he or she consciously or subconsciously wants to offer to a reader. Truth is an idea that belongs to both the subjective self who tells the story and the writer who presents the story, and its existence is at the root of tension between the writer and the subject or self. Stephen Butterfield, author of Black Autobiography in America, defines the two existences found in autobiography as a dialectic between what you wish to become

In black autobiography, the metaphor of the self is rooted in the subjugated self's engagement with racism, as well as in the self's struggle to define himself as a black person in society. Butterfield sees the differences between the self in autobiographies written by white authors and those written by blacks as taking into account the effect of Western culture on the Afro-American. The self is conceived as a member of the oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to the other members. It is a conscious political identity, drawing sustenance from the past experience of the group. Mostern further argues that the identity of the self remains in the constant and conscious negotiating of the I with a variety of racialized engagements. As I will elaborate, the need to identify with the group is profound, but how the I and we are defined in relation to each other may change for the black autobiography subject, depending on the author's intent and the era in which he is writing. For the most part, black men's autobiographies show a need to connect with the community, as a racial and cultural group, and their need to do so is greatly illuminated when the fathers are absent. A father's absence makes it necessary for the son to find a place of belonging and to connect with other males in the community who can teach him cultural practices that may be thought of as distinctly black and male. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama prove the need for an engagement within black communities to define themselves as black men, a need made more prominent by the absence of their fathers.