Anne's Blogpost

Harriet Tubman (1821-1913) nicknamed Moses, she escaped slavery in the South becoming an abolitionist who helped hundreds of enslaved people to escape to freedom to the North.

“Black Bodies of Desire, Displacement, and Discontent”

The works selected for the course reveal desire, displacement, and discontent among the female characters. They focus on the lives of black women in fiction. In the novel Sula, the readers see three women who shape the girls’ identities in the years to come. Helene Wright, Nel’s mother is a respectable proper Black woman who raises Nel to be obedient and proper. Her desire is to make Nel into her own idea of a respectable Black woman in America. There is a false and forced idea of Black beauty in the world is damaging even today. The idea of the “black skin”, the idea “size”, and the idea “hair style and type” play important roles in the world especially in the Black community that continues to exhibit color consciousness. This is the idea that the closer to white features a person has is a plus. There is a duality for both displacement and discontent for Helene. Her displacement is control; she is the head of the household in her home telling both daughter and husband what to do. However, her discontent is also control, but it is the outside world in the eyes of both black and white that can only see black as lesser. Regardless of social status, the world only sees Black as nothing more than a lower uneducated class.

Eva and Hannah Peace play an important role in shaping Sula’s identity. Their desire, displacement, and discontent are love both, familial and womanly. “…those Peace women loved all men. It was Manlove that Eva bequeathed to her daughters…The Peace women simply loved maleness, for its own sake” (41). This type of love is satisfaction in filling the void of loneliness. Love plays a central role in both Nel and Sula’s friendship in that their desire in finding love. Their displacement of not belonging in their current role individually Nel a single mom and Sula as outcast in her community. And their discontent playing in the social norm of what society sees in Black women.   

In the novel Sula, childhood friends Nel and Sula display their own desires as women growing up during the early part of  the twentieth century. Nel is a well behaved young girl who would later on become a wife and mother. Nel’s desire is being needed as the narrator reports, “She actually wanted to help, to soothe” (83). She adopts the traditional mores associated with women as nurturer. Yet there is a feeling of displacement on Nel’s part. After her husband cheats on her with Sula, he leaves the family making Nel a single black mother. She is left alone in a changing world that she is now force to navigate on her own. Nel’s discontentment is that she never truly loved her husband Jude, but she actually loved Sula after all these years. “It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (174). At the end of the novel the reader finally sees Nel break down into tears. She comes to terms with her love for Sula years later.

The character Sula has great desire, sexual desire. She sleeps with her best friend Nel’s husband, not because she loves him, but because she has a passing desire. Because of her outlook on life, she suffers displacement. The community views Sula and her family as peculiar. Additionally, she is discontented in her small community of Medallion, Ohio. She travels to find contentment only to return to Medallion to die. Sula’s discontent is found in her refusal to follow the norms of society that require women to marry and have children.  She explains, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”(92). Sula is a unique character in black Literature because she challenges the societal norm of a patriarchal world. She paves her own path to find her own person.

Nikki Giovanni (1943-) An American poet who was part of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975). She is a strong fierce Black woman whose writings explore race, gender, and African American family dynamics. Her poem Ego Tripping was written in 1972 the poem is about the true identity of African American women. https://poets.org/poem/ego-tripping-there-may-be-reason-why

            Alicia Keys (1981-) is an American singer, songwriter, actress and pianist who has won sixteen Grammys. Her style of soulful voice blends with skillful piano playing creating a mixture of R&B, soul, and jazz giving off a powerful voice for change. She is a humanitarian worker who also serves as cofounder in Keep a Child Alive (2003) that advocates in the global fight against HIVs/AIDS combating the impact of epidemic on children and families in Africa and India.