In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures, "the premiere journal of African studies worldwide," in which I recounted my conscientious preparation, and ultimate checkmate, in my quest to secure an academic position teaching Black and African literature.
This may seem like a Quixotic choice in the angry fragmentation of knowledge stemming from our post Black-Lives-Matter upheavals, but w-a-a-y back in the 1970s, when I made my selection of academic studies, most professors of African studies in America were white, and there was still a kum-ba-ya quality to the whole enterprise.
I ticked off the stages of my preparatory journey, and -- I have to admit -- I was impressed by my own achievements. First there was three years of Peace Corps Service in the "Heart of Darkness" (aka The Central African Republic). That provided the experiential foundation of my studies to follow. The Central African Republic had been a former colony of French Equatorial Africa, and since literature was my foreordained area of specialty, it only followed that my time in Africa segued into a year of study at the University of Paris, where I perfected my French and took courses in francophone literature taught by well-meaning Frenchmen and -women who had spent time in the former colonies and had turned their service there into literary specialties by reading works written by the intellectuals of their particular fiefdom.
Returning to the States, I enrolled at Indiana University which boasted an excellent African Studies program and employed in its Department of Comparative Literature one of America's leading francophone experts, a charming, convivial Frenchman of slender academic achievement and no knowledge of an African language. "Screw that!" I thought to myself. "I'm going to be a different kind of Africanist," and I set about learning Swahili. Ten years later, I joined the Department of Kiswahili at the University of Dar es Salaam as a Research Associate as I prepared and wrote my dissertation on East Africa's leading literary light, an untranslated Swahili playwright by the name of Ebrahim Hussein. I befriended the great man himself, and when he began voluntarily conversing with me in Swahili rather than English (which, of course, he knew as well as a native speaker), I felt I had broken through to a rarefied level of linguistic intimacy.
I put myself on the job market the following year and was confident of the aces in my hand. The University of Wisconsin was certainly a reputable institution (I had changed schools during my graduate studies), and I had demonstrated fluency in not only French but in an African language. I had just had an article accepted in a major peer-reviewed journal; three of the papers I had delivered at conferences of the African Literature Association had been selected for inclusion in their subsequent anthologies -- an unheard-of achievement for a graduate student. Surely with my newly-minted Ph.D. I was a hot prospect!
Then I hit The Wall. OMG! I was a white! Worse, I was a white man! Actually, I was a gay Jewish man, but having my own experience of minority status and what is now called intersectionality mattered as little to the college hiring committees as my laborious acquisition of Swahili. They needed candidates of color or, failing that, at least a woman. I was screwed -- but I had done it to myself. And there was a philosophical side to all of this. I found out that not only was I politically unsuited to teaching Black literature (even though I was doing so at such institutions as New York University and several campuses of the University of California), I was ontologically incapable as well. While researching a graduate course in African poetry, I came across the following sentiment by a Nigerian critic. "By what feat of imagination, or metaphorical slip of the tongue, can one assert that a white person can understand what it is to be a black man? All dictates of common sense and reason suggest the contrary to be the case: that only a black man -- whether in America, Africa, Europe or elsewhere--can understand what it is to be black."
When I read those lines, my blood ran cold. All of the books, all of the years of learning Swahili and East African culture, all of the hours of conversation and exchange with Black colleagues, teachers, students, friends, lovers -- none of it meant anything. I was white and therefore could not "understand."
Is it true? Am I trapped inside my class/racial/gendered box? Is my emotional attraction to a culture and experience outside my "birthright" a pathology? A conscious or unconscious power play for dominance? An aggression, no matter how well-informed or well-meaning? Does that inviolable kernel of experience -- "it's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- incapacitate all effort at friendship, allyship, or even love?
What does it mean if I write that same line -- "It's a Black thing; you wouldn't understand" -- in a script that a Black lesbian delivers to a white man coming from an interracial relationship? Wait! That just happened in Shoga's latest narrative short, "The Knowing." It's like three-dimensional identity politics checkers! Who's really speaking here, and what does that do to the reality of the No Trespassing sign? If somebody figures it out, please leave a note at the front desk of whatever mental institution accepts me because this kind of s**t just blows out my circuits!
-Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, What Do We Do About Carlo?
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