More Than a Black Rat Sonofab---- Animality in Defining Americanness and the Human in Nambi E. Kelley’s Native Son

Abstract

More Than a Black Rat Sonofab----Animality in Defining Americanness and the Human in Nambi E. Kelley’s Native Son DeLisa D. Hawkes (bio) Nambi E. Kelley’s 2016 stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son opens with what the playwright calls “A Biggerlogue.” Bigger Thomas has presumably already murdered Mary Dalton and now stands in the middle of the stage, soaking wet and shivering with the light shining only on his naked body, a gesture towards simultaneous feelings of isolation and spectacle. Observers hovering in the shadows study Bigger; their uninterrupted gazes paint his image for the audience. In contrast to a monologue, the “Biggerlogue” does not feature Bigger speaking. Instead, the voice of the Black Rat reveals a powerful statement: “We all got two minds. How we see them seeing us. How we see our own self. But how they see you take over on the inside. And when you look in the mirror—You only see what they tell you you is. A black rat sonofab----.”1 Bigger stares into a broken mirror, his reflection an animalesque personification of himself as a rodent. Bigger then opens his mouth only after the Black Rat speaks for him. Nevertheless, Bigger only stands there—naked, wet, and shivering—as if he has either been symbolically born or baptized. The lights black out, and the “Biggerlogue” ends. Countless scholars have offered analyses of Wright’s novel and have argued that it can be read as postcolonial,2 anti-gothic,3 or that it questions “not how one becomes a black man, but how (or if) a Negro becomes a man.”4 Some scholars have focused explicitly on Wright’s inclusion of a black rat at the novel’s beginning. For instance, Matthew Lambert argues that “Wright uses [a black rat] in his depiction of the African-American experience in cities during the 1930s in order to critique racism and unfair housing conditions.”5 I argue that the [End Page 83] humanesque Black Rat in Kelley’s stage adaptation interrogates the centrality of animality—the concept of inherent animal nature—to the process of defining human, man, and other with attention to a white supremacist US cultural context. In this way, I read Kelley’s Native Son through an anti-colonial lens, paying attention to how power structures insist upon supposed human and animal nature to establish social and racial hierarchies. In conversation with Toni Morrison’s concept of an “Africanist presence” in American literature and Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of the figure of Man, I contend that Bigger and the Black Rat’s relationship in Kelley’s Native Son represents the centrality of animality in defining Americanness and its reliance on racialized others. While Wynter describes “The Millennium of Man” as the period in which the West worked to invent the idea of Man equated with the “white, bourgeois, heterosexual male,” which resulted in the belief that “to be not-Man is to be not-quite-human,”6 Morrison explains that “the rights of man [as] an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded, was inevitably yoked to Africanism,” or a non-white Africanist presence that became necessary for “the quintessential American identity.”7 Defining Americanness required a specific notion of freedom and power that relied upon black enslavement. Americanness necessitated the “construction of blackness and enslavement [that] could be found not only [in] the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me.”8 In other words, power and freedom became racialized concepts associated with whiteness, while the “strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive” emerged as American Africanism.9 Kelley emphasizes whiteness’s not-me projection through the human-appearing, racialized, and gendered Black Rat, highlighting the assumed loss of humanity experienced by the objectified and racialized body. The Black Rat also offers a lens through which to examine the effects of othering in the development of Americanness, namely through the embodiment of double consciousness, or what Du Bois defines as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”10 Double consciousness undoubtedly influences how societies define human...