A peculiar sensation

Black and Ashamed 
121
of the man in the street” (473), whose suffering is martyred for yet an-
other historical narrative of white redemption.
The narrator’s desire for whiteness, which characterizes the irst stage 
of his displacement, is ultimately based on the process of subjectivization 
that articulates the demands for his social existence.
42
In the racialized 
terrain of white America, the narrator can emerge as visible only by as-
suming the shame for his own visibility. This is relected in the naïve en-
thusiasm of his formative years for Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory 
strategies to accommodate white interests, rather than challenge their 
racial oppression.
43
The narrator’s inability to see the trenchant ambigu-
ity of his grandfather’s last words, urging his son to ‘“[l]ive with … [his] 
head in the lion’s mouth … [and] overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine 
‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you 
till they vomit or bust wide open’” (16), reveals the extent of his inter-
pellation by the racial myths that produce a ixed geography of power 
within which black agency is scripted:
His words caused so much anxiety … he had spoken of meekness as 
a dangerous activity… And whenever things went well for me I … 
felt guilty and uncomfortable… When I was praised for my conduct 
I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really 
against the wishes of the white folks… The old man’s words were 
like a curse. On my graduation day, I delivered an oration in which 
I showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of 
progress… I was praised by most lily-white men of the town … con-
sidered an example of desirable conduct … [and] was invited to give 
the speech at a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens. It was 
a triumph for our whole community.
(16, 17)
The interiorized racial binaries and the universal white narratives, seem-
ingly motivating the narrator’s guilt for breaking his normative contract, 
are, in fact, embedded in deeper, ontological structures of shame. The 
white gaze interiorized by the narrator as the self-policing agency of the 
Ego-ideal consigns black subjectivity to assume the burden for the signii-
cation and visibility of its own skin that one cannot expiate for. No mat-
ter what one 
does
, the fact of blackness remains ixed, renegrifying every 
attempt to escape the airtight cage of its imperatives. Shame persists over 
and beyond guilt, which remains inherently excusable, which one can 
be forgiven for through acts of self-abnegation, humility or punishment. 
We forgive only what we can punish. Shame, however, carves out a sub-
jectivity that has no recourse against itself. Subject formation for the 
narrator is thus inevitably tied to shame because it is related to the body 
and its inscription within the productive constraints of the regulatory 
schemas that articulate its meaning. But there is no body outside its racial 

---

122
Zlatan Filipovic
inscription. In fact, body or the fantasy of the unraced body is the irst 
effect of racism. What this means is that the political structures that pro-
duce race cannot be dissociated from the materiality of the body that is 
only ever articulated within them, as “the inscribed surface of events,”
44
and the narrator’s discomfort at his grandfather’s dying plea is only the 
growing recognition of this fact. The “curse” of his grandfather’s am-
biguous words is the birth of racial awareness for the narrator who is 
just beginning to realize that race legislates for subjectivity through an 
essentialist splitting of body and meaning.
In racial shame, I am 
for myself
a refused me. The ambivalence of iden-
tiication for the black subject resides in the fact that its skin is both the 
point of irremissible attachment and the point of regulatory detachment, it 
is both “a scene of fear and desire,”
45
in Bhabha’s terms. My skin
exposes
me – both reveals me and determines me outside myself. And to me, its 
black dirt is visible by means of the heteronomy I have assumed since, 
in racial shame, my subjectivity holds out against itself. I 
am
black but, 
having interiorized the racial myths of the white imaginary, I see myself 
as white seeing myself black. And the racial schema, abrogating all oth-
ers, betrays all my pretenses and nails me ixed in
being-despite-myself
, 
which characterizes the affective structure of shame.
The ‘boomerang’ for the narrator, however, comes during his “irst 
northern winter” (
IM
260), just before he witnesses the eviction of an 
old black couple whose shame of dispossession, including the “FREE 
PAPERS” from 1859 (272), was exposed in Harlem snow by the white 
authorities. Passing a store window, displaying “ointments guaranteed 
to produce the miracle of whitening black skin” and signs proclaiming, 
“[y]ou too can be truly beautiful … [and w]in greater happiness with 
whiter complexion,” he seizes sight of a yam stand, glowing black in the 
biting white air, “bringing a stab of swift nostalgia” (262). Not being 
able to resist the “savage urge” (262) through what he had earlier re-
ferred to as “an act of discipline,”
46
he buys and “wolfs down the yam” 
(266) while walking,
suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom… It was ex-
hilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about 
what was proper. To hell with all that… If only someone who had 
known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. 
How shocked they’d be… What a group of people we were … you 
could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us 
with something we liked. No more of that for me… They’re my 
birthmark… 
I yam what I yam
.
(264, 266, emphasis added)
In the second stage of displacement, signiied by the emancipatory return 
of the repressed black ontology, the body yet again carries the burden of 

---

Black and Ashamed 
123
affective investments. This time, it is ixed in a new symbolic attachment 
that seemingly reclaims the prerogatives of its history. In a boomerang 
of the repressed, the black body now becomes a source of identiication: 
“I yam what I yam” (266). Since there is no escape from under its un-
bearable weight and since it persists beyond all initiatives to transcend 
it, the body also becomes the only refuge left for the black subject. For 
the narrator, it now opens up a new relation to the past which suspends 
the identiicatory strategies of racial pragmatism, “of what works” (17), 
that determines his relation to the present. The “yams” and their ex-
plicit relation to prohibited pleasure, somaticism and hunger, signify-
ing the break-out, the “intense feeling of freedom” (264), of the black 
body from the prison of its scripted determinations, mark the birth of 
the narrator as a racial subject.
47
Denying the very soil of its signiica-
tion, the black consciousness now reverts to it, investing it with liberat-
ing vitalities and mystiications of black essentialism, “the shameless… 
Field-Niggerism” (265), in narrator’s terminology, in order to provide 
ontological legitimacy for the black experience. “This is all very wild 
and childish,” the narrator explains, “but to hell with being ashamed of 
what you liked. No more of that for me” (265–66). The black body itself 
becomes an open wound of signiication, where the question of shame 
powers its fundamental antagonisms on the streets of Harlem. Indeed, 
the battleield that Harlem becomes at the end of the novel is over the 
disinscription of the black body that is able to reset the stage for possible 
pasts and alternate futures, disrupting the white narratives of historical 
progress.