Invisible Man
by
Ras the Exhorter, a “wild man” (364), a visionary and a rival leader of
radical black separatism whose “hoodlums would attack and denounce
the white meat of a roasted chicken” (365). Propelled into violence by
the overwhelming historical forces, Ras is the inevitable effect of racial
articulations of power. His charismatic, sectarian rhetoric, “wrong but
justiied, crazy and yet coldly sane” (564), only relects the opposite end
of the never-ending pendulum of racial politics that tears through the
social terrain of America. After an attempt by the narrator to wrestle
Harlem and its community leaders from Ras to support the more concil-
iatory and racially integrative cause of the Brotherhood, Ras’s poignant
appeal quickly exposes the double consciousness of the black subject and
the inherent complicity of the Brotherhood in the continuing oppression
of black lives:
You
my
brother mahn! Brothers are the same color; how the hell you
call these white men
brother
?… We sons of Mama Africa, you done
forgot? You black, BLACK!… You got bahd
hair
! You got thick
lips
!
They say you
stink
! They hate you mahn. You African. AFRICAN!
Why you with them?… They enslave us—you forget that?… What
you trying to deny by betraying the black people?… In Africa this
mahn be a chief, a black king! Here they say he rape them godhahm
women with no blood in their veins… What kind of foolishness is
it? Kick him ass from cradle to grave then call him
brother
?… Is
that sanity? Is that consciousness … the modern black mahn of the
twentieth century? Hell, mahn!… He got you so you don’t trust your
black intelligence… Don’t deny you’self!… It’s three hundred years
of black blood to build this white mahn’s civilization and wahn’t be
120
Zlatan Filipovic
wiped out in a minute. Blood calls for blood! You remember that.
And remember that I’m not like you. Ras recognizes the true issues
and he is not afraid to be black. Nor is he a traitor for white men.
(370–71, 372, 373, 376)
Ras sees “the true issues” in the open relation of forces unmystiied by
the protean forms of racial discrimination. For Ras, the black subject can
only emerge in the positive expression of real antagonism that reconsti-
tutes agency through an absolute rejection of the white narrative within
which it has been determined. This “boomerang” moment, in Sartre’s
terms,
40
of racial disavowal that inds legitimacy in the self-valorizing
rhetoric of the Négritude movement and pan-African essentialisms is
necessary, according to Fanon, since it rehabilitates the past from the
black pit of shame where it has been buried alive and triggers a funda-
mental change in the “psycho-affective equilibrium”
41
of the oppressed.
Indeed, Ras could be seen as part of the counterhegemonic struggle over
representation and meaning of the black past that has been scandalized
within the racial schema upon which the white subject founds its prerog-
atives. When racial riots, instigated by Ras the Exhorter – who by the
end of the novel becomes Ras the Destroyer – inally take possession of
Harlem, he appears on
a great black horse. A new Ras of a haughty, vulgar dignity, dressed
in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain [with] a fur cap upon his
head, his arm bearing a shield [and with] a cape made of the skin of
some wild animal around his shoulders.
(
IM
556)
“A igure,” the narrator continues, “more out of a
dream
than out of
Harlem … yet real, alive, alarming” (556, emphasis added). Making
visible the suppressed black past uncannily claiming ownership of the
present, Ras seems to stagger reason itself, but that is only because the
history of
reason
is white.
Ras, however, does not only expose the brutal residues of racial shame
no longer blushing for its indiscretions, but also represents the narrator’s
own cresting ambivalence between his formal pledge to the organized
cause of the Brotherhood and his affective pledge to the suffering of
the black community. The two do not coincide, “[t]he Brotherhood isn’t
the Negro people” (468), and, with its overbearing, teleological abstrac-
tions, the Brotherhood runs aground against the throb of Harlem, its
“raw materials” (472), its “gin mills and the barber shops and the juke
joints and the churches … the beauty parlors on Saturdays when they’re
frying hair … and a cheap tenement at night … [where a] whole unre-
corded history is spoken…” (471). To the Brotherhood and its cyclopean,
one-eyed leader Jack, they are only “the mistaken and infantile notions
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