Oppression and Resistance of African American Women:
Drama as a Tool of Strategy in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A
Sara Vainikka 291578 Pro Gradu Thesis English Language and Culture School of Humanities University of Eastern Finland February 2021
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... 1
1.1. Aims and Structure ... 2
1.2. Suzan Lori-Parks as a Playwright ... 4
1.3. Material and Earlier Studies ... 6
2. The Theoretical Perspective ... 11
2.1. Feminist Theory ... 11
2.1.1. Historical Perspectives ... 13
2.1.2. Third Wave Feminism and Black Feminism ... 17
2.1.3. Intersectionality ... 21
2.2. Black Motherhood and Family Structure ... 24
2.3. Black Feminism, Literature and Theatre ... 29
2.3.1. Black Feminism and Theatre ... 29
2.3.2. Movement of Resistance ... 33
2.4. Drama as a Tool: The Brechtian Theatre Form ... 40
3. Analysis ... 45
3.1. Oppression ... 45
3.1.1. Oppression in Fucking A ... 46
3.1.2. Intersectionality ... 52
3.1.3. Black Identity and Motherhood ... 54
3.2. Alternatives ... 59
3.2.1. A Dystopian World ... 60
3.2.2. Resistance as a Theme ... 61
3.2.3. Resistance through Literary Strategies ... 70
4. Conclusion ... 78
Works Cited ... 81
1. Introduction and Background
1.1. Aims and Structure
This thesis aims to study the ways in which African American women’s identities are represented in an American play Fucking A (2000), written by Suzan Lori-Parks. In order to analyse the African American female characters of the play, this thesis concentrates on theories of feminism, black feminism and intersectionality, resistance and how the Brechtian theatre form applied in Parks’s writing establishes the identities of the characters. Since the notion of motherhood is strong in the characters displayed in the text, this study also addresses the ways in which African American motherhood provokes the constructions of African American female identities and is linked to experiences of intersectionality. The aim is to study how these forms of acting and performing in the play are truly acts of resistance to fight against the oppression that African American women suffer from. The thesis question is: How is the African American female identity constructed in the play and how does Fucking A display strategies of oppression and resistance?
The concerns of feminist theories such as intersectionality and black feminism need to be explained in order to answer the thesis question. The version of African American feminine identity that Parks introduces in Fucking A can be discussed and analysed through these theories. The women of the play negotiate the idea of the motherhood, sexualization, and the position the women are put into by men. The means of oppression and oppressive relationships and motherhood are the focus points in the analysis of the play. The act of abortion and related
female attitudes can be analysed in this thesis by linking them to the idea of resistance and motherhood. Female resistance against the patriarchy shows itself in different forms, but the form of theatre is a particularly notable one. Since Fucking A is a play, it is important to study theatrical theories, most notably in this study those of the theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht, as they function as tools in the process of introducing different versions of African American female identities. In this study, the Brechtian form of theatre is analysed as a tool of strategy to fight against oppression and oppressive relationships.
This study addresses the female identities of the characters and how they suffer from oppression due to their gender. The word “female” is used to describe the female personas of the play who fulfil the aspects of femininity such as a feminine name and feminine appearance and condition as well as motherhood as described by the author. The term motherhood is used in this context to describe the feminine role of a parent. The female experience is then described to be experiences of those who can be identified as females.
The aim of this thesis is to explore the representation of the characters in Fucking A, and how their representation tries to redefine and show resistance of African American women through black feminist theories and theories of motherhood. The terms “black” and “African American” are used in this thesis when presenting the female identities of the play. The identities of black women in the United States have been studied by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, who concentrates on the black feminism, and Kimberly Nichele Brown, who concentrates on the portrayal of African American women in literature. Due to historical events and the position African Americans have in the United States, as well as the position of women in terms of equality, the texts written by and about African American women must be analysed
within the context of black feminism and intersectionality, including the black experience in the analysis. This is something that has even been criticised by Ntozake Shange, who was asked
“about whether or not she wrote from experience” (Brown, 5). Shange answered by saying that
“Can’t a black person have an imagination?” (Brown, 5). Brown continues to state that Upon further analysis, I see the audience member’s comment as mirroring white mainstream’s imagination and its impression of blackness as somehow more authentic, more real than the experience of whiteness— delineated as inhibited, rigid, sterile. With such an expectation, black imagination is virtually unthinkable or perhaps deemed unnecessary when, supposedly, the real-life experience of blacks already provides such fertile material for writing. (Brown, 6)
This idea of the white mainstream’s imagination must be taken in consideration. This study is based on the theories of black feminism and intersectionality and on how the women are portrayed in literature. However, as the author of the study, I must consider myself as a white woman, writing about the perceptions of black women in literature. The importance of the author’s ethnicity and history makes Fucking A as well a unique piece of literature. Parks herself is an African American, which is significant when analysing the play. In this study the play is analysed and read as an allegory of African American female experience. The term, allegory, is defined and declared to exist in the Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Literature as follows: “[i]n literature, the description or illustration of one thing in terms of another, or the personification of abstract ideas. The term is also used for a work of poetry or prose in the form of an extended metaphor or parable that makes use of symbolic fictional characters” (127). Following this
description of allegory, in this thesis, the characters of the play are considered as personifications of African American women.
Feminist theory, intersectionality, and black feminism will be used to address the perception of women in history and in literature. This study is constructed as follows: firstly, the material of the thesis and the playwright are introduced. Secondly, the theoretical perspective is introduced. The introduction of the theoretical framework starts with feminist theory, which is the basis of the theories used in this study. The theoretical part continues with the introduction of intersectionality, black feminism, and the theory of resistance. The theoretical part will end with the theory of resistance in Brechtian theatre.
Lastly, the analytic part, Chapter 3, analyses the material by means of the theories introduced in Chapter 2. The analysis focuses on the strategies of oppression and resistance in the play, providing insight into the key question of this study – what are the women’s tools for strategies of oppression and resistance in Fucking A? The fourth chapter of this study provides a conclusion. The aim of the conclusion is to answer the research question and acknowledge the issues of the study and introduce possible further research topics.
1.2. Suzan-Lori Parks as a Playwright
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright who is well-known for her exploration of African American identities in her plays. In Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks, Jennifer Larson underlines the importance of the celebrated writer James Baldwin for Parks. Baldwin’s novels
also tackle the subject of African American identity, and he was one of the key figures who pushed Parks towards becoming a playwright. (Larson, 1) Parks’ first play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom started her journey of becoming one of the major African American writers, when it won the Award for Best New American Play (Larson, 1-2). After the award-winning play, she has published works that have been staged around the United States, such as The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, Venus, In the Blood, Topdog/Underdog and Fucking A, which is included in The Red Letter Plays alongside the play In the Blood. One of the reasons for considering Parks as one of today’s key writers of African American literature is the Pulitzer Prize for drama, which she won for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002 as a first African American (Larson, 2).
Parks’s signature style of using history or other literary works in her texts can be seen especially in Fucking A, where she draws on the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
According to Larson, “Parks’ texts represent this tumultuous relationship by revisiting, or, more accurately, by revising some of the most famous texts and contexts in our culture and history”
(Larson, 3). Parks uses this style in order to underline the relationship of history and identity that “remain ever entwined, haunting each other while seeking to redeem both the other and itself” (Larson, 3). Her use of older texts as the basis of her work can be considered as this praising of the past and its importance, and its relation and significance to the time when composing Fucking A. Parks does not simply compliment the past or educate her readers of the history’s obscurities, but her work can be a critique towards it as well. It is a critique of the past and the darkness of it, criticising how the black community and African American women have been portrayed and acknowledged in society.
History and identity go hand in hand, but they evolve in Parks’ works so “that we see these works again with more modern, more critical eyes – eyes that see beyond the surface of the work to the contexts that inform its creation” (Larson, 3). In the play discussed in this thesis, we can see the importance of identity in her work, the way it challenges and, in a way, gives a solution providing sight of African American feminine identity. The identity in question draws its form and existence from history that includes some even violent processes such as slavery and racism. These ideas of history, historical events participating in the shaping of African American feminine identity are the basis of this thesis.
1.3. Material and Earlier Studies
Fucking A (2000) takes place in “an otherworldly” world. It is not clear whether these characters are placed in the future or in the past and it is also unclear where in history the storyline is placed. The ethnicity of the characters is never truly pronounced, but as the author is an African American herself and due to correlation in oppressive relationships that draw from history, the characters can be considered as African American. In this thesis, the play is read as an allegory of the African American experience.
The play is violent, brutal, and even disturbing. Hester, the main character of Fucking A, is an abortionist, with the letter A scarred on her chest, as also in The Scarlet Letter. Her aim is to free from prison her son Boy, whom she has not seen in 20 years. Her frustration for not having her son with her produces a great hatred for First Lady, the wife of the Mayor, who
“ratted out” her son. This hatred carries on throughout the whole play, even when she is finally reunited with her son. This complicated, harmful, naïve, and even dishonest relationship between the mother and the long-lost son is accompanied with a difficult love triangle between Hester’s friend Canary Mary, Mayor, and First Lady. Whereas Hester is suffering deeply for being a mother who is physically unable to mother her son, First Lady suffers from childlessness. Her burden is to be married to Mayor and be reminded for not being a mother, while Canary Mary is openly having an affair with her husband. The search for motherhood can be considered as one of the main themes of this play.
According to Rena Fraden’s study “Suzan-Lori Parks' Hester Plays: In the Blood and Fucking A,” Parks’s work is always inflected by racial history in the United States (Fraden, 434). Fraden compares two Hesters, that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and that of Hester of Fucking A. Both characters, according to Fraden, are possessed by their past, which creates a link between African Americanness in general and Parks’s work. Fraden continues to argue that this African Americanness makes Parks
an outsider to the playgoing world of the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, contrasts with a modernism that allows her to channel all of her literary ancestors – black and white – so that she can insert herself into literary tradition as a cultural insider.
(Fraden, 435)
The possession of the past that Fraden discusses reveals the black experience of African Americanness, maintaining the history of slavery and oppression within the characters and Parks’s construction of the characters such as Hester. The oppression of today is the burden of African American history that continues to possess the characters. Intersectionality, the concept
of multiple oppression of black women in the United States, is discussed by Mehdi Ghasemi in his paper “The Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks” that studies the characters in the context of socio- cultural and historical elements, comparing the two Hesters – the black Hester, which is Hester of Fucking A, and the white Hester from The Scarlet Letter. Ghasemi compares the narratives of the two characters and associates them with the history of slavery and African American experience. He compares the two as follows:
Compared to the white Hester, the black Hester as a social outcast is under even harsher oppression. For example, by the end of the novel, the white, educated Hester is treated as a saint and survives with dignity, and her daughter Pearl prospers. They are warmly embraced by society and play a key role in giving comfort to other women in trouble. The black illiterate Hester, in contrast, due to race, class and gender prejudices, experiences a tragic denouement and is forced to slit the throat of her child. Thus, Parks highlights the continued existence of the malestream and shows its greater pernicious effects on African American women. (Ghasemi, 132)
Ghasemi’s description of the white Hester displays the white supremacy and the embracing of society for the whites. In comparison, the black Hester carries the burden of African American history, being oppressed because of her race, class and gender. Parks wanted to display the inequality between women in the United States, and how the things do not fall into same places for the two Hesters. The importance of historical elements makes Fucking A a play that represents the oppression of black women in the United States in comparison to the whites.
Ghasemi analyses the letter A to be a sort of symbol of time and how inequality, as a branded A, has not changed through time. It has not healed:
Parks seems to suggest that the letter A always exists, but its forms differ. As Hester says in the play: “The A looks so fresh, like they branded me just yesterday” (F, 125). Her observation indicates that oppression and injustice, exploitation and sexploitation, abduction and abjection have not ceased, but they have merely been transformed through the passage of time. In other words, Parks’s revision of Hawthorne’s theme shows that even the passage of time has not healed the sorrows of oppressed members of society, reasserting the agonies of African American women whose daily lives are marked by experiences of inequality. (Ghasemi, 131)
The African American women continue to live as the oppressed in the present – the A as a symbol of oppression and inequality has not vanished. In a way, the black Hester exists, as a female binary to the white Hester, who achieves to live by the white transcendence. Ghasemi continues to argue that the play represents intersectionality and displays the consequences of that oppression.
Fucking A represents an equation, consisting of some intersectional variables such as race, class and gender, which work together to position African American women at the bottom of social hierarchy. Poverty and illiteracy, rape and oppression, alienation and objectification are some of the vicious results of this intersectionality. (Ghasemi, 162) Ghasemi argues the behaviour of the characters and the acts of violence they suffer from to be results of intersectionality. The ways in which this study analyses these displays and strategies
of oppression is through the theories of intersectionality and black feminism. The aim is to display how the Brechtian theatre form, the drama of the play are strategies of resistance, to battle the oppression that remains a burden of the past.
The Brechtian theatre form and its impact in Fucking A is also discussed in Fraden’s analysis. Fraden does not go deep with the analysis of dramatics but mentions it to be a different convention than a novel (Fraden, 446). She argues that the characters are transparent through the “pauses and spells” and “They move generally in an allegorical, Brechtian direction, in which characters speak directly to the audience, revealing everything necessary for our understanding.” (Fraden, 446) In this thesis, the conventions of Brechtian theatre are analysed further, as they reveal the alienating impact of the theatre form and function as means to display the resistance of the female characters.
2. Theoretical Perspectives
The objective of this chapter is to present and discuss the theories used in the analysis of this thesis. First, feminist theory is presented and discussed in order to demonstrate the feminist ideology in literature and to indicate the basis for black feminism and intersectionality. The chapter continues to present the black feminism and its origins and characteristics, linking it with intersectionality, which is an analytical point of view in the analysis of this thesis.
Continuing on the basis of the ideas of black feminism and intersectionality, the chapter presents black motherhood and the black family structure. These structural elements of a black family and conventions of motherhood are discussed and presented in order to understand the characters and their societal positions of the play analysed. The chapter continues to associate these theories with literary elements and theatre, continuing to present the Brechtian theatre form, in order to display the evidence of this specific form of drama being a tool to display resistance.
2.1. Feminist Theory
At first, we must define feminism. It is not a simple task to define such an “ism,” as the idea of equality has changed drastically in the last decade and it seems that literature in this context ages quite quickly. Feminism has developed within the societies that have gone and are going through changes. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, feminism is “the belief that
women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state.” This statement indicates that feminism thrives for women to be treated the same way than men. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s (SEP) entry “Feminist Philosophy” introduces Feminism as follows:
As this entry describes, feminism is both an intellectual commitment and a political movement that seeks justice for women and the end of sexism in all forms. Motivated by the quest for social justice, feminist inquiry provides a wide range of perspectives on social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena. (McAfee, 1)
Feminism is then not only an “intellectual commitment” but a politically significant ideology that fights for the rights of women and aim for ceasing sexism. Dahlia Moore in Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Changing Women, Changing Society sees feminism as a worldview that is
originally developed from general liberal ideologies, emphasizes advancing women’s status in all domains of society that influence the relationships between men and women:
the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. It now includes diverse theories, beliefs, ideologies and movements that focus on different aspects of status, and varied routes to attain the goal of improving women’s circumstances. (Moore, 85)
Following these definitions, we can assume that the objective of feminism is the equality of sexes. The equality of men and women has transformed within time and it still continues to do so. In order to recognize and fully understand the whole history and understanding of women’s
rights and feminism one could go all the way back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and how the first human societies functioned, but in this thesis, I will mainly concentrate on what happened after the French Revolution, which has had a considerable impact on the Western world’s feminism.
2.1.1. Historical Perspectives
The inequality of the sexes had been present and involved in discussions for a long time before the French Revolution, but the revolution inspired many female writers about the feminine experience and the inequalities between women and men in the modern Western World. Since the revolution in 1789, women’s voices were raised in a concrete manner when the Revolutionaries demanded the right for women to vote and to have posts in the Republic (Osborne, 9). During the Revolution, women fought with the men, as equals, but did not hold equal rights as citizens (Osborne, 10-11). These historical events inspired female writers and women to demand equal rights for women, developing modern feminism.
Osborne states in Feminism: The Pocket Essential Guide (2001) that the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft alongside Olympe de Gouges, a French political activist and author of Declaration of the Rights of Women (1971) “found herself deeply frustrated by the revolutionaries’ neglect of women’s rights” (Osborne, 11). In the first edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft explores the relationships of men and women
and the differences of education of these two sexes. Wollstonecraft discusses the idea of love and the love of a woman.
Yet, if love be the supreme good, let women be only educated to inspire it, and let every charm be polished to intoxicate the senses; but, if they are moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent; and let love to man be only part of that glowing flame of universal love, which, encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God.
(Wollstonecraft, 146)
According to her, a woman's attribution in life, or an objective should not solely be about love - but about a chance to have a choice. According to her, women should have a choice in the matter of their educational purposes, and what they wish to be in life – if it is educating oneself, let one have a choice in the matter. This is one of the greatest and most powerful messages of modern feminism - equal right to have a choice.
The profile of women in societies throughout time has evolved due to changes in women’s rights to vote, to work, to participate actively in societies. According to Moore in Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Changing Women, Changing Society, feminism
is not uniform across societies, and the changes it has brought varies from one society to another, according to the existing culture in each society: from laws prohibiting gender discrimination to greater economic power for women; from changes in social norms in order to prevent sexual harassment to a growing acceptance of sexual preferences; and from a growing sharing of parenting roles to increased visibility of women in the public sphere. (Moore, 85)
It is possible to consider that the different changes and focal points of women form the idea of women’s roles in societies. Each population, country, and society experience different cycles of historical events or societal changes at a different time, which makes women’s roles in societies vary quite a lot. Developing countries for instance might be experiencing a different phase or a change in terms of feminism and women’s empowerment, as it comes to Western countries. Moore argues that “Some ideologies focus on equality, others on empowerment, and yet others on offering an alternative view of reality to the hegemonic (male) view” (Moore, 86).
Feminism itself as well has not been uniform throughout time – the “world view” itself has had various phases that we call waves.
The waves of Feminism are often referred to as the “Three Waves of Feminism”
(Moore, 87). These three waves occurred at a different time and focused on different feminist issues and objectives, based on the issues for the time being. In the eighteenth century, ideas and dreams of equal rights and empowerment occurred, and the First Wave of Feminism can be considered to have begun. The wave ended during the time of World War I (Moore, 87). The second wave occurred much later, but great changes took place especially during World War II, as Moore explains in the following paragraph.
During World War II, when men were away from their jobs, women took their places in offices, production lines, and agricultural work. Their accomplishments indicated that they are fully capable of participating in the world of work, and able to take care of themselves and society. However, when the war ended and men came back home, women had to vacate their jobs and return to their traditional family roles. (Moore, 88)
The acknowledgement of women’s capability left a mark. The freedom women experienced during the war did not go undone as women started to demand equal rights again.
The Second Wave of feminism occurred in the 1960s when liberalism grew in the United States (Moore, 91). In Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Changing Women, Changing Society Moore describes the conditions of the naissance of this third way were happening in this certain atmosphere of change: “The atmosphere of transformation created optimal conditions for the reawakening of feminist ideals and movements, but it also changed the thinking of women about themselves, their goals, and the ways to attain these goals” (Moore, 91). The Second Wave gave birth to more institutionalised Feminism, as organisations such as the National Organization of Women was formed (Moore, 91).
The Third Wave of Feminism occurred in the 1990s – the Second Wave was very powerful and expanded the idea of women’s rights, needs and power, which gave Third Wave even more space to expand itself. Feminism does change within its time - what is important and what should women fight against or fight for. Moore continues to argue that “Supporters of third wave feminism are mainly “Women of Colour,” a broad category that includes all non- white women, for whom race is an added source of oppression” (Moore, 96). Third Wave Feminism started to bring out the questions of race as well. Women were in a way, very divided as well.
One might ask: how did the African American women in literature succeed in having their voice heard? Did they create possibilities for African American women as writers in the future?
The biggest impacts must have been the Civil Rights movement, as Trimiko Melancon argues in Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation: “The
civil rights movement, with its focus on renegotiating the marginalized and segregated social space which African Americans had been consigned, centred itself around ending social segregation, as well as the political and economic disfranchisement of blacks” (Melancon, 27).
He continues to claim that the civil rights movement “[m]ade space for African American women to move forward in their quest for equality and liberation from American social justice”
(Melancon, 27).
Feminism can be divided into three different waves or, as some scholars suggest, into four waves. In order to understand the idea of intersectionality, which was born during this third wave, it is relevant to understand the concept of third wave feminism.
2.1.2. Third Wave Feminism and Black Feminism
Third wave feminism is not a critique or a direct expansion of the second wave, but it seems to take the feminist idea a bit further. Lise Shapiro Sanders in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration defines the third wave as “a movement that contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of pleasure, danger and defining power of those structures” (Gillis, et al. 11). The third wave might then be considered to notice other structures of feminism and female oppression in addition to the critique of politics. Third wave feminism is concerned with “wage discrimination, access to education, and domestic violence to eating disorders, globalization, and the effects of racism” (Gillis, et al. 50-51). The effects of racism as some of the concerns
of feminists can be discussed and analysed in more detail when exploring the idea of black feminism. As the aim of this thesis is to explore the African American female identity, it is crucial to include the theory of black feminism in it.
The African American experience is different in comparison to white Americans due to the history of slavery and oppression, and this is relevant and visible in the African American literature as well – it has changed and evolved through time. African American experience in the literature took a big step forward during the famous Harlem Renaissance in the early 1920s.
In From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. explore the African American literature culture and its development. They state that the movement that is also called the Harlem Renaissance
was essentially a part of the growing interest of American literary circles in the immediate pressing social and economic problems facing the country. This increasing interest coincided with two developments in African American life that fostered the growth of the New Negro Movement. The migration that had begun during the war had thrown the destiny of blacks into their own hands more than ever before. (Franklin and Moss, 402)
This movement involved African Americans to exhibit their history and experience of America as blacks within their writings. The African American experience became a visible topic for African Americans, which is what Suzan Lori Parks is portraying in her literary works. African American identity is based on its own cultural legacy and is considered a different legacy than the white American experience. Franklin and Moss continue,
If black writers accepted this separateness, it was not so much because they wanted to be what others wanted them to be, that is, a distinct and even exotic group in the eyes of the more patronizing whites. Rather, it was because their experiences had given them some appreciation of their own distinct cultural heritage and traditions. The plantations, the slave quarters, the proscriptions even in freedom, the lynchings and riots, and the segregation and discrimination had created a body of common experiences that in turn helped to promote the idea of a distinct and authentic cultural community. (Franklin and Moss, 403)
The common experience creates a community, forming and developing the African American identity. The African American feminine identity can be traced to this idea of common experience as an African American, but femininity, being a woman, forms a different “common experience” than the general African American experience.
African American experience as a woman relies on considerably around the audacity of sexuality of black women which is considered different to white women, as Patricia Hill Collins argues in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Hill Collins, 129). The idea of heterosexism positions African American women in a sexually oppressive position in the society. According to Hill Collins, heterosexuality is seen as normalised within the white men and women, but it is not the same with the blacks. As she writes: “Within assumptions of normalized heterosexuality, regardless of individual behavior, being White marks the normal category of heterosexuality. In contrast, being Black signals the wild, out-of-control hyperheterosexuality of excessive sexual appetite”
(Collins, 129). Blacks are seen as hyperhetereosexual, assisting on the excessive sexual
appetite. This sexualisation leads white and black into sexual binaries. Installing this idea into black women’s sexuality, black women’s bodies become “commodified” (Collins, 131), taking the control of one’s body away. Hill Collins continues to argue that the racial segregation has regulated the black women’s sexuality, differing them from the white women. This division of women into different sexual categories supports the system of oppression and binaries. Hill Collins writes about the difference of white and black female sexuality as follows.
Regulating Black women’s sexuality also constituted a part of gender oppression.
Dividing women into two categories—the asexual, moral women to be protected by marriage and their sexual, immoral counterparts—served as a gender template for constructing ideas about masculinity and femininity. The major archetypal symbols of women in Western thought construct women’s sexuality via a tightly interwoven series of binaries. Collectively, these binaries create a sexual hierarchy with approved sexual expression installed at the top and forbidden sexualities relegated to the bottom.
Assumptions of normal and deviant sexuality work to label women as good girls or bad girls, resulting in two categories of female sexuality. Virgins are the women who remain celibate before marriage, and who gain license to engage in heterosexual sexual practices after marriage. In contrast, whores are the unmarried women who are willingly
“screwed.” Whether a woman is an actual virgin or not is of lesser concern than whether she can socially construct herself as a “good” girl within this logic. Racializing this gender ideology by assigning all Black women, regardless of actual behavior, to the category of
“bad” girls simplifies the management of this system. (Hill Collins, 134)
According to Hill Collins, black women and in this case African American women are placed in the category of the highly sexual, unmarried “whores” (Hill Collins, 134). The sexualisation of black women brings a difference into the intersectionality in comparison to white women.
Black women are not simply oppressed by their gender, race or class, but they suffer the presumptions of sexualisation, name-calling and “bad girl” reputation, taking the control out of their hands in terms of their own bodies and sexuality. These two types – “bad” and “good” girl roles – are also represented in Fucking A through the contrasted characters of First Lady and Hester or Canary.
This study explores the portrayals of African American female identities in a theatre play.
Hill Collins has written with Sirma Bilge in Intersectionality about the concept of intersectionality and how it is considered an analytic tool, used in this thesis study as well.
Intersectionality, as a tool to work towards the analysis of the identities in the play, can be concerned as a “[...] theory of identity” (Collins and Bilge, 115). According to Collins, scholars and academics have used intersectionality “as an analytic tool to create more expansive understandings of individual and collective identities” (Collins and Bilge, 114). But what is intersectionality, and how does it differ as a theory from black feminism?
2.1.3. Intersectionality
Black feminism tries to draw attention to the treatment and rights of women from other ethnicities than solely white women. This is where lies the basis of intersectionality, which was
born within the black feminism. According to the feminist theorist Anna Carastathis’s Intersectionality: Origins, Constellations, Horizons,
Intersectionality originates in social movement discourses that identified the manifold manifestations of oppression, discrimination, and violence that structure the conditions in which women of colour live in the United States, Britain, and other white settler and imperial states. (Carastathis, 16)
This acknowledgement of the imperial states pinpoints the African American women as victims of intersectionality, as they are black and living in a white settler country, the United States.
That is what makes the characters of Fucking A victims and acknowledged as women oppressed and victims of intersectionality. Settler state people and the colonized, especially women, form a binary, and means that the construction of their identities is based on different status and level of living, putting the colonized women in an even more oppressive position. Even though the story takes place in another world, the analysis part will show that the characters portray African American women, which corresponds to Carastathis’s argument of the settler/imperial state being the oppressor.
According to the American academic Patricia Hill Collins, “people use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others around them face,” and in order to face social structure issues such as “race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age that operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together” (Hill Collins, 3-5). The acknowledgement of these different components that form an individual as someone oppressed is important when reading Parks. The idea of black women being oppressed in the ways of racism and sexism is an analytical point of view one should have when exploring
the works of African American female writers, such as Suzan-Lori Parks. According to Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge in Intersectionality, intersectionality “emerged as an analytic tool”
as an answer to challenges that black women in the United States faced, or still face. These challenges involved many movements that took place in the USA in 1960s and 1970s. As Collins writes,
[...] African-American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs simply fell through the cracks of anti-racist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and action above others, for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within feminism or class within the union movement. Because African American women were simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. (Hill Collins, 3)
Intersectionality gives black women a tool, something to work with and something to be acknowledged of – inequalities, that are not simple and balanced. These different categories are put under this one tool of analysis.
The idea of feminism being an ideology that tries to solve issues such as racism and sexism brings the idea of resistance into the analysis. The oppression that black women suffer is a combination of different aspects that build one’s identity, such as gender, race and for instance social class, which will be as well focused on this study of Fucking A. When looking at it with the perspective of resistance, it is possible to consider that black women find resistance
in battling the idea of intersectionality. Later on, in this study, resistance will be defined and analysed within the context and characters of Fucking A.
In Fucking A, the main character Hester is portrayed as a black woman, but also as a mother. The importance of this mothering experience is a significant factor in the formation of these African American identities in the play. Having defined intersectionality and black feminism through the African American experience, this study continues to present the uniqueness of black motherhood and black family structure within the context of intersectionality.
2.2 Black Motherhood and Family Structure
Black motherhood and black family structure are essential features for the construction of a black woman’s identity. In order to understand black women’s identities and the ways they are oppressed; these notions must be analysed as they position the women’s status in the society.
In Black Motherhood(s), Karen T. Craddock tackles the idea of African American women and their position in societies in the United States. She describes the identity of these African American women as follows:
The marginalization of Black women within society reflects their membership in groups that are perceived as having less worth and are construed as being lower in status. As with all social groups, social views and discourse have an impact on Black women, and how she derives meaning about herself has implications for overall health. Black women
contend with this ongoing tension and related issues of psycho-emotional health in a society that has harshly denigrated their immutable characteristics, constructing them as inferior. (Craddock, 36)
The inferiority constructed around the identity of a Black woman in the United States has an emotional impact on the construction of a woman’s identity. This impact reflects on motherhood as well - how is motherhood constructed and how is it performed? But what is
“motherhood”?
In this study, the term motherhood signifies the role of a person who identifies as a female guardian to a child. The term still must be explained further and detailed in a manner that is more adequate to the African American culture and heritage. Motherhood is a feminine experience, involving giving birth and/or raising a child, taking the role of a mother.
Motherhood, especially in the African culture, has a strong meaning and an effect on one’s identity. Motherhood is both a term and an institution. Karen T. Craddock explains how black mothers, including herself, “encounter and confront barriers of race and gender-based hegemony that are intertwined with strongholds around notions of motherhood” (Craddock, 1).
Intersectionality, women facing oppression through the assimilation of gender, race, social class and so on, co-exists with this idea of motherhood. In The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature it is stated that
The arguments that are made for motherhood in the African texts are based not on motherhood as a patriarchal institution but motherhood as an experience (“mothering”) with its pains and rewards. Consequently, motherhood is discussed in relative terms that
reflect different personal histories. As it were, the African texts give a human face to motherhood. (Nnaemeka, 5)
According to this idea of giving face to the mothering, motherhood is an experience that does not simply involve only women, but it is seen as an act of taking care of, mothering, that is not built on patriarchal ideas of women being solely the subject of these mothering acts. Can mothering exist in a masculine culture, if women and men can be discussed to be binaries to each other? In the same essay, it is argued that there exists a
Adrienne Rich’s path-breaking book, Of Woman Born, [that] made an interesting distinction between motherhood as an institution and motherhood as experience, arguing that patriarchy constructs the institution of motherhood while women experience it.
(Nnaemeka, 5)
Here it is suggested that motherhood is based on the idea that patriarchy makes this institution real, and women make the eventual act of mothering, concretizing and performing it.
Motherhood, in this context of a theatre play, can be considered to be a performance – being a mother is a part of the character’s portrayal and how it is performed.
It is significantly important to acknowledge the difference or a slight difference of meaning of motherhood in western countries and in African culture. When researching the significance of African American mothering, the studies frequently refer to the African motherhood. In order to understand the possible binary of African American and Western motherhood, we must analyse the African motherhood and its impact on African American motherhood experience. According to Ifi Amadiume in Male Daughters, Female Husbands
maternity is viewed as sacred in the traditions of all African societies. And in all of them, the earth’s fertility is traditionally linked to women’s maternal powers. Hence the centrality of women as producers and providers, the reverence in which they are held.
(Larrier, 194)
African women have a unique cultural history and are in one sense, raised to be and believe to the idea of motherhood. The importance of mothering in African societies can be viewed as something glorious, even sacred and holy as Amadiume puts it (Larrier, 193). On one hand, African Americans are living a different reality than women in communities in African countries, but on the other hand the cultural heritage of African Americans comes from the cultural traditions and acknowledgements that take place in African countries. When analysing the motherhood of African Americans, the African experience of motherhood has an impact on the identities constructed by African Americans. The importance of motherhood plays a big role in Fucking A, and it forms these female identities in the play. When looking at the African ideology of motherhood, it is relevant to consider the notion of black motherhood that Karen T.
Craddock tackles in Black Motherhood(s).
Black motherhood is not simply a caring relationship, a feminist experience but a complicated portrayal of an African American woman whose identity greatly depends on it. To quote Collins,
For any given historical moment, the particular form that Black women’s relationships with one another, children, community, and self actually take depends on how this dialectical relationship between the severity of oppression facing African-American women and our actions in resisting that oppression is expressed. (Hill Collins, 177)
As Patricia Hill Collins explains, the African American motherhood or the specific form of a black woman’s any family relationship is constructed by the oppression and the dialogue it constructs and the expressions of it. According to Hill Collins, black motherhood does not simply provide different status or positions outside the family, but it provides oppression within families as well (Hill Collins, 176). To quote Hill Collins,
In the context of a sexual politics that aims to control Black women’s sexuality and fertility, African American women struggle to be good mothers. In contrast, motherhood can serve as a site where Black women express and learn the power of self-definition, the importance of valuing and respecting ourselves, the necessity of self-reliance and independence, and a belief in Black women’s empowerment. These tensions foster a continuum of responses. Some women view motherhood as a truly burdensome condition that stifles their creativity, exploits their labour, and makes them partners in their own oppression. Others see motherhood as providing a base for self-actualization, status in the Black community, and a catalyst for social activism. These alleged contradictions can exist side by side in African American communities and families and even within individual women. (Hill Collins, 176)
Motherhood can be a mean of oppression and dependence, but it can also be an empowering position for a black woman. These both forms of motherhood and mothering or the need of it are also seen in Fucking A. The burden of motherhood is not simple due to the burden of history and the position that mothering puts the woman into. Motherhood might also be a tool of oppression, not only a tool for empowerment and freedom. In order to understand the meaningfulness of the search for motherhood and how motherhood is used as a tool of
oppression in the play, it is relevant to combine these theories of feminism into the art of drama.
Intersectionality and black motherhood show the presence of oppression in the play, but the form of the literary text also displays the strategies of resistance and oppression within itself.
2.3. Black Feminism, Literature, and Theatre
This chapter begins with a discussion of black feminism and its relation to theatre as an art form, drawing a connection to the art of theatre as a tool to pronounce black feminist thoughts.
The chapter then moves on to analyse power and patriarchy, in order to understand the black feminist need for resistance. The notion of power is analysed through Foucault’s theory of power, and the concept and the meaning of the term patriarchy as it is explained in the feminist study by Kate Millett. Lastly, the concept of resistance literature is explored in order to demonstrate the tools of resistance that literary works may use to emphasize African American and/or black feminist ideologies.
2.3.1. Black Feminism and Theatre
Like all art, theatre can serve as a window into the life-world of a specific time and place, providing a glimpse of a culture’s value systems, underlying ideologies, and understandings of human nature and the human condition. Yet theatre differs from other
art forms in that it is dialogic in structure – the very form of theatre requires interaction between and among human beings. (Morgan, 4)
This is how Margot Morgan pronounces the essence of theatre as a form of art in Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe: Imagination and Resistance. The choice of a writer to use the form of a play, forces the human interaction into the play in order to draw the ideologies and “understandings of human condition” (Morgan, 4). The structure of a theatre play forces discussion and creates more than one point of view. Theatre, as a form of art has existed and transformed itself from Ancient Greece to this day, having adapted itself to the geographical positions and cultural transformations within time. Performance has changed, the performers, and of course, the sources of text – including the content and the authors.
The history of women and theatre have been through changes within their own spheres and as one. Mark Frontier argues in Theory/Theatre that “In theatre studies, feminist history uncovers marginal genres, such as domestic melodrama, which focuses on the tribulations of women in the household [...]” (Frontier, 112) and that “Feminist theatre history is also interested in those relatively rare women who have managed to succeed in predominantly male artistic spheres” (Frontier, 113). Frontier then acknowledges the significance of female writing and the point of view that a female writer can show. It is not the same as a male perspective, as women do not experience the world in a similar manner. When analysing Fucking A, the significance of Parks’s voice as a woman in a patriarchal culture, portraying oppressed women, manifests the idea of feminist theatre in more than one way.
When looking at the history of theatre in general, the former days of Athenian theatre in the sixth century can be considered as the starting point of the theatre as we know it today,
especially the Athenian festivals of Dionysus. According to Sue-Ellen Case in Feminism and Theatre, “In the sixth century, both women and men participated in them, but during the fifth century, when the ceremonies were becoming what is known as theatre, women disappeared from the practice” (Case, 7). Case continues that the actual disappearance of women in theatre is not supported by any specific measures and laws by the government – they simply disappeared from the theatre stages, making women silent in terms of performative arts and even society, for a very long time. The desertion of women from the theatre stages reflects the position that women held in the society and in daily life. Society changed, which modified the female and male harmony.
Case states that “[t]he rise of the family unit radically altered the role of women in Greek public life. The family unit was the cause of their removal from public life. The family life became the site for the creation and transmission of personal wealth” (Case, 8). The concept of family and the notion of female being the “creator” and maintainer of the family – while the male held the public image and consumed the public life – became one of the main reasons to withhold women from theatres, something that the societies explore still today. The male/female identities transformed and departed further away from each other as the lives of these two genders were so different. When it comes to the concrete causes of this departing, the notion of ownership is discussed by Case: “[W]hile ownership became more individual and confined to the family unit, it was largely limited to the male gender. The rights of women to own and exchange property were severely restricted” (Case, 8). Whereas the male gender had a right to something the women did not, the gap between these two genders became wider. The absence of women in theatre in the past confirms the importance of women being heard in this
art of performance today. In the present time being, authors such as Suzan Lori Parks are able to articulate African American philosophies and most importantly, to be heard by people.
According to Lisa M. Anderson in Black Feminism and Contemporary Drama, black and feminist theatre exists and has a meaning and place in the sphere of theatre culture. According to her, black feminist theatre “[...] consists of playwrights, directors, performance artists, and scholars who, intentionally or not, blend the core values and aesthetics of black feminism with their art and scholarship” (Anderson, 1). Black women playwrights can be then considered through their race and gender as black feminist playwrights and so on, but the idea of black aesthetics needs to be detailed, and that is what Anderson does. She states: “By ‘aesthetics’ I mean not some objective ‘beauty’ of the text. I mean here the context in which a work is situated, how its construction and production are shaped, and how that shaping is informed by its politics” (Anderson, 2). This sense of black feminist aesthetics must be taken into consideration as dimension in Fucking A if we want to understand how black aesthetics forms and shapes African American female identities and consciousnesses in the play.
Suzan Lori Parks’s play Fucking A presents very clear structures in terms of dramaturgy for possible stage adaptations. It is necessary to consider the history and meaning of African, and especially African American theatre, as this play is a part of this form of theatre. Theatre can be based on experience of individuals, society or a whole population. African American experience differs from American experience, as the population’s history does not carry the same series of events, memories. The Black Arts movement (BAM) that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s (Crawford, 2) celebrated the blackness in the forms of art and affected the
development of the African American forms of art. Margo Natalie Crawford in Black Post- Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics argues that
The BAM has much more in common with twenty-first-century African American literature and visual art than we often realize. The push to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and sheer experimentation in twenty-first-century African American literature and visual art is sometimes framed as a push away from the narrowness of the category “black art,” but it is often a push back to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and experimentation in the BAM. (Crawford, 3-4)
The Black Arts movement’s impact on Parks’ theatrical approach can be recognized in her representation of African American feminine identities. The African American or black theatre must be considered as one specific form of theatre as it follows the influence of Black Arts movement, which Parks portrays in her play Fucking A.
2.3.2. Movement of Resistance
Do women as seekers of justice form a movement of resistance? Female resistance is a response to patriarchy, intersectionality - the oppression. Intersectionality as a term describes the particular form of multiple simultaneous oppression of black women. It is possible to argue that women’s writing, and in this case the female playwriting, is a form of resistance. As women writers did not have a voice until recently, their views are tools of empowerment within a culture filled with male perspectives and voices. The female resistance, and especially African
American female resistance, is an expression of strength and power that fights against the system, oppression directed towards black women. Resistance is then seen as a response to oppression and intersectionality, challenging it. Patriarchy, a term relevant to this study, is explained in the Historical Dictionary of Feminism as follows:
The rule by men as a group over women. The Latin pater refers to social rule of father, not to the biological father, so that a father may be a celibate man (as in the Roman Catholic priesthood). Patriarchal societies exclude women from the exercise of citizens’
political responsibilities, although some may have titular women (e.g., Queen Victoria).
Patriarchal societies are hierarchal in that, at a minimum, they are a two-class society. A critique of patriarchy is at the root of most feminist political theory. Although there is disagreement among feminists concerning the universality of patriarchy, the term provides a common understanding of the subordinate role of women and male dominance. (Boles and Hoeveler, 253; emphasis original)
The distribution of power positions men in a dominant status, as oppressors of women. As discussed in the section addressing intersectionality, black women are oppressed by not only their gender but their race and class – patriarchy enables the disposition of intersectionality.
Patriarchy exists and enables the uneven, unequal usage of power and oppression.
In Sexual Politics Kate Millett argues that the patriarchal government falls into different categories when it is put into practice – these include ideological, biological, sociological, class, economic and educational, force, anthropological and psychological factors (Millett, 26-58).
Patriarchal power, given to men at birth, is considered to have a family as its “chief institution”
(Millett, 33). Millett continues to argue that “Traditionally, patriarchy granted to the father
nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and sale” (Millett, 33). The power of dominance and ownership by male individuals is then a practise of patriarchy. Women can be considered as objects through this idea of male ownership granted by patriarchy.
Theorist Michel Foucault has written about power in his studies. Foucault’s notion of power is relevant to resistance: resistance tries to resist power that is held by men and in so doing offer other forms and options for power or to the distribution of power. Foucault presents six hypotheses that involve the importance of resistance and its position in regards of power.
He argues:
(i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network; (ii) that relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a conditioning and a conditioned role; (iii) that these relations don't take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organised into a more- or-less coherent and unitary strategic form; that dispersed, heteromorphous, localised procedures of power are adapated, re-inforced and transformed by these global strategies, all this being accompanied by numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement and resistance; hence one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with 'dominators' on one side and 'dominated' on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of integration into overall strategies. (Foucault, 142)
As Foucault claims above, power exists in the “social body,” and in relations such as sexuality, family, and production that are not simply binaries and dominated in terms of hierarchy and power relations. Power is a diverse production of relations that display domination and that is possibly affected by different strategies. Foucault finishes with two hypotheses illustrating the disposition of resistance in terms of power, stating
(v) that power relations do indeed 'serve', but not at all because they are 'in the service of' an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies. (Foucault, 142)
Foucault continues to state that resistance exists where power exists, as they complement, coexist with each other and are indeed, in need for each other. Resistance can be found in the same place as power, as resistance needs power to resist and power produces itself and strengthens itself from resistance.
The feminist ideology of equality is an objective for black women’s resistance. The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future is a study of patriarchy and the female resistance of it that draws an overview and an idea of the resistance of patriarchy by women. “The fact that we are inherently relational and responsive beings leads us to resist the gender binary and hierarchy that define patriarchal manhood and womanhood, where being
a man means not being a woman and also being on top” (Gillian and Richards, 4). According to Gillian and Richards, humans are naturally drawn to resist binaries that form an unequal hierarchy. This may mean that women are in an obvious position to be resisting men’s power over women. Based on this idea, women are always opposing the patriarchy and gender inequality. Women throughout time have sought justice and acknowledgement for themselves, and this search can be seen as a form of resistance – women are and have been resisting the oppression and inequalities.
The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future studies the roots of slavery in the United States and points out the relatedness of slavery, feminism and patriarchy and what they mean while co-existing. As its authors write,
The view of patriarchy as at the root of slavery and racism is hardly novel, as the abolitionist feminists make clear. Yet patriarchal assumptions proved so powerful that the anti-patriarchal core of the abolitionist feminist movement was marginalized with the Reconstruction Amendments that emancipated black men and women from slavery but emancipated black women into patriarchy. (Gillian and Richards, 227)
According to Gillian and Richards, the certitude that black women were forced through political reconstructions into patriarchy, proves the oppression and the existence of patriarchy within black communities in the United States. The position of a black woman in the United States is and has been notably complicated and painfully repressed. This collective experience of black women has given the reason to resist oppressors, the patriarchy.
African Americans have suffered from slavery and segregation in the history of the United States, and it constructs the present African American identity. The resistance against the oppressive power shows itself in different aspects of the African American experience. In Many Strides to Freedom: African American Women’s Unsung Contributions and Legacies, Janelle Renee Carter-Robinson discusses a book called Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives (2000), edited by Yetman, where real life stories of slaves are told in a very open and harsh way to the effect that while reading the stories, “you can vividly hear their pain as well as applaud their need to survive in a world that seemingly showed them no mercy” (Carter- Robinson, 1). This painful history of the slaves has led to moves of resistance, and the civil rights movement is a great example of that.
As Zhang claims, “The African Americans’ civil rights movement was a long and large- scaled popular social movement staged by African Americans in the early 1940s to seek and exercise their civil rights” (Zhang, 13). The author of In the Origins of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Ai-Min Zhang, describes the Civil Rights movement as a “spontaneous struggle participated in by African Americans and other minorities seeking to end segregation and other forms of discrimination and to secure rights equal to those enjoyed by whites” (Zhang, 11). Zhang states that the beginning of the American legal system of civil rights started from the end of the American Civil War, when the 13th Amendment prohibited slavery, the 14th gave equal protection of laws for all citizens, and the 15th Amendment gave black citizens the right to vote (Zhang, 12). The Civil Right movement struggled against the white dominance that led segregation and slavery in the United States. The impact of this movement has been tremendous
and still affects and exists in the United States, only under different names and forms. The Civil Rights movement gave the African Americans a voice and a feeling of unity.
Zhang calls the Civil Rights movement a struggle. The Civil Rights as a struggle has been a fight for one’s rights, a movement of resistance, trying to resist the inequality of blacks in the United States. African American strategies of resistance exist in other forms as well, such as art and literature. Different works of art and literature can exist as acts of resistance, as can be seen in the characters’ behaviours and identities in Fucking A. This factualisation of art being a form of resistance comes across in Mohamed Enani’s “Resistance—Existential and Linguistic: A Personal Perspective” where he describes the political situation in Egypt in the late 1960s, when one quarter of a million citizens left Egypt. This massive emigration was by some described as a sort of negative resistance (Enani, 18), but art was the opposite.
[a] huge battalion of writers and artists showed how art could be a truly positive form of resistance. Novels, plays, and poems continued to be produced, embodying disenchantment with the carceral society that remained unchanged, in spite of the military defeat. (Enani, 18)
The importance of literature as a form of resistance in society might be seen as positive. Its stories impact of history and characterisations. Literature introduces and is considered as one of the strategies of resistance.
In her review of Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature Mary Layoun draws the conclusion of resistance literature based on Harlow’s analysis as follows
