The Immersion Library

The way home we seek is that condition of man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy. Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality – that is, the fixed manners and values of the few – and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.

In these essays, Ellison wrestles with critics, interviewers, and his own experience in an effort to find meaning in a multi-faceted existence as a black man in America. Because of the astounding level of intellect in his arguments, his refreshingly clear perspective – seemingly unassailable by the manufactured poisons designed to help us ignore rational thought, I find myself frustrated as it all leads to a single, simple conclusion: all people are human. All people have unique experiences influenced by the world around them. The hypocrisy of the American Creed and the engineered stigma of blackness in America influenced Ellison’s experience. Unfortunately, it requires Ellison’s level of excellence to state this fact and, more embarrassingly, for people to believe him.

He ruthlessly defends this assertion against anyone who might inadvertently subvert the truth; those who would practice outright bigotry and an irrational perspective – victims of that manufactured poison – or even so-called allies who reduce the human to a social science, or a literary device, or in any way an “thing”. The black person experiences America as a divorcee from their heritage and confused by an existence where their countrymen praise and pledge allegiance to an ideology that they contradict in practice. As all Americans do, they yearn to forge their own identity rather than imbibe the one that others would press upon them through media, politics, or social structure.

There are, as always, political and economic motives for this rending of values, but in terms of the ethical and psychological, what was opportunistically labeled the ‘Negro problem’ is actually a guilt problem charged with pain. Just how painful might be judged from teh ceaseless effort expended to dull its throbbings with the anesthesia of legend, myth, hypnotic ritual and narcotic modes of thinking. And not only have our popular culture, our newspapers, radio and cinema been devoted to justifying the Negro’s condition and the conflict created thereby, but even our social sciences and serious literature have been conscripted – all in the effort to drown out the persistent voice of outraged conscience.

It saddens me to think that Ellison spent so much time defending his perspective rather than living it – that others constructed his reputation as a black man with things to say about the “Negro problem”. His words about art and literature transcend similar criticism with which I am familiar. He saw himself as an artist – first through music and accidentally and thankfully through literature. The fact that his art expresses the experience of black men is incidental as Ellison was a black man. He exerted his perspective on life in the same way any artist would. But because we have an “American problem” – not a “Negro problem” – he was relegated to defending that experience, like a sacrifice on the altar of American political pontificating.

However, Ellison believed deeply in American democracy. And I think he hated to see it misappropriated. Manipulated and abused. A slander in the mouths of many of her citizens. Any true patriot would see this hypocrisy as a threat to American ideals; any “solve” that would stem from the irrational, that refuses to see that the execution of the American ideal strays far and wide from the identity of it, is patronizing, exhausting, and dehumanizing.

Because it is his life and no mere abstraction in someone’s head. He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until he can change it; must live it as he changes it. He is no mere product of his socio-political predicament. He is a product of the interaction between his racial predicament, his individual will, and the broader American cultural freedom in which he finds his ambiguous existence. Thus he, too, in a limited way, is his own creation.

Ellison’s works are not only important to black life, but to American life. In a world where we can only see Invisible Man as an emblem of the black experience, we fail to see that he is an artistic expression of a particular human experience in a country in which much stigma has been branded to his skin color. A pity that Ellison expended so much effort in explaining this to people.