Funny house of a negro is a representative of the operation of female not in the direct sense but at the both level at the psychological and physical. Funnyhouse highlights the struggle of
Sarah whose black skin evinces a lack
of identity and a lack of social
placement in the dominant society.
She portrays herself onto various
selves who punish and betray her,
leading her to reject Blackness and
femaleness as well, and eventually lead her to
commits suicide. An example of
extreme violence, it exposes the same
conflicts African American women are
still struggling and facing with. For Sarah, a “living
dead” in Balibar´s words, life becomes
“worse than death or more difficult to
live than death itself and her failed
attempt to “fit in” can be considered,
in Bhabha´s terms, another form of
colonized Other. Despite the media
claims that racism is over, we may be
facing a new kind of discrimination.
For most women, […] they would not be so much guilty as
ill. Mutilated, wounded, humiliated, and overwhelmed by a feeling of inferiority that can never be cured. […] Women do
not make laws, even for themselves; that is not in accordance
with their nature. (Irigaray
Contemporary efforts to explain the position of AfricanAmerican women in the USA were built upon the notion of
“double jeopardy” (Beale, 1970). Beale´s idea recognized
that African-American women faced double discrimination
because of their race and sex. […] they lack access to
authority and resources in society and are in structural
opposition with the dominant racial/ethnic group (EuroAmerican) and the t.dominan L
Luce Irigaray points out that women’s
“prehistory”, their history prior to the feminist movement, “implies such a
misprision, such a negation, such a curb on her instincts and primary instinctual
representatives, and therefore such an inhibition, […] as to bode ill for the
history that follows” (111). Consequently, women will remain:
in a state of childish dependence upon a phallic super-ego that looks sternly
and disdainfully on her castrated sex/organ(s). In its cruelty, woman’s superego will favor the proliferation of masochistic fantasies and activities, rather than help build up “cultural” values -which are masculine in any case. .
In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Sarah is inhabited by various selves who punish
and betray her even as they speak her history. She identifies herself, projects her
self, as Freud would say it, onto those other selves; rejecting her own identity.
Following Elin Diamond, the play follows the form of a classical Freudian
dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud states that identification
resembles the conditions of hysterics, enabling patients to suffer on behalf of a
whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play singlehanded. This
tendency to play all parts produces an obvious threat to identity, creating an
indistinction of the “I” and the “s/he”. He goes further in his subsequent studies
stating that the loss of a loved object provokes identification with the
abandoned object, setting itself inside the ego. However, and this is the cruelty
of melancholia, the object, now set up, acts as a critical agency that reproaches
the ego, becoming constitutive of psychic development.
The main character in
Funnyhouse of a Negro is incessantly faced by her conflicting sides, all of them
wishing to become a part of that pyramid top. Following Anlin Cheng, thecharacter’s “melancholic” construction of her ego “provides a provocative
metaphor for how race in America, or more specifically how the act of
racialization, works. While the formation of the American culture, Hers is a struggle to find her place in
society by means of denying her own history.
In the opening scene we see a grotesque imagery that is nightmarish. The
play opens with a woman wandering across the stage as if in a trance, carrying a
bald skull. The play’s structure then begins to unfold, not only as a growth of
images but also as collections of events. The main character, Sarah, is played
simultaneously by different characters who represent various sides of herself,
sometimes saying the same lines, but never in unison, and never in dialogue
where each might hear or understand the other. Sarah’s efforts to achieve
wholeness and identity, and her simultaneous conflict with paranoia, and the
will to self-destruction, ultimately result in a disintegration of her personality.
tSarah’s mind, which is the funnyhouse, the madhouse, from which she cannot
escape the deadly psychic and physical space of its rooms:
The rooms are my rooms; a Hapsburg chamber, a chamber in a Victorian
castle, the hotel where I killed my father, the jungle. These are the places my
selves exist in. Each room represents not only her melancholic search for the perfect
identity, the white one, and her rejection of her African heritage but also, her
oppression within their wall.
Sarah’s struggle is the struggle of all women in a world which not only
mocks and rejects Blackness but femaleness as well. Probably the most powerless group, biracial women, are usually rejected
by both races by virtue of their sex and mixed blood; an already subaltern
condition aggravated by racial animosity. They are often a source of
embarrassment to both sides of their family, because on their white relations
side they are a physical statement which lowers the class status of the family.
To her black relations she is a tangible embodiment of consorting with the
“enemy. As
with most African Americans, Jill Nelson reminds, “light skin is the result of
rape and sexual exploitation during slavery”, and Funny house’s
Sarah is obsessed with her “light” colored female identity. Her inability to
reconcile her divided self is seen in the play through the multiple characters or
personas that are all parts of Sarah’s selfhood. Lee suggests that Kennedy
created Sarah as a mulatto rather than a ‘black’ girl to emphasize Otherness by
taking marginality in Euro-American culture to its extreme. Sarah’s
desire to be assimilated by the dominant culture seems a natural rejection of
being stigmatized by society’s definition of Otherness.
Central in her struggle are her parental figures, which psychically haunt
her. Although Sarah’s mother looked white, “My mother was the light. She was
the lightest one. She looked like a white woman, she was in
fact biracial, and Sarah’s father was ‘black’. This is psychically most disturbing
to Sarah, who identifies so strongly with her mother that she cannot resolve the
racial conflict of her birth. Her mother, who is dressed in a white nightgown
carrying a bald head, continuously mutters “Black man, black, man, I never
should have let a black man put his hands on me. The wild black beast raped me
and now my skull is shining”.
The play is dominated by a threat of rape by her father who, she believes,
continues to come to her room, knocking loudly throughout the play in an
unending ritual suggesting incest and violence,
Victoria. (Listening to the knocking) It is my father. He is arriving again for
the night. (The Duchess makes no reply) He comes through the jungle to find
me. He never tires of his journey.
Duchess. How dare he enter the castle, he who is the darkest of them all, the
darkest one? My mother looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any
white woman’s. And at least I am yellow, but he is black, the blackest of
them all. I hoped he was dead. Yet he still comes through the jungle to findme.
Through these scenes we can assume the operation of women at the physical level where Sarah' mother was raped bye Sara's father and she is also experience the same atrocities every night.
Hair takes on importance throughout the piece, its progressive loss equated
with the loss of African-American identity. In folklore hair often symbolizes
fertility or power over the person whose enemy might shear it. In this play,
which begins with Sarah’s mother passing before the closed curtain carrying
before her a bald head, various characters lose their hair, which slowly and
nightmarishly falls around them. ‘Kinky black’ hair sticks out from “from
beneath both [the Duchess and the Queen] their headpieces spring a handful of
wild kinky hair” (2-3), while the long, straight black hair that continually falls
out is associated with the Sarah of mixed blood who tries to be as white as
possible.
Duchess and Jesus (Their hair is falling more now, they are both hideous.)
My father isn’t going to let us alone. (Knocking) Our father isn’t going to let
us alone, our father is the darkest of us all, my mother was the fairest, I am in
between, but my father is the darkest of them all. Ha is a black man. Our
father is the darkest of them all. He is a black man. My father is a dead man.
(Then they suddenly look at each other and scream, the Lights go to their
heads and we see that they are totally,
Throughout the play, the farther away one gets from ‘blackness’, the more
hair falls out –the whiter the character, the balder. As her female selves lose
their hair, the threat of her father’s return, of a confrontation with her
irreconcilable blackness, grows imminent.
Sarah‘s search for love and acceptance in the white world offers her no
solace or comfort. She admits she doesn’t love the Jewish poet, though she
responds wildly to Raymond’s embrace, even though he is unmoved by her
fears and torments. Disarmed and unprotected, an archetypal fallen woman, she
begs for love. In spite of this, Raymond watches her suffering and when he
discovers her death his only remark is, “She was a funny liar”. To him she is an
oddity to be observed from a distance.
The white landlady’s scenes (there are three in the play) mark important
structural divisions of the plot. She appears toward the beginning and at the end,
and she appears at the precise moment the play reaches its climax. She behaves
as a corroborating witness, like an innocent bystander responding to an official
investigation of the events. Curiously enough, her name, Mrs. Conrad, reminds
us of Joseph Conrad who in his Heart of Darkness narrates the inaccuracy of a
white man to understand the African world.
Not all of Sarah’s selves are white. One of them is Patrice Lumumba, the
assassinated quintessential African hero. However, the fact that this is a male
figure despises her womanness.
Thus we can interpret a funny house of a negro as a text of demonstrating the operation of women at large by a single character at the both stage psychological torment as well as physical violence. sarah's mother was raped which denotes physical torture as well as sexual assault at the physical label of women how she faces the double torment because of there racial identity as well as femininity. Sara who are always despised because of her colour also experience the same atrocities like her mother both at the psychological label. she creates 4 characters to escape from the reality and her African American identity.
