Michael Eric Dyson (15 page)

In contrast to practices in ancient cultures, body modifications have been dramatically altered by consumer culture.
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In many ancient societies, body modifications had many functions and were imposed on tribal members. Body modifications were used to mark one’s age, social rank or status as a slave, or one’s relation to a tribe; to signify mourning and to ward off disease and evil; to secure one’s life in the afterworld and to possess magical powers; to intimidate opponents; and to enhance one’s appeal to the opposite sex.
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Body modifications were also used to marginalize tribal members and to mark criminals with stigma and shame. Contemporary practitioners of modifications, including tattooing, scarification and body piercing, seem to invite or underscore their marginal status. One may be resisting conventional notions of “normal,” “beautiful” and “appealing,” or one may be rejecting the mainstream’s views of culture and politics. Whatever their motivation might be, it is clear that those who practice body modification can now signify on their bodies, through their bodies, with their bodies, thus liberating themselves from certain Western norms.
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The freedom to experiment with one’s body enhances the artistic elements of body modification. Tattooing in the contemporary
vein may be seen as the body’s graffiti, encouraging participants to paint maps of identity on the body’s surface. Scarification in the modern context may be seen as the body’s Braille, inspiring participants to raise the flesh’s surfaces to read messages others are blind to. And piercing may now be seen as the body’s crochet needle, allowing participants to embroider the skin in striking patterns of self-disclosure. Of course, as was true with disco music, body piercing, which thrives in gay and lesbian cultures, represents the “homosexualization” of American expressive culture while underscoring the exhibitionist impulses of consumer culture.
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Body piercing allows some black youth to adapt jubilant performance to their skin and to improvise their identities. Their improvisational identities inspire black youth to use body modification to gain surer self-understanding. Even as black youth applaud and embrace the modified body in white cultures, they must remember that their black skin is already a permanent marker of difference. (Of course, Michael Jackson’s chilling reversal of pigment suggests the elasticity of the epidermis, but even so, the disappearance of his color has not kept Jackson from finally being treated like the black man he was remembered to be.) To be sure, black skin is sometimes loved as an exotic fetish, but it is more likely viewed as an uninhabitable and disfiguring border. This fact is undisturbed even as body modifiers adopt “Modern Primitivism” to reject the materialistic values of Western culture and to incorporate the ideals of “primitive” cultures.
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This concept, quite useful in curing Western myopia, carries cataracts of its own. Some whites fail to see how they have a choice whether
to be identified as “primitives,” while for black folk, the batteries are always included and the primitivism is always assumed, or, rather, there is what can be called a
civilized savagery
ascribed to even the most postmodern, body-modifying black subject around. Black youth can tap into the broader history of revulsion to the modified body in the West. But they can also embrace urban black identities that are scarred by cultural disdain and tattooed with racial disgust.

For an example, one need look no further than Cosby’s cynical insistence, all in the tone of his voice, that the body piercing of black youth is both a sign of their African ancestry and a signal that they have no idea what that ancestry means. His words resonate in simple blackness and drip in contradiction. On the one hand, Cosby seems to suggest that black youth are both dramatically and irreversibly alienated from their African roots (“What part of Africa did this come from?”); on the other hand, he suggests that black youth have no idea about their African roots because they are
not
African. (“These people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa.”) Of course, one might reasonably levy that charge at Cosby as well, given his stereotypical misrepresentations of black youth and his ignorance of the African origins of their jubilant performances on skin and streets. Body modifications do have roots in African and in many other civilizations. Scarification and body painting were practiced in Sahara in 8000-5000 B.C.E.; Egyptian mummies of Nubian women had a series of tattoos across their abdomens in 4200 B.C.E.; and in 4000 B.C.E., men in predynastic Egypt wore decorated penis sheaths while the women were tattooed.
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In today’s Africa there is overwhelming evidence of body modifications, enhancements, adornments and decorations that suggests at least a provisional link to
African
American culture. As Cosby’s comments reveal, there is still a great deal of ambivalence about the role of Africa in black American culture. The romantic view of Africa has rightly been rejected; it feeds on ignorance or denial of the continent’s complex identities and conflicting values. But there is startlingly little appreciation for African cultures and ideas, even among black folk. While we worked to free our bodies from white supremacist rule, and our kin of color from colonialism, we often failed to decolonize our imaginations and update our images of the world that birthed our ancestors. The last frontier of bigotry toward our ancestral homeland to be conquered may lie no further than the mirror.

One need not subscribe to
National Geographic
to learn how Africans have adapted the ancient art of body modification to their current situations. They have largely spurned the stigmas and tribal traumas of the past, with notable exceptions, including female circumcision, an act whose brutality Alice Walker helped bring to the world’s attention.
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Perhaps one of the young women Cosby thinks has no knowledge of Africa may know of Turkana women from Kenya who sport multiple piercings along the rim of their ears; or Suri women in Ethiopia who display scarifications, large ear plugs and body painting; or the young Dinka women whose facial scarification can be read as painful elegance; or the Iwam warrior from the upper Sepik river in New Guinea with a pierced nasal septum.
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If Cosby’s views on fashion and body modifications prove his disinterest in straying too far from the comforts of his insistent bias, a trait he shares in common with millions more, his take on unique black names is especially dispiriting. Behind those colorful and sometimes extravagant, even outlandish, names is a history of black subjugation that has rattled the black psyche with ungodly precision. There is nothing those names could ever mean that could begin to approach the offense that brought them into existence. Shaniqua never enslaved humans as chattel.
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Taliqua never tore a child from her mother’s breast to rape or sell her. And even though Muhammad isn’t in the same class, a slip we may ascribe to Cosby’s general disdain for non-European names, even he, in black skin at least, never benefited like his owners from the savage pleasures of white supremacy. Whatever acrimony Cosby has for the unique names of the black poor—and he is surely not alone—he should at least learn, as should we all, even if in the briefest fashion, the story of how black names were dragged through mud and used to denominate us as beasts and fools. But we fought back with a homespun ingenuity that pitted our imaginations against the ghastly terrors of chattel slavery and we took back our dignity, or at least our self-determination, one syllable at a time.

When African slaves got to American soil, their spirits were broken and they were robbed of their identities, a fact most memorably glimpsed in the stripping away of their names and their bleak renaming by their owners. The new names the owners bestowed often bled with the contempt they felt for the slaves; many Africans were named after animals,
inheriting monikers like Jumper, Bossey or Postilion.
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In other instances, Africans were given biblical or Puritan names, or named after classical deities, as if to conjure the distance between their wretchedly inferior beings and the ideals and achievements those names summoned. They were given names like Hercules and Cato, or Othello and Claudius.
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If an owner thought a slave particularly dumb, he was sure to stick him with Plato or Socrates; if, hypocritically enough, a black female was deemed promiscuous, she would get the name Diana, all the more to pour derision on their heads.
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Africans were also given names of titles that marked their exact opposite status: General and King. (In the generations after slavery, blacks continued this tradition in various ways, but, of course, without the vicious signifying that accompanied it. My grandfather, born in the late 1800s, for instance, was named Major Leonard.)

Later, slaves were named after geography, and received place names like Quebec and Senegal, Bristol and Cambridge. Or they were named after famous personages like Byron, Washington, Lafayette, Napoleon, Lincoln and Madison.
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As slavery expanded, African Americans began to win back the freedom to name themselves—sometimes overtly, sometimes in more subtle ways, but largely by refusing to tie their identities to the names their owners gave them.
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In the instances they were in control, Africans named their infants seven days after birth, a sign that they took naming seriously and that a great deal of thought went into naming each African child.
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Some slaves secretly held on to their African names and referred to themselves by their “country
names,” suggesting the provisional control that slaves on predominantly black estates were gaining over some important matters.
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Many slaves also kept their ancestral roots alive by giving themselves African nicknames used in their own company, creating a familiar feeling in a strange land. By the mid-eighteenth century, more than one-fifth of slaves on big estates in the lowcountry had African names, proving they had ingeniously battled the usurpation of their identities by white owners.
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By the second and third generations of enslavement, when blacks gave their children African names, it reflected the effort to stimulate the memory of their African ancestry in their children and grandchildren.
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Even with the rise of European names in slave communities, slave parents insisted on maintaining African naming practices, like naming their children after important days, events and places.
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Thus, if a child was named Christmas, he had a European name backed by an African tradition of recognizing an important day.

When Africans insisted on fitting their children with names from their distant homeland, slaves in the South often chose events relating to birth, such as the day the child was born: Quash, Squash, or Quashy for Sunday, for example; Cudjo for Monday; and Cuffy for Friday. Sometimes those names were linguistically deformed in crude substitutions, like Coffee for Cuffie, or by translations into English, so that African children bore the names Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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African children were also named after months, with names like April, June and August; times of day, with names like Morning; and seasons or festivals of the year, yielding
names like Winter and Easter. There were African names derived from tribal names, such as Hibou from Ibo, Becky from Beke and Fantee from Fanti. African children also bore Anglicized African names: Andoni became Anthony, Nsa became Henshaw, and Effiom became Ephraim.
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Sometimes, white owners degraded African names and lent them pejorative meanings. For instance, the Hausa name Sambo, usually given to the second son of the tribe’s family, was twisted in South Carolina to signify a lazy, stupid black male, a negative meaning that survives to this day. Quaco, the day name for men born on Wednesday, was derisively transliterated as Quack.
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The African naming tradition in the New World was often extravagant, similar to traditions in the African cultures blacks left behind. Besides secret nicknames, there were secondary names assigned to blacks to distinguish them from others with the same names on large plantations; names for occupations, such as Engineer Ned, Carpenter John and Headman Frank; names for age and appearance, such as Old Daniel, Great Jenny or Little Mag (later, placing “Big” before a name reflected the southern practice of giving the title to the oldest member of the family with a common name, usually a father whose son was named after him); names showing relationships, such as Katina’s York, Jenny’s Dolly or Henry’s Tom; and finally names that through sheer exuberance and creativity were made up and later generally adopted, names like Pie-Ya, Frog, Monkey, Cooter, John de Baptist, Fat-man, Fly-Up-de-Creek and Cat-Fish.
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Africans engaged in what may be termed resistive nomenclature: Siblings and parents
named their children to combat the broken family ties when kin were sold. Brothers and sisters named their children after each other and sons and daughters were named after their fathers and mothers, though father and son pairings were more usual.
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After slavery, black folk took on names that signified their newfound freedom. Their overwhelming choice of Anglo-American names over African names reflected their profound acculturation as well as their emancipation.
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Freed blacks also chose Anglo-American names to purge their ranks of derisive classical names and of names usually given to mules or dogs—the logic seems to have been that if Anglo-American names were good enough for white folk then they were good enough for black folk seeking to occupy a free society. Blacks also moved from the informal and diminutive, Jim and Betty, to the full and formal, James and Elizabeth.
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And, for the first time for most blacks, they shed the stigmatizing use of single forenames and selected surnames to match their newly emancipated status. Many of those surnames embodied their liberation, including Freeman, Newman, Freeland and Liberty. Blacks drew other surnames from their trades and skills, an ancient custom, while some blacks chose to be identified with their color, hence the popularity of Brown.