யூதர்கள், ஐரிஷ் மக்கள், இத்தாலியர், கிரேக்கர் எல்லாம் கூட ஒரு கட்டத்தில் வெள்ளையர் என்று கருதப் படவில்லை. மெல்ல மெல்லத்தான் அவர்கள் வெள்ளையராக ஓரளவு அங்கீகாரம் பெற்றிருக்கின்றனர். அராபியர்கள், பெர்சியர் (இரானியர்), துருக்கியர் போன்றவர்களில் பலர் வெள்ளையர் போலத்தான் இருக்கின்றனர். ஆனால் அவர்கள் மரபணு சோதனையில் சிறு சிறு வேறுபாடுகள் கொண்டு தெரிவர்.
மரபணுக்களைப் பொறுத்து சுமார் 99.999 சதவீதம் அனைத்து மக்களும் ஒரே போன்றவர் என்று ஒரு சமீபத்திய அறிவியல் கட்டுரை சொல்கிறது. [இதன் விவரம் அடுத்த பதிவில் கொடுக்கிறேன்.] சுமார் 0.001 சதவீதம் வேறுபாட்டை வைத்து ஒருவரை வேற்று இனம் என்று கருதி வெறுப்பதோ ஒதுக்குவதோ அறிவு சார்ந்த செயலாக எனக்குத் தோன்றவில்லை.
ஒருவரின் மதம், நடத்தை, கருத்துகள், அரசியல் நிலை, பாலுறவு வகைத் தேர்வு, பொருள் வசதி போன்ற வெளிக் காரணிகளால் நட்பாகவோ, பொருந்தாதவராகவோ நாம் கருதுவதில் ஏதோ அர்த்தம் இருக்கலாம். ஏனெனில் இவை ஏதோ விதத்தில் நம்மைப் பாதிக்கக் கூடும்.
ஆனால் இனம் என்பது முற்றிலும் கற்பிதமா என்று ஒரு கேள்வியை நாம் கேட்க வேண்டும்.
இன்றைய ஜெர்மனியில் கூட இன்னமும் யூத எதிர்ப்பு அரசியல் இருந்து வருகிறது. இதில் அபத்தம் என்னவென்றால் இன்று ஜெர்மனியில் யூத எதிர்ப்பை வலுவாக்கி வருபவர்கள் யூதர்களுடைய அண்டை நாடுகளில் இருந்து ஜெர்மனிக்குப் புலம் பெயர்ந்த அராபியர், துருக்கர் மேலும் இதர முஸ்லிம்கள். யூதர்களை அழிப்பது சரியே என்று குரல் கொடுக்கும் இவர்களின் அறியாமை எல்லையற்ற படுகுழி.
இந்தியாவில் ஜாதி வேறுபாடுகள் எல்லாம் இருந்தாலும் அது இன வேறுபாடாக உருமாற்றிக் காட்டப் படுவது நடந்தது யூரோப்பியரின் ஆதிக்க காலத்தில் இந்து சமுதாயத்தை உடைக்க ஏதாவது ஒரு நெம்புகோல் தேடிய கிருத்தவ வெள்ளையர்களின் முயற்சியால்தான். தமிழகத்தில் இன்று ஆதிக்கம் செலுத்தும் திராவிட அரசியலின் ஆணி வேரே கால்டுவெல்லின் இனவெறி மொழியியல் ஆய்வுதான். அதன் மூலம் யூரோப்பிய இனவெறி கருத்தாக்கம் என்பதை அறிந்தவர்கள்தான் திராவிட இயக்கத்தினரும் அதன் பாதந்தாங்கிகளும் .
இன்று இனம் என்பதே கிடையாது என்று வாதமிடும் உலக இடது சாரிகளுக்கு நேர் எதிரான நிலையில் உள்ளவர்கள் இந்திய இடது சாரியினர். இன்னமும் ஆரிய திராவிட இன வெறி அரசியலுக்க்குத் தூபம் போட்டு வளர்க்கும் கேவலத்தை உவந்து செய்து வருகின்றனர். இதில் உலக அரங்கில் பெரும் கருத்தியலாளர் என்று வலம் வரும் 'சிந்தனையாளர்கள்' பலரும் உண்டு. இவர்களைக் குறித்து பின்னால் பார்ப்போம்.
இனம் என்பது ஒன்று உண்டா இல்லையா என்று இடது சாரிகளைக் கேட்டால் பலவிதமான உளறலான கருத்துகள் கிட்டும். உலக மக்கள் அனைவரும் ஒன்று என்று ஒரு பக்கமும், இனத்தால் அவர்கள் வேறு வேறு என்றும் ஒரே நேரம் எதிரெதிர் கருத்துகளை வைத்திருக்கும் ஒரு 'பகுத்தறிவான' கூட்டம் அது.
கீழே உள்ள ஒரு கட்டுரை ஒரு அமெரிக்க இலக்கிய விமர்சகரின் விசித்திரமான வாழ்வைப் பற்றியது. அவர் கறுப்பரா, வெள்ளையரா என்பது அவ்வளவு தெளிவாக இல்லை. அவர் தன் வாழ்வை ஒரு வெள்ளையர் போல வாழ்ந்து முடித்தார் என்றாலும் அவருடைய மகளுக்கு இறுதியில் அவருடைய பின்னாளில் அவர் ஒரு கறுப்பர் குடும்பத்தில் பிறந்தவர் என்று தெரிய வருகிறது. அல்லது கருப்பு மூதாதையர் தமக்கு உண்டு என்று தெரிய வருகிறது.
அவர் இறந்து ஆறு வருடங்களுக்குப் பிறகு அவருடைய பெண் சமீபத்தில் வெளியிட்ட ஒரு நூலின் விமர்சனம் கீழே. இது வாஷிங்டன் போஸ்ட் பத்திரிகையில் வந்த ஒரு விமர்சனம்.
இதில் இனம் என்பது ஒன்று உண்டா என்ற கேள்வி அடித்துத் துவைக்கப் படுகிறது. மரபணுக்கள் மூலமாக இனம் என்பதை நிறுவ முடியும் என்ற கருத்தையே இந்த விமர்சகர் எதிர்க்கிறார்.
தமிழகத்திலும், இந்தியாவிலும் பல இடது சாரிகள் மரபணு ஆய்வு மூலம் இந்த ஆரிய திராவிட வரலாறுக்கு ஆதாரம் தேடத் துவங்கி இருக்கும் இந்தக் கால கட்டத்தில் இந்தக் கட்டுரை என்ன வழி காட்டும் என்று எனக்கு யோசனையாக இருக்கிறது.
அறிவியல் பிரச்சினைக்கு இலக்கிய விமர்சனம் வழி காட்ட மூடியாதுதான். ஆனால் வாழ்க்கை என்பது அறிவியலின் கருவிகளைத் தாண்டிய கடும் சிக்கல்கள் நிறைந்தது.
படித்து விட்டு விமர்சனம் அனுப்புங்கள்.
சூ.கா.
_____________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Yardley
A father and daughter, torn between racial boundaries.
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, September 30, 2007; BW15
ONE DROP
My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets
By Bliss Broyard
Little, Brown. 514 pp. $24.99
For most of the 1970s and '80s, Anatole Broyard was a staff book critic for the New York Times, writing two or three reviews a week for its daily pages, as opposed to its Sunday book section. My own career in that same line of work was just getting under way, and I paid close attention to what he was doing. He obviously was intelligent and erudite, but I sometimes felt that he was more interested in showing his technical skills than in giving books deep, fair readings. Still, he enjoyed considerable influence and was widely known in literary circles.
Broyard died in October 1990 after a long, painful and debilitating struggle against cancer, but continuing interest in him was insured by the disclosure that he was, as his wife told their two adult children, "part black." According to Bliss Broyard, "My mother explained that my father had 'mixed blood,' and his parents were both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race-mixing had been common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was, or was supposed to be." Broyard's response to this, as he moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village and began to live a bohemian life in the postwar years, was to "pass for white." He did so for the rest of his life, though many who knew him were aware, or suspected, that his racial identity was not precisely as he presented it.
Six years after Broyard's death, the New Yorker published an article by Henry Louis Gates, the well-known professor of African American studies, called "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," which was, predictably, the cause of much heated gossip in literary, journalistic and publishing circles. Now Broyard is back in the news with the appearance of this family history and memoir by his daughter. One Drop, Bliss Broyard tells us, takes its title from "the 'one-drop rule,' which classified as black any Americans with the tiniest fraction -- just one drop -- of 'black blood.' It had grown out of a practice dating back to slavery known as hypodescent, which assigned someone of mixed parentage to the lower-status race, and had become the legal and social custom in the era of legalized 'Jim Crow' segregation." The book is an account of her effort to discover just "how black" her father was and thus, obviously, "how black" she is.
It's a peculiar book. The author's sincerity and honesty are evident and appealing, and her subject is of continuing interest and importance even now, when an appreciable amount of heat has been drained from our old obsessions and fears about race. The problem is that One Drop is actually at least five books -- her father's story, her own story, her family's story, the story of "passing" and the story of racial identity in the United States -- and its author doesn't do a very good job of weaving them together into a seamless, coherent narrative. For well over 100 pages, she wanders this way and that, telling this story and that, interviewing this person and that, circling around the one story of greatest interest -- her father's -- but never really pouncing on it. Then she takes a detour of nearly 200 pages to explore the Broyard family's history in New Orleans. Not until she gets past page 300 does she finally focus fully on her father, and one can't help wondering how many readers she will have lost by then.
"My father had left behind so much unfinished business," she writes, and her hope is to wrap it up. This would be a difficult task in any circumstances, but it is all the more so in this case because of the exceedingly complex life, character and legacy of Anatole Broyard. He was by most accounts immensely charming and energetic, positively catnip to women (and quick to take advantage of it). But he was also boastful and vain, as well as an operator who, as one friend told Gates, was " exorbitantly in control" and "fastidious about managing things." Thus it is extremely difficult, for example, to figure out why he chose to pass for white, or to get much sense of how this choice weighed on him, as anecdotal evidence suggests it did.
He was born in New Orleans in 1920, into a family that had been there since the early 1750s when Etienne Broyard, "a white man from France . . . landed in the Louisiana Territory." Within a century "the Broyards had begun to be identified in public records as mulatto or free people of color." Bliss Broyard's research has convinced her that "the moment of mixing in the Broyard family" occurred in 1855, when her great-great-grandfather married a free woman of color. Her account of how subsequent generations of the family dealt with (or ignored) this legacy is interesting, but she insists on larding it up with a boilerplate history of American laws, controversies and customs regarding race. By her own honest admission she knew almost nothing about race in America until her father's secret was revealed, and to her credit she studied it closely; it really was not necessary, though, to regurgitate so much of what she learned -- most of which will be familiar to many readers -- in this book, which is too long by about 150 pages.
It's also unfortunate that she spends so much time fretting about her racial identity. The notion of crossing "from white to the other side" clearly has some appeal for her, and when her New Orleans relatives call her "pure white," she is uncomfortable, yet she just can't let go: "It had been nearly a decade since my father had died, since I'd learned of his -- and my -- African ancestry, since I'd begun reading and learning and talking about race. And despite my glimmerings of double consciousness, I didn't yet feel black. I was still waiting for an 'Aha!' moment, an affirmation of this identity down deep in my bones." Fortunately, within just a few pages of this unbearably PC declaration, Broyard admits that "the thought of how blinded I'd been in my obsession to find a slave ancestor made me feel sick with shame," which redeems her, as does this:
"I hated the image of myself in [a black acquaintance's] eyes -- a silly white girl making a big fuss over nothing. I hated how uncertain I became when trying to locate myself on this racial landscape or even recognize its terrain. Torn between trying to pinpoint the boundaries between black and white and an urge to deny their existence at all, I was caught in a dialectical tug-of-war. The futility of my efforts reminded me of a skit I once saw in which a man kept moving a wooden chair around an empty white room, unable to find a spot that suited him, despite their being all the same."
As she seems finally to have understood, the whole notion of race is fraught with ambiguity. I won't reveal the results of the DNA tests she finally had done, but what they proved more than anything else is that racial identity is a complete mare's nest. In issues of race as in so many others, "Know thyself" is an injunction almost impossible to obey. Notions of racial purity are as false as notions of racial impurity; there's no such thing, though much of human history has been frittered away by people trying to legitimize race as the defining element in what passes for civilization.
Still, it's not really surprising that Anatole Broyard chose to live as he did. He didn't look in the least bit "black," and he wanted to enter the world of literature, which in the 1940s and '50s in this country was patently "white." He placed personal ambition ahead of racial identity or racial solidarity or whatever one cares to call it, and his daughter makes a pretty solid argument for him: "My father truly believed that there wasn't any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for who he was supposed to be was himself." To be sure, a black friend had a point when he "sniped that my dad was black when he entered the subway in Brooklyn and white when he got out at West Fourth Street in Manhattan," but that's the choice he made, and he managed to live with it.
His daughter asks: "Was my father's choice rooted in self-preservation or in self-hatred? Did it strike a blow for individualism or for discrimination? Was he a hero or a cad?" Those are good questions, and as Bliss Broyard well understands, they can never be definitively answered, though my own hunch is that "All of the above" gets somewhere close to the truth. *
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
_______________________________________________
சில வாசகர்கள் மேற்கண்ட கட்டுரைக்குத் தம் மறுவினையைத் தந்திருக்கிறார்கள். அவற்றில் ஒன்றைத் தருகிறேன்.
ONE DROP My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets
By Jonathan Yardley -
White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana by Virginia R. Dominguez and Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule by Frank W. Sweet and Passing for Who You Really Are.
Bliss disappointed me greatly by seeming to buy into the old canard that there is something immoral about a person with even a small amount of "black" ancestry identifying himself as "white." Hello, Bliss. Have you heard of Latinos and Arabs? They are almost always partially of sub-Saharan African ancestry but don't call themselves "black." Most of them identify as "white" on the census and other forms. You live in New York City, which has more "mulattoes" than New Orleans. However, because they are also Puerto Ricans, their "black blood" doesn't count? Why?
Many reviewers in the media have painted Anatole Broyard as a villain who deprived his children of some kind of wonderful heritage. I side with Anatole. First, he was not "black" and he would have been guilty of emotional abuse if he had taught his children to embrace a false racial identity invented as a stigma. A few say that he should have taught them about their wonderful Creole heritage. Why? It is a dying ethnicity and its people are being assimilated by force into the "black" fold. Creoles either go as "black" or "white." The few remaining Creoles who seek an in-between path are dying out and have no political power. I also noted, from reading the book, that Bliss is a very emotional, impressionable person. She was too full of liberal guilt and easily enamoured of anything "black" as a grown woman. I shudder to think how she would have reacted as a teenager or child. Her brother Todd seems to be far more stable. There is no evidence that the great revelation that his father was "tarbrushed" caused him to change his identity or indulge in racial angst.
There is a scene in the book where Alexandra Broyard (the supposedly "pure white" Norwegian-American mother of Bliss and Todd) discovers that she has partial Native American ancestry. It is interesting to her, but she has no plans to change her identity or even check more "race" boxes on those omnipresent forms. She is like most white Americans in that regard, since American Indian ancestry is not presented as a source og genetic inferiority that destroys forever one's European heritage or right to call oneself "white." Shouldn't "black" ancestry in white people be decriminalized and treated like American Indian ancestry?
