Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe : An American Grammar Book

by Hortense Spillers

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Race, Gender Studies, Essays

16 pages, Spiral-bound

Published February 24, 2020

About the author

Hortense Spillers is a literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, published by Routledge in 1991.

Reviews

[Ife · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's face it. I am a marked woman

Mama's Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book is a seminal piece of Black feminist literature. The overarching thread of the essay is Spillers talking about Black women's constructed alterity in the American "national treasury of rhetorical wealth", zooming in on the infamous Moynihan Report. Other Black feminist scholarship on the report such as that in Women, Race & Class typically pointed out that Moynihan's notion that Black communities were dysfunctional because of the mythologised castrating matriarch in Black families stemmed from patriarchal thinking. Spillers agrees, but goes further to argue that Moynihan's report, and the historical treatment of the Black family under chattel slavery, evinces how Blackness complicates the very notion of gender and invokes questions of whether Black people are/were seen as human.

She further problematizes anthropology, the American family, reports, biology, language, history and so many things we take for granted bringing all of these into the locus of their participation in Black people's dehumanisation. I found especially her analysis of the family extremely insightful and forward thinking:

It seems clear, however, that "Family," as we practice and understand it "in the West" - the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of "cold cash," from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice-becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community.

This essay has been so influential in so many variant Black studies and reading it helped me better understand Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Everyone should attempt to read it though it is admittedly very dense, at least in its 1st and last part. The 3rd part is very readable though.

[Lieze Doyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

'sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us'

[Rosanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understood this reading as an metaphor for the social spheres of colonizer to colonized. The colonizer uprooting, taking, naming, claiming of a people group. The colonizer forcing education (an American Grammar Book), on Africans. Ultimately, the colonizer historically breaks apart families; yet, tries to define what it means to be a civilized family. African-American women have had a deeply complex history; thus, their sexual identities and family structures can break away from the “dominant American grammar” or colonizer thought of civilized family. Spillers calls for a “violent rupture from American behavior that makes such syntax possible and introducing a new field more appropriate to the historic movement.”

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. "Peaches" and "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire" and "Earth Mother," "Aunty," "Granny," God's "Holy Fool," a "Miss Ebony First," or "Black Woman at the Podium": I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
• The problem before us is deceptively simple: the terms enclosed in quotation marks in the preceding paragraph isolate overdetermined nominative properties. Embedded in bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean. In that regard, the names by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus.
• the "Negro Family" has no Father to speak of- his Name, his Law, his Symbolic function mark the impressive missing agencies in the essential life of the black community, the "Report" maintains, and it is, surprisingly, the fault of the Daughter, or the female line
• This stunning reversal of the castration thematic, displacing the Name and the Law of the Father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter, becomes an aspect of the African-American female's misnaming. We attempt to undo this misnaming in order to reclaim the relationship between Fathers and Daughters within this social matrix for a quite different structure of cultural fictions. For Daughters and Fathers are here made to manifest the very same rhetorical symptoms of absence and denial, to embody the double and contrastive agencies of a prescribed internecine degradation. "Sapphire" enacts her "Old Man" in drag, just as her "Old Man" becomes "Sapphire" in outrageous caricature.
• Even though Daughters have their own agenda with reference to this order of Fathers, my contention that these social and cultural subjects make doubles, unstable in their respective identities, in effect transports us to a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the New World. That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile.
• Scenes of ACTUAL mutilation
o Mark a theft of body: a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join.
o But this intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted by externally imposed meanings and uses:
 1.the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality;
 2) at the same time-in stunning contradiction-the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor;
 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of "otherness";
 4) as a category of "otherness," the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness," resonating through various centers of human and social meaning.
o Distinction between BODY AND FLESH
 t I would make a distinction in this case between "body" and "flesh" and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the "body" there is the "flesh," that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies- some of them female - out of West African communities in concert with the African "middleman," we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the "flesh" as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship's hole, fallen, or "escaped" overboard. *****
• Extant study of slave codes have The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose-eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet
• These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually "transfers" from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments? As Elaine Scarry describes the mechanisms of torture [Scarry 27-59], these lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, "owners," "soul drivers," "overseers," and "men of God," apparently colludes with a protocol of "search and destroy." This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.
• SOOOO GOOD
• VESTIBULARITY AS A PRE-VIEW of CULTURE
• This profitable "atomizing" of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, be- tween human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory
o The symbolic order that I wish to trace in this writing, calling it an "American grammar," begins at the "beginning," which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation
• al shock waves touched off when African and European "met" reverberated on both sides of the encounter. The narrative of the encounter. Olaudah Equiano records a “fall,” a veritable descent into the LOSS OF A COMMUNICATIVE FORCE
• The captivating party does not only "earn" the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name and "name" it
• UNGENDERING IN THE PASSAGE
o Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imag- ine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally "unmade," thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that "exposed" their destinies to an unknown course
o The female in "Middle Passage," as the apparently smaller physical mass, occupies "less room" in a directly translatable money economy. But she is, nevertheless, quantifiable by the same rules of accounting as her male counterpart
o we get very little notion in the written record of the life of women, children, and infants in "Middle Passage," and no idea of the fate of the pregnant female captive and the unborn, which startling thematic Bell Hooks addresses in the opening chapter of her pathfinding work [see Hooks 15-49]. From Hooks's lead, however, we might guess that the "reproduction of mothering" in this historic instance carries few of the benefits of a patriarchilized female gender, which, from one point of view, is the only female gender there is.
o The loss of the indigenous namelland provides a metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relations, including the displacement of the genitalia, the female's and the male's desire that engenders future. The fact that the enslaved person's ac- cess to the issue of his/her own body is not entirely clear in this historic period throws in crisis all aspects of the blood relations, as captors apparently felt no obligation to acknowledge them. Actually trying to understand how the confusions of consanguinity worked becomes the project, because the outcome goes far to explain the rule of gender and its application to the African female in captivity.
• In the context of the United States, we could not say that the enslaved offspring was "orphaned," but the child does become, under the press of a patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order, the man/woman on the boundary, whose human and familial status, by the very nature of the case, had yet to be defined. I would call this enforced state of breach another instance of vestibular cultural formation where "kinship" loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations. I certainly do not mean to say that African peoples in the New World did not maintain the powerful ties of sympathy that bind blood-relations in a network of feeling, of continuity. It is precisely that relationship-not customarily recognized by the code of slavery-that historians have long identified as the inviolable "Black Family" and further suggest that this structure remains one of the supreme social achievements of African-Americans under conditions of enslavement
• It seems clear, however, that "Family," as we practice and understand it "in the West"- the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of "cold cash," from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free ex- change of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice-becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community.
• The destructive loss of the natural mother, whose biological/genetic relationship to the child remains unique and unambiguous, opens the enslaved young to social ambiguity and chaos: the ambiguity of his/her fatherhood and to a structure of other relational elements now threatened, that would declare the young's connection to a g by way of their of their own siblings
• Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived "pleasure" from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask. Whether or not "pleasure" is possible at all under conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we could go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that "sexuality," as a term of implied relationship and desire, is dubiously ap- propriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the master's family to the captive enclave. Under these arrangements, the customary lexis of sexuality, including "reproduction," "motherhood," "pleasure," and "desire" are thrown into unrelieved crisis.
• But just as we duly regard similarities between life conditions of American women- captive and free - we must observe those undeniable contrasts and differences so decisive that the African-American female's historic claim to the territory of womanhood and "femininity" still tends to rest too solidly on the subtle and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology.
• The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to tem- porize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historic development - the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent-takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women's community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated - the law of the Mother- only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father's name, the Father's law.
• Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an "illegitimacy." Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood - the power of "yes" to the "female" within

[Travis Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most difficult thing I've read and I don't understand what it's saying. I do know it's saying something though. I'm just not there yet. Time to reread.

[B. Lee-Harrison Aultman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a book, but originally an article in the feminist literary journal Diacritics, in a special issue entitled "Culture and Countermemory: The 'American' Connection," this now-canonical work also appears in in the anthology Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. With amazing breadth, depth, care, and attention to taxonomic invention, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" continues to have lasting power over contemporary theories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, and American cultural symbolics of family and embodiment.

I will elaborate these points elsewhere, in addition to examining the immensely generative concept of ante-ontology (as the interstitial point between cultural vestibularity and culture) in another review. There, as well, I hope to connect how Spillers' notion of "ungendering of the flesh" has had profound imaginative and material impact on critical trans studies.

[Neeka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most influential and necessary works of the 20th century. It broadened my perspective of the world in a multitude of ways, and for me it represents one of the greatest feminist works ever written.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The notorious bastard, from Vico's banished Roman mothers of such sons, to Caliban, to Heathcliff, and Joe Christmas, has no official female equivalent. Because the traditional rites and laws of inheritance rarely pertain to the female child, bastard status signal to those who need to know which son of the Father's is the legitimate heir and which one is the impostor. For that reason, property seems wholly the business of the male. A "she" cannot, therefore, qualify for bastard, or "natural son" status, and that she cannot provides further insight into the coils and recoils of patriarchal wealth and fortune.'

Hortense Spillers article, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book explores the matriarchal misnomer of the black woman in the United States during and after slavery. Spillers argues that these sociological terms don't apply, despite the cultural image some people may have in their minds, because women never had the power to assert their influence over their children, who they were seperated from, using Frederick Douglass's slave narrative as evidence. Obviously, children were (and continue to be) separated from their fathers', but it is the father's absence that leads to the assumption that the mother becomes the default provider, to fill in the void left by his absence, even in situations in which she cannot, such as slavery.

Spillers discussed the dehumanisation of Africans into mere arithmetic, removed from their names, homelands and given new ones in opposition to Europeans who are always noted by name in transactional records. Stuck in a state of neither here nor there has obviously led to intergenerational trauma, the reduction of African slaves to their bodies, but the gendered difference between them, such as women being allocated less space than men on ships during the Middle Passage. Spillers highlights the lack of academic exploration on gendered difference between slaves and their treatment at the time of writing.

The article is short, but Spillers language is dense, academic and complex, necessitated by the violent subjects she explores and how they relate to feminism, resulting in a difficult but ultimately rewarding read.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

"These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might well ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually 'transfers' from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substituons in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments... The mechanisms of torture, these lacerations, wounding, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, readings, punctures of the flesh create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whos state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, 'owners', 'soul drivers,' 'oversears," and 'men of God," apparently colldues with a protocol of search and destroy. This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside."

"The loss of the indigenous name/land provides a metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relations, including the displacement of genitalia, the female's and the male's desire that engenders the future. The fact that the enslaved person's access to the issue of his/her own body is not entirely clear in this historic period throws in crisis all aspects of the blood relations as capters apparently felt no obligation to acknowledge them. Actyally trying to understand how the confusions of consaguinituy worked becomes the project, because the outcome goes far to explain the rule of gender and its application to the African female in captivity."

[Nihar Mukund · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

It is definitely a seminal text with fascinating ideas, but Spillers has a terrible habit of writing long sentences with complex lexicon functioning in specific -- psychoanalytic, mainly -- ways, becoming a headache in the process at times, and moves between topics a bit too quickly, assuming that everyone can follow her train of thought, even though it draws from underexplored terrains. In addition -- as a regular em-dash user -- a single sentence -- in my humble opinion -- should not use more than one em-dash.

You see what I mean?
I can't mark lower, though coz it is ultimately a cornerstone for so many of the ideas I care about. This is technically my second time reading it, but the last time is an assignment-haze blur.

[Dellana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my feminist theory class. Spillers is dense, thorough and harsh. "Our society presumes male leadership publicly and privately... a subculture such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage".
Spillers challenges white feminist ideas, emphasizing the historical black woman "matriarch" being completely misnamed. She does not ignore the fact that black women were treated as animals; birthing their master's child and never seeing it again.
Spillers is distinguishing "body" and "flesh" as separate beings; flesh being beaten and colorized (ethnicity), body being genderized and othered.

[jaila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for my History & Literature Sophomore Tutorial: Race, Gender, and Representation final paper on “the impossibility of Black motherhood in the U.S.” Truly a densely profound work on the treatment of enslaved Africans and the implications of “parenthood” and the ungendering of Black women. Rips Moynihan to shreds, obviously!! Necessary literature for understanding the legacies of slavery in contemporary time + the evolution Black woman archetypes.

[Seth Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think the majority of us in the academy have reckoned with the actual materiality and pervasiveness of the “American grammar” she calls our attention to. Every time I read this it gets both easier to understand and then harder to read because you are forced to reckon with every single conceptual move she makes and you can’t just read on. Particularly struck with her reading of Harriet Jacob’s memoir this time around.

[Noah Trap · Rating 5 out of 5]

God. Revisit please

[Tia Hines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Either this was a lot simpler than I thought, or I’m a lot dumber than I thought…

[Maddy]

#4class - yeah she is a genius.

[toots · Rating 3 out of 5]

while it’s theoretically dense and historically wrought it did not sufficiently contend with the ethical dimension of black maternity for me

[Sam Bolton · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.75) – Seminal and of critical importance. I have a bone or two to pick with the ways whereby desire becomes taken up and misunderstood–but don't I always?

[Amelia Bruns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really dense, and really heartbreaking

[Mert · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/5 Stars (%44/100)

Hortense Spillers was and still is one of the most influential black writers, especially for women. As a black feminist, she worked hard to be the voice of black people, more specifically women. This was an interesting read for me. I found it informative but a bit longer than it needs to be. She talks about a lot of different ideas by giving tons of names and after a while, it gets a bit complicated and the message gets lost in my opinion. That's why this essay was "okay" for me. There is no denying Spillers' importance but I did not enjoy this as much as I thought I would.