"Whatcha Gonna Do?

": Revisiting "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book":

A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly
Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan
Author(s): Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley,
Jennifer L. Morgan
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1/2, The Sexual Body (Spring - Summer,
2007), pp. 299-309
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649677 .
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 "WHATCHA DO?^?REVISITING
GONNA "MAMA'S
BABY,
PAPA'S ANAMERICAN
MAYBE: GRAMMAR
BOOK"

WITH
ACONVERSATION
HORTENSE SAIDIYA
SPILLERS, FARAH
HARTMAN, JASMINE
GRIFFIN,
SHELLY & L.
MORGAN
JENNIFER
EVERSLEY,

28, 2006
OCTOBER
SATURDAY,
SE Thank you, Hortense, for making time to talk with us. Jennifer and I
are that the three of you came out on a
really grateful Saturday evening.
Can we begin with Farah and Saidiya talking about how "Mama's Baby,
has influenced work, and then maybe Hortense can
Papa's Maybe" your

begin with discussing how you teach or talk about it.

FG There are times when I've to the essay,

specifically gone knowing
that there's something in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" that will be
and useful to me, and then there are times later on I realize
helpful
without even knowing it consciously, the article has informed and influ
enced I
things that have done. I wrote this essay called "Textual Heal

ing" and I started out by using your sources, by asking, where did she
get that information?! How did she even know to go these particular
sources? For so of us, "Mama's was the first
many Baby, Papa's Maybe"
time we even thought about some of the things that you cited. When I
wrote that essay, which is about what we call neoslave narratives
really

now, to think about the that these women writers were

trying history

to, the frame that Iwas to understand, that histo

responding beginning

ry
was set up for me "Mama's Iwas
writing
a
by Baby, Papa's Maybe."
review essay for Signs on black feminism in the academy, and as I began
to talk about Hortense somany peo
Spillers, I realized that the work of
was
ple of my generation has been formed in relationship to this essay. I
focusing on literary critics?Sharon Holland, Elizabeth Alexander,
Fred Moten, Lindon Barrett, all of us?and I thought how I literally
could not think of another essay, I don't know?maybe "The Souls of
Black Folk?"?I really couldn't think of another essay that had that kind

[WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 35: 1& 2 (Spring/Summer 2007)]

? 2007 Farah Jasmine Griffin,
by Hortense Spillars, Saidiya Hartman, Shelly Eversley,
& Jennifer L. Morgan. All rights reserved.
300 WHATCHA 00?
GONNA

of impact on a generation. The essay has profoundly informed my work

and the work of the people with whom I consider myself in dialogue.

SH Indebtedness is the word that comes to mind that I would use to

describe relation to Hortense 'swork. That's how Iwould summarize
my
it. Imean I am still struggling with the problematic terms that "Mama's

Baby, Papa's Maybe" has generated, I am still thinking through Hort

ense's I do have a about how feminism as a or a
prism. question critique
rubric or fails to own critical intervention. It's
explains explain your

interesting in that the first paragraph of the essay opens with all the
names of the marked woman, but in the second it's the
paragraph prob
lem of the color line that explains the territory in which that naming
takes place. I'd like to think about your own to
project's relationship
feminism. I think it has a critical relationship to that project but I don't
think that your work can be
encompassed by the feminist project.

HS You know, I have always been very interested and humbled by peo
response to "Mama's What Iwas to
ple's Baby, Papa's Maybe." trying
do when I wrote that essay years was to find a
many ago vocabulary
that would make it possible, and not all by myself, to make a contribu
tion to a larger project. I was looking for my of black
generation
women who were so active in other to open a conversation with
ways,
feminists. Because my idea about where we found ourselves in the late

1970s and the mid-1980s, was that we were out of the conversa
really
tion that we had, in some ways, initiated. In other words,
historically
the women's movement and the black movement have been in
always

tandem, but what I saw happening was black people being treated as a
kind of raw material. That the history of black people was something
you could use as a note of but it was never that had
inspiration anything

anything to do with you?you could never use it to explain something

in theoretical terms. There was no discourse that it in terms
generated,
of the mainstream academy that gave it a kind o? recognition. And so

my idea was to to generate a discourse, or a that would

try vocabulary
not just make it desirable, but would necessitate that black women be in
the conversation. And that is a theoretical conversation about num
any
ber of things but one of the things is certainly the feminist project. I had
to write a called "Interstices ..." for a feminist conference at
piece
Barnard College in 1982. Iwas supposed to talk about black women, the
 HARTMAN,
SPILLERS, & MORGAN
GRIFFIN,EVERSLEY, 301

sexuality of black women. And I thought, you know what, before I can
get to the subject of the sexuality of black women I didn't see a vocabu

lary that would make it possible to entertain the sexuality of black

women in any that was other than traumatic. Before could
way you
have a conversation about of black women had to clear
sexuality you
the static, clear the field of static.
And so "Mama's was somewhere in
Baby, Papa's Maybe" really
there along with "Neither Nor," "Permanent Obliquity," and maybe
one or two others. all to that decade when we were
They belong

searching for a vocabulary and didn't find one that was immediately
available. The available discourses all seemed to come out of
experi
ences that somehow, when they got tome, did a detour. [Laughter.] Or
the language broke down. Or it could not speak in theoretical terms.
There were reasons the couldn't address race and
always why academy
And so my was a to be in battle.
gender. anxiety finding way actually
To to war with a whole of violent behavior that
actually go repertoire
was in a very way. You know,
always performed genteel people sitting
around tables, wine, cheese. are the nicest
sipping eating They just peo

ple in the world, [laughter] but they are carefully cloaking just an
incredible hostility. And so the idea was to break from that barrier.
It seems that we are the wheel in that way. You
always recreating

know, there are all these earlier pioneers in the institutional works of
the black intellectual. Imean all ofthat work has been done, but then
what happens is that the forces that are really hostile to black life, to
black are
operating. So that we are in a of reac
people, always period
tion now that is so that if we are not careful the work we are
strong,
now is to have to be "rediscovered" at some You
doing going point.

know, are to have to it, or rediscover it

people going keep doing again,
or reassert it because the forces of are so forceful and so
opposition
and us, want to
powerful they're always pushing against they always
enforce want to do that
forgetfulness. They always something forgets
the African or reabsorbs it, it in another
presence reappropriates way.
The need to confront violence, violence, intel
psychological epistemic
lectual violence is "Mama's was
really powerful. Baby, Papa's Maybe"
about bolstering myself, living to fight another day?I became very
a
good at being marksman and ducking.

I read "Mama's as a historian of a

JM Baby, Papa's Maybe" slavery,
302 WHATCHA
GONNA
DO?

historian of early modern slavery, and like Farah and Saidiya, when I go
back to the I am stunned to realize how much "Mama's
essay Baby,
own work. to write a
Papa's Maybe" generated my Just trying history
of women in to claim that to see what
slavery, vocabulary, happens
when you there are there who this entire field has
say?OK, people
to erase. I want to them back out there. There are
attempted just put
across the who are for that and
people academy looking vocabulary,
that's the essay so across so fields and to
why speaks powerfully many
such a wide of those of us who are to confront the vio
variety working
lence of the past and in our fields.

FG In many ways I think that the project of "Mama's

Baby, Papa's
Maybe" is successful because it did become work we didn't have to do

again. "Mama's us a Iwas won

Baby, Papa's Maybe" gave vocabulary.
if you remember what was the of some of your to
dering response peers
the essay when it
appeared?

HS You know it was kind of astonishing. I think some o? it was the

venue in which it Imean it came out in Diacritics.
appeared,

All We remember . . .
[Laughter.]

HS You know, I knew that something weird or odd had

happened
because the who were me that had read the or
people telling they essay,
who were about the were white men. And so I
talking essay, thought?
uh, oh, is this good or bad?I don't know what this means! And it was
white men. The first tome
gay people who responded in relationship to
this essay?outside the of African Americanists, or African
community
American African Americanists?were white men. And I
gay thought
that was remarkable that were interested in this.
really pretty they

SE That might be about the way that your essay intervenes in the patri
archal structure of an arena which
family, queer studies, especially gay
male studies, has to find away to critique as well if the gay male subject
can somehow have the of a "man" who does not
authority produce this

family in the way that a hetero man might.

I'd like to raise the of anti-race race men, or
question cosmopoli
tanism?a sometimes idea to deracinate the intellectual
well-meaning
 SPILLERS,
HARTMAN, & MORGAN
GRIFFIN,EVERSLEY, 303

or the discourses of race, which somehow, also reifies

critique though,
the discourse of a masculinist Because have to
gender, superiority. you
the role of of in the construction of the
recognize gender, masculinity,
comes back to the idea of a civilized
cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism
intellectual that is, of course, founded on the patriarchal family and the
of the How have you the conversation around
legacy patriarch. engaged

cosmopolitanism?

HS Well, I guess I have, and I think another way to ask your question is
to wonder if I have ever been attacked scholars committed to cos
by

mopolitanism? I have been trying to think of ways to get into that con
versation and demolish it. What the conversation does is truncate half

of the discussion and it chooses the straw man to argue But it

against.
seems to me that the worldling, the cosmopolitan, is always figured in
these conversations as male. It seems to me that the notion of the cos

is a way to reclaim that have been up; that the

mopolitan positions given
of the conversation is a way to reassert race as male
framing hegemonic
whiteness. It's certain features of a old
reclaiming very argument.

SH What I understand your essay to be doing, in part, is questioning the

of as an For me, of the of
purchase gender analytic category. part power
the essay is really about mobilizing black feminism and postcolonialism
to do the work of interrogating the writing of the human. I guess I am
about two axes of what we're One is the of
thinking doing. claiming
Hortense as a feminist foremother and also about the contain
Spillers
ment of the under the rubric of "feminism"; and the second
project
concerns the that is involved in "Mama's
aspect larger ground clearing

Baby, Papa's Maybe," which iswhy it begins in early modernity?it's

not about the names, which open the essay, but also the
only specific
order of naming.
larger

to
HS So, I think what you're suggesting is that the essay is attempting
look beyond the feminist project to a larger human project; is that right?

SH Yes, that's how I understand the essay.

HS I think that iswhat Iwastrying to do, at the same time that Iwant
ed to point out what is problematic about black women stopping at the
304 WHATCHA DO?
GONNA

Because the refusal of certain to

gender question. gender privileges
black women was a of the At the same time,
historically part problem.
that you have to sort of see that and get beyond it and get to something
else, because are to go to to
you trying through gender get something
wider. And I think that's men were in "Mama's
why Baby, Papa's
That is what I was to
suggest about certain
Maybe." trying perfor
mances of maleness on the of black men, and what Iwas to
part hoping

suggest is that black men can't afford to appropriate the gender prerog
atives of white men because they have a different kind of history; so you
can't just simply be patriarchal. You have to really think about some
else as come to that If there is any such as a kind
thing you option. thing
of symbiotic blend or melding between our human categories, in this
case of the diasporic African, then this is the occasion for it.Men of the
black diaspora are the only men who had the opportunity to understand
about the female that no other had the
something community opportu
to understand, and also vice versa. Woolf talked about the
nity Virginia
"incandescent intelligence" that Shakespeare supposedly had that was
neither male nor female. I think I am probably not talking about a thing
that is somehow male and female; but I think it is a kind of humanity that
we seem very far from, and that I used to think black culture was on the

verge of I think I am less sure now that we're on the verge of

creating.

creating that than Iwas growing up. When Iwas growing up, I thought
I saw in black culture a kind of democratic form that I haven't seen
like that since. It just seemed that that
quite community automatically
did something in relationship to being human that was really quite dif
ferent. That people did whatever work was to be done, whether itwas
"men's work" or "women's work," if it needed to be done, sim
people

ply did it; to raise children, to maintain communities. As I see it now,

success in black culture has brought us a lot closer to appropriating gen
der dynamics that I do not necessarily like. That a black man can be an
and a and a black woman can be "feminine" and
entrepreneur capitalist
sit at home?we're much closer to those binaries, and I suppose
getting

any issue o? Ebony will show you this. [Laughter.]

JM You used the phrase "African diasporic subject." One of the things
you do so powerfully in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" is talk about the
space o? the middle passage, and that what there, was a vio
happened
lence that caused to evaporate. So then I think about that model
gender
 SPILLERS, ? MORGAN
GRIFFIN,EVERSLEY,
HARTMAN, 305

and all of the work that has been done subsequently around the organiz

ing frame of the Black Atlantic, the rubric of "the Diaspora," thinking
about movement and about how a kind of diasporic racialized subject
into as a result of the violence o? the transatlantic slave
gets put place
trade. Like Saidiya, I don't think this piece is contained by feminism.
"Mama's makes a claim that
Baby, Papa's Maybe" actually very strong
as the originary space defining difference?and,
dislodges gender
rather, says that what defines difference, if you start with the transat

lantic trade as the is racialized violence. Is the work that's

inaugural,
done on the black Atlantic, the Diaspora, as a to scholar
way organize
as a way to as a way to conversa
ship, organize departments, organize

tions, does that feel to you as a place that might push

us forward? You
said that used to see black culture on the of some
you verge creating

thing different, and then you see a retreat. Does thinking through the

Diaspora, or the Black Atlantic, help?

HS No. [Laughter.] Actually what I think about the Black Atlantic is

that it really is a very close funky little room with all the men in it?and

they're all speaking English. [Laughter.]

that's really what that is; it really is a way to, I think, escape
And
the female again. In fact I am thinking that maybe the introduction of
the model, and the transculture, these are all ways, to
global perhaps,

escape the messiness of Gender as I was to mean it in

gender. trying
those essays I in the late 1990s. In other words,
produced 1980s/early
as an issue for and not for women, or black
gender everybody just
women and black men. these terms?"Black Atlantic," "Dias
Maybe
terms. redescribe some
poric"?are covering They simply prior hege
monic sense of priority that I find troubling. Inmy new project, Iwould
like to think about current forms of cultural production in cities of the
Atlantic with critical black populations in relation to theories about
black diasporic culture. Iwould like to take up the issue of the Black
Atlantic to see how those theoretical interventions are in the
operating
actual I suspect that the way that the concept of the Black
Diaspora.
Atlantic is is a way to circumvent
currently being configured gender
rather than to further it.
complicate

SE I'd like to ask you about how you see black feminism today?
306 WHATCHA
GONNA
DO?

HS Iwonder where it is, actually. I think that the feminism as of the

1980s became curricular in the same way that black studies did
objects;
in relation to black liberation movements. I am very fascinated with

that moment. Something happens on a dime, it happens imperceptibly.

There is a movement in the normal and the afternoon there is a
day by
curricular All of a sudden, it would seem, the conversation
object.
and it is so sudden it is traumatic, and for some
changes, institutionally
individuals it is traumatic. You are about one
talking day presenting
fourteen demands to the office and the next are
provost's morning you

trying to identify the chairperson of the new department and the logic
sties involved?that's a moment. And I think it bears
very interesting
the conundrums of its past, so that there are feminists, and then there

are feminists. In other words, there are women in this country today
who legitimately wonder, what happened to their movement? But it
went to the To the With
university. disciplines. fund-raising impera

tives, and and that's a different animal from the move

hiring practices;

ment, from the that come out of time and the

polemics jail confronting

police. So what feminism has become is a curricular object that, in the

o? at least one of its has a different
living memory generations, very
source?a movement And the the
component. people entering academy
have so benefited from the movement that don't see that need
they they

it, they don't feel that they need to declare a feminist in that
allegiance
Indeed, women are hostile to the idea of a feminist
way. many actively
are hostile. And this isn't a smart
politics, they actually position,
because it will mean that we will have to fight those battles again, this
will come back, because somehow we haven't out a to
figured way
historical memory, with feminists, or with women, who
carry very
want to The cost of Americanization, of is to
quickly forget. equality,
In black culture a narrative of antagonism is inscribed in its
forget.
memory. For others, the narrative of Americanization means that you
have to forget the old country, the old land, the old pain, that you must

forget it, that is the price that you pay. I think that iswhere we are with
women The mainstream success off the women's move
today. coming
ment, is like what Prof. Zillah Eisenstein calls the "decoy." In other
words, if you want to advance the most can
retrogressive policies, you
advance them, you can sell the poison by way of the decoy. I feel that
we have reached one of the most in American histo
dangerous periods

ry, and it is borne on the back of the civil rights and feminist movements
 SPILLERS,
HARTMAN, & MORGAN
GRIFFIN,EVERSLEY, 307

that was spearheaded by black people and radical white people and that
has now been neofascist forces in this You can now
co-opted by society.
sell it.

FG So that Condoleeza Rice can say, and only she would say, that the
terrorists who killed the four little girls are "just like" the terrorists we
are now. she can that.
fighting Only say

HS Everything has been pulled inside out.

SH It's that use the term "neofascism," because to return

interesting you
to "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in thinking about the temporality of

slavery, I tend to think of you alongside of George Jackson. Because the

essay isn't about the historical of but about
only experience slavery,
what continues to live on from that In that context Iwon
experience.
der about the future of a black radical feminism. Much attention, for
has now into about the state.
example, gone thinking prison

HS I have that where the women's movement was

always thought
was towards a that did towards So that
moving society justice everyone.
for black feminism, radical feminism, to into a concern with
morph

prison reform or health care is appropriate. These and the other big
issues of our time seem to me to be an extension of human
appropriate
An up, those I guess, that come out of
rights. opening along stages, par
ticular local movements, that lead to broader, and
something bigger,
finer than what we've had. that for a little while we've
Except gone

backwards, though
I can't
imagine that we are to
stay here very
going
But there's forward momentum, and when are in
long. people pain long
wake up to where are. So I am that we
enough they they thinking really
make a mistake when we read those movements in their
particularity

ultimately, because I think that the start is particular, but that their
thrust is and must be outward, broader.
always

FG I had a final question; did you have any sense that "Mama's Baby,

Papa's Maybe" would stand out in the ways that it did?

HS No, no, I didn't. But I try to think of what particular event generated
that I know that I started to think about that at the time that
essay. essay
308 WHATCHA DO?
GONNA

Iwrote about Ishmael Reed and Harriet Beecher Stowe. And I know
that when Iwrote "Mama's that Iwrote it with a
Baby, Papa's Maybe"
of Iwas very emotional when Iwrote it. Iwas on
feeling hopelessness.
the verge of about what Iwas about. And Iwas to
crying writing trying

explain what seemed to me

impossible to explain. Gloria T. Hull, Bell
Scott, and Barbara Smith had come out with the collection All theBlacks
Are Men, All theWomen Are White, but Some of Us Are Brave, and that was
the situation that Iwas trying to describe. Conceptually and theoreti
What was that like? I had an urge to find a category that respect
cally.
ed history. I wrote it with a sense of urgency, with a need to tell

something that had been told over and over again?I knew that none of
it was new. But what was new was that Iwas to the lan
trying bring
of a to a very old a that
guage postmodern academy problem, problem
historians had been writing about for at least fifty years at the time that
Iwas this And so Iwas to ask the
writing piece. trying question again,
ask it anew, as if it had not been asked before, because the
language o?
the historian was not telling me what I needed to know. Which is,what
is it like in the interstitial spaces where you fall between everyone who
has a name, a a an
category, sponsor, agenda, spokespersons, people
out for them?but don't have That's situa
looking you anybody. your
tion. But I am like the white elephant in the room. Though you can't
talk about the era of sound in the U.S. without talking about blues and
black women. You can't talk about the eras of in the Americas
slavery
without talking about black women, or black men without black
women and how that the is not a
changes community?there subject
that can about in the modern world where will not have
you speak you
to talk about African women and new world African women. But no

one wants to address them. I felt that in 1986 and 1987 no one wanted to
a theoretical on this, Imean we are invisible And
put spin really people.
I just kind of went nuts. And I am saying, I am here now, and I am doing
it now, and you are not to me. And so all of those
going ignore essays
are am here now, "Whatcha do?"
saying?I gonna
 SPILLERS, & MORGAN
GRIFFIN,EVERSLEY,
HARTMAN, 309

SAIDIYA HARTMANis the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and

Self-Making inNineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997)

and Lose Your Mother: A fourney Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2007). Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quar
Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Femi
terly; Callaloo;
nisms and the State (Duke University Press, 1999); and Loma Simpson: For
the Sake of theViewer (Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992). She teaches
at Columbia University and lives inNew York City.

FARAHJASMINEGRIFFIN is professor of English and Comparative Litera

ture and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the
author of a number of books and on American culture.
essays

HORTENSEJ. SPILLERSis the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of

English at Vanderbilt
University. She is the author of several influential
essays and editor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition
and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex andNationality in theModern
Text. She is author o? Black White and In Color: Essays inAmerican Literature
and Culture (University of Chicago, 2003).

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Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1996. "Textual Black Women's Bodies,
Healing: Claiming
the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Callaloo
Slavery."
19(2):519-36
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. All theWomen Are

White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave :Black Women's Studies. Old

Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press.

Jackson, George. 1970. Soledad Brother: The Prison Fetters

of George Jackson, ed. Jean
Genet. New York: Coward-McCann.

Spillers, Hortense J. 1984. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words." In Pleasure and

Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance. London: Pandora. This

essay collection after the controversial "Towards a Politics of Sexuali

emerged
at Barnard 1982.
ty" conference College, April
-. 1987. "Mama's An American Grammar Book." Diacrit
Baby,Papa's Maybe:
ics: A Review Criticism 17.
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-. 1989. "Notes on an Alternative Model?Neither/Nor." In The Difference

Within: Feminism and Critical ed. Elizabeth A. Meese and Alice A. Parker.
Theory,

Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
-. 1989. "The Permanent of the In(pha)llibly In Changing
Obliquity Straight."
Our Own on Criticism, and Writing ed.
Words: Essays Theory, by Black Women,
S.Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Cheryl