{"id":16748,"date":"2011-10-06T01:57:12","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T01:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16748"},"modified":"2012-02-19T01:45:38","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T01:45:38","slug":"joe-christmas-and-the-chamber-of-secrets-the-black-white-dilemma-in-william-faulkners-light-in-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16748","title":{"rendered":"Joe Christmas and the Chamber of Secrets – The Black\/ White Dilemma in William Faulkner’s Light in August"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Christmas and the Chamber of Secrets – The Black\/ White Dilemma in William Faulkner’s Light in August<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Africa Resource<\/a>
\n2010-04-04
\n21 paragraphs<\/p>\n

Isabel Adonis<\/a><\/strong>, Writer and Artist<\/p>\n

I read William Faulkner’s<\/a> Light in August<\/a><\/em> in my early teens and I scarcely understood it.\u00a0 But I understood something and many years later a woman at a party mentioned that she had read the same novel at college.\u00a0 For a while she talked about miscegenation<\/a> and on my return home I decided that this was something that I wanted to look into.\u00a0 I wandered down to the little second hand bookstore in <\/strong>Bethesda<\/strong><\/a> where I used to live and it was the first book that I found there, as if it had been waiting for me to claim it. I am mixed race, my mother was Welsh and my father was from the Caribbean.\u00a0 Many people treat me as if I am black, an exotic, and a foreigner. But I have lived a life like the character in the book, lonely isolated and forever going round in circles searching for my authentic self.<\/strong> And just as in Faulkner’s deep south<\/a> I live in a society which is determined to make me bad, determined to make me take the role of scapegoat, to make me ‘the other’ of themselves.<\/p>\n

In the novel we learn that Joe Christmas’ skin tone is “parchment<\/a>” and that he doesn’t know his parents though he suspects one of them was black.\u00a0 He was left on the steps of an orphanage on Christmas day, hence his name.\u00a0 In the book he is aged thirty-three so we know that he has a Christ-like persona: he has come to redeem our sins. As a little boy in the orphanage he is fond of making his way to the dietician’s\u00a0 room where he likes to suck on her toothpaste.\u00a0 On one particular afternoon he has taken the toothpaste from the sink when he hears her returning to her room with the interne from the local hospital.\u00a0 For safety, he hides behind a cloth curtain and witnesses her making love.\u00a0 Because of his anxiety he eats too much toothpaste and is sick.\u00a0 As a result, he is caught by the dietician…<\/p>\n

Read the entire essay here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Christmas and the Chamber of Secrets – The Black\/ White Dilemma in William Faulkner’s Light in August Africa Resource 2010-04-04 21 paragraphs Isabel Adonis, Writer and Artist I read William Faulkner’s Light in August in my early teens and I scarcely understood it.\u00a0 But I understood something and many years later a woman at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[7732,7731,490],"class_list":["post-16748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-africa-resource","tag-isabel-adonis","tag-william-faulkner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}