Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" as descended from Malcolm X

Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as descended from Malcolm X

by Mark Schauer

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book,” Malcolm X told Alex Haley as they collaborated on X’s autobiography, surely not realizing that his own memoir would deeply influence millions, including then-California prison inmate Eldridge Cleaver. (X 400) That Cleaver’s prison tome Soul on Ice was in the tradition of Richard Wright’s Native Son and, especially, Malcolm X’s autobiography was evident to critics from the start, even to Cleaver: “I have, so to speak, washed my hands in the blood of the martyr, Malcolm X, whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am now caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my own” (Cleaver 66). Cleaver’s efforts at sexual myth-making and analysis of black oppression in prison were far more ambitious than X’s, and merit greater attention than they have heretofore received. Despite this, most critics fail to get beyond Cleaver’s description of raping white women as an “insurrectionary act” (which he renounces in the text) and various comments that are homophobic to modern sensibilities, including a blistering screed denouncing author James Baldwin. “These important and necessary criticisms have overshadowed the ways that this text… in its attempt to map the racial and sexual dimensions of the U.S. social imagery and the importance of the sex/gender system to the formation of racial identity anticipates contemporary developments in theoretical discourses on race and gender” (Taylor 71). Despite its limitations, Soul on Ice is not only the closest and most influential literary descendant of Malcolm X’s autobiography, but a significant advancement in both the prison-writing genre and American radical political consciousness.

It seems pointless to begin the other analysis Soul on Ice without addressing the oft-repeated misogyny and homophobia present in the text. The most infamous line of the book is Cleaver’s description of rape as “an insurrectionary act” (Cleaver 14). Though he renounced this interpretation of the crime of rape two paragraphs later, and, as Reid-Pharr observes, throughout recorded history, “the rape of women is used regularly to terrorize and subdue one’s ‘enemies,’” many critics have interpreted Cleaver’s statement as singularly beyond the pale. (Reid-Pharr 375). Reid-Pharr, however, shows that the immature interpretation of rape was nonetheless consistent with Cleaver’s battle with white men. “Both white and black women act as pawns in an erotic conversation between Cleaver and his white male counterparts. This fact is emblematically represented in an exchange between Cleaver and a white prison guard who enters his cell, rips a picture of a voluptuous white woman from the wall, tears it to bits, and then leaves the pieces floating in the toilet for Cleaver to find upon his return” (Reid-Pharr 376). Though his youthful opinion of rape should be condemned, Cleaver was fearlessly examining and coming to terms with his misogynistic tendencies, as exemplified in one of his love letters to the lawyer Beverly Axelrod: “I have a bad habit, when speaking of women while only men are present, of referring to women as bitches… a while back I was speaking of you to a couple of cutthroats and I said, ‘this bitch,’ and I felt very ashamed of myself about that. I passed judgment upon myself and suffered spiritually for days afterward” (Cleaver 149-50). This effort at respect for women by a convicted rapist in many ways goes beyond X’s, who casually told Alex Haley, “you never can fully trust any woman… I’ve got the only one I ever met whom I could trust seventy-five percent… I’ve told her like I tell you I’ve seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women” (X 396). “Before his conversion Malcolm astonished even himself by his deep distrust of women, who he regarded as, ‘nothing but another commodity.’ This attitude came under control in Islam, as he accepted the ‘place’ of women in the elaborately structured Muslim division of the sexes” (Clasby 25). Further, Cleaver specifically depicts women, especially white women, as mutual victims of the white man. He quotes the aging inmate Old Lazarus as saying, “I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed and the white man minds his own business. Until that day comes, my entire existence is tainted, poisoned, and I will still be a slave- and so will the white woman” (Cleaver 160-1).

The most blatant of the homophobic passages of Soul on Ice comes in an ambitious tirade against the noted author James Baldwin. To Cleaver, Norman Mailer’s The White Negro was, “prophetic and penetrating in its understanding of the psychology involved in the accelerating confrontation of black and white in America” (Cleaver 98). Baldwin’s literary rebuttal of Mailer left Cleaver feeling “personally offended,” and that Baldwin had, “committed a literary crime by his arrogant repudiation of one of the few gravely important expressions of our time” (Cleaver 98). His rejoinder in Ice is salted with gay-baiting slurs that were accepted and prevalent during the time period, especially in the homosocial world of prison. “Although Cleaver’s argument is articulated in homophobic terms, homophobia is not its subject; homophobia is rather the cultural lexicon upon which Cleaver draws to craft an essay whose proper content is intended to be a defense of Norman Mailer’s The White Negro … Cleaver prefers Mailer’s romanticized and stereotypical representations of black masculinity as violent, sexual, spontaneous, and rebellious and suggests that it is only Baldwin’s racial self-hatred and homosexual hatred of masculinity that keeps him from celebrating these qualities as well” (Taylor 84). Cleaver failed to see, however, that his own heterosexual hang ups were as fraught with racial baggage as Baldwin’s allegedly counter-revolutionary homosexual ones. “By his own account, Cleaver’s youthful longing for white women, his obsession, is no less a form of racial death-wish than is the supposed self-hatred of ‘many Negro homosexuals’ or ‘the ethos of the black bourgeoisie’” (Sexton 39). Cleaver’s homophobic rant against Baldwin is rendered even more bizarre given Haley’s report that Malcolm X respected James Baldwin as both a writer and activist: “He’s so brilliant he confuses the white man with words on paper… he’s upset the white man more than anybody except the honorable Elijah Muhammad” (X 408). Reid-Pharr interprets Cleaver’s literary assault as a classic example of homosexual scapegoating, which “societies suddenly thrown into confusion” throughout world history have resorted to: “To strike the homosexual, the scapegoat, the sign of chaos and crisis, is to return the community to normality, to create boundaries around Blackness, rights that indeed white men are obliged to recognize” (Reid-Pharr 373). The post-World War II United States was a scene of such social confusion, and the exact same time period saw an increased awareness of homosexuality from researchers like Alfred Kinsey, which precipitated an even more acute social identity crisis throughout American society, one that was particularly acute in a black community made boundary-less by 400 years of oppression. As Clasby observes, “when the native son seeks a place in history, seeks in fact to make it his story, certain patterns emerge. These involve the paradoxical rejection and imitation of the settler’s values and the resolution of the paradox in the final adoption of a new and broader view of humanity” (Clasby 20). Cleaver’s homophobia is a reflection of the dominant society’s values, deployed in a misguided attempt to simultaneously construct a black masculinity and defend a sympathetic white author who was publicly grappling with the same issues of gender, race, sexuality, and economics as him, oftentimes with the same degree of error.

[...]