SOURCE: Griffin, Christopher O. “Roots, Violence, and the Context of Intention.” Griot: Official Journal of the Southern Conference on Afro-American Studies, Inc. 15, no. 1 (spring 1996): 1-14.

[In the following essay, Griffin examines the use of violence as symbol in Roots.]

This is ultimately the most profound claim that any ritual or any religious system can make: that through their thoughts and actions, people can fill their existence with meaning.¹

PREFACE

Roots: for many today, the title carries connotations associated with words such as “plagiarism”, “deceit”, and “falsification”. Moreover, the stigma attached to the novel often makes it difficult for readers to move beyond these negative terms and to focus on the novel as legitimate fiction rather than questionable history. Nonetheless, Roots has enlightened great numbers of readers to the struggles of the African-American, and despite its faults or those of its author, Roots still possesses untapped illumination for all humankind.

In an essay seeking to undermine Haley's vision of Kunta as “the African par excellence … a figure symbolic of the cultural greatness of Africa” (294), Harold Courlander (who in 1977 charged Haley with plagiarism) nevertheless offers that at this point in Roots's own history, “the question of historical veracity has diminished importance,” and “the literary elements loom larger” (302). Courlander is correct: readers of Roots should at this time in the novel's history focus on the story and the knowledge it can impart, rather than on the possible deceitfulness of the book's early description as nonfiction or the charges of plagiarism leveled against its author.

Despite the length and breadth of Roots, one character remains prominent in the minds of most when the book is mentioned: Kunta Kinte. Kunta's story begins the saga that is Roots, and although the story stretches far beyond Kunta's life, the other protagonists² are always in Kunta's shadow; the traits embodied in him can be traced through his descendants, yet none ever eclipses in the reader's memory the disturbing power of Kunta's life.

For decades, scholars such as Mircea Eliade have argued the importance of symbol and ritual throughout many of the world's “premodern societies” (ix). Studies of tribes relatively untouched by the industrial swath of modern civilization have demonstrated unequivocally the legitimacy of Eliade's and others' primary anthropological observations. Nevertheless, Eliade's message, that the value of initiation, “all but forgotten in the contemporary world, is none the less supremely valid” (Gaster), still demands reckoning, for society—American society in particular—continues to witness the relentless fraying of its social and ethical fabric. That fabric, unfortunately, is being rent largely by the growing numbers of troubled young men whose understanding of their place in society and their place in the history of society grows more obscure with each passing day. Confronted with the absence of any long-standing and meaningful history or culture, many of America's youth seek out gang culture and create their own histories, complete with tribal hierarchies, inter-tribal loyalties, and feudal—and often fatal—animosities. The negative violence these youth suffer, both physically and spiritually, is inestimable.

In the face of such violence, fiction can offer illumination. One of fiction's greatest qualities is its ability to inform life, to provide insight into situations relevant to one's own. In the late 1970's, Alex Haley's Roots created a resurgence of interest among African-Americans for African-American and African history. Unfortunately, charges of plagiarism curtailed both the book's influence as well as the full critical examination most works as thought-provoking as Haley's usually receive. It is time to re-examine Roots, to discover again the triumphs and tragedies of one family's initiation into American, for there are important lessons to be learned.

RITES OF INITIATION

In Roots, Alex Haley describes with alarming clarity Kunta Kinte's frequent and painful beatings. Yet these beatings are purposeful and necessary; Kunta himself acknowledges their worth in making him a wiser individual. At times, he even anticipates with pride how someday he will get to administer such beatings on his own progeny.

Obviously, these beatings are not the brutal, malicious acts of the “toubob”, or white man, whose lashings and abuse leave Kunta Kinte with horrific reminders of the injustice of “the Negro's place” in the “white man's world”; they are, rather, those beatings received by Kunta as a child from those who love and seek to educate him. This paper examines some striking similarities and vital differences between Kunta's excessively disciplined childhood and his abuse under the yoke of slavery, in the hope that something can be learned that may be of relevance for today's youth and the crisis of meaningless violence that engulfs so many of them.

Kunta's capture by slave traders marks a distinct division in the protagonist's experience, for it marks the end of one initiation and the beginning of another. The first of these initiations brings Kunta fully into the Mandinkan society to which he belongs; the other initiation, however, thrusts him mercilessly into the slave society of the American south. Interestingly, Kunta's brutal initiation into slavery is not the only initiation infused with violence and excessive discipline. In fact a comparison of Kunta's adult experiences under white oppression to his childhood experiences under Mandinkan discipline reveals that violence per se cannot be labeled an a priori evil.³ Instead, the context of intention determines the moral label assigned to particular acts of violence, legitimating violence in certain situations while condemning it in others. Clearly, the violent initiation that forces Kunta into slavery is destructive and crippling; the violence of Kunta's Mandinkan initiation, however, is constructive and strengthening.

Such constructive initiatory ritual is lacking in today's society, and the results are everywhere apparent. In the past, memories and tradition evoked in meaningful rituals created, in the words of Margaret Mead, “a sense of identity, security, and continuity” (95). “Today, however,” continues Mead, “much of this is being lost. We are reaching a serious state all over the world, but more acutely, I think, in American than anywhere else” (95-96). Mead is correct. In America, the number of violent crimes and crimes perpetrated by youth continues to increase, and, sadly, a disproportionate number of the offenders are African-American.

One survey, included in Adam Walinsky's recent article “The Crisis of Public Order,” revealed that, of “black men aged eighteen to thirty-four in the District of Columbia … [o]n any given day in 1991, 15 percent … were in prison, 21 percent were on probation or parole, and six percent were being sought by the police or were on bond awaiting trial” (47). Walinsky later offers a few of the possible reasons for figures such as these:

These young people have been raised in the glare of ceaseless media violence and incitement to every depravity of act and spirit. Movies may feature scores of killings in two hours' time, vying to show methods ever more horrific; many are quickly imitated on the street. Television commercials teach that a young man requires a new pair of ＄120 sneakers each week. Major corporations make and sell records exhorting their listeners to brutalize Koreans, rob store owners, rape women, kill the police. Ashamed and guilt-ridden, elite opinion often encourages even hoodlums to carry a sense of entitlement and grievance against society and its institutions.

(53)

In a comment sadly appropriate to this essay, Walinsky concludes that the youth who commit these crimes “are often children whose older brothers, friends, and uncles have taught them that only the strong and ruthless survive. Prison does not frighten them—it is a rite of passage that a majority of their peers may have experienced [italics mine]” (53).

For tribal youth, manhood initiation served as the rite of passage from a childhood of relative irresponsibility to a manhood of personal and social responsibility. This spiritual, or religious, ceremony held great meaning for both the initiates and the tribe as a whole, for with an understanding of the initiation's religious significance came a responsibility of social significance. In his study of ceremonial masks of the Jola and Mandinka tribes of the Upper Guinea coast, Peter Mark concludes that “the central institution that seems to ensure both the maintenance of [tribal] identity and the continuity of cultural tradition from one generation to the next is the men's initiation” (38). Clearly, the youth of America also undergo a rite of passage on their journey to physical manhood. At present—and due to the absence of any formal and constructive initiation ritual—prison is that rite of passage, the only cultural identity being one of shame, the only cultural continuity one of depravation, and the only transformation one of physique.

True manhood initiation, then, not only benefits the individual; it also strengthens the community. In The Transition from Childhood to Adolescence, Yehudi A. Cohen articulates the interdependence between individual and social stability:

In the development of a sense of personal identity there are two wellsprings from which an individual draws: the personal and the social … The child's need to find a personal identity or sense of self would be aimless without the orienting targets of social belonging, and without the meaningfulness of a particular kind of life with other people.

(60)

A sense of self, then, is inextricably linked to a sense of place within society. When the latter is forgotten, the former also begins to disappear, and the results are tragic. Within Kunta's initiation experiences in Roots,⁴ however, Alex Haley offers America a possibility for reclaiming its children, for renewing self-discipline, strength, and pride in the coming generations.

KUNTA'S RITES

The story of Kunta Kinte is a story of violence. Violence informs the very nature of Kunta; were those passages involving Kunta and violence somehow excised from the novel, the reader would know little indeed of him. Three pairs of incidents in Kunta's life not only reveal the level to which violence imbues and informs Kunta's character but also demonstrate a contextual legitimization of violence as an appropriate tool of instruction. Such legitimization is based not on the violence, but on the intention with which such violence is implemented.

Kunta's abduction by slave traders is a powerful beginning to his initiation into slavery, for it sets the tone of Kunta's relationship with that system. Searching the forest for the perfect tree trunk from which to make a drum, Kunta is ambushed by a band of slave traders:

… [H]e heard the sharp crack of a twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead. It was probably [his] dog returning, he thought in the back of his mind. But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed, whirling in the same instant. In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised; heard heavy footfalls behind him. Toubob!

(165)

Undaunted though outnumbered, Kunta fights for his life. At this point, all of his fears concerning the toubob are true: they are sly in approach, ruthless in attack, and foul in smell. Kunta's relationship with slavery is established through and defined by violence.

Unfortunately, Kunta is unable to defend himself from his four attackers; his efforts, in fact, only result in greater violence upon himself:

… the … club smashed into Kunta once again, staggering him to his knees … His head ready to explode, his body reeling, raging at his own weakness, Kunta reared up and roared, flailing blindly at the air, everything blurred with tears and blood and sweat … The toubob's heavy club crashed against his temple. And all went black.

(166)

Perhaps due to the concentration of its detailed brutality, most readers of Roots often overlook the fact that the above abduction of Kunta is actually the second in the novel. Yet the first abduction, although no blood spills, is strikingly similar to the second in description, and in many ways it is a peculiar foreshadowing of the latter incident.

Several years previous to the abduction discussed above, on a night near the end of the yearly harvest festival, a young Kunta “glimpsed … something shift, and before he had a chance to turn around … a long hood [had been pulled] down firmly over his head. The terror that show through Kunta all but numbed him” (101). Thus hooded, Kunta is led to a seat in his hut, where he anxiously awaits the commencement of what he has only heard about in legend and rumor:

[Kunta's] heart seemed to stop as he sensed the sudden movement of someone rushing into the hut. Before he could even brace himself, his wrists were grabbed, and roughly he was snatched up from the stool and jerked out through the hut door into the all but deafening noise of staccato drums and screeching people. Hands knocked him and feet kicked him. Kunta thought of desperately bolting away somehow …

(103-04)

The passage above is an excerpt from the first night of Kunta's initiation into tribal manhood training. In this episode, as in that of Kunta's abduction by slave traders, the elements of surprise, fear, and force play crucial roles in disorienting Kunta and bringing him into submission. Violence is used in both abductions, yet one stands out as unequivocally wrong, while the other does not, even though the terror inherent in both abductions is created through violence and intimidation. But, as Gilbert H. Herdt writes of Sambian initiations in New Guinea in his book Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity, “The boys [undergoing initiation] are deliberately frightened and made distraught, setting the right mood for ritual initiation” (221).

Similarly, in Kunta's manhood initiation, the terror is a means of creating heightened awareness and sensitivity. “What we have is a break,” writes anthropologist Mircea Eliade, “sometimes quite a violent break, with the world of childhood—which is at once … the child's state of irresponsibility and happiness, of ignorance and asexuality” (8). By being “violently flung into an unknown world” (Eliade 9), Kunta and his other initiates are “[introduced] into the realm of the sacred, imply[ing] death to the profane condition, that is, death to childhood” (Eliade 18). Such symbolic “death” is necessary, argues Eliade, if an individual is to assume the responsibilities and maturity of tribal manhood.

No one will argue that Kunta's relationship with slavery is not clearly one of victimization and involuntary pain. Nevertheless, one may be too quick to confuse the violence in the case of Kunta's abduction into slavery with violence in toto, and thereby to condemn all violence by condemning a particular incidence of it. While the negative violence inflicted upon Kunta by the slavers should not be ignored by the reader—how can it be, with Haley's flair for gruesome detail?—it should not be used as an argument against violence per se.

A per se judgment against violence encounters difficulty once the violent nature of Kunta's manhood initiation is noted. Violence cannot be condemned in toto; there must be a qualifier attached to these scenes of violence in order to differentiate between the violence of each. In the manhood initiation scene detailed above, Kunta is subjected to frightening violence, yet he nevertheless possesses some level of expectation, a vague awareness of what he is undergoing. Seated with the hood over his head, Kunta realizes that “the manhood training was about to begin” (103). And although he is fearful of what may happen during the ensuing months of training, he is aware of its higher purpose, and so is able to suffer violence for the sake of that purpose.⁵

This will to suffer violence for a known goal is one element that separates the violence of Kunta's initiation into Mandinkan manhood from that of his initiation into slavery. Despite his fear, Kunta recognizes the intention behind the violent behavior of the men of his village: to create the proper atmosphere for Kunta's education.⁶ As Eliade remarks, “The physical ordeals [of initiation] have a spiritual goal—to introduce the youth into the tribal culture [and] to make him ‘open’ to spiritual values” (16). Furthermore, his willing abduction into manhood training entails a willingness to suffer for a goal, and so Kunta is not a victim but a participant.

In his abduction by slavers, however, Kunta rightly possesses no will but that of resistance, for here there is no joint goal involving his complicity with those inflicting violence upon him; this violence is in no way for his future benefit. Although Kunta has heard legends of the toubob as he has heard legends of manhood training, there is neither warrant nor reward for his suffering in the bonds of slavery. His abduction by the slave traders, therefore, does not entail any will to suffer on Kunta's part; he is victimized rather than inducted. The absence of any constructive purpose or will to suffer on the part of Kunta is what makes the violence in this abduction scene so disturbing, so obviously wrong. As an instrument of intimidation for the purpose of instruction, however, violence is shown to be extremely effective, and it is a device willingly submitted to by Kunta in order to move toward the goal of Mandinkan manhood.

The two abduction scenes, however, are not the only examples wherein Kunta's experiences of violence are similar in description but different in context of intention. The fraternal bonding of Kunta's kafo, or age group, during their initiation into manhood, for example, closely parallels Kunta's involvement with his fellow prisoners on the trans-Atlantic slave ship.

Parallels between Kunta's initiation into Mandinkan manhood and his “initiation” into the American slave system have been identified previously by critics such as Helen Othow, who writes that “the initiation ceremonies which Kunte [sic] underwent in Juffure are paralleled by the major initiations which he has to undergo in the hold of the slaveship [sic] with his fellow suffering members of humanity” (315). Othow, however, discusses Kunta's parallel initiations only as examples of the book's adherence to traditional epic form, and she fails to differentiate between the contexts of intention of the violence of Kunta's manhood training and the violence of his slavery. Yet such contextual distinction is necessary if the reader is to avoid a blanket condemnation of violence and a resultant misreading of Haley's novel.

Kunta's voyage to America is possibly the most horrific section of the novel, for Haley spares no details in his agonizing portrayal of the conditions of the journey. The voyage provides Haley with an opportunity to focus on the violence suffered by Africans at the hands of the slavers:

Naked, chained, shackled, [Kunta] awoke on his back between two other men in a pitch darkness full of steamy heat and sickening stink and a nightmarish bedlam of shrieking, weeping, praying, and vomiting. He could feel and smell his own vomit on his chest and belly. His whole body was one spasm of pain from the beatings he had received in the four days since his capture. But the place where the hot iron had been put between his shoulders hurt the worst.

(166)

This is only the beginning of Kunta's voyage; as the trip proceeds, the level of violence and suffering only increases. Haley uses the violence in this floating hell to reveal Kunta's character and his growing impressions of his oppressors as he grapples with the anguish of his situation. Lying in the slave ship's hold, crunched together with scores of others in the stinking darkness, Kunta wonders, “What sins was he being punished for in such a manner as this? He pleaded to Allah for an answer” (168).

The only answer Kunta receives is the community of suffering which develops between the men shackled in the ship's hold. After a Foulah tribesman is whipped nearly to death for strangling a slatee traitor, “a clear voice call[s] out in Mandinka, ‘Share his pain! We must be in this place as one village!’” (175). Kunta identifies the voice as that of an elder and identifies with his plea: “[The elder] was right. The Foulah's pains had been as Kunta's own … Either they would all die in this nightmare place, or somehow the toubob would have to be overcome and killed” (175-176). At other times, the narrator describes how in the slave ship “Kunta and his Wolof shacklemate hugged each other on the shelf as the searing blows jerked them convulsively back and forth” (178), or how the slaves were forced to “dance” together for the crewmen (180-181). By the end of the first fifteen days, a community of suffering forms among the men in reaction to all of the violence, and they begin to communicate:

Kunta realized from the low murmuring that spread gradually throughout the hold that … he and his own shacklemate weren't the only ones trying now to communicate with one another … And there was a new quality to the quietness that would fall [when the slavers entered the hold to feed them]; for the first time since they had been captured and thrown in chains, it was as if there was among the men a sense of being together.

(183)

Another such community develops elsewhere in Roots, and under similar circumstances. After being abducted from his hut, the young Kunta and the rest of his kafo are marched to the jujuo, or training compound, where their initiation into manhood truly begins. Eliade's description of premodern initiation rites confirms the universality of much of Kunta's ordeal: violent separation from the mother “by unknown, often masked men” and being “carried far from their familiar surroundings” are the two most common steps in tribal manhood training rites (8-10). As in the hold of the slave ship, violence is the medium through which unity is formed in the jujuo. After greeting Kunta's kafo, or class, upon their entrance into the jujuo, the chief instructor, or kintango, turns his back while his assistants pounce on the boys and proceed to “lay about among [them] with limber sticks, pummeling their shoulders and backsides smartly as they [herded] them like so many goats …” (106). Beatings continue throughout manhood training,⁷ and, like the Africans in the slave ship, the boys in the jujuo are treated as “goats” or cattle. “Herd” is a verb used frequently in both situations to describe each group's movements.⁸

After suffering continual beatings, marches, and other forms of physical and mental violence, “the boys began to understand that the welfare of the group depended on each of them—just as the welfare of their tribe would depend on each of them one day” (112). During the initiation of the Wiradjuri youth of Australia, the novices are forced to stay up late and rise early. While this forced sleep deprivation might be viewed by less informed critics as a method of violent oppression, such acts in fact serve a vital purpose for both the novices and the tribe as a whole. Eliade writes, “Not to sleep [during initiation] is not only to conquer physical fatigue, but is above all to show proof of will and spiritual strength; to remain awake is to be conscious, present in the world, responsible” (15). Violence demonstrated in the above examples creates a similar unity both among the men in the slave ship and among the manhood trainees. The unity of the first group, however, is a dark parallel, both textually and spiritually, to the unity of the second. Although the bonding among trainees is similar to that which occurs on the slave ship, the kafo's unity is accompanied by a knowledge of purpose, whereas unity among the men in the slave ship is accompanied by a resignation of hope. The context of intention necessitates violence's effect of despair in the slaves while allowing more positive results in the boys undergoing manhood training.

Despite the catalytic function that violence serves for unity both on the slave ship and in the jujuo, the gulf between the contexts of intention in the scenes is profound. On the slave ship, Kunta and his fellow sufferers are devoid of hope and purpose. As the ship first lurches from its moorings, Kunta and the others recognize the futility of their dreams of home:

The anguished cries, weeping, and prayers continued, subsiding only as one after another exhausted man went limp and lay gasping for breath in the stinking blackness. Kunta knew he would never see Africa again.

(173)

Kunta's anguish and hopelessness on the ship contrasts sharply with his thoughts during manhood training. From the first day of their arrival, the boys in training undergo forced marches nightly for a week, “each [march] longer than the last” (108). Kunta and his companions find that their feet blister daily, but the instructors refuse to allow time for healing. Despite the seeming neglect of the instructors, Kunta “[finds] by the fourth night that he somehow didn't mind the pain as much, and he began to feel a welcome new emotion: pride” (108). Pride can only arise in a community where hope is alive and purpose is recognized; the violence in each situation, therefore, derives its moral evaluation from its context of intention—in these cases, the presence or absence of hope and purpose. As in the earlier comparison, violence cannot be dismissed in toto without skewing its potential as a positive catalyst for the creation of community, and from that community, pride. Yet a catalyst's distinction as “positive” may only be granted to situations, such as Kunta's manhood training, in which hope and purpose are present to convert communal suffering into self-discipline, strength, and pride. In the absence of these conditions, violence is an instrument, not of instruction, but of destruction, and in such situations it is rightly condemned.

Although the spark of hope is smothered in the filth and violence of Kunta's journey to America, it rekindles at the sight of land.⁹ But rather than the positive hope that accompanies a positive goal, Kunta's hope is that of escape: a goal, yes, but one defined as the reactionary negation of his present condition rather than the constructive progress toward a higher condition. On four different occasions, Kunta attempts to escape the bonds of slavery; each of these attempts, however, ends in failure and oppressive violence. The first and second attempts result in severe beatings, while the third attempt ends with Kunta's receiving two bullets in his leg. The fourth attempt, however, stands out in its brutality, for it symbolizes the finality of Kunta's physical separation from Africa and provides a morbid climax to his violent initiation into slavery.

Commencing his fourth escape attempt by hiding beneath the leaves in a tobacco wagon, Kunta rides through the night, hoping this way to keep the dogs off his scent. He underestimates the persistence of the toubob's mercenary slave-catchers, however, and after three days finds himself again at the mercy of the hounds: “… the hounds kept gaining on him, closer and closer, and finally, soon after dawn, he could see them over his shoulder. It was like a nightmare repeating itself” (262). Realizing that he cannot run any longer, Kunta turns to face his pursuers, unaware that his life, in a very real, very physical way, is about to be altered.

After apprehending Kunta, the slave-catcher, enraged at the wound give him by Kunta's resistance, offers Kunta a choice: “[The slave-catcher] pointed to Kunta's genitals, then to the hunting knife in his belt. Then he pointed to Kunta's foot, and then to the ax in his hand” (263). Kunta, adhering to the Mandinkan directive that “a man … must have sons” (263), covers his genitals with his hands, in effect indicating his grim choice:

One [man] pushed the trunk [of a tree] under Kunta's right foot as the other tied the foot to the trunk so tightly that all of Kunta's raging couldn't free it … Kunta was screaming and thrashing as the ax flashed up, then down so fast—severing skin, tendons, muscles, bone—that Kunta heard the ax thud into the trunk as the shock of it sent the agony deep into his brain. As the explosion of pain bolted through him, Kunta's upper body spasmed forward and his hands went flailing downward as if to save the front half of his foot, which was falling forward, as bright red blood jetted from the stump as he plunged into blackness.

(263-64)

The heinous cruelty of Kunta's pedal mutilation is reinforced by the gruesome detail of the event. There is no justice here, no excuse to rationalize the violence inflicted by the slave-catchers. The absence of purposeful context here creates perhaps the most drastic contrast when this scene is examined beside the mutilation Kunta undergoes in manhood training, a mutilation almost euphemistic in its avoidance of detail. Referred to as “the kasas boyo operation” (120), Kunta's circumcision is an event “which made Kunta and every other boy shudder to think of” (120), and it is an event performed “without warning” (120):

The men then leaned down, grasped him firmly, and lifted his thighs upward. Just before closing his eyes, Kunta saw the kintango bending over him with something in his hands. Then he felt the cutting pain. It was even worse than he thought it would be … In a moment he was bandaged tightly … But the thing [he] had feared above all else had now been done.

(121-22)

Kunta's initial reactions to the two events are similar: immediately after his circumcision, Kunta is “weak and dazed” (122); following his pedal mutilation, he “lapse[s] into and out of consciousness, his eyes closed” (264). Without a context of intention steeped in Mandinkan tradition, the violence of circumcision—penile mutilation—would be cruel and unjust, deserving the same condemnation as Kunta's pedal mutilation at the hands of the slave-catchers. In both cases, violence is inflicted upon Kunta; nevertheless, the reader justifies one and condemns the other. Again, the context of intention is the decisive variable for accurate judgment; the reader readily acknowledges purpose in one incident, ruthless absence of purpose in another. In an insightful passage related to circumcision and other initiation rites involving similar violence, Mircea Eliade warns the critic against hasty condemnation:

What we should note is the fact that the novice is radically regenerated as the result of these sanguinary mutilations … Hence we must guard against being misled by the aberrant aspect of some initiatory mutilations or tortures. We must not forget that … the strange and monstrous are expressions frequently used to emphasize the transcendence of the spiritual.

(28)

In the case of penile mutilation, Kunta recognizes more than immediate or personal purpose—that this must be done to “prepare film to become a father of many sons” (120). As the circumcision begins, the chants of his kafo's fathers recount the history of which he is becoming a part: “This thing to be done … also has been done to us … as to the forefathers before us … so that you also will become … all of us men together” (121). In his book Birth and Rebirth, Eliade devotes an entire chapter to the role circumcision and similar violent acts plays in initiation rites (21-40). The violence—and significance—of Kunta's ordeal, then, is not merely a product of Haley's imagination. Furthermore, in the first chapter of Eliade's book, the author emphasizes that “the puberty initiation represents above all the revelation of the sacred—and, for the primitive world, the sacred means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but also the whole body of the tribe's mythological and cultural traditions” (3). In the context of his tribe and its violent initiation rites, Kunta recognizes his place—and the place of this violence—in the history of his people. In America, however, Kunta has no history; there is no meaningful context within which to place the slave-catchers' violence. Kunta's pedal mutilation is tragically symbolic of his severance from his home, of his isolation in an alien land, and of the severe changes his new history will undergo as it is formed in America throughout succeeding generations.

After examining selected incidents of violence in Roots, it should become clear that the categorization of violence per se as evil is not an apriority but rather a categorization dependent on a given situation's context of intention. While violence in some scenes plays a crucial role in eliciting sympathy with Kunta and alerting the reader to the potential for evil inherent in humankind, violence at other moments—and in different contexts—is a powerful tool of instruction. Violence in toto, therefore, cannot be condemned, neither in Roots nor in life, for situations exist in which the reasons for violence are meaningful rather than meaningless.

In his book Iron John, Robert Bly suggests that those anthropologists who characterize tribal initiation rites as “sadistic and humiliating acts on young men under cover of initiatory ritual” are themselves victims of an initiation-less society, and it is they, claims Bly, who need to undergo such initiation rites more than anyone (96). These rites, says Michael Ventura, “would assault … adolescents with, quite literally, holy terror.” Nevertheless, continues Ventura, “This practice was so effective that usually by the age of fifteen a tribal youth was able to take his or her place as a fully responsible adult” (qtd. in Bly 180-181). As it is in Roots, some form of violence is inherent in many initiation ceremonies throughout the world, and that violence, correctly administered, in a sense transforms children into responsible adults.

“It [is] important to make it clear,” writes Mircea Eliade, “that puberty rites … imply death to the profane condition, that is, death to childhood” (18). As tragic as this “death” may seem to some, such death is vital and necessary in order for youth to be reborn symbolically as responsible adults. According to Cohen, “A sense of identity implies social values that people have about themselves in relation to each other within the groups in which they are anchored. That is a sense of identity implies one or another form of the sense of responsibility …” (137). The “death” of the child and the “resurrection” of the man, both achieved through the violence of initiation, offer the individual not only a sense of self-identity but also a sense of place within a community, and, therefore, a sense of community responsibility. The potential good of such “resurrection” in American youth is self-evident. Unfortunately, the unsubstantiated fear and condemnation of violence in toto has in recent years presented a significant barrier to the resurrecting of American's boys into men.

The statement “violence is wrong” is axiomatic to many. To believe such a statement, however, is to skew the complex role violence plays in Roots and to refuse the illumination Kunta's manhood training emits regarding the use of violence for good. The violence inflicted upon Kunta within the world of slavery is obviously unjust; but the injustice of such acts stems not from an a priori condition of violence as evil. Rather, the injustice stems from the context of intention informing those incidents of violence that have no purpose but to oppress, and which have no goal but to destroy. In the violent furnace of his Mandinkan initiation, however, Kunta discovers his strength, pride, and responsibility: the traits most needed in the youth of today.

AFTERWORD

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a growing disdain toward the violence of corporal punishment in both schools and homes. It only follows that the acts undergone by Kunta and his kafo would be deemed cruel and inhumane in today's culture of comfort. Detractors of physical punishment claim that it inhibits an individual's desire to learn and teaches the individual to associate education with suffering—an association those detractors label as negative. In the February 1995 issue of The Atlantic, John Staddon, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology at Duke University, argues that chief among the wrongs such psychology has perpetrated against society is the dissemination of this idea: that punishment, especially corporal punishment, is not only cruel, but ineffective.¹⁰ That corporal punishment's ineffectiveness could be the result of improper contexts of intention is a suggestion that, predictably, has not been received warmly nor been examined thoroughly.

This skewed evaluation of corporal punishment is B. F. Skinner's legacy: a legacy in which individual responsibility is abandoned and the positive potential of the Mandinkan method of education is discounted. This legacy, however, does not have to continue: the model which instilled self-discipline, pride, and responsibility in Kunta Kinte offers one method for instilling purpose and meaning into the male youth of today. Bly argues that “the recovery of some form of initiation is essential to the culture [of America]” (35). “The boys in our culture,” writes Bly, “have a continuing need for initiation … but old men in general don't offer it” (14). As reported earlier in this essay by Adam Walinsky, a prison term often fills the void left in young male psyches by the disappearance of positive initiation rituals. Using many tribal cultures such as the Kikuyu in Africa as examples,¹¹ Bly exhorts modern culture to embrace such initiation once again, for delaying or neglecting initiation “add[s] to our explanation of why we have so many boys and so few men” (182). In Roots, there is no doubt that Kunta, through the rigors of Mandinkan initiation, becomes a man.

Harold Courlander has remarked that in Roots, “Haley's basic theme is that … Kunta forever remains an unreconstructed African” (299). In fact, it is Kunta's strong resistance to slave society and his adherence to African customs that defines much in his character. One should ask, perhaps, from where does this resistance and adherence come? The answer is found primarily in the four and one-half months of violence through which Kunta passes during manhood training. If violence is the medium through which Kunta's pride in Africa, confidence in himself, and knowledge of Mandinkan ways are acquired, perhaps society as a whole should reconsider the results of Skinnerian behaviorism and the decrease of corporal punishment in the home and school—results seen every day in the meaningless violence within American's communities.

Although a work of fiction, Roots possesses enough research to suggest that the positive results of initiations such as Kunta Kinte's might be enough reason to attempt the implementation of a similar ritual, not only within African-American communities, but in all communities where youth face great odds for a successful upbringing. Anthropological data confirm the positive benefits of manhood initiation in tribal cultures throughout the world. Those who object to the use of the fictional Roots as a model for reality not only should note the enormous anthropological evidence corroborating the significance of Kunta's ordeal, but also should reacquaint themselves with one of fiction's greatest functions: to inform life. Community centers and social groups with their relaxed and nonviolent benevolence have generally failed to slow the tide of negative violence many youths inflict on one another in the service of gangs and hurtful groups. It may be that a system similar in spirit to the Mandinkan use of violence within meaningful contexts of intention can prevent our nation's youth from being consumed by the meaningless violence of gang- and drug-warfare—the violence whose only intention is to destroy.

Notes

1. This quotation is taken from Bruce Lincoln's book Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women's Initiation, page 108. It may seem anomalous to attach an epigraph from a book focusing on the initiation of women to an essay focusing on the initiation of men. I want, however, to illustrate two ideas with this epigraph: first, that the significances of women's initiations have, at a certain level, correspondences with those of men's initiations; and second, that, as Robert Bly writes, “there are in reality besides these two states, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine,’ all sorts of degrees, intermediate states, unions, combinations, special cases, genius exceptions, and so on” (236). As a male, I am focusing on that gender which by nature I know best; this essay is not an attempt to be exclusionary, but rather to speak to that with which I am most familiar. That being said, I would like to thank Dr. Nancy Chinn, Bindu Malieckal, and David Ruiter for providing helpful criticism during the writing and revising of this essay.

2. In her essay “Roots and the Heroic Search for Identity.” Helen Chavis Othow identifies “seven hero-protagonists in Roots, corresponding to the seven generations from which the author traces his ancestry” (317).

3. This paper uses the term a priori in the sense of its second, philosophical definition: “existing in the mind prior to and independent of experience” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language).

4. All page references to Roots are from the first Dell edition of 1977 (see Works Cited for bibliographic details).

5. The significance of sensory and other prohibitions such as the covering of Kunta's head is clearly explained by Eliade thus: “… all these prohibitions—fasting, silence, darkness, complete suppression of sight or its restriction to the ground between the novice's feet—also constitute so many ascetic exercises. The novice is forced to concentrate, to meditate. Hence the various physical ordeals also have a spiritual meaning. The neophyte is at once prepared for the responsibilities of adult life and progressively awakened to the life of the spirit” (Birth and Rebirth 16).

6. Researchers such as Y. A. Cohen have hypothesized that “cataclysmic experiences during periods of momentous vulnerability and psychological exposure” are vital to a fully effective instilling of social responsibility. Cohen correctly suggests that “these periods … occur during the transition from childhood to adolescence” (138).

7. An interesting inverse proportionality manifests itself in these two “initiations”: while beatings on the slave ship increase throughout the voyage's duration, those in jujuo decrease as the trainees demonstrate their knowledge, self-discipline, and responsibility.

8. The level of violence of the slave initiation is obviously much more severe and gruesome than that of manhood initiation. Nevertheless, the fact that violence is used as a method of instruction by the men of Juffure prohibits a total condemnation of violence per se without misconstruing the novel by negating the positive effects of certain forms of violence.

9. The parallel nature of the two initiations is reinforced temporally as well as thematically, for the time spent in manhood training is equal to that spent on the slave ship. Manhood training ends “with the fourth moon high and full in the heavens” (Haley 124)—the full moon being the midpoint in the lunar month; the slave ship lands in America “four and a half moons” after its departure from Africa (Haley 209).

10. It is not my intention to delve deeply into Staddon's essay, although I would recommend it to anyone who considers the tenets of Skinnerian behaviorism as scientifically proved.

11. Bly's reference to the Kikuyu is found on pages 15-16 of Iron John.

Works Cited

“A priori.” Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Unabridged. 1967 ed.

Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book About Men. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1990.

Cohen, Yehudi A. The Transition from Childhood to Adolescence: Cross-Cultural Studies of Initiation Ceremonies, Legal Systems, and Incest Taboos. Chicago: Adine, 1964.

Courlander, Harold. “Kunta Kinte's Struggle to be African.” Phylon 47.4 (1986): 294-302.

Eliade, Mircea. Birth and Rebirth. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958.

Gaster, Theodor H. Jacket Notes. Birth and Rebirth. By Mircea Eliade. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958.

Haley, Alex. Roots. 1976. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977.

Herdt, Gilbert H. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.

Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women's Initiation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.

Mark, Peter. The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Mead, Margaret. “Ritual and Social Crisis.” The Roots of Ritual. Ed. James D. Shaughnessy. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973.

Othow, Helen Chavis. “Roots and the Heroic Search for Identity.” College Language Association Journal 26.3 (1983): 311-24.

Staddon, John. “On Responsibility and Punishment.” The Atlantic February 1995: 88+.

Walinsky, Adam. “The Crisis of Public Order.” The Atlantic July 1995: 39+.