Macon's Hip-Hop Credentials

In the first chapter of the first part of Angry Black White Boy, we get a pretty detailed picture of Macon Detornay's cultural immersion in hip-hop and how this has led to a much deeper exploration of African American history and culture. He is proud of the depth and breadth of his hip-hop knowledge, as when he makes sure Andre (who is from L.A.) knows that Macon is "the only kid from the Bean [a.k.a. Boston] who was up on L.A. hip hop before Straight Outta Compton," namedropping KDAY tapes that he got "from [his] man's cousin." Andre acknowledges that "that's some O.G. shit," and seems duly impressed. Macon is eager to impress the reader with the depth of his knowledge of Five Percenter terminology and cosmology, as he reviews his notes "with idle pride" while piloting his cab through Manhattan. Indeed, he is correct in assuming that there aren't too many white boys out there who know this stuff as well as he does, and "he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn't known this shit." So how did he gain access to this privileged knowledge and alternative education?

Macon got into hip-hop during what is known as the "Golden Age," from about 1988 to about 1992, when it was still relatively rare for a white kid to listen, and even more rare for a white kid to listen as closely and deeply as Macon does, right before the genre crossed over into mainstream acceptance and, many critics would say, a watered-down and more commercialized style and content. The New York-based rappers who dominated this period--Brand Nubian, A Tribe Called Quest, X-Clan, Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and others--all hail from the generation after Black Power, and many of them were raised with Five Percenter philosophy and youth programs in their communities, which is reflected in their work. The music and lyrics are explicitly Afrocentric, and the imagery explicitly alludes to Five Percent Nation and Nation of Islam iconography and specific locations in Harlem, where the movement began. References to "the Asiatic Black Man," "Gods," "Earths," "Knowledge of Self," and other Five Percenter terms abound. Rappers address issues like economic nationalism and self-reliance, Afrocentric pride, the whitewashing of Eurocentric history, and a host of related topics that undergird Macon's alternative education.

To get a quick sense of the historical progression between the Golden Age and the commercialized era in which the novel is set, which Macon despises, compare this video by Brand Nubian ("Wake Up," from the album All for One, 1990):

to this one, from 1998, featuring the Cash Money Millionaires and a tune aptly titled "Bling Bling":

In the Brand Nubian video, the locations and images are specific and significant--street corners and storefront mosques in Harlem, Five Percenter iconography, Afrocentric fashion (beads, Africa medallions, dashikis and kufis)--and the lyrics are all about raising the listener's spiritual and political consciousness (i.e. "wake up!"). By 1998, we see how fully the aesthetic of rap videos has been transformed by commercial viability and MTV: the Africa medallions have been supplanted by a gold-and-diamond-encrusted dollar sign, and the lyrics and imagery are an unabashed celebration of the trappings of wealth and luxury. Social and political consciousness is out, bling is in, and if Macon has a chip on his shoulder about the current state of hip-hop at the time the novel takes place, developments like these have a lot to do with it.

Jack as Utopian Social Critic

It’s a common trope of utopian literature to feature an outsider’s perspective to comment on our flawed civilization. The traveler from another planet, or some distant imaginary realm, or the future, will be led on a walking tour of earth’s poor houses, prisons, and mental institutions, and the outsider will comment repeatedly on how shocking, confusing, and unnecessary all these social ills truly are. “In our advanced civilization, you see, there is no sickness and no poverty. We’ve solved the problem of crime, and we have no jails. Why is it that people in your world go hungry, when there is more than enough food to go around?” The effect, of course, is to lead the reader to compare his or her familiar society with the radically unfamiliar (and, in many cases, depressingly implausible) idealized civilization the outsider represents.

Emma Donoghue uses Jack and his unique perspective to an analogous effect in Room (although I am emphatically not suggesting that she posits Ma and Jack’s experience in Room as some kind of Utopia). One of Jack’s earliest interactions with a medical professional, soon after his and Ma’s escape/rescue, entails the doctor telling Jack he’s “some kind of hero” and asking him, “How’re you liking the world so far?” (177). Jack is bewildered, of course, and remains silent on “the world so far.” He can only nod once the doctor loads the dice and prompts him with, “Pretty nice?” At this early point, not much is “nice” about being in the world for Jack. He does end up finding much about the world to be “pretty nice”—bacon, ice cream, Legos—but he also finds the world bewilderingly complex and often ambivalent. For Jack, we all exist in an increasingly vast realm he calls Outside, but from our perspective, he’s the outsider, and Donoghue uses Jack’s sharp, intelligent, perceptive narration repeatedly to shine a critical light on aspects of our world we take for granted, much like the Utopian novelist.

Noreen describes Jack as “like a visitor from another planet” (225), and while he corrects her (“We’re not visitors, Ma says we have to stay forever till we’re dead”), his observations about early twenty-first century American society often serve a kind of social-critical function, akin to the visitor from another planet in Utopian fiction. Jack returns repeatedly to the idea that he and Ma are not fundamentally the same as these other people he’s seeing everywhere, and he has trouble getting his head around the fact that Ma once was one of them. He accepts Dr. Clay’s insistence that he’s “one of us,” part of “humankind,” but Jack privately wonders, “maybe I’m a human but I’m a me-and-Ma as well. I don’t know a word for us two. Roomers?” (274). But Jack is really the only true “Roomer,” as Ma is not forming her impressions of our planet for the first time, the way Jack is. When he makes offhanded comments like, “Outsiders are not like us, they’ve got a million of things and different kinds of each thing, like all different chocolate bars and machines and shoes. Their things are all for different doing, like nailbrush and toothbrush and sweeping brush and toilet brush and clothes brush and yard brush and hairbrush” (264), this serves both as a representation of his genuine disorientation at the endless variety of things that occupy space in our world and an implicit comment on all the stuff we surround ourselves with. In contrast, Ma and Jack’s starkly reduced way of life in Room might seem ideally simplified.

Plenty of Jack’s observations, wherein he defamiliarizes our world in a way that allows us to see it fresh, are simply funny—like when he alludes to the book about “mutant turtles who say no to drugs” (224). Or he points out totally familiar habits of speech, often involving the weird ways adults relate to children, because he hasn’t heard these things thousands of times, as other kids have (like when he bangs his head on the faucet in the bath and Grandma says “Careful”: “Why do persons only say that after the hurt?” [283]—good question, Jack!). At times he offers a kind of social-critical commentary, but it seems like he must be repeating an explanation Grandma or Steppa or Ma has given him, as when he describes the lottery: “The little cards with numbers all over are called a lottery, idiots buy them hoping to get magicked into millionaires” (285). This passage begins as Jack making his own observations about the sheer amount of trash our profligate civilization generates—“There’s lots of every kind of thing in the world but it all costs money, even stuff to throw away, like the man in the line ahead of us in the convenience store buys a something in a box and rips the box and puts it in the trash right away”—but “idiots” is not a word Jack typically uses, and when he describes the lottery, we imagine him parroting something Grandma must have said (as kids will do).

But some of his comments veer closer to social commentary, especially when he’s making observations about parenting. Again, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything ideal about Jack and Ma’s arrangement (like the book-club member who compares their imprisonment to her “peaceful” week spent at a monastery in Scotland, easily one of the dumbest comments made in this book [280]). But compared to Bronwyn and her parents—who I’m sure are fine people, and Bronwyn is going to grow up to be a fine, if somewhat entitled and overindulged, young woman—Jack and Ma seem to be doing pretty well. Jack is struggling to adjust to Outside, naturally, but his disorientation at the mall has everything to do with the fact that he has never been to a mall before, has never even heard of one, and doesn’t even know how stores work. If Jack behaves “badly” in the scene where Paul and Deana take him to the mall, it’s because he has no idea what’s going on. Bronwyn’s behavior, we surmise, is par for the course. She is accustomed to throwing a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way, and her parents are all too ready to indulge her. Paul and Deana’s take on parenting is very familiar to me as a contemporary American parent—and far be it from any of us to judge a fellow parent’s efforts too harshly. But dismissing a drum as a gift for a child as a “concussion hazard” seems like an especially ludicrous example of the modern-day obsession with helmets and safety seats and protecting children from every possible risk that might befall them. I’m not saying Bronwyn is turning into a little monster (though you’re certainly free to draw that conclusion yourself), but it’s clearly not a case of Paul and Deana’s parenting looking obviously so much better than Ma’s.

Some of Jack’s observations sound almost too pat, too perceptive and pointed and critically astute for even an exceptionally verbal five-year-old. “In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. [Uni students: Holla!] Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don’t have jobs, so I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything” (286). Paul and Deana, of course, are balancing child-rearing with jobs (so Bronwyn gets to go to a high-end daycare facility to study sign language and hip-hop!), and this maybe has something to do with their Starbucks-fueled state of perpetual anxiety at the mall. But this passage also calls to mind the Utopian-fiction dynamic I described above: “You earthlings seem to always be in a hurry, but you never truly allow yourselves to be at the place you are.” Jack seems right, of course, and the reader is intended to glimpse something about the way we all live these days—to see contemporary culture mirrored back to us through the eyes of an innocent.

In the next paragraph, Jack nails a scenario that I certainly recognize as a parent: “Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear” (287). We might update this playground scenario a year or two and describe the parents filming the kids’ reenactment of the “cute” thing, and then ignoring the kid while posting the footage to Facebook on their phone. I find this passage extremely sad—which is saying something in such a sad novel. It’s the impression that the parents “mostly don’t seem to like” their kids, even as they photograph them and share their “accomplishments.” Jack’s mother has no photos of his early years, but she doesn’t see this as “terrible” the way her mother does: “I don’t forget a day of it” (299). But Jack has no doubt in his mind that Ma “likes” him (in addition to loving him—not necessarily the same thing). It’s partly a result of their perverse living arrangements that creates this closeness, and again, Donoghue is not endorsing the situation that led to this special closeness. But as with the Utopian outsider commenting on the ways of our world, we might feel indicted in this visitor from another planet’s description of what we look like when we’re supposed to be playing with our kids.

“The Limits of Jack’s World”

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein summed up his conclusions about the relationship between language and the world in an oft-cited aphorism: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The implications of this statement are profound: Wittgenstein is not quite saying that “all we have is language,” that there “is no objective reality” apart from language, but he does insist that we have no meaningful experience of the world without the language in which to conceive and express that experience. Our reality is shaped by our language, and not the other way around. “Objective reality” is not something we have unmediated access to, and so to that extent it does not meaningfully exist. Our picture of reality is entirely determined—and limited—by our capacity to say (or think) something coherent about and within it. “The world,” in this formulation, is not a material thing or place “out there” but rather a reflection and projection of our language itself. Elsewhere in the same volume, Wittgenstein observes, “The world is everything that is the case”—when we say “the world,” we basically mean “everything it makes sense to say.”

Learning a language means learning a world. And watching a child learn language is a powerful illustration of this concept in practice—you can see as they file new information, new words and concepts, into their already existing picture of the world. A new word or concept needs to fit somehow, and that “somehow” is grammatical. When I learn that the earth revolves around the sun, a picture of the universe and my place within it takes hold. If I were living before Copernicus, I would have inherited a different picture of the cosmos, and different sentences would make sense to me: my language would be in many ways incompatible with the language I now speak. A whole bunch of statements that would be true and reasonable in my language would make me sound ignorant, superstitious, or even blasphemous in a pre-Copernican context. I haven’t gone out and independently investigated and confirmed the orbit of the earth around the sun; it simply makes grammatical sense within my inherited language to talk this way. Statements about the earth’s movements are “held in place” by the larger linguistic context within which these statements make sense. This is true for everything we know. Our minds are circumscribed to a profound degree by our language.

In Room, by creating a narrative voice for Jack and engaging us intimately with his point of view as he tries to make sense of his profoundly circumscribed world, Donoghue illustrates Wittgenstein’s insights into the nature of language and our perception and experience of reality. We surmise, from the earliest pages, that Jack’s strange way of speaking is an accurate reflection of the reality he is forced to inhabit. He doesn’t feel constrained by the narrow dimensions of Room because he doesn’t know anything else. Jack’s “Room” seems to require only a limited number of words—the objects he needs nouns for are much more limited than for the average child. Jack has no need for generic nouns (a bed, a stove, a thermostat—or a mother, for that matter). So instead his world is populated by proper nouns: Bed, Door, Thermostat, Ma, and so on. These are literally one of a kind for him, as simply explaining that there are other doors of which “Door” is but one example would require explaining a lot to Jack, and Ma hasn’t been up to the task. He can see that doors are represented on TV, and that these resemble his Door in their form and operations, but this is explained by his dichotomy of “real” versus “TV”—TV represents another “planet,” another “world,” and his world has only one Door.

Ma is doing a heroic job of attempting to educate Jack, to exercise his mind and to teach him to read and do math and to learn things about science. And when it comes to language, the endeavor is full of dangerous territory. Jack’s world is profoundly, artificially, and criminally limited by Old Nick—but it’s crucial to grasp that Jack doesn’t experience it as such. His language makes his experience of Room incredibly rich; as we’ve talked about in class, it’s the setting for all these fun games Ma has invented, it’s populated by furniture and items that reflect his personal history (and he knows these stories by heart), and which Ma has “personified” by giving them proper names and genders. But the process of learning language, as anyone who has spent time around five-year-olds can attest, means asking a lot of questions, usually questions about what is real and what isn’t, and how one thing relates to another. Kids at this age have this insatiable hunger to learn about their world, and it’s no coincidence that this is the point at which their linguistic capacity has developed to the extent that they can frame such questions independently: a certain “bedrock” needs to be established before questions can even be formed. This is precisely the dilemma Ma faces as the novel opens—we can see that it’s becoming more and more difficult for her to maintain the bedrock fiction of “Room” as the entire universe in an 11x11 space. Jack’s questions, the new words and concepts he’s constantly learning, inevitably bump him up against the limits of his world. Jack’s language seems to be starting to outgrow his narrowly circumscribed world. Or, to stick with Wittgenstein’s formulation, as his language expands, his world inevitably does, too. And Ma will need to find a way to deal with this.

In the scenes before Ma decides to finally tell Jack her “story”—to “unlie” and strip him of his innocence—we repeatedly see how Jack’s questions press against the limits of what Ma is willing to tell him. She’s beginning to see that he cannot fully learn language without requiring her to explain a whole host of things that she has tried to keep him innocent of. When they measure Jack’s height on his fifth birthday, Ma remarks that it’s “normal” for him not to have grown more than an inch or two over the previous year (even as she’s clearly worried that it’s not normal, and that Jack’s development is stunted). Jack asks,  “What’s normal?” (13). He’s not asking what would have been a more typical amount of growth in a year, and he is not intending to make some broader point here about diversity (What is “normal,” after all? Aren’t we all unique individuals?); he simply does not know what the word “normal” means. Now how would you define it for Jack? Ma “chews her mouth” as she tries to find a way out of this corner. “It means OK. No hay problema.” Jack accepts this explanation and moves on, but we get a glimpse here of the minefield Ma must step through with even the most ordinary (or normal) words: not only is nothing about Jack’s growth and development “normal” (hay problema, in other words), but even trying to explain the concept of normativity, of Jack’s growth being more or less in line with how kids “typically” grow, would mean introducing him to the idea of a vast mass of other kids out there in the world, against whom he can be measured. His picture of the world would be altered. Ma can’t really define the word without sharing the picture of the world (that it is inhabited by billions of other people, and that we can generalize about the way they grow up) that it reflects. Jack’s world is limited by his language.

Later in the same scene, Jack says that he wants to “grow to a giant, but a nice one, up to here” (13), and Ma replies, “Sounds great,” but Jack notices that “Her face is gone flat, that means I said a wrong thing but I don’t know which” (14). What has Jack said “wrong” here? Well, he seems to believe that sometime around when he turns ten he’ll transform into a woman and have a baby boy growing in his belly—his mother has had to resort to more than the usual prevarications parents use to avoid answering tough questions about where babies come from. But it’s clear to us that Ma is hanging up on Jack’s simple claim about what he wants to be when he “grows [up]”—he hasn’t said anything wrong, and he is learning what phrases like “grow up” mean and that this will happen to him in some form. But for Ma this phrase calls up a world of trouble Jack is not privy to: what will he be when he “grows”? How much longer can this situation persist? Jack’s familiar and amiable fantasy about wanting to grow into a “giant” (kids say stuff like this all the time) evokes near panic in Ma, one that’s growing throughout these early pages, as she sees his language starting to expand beyond the walls of Room.

The game of Parrot, where Jack has to memorize a string of spoken words from the TV and repeat them verbatim, is a brilliant way to exercise his mind and develop his vocabulary—one more example of Ma’s heroic improvisational skills as a parent and educator. But this also provides an exceptionally risky venture, in terms of maintaining Jack’s limited language to reflect his limited world: Jack misconstrues “labor law” as “labeling” when he repeats a phrase from a guest on a political talk show. Ma corrects him, like a good teacher, and when he asks “What’s the difference?” she makes an effort to answer. “Labeling is stickers on tomatoes, say, and labor law—” (35). Where can she go from here? How would you define “labor law” in a way Jack could understand? Ma is visibly relieved when Jack lets her off the hook with his “huge yawn” (really, no five-year-old actually wants an adult to explain labor law). But again, we see how impossible the fiction of Room will be for Ma to maintain.

To her credit, Ma does not allow Jack’s world to stay limited by Room’s four walls. She could have done so, perhaps—banishing TV entirely, and sticking to the fiction that they are the only two “real” people in the universe, with Old Nick occupying a position somewhere between God and jailer (or Santa and Satan). But Ma wants to educate her son, to raise him to be a “human,” intelligent and self-aware and maybe even “normal,” and we’ll see, in “Dying,” how relieved she is to finally abandon the ruse and let him in on her secrets. She now has a co-conspirator, and Jack’s intelligence will be vital to their escape plan. Jack is devastated when his picture of his tiny world is suddenly blown wide open, but he’s better equipped to handle it because Ma has educated him so well. He has an exceptional vocabulary for a boy his age, and in his circumstances, and this means that he can accommodate all this new space, all these new people.