Introduction

Lacan prides himself as “the vicar of Freud” with the sole mission of rerouting psychoanalysis back to its root. But a precocious reading of Lacan does not make that mission obvious until one reads Freud himself. There lies the wisdom of Lacan, of which I am tapping through this writing. Particularly, I want to wrestle with the split subject as it relates to the Black race in Africa and America. And to get that going, I am reading the characters of Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory sitcom alongside Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. Both characters appear to be demonstrating the nature of the split subject representing Black African experience of colonization as well as the African American experience of “civil right.” Beneath these signifiers (as societal constructs) lies a new surface which speaks a better language.

Our main argument is that in the context of Africa, colonization was an error of misinteraction in the manner of the Amy-Sheldon saga, where the African black is caught in the web of signifiers that should have been bypassed by now. This implies that colonial (Amy-Sheldon) entanglement is half the story of the African people; the other half can be symbolized (or not) by the Lacanian split subject which precedes the mirror stage to which both colonization and civil right can be represented. Thus, a step beyond the chain of signifiers that define the black race could mean a new surface for a new connecting chain in the two phases of the black race. We shall begin with a cursory look at Seshadri-Crooks (2000) work on race and then analyze the two characters of interest and then proceed to show the new surface here envisaged.

Race-Civil Right and Colonization

These two signifiers plague the black dictionary in America and Africa respectively. Race is deemed “a practice of visibility” which is “a regime of looking” which thrives when the details of the viewed are recognized from the viewer’s symbolic position, “a system of organizing difference” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). Race is also viewed as a symptom and similar to Brennan’s “ego era” because of its defining attributes: dominating others and the environment (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). This author, having based her point of departure of racial discourse on sex, further attributes the fantasy of completeness which the discourse engenders, on the Hobbesian social contract. In that case, claims to participation in global affairs becomes heavily masked by domination and “personal (or particular) interest masquerades as public good” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000).

The elephant joke is applied in the theory of racism wherein an Englishman, a German, and a Negro were asked to tackle the subject, The Elephant. While the German was researching for 10 years bringing up 20 volumes of work, and the Englishman bought sophisticated hunting equipment and targeted elephants in Africa for 5 years and wrote on how to shoot, the Negro “simply retired to his home and wrote a letter to the Times on the subject: ‘The Elephant and the Race Problem.’” While this is a joke, and Seshadri-Crooks does not directly expound on it, this withdrawal effect of the Negro is very significant regarding the role of signifiers in the black symbolic world. How else can we explain a rich continent like Africa as the poorest place in the world?

Race was born when the surplus value of the African peoples toppled the immensity of European invaders such that the latter cared less to belong to the same human species (Arendt, quoted by Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). Further attention to the issue of race shows also that bureaucracy thrives on the legend of the Whiteman (the hero) slaying the primitive dragon of superstition, “which deteriorate rapidly into boyhood ideas of adventure as selfless service to the cause of Empire” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). Yet, analyzing the role of Whiteness through the extremes of formlessness and annihilation, whiteness functions both as support and panic-inducing kernel (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). As master signifier, “extimacy” (“paradox of the excluded interior”) is re-enacted. Race and bureaucracy merge in the relationship of the colonialists to Africa.

The uncanny shows up in the fight against global racism especially directed towards the black. The laughter of the natives on the colonizer himself who does not like the Empire duty and is threatened by the laughter evokes anxiety in the colonizer. Refusing to be the subject of that laughter “is the natural impulse of an authority figure to police the strange as it were” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). Such a reaction while anxiety-driven also makes recourse to “the colonizer’s inclination to infantilize the natives to sustain the logic of the civilizing mission.” In the case of the contradiction between bureaucracy and race where the subject is politically vulnerable, comic relief becomes a great tool to help cope. It attempts to conceal the gap between the fragmented body and ego ideal, serving as “safety valve for narcissistic aggression.”

Yet, if it is true, as Lacan says, that the closer we get to “real psychoanalysis,” the humorous it becomes, it can be wagered that the role of the African American subject is in dire need of complementarity by the black on the other side (the African). Hostile jokes, according to Freud, become a substitute for the forbidden violence between natives and foreigners’ civil laws. But as critiqued by Palmer, racist jokes can be a recycler of violence rather than a defuser. In such a situation, he sees no reason why jokes cannot “possess the agency to overturn rather than uphold social norms or inhibitions against hostility” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000).

During the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in the USA, some scenes featured music and dance in place of destroying buildings. That would serve as the displacement of a just anger (aggression) that Palmer would want reviewed in-depth. In other words, the illusion of containing racialized anger by a sense of humor can indirectly keep the cycle of oppression and violence on, and in the case of colonization, it does a lot of harm. Recounting the joke of a Texan in Africa, who was advised to go shoot an elephant, but he’d rather shoot “the head beater of drums,” (an African noisy nigger), Palmer says, “It is only in the colonial scene – in Africa – that this particular Texan can free himself from the pressure to displace his aggression” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). In the USA, such jokes are crafted in the context of “an economy of juridical prohibition and inflammation of differences.”

But Arendt is right in her notion of “administrative massacres” as a recycler of colonial violence against the natives. This was and is still the enactment of the in-between wherein the one who represented the face of the empire was free to not be responsible to the parliament or law in general. “Thus the ambivalence of colonialism, or the regime of Whiteness, both can or cannot produce jokes” (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000). This is very interesting when one is at that in-between world as an African. The danger is that Whiteness as formlessness becomes the only screen viewed by both the innocent African and the African American whose eyes only see Whiteness. The repetition experienced in black fight for freedom both shows the success of Whiteness (still an illusion of wholeness) and the failure of the eyes.

True overcoming of racism can be in the fields of wholeness and the comic relief that comes from the in-between position. What this means is that the biblical “deep is calling on deep” can tally with the Lacanian expression that the more jovial psychoanalysis is, the more it is psychoanalysis. Thus, we can say that the repetition of racial episodes signals a certain going back in response to the call of the deep. It means while the African American is out on the street of the USA thinking he is fighting against racism, that very action invites him to adjest and adjust his gaze (the Lacanian donteregard) in the manner of passing through to the platonic world of forms where other blacks take their stand. Such an adjustment would only lead to a greater harmony with the root. In other words, what sounds like a joke — there is something within the black body everywhere that calls for a better form of closeness in the fight against racism — is real in the non-Lacanian sense. For:

Any system of thought that has refined itself beyond the ability to imagine kinship with the stranded Guatemalan kid detained at the U.S. border, or with the functionally enslaved Uyghur in China, or, again—I can’t get over it—with the Native American on whose stolen ancestral ground you live and do your business, is lost in its own fog… the impulse toward freedom is always seeking friends (Cunningham, 2020).

From the Split Subject…

Lacan translates “the Freudian trio” — the id, the ego, and the superego — into the registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. This language is very important for the Lacanian idea of the subject. A seminal reading of Freud’s clinical vignettes gives the impression of the client’s psychic world functioning like strings without a core. For instance, in the analysis of Dora, Freud shows the client as just a string floating in the sea. So, one question is, who is she? This question rouses the interest of Lacan is rediscovering the subject of the unconscious (Smith, 1988). The idea of strings without a core locates the unconscious: at that core, the in-between space where the break — the split — occurs. This analogy already betrays a form of instability in ordinary language, but a key notion of the Lacanian unconscious. The subject then becomes “only an attribute of such a being” referring to “any living active being” to which language becomes the Other. The unconscious is then “imbricated into both” and determines their mode of conjunction (Smith, 1988). It has a life of its own, and as such, can break and carry on its own activity, “constituting a kind of surface in motion where the ‘subject’ is, exactly, articulated in its relation to language,” the edge of relating to the symbolic (Smith, 1988).

As “speakings,” the subject is born already divided, only with “homonymy” (Lacan, 2006). This subject is not a correspondence to any living being but as an attribute of being; it is the unconscious. “The opening and shutting of the unconscious in the activity of a lived life… gives the two domains [subject and Other] their mode of conjunction…. The unconscious is between them as their active break” (Lacan, 2006). The unconscious then introduces a break that is not portrayed in what is said: “God gives them speech to hide their thoughts” (Lacan, 2006).

Beyond psychoanalysis, though, his idea of the split subject applies to the African identity as well. The theory of the Lacanian subject is like the subject itself: it comes first in “nots” and “buts” as we see in Fink (1995) analogies. The “individual” or “conscious subject” in Anglo-American thought is not the true subject. This is because the conscious thinking and speaking subject has been drowned by ego psychology which crystallizes what is fluid. This “crystallization error” of “sedimented ideal images” is “tantamount to a fixed reified object with which a child learns to identify, which a child learns to identify with him or herself” (Fink, 1995). In this notion of sedimentation or crystallization is the assimilation of various images to be cathected and most come from the reflection of the Parental Other. The Lacanian subject is also a “but.” In other words, the subject is everything but a permanent entity unlike the unconscious: “ne and ‘but’ sign the death sentence of the subject of the unconscious” (Fink, 1995). To this signature might be added the role of the imago (Lacan, 1953, 2006).

The Lacanian subject, then is not the speaking subject, because once the subject has spoken, it gets replaced by what is spoken about; the signifier replaced by the signified; “speech was given to man to hide his thoughts” (Lacan, 1953). The subject is a breach in discourse; it is “a fleeting irruption of something foreign or extraneous” (Fink, 1995). Freud had a similar idea about the subject — something that disappears “almost instantaneously.” But it is interesting how for Lacan the Cartesian subject functions in much the same way. This is in view of the fact that without repeating cogito ergo sum, no trace of his being can be made. That is an idyllic moment where the subject cannot take refuge (Fink, 1995). Rather than thinking-being overlap as we have in Cartesian thought — “I think, therefore, I am” — Lacan says there’s no such overlap in the true subject since the unconscious thought is the real focus, not the conscious one studied by “Descartes the philosopher.” The real notion of the subject is established “in the fact that a speaking being’s two ‘parts’ or avatars share no common ground: they are radically separated (the ego or false being requiring a refusal of unconscious thoughts, unconscious thought having no concern whatsoever for the ego’s fine opinion of itself)” (Fink, 1995). There lies the birth of “a surface with two sides.”

This description is so appropriate for the colonized subject who is also black. The split is traumatic. Though the subject has a fleeting existence, Lacan holds that bringing the I to its brief stage becomes then the work of analysis. The I is the position of responsibility (Fink, 1995) — something that is still missing in most of Africa.

As a part of Lacan’s critical discourse on the split subject, there is the idea that the ego is formed outside the subject. In other words, the mirror image that the subject views about itself can constitute a stumbling block for the subject. In the mirror stage, the child sees/hears the supposedly affirming phrases such as, “that is you,” “that is what I want to be.” These are meant to move the subject from incompletion to anticipation (Lacan, 2006). The subject is incomplete from birth, and yearns for completion and, in the case of Sheldon, closure. In that line of discourse is the role of “the Other,” beginning with the Parental Other. Alongside the parents is the fact that, according to Lacan, the construction of the image on the mirror happens on the outside too. In other words, the images displace or are displaced by the ego especially since the subject’s imaginary identity lies outside. The ego is “the other” just as the Parental Other. This phenomenon makes “double misrecognition” possible: alienation and deception. “The primordial ego corresponds to the first alienated stratum of our imaginary identity, the product of an original alienating redoubling of the subject caused by his capacity to identify himself with his mirror image (or with the imaginary other understood as a mirror image)” (Lacan, 2006).

The split of the subject is rooted in its premature birth, which predisposes the human subject to seek “the Other” beginning with parents. Colonization crafted a form of “societal parenting” for the colonized. The primordial incompletion of the black African society, like other societies at the time, became the vulnerable point on which colonization pitched its tent of error and the colonial master became a parent of some sort. What that means is that even though the subject is fleeting, much like the ego, the I of the black subject is still lying buried under the debris of the two monsters — colonialism and collectivism. The first exacerbated the imago of the black subject by pointing to a crystallized image of the Whiteman — “that is who you are.” Since then, Africans have defined their subjectivity in self-punishing ways.

To the Fragmented Land

The colonized black subject is not only split, but also inhabits a fragmented land. Within that understanding, we can deduce three forms of cracks (fragments) sustained by Africa in the process of its growth and development: the historical crack (Eric, 2016), the patriarchal crack (Achebe, 2017), and the bribery-corruption crack (Okonjo-Iweala, 2018). The first is the colonial, induced by the outsider’s desire for the black world, and the second and third are the foundations that aided the first. The patriarchal crack is the breakdown of effective communication among the different peoples that make Africa like we have in Nigeria’s small-minded false reconstruction of the nation in the images of the big dominant tribes. Bribery-corruption is the real demonstration of the black internally split subject which needs the attention of attuned scholarship.

With that being said, the pre–World War 1 infamous Berlin conference (1884–1885), chaired by Otto von Bismarck, is said to be the genesis of “colonial adventurism” (Eric, 2016) from which nation-states were doled out on Africa. Eric shows that the economic exploitation of the area merged into a country — Nigeria — was a strong reason for the overall colonial adventures in the first place. Notwithstanding the fact that ethnic groups, local kingdoms, and local states existed before, the whole idea of colonialization was not to study them in their own terms but to dominate, and that dominance has led to further fragmentation of Africa. Even after 100 years of colonial merger, Eric says the challenge of nation-building (healing the fragments) can be unbearable. It is good to note that Nigeria started as an independent nation in 1960 but was merged into a country in 1914 by Lord Lugard. Thus, Africa became the fragmented body to be tossed about as the property of the colonizer.

This fragmented body is often manifested in dreams: disconnected limbs, growing wings, and taking up arms for internal persecutions (Lacan, 2006). Fragilization also defines the hysteric’s fantasmatic anatomy manifested in schizoid and spasmodic symptoms. Thus, the I formation is like a stadium (or fortified camp) in dreams with walls and two opposing fields of battle with its remote inner castle forming a representation of the id (Lacan, 2006). A similar metaphor occurs in the neurotic. But one sees the fantasies of colonization replayed in the young African subject’s projection about the First World: as the white colonizer battered the African continent and left, so are the young black people wanting to follow the Whiteman to his homeland. The primary scene of creating fragments out of Africa was characterized by disaffirmation of the black subject and painted a wrong image of life for them. The black subject’s inordinate love of collectivism and conformism to “the original image” painted for them by the Whiteman blinds them from defining their I. Like the Lacanian description of dreams, the young black subject’s aspiration “to make it” in the Whiteman’s land requires the skilled and sustained attention of the attuned loving and caring scholar. But let’s first see how Sheldon and Amy portray that primary setting where the colonial master acted in persona of the Parental Other for Africa.

The Role of the Other

Sheldon and Amy

Amy Farrell Fowler is a key character in The Big Bang Theory, an American sitcom which ended its 12 season-long strides on May 16, 2019. This character later became the wife of the genius, Sheldon Cooper, and co-recipient (with him) of the Nobel in that sitcom. In the episode under consideration (Season 6, Episode 21, first aired on April 25, 2013), Cooper seeks “closure” after his favorite show was ended abruptly. Amy tries to teach him that in life, closure is not always guaranteed; Sheldon proves otherwise after she left him alone. Table 1 shows the transcript of the conversation between the two characters. This interaction is symbolic, and representative of the way colonial patterns are to be decoded by Africa herself. Following the imago painted for Africa by the outsider is not helping the continent at all. Sheldon shows how to handle an outsider effect by turning inwards — and that is what Africa has not done yet. Figure 1 then can function as a colonial image captured at the interactive scene of the two characters: Amy-Sheldon and colonizer-colonized.

Table 1 Sheldon’s search for closure transcript: a type of colonial interactive space (https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/The_Closure_Alternative#:~:text)
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Image of Amy and Sheldon, a type of colonization imago

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In that deep interaction between Amy and Sheldon, one sees the limited understanding of the Other. Yet many things are created in the world with that limited viewpoint.

Okonkwo

Okonkwo is the chief character in Things Fall Apart, a classic which shows the prior interaction between the colonizer and the African much like Amy and Sheldon. Okonkwo is a diehard defender of his African tradition as the man of the house, and is so loved by his tribesman, having served as their indefatigable warrior before the Whiteman comes. When the latter arrives on the stage, Okonkwo seems not to notice him. In other words, he does not ask the right question: what does this moment call for? He keeps going vehemently defending his customs and even beheading one of the first colonizers in that novel. Something is at stake here! Okonkwo is blind to his tribesmen’s opposite reaction to his; they all welcome the Whiteman and quickly adapt to his way of life while they are still in Africa. There is a switch in the role here: the Whiteman becomes the owner of the African world just by appearing on the stage. Okonkwo, the only potential savior of the tribe, soon would commit suicide for the insanity of his tribesmen who have welcome the Whiteman’s style of life with a flash of lightening.

Sheldon appears much like Okonkwo would if the latter were photographed; Amy functions both as the colonizer and the enforcer of civil rights. In the mirror stage of Lacan’s analysis, the ideal image projected for the child by the Parental Other is limited and can constitute an obstacle in the later development of the child.

It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge… into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process. The very normalization of this maturation is henceforth dependent in man on cultural intervention, as is exemplified by the fact that sexual object choice is dependent upon the Oedipus complex (Lacan, 2006).

Thus, the African desire beckons for a kind of cultural intervention that will see beyond the colonial master’s shortsightedness. The path to such intervention would have to be self-reflective as well. The cultural intervention needed by Africa is that of seeing wider what her issue is — the black split subject — on which colonization pitched its tent.

The Symbolic Order for Sheldon and Okonkwo

Colonization made the blacks, while in their homeland, to function as displaced Europeans. They became “other natives” (alter-natives) while their land became the extension of European Crowns. Colonization created a form of imaginary citizenship that the black split subject still struggles with, “the black wanting to be like the white” (Fanon, 1967). We can reverse that error through a deep self-reflective iatrogenic approach to our cultural forms and values. That is what happened after Amy left Sheldon alone, like the Whiteman’s departure from Africa, after the error of colonization. This idea opens a new way to discussing the form of error that colonization represents, and why, like Sheldon, we should transcend that realm to the black split subject itself.

Colonization is not yet seen as an error that anyone can commit while trying to help a loved one, a family, or a friend. So, we are saying, “let’s befriend the colonizer a bit and see what happens,” like Reinhartz (2001), a Jewish author, befriends “the beloved disciple” of Jesus so she could understand why this disciple used such a biting tone to describe “the Jews” in the gospel of John (Akpan, 2020, in press). Such an approach constitutes the tying of loose ends which is lacking in current academic-informed decolonization approaches to Africa’s problems. A new approach to colonization en route iatrogenesis builds on what happened after Amy left Sheldon alone. Immediately after Amy left, Sheldon attained his hitherto denied gratification (a stage yet to be reached by the black subject). But the call to consider colonization as a form of iatrogenesis even goes beyond Sheldon’s gratification. It poses introspective questions such as what was Amy trying to do? It is metacognitive and leads to the long overdue search for a shift in the black African’s understanding of its subjectivity, the foundation of its split story exacerbated by colonization.

The split black subject then becomes one who has remained at its current position of recipience for more than a thousand years (Mayer, 2002). For such an identity, life is still at the peripheral stage of naturality or in a more honest language, the realm where, as Hobbes says, life is brutish and short. It inhabits a realm where the tools in its domain can easily become weaponized because they come from the outside and not generated from within the subject. But, like Lacan encourages, the split subject is fleeting, meaning that the realm of the African subject is only temporary and can shift if the needed tools are applied efficiently — his unrootedness.

The Shift: Colonization and Racism as a Language of the Pharmakon

Jung (1948) has drawn our attention to the double effect of the Greek word, pharmakon, as “antidote” and as “poison.” From different perspectives, these two contrary ideas can be seen in colonial history. For instance, the giving of language to the African blacks in their homeland could be an antidote to the colonial perception of babbling as much as it poisoned the multilingual heritage of a people. Through one, many Africans communicate with the world and through the other, they disintegrate. It is the latter arm of the colonial pharmakon that sees Nigerians migrate to other lands with the same talents and treasures that could have been used to build their own homeland. The shift advocated here is to treat colonization as a pharmakon that was brought to “help” the African people. Shifting the language can also expand on the way we handle colonial-related aspects of the African life. The language of the pharmakon is a language of the heart, the one that sincerely sees through history to admit the fact that Africa is not only suffering from the fault of the Whiteman but has suffered worse in the hands of its own people, beginning from military iatrogenic intervention after independence as we had in Nigeria between 1966 and 1999! Yet, the foundation is still remote — the split subject.

It can be a herculean task to reverse an error, and in fact, as Meckler and Boal (2020) show, some iatrogenic instances are irreversible and very harmful. So-called solutions to black issues have always worn Western garbs and constitute a conformant following of patterns. These patterns continue to iatrogenize native values as well as the black subjectivity while feeding on the error strings established during the colonial era. Before we reverse iatrogenic situations in Africa, we have to start its discourse. What this means is that there are many natives that do not understand colonization as iatrogenic. All that they know is that “the Whiteman brought religion to us and helped us to worship the true God the right way.” With such bounded rationality comes the fight over who has the true God or the right way to worship as we have in the quagmire of the Nigerian Muslim-Christian rifts. Approaches already mentioned, like decolonization, layer out their “errors of resolution” by recycling the iatrogenic wheels.

But there is another way — the communal compassionate discourse on errors. Such a discussion would not just aim at solving the problems that have circled every black person in since the beginning of written history, but to bring out the virtue of honesty and integrity that have been in short supply ever since. The philosophy behind this proposal is that if we begin with a good-turn-evil moment in people’s lived experiences, they will all be excited to share and be more involved. In a group discussion, the facilitator can pose the question: “How many of you remember a time when you thought you were helping someone, but the person became so mad at you, and/or the situation got worse?” With such a personal approach, the foundation would have been laid for big categories like colonization to be introduced. But first, one must prepare the grounds for honest discussion and group formation where like and unlike minds can speak to each other.

An introspective approach to iatrogenesis can establish a richer ground for a better approach to errors of history in relation to the black world. Colonization introduced the beneficiary-benefactor dyadic relationship in Africa (Aderinto, 2018; Ekeocha, 2018). It brought a knife that slashed the global population into slaveable-unslaveable peoples (Akpan, in press), godly-ungodly nations (Goldie, 1890). Colonization also produced mental ableism (a subject yet to be attended to in Africa) by taking a predominantly traditional society and upturning their values, selecting some as educate-able and employable and the rest as trash (Achebe, 2017).

This last category is kept alive by the so-called National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) wherein “official” employment in Nigeria is only limited to those who have undergone that program rather than every citizen. So narrow a focus, contemporary African societies have kept the fire of the colonial dyads burning for so long, thus demonstrating the deep iatrogenic wounds in black subjectivity. There is an urgent need to shift by refuting the sociomedical approach to life, which was the prevailing tone during colonization. If the African approach to colonization shifts from being a mere reaction to the globally determined themes to an introspective mode such as “wait a minute, I have been a split subject from birth,” as Sheldon shifts from expecting gratification from Amy, then a new perspective on colonization can be intuited. The new fruit? How about individualized collectivism since the agency of the African subject to determine its social life is compromised by collectivism and exacerbated by colonialism? The shift to the language of the pharmakon is also a shift of focus to the realm of the split subject who can determine its healing course different from the outsider-determinant colonizer. It sees through the foundation of the African issues in new and creative ways.

Conclusion

In Lacanian thought, the mirror stage is the beginning of the imaginary. But the relationship that the mirror stage seeks to establish between the organism and its reality is already skewed in humans because of their premature birth. The African subject, who still lives as “the imaginary citizenship of Europe and America,” constitutes a diversion of attention from what is fundamental — that split subject from birth. Rather than look inward at what that split entails, much attention is paid to the big categories — “I am Christian,” “I am Muslim,” “we speak British English in Nigeria,” etc. — the scars of colonial entanglement. These robotic patterns of declaring one’s participation in the global scene are not affirming the black subject much like colonization. Lacan provides a base for re-examining the black colonized subject in ways that can bring about transformation within the communities of Africa.

In analyzing the Lacanian subject, we, with Fink (1995), read Freud’s second phrase — “I am being beaten by my father” — as showing what psychosocial height the black subject is yet to attain. A people that are typically communal (or collectivist as Western literature says) might be at the first phase — “the child is being beaten” — for a long time. The role of the scholar then is to move the people to where transformation is possible, and that is in the realm of the I. Even though the I is fleeting, it is a position of responsibility as demonstrated by Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory (Season 6, Episode 21, first aired on April 25, 2013). That is the position of hearkening from inside out which the black subject is yet to do.

In that light, we argue that the way the African American world had been modeled, much like what the father says to the son — “you are a model” — has been subjected to miscommunication. “You are a model” can mean “you are counterfeit” (Fink, 1995). Indeed, Hutchinson (2017), a former British consul to West Africa, labels the African as “naturally imitative” and functioning at a level of helpless infancy, not excluding their intelligence. “That is who you are” was a colonial language when the African subjectivity was molded as a European counterfeit. Like many acts that call the attention of the analyst, that kind of imago has been congealed and spread for many generations among African peoples, constituting intergenerational traumatic event (Sotero, 2006) that shows up in breakneck speed towards illegal immigration (Ikuteyijo, 2020) despite their enormous human and natural resources. A compassionate way, which we advocate, is the human way that breaks down the superior-inferior barriers erected during colonization. It means we all make mistakes and colonization was one; to right it is then to rework our ways through the I structure that is already skewed at birth. The African American might hear “civil right” but the meaning might be “you are not yet civilized.” That has been the attitude of the so-called global culture which Africa follows sheepishly but is yet to catch up as if their self-determination is nothing more than a “dead past” (Kimbles, 2014). The lasting foundation to black transcendence of the Other, the language crafted as error is for both sides of the divide — the African and the African American — to work together and bypass these signifiers. Both sides are still unrooted as it were. Cooper shines at the very spot where Okonkwo fails.