Search for Identity in James McBride’s The Color of Water

Abstract

James McBride’s autobiography The Color of Water explores issues of search for identity in the form of a tribute to his white mother, as James himself is a black son. James feels a question swirling around his head about why he and his mother has different color. But finally comes to the conclusion that, the effort of his mother to raise a fatherless family in the highly uncongenial Jewish, black and white American community is praise worthy. Young James learns the color of life as the color of water and then foregrounds the painful experience his mother had to undergo. James prioritizes his mother’s identity for his to be established. Going through the issues of cultural identity, this research presents the identity crisis and feelings of alienation in the mother and son. To seek special cultural relation between characters in foreign land of America, the issues of cultural hybridity from the prominent theorist, Homi K. Bhabha, and issue of blackness by Frantz Fanon has been applied to examine the text. Finally, in this connection of relations, and struggle of living in America as being black and Jewish, James solely locates himself as the part of the great loving mother.