Preadhin' and Singin' Just to Make It Over: The Gospel Impulse as Survival Strategy in Leon Forrest's Bloodworth Trilogy
2016; Saint Louis University; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoAs an artist steeped in African American tradition and culture, Leon Forrest consistently drew from their wellsprings recreate in his fiction both the horror and beauty of the African American experience as he perceived it. Among the many media through which this experience is most basically expressed is music. From the sorrow songs ragtime the spirituals and the blues jazz and gospel, black music has provided for the African American writer a springboard into culture and the contemporary experience. This was certainly true for Forrest, who not only used music as theme and metaphor throughout his fiction but whose development as a writer was admittedly influenced by black music in general, and Mahalia Jackson's gospel music in particular. In fact, in the opening essay of The Furious Voice for Freedom, a critical collection inspired by Forrest's love of Lady Day, the author acknowledges the reinventive quality of music, which he became aware of through both his father (who was an amateur lyricist ) and his mother (whom he describes as a story-telling vocalist), as one of his greatest artistic inspirations. The vocalist's attempt get back the purity of the instrument and the instrumentalist's attempt get the purity of the vocalist, he admits, became a standard for him as a writer as he tried commit paper the literary voices he heard in his head. And while all black music, in a general sense, possesses the transforming power he so desperately sought for his writing, it is Mahalia Jackson's How I Got Over and Didn't It Rain that taught Forrest how release his soul-in-agony onto paper. He recalls: It was the mid-1960s. I was down and out. Jobless. And I was trying make one last-ditch effort at becoming a writer. But I couldn't seem turn the corner without running into a slew of dead-end corridors....The death of my mother--an anchor and a rock, a source of worship and agony--had left me riddled and confused...(27) Each evening after another failed job attempt, I'd come home, fix another can of beans or sardines, pray that I could find a way out of no way at my typewriter, and try again. And I'd listen Mahalia Jackson on a small record player. I had friends. Intellectual friends and a few who were also trying write. But none who cared for the life of the spirit--or the spiritual questions....But in the heartless days of winter...Mahalia's visited me on several occasions....Her scripture of song was enough; she seemed reach me in a profound way as I raced around my labyrinth of dislocation, through her song How I Got Over....Mahalia seemed move over mountains and reintroduce me the motherlode and the mother tongue of folk culture....Mahalia's music seemed evolve me out of my condition. (28) Through Mahalia, Forrest was reminded that most great literature deals with spiritual agony and the hero's attempt transcend it. (1) From Mahalia he learned that if he wanted be born as a writer, he would have to die over and over the worldly quest of harmony within the since, ultimately, the artist must constantly transform himself again and out of the chaos of his soul if the moment of miracle is have any meaning for the listening audience. So while we see the influence of multiple genres of black music throughout Forrest's fiction--it is Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit that drives There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden and Lightnin' Hopkins's I've Had My Fun that inspires scenes from The Blood worth Orphans--his thematic fascination with reinventive transformation, a technique most often associated with and approached through jazz, posits gospel music (more so than other genres) among the strongest metaphors through which read the novels of a writer who sought reveal survival strategies that find success in both the sacred and the secular world. …
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