Everybody Knows Her Name: The Recovery of The Past in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose
1989; Johns Hopkins University Press; Issue: 40 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2931302
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoNot having been around people very much who are dying, I did not know until then how it felt to see somebody walking down the hall tonight, then not see them in the morning because they are gone. Gone with a big letter, gone with a capital G. I mean solid and really not-here-no-more-gone. Silent, with nobody to scream. Nobody like Zarita around to make a big noise, nor Joyce to cry sweet and polite. Nobody to yell, 'He's gone.' name I can't But maybe why I remember that man in Baltimore so well is because there was not a human to cry, 'Gone! He's gone!' -Langston Hughes, Empty Room His name I can't recall. Simple's painful recollection of the death of an unnamed roomer in one of Langston Hughes's Simple tales (105-06) is a poignant emblem of humanity's dread of annihilation, not mere physical extinction but the obliteration of one's prior existence and significance from human memory. Simple's urge to excavate the life of this anonymous roomer from the tomb of oblivion parallels a major scene in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) when the protagonist, Dessa Rose-herself unnamed in a patriarchal sense since she lacks a patronymic-recites a concise genealogy of her family, naming them for posterity lest they be forgotten (119). This torrent of family names appears in a novel intensely concerned with onomastics: names, nicknames, pet names, misnomers, and name-calling, for example. In fact, Williams's entire novel is a signifying text on many levels. Three personal names, a pet name, and an epithet are used ironically and symbolically: Adam Nehemiah, Kaine, Mammy, Rose, and devil woman, an epithet conferred upon Dessa Rose.1 Moreover, Dessa literally reclaims her given name and figuratively reclaims her personal history. Consistently misnamed Odessa; referred to successively as The Darky, The Wench, and The Negress in the titles of three major sections of the novel; and called out of her name with expressions like 'devil woman' (20, 178), 'treacherous nigger bitch' (22), and 'uppity, insolent slut' (121) -this ex-slave narrator, formerly illiterate, transforms herself into the Dessa Rose Anti-Defamation League. By the time of the action in the novel's Epilogue, she has begun to inscribe
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