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Inscriptions in the Dust: A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved as Ancestral Requiems

2002; Saint Louis University; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2903363

1945-6182

Anissa Janine Wardi,

Race, History, and American Society

The American a landscape of contradiction and continuity, is cast a repository of cultural memory in twentieth-century African American literature. Many writers recuperate South a site of reconnection with ancestral history this symbolic geography bears witness to what Jean Toomer labels pain and beauty of African American history. Frank Shelton amplifies on paradoxical construct of South: The dichotomy between kinship with Southern land and oppression blacks experienced on that land informs black Southern version of pastoral.... it seems clear that, many current black writers (Southern and non-Southern alike), unlike white Southern writers, meaning of life is to be found through forging a personal connection with Southern history, a history that involves enslavement, prejudice, and racism but nevertheless strengthens individuals through offering them a relationship with land and a in a community of people nurtured by a environment. (13,28-29) Carolyn Jones has added to this discussion, eloquently exploring configuration of South a site of violence and labor which African Americans wrested a homeland: Black Americans shaped landscape of American South. The houses that were built, human beings that were nurtured in them; forests that were cleared, and crops that were planted and harvested were all tended by Black hands and formed by African cultural practices, technologies and sensibilities. The landscape of in beginning so alien to African slaves, became, most part, neither legally nor economically their own, but became spiritually their own through their own labor and under most difficult of circumstances. (37) In this way, numerous critics have articulated South a complex geography of and exile: Baraka labels Black-South a homeland and the scene of crime (143, 142); Atkinson and Page remark on joy and shame of South (97); Yaeger considers Southland as ancestral torture chamber and ancestral home (56); Fultz argues that, for many African Americans, South remains a of comfort and contradiction--a to turn toward and a to turn from (79); and Beavers contends that men in Toni Morrison's fiction, South is a place of origin and curse (61). Farah Jasmine Griffin's explication of Billie Holiday's song Strange Fruit is particularly fitting this analysis: Her portrayal of naturally beautiful South, marred by realities of burning black bodies, gives meaning and emotion to descriptions written by novelists.... Holiday places black body at very center of pastoral. Its blood nourishes fertile earth which in life it tilled. (15-16) For Griffin, Holiday's insistence on lynched and burned black body in landscape disrupts spurious constructs of South Arcadia. Griffin seemingly intends to applaud Holiday forcing a recognition of South's violence; however, Griffin's language has larger implications this study. For my purposes, placing black body in very center of pastoral results in a revision of American Southern genre itself. While, in African American pastoral, this reasserted black body is enslaved body--lynched, maimed, tortured, and abused by racism and its institutionalized powers--it is also ancestral body, with its accompanying folk culture and practices, spirituality, community, and kinship networks. Ernest Gaines implicitly affirms conceptual model of this analysis: think that's what I have in my writing--you have that pastoral, agrarian thing--the fields, and streams and trees, and all that sort of thing, but then there's that other thing going on all time (Interview 318). …