Notes
169 NOTES 1. Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and The Island: Martinique 1. Because of the greater structural difficulty and complexity of the last two auto/biographies , Hoop Roots and The Island: Martinique, the analyses of them in this chapter are significantly longer than those of the first two. Wideman’s writing is never easy, but it does become more difficult and complex over time. Throughout this study, the length of the analyses of works varies based on their difficulty and complexity. 2. Critics agree that Wideman does not make a clear distinction between fiction and supposedly nonfictional genres. For example, Eugene Philip Page talks about Wideman “[blurring ] the distinctions” (9) between “fiction and memoir” in Brothers and Keepers. 3. As stated, writing is the theme, and structure conflates with theme. In this context, John the writer is conscious that his entire book is a narrative device that features the figuration and symbolization of writing instead of the realistic description of the physical world. Writing is the main tool that he uses to connect with his brother. My analysis at places specifies narrative device, figuration, and symbolization, but writing as a conscious process is actually implied throughout this text, the other auto/biographies, and much of Wideman’s writing in the postmodern phase of his career (after 1973). The self-consciousness about writing and emphasis on narrative process in Brothers and Keepers identifies it as postmodern . My later discussions of the evolution from modernism to postmodernism in Wideman’s novels will deal much more with the postmodern. 4. Page concludes that, fictionally, Robby “actively collaborates with Wideman in developing the book; he too becomes a writer, as evidenced by his letters, his poems, and his graduation speech; he completes his associate’s degree and is given the honor of delivering that speech” (12). Michael Feith makes the broadly similar point that the “final result is a truly dialogical book . . . [that] stages a dialogue between the two brothers” (672). 5. Great Time is briefly mentioned and also defined here in Fatheralong. I discuss Great Time in more depth later in the analysis of Hoop Roots. 6. Claude Julien points out the blank spaces as indicators of the narrative’s “chronological disjointedness” and sometimes subtle movements back and forth (19–20). 7. Emphasizing that Wideman’s auto/biography is fiction, Julien argues that the narrator in this story does not have “much in common with the considerate son/father in the other parts” (20). He is “not a person but a character in his own right, i.e., a functional cogwheel in a story.” 8. Heather Andrade describes the connection between basketball and writing: “Basketball —namely, ‘playground hoop’—becomes a metonym for the active storytelling enterprise suf- 170 notes to pages 17–22 fused with . . . emancipatory potential” (“Race, Representation, and Intersubjectivity” 53). Since the book is about liberating writing/storytelling, focuses significantly on basketball, and is entitled Hoop Roots, Andrade is correct. However, the book is also about love; the narrator /writer says and shows through his own characterization that love of writing, basketball, community, and family is a major impetus for writing. Further, the narrator/writer says that music is very important. Music is seemingly another “metonym” for writing that he could not access or play, as he could basketball, to make a revolutionary statement about race: “[B]efore basketball and writing came music. All music but especially music performed by people who sounded like me, like the voices of Homewood. . . . Though I couldn’t translate the lucid, shimmering counterpoint of quartet close harmony into words, part of the magic, the freedom of music meant that I didn’t need to turn it into words” (14). 9. Conceptually and structurally, Great Time is prominent and obvious in Wideman’s later works, but is not unique to them. Andrade argues that the concept of Great Time applies to earlier works by Wideman also. She states that in Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1983), and Brothers and Keepers (1984), for example, “storytelling functions as a bridge between the past, present and future, and between myth, history and memory. Storytelling is born out of ‘mosaic memory’ and exists in ‘Great Time’” (“Mosaic Memory” 344). 10. Jacqueline Berben-Masi says that the readers are implicitly among others listening to the narrator’s story in Hoop Roots (“Of Basketball and Beads” 37–38). 11. See the discussion in chapter 5...
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