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Chapter 8. Memorizing the Dark: Margaret Walker and Toni Morrison Compress African American Time and Space in Poetry and Fiction
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153 Chapter 8 Memorizing the Dark: Margaret Walker and Toni Morrison Compress African American Time and Space in Poetry and Fiction By Eleanor J. Blount Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury In the twenty-first century, both science and literature inflict upon us a more taxing concept of memory than was standard at one time. Earlier notions of time have been agitated, stretched, revised by modern and post-modern theorists. Owing to the dicta of Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and many less luminary others, today’s literate thinkers are aware that mental rumination tends toward fragmentation and non-linearity. Yet, it yields fully comprehensible narratives. When the rumination centers on events we perceive as “past,” it becomes a story we refer to as a memory. When seeking an exegesis of African American slavery, not merely as history dissociated from life of the present day but as literary text vital to the identity of contemporary Americans, applying some investigation into the nature of the time-space continuum may be helpful. It is certainly so if the novels and poems of Toni Morrison and Margaret Walker are selected as exemplary (and they are) of well-grounded African American historical literature. These two writers present as highly significant the need to pay tribute to ancestors whose determination to survive the peculiar institution 154 built and endowed today’s society, and the ability to resurrect seminal narratives by re-membering testimonies which have unfortunately and incorrectly been relegated to a kind of false nothingness called the past. Before looking at their respective works, however, let us acclimate the discourse to concepts of time and space that differ from those used more routinely. Physicist Einstein‘s special and general theories of relativity dissolve the layperson’s stock belief in “time.” He often referred to the separation of past, present, and future as a persistent illusion6 . He refutes the moment of now. With E=MC2 he proved that though the speed of light is universally constant, time is relative and, therefore, not an absolute. It depends on a changeable thing with which it enjoys mutuality–space. This coexistence leaves time malleable to the human subconscious, and for that reason, humans have manipulated it into segments labeled past, present, and future for ease-of-life’s sake. As soon as we stretch our imaginations to align with Einstein‘s that shows us why/how there is no such thing as time, in the colloquial sense of that word, literature and psychology step in to add another dimension to our effort. In addition to the two African American subjects, Faulkner, Proust, and Freud convince us that time and memory are interlaced, codependent. Furthermore, they teach that to give short shrift to conscious or unconscious memory is to diminish time, especially if time is viewed as commodity. Memory must be honored lest dire consequences be suffered. After all, amnesia, the absence of memory, is a disease. To the rescue, Morrison and Walker endeavor through fiction and poetry to rekindle, or instill for the first time, storied memories of African American life through time by re-membering the forgotten or intentionally dismembered histories of silenced people. Time spent with them reveals that rumination occurs less absent mindedly and 6 The statement made by Einstein to Besso’s widow is often misquoted or incorrectly translated. Definitive citations appear in Correspondance avec Michele Besso 1903-1955 (Paris: Herman, 1979) 327 pages and Albert Einstein-Michele Besso Correspondence: 1903-1955 (Paris: Herman, 1949), pp. 537-538. [3.237.0.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:50 GMT) 155 less temporarily than we ought casually assume. Occurrence is recurrent, so it behooves present readers to pay closer attention to the ways in which these poets/novelists have ordered what looks like the past and brought memory to the fore. At this juncture in our examination, a new rhetorical wrinkle emerges. Finding language to assert that that which must exist but in actuality does not, requires care. Let us remain cognizant that the mind’s fragmented thoughts we are scrutinizing form a meandering stream, not a rigid line, of consciousness. The resulting disregard for chronology and spatial sequence creates a linguistic strain on discourse such as that which is undertaken here. Phrases already used here-- centuries, early vs. late, modernity, and bring...