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American Literature 73.4 (2001) 883-884



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Symbolizing the Past: Reading “Sankofa,” “Daughters of the Dust,” and “Eve’s Bayou” as Histories. By Sandra M. Grayson. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America. 2000. ix, 96 pp. Paper, $21.95.

When Toni Morrison described the project of her writing as a “literary archaeology,” she also mapped a trajectory for the black artist and the black studies critic. In Symbolizing the Past, Sandra Grayson inherits Morrison’s project, recovering and reassembling fragments of the enslaved African woman’s history in her examination of the films Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, and Eve’s Bayou. Grayson is concerned with the legacy of slavery, the proclivity of West African traditions in African American culture, and the centrality of the black woman in African American history. Locating black film in a continuum of black oral tradition, Grayson traces the “encoding strategy” in slavery to frame her analysis of the films. The oppressive conditions of slavery necessitated a sophisticated system of coding by enslaved Africans, a process of foreclosure, defamiliarization, and transformation that could safeguard knowledge from oppressors.

The most compelling aspects of Symbolizing the Past are Grayson’s close readings and decodings of the films, which illustrate the continuity of West African traditions in African American culture, despite the violence of slavery and colonialism. In Sankofa, she deciphers the Asante codes of the sankofa and buzzard symbols and the presence of Nunu and Asona ancestors in order to reveal how they empower the women in the film (26). Grayson reads Daughters of the Dust in the context of the female orishas (or deities) of Yoruba [End Page 883] religion and the symbols of the Kongo culture that emphasize the agency of black women (50). Grayson interprets Eve’s Bayou as a representation of black female power in its encoding of West African (and African American) traditional beliefs in “[b]lack women as preservers of the oral tradition and possessors of supernatural power” (54).

While her readings are often exemplary, Grayson’s historical research on West African traditions and African American oral tradition sometimes shifts the focus from the films and from more complex criticism. Grayson never fully grapples with the work of the encoding strategy in black culture, and the relationship between an African past and an African American present (and future) is often uncomplicated. “Memory” names a complicated matrix of possibility, a selective and strategic network of challenges and limitations. Grayson needs to problematize the encoding of West African traditions in the context of memory: What is lost? What is transformed? What is invented? What is rejected? Grayson also does not work through the complexity of gender relations in West African societies, neglecting the presence of misogyny in the black woman’s “past.”

Despite these problems, Grayson’s Symbolizing the Past is an important contribution to African American studies, black cultural studies, and women’s studies. Grayson recognizes and analyzes the representations of “women of African descent as active agents of change in their own lives and in history” (80), as warriors, healers, and leaders. Furthermore, she challenges contemporary scholars of African American studies to go beyond a generic Africa in their work, to contend with the diverse and distinct cultures of “The Continent.” In its achievements and limitations, Symbolizing the Past points the way to further research on what Toni Morrison terms the “disremembered and unaccounted for” history of African (American) women.

Christian Campbell , Duke University



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