Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman's Art and Experimentation

3. Hiding Place, Damballah, and Sent for You Yesterday: NEW DIMENSIONS OF POSTMODERN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE HOMEWOOD TRILOGY

63 3 Hiding Place, Damballah, and Sent for You Yesterday new dimensions of postmodern experimentation in the homewood trilogy H iding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983)—the three works that follow The Lynchers (1973)—are called the Homewood Trilogy because they tell stories about the life of Wideman’s family and the people in the Homewood community where he grew up. Between 1973 and 1981, Wideman lived with his wife and children in Laramie, Wyoming, and taught at the University of Wyoming. Ironically, he changed the direction of his fiction to emphasize black culture while he was away from the black cultural traditions of Homewood. As he has said in interviews, the stories he heard about his own family and the community when he went back to Homewood on family occasions inspired his change of focus, but having distance from the black communal source gave him the perspective he needed to change. The focus on blackness marked a departure from a reliance on European tradition, especially modernism, which had been a staple of Wideman ’s first three novels: In my first three books, the way I tried to assert continuity with tradition and my sense of tradition were quite different than my understanding of these matters in Damballah, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday. . . . That is, for my first books, the tradition was mainly European, mainly literate. Because I was a black man and had grown up in a black community I sort of divided my books. Blackness provided the local habitation and names; the scenes, people, conversations, were largely drawn from my early experience , because that’s what I knew best. But I was trying to hook that world into what I thought was something that would give those situations and people a kind of literary resonance, legitimize that world by infusing echoes writing blackness 64 of T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Faulkner, English and Continental masters. . . . But as I grew and learned more about writing, I found, or rediscovered I guess, that what Bessie Smith did when she sang, what Clyde McFater did, what John Coltrane did, what Ralph Ellison did, what Richard Wright did, what the anonymous slave composer and the people who spoke in the slave narratives did, what they were doing was drawing from a realm of experience , a common human inheritance, that T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Tolstoi, and Austen were also drawing from. As a writer I didn’t need to go by way of European tradition to get to what really counted, the common, shared universal core. I could take a direct route and get back to that essential mother lode of pain, love, grief, wonder, the basic human emotions that are the stuff of literature. I could get back to that mother lode through my very own mother’s voice. (Rowell 95–96) A black construction of postmodernism replaces white modernism as the main feature in Wideman’s writing, and alters its tone, theme, and form.1 The work published in 1981 and after focuses on the black cultural tradition, and the rhythms and nuances of the black oral voice become a more dominant structural influence than forms and structures derived from the white modernist tradition, such as stream of consciousness. Alienating modernist states of dream and imagination in the early works are prevalent in the Homewood Trilogy, but are secondary to an emphasis on black cultural stories, told in a black voice, that unite and support. Similar to what other black and ethnic writers do using divergent approaches , Wideman derives black voice and story from postmodernism’s general premise that all art and literature, as well as reading and interpretation , is biased, subjective human construction. In “‘All Stories Are True’: Prophecy, History, and Story in The Cattle Killing,” Kathie Birat makes statements relevant to my point about postmodernism in Wideman’s writing after the early works. She argues that Wideman uses “strategies which have come to be associated with the phenomena grouped under the terms poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction” (629).2 In the context of postmodernism, Wideman “concentrates on reading American history in search of stories which may be turned back upon themselves in a self-reflexive gesture which will liberate them from the frozen discourse of a totalizing vision” (631). “[F]or Wideman the very power of storytell- 65 New Dimensions of Postmodern Experimentation in the Homewood Trilogy ing lies in...