From Black Nationalism to the Ethnic Revival: <i>Meridian</i>'s Lynne Rabinowitz

Abstract

Late in Alice Walker’s novel Meridian (1976), Lynne Rabinowitz recalls her confrontations with a family of Jewish deli owners in the South. During this confrontation, Lynne refl ects on their mutual resentment: the couple judges her as a white woman who associates with black men, and she judges them for forsaking their once-oppressed Jewish community to join the community of oppressors—the dominant Anglo-American culture. This passage takes place after Lynne has sustained a series of tragic losses. She has left behind her family and the creature comforts of suburbia, abandoned her dance career, moved to the South to join the Civil Rights Movement, and married Truman Held, a black revolutionary artist. She has befriended Meridian Hill, a black civil rights activist and the novel’s protagonist, and borne a daughter, Camara, with Truman. She has been rejected by her black friends in the Movement after its ideology became more nationalist. She has been raped by Truman’s friend and then sexually exploited by his other friends. She has lost her daughter to a violent crime and her husband to another woman. She is left wandering, alone, without a community or a cause. Because Meridian remains one of few Civil Rights Movement novels, scholars have focused largely on either the relationship of this text to the African American literary canon or the main protagonist’s (Meridian’s) struggle to balance her loyalties to race with her identity as a woman. 1 In their illumination of these racial questions, few scholars have examined the Jewish character Lynne Rabinowitz. 2 I assert that Walker employs Lynne as a cautionary tale for ethno-racial groups in the US, many of whom, by the time of the novel’s publication, had initiated nationalist movements to advocate for civil rights, foster cultural awareness and pride, and resist dominant culture conformity. 3 Lynne’s tragic narrative of exile serves as an allegory for the fl awed community- and coalition-building of the