Language and Humanity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose

Abstract

Language and Humanity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose Jennifer Ryan-Bryant (bio) The titular narrator of Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel Dessa Rose concludes the book by emphasizing the importance of recorded histories. Now that she is old, Dessa observes, "my mind wanders. This why I have it wrote down, why I has the child say it back. I never will forget Nemi trying to read me, knowing I had put myself in his hands. Well, this the childrens have heard from our own lips. I hope they never have to pay what it cost us to own ourselfs" (Williams 236). Here Dessa describes the processes through which storytelling occurs: she recounts her history, asks her son to write it down, and interprets its complex social meaning for future audiences. Most importantly, she frames herself as a text, a living embodiment of the past. This commentary also highlights the work that her story has done to preserve the realities of slavery; in recording these details, she reclaims language itself from her white oppressors. Such strategies work in large part because Williams is able to "combin[e] the discourse of history with that of fiction," thus contesting the restrictions inherent to "the linguistic system of slavery" itself (King 358). Nemi's—white pro-slavery writer Adam Nehemiah's—assumption that her body and voice are texts that he can use for his own purposes disintegrates in the face of Dessa's determination to be and to own herself. As Ashraf Rushdy suggests, she "uses her voice to achieve her liberation from the prescriptive pen of Nehemiah's written record" (366): the command that she exercises over her story enables her both to discredit his version of events and to explore the advantages of blending oral and written representations of her history. Both Williams's critical and her creative work privilege the notion that choices about language use—its shape, style, dissemination, occasions, and subjects—are central to real political and aesthetic innovation. Her two collections of poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975) and Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982), focus on women's efforts to maintain their sense of self in the midst of romantic or social conflict. Many of the individual poems employ blues forms and themes, including portraits of classic-blues singer Bessie Smith, to suggest that even the most painful situations in life produce new sources of beauty. Williams also wrote several examples of literary criticism, among them "The Lion's History: The Ghetto Writes B[l]ack" and "Some Implications of Feminist Theory," that locate real social change in new uses of language and in revisionist histories. In many ways, Dessa Rose represents Williams's most complex exploration of this concern with linguistic definition and power, to some extent because it "questions the privileging of certain voices over others" by positioning multiple voices in sometimes conflicting dialogue with one another (King 353). Dessa begins the novel as the nearly faceless subject of Nehemiah's scrutiny; the title of [End Page 87] the book's first section, "The Darky," reflects his dismissal of her humanity and the control he asserts over the language that defines her. However, Williams devotes the majority of all three sections—"The Darky," which Nehemiah narrates, "The Wench," which a white woman relates, and Dessa's own "The Negress"—to following the emergence of Dessa's influence over the language that has been used to define her. By the end of the story, she is able to refute the notion, in the words of Williams's contemporary Toni Morrison, that "definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined" (Beloved 225). Luckier in the end than Morrison's Sixo, who found that the argument "Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work" was not enough to spare him another beating (224), Dessa wrests control away from the other speakers who try to constrain her in order to become a "demythologizer" and "self-actualizing human being" (Davis 552). As a means of asserting her linguistic acumen, she chooses a set of specific narrative techniques through which to frame her story's personal and historical complexities: song, storytelling, naming, and public performance. Finding Dessa...