Memory, Narrative, & Identity

Abstract

Memory, Narrative, & Identity. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. xi + 349 pages. $50 hardcover, $20 paper. This collection of essays is an important book, not only because of its impossibly ambitious theme but also because it successfully gives us an updated report on what surely remains the most nagging concern of American culture: the search for a usable past. While we are among the most opulent and foot-loose people on earth, the essays in this collection show that we are nevertheless haunted by the ghosts of out past (see William Keough on ghost values'); correspondingly, we consistently align imagination with memory in out endless quests for identity. Those famous lines from Waste Land, written in 1922, come readily to mind: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? And, of course, the reason for this modernist obsession immediately follows: Son of man, / You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.... On the other hand, as Minty Brown points out in Paul Laurence Dunbar's novel The Sport of the Gods Somehow old teachings and old traditions have an annoying way of coming back upon us in the moments of life.... Has there ever been a moment in our country's life that has not been critical? Again and again, contemporary writers--Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth, M.G. Vassanji, to name a few put forward in this collection--recount out current critical moments, but they are by no means resigned to the impasse which Waste Land sentenced us to. Beginning roughly with the seventies, a new inventive spirit, first identified with the emerging exigencies of ethnic and women writers, has come forward to establish more socially combative narrative paradigms. Dramatizing memory, these writers have designed a redemptive project for the exiled self, often by focusing on community, family, ancestors, a sense of continuity--however problematical--with the past, and perhaps most importantly, the ethical values of solidarity, justice, and those typically associated with a specific ethnic neighborhood or locale. Indeed, this explosion of new energy came with the foregrounding of new subjectivities, new territories, and the exploration of new semantic fields. As most of the scholars show in these essays, however, this positive return to a reinvigorated combativeness by no means implies a less sophisticated or referentially facile sense of storytelling. If anything, in the hands of the above writers storytelling now requires a special paideia, an interpretive astuteness that often teaches or builds on an ethnographic or simply ethnic fluency in order to appreciate what it is about. In his essay on 19th century Mexican-American autobiographies, for example, Genaro M. Padilla shows how these archivally incarcerated and apparently straightforward stories derived their representational cunning from historiography, folklore, and anthropology. …