The Paradoxical Journey of the African American in African American Fiction

Abstract

IF THERE one observation to be made about the African Americans' home search throughout American history it that theirs both a painful and a furious passage. Slavery, pogroms, and racism are all too recurrent and pervasive. African Americans, like Native Americans, have suffered from the brutal attempts of the Western world to amputate them of their past, their heritage. In particular, African Americans have been presumably rooted in rootlessness, despite the fact that this assumption not culturally absolute.' The paradox appropriate because everything about the African American's life and situation paradoxical, to the point, it seems, of impossibility. Bringing graphic clarity to bear on this point, James Baldwin in Stranger in the Village recognized that the African American slave is unique among the black men in the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore. I am told there are Haitians able to