Against Mourning

Jews are not the only people ravaged by memory. For African Americans, it is the long arm of slavery that holds back the living. “…[m]ama told me what they all lived through, and we were supposed to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget,” the central character of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora explains. This novel tells the truth more convincingly than many testimonials. “Always their memories, but never my own,” blues singer Ursa muses, the insistent negation of the phrase an echo of the Jewish pledge against forgetting. Here a hysterectomy proves strangely restorative: prevented from “making generations,” Ursa conceives a life that sustains more than treachery. Want becomes wanting: in singing, she expresses desire as well as loneliness.

Utopian the novel is not. If it closes on a note of ambivalent promise, Jones does not jettison the past. Still, the book argues forcefully against the blind continuance of oral history when this becomes more disabling than recuperative. Recalling hurt repeats the injury: “We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound,” her mother tells Ursa. “Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it visible as our blood.” Her relatives school her to continue this painful catechism, but Ursa refuses. Burn. Wound. Scar. What are you left with? Better to cut yourself away from your roots than be strangled by them. Jones invokes surgery to literalize this principle, but other novels offer parallel admonishments. The heroine of Octavia Butler’s Kindred escapes the antebellum South though she loses her right arm in the process.

Sad, "For African Americans, it is the long arm of slavery that holds back the living."

Every culture on the face of this planet has practiced slavery. Some parts of the world still do (Islam in the Sudan). The English words Thrall, bondman, indentured servant, serf, peasant, Freeman, etc. reflect this. Sacajawea (Lewis and Clark's guide) was a slave kidnapped by another Indian tribe. The Romans practiced it, Arabs, Polynesians, the list is as long as the list of nations. Some like those south of the border also ate their captives after cutting their hearts out. The cast system is a form of perpetual slavery.

This does not mitigate the evil, but it needs to be put in perspective. The Europeans, which includes the USA, under the influence of the Christian faith are the first peoples to get rid of slavery. It is that influence which has driven it out around the world.

What holds a group back, now, is not the past but what one is doing in the present. Victim-hood exploited and perpetuated by a political party together with an attitude of dependence is doing more to "hold back" the living. Instead of feeling sorry for oneself while living in the midst of abundant opportunity, why not battle to free the African slaves, still under genuine oppression.

I’m neither Jewish nor black but I think the difference is Jews pass down from generation to generation the way God delivered them from various circumstances whereas blacks tend to pass down from generation to generation their victimization as if they were never delivered from any of them.

Forkinsocket,

You post the most interesting articles.

Each morning, and again in the evening, I search through the latest articles posted. It seems ping more of your threads than any other!

the way God delivered them

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Very interesting. Maybe that is why there isn’t a Jewish holiday to remember the Holocaust. In this extermination they weren’t delivered.

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