Black memoirists thus give a palpable shape to those who, despite our national fixation on race, tend to remain largely invisible and who remain a “problem” rather than a people with problems. The books under discussion suggest yet another grouping: chronicles of suffering and despair penned by those who miraculously escaped their probable fates. Memoirs can be as slippery as they are wide ranging, not only because the voices that tug our sleeve for attention often straddle the thin line separating fiction from autobiography, but also because memoirs cover such a large territory-everything from backward glances by the rich and culturally famous to accounts of “how it was” by out-of-work politicians. In the same way that Shelley saw all poems as fragments of one vast ur-poem, we see the black memoirist’s tale as part of a larger, subsuming saga-an entry in the vast, multivolume project of Narrating the Negro. Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Black Man in America. Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |