Saturday, February 21, 2009

Sherley Anne Williams: "Dessa Rose"

Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel is an imaginary encounter of two strong women who were involved in two actual accidents, as the blurb informs: In 1829, in Kenucky, a pregnant black woman was sentenced to death for helping to lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. In North Carolina, in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In "Dessa Rose", the author asks the question "What if these two women met?". The title character is a whip-scarred pregnant slave waiting in jail until the child is born to be executed for committing crimes against white men (namely for attacking the wife of the master who killed her plantation lover and for raising a rebellion of chained coffle slaves who killed their white captors and broke free).

Told in three narrative voices which represent different points of view, the novel develops in three parts. "The Darky" presents the dominant master's text of Adam Nehemiah, a white author who wants to gain fame by writing a coherent and lucid analysis of "Odessa's" crimes; "The Wench", which means a low, vicious young woman of ill fame, presents the point of view of the white woman, Ruth Elizabeth (Ms Rufel) Sutton, who gives shelter to the runaway slaves and, finally, makes friends with Dessa.
At last, "The Negress" reveals Dessa Rose as a full first-person narrative voice. Such an arrangement of the narrative voices allows the reader to follow Dessa's gradual escape from the white man's control, visible here as a misreading of her (he constantly misnames her "Odessa"), to freedom, associated here with Dessa's capability of self-expression. The writer explains her intention in the "Author's Note" as follows: Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us... I know now that slavery eliminated neither heroism nor love; it provided occasions for their expressions.

However, Dessa Rose is for me first of all a novel about women in the antebellum South, both black and white, who managed to survive thanks to friendship. It is a novel about female bonding and the possibility of creating a women's community in the effort to support each other because, after all, all women - regardless of skin color - were exposed to the same threats and oppression.
In this the novel very well illustrates the black feminist critic Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's suggestion of analysing black women's discourse as dialogue with black men (visible here in the creation of a black community based on the African call-response patterns included in the narrative) and with white women (the community created is based on the shared experience of white men's oppression, and the fact that Dessa was whipped on the inside of her thighs and her intimate parts suggests a symbolic rape). Dessa Rose ponders on this in her narrative, when she is lying awake after a white man ("bad Oscar") attempted to rape her defenceless mistress, Ms Rufel: I laid awake a long time that night while she snored quiet on the other side of [her] baby. The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn't knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us... I slept with her after that, both of us wrapped around Clara. And I wasn't so cold with her no more. I wasn't zactly warm with her, understand; I didn't know how to be warm with no white woman... But really, what kept me quiet was knowing white mens wanted the same thing, would take the same thing from a white woman as they would from a a black woman. Cause they could. Highly recommended:)

P.S.1 On Wednesday, Feb.25 TVN7 shows (again) Spielberg's The Color Purple, which is an adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. I recommend the movie because it was Whoopi Goldberg's debut and because The Color Purple will appear in a TOP OF THE TOPS review, when I finally get to writing about Beloved;)

P.S.2 I hear Bill Bryson's hilarious Notes from a Small Island is due to appear in Polish on March 3rd, which is great news. I've read the fragment published in the Dziennik's cultural supplement and liked it a lot. However, I still think that nothing can beat the original version: after all, Bryson's "English" humor and irony taste best in English;)

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Extra Entry: K.Miller, T.Cichocka: "Bajki rozebrane"

In their conversation recorded on 400 pages, Katarzyna Miller and Tatiana Cichocka remind the readers of the old truth that it's not people who tell stories but it's actually stories that tell people. Old tales containing collective wisdom passed down from generation to generation reflect people's yearnings, dreams, anxieties and joys encoded in archetypes (that is, in Jungian terms, symbolic themes which are innate and universal). The two women - Miller, a psychotherapist and philosopher, and Cichocka, a journalist - re-read the well known tales in order to discover meanings which are surprisingly up-to-date (like, for example, "Hansel and Gretel - Welcome to McWorld"). The fact that the two interlocutors are associated with Gender Studies at Warsaw University (as a teacher and a former student, respectively) may have resulted in their decision to apply Jungian rather than Freudian analytical psychology to their decoding of the tales, though references to the classical Bruno Bettelheim are not infrequent in the book.

Also, the fact is probably responsible for their gender-oriented interpretations of the tales (incidentally, this is precisely the reason why I bought the book;). So, what can an adult learn from, for example, the fact that in Andersen's The Snow Queen it is Kai who falls victim to the splinters of the mirror? Miller associates the splinter with patriarchal power with which the boy is contaminated. The power granted to the boy by the mere fact that he is male becomes the "patriarchal flaw" which corrupts him because he has no idea how to use this, well - undeserved and totally unearned - gift. Not knowing how to handle
the power of the masculine position (no one has taught him that power means also responsibility), Kai relishes in executing it by becoming cruel to Gerda.

The book is worth recommending to any (prospective) parent or teacher, since it debunks certain myths connected with, for example, the need to avoid exposing children to the cruelty and violence permeating the Grimm Brothers' or Perrault's tales: fairy-tale cruelty is only symbolic, and evil must always be vanquished. In this way children learn that pain, cruelty and fear are part of life, but the hero/ine with whom the child identifies shall overcome;). A very wise and enlightening book: it teaches what to talk about when you talk about fairy tales with children.

P.S. I can't wait to meet my nieces (12 and 8) and re-read The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty and Ali Baba with them. Especially as they both already know perfectly well who Mary Wollstonecraft was, what a heroic life Emmeline Pankhurst lived and the fact that New Zealand and Australia were the first countries in which women got the right to vote (courtesy of The Little Book on Feminism). They can also tell what the cover of the latest issue of the Zadra magazine illustrates. Unfortunately (or, maybe: fortunately?), my elder niece has also become sensitive to her (male) history teacher's chauvinism, but that's the price one always pays for a rising consciousness. Anyway, it seems that it's never too early - or too late;)

P.S.2. Thank you, evans, for recommending the book to me xxxxx;)