Booking Future Passages

Those repeated moments in Praisesong for the Widow when Avey feels the presence of the past (and of her ancestors) physically -- e.g., "And it seemed so real, the fight, that when I woke up the next morning I was actually hurting, physically hurting. And my wrist was sore from her holding it" (170) -- reminded me that I nearly included on our semester's reading list Octavia Butler's time-traveling, nearly sci-fi slavery novel, Kindred. Butler's protagonist is a contemporary African-American woman who, during her nightly dreams, finds herself, frightfully, suddenly immersed in the horrors of a nineteenth-century southern plantation; when she wakes up, her body is physically marked and bruised by the experience, thus physicalizing the notion of historical trauma.

I bring this up because this may be a good time to consolidate some additional texts that we might have read (and that we might still read on our own!). There's the relevance of a text like Melville's novella, Benito Cereno (which makes me think we could also have included the narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, and surely other texts from the American tradition). In addition to Kindred, I would recommend Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which is a truly shattering novel (set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by a gifted writer; if you want to get a more modest sense of Danticat's work, check out the memorable short story "Children of the Sea," which you can find in the volume Krik? Krak?, and which I nearly put on our secondary reading schedule. Chamoiseau's novel Texaco, of course, comes to us with great acclaim. Charles Johnson's Middle Passage would have been a solid choice for the course (and it, too, was in the queue until the last moments of preparation), and would have allowed us to pull in some of the New Orleans/Mississippi Delta components of the world of Atlantic passages. A possible alternative to Star of the Sea (in terms of the Ireland/America transit) would be Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, one of 2013's great, great novels. I also considered More's Utopia for the early weeks of the class. And then how could we forget Toni Morrison?! Any others??

One more stray recommendation for you, as I scan my memory: in the April 18, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen has an interesting personal essay ("Farther Away") in which he combines an accounting of his period of solitude and isolation on an island in the South Pacific, a consideration of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (which also could have been a candidate for the course had we had world enough and time), and a reflection on the life and death of his good friend, David Foster Wallace.