Filling Stations

During the "nation dances" late in Praisesong for the Widow, Avey observes that "it was the essence of something rather than the thing itself she was witnessing ... All that was left were a few names of what they called nations which they could no longer even pronounce properly, the fragments of a dozen or so song, the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends. And they clung to them with a tenacity she suddenly loved in them and longed for in herself. Thoughts -- new thoughts -- vague and half-formed slowly beginning to fill the emptiness" (240). This notion of "filling the emptiness" harkens back to at least a couple of earlier scenes -- e.g., when she's slumped forward and emptied out on the hotel room floor, "prostrate before the darkness" (143) and when she's on the wharf a second time and realizes that "there now seemed to be a small clear space in her mind" (187). Sensing this was an echo of Clare and a passage I had read in No Telephone to Heaven, though, I found this message from one of Kitty's last letters to Clare: "A reminder, daughter -- never forget who your people are. Your responsibilities lie beyond me, beyond yourself. There is a space between who you are and who you will become. Fill it" (103). The idea of being emptied out and refilled thus resonates on a number of levels in each novel, and maybe even adds still more mysterious beauty to the blank spaces between words in those last moments of Cliff's novel. Not only are we as readers asked to fill in the blank spaces of a fractured and fragmented narrative, but these empty spaces also symbolize the dissolution that is needed before something new can emerge (whether it's a new language, a new self, a new society).

How appropriate, too, that Marshall's novel ends so movingly with scenes of song and dance. These scenes both honor the novel's title (the "praisesong" is a celebratory poem/song that originated in African cultures) -- which prepared us for the fact we'd be experiencing a musical composition as much as we'd be reading a story -- and bring so many of our earlier texts into the same orbit (which we already talked about a little bit). It makes me think that a study of the body and the kinesthetic imagination in some of our texts could have been a great paper topic as well. In the quote I shared Wednesday night, from his poem "Tom" (from Rights of Passage, 1967), Edward Brathwaite writes "dance / and dare to remember." And then there's this from Sterling Stuckey, which perhaps I'll include on a handout in support of our brief time on Gilroy and music next week during our last class meeting: "Dance was the most difficult of all art forms to erase from the slave's memory in part because it could be practiced in the silence of aloneness where motor habits could be initiated with enough speed to be autonomous. In that lightning fast process, the body very nearly was memory and helped the mind recall the form of dance to come. For in dance, such is the speed with which the mind can work, and the body respond to it, that the time between thought and action all but disappears. In a sense, then, the body is mind, and is capable of inscribing in space the language of the human spirit. When the tempo slows, of course, the body configures what the mind more easily recalls."