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MARGARET WALKER'S JUBILEE AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

Authors:
lolARGARET WALKER'S JUBILEE AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY
Yakubu
Ao
Nasidi
'..'
'HOW much of the burden of history can fiction hear'~
Mar~aret Walker's aptly formulated question provides
a useful starting point for speaking to the most central
issues of her first novel, Jubile. The very form of
the question throws into bold relief a certain
ideolo~ical position which points to even more worrisome
issues of general theory and olemics. Yet it is
these very controversial issues that can, as it were,
lead us to the heart of the novel, and allow us to
situate Jubilee more meaningfully within a larger
context.
The problem is with the word 'burden'. Need
,
history be a burden to fiction~ The implicit assumption
here seems to be that fiction exists within a soverei~n
domain, but sometimes in the exercise of its sovereignty,
it is forced to bear the burden of history -- as though
history were some unavoidable nuisance. History, it
seems, becomes a real burden if it hasn't undergone any
process of fictive transformation, if it is allowed an
untouched empirical existence: dates, names, general
data, events, etc allowed to maintain a 'real' existence
within a domain of 'non-reality'.
The quantitative vision impl1cit in Walker's approach
points to the fundamental questions not only of creat1v1ty
but of literary theory: What is the precise relationship
1
-
~
-
between fiction and historYl How far can fiction go with
actual historical events' without
10s
ng its status as
fictionl This is very thorny is ue in contemporary
criticism and one of the most influential critics on the
left has lent his polemical voice to the debate. Fiction,
he believes, cannot deal with history, real history. The
relationship between the two is a necessarily indirect one:
The notion of a direct spontaneous relation
between text and history, then, belongs to
a naive empiricism which is to be discarded.
For what would it mean to claim a text was
directly related to historyl The text can
no more be conceived of as directly denoting a
real history than the meaning of a word can
be imagined as an object cqrrelated with it.
A text naturally may speak of real history,
of Napoleon or Chartism, but evn it is maintains
empirical historical accuracy this is always
a fictive statement -- an operation of
historical data aCGording to the laws of
textual production.1
Thus even where we stumble upon actual history it is there
only as a prop of the fictional, a bolstering devise that
has more to do with the imaginative intentions of the
author than with empirical reality:
••• literary texts frequently involve
cognitive propositions, but these are not
there to inform us about the real.2
But an argument which insists on the separateness of the
two categories whereby one must be subsumed by the other
ignores a certain corollary: How much of the 'real' is
reall HOW f ithful to the real is the method of the
- 3 -
historian' For history is not as rid of fiction as we
would like to think. cognition is only possible through
words, and words are the stuff of fiction. Therefore a
more useful approach would be for us to view the two
categories in mutual terms, as locked n a symbiosis,
where history, or the movement of history, determines
fiction, as fiction comes into being to lend it a deeper
experiential and emotive significanca.
This, to me, is the precise relationship of Jubilee
to its historical matrix. ubilee is a reworking of
history in the more emotive terms of fiction, but the
historical is not ther~ to bolster the fictional. In this
case we could in fact say it is the reverse: the fictional
is used to allow us a new experiential 60cess to the
receding events of the past, re-opening emotive channels
to the life of an individual and the inhuman events that
shaped her destiny, and by implication, the destiny of the
millions of others. History in Jubilee does not serve
to counterfeit the ficitional. On the contrary, through
mutual interaction, it is the chief source of the novel's
aesthetic significance. This seeming paradox has been
articulated by Barbara Foley in her study of black
American literature. Does the 'real' vitiate the
aesthetic effect on the reader or does it reinforce it?
Although the specifc manifestations of his-
toricity vary with the writer and the times,
- 4 -
the notion that many of the. events depicted
'did' as Carlyle put it 'in very deed occur'
is crucial to the rhetorical and aesthetic
effect of much black lit ture.3
Jubilee and History:
The story that Jubilee tells is based on the story
of the author's great-grandmother as orally told her by
her grandmother, who seemed to have narrated the events as
faithfully as memory would allow. It is a novel concretely
rooted in history, and the author has personally vouched
for the veracity of her characters and events.:
The entire story follows a plot line from the
first Chapter until the last: the hourneys,
the Big Road, the places vyry and Innis lived
and the reason~ they moved.4
vyry's story therefore already existed. It was only
waiting to be retold in a new form, by a new generation -
a task which became such a consuming passion for the author
that she willingly moved her family and changed habitat
for it. From conception through execution Jubilee occupied
the author's attention for nearly three decades. This by
itself is enough to distinguish it from other novel~.
unlike most others it is not the romantic outsome of a
self-centred fantasy. Jubilee is the product of several
years of perspiration and painstaking research: its
method of evolution has been more historiographical than
fictional:
- 5 -
The real nam of y ••• great-grandmother Randall
Ware, free b ckm n
0
G orgia an a blacksmith
of Dawson,
h
een re ine
in
the story. The
records of th ransac ion re
1
estate during
the Recon 'ruction are in he
c
untry courthouse
of Terrell County 1n D
WSO
,reo
:5
or again,
Minna in my story was
my
ternal grandmother
Elvira W r ozier.
Wh ~
my great-g andmother
- vyry in the
0
t~y ied a m nth before I was
born in 1915 grandmother ( nne) was already
in Birmingham waiting with my mother for my
birth.6
Characters and 'names are retain d and the author's task,
in literary terms, has been to give them fictional typifica-
tion, not in a way that removes th m from history, but
makes them stand out even more conspicously in it. In
cliched language she gives her char cters a 'flesh-and-
blood' dimension which makes them not only real and
imaginable but empathically engaging. It is here that
Margaret Walker scores her main technical points: the
recreation of characters and the depiction of events that
shape and govern their motives. The use of language to
~
delineate characters along the lines of class and social
status has been the book's major tool of realism -- and
this not just between white and black, but between black
and black. For even among the blacks social divisions
were already beginning too occur, between field hand and
house servant, and of course between the more suave, like
the freem n Randall ware and he others.
- 6 -
Compare vyry's:
Oh nawl colored folks won't stand for that.
I reckon a 1 of us would die fore we'd go back
to that th re miserYl?
and Randall's
vi
11 hey' re not "qoLnq to h ve it the same way.
Freedom won't mean much more than they can't
buy and s 11 us on an auction block. Even the
Confe erates abolished the slave trade. But
they mean to keep us under some kind of different
system. controlling our labour and restricting
our movements, and not allowing us to vote and
trying to keep us ignorant.8
vyry's language is not only folk language, her beliefs
are also folk, for she never rises above a level of
thinking which her background and social station as a
It· is not only in the characterisation that walker
slave and house servant allow her.
scores feats of crAa lve achievement, but in the depiction
or relationships as well. It is impossible as we go past
brutal plantation life and the haunting shadow of Grimes,
to forget the final moments of the story: the accidental
meating of vyry and Innis Brown, their murriage and
subsequent epic search for a home. The story of vyry and
Innis is symbolic of the new attempts by blacks to create
a family after its almost total destruction in slavery --
and it is one of the most memorable sections of the novel.
The cr ative efforts of argaret Walker are indeed
wor y of not
- 7 -
But, for the most part, as recounted in
HOW
I wrote Jubilee,
the author has been as close to verisimilitude as the
medium would possibly allow her. It is a case of stretching
'non-fictional' material. Technic lly, therefore, Jubilee
the novel to its last point of elasticity, to accomodate
is thin. Its significations are not introverted, in the
modernist sense, but constantly point outward to history,
The history of Vyry is of course private histor.y:
to the painful events of the past; for the authors'
overriding intention is their creative redemption.
childhood, stewardship in her own father's house as his
~
slave, marriage, emancipation, filial responsibilities.
But it is the history of several others who has to survive
under a brutal and inhuman system. The appaling insensitivity
of the slave masters, the hopelessly unstable life of the
slaves, the attachment to religion -- all these are vividly
vyry's story achieves a general significance by
represented.
constantly situating its~lf within the context of the larger
events that shaped the destiny of individuals -- slavery,
Civil war, Reconstruction. The linkage of events is linear
-- from the darkest days of slavery to the arrival of what
appears to be a new day for blacks.
- 8 -
Jubilee's almost total reliance on history is of
course not peculiar. placed on the broader spectrum of
black American literature the obsession with history seems
to be a pervasive ch ract ristic4 8 rbara Foley has traced
this tendency to the nature of the slave narrative. Thus,
in addition to the emotive attraction that history holds,
the insistence on a 'strong
f
ctual presence' recalls an
earlier literary practice -- the Slave Narrative -- where
the need was felt to counter the cynicism and disbelief of
a predominantly white audience. Darwin Turner has noted
that the Slave Narrative operated in an atmosphere where
it not only had to rely on the documentary but to proclaim
the fact that it did, because it was catering to a skeptical
and hosti~e audience who sought nothing more from black
artists than a 'titillation of the senses expressed through
presentation and explanation of the past'. Turner's fear
is that most black writers still unwittingly pander to
these tastes through their fixation on history.
At this point what need_ to be examined are the
ide4J.ological implications of a literary approximation of
history. For of course it is naive to assume that the role
of the writer is one of documentation in a listlessly
objective sense. Margaret Walker speaks of her own
philosophy of history which she sess as being radically
differ nt from either the 'So he n white, or Northern
white point of view'.
- 9 -
It is to be expected that her own vision and philosophy
will cast their shadow over the historic 1 material. In
Jubilee her concern w s to recast history from a
specifically 'black point of
v'
w'. In spite of Dr. Turner's
suspicions, the issue of histo
y
rem n much an important
one for blaCKS. Against a st adfa t refusal
by
the
larger society to eal with the past, against continuous
efforts to mystify history, especially the history of the
blacks, the black writer must make a constant and still
pertinent attempt to open it up, to bring its hideousness
into contemporary consciousness, History is full of
wounds that must be ~pened up. Jubilee succeeds in doing
this in spite of the author's attempts to put forward,
through Vyry, an ideology of compro.mise and Christian
forgiveness, towards the end of the novel. This of course
is to be expected, for, given the politics of its
production, the author could have done no better. One
need only read How I wrote Jubilee to properly
appreciate the full import of Barbara Foley'S word:
The writer's personal vision of the world, the
strategy chosen to articulate this vision, and
the historical context of the moment of composi-
tion bear dialectical relations td on~ another;
and synthesis or contradiction is one sphere is
bound to reflect - or be reflected by - synthesis
or contradiction in another.9
'The historical context of the moment of composition' is
- 10 -
certainly a very important phrase. It has to do with
the operative forces in soicety with which the writer
either has to align or contend, and which in the long run
overdetermine her vision and p rscnal philosophy_ (The
writer's vision is hers bu
i
is lso the publishers,)
There is a whole 'politics of rodu tion' that is
literature, as though the literary text dropped from
deliberately left ut of most crittcal articul~tions of
heaven or brought itself into being. To properly come
to grips with a text like Jubilee we must not only deter-
mine its use of history, but most situate it, itself, within
history -- the histo~y of its production. Here Margaret
of the mqce formal and technical principles of art all fall
Walker's own formal training in literature, her acquisition
properly into focus. But of course she proves that these
can be used to advantage. The real danger is in the
reception of the book. Texts like Jubilee are usually
?ppreciated and talked about within a framework that
subverts them. Richard Gilman aptly describes this
tend~ncy in white liberal reactions to one of Malcolm xes
works:
It should have larmed them far more radically
than it did. But by praising Malcolm for this
candor, his 'power' or his 'solitary indictment
of our society', by making a literary compatriot
of him, the white cultured community affectiv~ly
blunted the really unsetting fact about his book:
is not style-conscious. Its style has more to do with
- 11 -
that it was not written for us, it was
written for the blacks. It is not talking
about human condition (that
western
idea
which from the battl line locks like a
luxury product) but out the con t'on of
black people$a~ ••10
The New York Times' Book Review di just this with Jubilee
....-.s~
'In its ep
i
sode and in
Vy y,
d.~.~ilee
chronicles the triump\.t
of a free spirit oVAr m ny kinds of bondage'_ By
evaporating the specific issues of the text into the
abstract, by speaking ~f black history in the terms of
general humanity, its radical and revolutionary potentials
are vitiated. This is precisely why it yields us no real
devidends to talk of Jubilee in the innocuous terms of
conventional criticism, by overconcerning ourselves with
symbols, images and metaphors -- inverting the text formal
back upon itself, thereby to strangle its voices. Jubilee
content than with formal artistic properties. It is a
text which beacons constantly to its historical outside.
\
consequently the categor~ of history far from being a
burden, is the most useful concept not only for analysing
but also for understanding Jubilee. In speaking of the
use of History Malcolm X succintly summarises its
importance thus:
When you deal with the past, you're dealing with
history, you're dealing actually with the or'gin
of a thing. When you know the origin, you know
the cause. If you don't know the cause and you
don't know the reason, you're just cut off, you're
left standing in mid-air.
- 12 -
Going back to history is for th b cks a ex rcise in
self re-ex mina ion. I~ s
W
Y
0
ating to the
present, for, as
Hd~old
The farther the N 9
0
from hie historical
antecedents in time, mor
t"
OU5
become
his concept~al
ti
them ier hi~ social
conceptions, the mor uperfici
1
his visions.
His one great and p nt hope is to know and
understand his
Afro-Am
rican history in the
united states more profoundly_ Failing that,
and faily to create a new synthesis and a
social theory of a tion, h will offer the
historical fat d scribed
by
the ph"losopher
who worked with those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it.12
lies in its unde standing of the importance of
This is precisely wh~re the contri u ion of Jubilee
history • .'
NOTE
1.
Terry Eagleton,
Cr ..i.c"am
and
Id
Clogy
'Verso,
London 1978) p9700
20
Eagleton,
!
Ideology: Fiction, N ra Iv " ed.
Aronowitz,
Brenkman, Jameson
So inl Te~t 2
(Madison
1979)
p.65.
-
.
3.
Barbara Foley, 'Hisvory, Fiction and the Ground Between:
The Uses of the Documentary made in Black Ll terajure
t
in
~, (Vol.95, 3 1980) p.390.
4.
Margaret Walker, How
I
Wrote Jubilee
(Third
World Press,
Chicago, 1977)
p
o24o
5.
Margaret v/alker, 'Acl<nowledgement
t
in
Jubilee (Bantam
1966)
0 ••• •••
6.
Walker, How
IT
VIr.
e
J.ulJilee(Chicago, 1977)
p.11
o
7.
Walker, Jubilee p.396.
8
0
Ibid
o
p.
396.
9.
Barbara Foley, 'Bistory~ Fiction and the Ground Betweena
The Uses of the Documentary mode in Literature', in PMLA
(Vol.95, 3, 1980) p0391.
10
0
Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (Vintage,
New York, 1970)
P.So
11.
Malcolm
X,
On Afro American Histor~ (Pathfinder,
New York, 1970)
.4
(New Yorks
Black Green
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Article
Although the so-called nonfiction novel is ordinarily seen as a distinctly post-World War II phenomenon, Afro-American literature has from its beginnings relied to a marked degree on the documentary mode. Close scrutiny of Afro-American prose narrative provides the basis not only for revising some common literary-historical generalizations but also for examining the nature of mimesis and historicity, since Afro-American writers have employed a wide range of techniques to persuade their readers of the truths proposed in their texts. A consideration of the uses of factuality in this body of literature enables us to make broader theoretical distinctions among the kinds of propositions conveyed by various types of fictional narratives and to illuminate the shady borderline between factual and fictive discourse.
i.c"am and Id Clogy 'Verso
  • Terry Eagleton
  • Cr
Terry Eagleton, Cr..i.c"am and Id Clogy 'Verso, London 1978) p9700
  • Walker
Walker, How IT VIr. e J.ulJilee(Chicago, 1977) p.11o
The Confusion of Realms (Vintage
  • Richard Gilman
Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (Vintage, New York, 1970