Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on October 21, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(4):727-742; doi:10.1093/isle/isp106
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Currents of Memory: Ancestral Waters in Henry Dumas's "Ark of Bones" and August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Water—fluid, shifting, and indeterminate—marks an African Diasporic history in America. The waters of the Atlantic Ocean brought captives to the shores of America; the current of the Mississippi River carried the enslaved "down river" to new and often harsher plantations and worksites; the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers served as routes to the North for escaping slaves; and swamps, bayous, and inlets allowed fugitives temporary havens from search parties and bloodhounds. Waterways, texts of both forced and chosen movement, are principal sites of memory in African American literature. For centuries, people have conceived of waterways as symbolic links to human anatomy: "Were they not figured as bodies of water because, since antiquity, their flow was likened to the blood circulating through the body?" (Schama 247). While making use of this Platonic notion of watercourses conforming to the "universal law of circulation that governed all forms of vitality," (247) and thus