Angela Jackson: The Novel as Luminous Web
It is not uncommon for writers to use many genres to provoke
thought about historical time. It is
unusual, however, to consider that the interplay of genres shapes our larger
visions of time and life.
Reading a stanza from Angela Jackson’s poem “The Spider
Tells Her Horror Stories”
Even I
have no sufficient howl.
Not enough thunder
in the cups of my eyes
To slit irises, let out
the barren spaces, the
besieged lives.
[[Dark Legs and Silk
Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books,
1993), pp. 38-39]]
against, or in tandem with, her novel Where I Must Go (Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern
University Press, 2009), brings into being what Nathan A. Scott, Jr. described
wonderfully in Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Echoing H. D. Lewis, Scott argued that the
end toward which poetic art is devoted is the apprehension and disclosure of “the
character of particular things in the starkness and strangeness of their being
what they are” (2). Along with the
recognition that it is quintessentially “poetic,” Where I Must Go brings the mystery of presence into our line of vision. Jackson’s novel is a luminous web. Once you enter the poetic architectonics of
the web, you are caught in remembering the seductive discord between the
popular culture in the 1960s and the life-serious activities of the Civil
Rights Movement and integration in higher education, of the rise of Black
Studies and Black Power and Afrocentricity, and of Time’s sweeping of us all
into modes of the post-whatever. The
quality of remembering, need it be said, is directly dependent on whether you
were there in the 1960s or only born into consciousness in the late 1990s.
The first-person narration Jackson uses in constructing a
story about events at Eden University (substitute Northwestern University in
your acts of discerning referentiality) obligates you to pay attention to the
work of language in occasioning aesthetic experiences and in sponsoring
perplexity about what you thought you understood about American and African
American life in the last century. Jackson dislocates racially-marked certainty
about the texture of urban experiences, education, and the properties of
womanist thinking that has been baptized by Roman Catholic ideologies. Jackson is a poet and novelist who demands
much of her readers. That fact may
explain, in part, why Where I Must Go
has not been anointed with rivers of praise and has received scant notice from
those who canonize African American novels. Habitation in a luminous web
requires labor and love.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
PHBW BLOG
September 23, 2013
